Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal

let your eyes adjust before being able to make out the machines, the furniture, and the body that inhabits it. Simon Limbeau is there, stretched out on his back in the bed, a white sheet pulled up to his chest. He’s hooked up to a respirator. The sheet rises slightly with each inhalation, a small but perceptible movement – you might say he was sleeping. The murmur of the ward is muffled, and the constant vibrations of the medical equipment only emphasize the silence as they bore into it with their basso continuo . This could be the room of someone who was sick, yes, you could believe this, if it weren’t for the dimness, subdued, and the sense of withdrawal, as though this room were actually somewhere outside the hospital, a depressurized alveolus where nothing more takes place.
    They hadn’t said anything in the car, nothing, there was nothing to say yet. Sean had left his vehicle parked in front of the bar – a station wagon running out of steam stuffed full of skiffs he’s made, and the surfboards that Simon has collected, gathered from here and there, shortboards or fishes – and got into Marianne’s car, a first, which she drove with forearms parallel and stiff as matchsticks while he kept his face turned toward the window, from time to time uttering some pithy thing about the traffic’s smooth flow – a flow that was their ally, carrying them quickly to their son’s bedside, but a flow that was also, from the first ring of the telephone, pushing them quickly toward calamity without any possibility of avoidance: nothing came to hinder or slow them on their path to the hospital. Of course, the chance of a twist came to both their minds at the same moment – scans presented backwards, a mix-up in the test results, a mistake in the reading, a typing error, a computer bug, it could happen, yes, just like two babies can sometimes be switched in the maternity ward or the wrong patient brought to the O.R., hospitals aren’t infallible – without either of them being able to completely believe it, and without them being able to say it openly to one another, and then buildings with smooth windowed facades grew before them until they engulfed the windshield, and now they were groping around in this room.
    Marianne goes over to Simon, as near as possible to this body that has never seemed so long before, and that she hasn’t seen up this close for years – Simon’s modesty, locked in the bathroom, demanding that they knock before coming into his room, or walking through the apartment draped in towels like a young bonze. Marianne leans over her child’s mouth to feel his breath, places a cheek against his chest to hear his heart. He’s breathing, she can feel it; his heart is beating, she can hear it – does she think then of the first heartbeats picked up at the ultrasound clinic at the Odeon in Paris one fall afternoon, the first cavalcade of rapid beats when spots of light amassed on the screen? She stands up. Simon’s head is encircled by a bandage, the skin is intact, yes, but is his face still there? The question assails her as she examines her child’s forehead, the slope of it, the lines of his eyebrows, the shape of his eyes beneath their lids – the little hollow of skin in the inner corner of the eye, smooth and concave – as she recognizes the strong nose, the finely drawn full lips, the recess of the cheeks, the chin covered in a fine beard, yes, all of this is here, but Simon’s face, all that lives and thinks within him, all that animates him, will any of that come back? She sways, legs weak, clutches the edge of the wheeled bed, the drip moves, space reels around her. Sean’s outline grows blurred as though behind a windowpane spattered with rain. He has moved to the other side of the bed, stands directly across from Marianne, and now he takes his son’s hand while from the frozen depths of his belly to the edge of his lips, just parted, his name is barely formed: Simon. We’re