chocnut’s Reviews > Mend the Living > Status Update

"long enough for them to count the instruments and compresses, [...] long enough for the team to break up, [..] to take off their O.R. clothes and get dressed again, to splash water on their faces and wash their hands, then leave the hospital to go catch the first metro, long enough for Alice to regain her colour and venture a smile while Harfang whispers in her ear, so, little Harfanguette, what do you think?"

Should have been home instead of out blinking back tears reading this passage...

"out of his pocket, puts them in Simon’s ears, turns on the MP3 player, track seven, and the last wave forms on the horizon [...] it uncovers fossils and tips over treasure chests, reveals invertebrates that deepen the thickness of time, hundred-and-fifty-million-year-old shelled ammonites and beer bottles, plane carcasses and handguns"

"he lists the symptoms of angina one by one – constrictive chest pain, sensation of being crushed across the span of the chest, of being squeezed in a vise, [...] but you don’t collapse; then he details the symptoms of cardiac arrest – heartbeat shoots up to more than three hundred beats per minute, a ventricular fibrillation that causes the breath to stop, which causes a blackout, all in less than a minute –"

"and thinks that at the moment of matching Simon Limbeau’s living organs, at the moment of sharing them out among ailing bodies, thousands of lungs are inflating together over there, thousands of livers are being inundated with beer, thousands of kidneys are filtering the body’s substances in unison, thousands of hearts are pumping in the charged atmosphere, and [..] she is struck by the fragmentation of the world"

It’s time now to turn to those who are waiting, scattered across the country and sometimes beyond its borders, people registered on wait-lists according to the organ to be transplanted, and who wake each morning wondering if their place on the list has shifted, if they’ve moved up the digital file, people who can barely conceive of a future and are living constrained lives, stranded by the state of their ailing organ

"But no, nothing. Simon is there, unchanged, the micro-movements of his body still lift the sheet lightly, so that what they’ve gone through doesn’t correspond to anything, doesn’t find any confirmation, and this is such a violent blow that their thinking comes unhinged, they flail and stammer, a rodeo, speak to Simon as though he could hear them, talk about him as though he couldn’t hear them anymore [...]"

"Simon’s heart. Marianne’s head spins. Simon’s heart – little islets of blood cells meet in a tiny sac to form the initial vascular network on the seventeenth day, the pump begins on the twenty-first day [...], blood flows into conduits as as they are formed, innervating tissues, veins, tubes, and arteries, the four chambers develop, everything in place on the fiftieth day even if it’s not complete yet."

"[..] even though, in his opinion, the series don't say anything about death, the corpse may well fill the focal range, asphyxiate the screen, be scrutinized,
fractioned, turned over, but it's only a simulacra, and everything unfolds as though, as long as it hasn't revealed all its secrets, as long as it remains a potentiality – narrative, dramaturgical – this corpse could keep death at a distance."

"[..] the kind of embrace you give in order to become a rock in the cyclone, a stone before leaping into the void, like something from the end of the world [..] it's also a gesture that reconnects them - their lips touch - that underlines and does away with the distance, and when they disincarcerate each other, when they finally release each other, stunned, done in, they're like sailors washed up after a shipwreck."

" [..] he memorizes the numbers and compares the data. Little by little, he forms a clear idea of the state of Simon's body. A kind of apprehension comes over him: although he knows the steps and the milestones of the process he's beginning, he also knows to what extent it differs from a well-oiled mechanism, a chain of set phrases and diagonal checkmarks on a checklist. This is terra incognita."