Free Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal

single living being caught up in the continuity of days, occupied with the simple and insignificant acts of a winter morning: nothing comes to insult Marianne’s suffering as she moves forward like an automaton, with a mechanical step and a hazy look. On this fateful day. She repeats these words to herself in a murmur, doesn’t know where they come from, she says them with her eyes glued to the tips of her boots as though the words accompanied the muted beat, a regular sound that spares her from having to think beyond this moment, this one task: take one step then another and another then sit down and drink. She heads slowly toward the café she knows is open on Sunday, a shelter she reaches at the limits of her strength. On this fateful day, I pray to you O my God. She whispers these words in a loop, separating out their syllables like rosary beads, how long has it been since she said a prayer out loud? She wishes she could keep walking forever.
    She pushes open the door. It’s dark inside, traces of nocturnal lapses, smell of cooled ashes. Alain Bashung sings. Voleur d’amphores au fond des criques (thief of amphorae at the bottom of creeks). She goes to the counter, leans over the zinc, she’s thirsty, doesn’t want to wait, is anyone here? A guy comes out of the kitchen, enormous, a cotton sweatshirt stretched tight across his belly, loose jeans, dishevelled shock of hair like he just rolled out of bed, yeah, yeah, there’s someone here, and once he’s in front of her he starts up again formal so, miss, what are we having? A gin – Marianne’s voice, barely audible, an exhalation. The guy slicks his hair back with two heavily ringed hands, then rinses a glass all the while slanting a glance at this woman out of the corner of his eye, sure he’s seen her here before: everything all right, miss? Marianne turns her eyes away, I’m going to sit down. The large spotted mirror at the end of the room reflects a face she doesn’t recognize, she turns her head away.
    Don’t close your eyes, listen to the song, count the bottles above the counter, observe the shape of the glasses, puzzle out the posters. Où subsiste encore ton écho (where an echo of you still remains). Create decoys, divert the violence. Build a dam against the images of Simon that form rapidly and crash into her in successive waves, in a great sweep, push them away, beat them back if you can, while already they’re organizing into memories, nineteen years of memory sequences, a mass. Stave them off. The flashes of memory that arose when she talked about Simon in Revol’s cubbyhole had lodged a pain in her chest that she was powerless to control or diminish – for that, she would have had to locate the memory in her brain, inject a paralyzing fluid, the needle guided by a high-precision computer – but all she would find there would be the motor of the action, the ability to remember, because memory itself is actually held in the body as a whole, Marianne didn’t know this. J’ai fait la saison dans cette boîte crânienne (I spent the whole season inside this cranium).
    She has to think, gather things together and reorder them so she can utter a clear phrase to Sean when he arrives, spared as yet. Chain the propositions together intelligibly. First: Simon has been in an accident. Second: He’s in a coma – gulp of gin. Dresseur de loulous, dynamiteur d’aqueducs (Spitz trainer, dynamiter of aqueducts). Third: The situation is irreversible – she swallows, thinking about this word she’ll have to speak aloud, “irreversible,” five syllables that vitrify the state of things and that she never, ever says, believing in the continual movement of life, the possible reversal of every situation, nothing is irreversible, nothing, she has the habit of saying time and time again – and usually she says it lightly, swaying the phrase like you would gently shake someone who was discouraged, nothing is irreversible, except death, disability,