The Ninth Life of Louis Drax Read Online Free PDF Page A

prayed for a miracle in the ambulance, prayed to a God she’d given up on long ago, never really believed in. And now here, as requested  ...
         It’s unthinkable. She shudders and blinks.
     
    Despite the refunctioning of his lungs and vital organs, the patient did not regain consciousness, though his condition stabilised and improved. He remained in a comatose state in Dr Philippe Meunier’s neurological unit in Vichy for three months, until a sudden fit caused his condition to deteriorate considerably. At this point, according to the normal procedure, his transfer to the Clinique de l’Horizon in Provence was approved.
        On 10 July, he arrived as my patient in deep coma  ...
     
         A Portuguese artist’s reworking of the Gall/Spurzheim phrenological map hangs on the wall of my office, above the table where I keep my bonsais. With deft brush strokes the artist has transmogrified the skull into a piece of natural architecture, a set of juxtaposed compartments all labelled according to phrenology’s vision of the mind’s contents: secretiveness, benevolence, hope, self-esteem, time, continuity, parental love, eventuality and so on. Nonsense, but so much more poetic, somehow, than the real structure of the brain, with its interlocking meat-chambers: the frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital lobes, the putamen, the pallidus, the thalamus, the fornix and the caudate. I remember glancing up at my phrenological map on the morning Louis Drax was due to arrive, as though it might hold a clue.
         But look, before I plunge further into the story of Louis, let me tell you that I was a different man then. For all my professional success and for all the insight I believed I possessed, I was living on the surface of life. I thought I had seen its innards, taken its pulse, got an idea of its hidden workings. But I hadn’t really seen within. Had not yet marvelled. Put it this way: I was a man doing a job I loved – perhaps too much, too intensely – but I had my failings too, my tendencies and my traits and my blind spots or whatever a psychologist would call them. I won’t apologise for myself. The fact is that during the terrible summer when the world cracked open, I was who I was.
         The day Louis Drax arrived at the clinic began on a bad note, domestically. It was a close, rain-starved July, one of the hottest on record in Provence; every day the temperature soared as high as the forties and the radio and TV blared fresh warnings of forest fires. It seemed that the arson season was starting early. As I sat out on the balcony finishing breakfast in the morning sunshine and skimming the previous day’s Le Monde , crashing noises came from the kitchen. When I’ve committed any kind of marital transgression, Sophie has the habit of unloading the dishwasher in a particularly cacophonous way. I knew better than to stir things up further, so at eight o’clock I prepared to leave for the clinic without giving her my usual kiss goodbye. But as I was closing the front door behind me, she flung open the kitchen window and stuck out her head like a cuckoo from a Swiss clock. She’d washed her hair and was dripping water.
         —So, am I to expect you home for dinner at eight, or will I once again have the fun of cooking something only to sit on my own and watch it go cold for an hour?
         Sophie was referring to the previous evening, when I had returned home to find her sprawled on the sofa, red-eyed, and flanked by greetings cards from the girls, her sister and her mother, wishing us both a happy twenty-third anniversary – an occasion I had totally forgotten, despite the fact that our eldest daughter, Oriane, had rung me the previous week to remind me to ‘do something romantic with Maman’. Not only had I failed to do anything romantic, but I had added insult to injury by coming home from work late – dismally, shockingly late, even by my own standards. I’d been recounting the