The Ninth Life of Louis Drax Read Online Free PDF

content of an editorial in the United States Journal of Neurology to my patients and lost track of time.
         —It’s just so humiliating! Can’t you show just a shred of romance? Sophie had wailed, as she cleared away the uneaten dinner she’d prepared. —I’m beginning to wonder why we don’t just go our separate ways, Pascal. You’d rather lecture comatose people about neurological theory than have a conversation with your own wife. Look at the two of us, rattling around in this big empty house like a couple of ... I don’t know. Pointless marbles .
         Sophie never shies away from reality, and I recognised she had struck a note of truth. I felt bad, and said so – but my apologies fell on stony ground. It wasn’t an easy time in our marriage. Once upon a time we had been happy. We had children early, made a good family. Then ... well. A typical marriage perhaps: radiant moments, small losses of faith, nagging doubts, resurgences, complacency. For the last few months the public library in Layrac, which Sophie ran with characteristic zeal, had been threatened with cutbacks. With both our daughters now installed at the fac in Montpellier, Sophie was feeling frustrated and unfulfilled.
         I loved my wife, as far as I knew. But how far did I know? The empty nest had highlighted a lack, not just for her, but for me too. Emotional and physical. (Why is it so hard, I wondered, for a woman to grasp that a man needs the comfort of a female body from time to time? That it’s unfair to make a man sleep alone every time he rattles her cage?) That burning summer, even before the arrival of Louis Drax, things seemed to be spiralling downward.
         My walk to work takes five minutes, door to door. A light morning mist hung in the bright air, with something feral in its scent, as when the hunting season is in full spate. Life , I thought. It smells of life. I love breathing in that mixture of pine resin and sea salt. It stirs the brain, puts the turbulences of marriage in perspective. Sophie was always mollified by flowers, especially if they came in the form of a highly expensive bouquet with cellophane and ribbons, so as I made my way to work through the olive groves, I resolved to drop in at the village florist’s on the way back from work and make us both feel better. As the clinic came into view up ahead, stark white and bright in the sun, bleached concrete and stainless steel grafted on to the nineteenth-century stone shell of the former Hôpital des Incurables, my heart lifted. By the time the automatic doors slid open to welcome me and I inhaled the first gush of chilled air, I was on a high.
         Part of my excitement was about the new patient they were bringing me. It may sound strange to say this about somebody who appears to be irredeemably comatose, but I was looking forward to meeting the Drax boy. I don’t read the home pages of the paper closely, so I knew nothing about his accident at that stage, but I’d certainly heard about his bizarre return to life on the medical grapevine, though swift PR work in Vichy had ensured that part of the story never reached the papers. Hiccuping corpses don’t do a hospital’s image any favours. Given his medical history, I was intrigued about the state I’d find the boy in. Might I be the one to discover a sign of hope, where others – Philippe Meunier in particular – had failed? In my field, you can’t help fantasising about trouncing everyone’s expectations by producing an unexpected recovery. I spend much of my time doing just that.
         I’m an optimist, when it comes to coma. These people are capable of more than it appears. Those who awake – often in an agonisingly slow, incomplete way – can occasionally recall intensely lucid dreams, almost like hallucinations: long, involved fantasies about people they could never have known or met in real life; scenarios so much more vividly alive and compelling than the dim, humdrum noises