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nothing to be done, it’s already over: Simon Limbeau’s brain is on the verge of destruction – it’s drowning in blood.
    Diffuse lesions, severe cerebral swelling, and nothing that could keep the intracranial pressure under control, it’s already much too high. Revol sinks back in his chair. His hand comes to cup his chin as his gaze trails across the desk, skims over the disorder, the scribbled notes, the administrative circulars, the photocopy of an article issued by the ethics committee of the Paris public hospital administration on organ recovery “after the heart has stopped”; his eyes glide over the small objects placed there (including the turtle carved of jade, a present from a young patient with severe asthma), grind to a halt on the mauve slopes of Mount Aigoual draped in streaming runoff and Revol probably thinks back, then, in a flash, to that day in September when he was initiated into peyote at his house in Vallerauge – Marcel and Sally arrived at the end of the afternoon in an emerald-green sedan, the rims splattered with dried mud; the vehicle stopped heavily in the courtyard and Sally waved her hand out the window yoo-hoo we’re here! her snowy white hair flying about inside the car, revealing her wooden earrings, duo of varnished scarlet cherries; and later, after dinner, when night had fallen over the plateau, a rain of bright stars, they went out into the garden and Marcel’s hands pulled back a newspaper wrapping to reveal a few small verdigris cacti, round and without spines; the three friends rolled them in their palms and breathed in the bitter smell; these fruits came from far away, Marcel and Sally had gone to get them in a mining desert in northern Mexico, illegally stowed and carefully transported them all the way to the Cévennes, and Pierre, who studied hallucinogenic plants, was impatient to try it: he was fascinated by the idea of these visions from nowhere, brought on by the combination of powerful alkaloids contained in peyote, one-third mescaline, visions with no link to memory – visions that played a major role in the ritual use of this cactus, usually consumed by Native Americans during shamanic ceremonies. Even more, Pierre was interested in the synesthesia that sometimes happened during hallucinations: psycho-sensory alertness was supposed to be most intense in the first phase after ingestion, and he hoped to see tastes, see odours, see sounds and tactile sensations, and hoped that the translation of senses into images would help him to understand – to pierce – the mystery of pain. Revol thinks back to that sparkling night, when the canopy of heaven tore open over the mountains, revealing unsuspected spaces into which they attempted to dive, lying in the grass with their backs to the earth, and suddenly he’s struck by the idea of a universe in expansion, in a state of perpetual becoming, a space where cellular death would be the catalyst for metamorphosis, where death would shape the living the way silence shapes sound, darkness the light, or static the mobile; a fleeting intuition that persists on his retina even now when his eyes come back to skim over his computer screen, this sixteen-inch rectangle radiated by black light announcing the cessation of all mental activity in Simon Limbeau’s brain. He’s not able to connect the young man’s face with death, and his throat grows tight. Nearly thirty years, though, that he’s been working in death’s vicinity, thirty years that he’s been hanging around death’s door.
    Pierre Revol was born in 1959. Cold War, triumph of the Cuban Revolution, first vote for Swiss women in the canton of Vaud, filming of Godard’s Breathless , release of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Miles Davis’s mythical opus, Kind of Blue  – only the most important jazz album of all time, to quote Revol, who likes to show off, lauding the vintage quality of his birth year. Anything else? Yes – he adopts a detached tone, crafting