30The clock on the wall of the doctors' room showed 11:50 p.m.
There were still ten minutes left, Jacques thought, as he looked out the window at the damp road. The roar of an engine could occasionally be heard and, in the distance, the music of the show taking place at the Arc de Triomphe that would soon announce the end of the old year. Just above the building opposite, the moon was about to be hidden by a large cloud.
He turned and sat down behind his desk again.
The department seemed quiet, none of the staff had called him in the last hour. The preceding hours, instead, had been nerve-wracking: four serious cases had arrived from emergency, the condition of a couple of patients had worsened and a poor elderly man had died.
Life, a beating of wings that become lost in the universe o
