Synopsis

It's nighttime, and a young doctor finishes yet another shift in the emergency room. Her work has become a black hole into which everything else disappears—her boyfriend, her friends, her passions, her life outside of it. From defending herself from the pain of others, from the anger, frustration, and impatience of the diverse humanity that crowds those rooms, she's starting to feel nothing. The idealism of her early days becomes a vague memory, the enthusiasm fading with each shift. She thinks of all this as she briskly crosses the empty hospital parking lot, but suddenly she freezes: on the hood of a car, there's a disturbing figure with two long, membranous wings, waiting for her. Lucifer at first seems like a hallucination caused by fatigue, but then his presence becomes constant. While human relationships around her disappear, while the outside world seems increasingly opaque, and inside the emergency room, red codes, treatments, hospitalizations, and emergency surgeries pile up, he is the only one who remains, who befriends her. Who fills the void left by others. But his presence is anything but disinterested, bringing with it disturbing questions—What value do you place on your soul? How do you save yourself from the suffering of others? Is there a right distance from evil?—and who, at a certain point, offers her a pact. This gripping novel is a meditation on pain: that of those who experience it in their own flesh and that of those who heal them. The portraits of those who populate the emergency room are vivid, very human, and at times disturbing. Their bodies are enigmas, terrifying abysses, marvels of false alarms and hidden dangers. Some people discover within half an hour that they have a serious illness, some exaggerate their symptoms to get a few days off work, some refuse to accept the agony of a loved one and attack healthcare professionals. Doctors and nurses do their best to deal with the constant influx of emergencies, but all that pain eventually eats away at you: even if you don't want to, you have to numb yourself, or you'll succumb.