Tom is Dead

by Marie Darrieussecq

  A white nothingness, with red veins. An eye without iris or pupil, an empty white globe. After the injection, I am inside this eye. Not a single window. Attacks of smothered red fury. A white void. Only fits and starts of consciousness. Misery that manages to penetrate, to throb. I no longer have any idea what I’m suffering from. It’s painful. From time to time, I find myself once again sitting in the white room and I watch, as if through a pane of glass, this woman in pain.

  And what follows is absurd, detached from everything, a space module bolting towards the void.

  Out of nowhere, I remember a passage from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Anaesthetised women about to give birth: the pain remains, but consciousness is put to sleep. Leaning over the cradle, they will remember nothing. Meanwhile, attached to their beds, they wail. An impersonal, unthinking pain. Pure. No one left. No way of blocking it out.

  When I regain consciousness, in some kind of return to wakefulness, a doctor announces that Tom is dead. He was already dead in the ambulance. I’m standing in a corridor with Stuart.

  I’m standing at a window, on a calm autumn day. The children are at school. Tom is playing next to me. He’s dead. The swing creaks. In his room, I hear the sound of Lego fortresses collapsing, and his laughter in the face of the laws of gravity.

  I’m standing at a window, on a winter’s day. A doctor tells me that Tom is dead. ‘He’s dead.’ I already knew. The effect of the injection lingers. I’m conscious but it is as if the pain is sitting beside me. I notice it. I’m an empty husk. Somebody else beside me moans in agony. Agony is a false friend—it’s the climax of suffering, the grief that kills without the dying.

  ‘Do you want to see him?’ he asks in English. Tom’s death happens in English. Over there, far away, in Sydney. Far from the France that I left behind. I watch the lips moving. My husband replies, ‘Yes.’ There are mouths around the words. Three or four days before, I saw a film by Louis de Funès, a film from my childhood, but in ‘Australian’. De Funès’ mouth makes grand speeches that outrun the translation. His mouth dances around a foreign language, a St Vitus dance, a mouth possessed. His lips are eloquent, agitated, convincing. The doctor speaks to us, warns us. His hands are open, his arms are spread. Tom, so small, holding an educational toy, wants to push cubes through round holes and triangles through square ones.

  I utter one sentence. I ask a question, I’m in the white room. ‘What is your name?’ The doctor’s mouth is wide open. I remember memorising his name for later. I can’t remember it anymore. I have the vague idea to take down his name for when I would lodge a complaint. Against whom? It’s no fun! Tom shouted when Vince hassled him—Tom rarely spoke English.

  At one point, I try to catch Stuart’s eye. My husband, Stuart. We set off down the corridors. I can’t find him. The corridors realign at right angles. At each right angle, I fail to catch Stuart’s eye. Maybe my eyes are continuing straight ahead, drifting along. From time to time, it seems like I’m laughing; in any case, I’m shaking my head, like an animal, to get rid of what’s bothering me. Tom is no longer anywhere but he’s all around me—the corridors, the doctor, Stuart’s back, the blinding lights on the ceiling, they are Tom—he has been pulverised out of me but his molecules fill all of space.

  Tom is in front of me. He’s asleep. I’m cold. There is smoke nearby. I’ve never seen Tom look this shade of white before. Tom, stop that right now. Tom’s pranks. The skin below his eyes is grey-red, the closed lids are chalky. It’s as if the usual blotch of colour in his eyes, where Tom existed, has run down into this grey-red. He looks at me from beneath it. I think I’m dreaming. I’ve never seen this colour on a human face before. The same colour seems to have run to the base of his neck into the soft tender hollow there. I’m amazed. I try to question Stuart but there’s only his back, or his shoulder. Tom’s hair is smooth, silky, alive. There’s no trace of a wound apart from these blotches (I’ll learn later that we refer to this as postmortem lividity—I thought that livid meant white). I know that he’s dead, I see that, but I look at his hair, alive, and I want to gather something, there at the tips, to pick some with my hands…I look around the room, but there is nothing there. I can’t see his death. An empty room, full of emptiness. Tom is here; his death should be here too. To meet us in some way. It’s absent. A careless teacher. A negligent death. I think about this. I feel awkward. I think about my bad English, about how much I hated school and how much Tom (and Vince, and soon Stella) handle everything better than I do. Tom copes better than I do with death, that’s a fact. My little boy, so strong.

  I don’t say anything; I can’t see what I could possibly say. People will judge me according to the way I handle myself, and how my son looks too. His fingers are dirty. His fingers are dead. I think about this. I understand nothing, I’m stupid. He’s dead, I can see that, he seems turned off from the inside, like a lamp. But I can’t see the cause of his death. I bump up against it, I flutter around it. I realise that he’s not wearing the clothes he had on for his nap, but something white, that I don’t inspect, but as I look back now, I see Tom’s face as white as that thing that envelops him. Made of the same white material. Cloth, rag. Wrap. Slap like wrap. A smack for being dead. I can see that he’s dead but I can’t see the cause of his death, and I’m stuck on this idea like I was on de Funès a minute ago. I don’t think that it’s the last time I’ll see him, I don’t think that it’s the last time I’ll see his face. I want to touch him but I don’t dare. I’m afraid of disturbing things. I don’t think about how when I spoke to him at naptime, when I ordered him to go straight to his room, the children’s room, that it was for the last time. I don’t understand that for seeing Tom, it’s all over.

  Yesterday, at the exact moment when I wrote this sentence, I had an unbearable impulse, in my arms and in my chest, to stand up and grab him, to carry him away. Ten years on. Cuddle him, one last time. Touch his silky hair. Touch him, carry him away—silky, what does that mean? To sob over his body, embracing it, and I sobbed in my study in the Blue Mountains, ten years on. With the certainty that nobody can understand. What’s the point? Him, Tom, whom I will never see again. Whose hair I didn’t even stroke one last time, in his shroud, at the morgue. Even I can’t understand. Maybe I’m the only one who can’t understand.

  Death has made me stupid. The injection and death. Misery has made me stupid. Misery has cooked my neurons. Standing before Tom’s body, I lost part of my mental faculties, and I don’t mean my mind—I’m talking about my intellect, my reasoning, about a+b+c, about common sense, about whatever it is that enables you to think, to follow what’s happening, to keep up with others. To be receptive, reactive, to get it. It doesn’t come back. It’s final. A handicap, for life. An idiot.

  I don’t go back. I don’t want to reread it. I’m trying to write Tom’s story, the story of Tom’s death, I’m trying to make sense of it, Tom who has become dead, Tom whom we think of only in terms of his death. I remember the moment before his nap. If there’d been a trial, no doubt the lawyers would have focused on this. Vince, Stella, Stuart and me, and Winnie the Pooh, in the dock. Of course, I wanted to hug him before his nap. To kiss him, cuddle him. But I also wanted to sleep. It seems almost incomprehensible to me now. When I was seeing him for the last time—how could I? I’d like to tell him everything that we won’t have time to tell each other, experience with him all that life that we won’t have. But I also remember, I’m so tired. I’d like to kiss him, cuddle him, but I can’t bear it anymore. I’d like to tell him how much I love him—I often said it to him, and to Vince and to Stella, none of our children were short on love—tell him how much I loved him. But I’m tired. I remember being beside myself with exhaustion, what with moving house, Stella still small, and me not getting on with Stuart. At that moment, in our relationship, the children were the civilians in a war. Of course, I’d like to shelter him, fall asleep with him, take him back into my body, into the shelter of my womb, and start all over again. Start at the be
ginning. Take the right fork in the road, the right direction.

  We’re in the corridor. Somebody gives me a bag; I have a bag in my hands. Maybe somebody gave it to me before, maybe I’ve been holding it for a long time. It’s a plastic bag from Coles containing Winnie, a Spiderman T-shirt and a pair of striped Petit Bateau underpants that I bought for Vince in France. I gasp because these are Tom’s things, the ones that he was wearing not long ago, not long ago for his nap. Not exactly a gasp, but I inhale so forcefully that my vocal chords vibrate. I retrace my steps. Over there, somewhere over there, at the end of the corridor, Tom has to get dressed. He can’t stay like that. Yet I know, I know that he’s dead. I remember the whiteness, Tom laid out, and those blotches under his eyes. Ten years later, the memory hasn’t altered. The memory is intact. I don’t open this drawer often. I remember the whiteness, the hair, the grey and the purple. Writing it almost stops me from seeing it. Does writing it keep it intact? In the end, will everything be worn away?

  I have the bag in my hand—at the end of the corridor, there’s Tom; somehow I will find my way there. Stuart holds me back, he says something to me. At the end of the corridor, there’s Tom. Stuart shouts and, as I’m struggling, he shouts once more, ‘He’s dead, now.’ He pauses between the last two words, a stressed comma, and I ask myself why he added now. Tom has always been dead. Laid out, purple and white, between us. Everything is clear. Everything is clear-cut and understandable.

  I discover that Stuart has organised everything. For example, as soon as we get home, he’s the one who prepares a meal. That same night, or that same afternoon, even today I don’t know—had one night passed since Tom’s nap?—that same day, he prepares a meal. I can see the place—it’s empty— but I can’t see the time. I can see, in the apartment in Sydney, the window, the bedroom, and the kitchen where Stuart is preparing a meal. Stella and Vince are sitting in their chairs, the small one and the large one. In the middle chair there’s nobody. Stuart went to pick up the children from where they were. From where they were stored, as it were. Safe. Waiting to see us again. I remember Stuart saying: ‘They should be here.’ I’d uttered exactly the same words when Stella was born. Her brothers should be here. My two sons, by my side. When Tom was born we kept Vince at a distance, at my mother’s house, as if it was important to keep the eldest away from Mysteries. Fear of fatigue, I suppose. And I’d regretted it later—what don’t you regret. But I was right: fatigue kills.

  Stuart had arranged everything. That meal, for example. Had he been shopping? When? I’m sitting on my chair. I watch this man who is frying frozen hamburgers. We’ve been living in this apartment for three weeks. There’s nothing there. Chairs, a table. In the rooms, beds. Boxes set down in each room, with kitchen written on those ones there, before my eyes. I watch Stuart and it’s now, as I write, that I see him, alone in the supermarket aisles, pushing a trolley around the frozen food section. Asking himself, somehow or other, what he will buy. Because you must eat. Because the children must eat.

  I don’t know how long the effect of the injection lasted—or, shall we call it, the shock—I confuse them; no doubt only a few minutes apart, my brain received the shock then the injection. I think the ambulancemen who came to get Tom gave me an injection straight away, so maybe I screamed all the way there from the house, home sweet home, right from that apartment in Sydney.

  I discover that Stuart has arranged everything. He doesn’t look at me, he organises. I watch the performance. He feeds Stella in her highchair. Stella doesn’t take her eyes off me. Later, it’s the opposite; she won’t look at me anymore. Stuart looks for clean cutlery. He wipes Stella’s mouth. He makes comments out loud, he talks to himself, or Vince speaks, maybe. Vince doesn’t take his eyes off me. It’s as if they already knew, as if they’d known even before me. I see Stuart, I see him only now, this man who’s just lost his son, alone in the supermarket aisles buying food for the children who are alive. For the children who eat, who chew, who swallow, who have a living digestive system. He looks in the boxes for clean cutlery, a mute rage slapped across his face. Like the octopus in Aliens, the octopus stuck onto faces, the first stage of death. My mummy always said there were no monsters. Tom was afraid of the dark, like Vince, like Stella, like everybody. Wherever we went he had to have his night-light, which was also Vince’s, but Vince had the good excuse of a frightened little brother.

  I remember the sentences that went through my mind better than the events. The event had already taken place. Stuart is standing in front of Tom’s body, I see him from behind, I see Tom all white except for the blotches. Stuart hands me a bag full of Tom’s things. Stuart feeds Stella. Minced meat and chips. Tom is totally absent. They gave me an injection but I no longer know why. Tom is sitting in front of me and is eating minced meat in a highchair; he’s eighteen months old. He doesn’t take his eyes off me. I’m sitting behind Stuart, in a funeral parlour. In English, they say funeral parlour, it’s written out the front. ‘Let’s go,’ I say to Stuart, but no sound comes out of my mouth.

  In the Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris, among the graves of dead children, there’s a tombstone. In the nineteenth century, children often died. This tombstone was sculpted by the father, a sculptor we call ‘pompier’—as in art pompier—I don’t remember his name anymore. He made statues for the Jardin du Luxembourg, one was an allegory of winter. The child is two-and-a-half. He is depicted standing, dressed like a little lord amongst his toys. A harlequin doll lies at his feet. Maybe there’s also a ball, or a little rocking horse? I only saw this tombstone once, a long time ago. After that I could never find it again in the maze of graves. As I stood in front of the tombstone, I imagined this father, designing, drawing, freeing the form from the marble and, little by little, finding his son’s features. Alone in his studio with his chisel and graver. How long did it take? And what was the mother doing? Doing is not the right verb. Where was she, how was she coping? Once the injection wore off, the moment that followed was impossible to bear. Every moment that followed. Sixty times an hour. What did the mother do to keep her head and her hands busy? Was she laid down all higgledy-piggledy, like the harlequin? Or was she standing in the studio with the father, advising, sculpting with him? I’m sure she wasn’t. That day, standing before the grave, I sensed the waves of her disapproval, across the centuries. And maybe this disapproval kept her busy. Maybe the tombstone, as well as the solitary work of the man, served this purpose: to sustain the mother’s fury.

  We are not alone; this is what I tell myself. That there are men capable of loving to such a degree the creatures that come from women’s wombs—I think about this and I feel like crying. We’re both sitting on our chairs in front of a table; on the other side there’s someone. I know, rationally, that it’s the funeral parlour employee. A part of my brain is even interested to see how this guy will proceed. Does he have any training in psychology? Or only training in sales? Stuart has arranged everything. It’s a matter of handles. The man opens a photo album and, all of a sudden, I don’t want to see photos of dead children. I say it again: let’s go. But I can’t form the sound at the base of my throat; though I shape the words, everything seems separated and disjointed.

  It’s a handle catalogue. I hear Stuart name materials and colours. Everything that happens, that exists, the words, the sounds, Stuart’s body, the employee on the other side of the table, the pages of the catalogue, the golden handles, everything floats, scattered around me. It was Stuart who got us into this. It was Stuart who left me alone with the children, one time too many, because he had better things to do, because it was a matter of great urgency that this shitty city be fitted out with street furniture. It was Stuart who left it to me to find an apartment, to move house, to move us in; it was Stuart who first neglected Tom. And neglected me. Took us both into his negligence, into the tremendous pull of his negligence, into this stupor, into this permanent jet lag, Tom and I numb to death, dead, Tom and I, beneath Stuart’s negligent gaze.

&nb
sp; I’m in the funeral parlour sitting just behind my husband. I’m in the white room. I register that Stuart has organised everything, that he must have even organised the meeting with this employee to decide the manner of Tom’s burial. I know we’re not easy clients for this guy to deal with. I also know that I must appear exotic to him, but under the circumstances he doesn’t dare ask me where I’m from. A grieving mother. A particular breed of his clientele. Supposedly, there’s no name for it, like ‘widow’ or ‘orphan’, but grieving mother says it well— that’s what I am, here, in this funeral parlour. And if that’s what I am then it means that one of my children is dead, at least one of my children, in this case Tom. And I’m going to watch how this guy tries to sell me a coffin and coffin handles. Every situation is a good opportunity to learn—there’s treasure everywhere, it’s Winnie the Pooh’s motto. This guy must be used to being hated. Or completely ignored. And presumably there’s worse than him, more sententious, more soothing, or not as good at acting. A part of my brain plays with Tom’s death as if with a cold, hard ball. Nothing matters anymore about Tom’s death, including Tom’s death.

  He says a word. He asks a question that I don’t understand and Stuart turns to me. Both of them look at my hands. They seem focused on my hands, so I look at them too. There’s nothing special about them. It’s a word that means ‘padding’, I understood then. What colour and what kind of material would we like the padding of our son’s coffin to be? They’re going to bury him, close him up in a metre-long box with padding. If I let them. The last time we measured Tom in Vancouver, he was one metre tall. We made a mark on the door, one mark each, even for Stuart and me who have stopped growing, but you never know. We had fun, in this family. We had fun, we invented games. We loved each other too, Stuart and I. How can I talk about this? He looks at me. We’re in the street, in front of the shop, the minute before I said, let’s go. My voice was hoarse, but I managed to hold everything together, everything that was needed, will power, sound, meaning, muscles, air, vocal chords. Stuart uttered my name, annoyed—are you allowed to have a fight in a funeral parlour? ‘It’s an understandable reaction,’ says the employee. He gets up in turn and I think he wants to touch my arm. I push him away with all my strength, and he’s crowned with a wreath of artificial flowers.