The Extinction of Snow

by Frederick Lightfoot

  “Was dying useful?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But that’s what happened.”

  “The second crime doesn’t make the first any less. We have to make a stand or we will have no dignity at all.”

  “It’s a mission then?”

  She shakes her head again, her eyes closing on me, but quickly opening. “I don’t know what word I would use.”

  “A good mission probably.”

  “Maybe. But maybe I’d just call it an occupation.”

  “Full circle, of course. So did Joseph die for his occupation?”

  “Joseph didn’t die for anything. Joseph was killed.”

  “Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that such a thing could happen in a sophisticated, civilized country as this? Is it not fanciful, a bit simple?”

  She looks at me intently, our level eyes engaging each other, no longer resistant. “If you look at the sophistication and the civilization for long enough, you’ll see it’s all made up, just a sham.”

  “A mirror within a mirror?”

  “Yes, if you like.”

  “But knowing that leads to insanity. I’ve seen it, the resultant madness, the derangement, the thousand sad and baffling riddles.”

  “We all have to be vigilant, stand up against domination in all of its forms. The search for any truth is not a clear path to freedom. We have to be wary and a little bit courageous, though as for myself, I’m only so-so.”

  “You’re very philosophical.”

  “Which is always portrayed in a poor light.”

  “No, not for me. I am married to a philosopher. My husband has an astonishing mind. Was it courageous taking his own drug?”

  She eyes me with a look of sudden concern. “Joseph never took his own drug, he was given it.”

  Pierre-Yves Moreau comes back to the table carrying a pot of coffee. He has obviously afforded us time, listened as best he could to what was said and assumed we were in the process of making common ground. Is he right? He probably is. I am drawn to her. She has made me need her. I want to be admitted to her world of occupation, her understanding of love.

  Pierre-Yves Moreau sits between us and pours the coffee. We sit together in silence for some time, shifting easily from contemplation of each other to contemplation of the garden. It seems we are as much out there, our thoughts engaging with the rules and laws of nature, the curiosities of the given world, and our means of knowing them, as we are in here, in this former holiday home. She is right of course, the act of looking brings things into existence, looking makes secret visions visible. Reality is a construction, a composition, formed and deformed, and formed again. We stagger under its rules, trying to free ourselves of things that are inescapable. She is quite right, we need our occupation. I need to move on.

  “Tell me about Joseph’s death. Tell me how my son died.”

  She flashes a quick look at Pierre-Yves Moreau, but she is comfortable with this. It is a moment of particular, measurable truth. She speaks slowly, quietly, clearly describing images inside her head, the fixed account of a terrible event. Will memory sustain it, or will it change, alter into a new story. It is hers, hers to do with as her mind dictates. For now I dread it, yet welcome it.

  “We had only been here a few days, staying in the house, Pierre-Yves’, when Joseph received a message, a text from someone asking to meet with him. I told him to ignore it.” She pauses and looks directly at me. I can’t tell whether she is asserting a notion of innocence or guilt in her failure to insist on it. Perhaps it is both. She still struggles with these things. I share so much with her already. “I should have been more forceful.”

  I smile, surprisingly, and say: “You had a row.”

  She laughs, gazing at me gratefully: “Yes, I suppose we had a row. We had no idea who the message came from. As far as we knew only Pierre-Yves and one person inside knew we were coming.”

  “Who? Who knew?” Her eyes flash at me suspiciously, wary of my wanting to know. Her trust has been damaged beyond recall. She is, of course, right to question my need to know. It comes from the same abuse of trust. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for you to break a confidence.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she says, thinking it through, going over it again in her own mind. “Someone I had spoken to through the website often. And Joseph had met her, once, once only on a visit to the laboratories in London. They hadn’t spoken a great deal then, but they knew of each other. I have no doubts over her. Really, I don’t.” She looks quickly towards Pierre-Yves Moreau, needing his corroboration, his agreement on trust.

  He smiles and shrugs: “I do not know the person. It is better I do not, that she does not know me.” He waves the idea away.

  Joanne looks lost, the responsibility she has in the narrative hurting her. “Joseph said that we had to take any information we could, that falsified trial data was just the tip of the iceberg. He knew there was so much going on inside, behind the corporate gloss – the illegal extension of patents through legal loopholes and governmental bribes, research on drugs to protect tourists while locals die, drugs for manufactured illnesses, preying on the paranoia of people’s lifestyles. I can still hear him, Mrs Tennant, sad, angry, obsessed.”

  “Louise, please.”

  “I knew it was dangerous.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “When Pierre-Yves found him he was raving.” I flash a quick look towards him but he makes no acknowledgement of his part in the story. “He said he had come through a long white tunnel into a cleansed world. He said he could speak in tongues and had seen the purity take place. He thought there were no features or details to anything, that they had all been cleaned away. But he knew himself, sensed himself inside the white world. All life is sacred, he said.” She pauses and looks at me questioningly, tormented by the hurt she is giving us both. “He wanted to be forgiven for ever thinking otherwise. I didn’t understand. I don’t.”

  I am sacred, comfot me, that terrible message erupts in my mind, but I stay composed and ask: “And you put this down to the drug he was working on?”

  “Not at the time. Later when the toxicology report pointed to it. I knew they had given it to him. Joseph didn’t have access to Nivis, how could he?”

  “They called the drug Nivis?”

  She smiles: “Because it was still being developed, a white powder like snow, so it was called snow. Nivis.”

  “But you can’t know for sure that they gave it to him.”

  She skews her face. “That was the data they suppressed, that even in small doses it could cause psychotic like symptoms in people. But that wasn’t the real problem. If the psychosis was minimal and very selective, maybe that’s a price that it could be argued worth paying for such a drug, but Joseph found that in animal tests it was forming rudimentary plaques in the brain tissue, so the likelihood of long term cognitive dysfunction was a very real likelihood.”

  “Dementia?”

  “Yes, I suppose, something like dementia.”

  She stops speaking. Perhaps I am supposed to say something, take my part in this narrative, judge it, give approbation to my heroic child. In the end he wanted to be forgiven. I find it sad and baffling. Had he struggled so much with the man his grandfather became, worried that the same fate awaited John and him? John thought he was intolerant, maybe even petty minded, despite the upbringing, the education. I just thought he was put out by the inconvenience, the sick man indoors, the human spillage, the sloppy eating, the poverty of words. I never ventured into the hardness for Joseph. I am at fault. I let them down, father and son, let them fall out, no longer seeing eye to eye. And at the last is that what Joseph saw, the perfection of John’s father, the surviving soul of the man who in his sky-blue sea house taught him so much about love. I sigh deeply. Silence is my answer to all of this, the only answer I have. But Joanne is in limbo, in need of dialogue, in need of occupation. I smile weakly and say: “I never knew that Joseph experimented on an
imals. He obviously thought it better not to let me know.”

  “You mean that’s what he wanted to be forgiven over?”

  I continue to smile in my weak, shambling way: “Maybe, who knows. He sent me an email. I am sacred, comfort me.”

  Joanne purses her lips, downcast, hurt again by a fragment of the narrative new to her. Discoveries beyond our consciousness seem so large and harsh. I have not afforded her the ambiguity of the last two words. I am sacred, comfot me. When I say it aloud comfort me seems right; besides it is also a component of love. I suppose I can never be sure of any of it. Maybe he was scared and sacred. He was sacred to me. He is sacred to me. That is the only truth I need.

  “I didn’t think he was capable of sending an email. He must have done it when I left him alone, before he took off.” She looks embarrassed. I wonder whether that is because of her lack of judgement or because he contacted his mother. We each have things to live with. I hope it draws us together, I am sick of being set apart.

  “Took off?” I query, needing to know everything.

  Pierre-Yves brought him in and we tried to get him to sleep. It took a while but I thought we had settled him. He was still muttering but it seemed like he was going to sleep. Pierre-Yves stayed a little longer and then left us. I don’t know how much later it was but he started raving again. I went to get Pierre-Yves but when we got back he was gone.”

  “Why didn’t you get a doctor in the first place?”

  “Because I made a mistake.”

  “And he was hit wandering on the road.”

  “No, no he wasn’t. He was dumped on the road later. They killed him.”

  “But we can never know that.”

  “I don’t have to look very hard, Mrs Tennant, to see them and know that they are responsible. I can see through it, Mrs Tennant, and I know.”

  I make no response. Do I assume that her calling me Mrs Tennant is deliberate or a mistake of the moment? Are we going to take this away in our own sequestered way, each assuming a greatness over the other that sensitivity and understanding should disallow. I hope not. I will happily concede a special knowing of my son to this woman, happily concede to their love, but I insist on my belonging. I am sacred, comfort me, comfort me with the godless care one human soul can afford another. My name is Louise, mother of Joseph, wife of John, comfort us all. “I don’t doubt your knowing, Joanne, not for a moment.”

  “They are culpable. I have no doubt about that. As far as I am concerned they drove every car that struck him.”

  I nod my agreement. Of course they are culpable. I know the way blame works in these matters. I hear the sound of it every day. I say: “There is a piece of music goes over and over in my head whenever I think of Joseph lying in the road, a very beautiful piece of music.” She nods her head as if she understands, and perhaps she really does.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It is cold in London. I sit in the window and look down into the street. I have my glass of wine but I’m sipping it, taking pleasure from it. After days of bright, brittle sunlight there has been a late cold snap. There is even the promise of late snow. I don’t believe it. I have come to believe in the extinction of snow. I also know that I am against it. I want to challenge defeat. I have had enough of it. I am due to return to work soon. I have just rung Vivien to tell her the news. She is delighted of course. She feels responsible. To her mind she has seen me through my period of turmoil, something we will look back on together as lost time. I also rang her as soon as I got back from France, apologizing for letting her down regarding the pamper session, which she immediately dismissed, and since then she has again been ringing regularly. We were both sorry not to have said goodbye when she left London the last time. We neither have tried to explain it. I haven’t told her any details about my journey but will, when we meet, two sisters together. Strangely she hasn’t asked. I am pleased about that.

  My counsellor assumes I’ve moved on. I would challenge that, except there isn’t any point. Time is not linear. I have moved nowhere. Everything stays with me, my sacred world of love. I need love. I need occupation. I have agreed to return after Easter. The facile symbolism of it disappoints me. The world is full of symbolism though, connections, compositions, constructions. It is there in the golden section, in poetry, in nature, inference and possibility. It is in our way of seeing.

  I am told that further development of Nivis has been suspended. Joanne keeps in touch. I don’t know what our relationship is. We deal with each other with a certain piety. We share something deep and unspoken, without fully articulating what that is. On one level of course it is the memory of my beautiful boy, but there is something else that we neither can fully decipher. I took the material they had been collecting to Paris and put it into the hands of Dominique Dufour. Joanne reasoned that she and Pierre-Yves Moreau were known as activists, though not that they were together. I was a grieving mother asking too many questions. The handover of Joseph’s work took place in a small grocery in the village, the only grocery in the village. I still can’t quite believe the fear and the looking, wondering about everyone, doubting them all. The handover was terrifying. A young woman bumped into me, apologized profusely and began dusting me down and straightening me, whilst at the same time passing a shopping bag into my hand, the same as the one I was carrying which she took from me. At the time it felt like theft. I can still see glimpses of her small, nervous face. The overall picture is gone, but the detail remains, the nervousness, the need to trust.

  Taking leave of Pierre-Yves Moreau was difficult. In no time there had developed so much trust and friendship between us, indeed, what could only be described as a subtle and developing love. He brought Joseph back to me, made us whole again, and for that I will always be grateful. Even in the midst of his grief he knew it was right to care, to care and reclaim. His is such a tired yet tireless spirit. Instead I trusted Bill, trusted and gave myself to him – or whoever. I am to blame for a reckless, mistaken, error of judgement. If only I had met Pierre-Yves Moreau first it all could have been so different.

  Of course that is true of everything. We engage with the world we have, not the one that might be. Time and space are arbitrary, subject to luck and experimentation, and we have to be engaged, connected, we have no other choice. I think that is what was in Dominique Dufour’s expression as she took the papers from me. I think she saw it as my redemption. I had committed an act. I don’t think I would dispute that. My redemption, for want of a better word, was in that and in so much else. I must admit that I felt momentarily uneasy as I handed over the file. But I remembered my gratitude to Dominique Dufour and my need to believe in her. Of course she is honest. Hers is a good mission.

  John’s father, Jim, is dead. Jim is dead. The home tried to contact me but were unable. They involved the police but with no success. I went to visit when I got back to London. It seemed the right thing to do. A very troubled woman said that they had been trying to contact me. I knew from the tone of her voice what was coming. Apparently his breathing had become difficult. He was bedbound for a number of days. He was quite a fighter she said. He didn’t go easily. I don’t know whether I was pleased or not that he didn’t go easily. It suggests he was waiting for something, or more accurately someone, I suppose.

  I rang John to tell him. I told him that his father had died quietly and peacefully. I was sorry that I couldn’t have let him know earlier, but I didn’t feel any guilt. At the end of the day I was trying to find out the truth about our son. All truths are ours, John’s and mine. We are inseparable. Our stories are one. My redemption is in the unflagging, endless love I feel for him and know he feels for me. He said that he was sorry that he had not been there, but believed his father would understand, and then told me he would be home for Easter. He said he was more than ready for it.

  My beautiful son is dead and I need occupation. I have things to do, curiosities to investigate. I want my mission to be a good one. That was always the hope.

 
It is beginning to snow. The weather reports may prove to be right. I have every hope that these large drifting flakes will lie. For a while the whole visible world will be white. There will be no boredom in that at all.