Tom is Dead

by Marie Darrieussecq

  Stella had been born on a planet where Tom already existed. Tom had always been in her world. But not in Vince’s world, or in mine, or in Stuart’s. In hardly anyone’s world. Stella was the only one among us for whom Tom was a given. Like the trees, the sky, words, Tom was there. And Stella’s forgetting was killing him, still. Stella’s stubborn little head. Her head screwed on properly, this miracle, this gift—Stella survived by forgetting a given in her world, by forgetting her brother Tom.

  Stella was barely talking when Tom died. She said D-aa and M-aa but she understood; language was about to take hold of her when Tom died. But afterwards she remained mute, concentrating instead on walking, racing, cavorting about. Looking at her, you might have thought she was a happy child, but now all she could depend on in the universe were the laws of gravity, the air that we breathe and certain constants of the physical world.

  I’d kept a diary of Vince’s and Tom’s first words but Stella, my only daughter, memorised herself all on her own. And Stuart never wanted to believe that she said T-aa for Tom, that she remembered him, that she looked for him, understanding, little by little, that he wasn’t playing hide-and-seek, or peek-a-boo, but that he was gone, gone—then, forgetting. Today, I look at her—she’s twelve now—and I think again, fleetingly, I allow myself to wonder, if she saw him, the day of his death, if the last moment passed before her eyes, at naptime, through the bars of her cot.

  Tom had seen himself dying, I knew it, I felt it; he’d had the time to die. Instant death they’d told me, but what does that mean—he’d had the time to meet his death, alone, at four-and-a-half.

  It wasn’t enough to go to Tasmania, it wasn’t enough to tear ourselves away from time and to walk in forests that once saw dinosaurs. No, time was modern. Tom’s death was modern. It was now, between two plane flights, that he wouldn’t reappear. There I was again, devastated, crushed, incapable of looking after the living, incapable, yet again, for the umpteenth day; with tears welling up from the past, drawn from the craters beneath the dinosaurs’ feet.

  Crossing the threshold of this building, every day, in Victoria Road. Leaving, entering, passing through.

  My living children, my machines. They had to keep functioning. I had enough to do with Tom’s death. Tom had become the first in line. Perfect as a dead child, well behaved as in those old funerary photos, where the soul had to be captured before it took flight. Eyes closed. He looks like he’s asleep. Vince, especially, always picked the wrong moment. One day I found him in tears and, when I understood, when I finally came back to my senses, I didn’t take him in my arms. We cried alone, side by side, without touching each other. I don’t know why. Vince had become untouchable, like our pain.

  For months, maybe years, I treated them like they were koalas. They needed to be disturbed as little as possible. They needed to be protected, their feeding and comfort taken care of, their habits respected and their habitat preserved. It was as if Tom’s death had erased my own childhood. I no longer knew anything about childhood. I believed that at four-and-a-half you’re forty years old, and I believed that at the age of eight, Vince’s age, you’re devoid of thought, desire and anger.

  I was like this Japanese couple I’d seen a long time ago in a documentary. They observed mourning for their son in accordance with an ancient ritual: the mother, a portrait of her son on her chest; the father, a small barrel under his neck containing his son’s ashes. Except that the barrel was empty, the son lost at war. To a western mind, even one moved by this vision, there was an inevitable parallel with a Saint Bernard, a keg around its neck.

  I hadn’t lost Tom yet. Since then, I often think about this aging couple, clinging to the customs of mourning and the rituals of grief, encapsulated in the past, a past that grows increasingly distant from them. I’m carrying a small empty barrel and I drift further away, mislaid in time, planets pass by, pointless circles, and I’m turning too, in the emptiness, midway from the origin of things.

  Maybe Tom never existed. Maybe I imagined everything, those four-and-a-half years plus nine months, in order to justify this horror in me, this empty place that I’m talking around, talking, talking, or else I’m silent. Sometimes the pain is displaced, Tom dissolves in time—the pain is there but I no longer know why.

  Stuart did nothing but work between Tom’s death and the holiday in Tasmania. I had a glimpse of what he was going through whenever I managed to go out and make myself do the shopping. The good morning of the woman at the checkout irritated me. Her movements, the way she passed objects over the scanner, yoghurt, steak; the enthusiastic colours of the ads, the impeccable cleanliness of the aisles, the studious stupidity of the customers, everything, anything, felt like an attack, felt beside the point. That was the most difficult thing: the transitions. For Stuart, it happened every day. I imagined him diving into a pool, with his cap and his goggles, but naked, terribly naked. He entered into one hallucination, work, and at night he entered into another, the apartment. From one to the other, from one side of the world to the other, driving in the car was his transition, the fast, modern transition; this moment of solitude that’s considered polluting and selfish. Stuart, all alone in his car, went from one place to another.

  Two marine animals, alone. At the bottom of the sea or just below the surface. Cruising, as we say of boats. We didn’t feel less alone when we made love. Like everything else, making love had been coloured by Tom’s death. I remember a certain rage, a need to feel alive, to feel hatred. To hurt myself, at times. Make love is a stupid expression, or maybe, yes, to make love, to build it from scratch out of this embattled story. Tell each other tales of love above the tangled bodies. I’d never really understood the connection between two bodies and love. Between the solitude of orgasm, and the everything of love. This annoys Stuart; in fact, we never talk about it—he says I’m French, that’s the word he turns to when he doesn’t know how to categorise me. I say to him; we could have not been together. Except that at one point in my life I decided to make my way in the world with him, his furniture, and, later, his children. And that it made me happier to follow him into the world than to stay where I was; that’s what love is, I tell Stuart.

  I have only vague memories of why Stuart and not somebody else. Except that all of a sudden, the air tore apart. Was sort of hacked away, as if the stuff of space somehow got broken down, became unstable. We were drinking tea or whatever in my student dorm in Paris, we were talking about something; and space tipped. There we were, clothed and neutral, then all of a sudden—dripping and hard with desire. His elbow brushed my elbow, the most harmless part of my body touched the most harmless part of his—and we became totally engorged with blood. We had to have each other, fast. To intertwine, to hold onto each other. To caress each other, too, gently. A total upheaval, sounds that no longer echoed, the horizontal slanted, the vertical turned upside down. And time bumped up against us, time, hard with blood, with beating heat.

  There remains a place in us from where all this begins. This place has not been destroyed. I don’t know why.

  I started going to a support group in Sydney. I needed to find others like me, people who know that you can lose all composure over a simple ‘hello’, who can’t manage to go through a door anymore or choose between two articles of clothing. Don’t know anymore how to get up, how to wash.

  There were twenty of us working with a moderator who was in mourning himself. And I saw us all as pathetic mutants, each with an extra little head on our shoulders, the head of the dead one. And each of us was the medium through which this head could think, and speak, stammer—through us…The two-headed ones, the mourners, saying whatever, as long as we were together, together crying over our dead with the eyes of our two heads.

  After Tom’s death, my comprehension of English had sort of shrunk. When two people spoke at the same time, I was lost. I missed a word and meaning unravelled, my strength abandoned me. The sentence became impenetrable and this flowed into the following sentences; I wa
s out of my depth. But with the support group I knew what we were talking about. So I managed to follow. It was almost relaxing. It was with them that I really learned to speak again. My language classes.

  I’d found my words and I talked a lot. I cut other people off. I believed that my suffering gave me every right. I behaved badly, as if grieving stood in the way of politeness. I remember a woman who’d lost her only son; he was fifteen, I think. She dressed elegantly. Elegantly for Australia. Pastel suits, white stockings, white stilettos, always a hat. She seemed permanently about to go to a wedding. With her painted nails and blow-dried hair, she cried discreetly, eyes behind a tissue. She didn’t come to all the meetings, because we terrible ones, we wanted, I wanted, to trample her hat and make her bawl, like we did at school. That first group was no good at all.

  There were widows and widowers, inconsolable mummies and daddies, and grieving brothers and sisters. I was attuned to these brothers and sisters, this brotherhood. I was missing a brother. My mother had lost a son, still a baby. One death per generation—I tried not to think about this too much. A curse, a tithe for the dead child. My mother seemed to have recovered from it (my father, no), recovered in her own way, like an old couch, the awful mess of grief concealed beneath the new upholstery.

  I’m still crazy, in a way. Maybe I was looking for a brother or sister among those support groups. Are brothers and sisters better than friends at hearing grief? There were twenty of us in that group, I think. There were some who spoke better than the others. Some who listened better than the others. Different social classes. And also an aristocracy that were in a league of their own: those who’d lost a child. Us. There were only four of us, including the woman in the hat.

  Because the other bereavements were nothing. Wimpy, sissy. Were we going to compare Tom with the loss of a grandmother? We, the seriously grieving ones. Like you say the seriously mad, the seriously premature, the seriously burnt. A pedigree dog show. With scorecards. Who’s suffering the most? Sure, it happened to other people, but me, it had never happened to me before. It was the first time that I’d lost a son. No, this group just didn’t work for me. The lady with the hat, a wide-eyed couple who’d lost a baby to cot death, and me. I was the one who suffered the most. She’d had fifteen years, the woman in the hat. Fifteen years. Shit, I’m crying as I write this. Vince is seventeen, I know what that means. A whole life. I had four-and-a-half years with Tom, one thousand seven hundred days to get to know him and to live a life with him. And that couple, who were they grieving for? A three-day-old baby. A future, OK, but not mine, not a four-and-a-half year future. I know for whom I grieve, what splendour, what wonder.

  I was the first and the only one. I wasn’t ready for groups. Or, for Australia, really.

  My second group, in Canberra, was for grieving parents. Exclusively. I drove for four hours, from the Blue Mountains and back, to take part in the meetings. I remember an old lady called Nathalie. She was Russian. There’s no right age, she said, to see your children die. We could talk about this stuff together, give ourselves up to the kinds of calculations that were unspeakable elsewhere, measure ourselves against this: the difference between losing a baby and losing a sixty-five-year-old son. Between losing an only child and a child with siblings. Between losing a child through accident or illness or assassination. Delving into the uniqueness of all these sorrows.

  And the scandal of the passage of time. That often came up. The grieving song. Time changes nothing, time doesn’t heal the wounds. I didn’t know what time had done to me. But I talked about it anyway. Maybe a certain distance between bouts of sobbing. The pain just as intense, but maybe a little less frequent. A kind of pacing, a slowing of the contractions, of the pulse, of the panic. Time consoles nothing. There were the hard and fast mourners, the inconsolable ones, and then there were the others, who wanted to move on, who were cop-outs, and cowards. But most of all we talked for the sake of talking. To keep each other company. To allow ourselves the chance to say the big sentences, those not for others’ ears. The others, the ones who haven’t lost anybody. Or not yet, or not a child. As if there are two species of humans: the innocents, and us. Those who only have one head, only one hat on their only head. And us. We chatted amongst ourselves, we helped each other and we hated each other, we allowed ourselves to mumble, soaked in snot and tears, alone, but part of the group. A chain gang, working ourselves to the bone, before taking off together.

  I was among others. I was welcome in the club.

  Because there’s one thing that you learn quickly—outside, in the street, in shops, at school—it’s never to cry in public. It’s easy to spot the ones who don’t know that death exists. And also to spot the ones who are phobic about death, who can’t stand, for every reason in the world, when you hold it up in front of them. You learn to carry your grief discreetly. To pace yourself, to avoid the precipices, not to put yourself in a situation where you end up sobbing. Or to shut yourself away at home.

  These support groups were my day out, my big day out. I got dressed up, I made an effort to be elegant, I now understood the woman in the hat. Everybody talked about how distant those close to them had become. But I didn’t have any friends anyway, not in Australia. I was distant anyway. All of our moving house had discouraged the best of intentions, and my silence on the phone only increased our isolation. In those groups, they quickly found me very French. The clothes, the accent, and the quirkiness, the quirkiness that we all have, found their adjective. French. They said, When it all overflows inside you, you have to cry. So then I saw the Seine in flood. I expressed myself as best I could, with my accent from nowhere. With this strange language that constructed itself within me, stratum by stratum—all the dialects, from London, the west coast of Canada, Stuart, Tom and Vince—upon the mother-rock of my French. And over all that, a slab of silence. Sometimes I got excited, I became talkative. Often, they didn’t understand what I meant, and neither did I, not really. So I laughed. We were used to it, we were all like that.

  Still today, I tell myself that he’s somewhere. I can’t give up. If I stop looking after him, what will become of him? He’ll disappear altogether. He’s dead, I know that, but he’s not dead to me. The grief inspectors would say that my work is not over yet. How do they expect it to be over? He’s so little. He must have slid between two layers of time. I know that physics can’t do anything for the dead. But the contours of space, and those of the mind…We’ve got no idea.

  I understand that we love a city, like a body, like a creature. I love Vancouver. It’s the city of the living. When you die, you leave something of yourself in Vancouver that glistens in the buildings and in the forests and in the sea. And then you go to Australia. The dead go to Australia. In one go, somewhere above the Pacific, the biggest ocean in the world, somehow between one shore and another, we are living and then we are dead. In Australia, you live between sea and desert, along a thin coastal strip. Vancouver and Australia, the two border outposts. Tom knows this as well as I do. I love Sydney. But I love it upside down, like the last city. The city where I became dead, before the limbo of the Blue Mountains.

  Places we’re not acquainted with. The folds, the insertions, the hems of time and space, sewn in layers one over the other. We’ve got no idea. The flowers dried between two pages, the postcards from before the birth, or the letters that come to life again, swelled with desire, words reread over time…Tom is somewhere in there, in the vicinity. In that Australia there.

  We hadn’t wanted to bury Tom because we didn’t want to be shackled to a country, to its land. Yet, Tom’s death made Australians of us. I’d thought that, without a grave, I’d avoid turning into a black widow, riveted to the cemetery with my devotions, my polishing cloth, and those flowers, those overalls, those watering cans, that make you look like a cemetery gardener. It was a mistake. I was missing a place where I could speak to Tom. I spoke to him everywhere, he spilled over, Australia was our speaking place, our visiting room, the sky, the sea,
the desert of Australia.

  Stuart’s been telling me about the days when he took the car and drove aimlessly. Getting stuck on purpose in traffic jams in Sydney, or in the queue for the ferries that cross the harbour. In the car he was nowhere, the pain slipped away, he no longer thought. As if he somehow got a head start on his pain, leaving it, not where it was, but slightly behind him, puzzled, lost, like someone who follows you—yeah, who follows you to do you in, says Stuart. He crossed the huge harbour, found himself on the other side, in a hilly suburb, sparse, already arid. Radio full-bore, in a bubble of air-conditioning, heading straight for the bush, heading nowhere, through a widescreen landscape. On automatic pilot, towards the empty horizon.

  The crematorium was there, where the bush began. He had no memory of the route we took that first time, no image of it; but he knew the way, like a horse. He drove, without thinking. He parked out the front, idling. With the impression that he wasn’t the only one waiting there in a car. Amongst the prowlers, those that don’t have a grave.

  His mind empty, his hands on the steering wheel, amidst the noise of the engine. My husband. Stuart. Tom’s father. He turned the air-conditioning off, he opened the window, and finally, he turned the engine off. He breathed the distant air of the Sydney suburbs. It was as if the air was thin, the molecules expanded…Already the air of the desert, full of little thirsty she-oaks, and saltbush, and all sorts of plants he couldn’t name. Tom was there. Tom grew there. With difficulty, thirstily. In these plants so removed from our milky childhoods, from our buttercups, from our daisies, from our fat clover. Wind. Ashes. The great bushfires of 1994 had blackened the trunks and fertilised the sand, and Stuart had dreams of cycles, homecomings, regenerations. Tom’s landscape.