Tom is Dead (2 page)

For ages, it seemed to me that other people lived a lie. They were unaware that death is the shadow of every object in the world. It was so obvious, yet nobody saw it. Vince and Stella also carried their double, their death, wherever they went. I took sleeping pills but even this chemical sleep was affected. The colour didn't fade. A colour endowed with physical traits, a weight, a consistency, a kind of constriction of everything, space, air, throat, chest, stomach…A sound as well, that came and went, piercing then hushed, always present.
Can't you hear? Can't you see?
They're deaf and blind, those others. Non-existent. Ghosts. My knowledge was incommunicable, a
minus
knowledge, an opening that let nothingness in. My knowledge of black holes was making the world disappear. The emptiness was growing. The bottomless pit.

At the beach, the day before yesterday, I relaxed for the first time in ten years. I was on holiday. I didn't think about Tom anymore. For an hour or two, it's true, I watched Vince and Stella like a mother watches her children in a moment of sun-drenched serenity. Set against the background of that vague understanding shared in the west: death as a distant horizon, a boundary, in the face of the beauty of bodies and the serenity of the scenery. You let out a sigh. Your shoulders are loose, breath relaxed, you exhale. I felt this the day before yesterday: this experience of a world without death. A pause, where you're nothing more than the beach, and the waves, and the stunning beauty of Stella and Vince. I'd managed to achieve, I believe, this state of rest: the blues that happy people feel. The heartrending side of happiness.

When Tom died, Vince was seven and Stella was eighteen months old. Sometimes I feel like I have had four children, Vince, Stella, Tom, and then dead Tom. Or in this order: Vince, Tom, Stella, and dead Tom. I was thirty-five. My parents were alive. The world was turning the wrong way. Time was going back to its source. I was constantly cold, in the beginning, a sensation of cold wind on my skin, an icy wind in midsummer—in the depths of the earth there was a gaping hole.

I can't begin. In my head, everything revolves around Tom and ideas lead to other ideas like the escalators in the shopping centres in Vancouver, escalators with several junctions, several directions, whereas I should begin at the beginning, namely the day Tom died. The date. But nothing seems chronological in all this. Go back in time, but to when? Unfold what? Which thread would lead to this conclusion
without having anything to do with the rest
? As if lives move forward in a sequential way, a+b+c…

Or else go back all the way to his conception, like the Chinese do. According to the dates, it must have been in London, in that waiting period between two of Stuart's postings, before Vancouver. At a hotel, one of those good, practical serviced apartments, where we were put up at times like that.

What surprises me most is the desire to make love; what with the move, Vince not quite three, the jet lag, and everything else we had to sort out. That this moment should be registered during those days, during those nights, in a particular room, beneath one of those decorative paintings you find in hotels like that. That there was a time and a place, an opening, so that Tom could come, Tom, and nobody else.

Where is the beginning? I hear an unusual sound. I'm sitting in a white room. The beginning is Tom's death. So do causes have effects, do events unfold as if along a thread?
Accidents happen suddenly—
I have always known that, always said that, my mother used to say it too. An unthinkable thing, that doesn't fit into any system, a thing that doesn't make any sense, crouching at the bottom of caves, and that suddenly rises, screeching, devouring. Yes,
accidents happen suddenly
, I've always been ready for this possibility. I remain seated, dignified, I keep my cool. I will cope till the very end of this catastrophe; from now on my life will be dedicated to Tom's memory.

The unusual sound preys on my composure. At exactly the same time, I'm enclosed in a red cube-shaped room. I am in a red cube. The walls are padded in a weird way: a damp material into which you can sink your fist. I am a moving blade that vibrates like a gong. I'm locked up in a red cube-shaped scream and I slam into blood-drenched walls; nobody hears me. The scream exits my own mouth, and the woman sitting in the white room is shocked: me, so calm, wailing away.

That won't bring you back Tom
, the woman in the white room is already thinking.
Control yourself, please. You're letting yourself get carried away
. Because you'll need self-control to be Tom's mausoleum from now on.

In the red room you don't think, you need to scream. The red room is made for isolating yourself from the white room. In the white room, you're ashamed to scream—it's common knowledge:
what is expected of us in these circumstances
. Know-how from time immemorial, from ancestors and sit-coms. I began to scream, and then, to my surprise, the scream took over from me. I stayed in the red room, banging against the weird walls. The red mucous was swallowing me up, dissolving me. A tiny humming insect in an enormous carnivorous flower. The world had become carnivorous.

My husband was holding me in his arms, or rather restraining me, holding me down. He wanted to make me go into the white room but I was terrified of it. The dignified mother, who takes care of the corpse in an atmosphere of lunacy. My future life. Inside the scream, I already knew everything. Saints sigh, and fairies scream.

Tom held tight in my arms and decomposing.

Don't stop looking at him. Safe in death.

Once I was inside the scream, the scream convinced me. There was nothing but the scream. Because it was IMPOSSIBLE. The woman sitting in the white room, the one who knew it was possible, she is the one who should have died.

I was not yet a weeper. The weepers come later, around the grave. I was completely preoccupied by the scream, by what I had to do: scream. Empty-handed, arms by my side, alone in the oblivion of the scream. Far away from the white room, from our house, from my husband and from my children, far from Tom. Then, the injection. My throat aching as if I'd been beaten from within. A scream worthy of the outrage. Accuse everyone. Make them bear witness to the impossible. But when the scream ends, it's irreparable, there's no going back. It happened. It's done.

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 beginning. Take the right fork in the road, the right direction.