Tom is Dead (10 page)

A moment of
oublie
, of forgetfulness. One free hour, on the beach. But I stayed in the vault. The cremation didn't have the imagined effect. Neither Tom nor I became airborne. My head, my hair is made of stone. My nails and my fingers are heavy. I can't lift my eyelids anymore, I can't lift my hands anymore, I can't raise them to my eyes.
Grave
, the English word for
tombe
, is heavy, and graves in French evoke falling because
tomber
is also the French verb
to fall
.
Jesuis tombée amoureuse de Stuart
, I
fell
in love with Stuart, and I
fell
pregnant with Tom. And with Vince and with Stella, and with nobody else. But Tom didn't become airborne, the cremation didn't work. I didn't start breathing in his molecules, his scent didn't lighten the weight of my head, and his gaseous hands don't comb my hair. No, I can't pass through his vaporous body. Contrary to everything, the Earth's atmosphere was not fouled, the air did not become unbreathable. Tom is dead but no modification of time, of climate, of human behaviour, is detectable around us.

Storms, tsunamis and earthquakes, forty days of darkness on Earth, would have appeased my wrath a little. A bit of pageantry to grab the imagination, a bit of furore to make the others stop dead in their tracks. The others, the unscathed ones. Two seconds of terror for them. Niobe, at least, has her little myth. Obviously, it's not Demeter in the Underworld. Or even Hecuba turned into a dog. But as for me, nothing. I didn't turn into anything. I didn't even know how to scream for very long: one injection, and out I went. What should be done for Tom? What devastation? Or what monument? My father, he was howling in a private hospital.

They say that nature can't stand emptiness. Sometimes I tell myself that the only tangible trace that remains, the only trace of Tom, the sign that I didn't dream it all, is the caesarean scar just above my pubic bone. Tom was the only one of my children to be born like this, to have exited my belly above my vagina and not through it, but what does that mean?

If the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth is a constant mass, Tom created his own little turbulence there, he inscribed himself into this air that we breathe, his volume existed. It seems to me that his removal beyond the surface of the Earth should leave an anomaly in the arrangement of the world…A distortion, a disturbance…A cloud of ashes between us and the sun…Something, and not this strange
as before
.

But the Earth seems to be an organism whose scars heal well. A system that re-forms almost the instant an element is removed. Before or without Tom,
idem
.

So I became mute. It was my lips that turned to stone. Silence descended into my veins and paralysed the muscles of my cheeks. I was seated and mute. My hair drooped. My fingers drooped. My eyelids and my eyelashes, and the skin on my face. I felt only the silence flowing beneath my skin like water beneath a city. I was dead. I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I did nothing. What was left of me was there to suffer.

Whoever was prepared to take note of this phenomenon would be testifying for Tom. I became a burden for Stuart and the children. But I was also, it seemed to me, something stable, that you could count on, like a table, or a tombstone, like Tom's death. I was Tom's representative on this planet, a heavy presence, an anchored pain.

I didn't mind taking on this work, given I didn't have any choice. Taking on their pain, so that they could move on. Mutely, I urged them to live. At least I thought it. As for me, just dismember me.

Talking served no purpose. Talking didn't stop the planet from turning. Day and night from following each other, people from getting on with things, machines from functioning. I kept an eye out for the breakdown, the explosion, the delirium. Nothing.

In the beginning, each morning, it was by way of rebellion. Even Stuart continued to breathe, even Vince and Stella continued to be hungry, to ask for things, to defecate. Even me.

I remember one day, the phone rings, it's my mother, she rings every day. No sound comes out of my mouth. My lips form syllables, my tongue fidgets, but my vocal chords don't vibrate. The air just goes round them, the air just keeps me breathing. There is an element of decision in this refusal. My will exerts itself upon my vocal chords to paralyse them, but, from this moment on, the paralysis overwhelmed me, I lost control over my own refusal. I believed I was refusing to speak, but already I couldn't stop myself from being mute.

When Stuart came back that evening with the children (during this period, Stuart left work really early to pick up Vince from school and Stella from day care in Bondi, where, thanks to Tom's death, we got a place that I'd characterise as compassionate), when the remaining members of this family entered the house, my lips parted around a pathetic ‘hello' but no sound passed between them. It was better that way. Never again would I utter an optimistic hello or
bonjour
or good evening. Yes, it was better that way, and that would teach them (what, I don't know), they would notice, these three scattered members of this destroyed family, they would take notice of me, but already I could no longer speak.

Body reflexes undergo reversal. You become strong, sick with strength. A dam is created, a membrane, you acquire a new organ at the base of the throat. Speech or swallowing. You don't die from being mute. But the others go crazy.

I had nothing to say, nothing to confess. The torture was never-ending and language was useless. Words formed in my head in layers, they inundated my neurons, spread out, joined up again, streamed to form other layers, and this floodwater didn't flow out, it dripped frustratingly in my mouth forming a boggy syllable which, before it was even uttered, lost its meaning.

My mother continued to call me, her courage is beyond belief, my mother spoke to me, alone, on the phone. She gave me news about my father, about his scream. Between two doses of medication, the scream was reborn—it rumbled in his chest, rose, then burst out. It seemed to me that I could hear him. I was mute, not deaf, but my mother spoke loudly, articulating each word. My father screamed for me, for us. This scream hollowed out a hole where Tom had been, at that gaping spot, that must be kept gaping.

Not long after,
The Scream
by Munch was stolen from the National Gallery of Oslo. It was the concentric waves around my father's scream that had engulfed the painting, swallowed up by his wide-open gob, it disappeared while my father screamed, and, of course, the painting would never be found, given that, in the end, the world didn't remain intact, given that anyway, based on a few signs, you could see there were faultline cracks in the surface, molecules were being engulfed, and of the material world all that remained were memories.

Undo that which has been created. Stella and Vince had a dead brother and a mute mother, not to mention a crazy grandfather. I saw them. They passed in front of my eyes. And, for a very long time, I believed that I could speak whenever I wanted to. But words, starting with ‘want', were like watches with broken springs.

When the time came, I'd speak
. But this moment didn't come. My silence took care of everything that I might have had to say.

I had a brief period of activity. I managed to take Stella to day care and Vince to school. I managed to wash them and to dress them. I did some shopping. I even cooked. My silence brought an improvement with it. The TV stayed on, a night light, a fixed point. Certain elements of the world penetrated my brain. Sometimes, I also had outbursts; I'd hug Stella tightly against me till she screamed. Once I cried on Vince, physically, on Vince's hair and cheeks—I leant over his bed and I poured out like a carafe. And then, like an unforeseeable wave, one of those killer waves in the middle of the sea, I grabbed him and shook him and I dumped everything on him, bucket loads of insults and screams.

After this outbreak, Stuart asked me to check into a hospital. It must have been at the beginning of autumn, around March or April. It was still very hot in Sydney. I was in a white room. I slept. I had a neighbour as mute as me. The room wasn't air-conditioned, or the air-conditioning had broken down: we were two large bodies laid out on white sheets, mute and motionless, sweating away. A couple of beached whales. My neighbour fanned herself with the security instructions, what to do in the case of a fire; it was her only movement.

What was wrong with her? What had she done? Two infanticides in the same room? My roommate. My girlfriend. In the beginning, I was upset by her presence, but even MALF wasn't able to secure me the luxury of a private room. Then I began to like her. Mutely, she created havoc. And, at other times, she was nothing but an extra, hired to make me speak. All her play-acting was only meant to be therapeutic; a Sydney hospital drama queen, and not the magician who, from under the sheets, would have made Tom suddenly appear like a rabbit. Near the end, even her eyelids didn't blink, even her chest didn't rise. She had a great talent for catatonia.

Even with the best intentions in the world, I wouldn't have been able to say anything to the shrink. Nothing got past my throat. Or else:
give him back to me
. Give him back to me and, if I'm sick, you'll see how I get better. The shrink spoke to two people in the room, me, and Tom beside me. Sitting quietly beside me. The English
you
, like the
vouvoiement
in French—I heard the plural form, I heard you two, you two the dead ones. I didn't speak to Tom either. Not yet, not already, not that I'm aware of. He was constantly with me, he read my thoughts. ‘When do you think you'll be able to go home?' the shrink asked me. And I felt the paralysis, its soft, dark fluid, descend to the bottom of my throat and spread out through my entire body. I would never go home. I would stay here, passive, a dead weight. Little by little, I would forget the house, even the desire for a house. And as this fluid spread, curiously, I rediscovered my limits, I touched something that could be an edge: an edge of me, something become me, my skin, my impotence, and, then beyond that, the world.

One night, after I got back, Stuart took my face in his hands. ‘Please,' he said to me. I tried. I tried in the best of faith. I tried to form a sound in my throat and to bring it to Stuart's face. I didn't know how to do it anymore. I opened my mouth, but my throat had become so narrow that only just enough air passed through it to keep me alive. Stuart took his face in his hands. He became two hands that watched me, pierced by two eyes. Tom played peek-a-boo between his fingers. Tom's laugh shivered between his fingers. Something rose up from Stuart's stomach all the way to behind his hands. His own scream. We'd been turned into animals and we discovered, each of us, our scream. A zoo of pain.

Most of the time, I had vertigo. I lay on my bed. As soon as I moved, even the slightest movement of the head, the apartment distorted. The walls leaned in towards me and lifted me towards the ceiling. I closed my eyes but I felt myself rising at great speed. As soon as I opened my eyes it started again, the straightened walls leaned in once more towards me. I was unable to move forward down the endless corridor. I held onto the walls, they shied away. The light bulbs on the ceiling fell towards me, blinding, accusing. The doors whispered. Sitting in the kitchen, I turned the radio on and let innumerable cups of coffee go cold. The next minute was impossible to live through. Each minute that came, always the same. I couldn't breathe. Time stagnated in coffee cups. Inhale, exhale. Impossible. I didn't know how anymore. I panicked. Time no longer passed into my body, through my body, basic reflexes threw me into a panic. My body became a barrier, to air, to food, to sleep, to coffee. The next minute, each minute, how to live through it? Panic attacks sent me running to the windows. I'd stop still, lost. Victoria Road continued on beneath the sunroom. The traffic signal for the blind went from red to green and the electronic voice gave its orders, go, stop. I closed the window, the muffled beep was a bell of misfortune, a little death knell, the death knell for Tom.

Tom was by my side. He'd sensed that he could come home, that I wasn't afraid anymore. He slipped in bedside me and, as long as I didn't say anything, he stayed there. Bird. The slightest noise made him fly away. I spoke to him in my head. I thought up sentences for him. As long as I spoke to him, as long as I held his attention, he stayed. Hypnotised. Noises made my heart leap. Stuart and Vince learned to walk on tiptoes, and even Stella didn't scream anymore, or I didn't hear her. I stayed lying there, and Tom came and sat on the edge of the bed. My eyes didn't see him, but my mind saw him. I sensed his presence and his features took form. At times, when I was exhausted by this intimacy, I'd get up and I'd sense him at the level of my hip, and I'd smooth my hand over his head caressing him gently. The air was hard and warm. And then I could, more or less, go on with other tasks, the washing or taking care of the kids.

Vince drew pictures of fires in orange, yellow and red, with black houses and firemen. Stella avoided me. Caution is the mother of reason. At eighteen months old, she'd learned, in one go, to feed herself up in her highchair, spoon in hand, a faraway stare. An empress. For the rest, she sought out Stuart. Stella never learned French. Stella, like Vince, still only speaks her father's language.

Jamais
,
toujours
—never, always
—
these were Tom's words; he'd just started trying out these difficult words. Never, always, at four-and-a-half?

Stuart followed my movements as if he were standing on a pier, hoping to see a boat return. Or to see the drowned start swimming? But I was also incapable of
reaching out
to him. Stuart's mouth became rounded, opened, he wanted to speak, he kept me company, but I couldn't. One night he said to me—he grabbed me by the shoulders, I thought he was going to shake me—‘
It was not your fault
.' But at the time I didn't hear it. It was one of those expressions of condolence like people said to me in our neighbourhood, when they really couldn't avoid me—‘It was not your fault.'