Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq

learning it. Hearing it. Listening to it. She was putting forward words, the first words, expert words. She assured me of my grief. She validated it. I was right, to be in this state. In this rage. It was expected, documented, it fitted into a framework, a scale. It was normal.
    There’s a lovely little cemetery in Souillac. It’s my grandparents’ town. I hadn’t attended my grandfather’s funeral; I claimed to ‘hate funerals’. Poor darling. But, after everyone was gone, I went to reflect in silence by his grave. So much more chic, I guess. And it allowed me to avoid seeing my father in tears, it allowed me to avoid having to hold his hand, to say I don’t know what. I’d come alone to say goodbye to my grandfather who, he too , had always hated funerals—I’d come alone to support a departed one in his ordeal, shed a few tears and intoxicate myself with death. As I was already there, I’d visited the abbey, and bought some postcards.
    Does Tom come from a particular land? Where do you bury your four-year-old son, what is his landscape, where does he feel at home? He didn’t tell me. He’d only just begun to find his way around, to name places, to tell the difference between a city and a suburb. He counted time as well as distance in ‘sleeps’, it was his unit of measurement: the night, the length of sleep. No, Tom left no last wish. Tom died illiterate, ignorant of death. A few questions, yes, and we gave him fairytales. That was it, his preparation for death.
    If we’d known—but you don’t know, you don’t know. The signs. Souillac Abbey is known for its depiction of the sacrifice of Abraham. This sculpted pillar had affected me so deeply that I kept postcards of it, pinned up from one apartment to the next. Abraham holds Isaac by the hair. Abraham’s grip is firm, his other hand holds a dagger. His eyes are wide open, possessed. Isaac, hands clasped, has an empty look, his eyelids half-closed. He looks four, ten, twenty years old. An angel bolts from above, head first, a bomb. He offers up a ram whose astonished eyes are more expressive than those of the humans. The ram is most honoured to find himself mixed up in this whole affair, though he got more than he asked for. The angel hollers, mouth an O, hollers at the madman, the fool. On the side, you can make out bits of hooves, tails and claws. A bestiary; I pinned up the four sides of Souillac’s masterpiece alongside each other in my different kitchens. A descent into Hell, if Hell is infested with devouring beasts, wolves, griffons, monkeys and vultures. Tom was afraid of this bestiary, he was afraid of wolves, like Vince, like Stella was from very early on. And this amused Stuart and me: where did these little civilised creatures get this atavistic fear from? Where, so far from forests, had they sensed wolves?
    But then Tom was born in Vancouver, in British Colombia, amidst the Canadian forests. In a way, Sydney and Vancouver are close, in that they’re both so far from Souillac. Of France, Tom knew only Souillac and Étretat, my family. He had no memories of Paris. Vancouver was the city where he’d really lived, four-and-a-half years, the entirety of his conscious memory. But to bury him in Vancouver made no sense. He’d spent most of his time hanging around my skirts, and to bury him in my womb would’ve been the only obvious thing. Me, his native land. Me, a grave. If I’d buried myself, him curled up in my arms, me dead or alive, what difference would it have made?
    The signs. Everything spoke to me. Or, everything suddenly went quiet; I was in total emptiness and silence, but I still preferred chaos.
    We say ‘the sacrifice of Abraham’, but it’s Isaac who is seized by the hair. The sacrifice of Isaac. It would have been completely useless, at the time, to tell me that every Romanesque church has its sacrifice, or to try and reason with