Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq Page A

me by saying that postcards…I always had dozens of them pinned up all over the place over the course of the moves. Hokusai’s waves, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde , Greek temples and theatre posters. At the time of Tom’s death, all those cards and knickknacks were, in fact, still in a box. But I had to invent a higher power. I had to have, in some way, enraged an avenging God, to have called death upon my son, to have offended the signs. I’d been deaf to the warning din.
    So I waited for the signs to finish their work. I waited for them to point out to me where and how to bury Tom. But I’d been abandoned. The signs were unreadable.
    The hospital called. I was at fault, like a child. I was irresponsible. I was abandoning my little boy in death. I remained deaf. They told me off in an official way. They understood, but they told me off just the same. In English, though I was losing my English anyway; I understood nothing—had they spoken to me in French, I wouldn’t have understood anything either. Make arrangements for the body. I’d found apartments all over the world but I didn’t know how to find a grave. Stuart was working, Stuart was earning, as they say, our living. The housekeeping. And I’d kept house, kept the kitchen washed and scrubbed, up to scratch, as best I could. But I wasn’t good at anything anymore. And neither was Stuart. Vince and Stella’s hunger made him go out and buy hamburgers to cook for them. As for Tom’s grave, Stuart was like me: he waited.
    In English, they say coffin , a false friend, not a couffin , French for bassinet. I struggled with this word, coffin. Not with the word, with the reality of it. Tom in this reality. ‘I should make it by hand, it’s up to me to make it.’ Stuart announced this to me. I loved him for saying that. There were flashes, bright spots literally. Right from the beginning, paradoxical moments. Not what you’d call happiness. Moments of love. I imagine Stuart in a timeless forest, sawing planks of white wood, assembling and polishing them, a bit more than a metre long and how wide, the width of shoulders? A box made of rough wood, without embellishment, Tom. What does Tom’s death look like? What death looks like him? It looks like this. We would’ve dug a hole in the forest. We would’ve gone back, following sources and streams, to an obvious place, where we’d have laid him down, in peace, beneath the humus and the leaves. But we would’ve needed time. We would’ve needed ten years, perhaps.
    You have to be ready so quickly, so suddenly. Tom went backwards and forwards in and out of his body, hors de son corps . What to do with Tom’s body, with this body? An empty shell. A slough like animals leave behind, that you find curled up on a path or clinging to trees, useless, translucid, a little disgusting. Or sometimes it was a cumbersome object, a bit of refuse, and, just like after a crime, an accomplice would get rid of it for us, would do the dirty work.
    And at other times, I thought of Tom as in this body. Trapped in this body. Tom-body shut away all alone in a drawer in the morgue of a foreign hospital, far from everything, far from us. Alone. In the cold. I looked at Vince and Stella sleeping in their little beds, and I cried, that’s when I cried. Tom alone in the drawer—to this day I can’t handle this, the image of him slipped in there. Tom was there. He needed to be taken care of, not left all alone.
    Two ideas were foreign to me: the idea of vigil, and the idea of burial. As if I’d remained innocent of the millennia of funerary knowledge. The Greeks, the Jews, the Christians. The first graves, and the graves before them, those without writing. The beginning of History starts there. I was innocent. New. A baby just out of its mother’s womb. To watch over a body in a morgue, to have a chair brought to you next to an open