Free Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq Page B

takes years to learn.
    I have no memory of going home after the cremation, of going home without Tom. It seems that’s how it is, you go home, a hot urn on your knees.
    Stuart had chosen the urn. There are catalogues for coffin handles, there are also catalogues for urns. For the remains of your beloved little one . Different sizes according to the age of the child. There’s a whole industry, with a wide range of choice. In porcelain, in marble, in cherry wood, in crystal. In all kinds of shapes: teddy bears, rabbits, little pink or blue shoes, little trucks, dolls with heads you can unscrew, seagulls flying off. The business of death is inevitably kitsch. Maybe kitsch is soothing.
    Tom was in a big urn for adults, the most sober possible, though still decorated with a little gilt because in Australia all solemn objects have at least a bit of gold. Tom’s urn didn’t suit him, it wasn’t Tom. But it was an insoluble problem, an impossible choice. How to solve such puzzles?
    We’d wanted to trick the truth of death, trick the rotting, and the earth, but now, we were alone with this unbelievable, impossible object, the thing just appeared, a sort of black vase with a Greek frieze on the lid, and something of Tom was inside it.
    Where do you put it? What do you do with it? There are no mantelpieces in Australian apartments. There are TVs—could we put it on the TV? Up high, out of Stella’s reach, at our height, adult height, not on the ground, not at the back of a cupboard—or in the sunroom, maybe? On the ledge of the bay window? In the sun with a view? Mad, stark raving mad, mad with cynicism and pain, you’re a mother and then you become this? Where were Tom’s eyes? The urn’s eyes? On which side? Stuart took the urn with him to his office. Most probably put it in his desk. In the city, amongst the bay windows and skyscrapers, and Stuart always away on building sites. I wondered if cremation preserves the teeth, the little baby teeth—the tooth fairy will never come for Tom. A few vertebrae, maybe? A few bits of bone intact, something of Tom? I’d made him, I’d carried him in my womb. Who can possibly understand? We weren’t ready for this cremation, for such a sudden, such a complete disappearance.
    The peaks of memory have almost faded. The memory of Tom no longer holds surprises for me; I have, I suppose, nothing left to discover in that territory. All the memories arrived like letters. Ten years on, yes, everything has come back to me, the mislaid parcels, the booby-trapped packages, the registered mail, everything that Tom sent me since his death. Anyway, there aren’t that many memoires linked uniquely to Tom.
    But reminiscences. This territory that we visit unexpectedly, suddenly thrown into a well of time—the trapdoor under our feet, the way your heart misses a beat. Recently, it was the Johnson’s baby shampoo that we used to buy in Vancouver. That smell, all of a sudden. Fourteen years on. And Tom was there, baby Tom, contained in the bottle. Johnson’s baby shampoo smells of camomile and some chemical base, like tarmac. Tom is a Canadian baby from the nineties, suspended in a time of abundance. A big baby, vaccinated and white, destined for wealth. I open the bottle and I’m with Tom, at bath time in our apartment in Vancouver. At home . In these accidents of geography.
    We don’t know, we couldn’t know. It’s the only truth. Nothing destined Tom to this life of four-and-a-half years, to follow his parents from city to city, hot on our heels, as if he mustn’t lose sight of them, these restless parents.
    I open the bottle and I intoxicate myself with Tom. The past enclosed in the bottle. The past present, in the present, as soon as I open it. My heart stops beating in my chest and I’m in pain. Tom is in this bottle. Time stops. A laughing mouth, a rubber duck, dark wet hair, steam. He’s there. You can