The Pitched Battle

1.
It is as if they are strangers that have stopped alongside each other
on the street, one of them perhaps asking the other for directions.
Only in the time it takes to ask and be answered, they have lived
together and married and almost raised a child. The evaporated street
frightens them, its sudden lifting striking them like the base of a
carbon black frying pan. They find themselves surrounded by books and
furniture and clothing and memories - memories more than anything else.
Where did all these fucking memories come from? How do I have memories
of you, when you are a stranger? This was how she looked at him. Her
bitter look accused him. It was rape, what he had done. The time they
had spent together, the time they had spent becoming strangers
together, the time they had wasted loving each other enough to make a
child, all that time made useless.

Each of them was burned out. Each of them was a burned out husk, the
remains of a body, life after life has gone. Crucially, that burning -
the burning of everything that made each of them an individual - left
them strangers. It took what they were and left only grief and pain and
unfocused rage.

2.
For a long time, they slept alongside each other. The death of the
child altered the way they were with each other. Where once she had
curved within the S of his body - the pair of them seen above, an ear
covered by blankets - now they remained apart, exclamation points on
the left and right side of the bed. The middle of the bed became an
uncharted wilderness that neither dared broach. Each lay listening to
the clock tick away the hours and minutes of the night. Neither slept,
or slept for very long. Occasionally, she roused him, when exhaustion
had proven so great he did sleep, accusing him in her rebukes about his
snoring, of not loving the baby enough to stay awake throughout the
rest of time.

What he intuited from her pinched stings: how could he sleep when sleep
was the enemy that had stolen their child? What he read in her face
provoked him beyond all countenance. He wanted to rage in the face of
her: I can sleep because in sleep I forget. I can sleep because sleep
is like death and I want to die. When the rage gripped him, his entire
soul crippled crisp upon the tip of a white hot soldering iron, he
could reduce everything down from abstract pain and complex grief and
civil mourning to nothing, to wanting to die. He never told her but
inside, over and over and over again: I want to die.

Sleep became a kind of admission. I am guilty. It was my fault. Take it
out on me. Accuse me. My grief is not great enough to keep me awake. I
am a terrible man. I am the worst father. I cannot pretend to attain
the lofty heights of true grieving.

He wanted to tell her. In his head, the words confused themselves. Was
he angry with her? Did he blame her? Did he blame himself? Did he hope
they would make it through this awful black tumour time? Or was it time
to walk away from all of the cancer shadows? Was it time to call this a
day? He wanted to tell her that her grief lacked honesty. He wanted to
tell her that she was phoney. He wanted to tell her that the thought of
his little girl weighed upon him throughout the magnified seconds of
every day. He wanted to tell her that he had never felt pain like this.
He wanted to tell her that what he was feeling was not pain, was so
beyond pain as to be psychic torture, as to require a new word (wanted
to tell her that this - the desire to find a word to express the sheer
scale of his pain - felt like vanity, felt like dishonesty, felt like
the exact thing that the silent voice in his head accused his wife
of).

He wanted love, more than anything else, then. He wanted each of them
to have the movie reconciliation. She would breakdown in the kitchen.
Perhaps she would stab him or throw a plate at his head, wounding him
in some obvious direct way, blood - actual blood (the blood their baby
never spilled) - coming between them. They would be standing in the
kitchen in the first direct sunlight of the day, neither of them having
slept, screaming, and suddenly the screaming would break (the
physicality of a tide turning), and they would weep. She would hold him
as he howled. He would hold her through her silence (because he
expected her final, great period of mourning to be silent, noble,
ridiculous). It would not be over. It would never be over. But, in that
instant, each of them would recognise that they had crossed the
blistering desert and reached the other side. He wanted each of them to
reach the other side. He thought he wanted each of them to reach the
other side together, but he wasn't sure and that debate raged alongside
the greater debate of how you cope with the loss of a part of yourself
(a part that was greater than a limb, that combined the physicality of
an arm or a leg with - something else, some sensient part like memory
or taste).

The rest is like a pitched battle in the pocket of a wet overcoat. He
looks at her and he is confounded by the look of her. She is a
stranger. He looks at her and he is wiped clean like a classroom slate,
he looks at her and thinks who are you? Just who are you? How did I get
to know you? And she stares back with a face only the mother of a dead
baby could love and says just die, will you? Dig a hole in the ground,
lie down and suck the ploughed earth over your body and take a deep
breath. Take a deep breath, suck the earth up through your nose, take a
hunk of that dirt in your mouth and swallow, keep on eating until
you're full of dirt and you're made of dirt and dirt is your name and
dirt is all you remember. And I say fine, and she says good, and we
stand back to back walk ten paces and fire and it's as good as
over.