Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

Corless felt shaky and infirm. His heart was racing. He saw the sun shining in the window and was amazed. How could the sun be shining? It should be night, it should be night and darkness and deepest winter. It should be the last night of the end of the world. He braced his hands on his knees. He called silently to his dead wife, saying her name in his head, saying it over and over.

The detective was speaking to him again, asking him some new question, or the same one again.

“What?”

“Have you been in touch with your son recently?” Hackett said. “I mean, would the two of you have been — would you have been close, like?”

Corless was barely listening. Hold fast, he told himself, digging his fingers into the bones of his knees, hold fast: others have suffered worse things than this, comrades whose families were destroyed, whose wives were raped, parents murdered, children tortured before their eyes. Hold fast.

“Close?” he said. “There are things we don’t see eye to eye on. Politics, that kind of thing. But he’s my son.” He gritted his teeth. “Was — he was my son.”

Hackett was standing by the window, looking out, as if there were something to see, his hat still in his hands. “So your son wasn’t political, didn’t follow in the — in the family tradition, as you might say.”

Corless gave a brief, harsh laugh. “My son,” he said, “is a firm believer in the eventual and inevitable triumph of capitalism.” His voice seemed to him to be coming not from his own mouth but from some machine close by, as if he weren’t speaking at all, as if the words he was hearing were a recording, badly made, a mechanical trotting out of worn-out slogans, assertions, denunciations. He was surprised at himself. Even now, standing on this precipice with a sea of grief stretching before him, he felt the old bitterness stirring, the old, aggrieved sense of general disappointment and disgust with the failed dream of a world transformed. What did any of it matter, now?

The doctor was by the door, still watching him intently. What did he see? A man lost to himself, a man who had given himself to a cause, had bound himself to an iron ideology. What was politics, compared to the death of loved ones? He clenched his hands on his knees again. No! Hold fast. Hold fast .

“There’s a question,” the doctor said, “about the cause of your son’s death, Mr. Corless.”

Corless tried to concentrate. What was being said here? What trick was being tried? “What do you mean? What sort of question?”

The doctor said nothing, only went on gazing at him. What the hell was he looking at, what was he looking for? He might have been squinting down the barrel of a microscope, Corless thought, studying some bug trapped between the glass plates, squirming in panic and torment.

The detective turned from the window. “As I said, there was a — a crash, in the Phoenix Park. Your son’s car ran into a tree. There was a fire.”

Corless stared, his face wrinkling into a grimace of anguish. “Was he burned?” he asked. “Was Leon burned?”

The detective shook his head. “We’re fairly certain — Dr. Quirke here is fairly certain — that he was dead, or at least unconscious, before the car caught fire. So there’s that, the fact that he didn’t suffer. You should hold on to that.”

How do you know he didn’t suffer? Corless wanted to ask. How do you know what happened or what didn’t? How do you know what my son’s death was like? Death is death; there’s always suffering. He closed his eyes for a moment and saw again his wife, who was hardly recognizable any longer, so wasted and frail was she, leaning over the side of the hospital bed and vomiting bile onto the floor. He had held her forehead in his hand, while the nurse came running. Sam, Sam, I can’t bear it any longer . And now Leon, burnt to nothing in that damned car that he was so proud of. He saw the irony of it: his son, Sam Corless’s only son, dying trapped in the quintessential product of the capitalist market.

He opened his eyes and stared at the doctor. “What do you mean, there’s a question about the cause of death? How did he die?”

“His car crashed into a tree,” Quirke said, “but from the look of it, he wasn’t going very fast at the moment of impact. Also, he suffered a blow of some kind to the side of the skull.”

There was a beat of silence.

“What are you saying?” Corless demanded. “Did someone knock him out first?”

Quirke held up his hands and shrugged. “I can’t say that for certain, no.”

“But you are saying it, right? You’re saying it’s a possibility — maybe more than a possibility.”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying, Mr. Corless. Mine is an uncertain science.”

“And what is your science?”

“I’m a pathologist.”

Corless saw the sea again, molten, aflame, the water’s purling edge and the child running towards him.

“So, then, Mr. Corless,” the detective said from his place by the window, “you say your son wasn’t interested in politics at all — that he wasn’t active in any way.”

“Why are you asking?” Corless asked. “What does it matter?”

Hackett fingered his blue-shadowed chin. “If your son didn’t die by accident, or if he didn’t mean to die—”

“What?” Corless half rose from the chair, then subsided again. “What are you saying, ‘if he didn’t mean to’?”

It was Quirke who answered: “The first people on the scene, the ambulance men, the Guards, assumed it was suicide. But that might be what they were meant to think.”

Corless had lowered his head and was shaking it slowly from side to side, a wounded bull. “Leon wouldn’t kill himself,” he said. This was a dream, surely it had to be. “He just wouldn’t.”

“Are you sure of that?” the detective asked.

He was regarding Corless closely. Corless only looked away. He hadn’t shed a tear, he realized, not a single tear. He was glad; when you weep you’re not weeping for the dead, you’re only weeping for yourself. He felt numb. That would wear off, though; yes, soon enough the numbness would wear off.

Hackett spoke to him again: “The thing is, Mr. Corless, if Dr. Quirke here is right — and his assistant agrees with him, by the way — and your son died under, well, let’s say suspicious circumstances, then it’s my job to find out what happened, to find out how Leon did die.” He paused. “And yourself, Mr. Corless, you must have enemies. You’re a prominent man, your views are well known, and they’re not popular.”

Again there was a silence in the room. They heard the sounds of the traffic in the street below. A horse and cart went past. Someone shouted a snatch of drunken song. This is a new city, Corless thought, one that came into existence a few minutes ago, when they told him Leon was dead. A new city, and I’m a different man in it. All sorts of things were dead along with his son, and other things had come into being, things that he would feel, when he was no longer numb. Nothing would be the same, ever again.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he said, suddenly plaintive. “I don’t know what you’re saying to me, what you’re asking.”

“I’m sorry,” Hackett said. “I understand. We should leave you in peace.”

He glanced at Quirke, who nodded.

In peace, Corless thought. In peace.

The two men moved towards the door. Corless didn’t get up from where he was sitting. He had the impression that if he tried to stand he would fall back again, and slump into himself, like a half-filled sack.

The sea. The waves. The child with the sunlight behind him, featureless now.

* * *

As they came out into the street the heat hit them again, a smoky miasma, and for a second they could hardly breathe. Hackett consulted his watch. “The Holy Hour is past.” He nodded in the direction of a marble-fronted public house on the other side of the street. “That place looks cool enough, and we could do with something to sustain us.”