Zach

Zach Marconi is the dead son of Napoleon and Heather Marconi and the twin brother of Zoe Marconi, whose suicide remains the defining wound in the family’s life. Though absent from the retreat in ordinary reality, he shapes its most intimate revelations and appears to Zoe and Napoleon during their psychedelic experience. Through family recollections and these visions, he is presented as both a vividly particular young man and someone whose inner suffering his loved ones could not fully see. The story’s movement is not toward a definitive explanation of his death, but toward a changed relation to it: his family begins to hold grief, responsibility, memory, and continued life together without making them interchangeable.

Identity and Family Background

Zach was a high-school-aged young man whose death by suicide occurred three years before the events at Tranquillum House. His father, Napoleon, teaches at a high school and recalls telling students that they are masters of their own fates. When he recites lines from “Invictus,” that familiar assertion becomes painfully complicated: the next day is the third anniversary of Zach’s death, and Napoleon recognizes that his son, too, made a choice—one that the language of mastery cannot make comprehensible or easy to accept. The family has come to the retreat because the anniversary is approaching, and because the loss remains active rather than safely confined to the past.

Zoe gives the family’s reason for being there a more immediate geography. January is difficult to endure at home because it is where her brother hanged himself. Her account makes the ordinary family home inseparable from the place of his death, while Napoleon’s account frames the retreat around the approaching anniversary. Together, their disclosures show that the family’s grief is not a single shared experience: the same loss returns through different memories, settings, and forms of speech.

The Brother Zoe Remembers

Zoe remembers Zach as outgoing and intensely interested in other people. He was chatty, like their father, and might have asked Frances about the publishing industry; he was also a self-described nerd who watched documentaries and listened to obscure podcasts. His curiosity about the world is precisely what makes his suicide difficult for Zoe to understand. She had thought a person so fascinated by life would not choose to give it up, and the contrast between the brother she knew and the death he chose remains a source of pain rather than a puzzle the narrative neatly solves.

Their relationship had its own ordinary friction. In the weeks before Zach died, the twins were not speaking. They had fought loudly over small domestic irritations—the bathroom, the television, a charger—and Zoe now looks back on those disputes as trivial. The remembered arguments give her grief a specific burden: she is mourning her brother while recalling that their last period together was marked by estrangement. Frances responds that this is what siblings do, but the reassurance does not erase the painful timing Zoe has disclosed.

In Zoe’s psychedelic vision, Zach returns with the familiar teasing intimacy of a brother who could call her a stupid-head. His physical closeness is striking because they were not siblings who usually hugged; their ordinary exchanges might instead include shoving each other hard enough to hurt. Now he puts an arm around her and pulls her close. The detail of his Lynx body wash, which he claimed to use ironically while believing its promises about making him more attractive to girls, makes the apparition recognizably Zach rather than an abstract image of the dead.

He tells Zoe that his death was not an act aimed at her and that, at the time, he was not himself. The exchange addresses a specific possible source of her guilt: their estrangement and the fear that his suicide was connected to her. It does not undo the loss or offer a complete account of Zach’s state of mind. Instead, it gives Zoe a moment of reassurance in the voice and manner she associates with her brother, allowing her to distinguish his death from a deliberate rejection of her.

Napoleon’s Memory and Recognition

Napoleon also sees Zach during the psychedelic session. When he says that Zach would have found the family getting high together hilarious, he answers himself by greeting his son, who appears in shorts and no shirt. For a moment, the vision restores the feeling of the four of them spending time together as an ordinary family, taking one another’s presence for granted. Napoleon asks Zoe whether she can see him, making the apparition at once a private encounter and an attempted point of connection between father and daughter.

The vision does not settle Napoleon’s anger about Heather’s concealed information concerning Zach’s asthma medication. After the retreat, he recognizes that although he dreamed of Zach, he did not dream Heather’s revelation; he believes he is no longer confused about which events were real. The distinction matters because his distress cannot simply be dismissed as an effect of the drugs. He recalls the division of responsibility in their household: Heather had medical training and managed health decisions, while he was the teacher in charge of homework. He had been willing to debate decisions, but Heather preferred to get things ticked off the list. His bitter thought about what she had got done reflects how the medication disclosure has sharpened his anger and connected it to their family’s established roles.

As Napoleon remembers Zach, he sees the boy’s first rough stubble and the way he lowered his eyes when he had done something wrong. He recalls a child who hated being in trouble and seemed often to be in it, contrasting him with Zoe’s greater ability to talk her way out of blame. These details restore the child behind the family’s later arguments about responsibility. Napoleon does not approve of his son’s decision and still calls it wrong, stupid, and the worst possible decision; nevertheless, he begins to imagine that Zach experienced it as the only choice available to him. He compares that constriction to people jumping from burning towers and to the desperation of someone who cannot breathe. This is a painful recognition of how unbearable Zach’s state may have felt, not a declaration that suicide was right or inevitable.

Memory, Responsibility, and What Remains

The novel lets different family members’ accounts of Zach stand beside one another without turning them into a complete explanation. Napoleon’s recitation of self-mastery collides with his son’s suicide; Zoe’s image of a curious, sociable brother collides with her inability to believe he would give up on the world; and the medication revelation complicates her parents’ grief with anger, concealed knowledge, and questions of responsibility. The contrasts remain unresolved. Understanding a possible dimension of Zach’s despair does not erase Napoleon’s condemnation, just as the family’s knowledge of his medication does not establish a single, simple cause for his death.

For Zoe, the vision eventually changes the place Zach occupies in her imagination. He is still there, she thinks, not as someone physically present but in her heart and memory, accompanying her as she finishes university, travels, finds work, marries, and grows old. Her conclusion insists that his choice of death does not require her to choose death or suspend her own future. Zach’s remembered presence becomes a form of companionship that can continue without denying his absence.

Napoleon’s later response to Heather also resists the easy allocation of blame. He tells her she is not responsible for Zach’s suicide, even though he had written to authorities and the pharmaceutical company to place on the public record that his son had taken his own life after being prescribed medication. The letters show that he pursued documentation and public accountability, while his reassurance to Heather distinguishes that action from a claim that she caused Zach’s death. Zach’s continuing significance lies in this unresolved distinction: the family can investigate what happened, remember the person they lost, and recognize their own anger and guilt without reducing his life or death to one verdict.