The Measure of Darkness

by Liam Durcan

  This was met by silence, with Martin pushing himself away from the table and shifting back and forth in his seat before lifting himself to his feet, trying as much as possible to make the movement look effortless in front of his daughter. Failing.

  “I need some air,” Martin said to Brendan, “Let me have a moment.” Martin maneuvered to the doorway of the room, waved off Brendan’s offer to help, and disappeared around the corner and into a hallway.

  Brendan realized he should have followed his brother out of the office, but he did not leave. He stayed in the room and felt Susan’s glare settle on him. He should still be at the Dunes. Susan said nothing, but the message was clear. She seemed a degree sterner now that her father had turned the corner. You shouldn’t let him out like this. He wanted to say something that excused himself and maybe even something that would remind her that he’d been the one at the bedside, but he was mute in front of her, looking at the bottom row of her front teeth, a wall of perfect tiny incisors, and he imagined her as a four-year-old with milk teeth and then imagined his mother. Still enthralled by her, by the idea of a female Fallon, he was incapable of any reasonable response. He realized, standing in front of his niece, that he would have been hopelessly at the mercy of daughters, a feckless purchaser and boarder of ponies, a down-on-your knees Barbie-man, his best hope of reclaiming any residual Y-chromosome function being the opportunity to play the potentially wrathful nemesis to a host of teenage suitors. He was about to agree with her—the visit had been a disaster and Martin, for all the sympathy lent him by the accident and the moral authority his status as the founding partner had conferred, came off as pretty much a bullying ass. So muteness seemed the best response in the face of her accusations. And even though her exasperation was captivating, he finally felt the need to defend himself. He sat down across the table from her.

  “You shouldn’t have brought him here,” Susan said.

  “He’s hurt and he’s paranoid. If I’d refused to bring him down here, he would’ve assumed I was just another part of the conspiracy against him.” Brendan lowered his voice slightly, perhaps, he thought to himself, in an attempt to sound more believable. “And I thought he had the right to ask you why you had his license suspended.”

  Susan shook her head. “He’s got absolutely no insight, Uncle Brendan.” Uncle Brendan. Nice. He would have liked a do-over as the uncle.

  “He cares about this consulate project, even if it’s over for him. The idea for him to be a consultant seemed like an interesting compromise.”

  “He’s half-blind and he’s paranoid. He can barely walk. You want someone that impaired involved with your house? With your country’s consulate?”

  “He only wants to see—”

  “He can’t see.”

  “You know what I mean. Eventually, he wants to go to the site. Wouldn’t that be good PR for the firm?”

  “The clients would object.”

  “The Russians?”

  “The Russians. They didn’t agree with my father’s vision for the project.”

  “Wasn’t his design chosen by the Russians in the first place?”

  “Initially, yes, it won the design competition. Then there was a change in the Foreign Ministry; new consular officials arrived with different tastes. The people who were to sign off on the consulate thought the design didn’t represent the image that they wanted to project, and they demanded changes.”

  “Big changes?”

  “Starting over. Yeah, the initial design was clearly too eclectic for them. It was like an homage to that Soviet architect he’s into: Melnikov. Dad called it a ‘modern take on Constructivism,’ but the Russians, the new Russians, were totally unimpressed. There was a meeting around Christmas and they came out and said it looked like a spaceship and they wanted something more conventional.”

  “And he refused.”

  “He refused.”

  “And that led to the buyout?”

  “Catherine and Jean-Sebastien agreed to modify the project, and they even kept some design elements in it, you know, as a gesture of goodwill to Dad. The last thing they wanted was for him to leave the partnership. But he wasn’t prepared to change one thing, a real line-in-the-sand ultimatum, and he let the Russians and Catherine and Jean-Sebastien know. The firm was going to lose the project.” Brendan nodded and wondered where Martin was at that moment, staggering into some fresh provocation or maybe just standing outside his old office, the loss settling in and becoming more than just a contractual detail. Becoming real. Susan folded the paper towel that Martin had drawn on. “He’s at home now?”

  “We got back yesterday.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He likes to have the lights out. A couple of times at the Dunes, I found him on all fours, crawling around his room. I thought he’d fallen, but he was down there, sort of exploring.”

  “Oh God. Does he have appointments to go to or something?”

  “In a couple of weeks. An assessment at a rehab center here in town and some medical appointments. He’s supposed to meet with a psychiatrist, as well.”

  “I think that would be a really good idea.”

  “His psychologist from the rehab center told me it’s pretty standard following a head injury to have depression,” Brendan said, and then continued. “Before the accident, he was okay?”

  “Sure. If anything, he was defiant. He spilt with Agnetha over a year ago, but he seemed genuinely relieved after that ended. Things around here were stressful, even before the buyout, but you have to know my dad; he doesn’t shy away from things like that.”

  “He didn’t talk about anything?”

  “Not really,” Susan replied, interrupted by a noise outside in the hallway, causing both of them to look toward the doorway that Martin had recently passed through. “That’s just him, though. Or maybe it’s a Fallon thing. Maybe you could tell me.” She squeezed his arm. “Thank you for coming to stay with him. With Mom away, it would have been impossible for me to look after all this. And Norah, well, she—”

  Brendan, magnanimous, waved her off: “You’re welcome.”

  “No one expected you to do this.”

  He tried not to sound offended. “All the more reason, then.”

  Susan looked at him for a moment, a facial gesture that made him think of his sons in Portland. They had never known their cousins. For a moment, he thought about all the things that were unknown in his life, and how the discovery of those things never considered led to what felt like a pang of loss.

  “You should get him out of here. I don’t think it’s going to be good for him.”

  Brendan nodded at this.

  After a short and frantic search, Brendan found Martin stalled in a corridor outside the lunchroom. Martin was standing silently at the end of the hallway, facing a window that, when Brendan looked over his brother’s shoulder, he could see overlooked an intersection. A blue-and-white city bus briefly rolled to a stop in the gap between buildings, and its appearance cheered Brendan, as he thought that Martin was watching, capable of taking it in. But then Brendan looked down and saw his brother’s feet shuffling under him, the effort without advance, someone in the water, struggling just to stay afloat.

  Chapter 8

  Martin’s hands wandered over surfaces, mapping out the dimensions of new territory. Paris, he said to himself, and his right hand lingered on one of the corners of the model that sat before him on the table. The northwest corner, he thought—he could see it so clearly (see was the wrong word, but then again, it was the only word, a word defiled for so long by the eyes when it meant knowledge and experience).

  The comforting certainties of the model, lifted onto the kitchen table by Brendan, were a respite after a rancorous day, which had ended with the futility of a dozen cold calls to lawyers in search of some way to invalidate the buyout deal, reinstate him with the Ordre, and take back control of the firm. The law firm that F/S+H retained refused even to take his call, which told him that Jean-
Sebastien and Catherine had been there already. With the legal avenues seemingly exhausted, Martin deployed plan B and tried to contact Tony Cheng, the senior project manager for the consulate, only to hit an unexpected wall of voice mail. Tony was not a voice-mail guy, Martin said glumly, explaining to Brendan that he had once called his associate for a relatively unimportant question, only to reach him at his mother’s funeral. No answer on Susan’s phone, and the receptionist at St. Joseph/Houde was not picking up, either. Total call screening. He felt quarantined.

  The model helped to calm him down. But it was more than a distraction. The model was space he could understand, an intersection of shape and memory, a revelation in the dark. Martin turned, hearing his brother near, feeling Brendan’s gaze on him, on the model.

  “I built it.”

  “Very nice. One of your designs?”

  Martin gave his head a shake. “Oh, no. Someone else’s. But I built the model.”

  “It’s nice anyway. Precision work.” He could feel Brendan move closer, at his right shoulder now. “What is it?”

  “A building designed for an exhibition in the 1920s. Torn down a few months after it was built.”

  “Modern, right?”

  Martin was reminded of every science-fair project he’d ever completed; the cursory visit of the school principal, who gave the impression he knew your disciplinary record more clearly than your name.

  “Modern? Sort of. Like saying a Chihuahua’s a dog.”

  Brendan was unfazed. “Do you remember building that?”

  Martin nodded, surprised at his answer as the words left his lips. “I suppose I built it in the last year. It stuck with me.”

  The index finger of Martin’s right hand moved up the stairs of the pavilion. With the pad of his finger, he navigated to the very point where Melnikov would have stood for his famous photo. Martin took his hands away from the model and opened his eyes, and the clarity of the steps and the facade itself were obliterated, bleached in a light so intense it could have been straight from a Los Alamos daybreak. Melnikov was gone, too, his work dismantled again.

  “Funny what sticks with a person,” Brendan said, turning away.

  It took three trips down to the garage to pack the car the following morning, and with each elevator ride, Martin had made it a point to accompany his brother, as if suspicious that Brendan was secretly dumping his belongings instead of loading the trunk of the Lexus. All this was the eventual result of Martin’s announcement that he wanted to get out of the city, away from the firm and any thoughts of the consulate. Martin tried to rationalize it as the necessary change of scenery (after only a couple of nights at home, on the heels of several months in a rehab hospital, this struck Brendan as patently false, but he understood the therapeutic value of distance after witnessing the humiliations, some admittedly self-inflicted, that his brother had gone through).

  This decision was also a relief for Brendan. He’d been forced to listen to an unremitting stream of his brother’s lonely-drunk defiance as he left F/S+H, followed by a sustained invective about his colleagues—Susan not escaping the harsh judgment—that segued into monologue about the lack of loyalty and the complete absence of gratitude. After all this, the suggestion to leave town seemed like the sanest decision that his brother could make. No distractions, no registered letters or obsessed-about former workplaces with their own threats of restraining orders. Besides, after less than forty-eight hours in Montreal—a city he was coming to associate with Martin’s squabbles and disappointments and the nuts and bolts of providing some form of custodial care—Brendan himself was already fingering the car keys.

  The car was packed (stuffed to the gills with boxes of notes that Martin made him bring, along with the architectural model, which needed to be fitted into the trunk with more delicacy than any animal birth demanded) and it was only once they were on the road that Brendan had a cascade of second thoughts. What if Martin became ill out there in the bush? A seizure maybe, or just if he wandered off. Was the cabin opened up, or even habitable? (Was there even a cabin? Martin had given him the key and a theoretical address, but that was just a key, and for all he knew it could have been the key to a locker at a downtown health club.) Lastly, he had trusted Martin to know the address and a rough idea of directions, and only now, on the road, was he beginning to wonder about their veracity, coming from a brain that had gone through its share of commotion. Susan was right. He couldn’t say no. Brendan hoped this wasn’t due to pity, and he tried to reconfigure the rationale into one where he was capable of recognizing his brother’s grievances, where he shared some of the sense of loss and exclusion and even abandonment. And finally, the trump card: They were family, and what did those bonds mean if not to allow the occasional exercise of questionable judgment in support of a deeper, less explicable sentiment?

  Without any help from Martin, Brendan finally found his way to the Champlain Bridge and continued on Highway 10 straight east. Traffic at midmorning was surprisingly heavy, and then it thinned out, and from that point he felt a relief that the open road provides to those who ruminate too long and hard. He sensed that Martin felt the same way (although there was no way of proving it; his brother was silent and affectless in the passenger seat). But traveling east with Martin beside him, he began to feel as though he was doing the right thing.

  “Hatley?” Brendan said speculatively. He looked at the GPS monitor, which only told him he was headed east and the destination was left “unknown.” “Not getting any results for Hatley.”

  “Try ‘North Hatley.’”

  “Okay, anything in the Hatley metropolitan area,” Brendan said as he reentered the destination onto the screen. It blinked back a map and an ETA. “Thanks,” Brendan said. There was no response from Martin, sunglasses on again, the fingers of his right hand maneuvering up and down the line of buttons of his shirt, the laborious attempts at a clarinet solo only he could hear.

  Even when Brendan was a teenager, he was forever hearing from his mother that Martin needed looking after. “Susceptible,” she would say in that way that made you realize she had a ready-for-broadcast two-hour supporting lecture if you chose to disagree with her diagnosis. It was his mother’s contention that Martin was easily swayed, and she shook her head when she said this, as though dismayed that genetics or environment had conspired against her second son to weaken the Scots backbone that had managed to see their people through difficult times. Brendan always appreciated that she never ventured it was the diluted Irish blood they got from their father.

  Whatever the case, his mother confided to him that summer he was called up for service that she was worried about Martin. It was the sixties and Martin was seventeen and Brendan thought his mother’s concerns were probably no different from those of the mother of any teenager anywhere else in America at that time. His mother even advanced the notion of drugs (she’d been reading about it, she told him, her eyebrow arching as he imagined the Ladies’ Home Journal exposé that had planted the thought).

  He reassured her, of course. Not out of a deeper understanding of his brother, nor simply because reassuring her seemed the most important thing to do, but because the evidence indicated otherwise. A good kid, good in school, talking about college in the long term, not mentioning Vietnam but signing up for ROTC, just like his older brother; all of it made Brendan assume that Martin was just like him, that they shared beliefs and he would do the right thing. He reassured his mother again that Martin was fine, and maybe she took his words to heart too completely. To her credit, she put none of it back in his face when she wrote him to tell him what Martin had done. By that time, Brendan was twelve time zones away and the news that Martin was leaving for Canada hit like mortar fire. His mother’s letter was made up of details, telegraphic, as though her disbelief didn’t allow for adjectives, much less emotion. She wrote that Martin had left without warning in August, crossing over the border to Canada. He’d written her from Montreal, where he had found a place and was regis
tering for school and applying for refugee status. There was no other explanation, except to say that he wasn’t coming back.

  Nowhere in his mother’s letter was there a mention of her, or their father’s, disappointment at receiving the news. No anger. Not a word about losing a son, just as there was no consideration of the legal consequences of draft evasion or possible imprisonment should he come home. Just details, like a travel itinerary.

  The little bastard. The little fucking bastard. Remembering his reaction to the letter was still capable of provoking something in Brendan now, nearly forty years later. Something more than rage. The visceral response to betrayal. The physical feeling of being clubbed by someone’s repudiation. Your values mean nothing; your example means nothing. The sun beating down as the pages of the letter crimped in his hands and the deep, air-gnashing ambient howl of C-130s. You are a fool.

  He got rid of the letter immediately, but of course it stayed with him. In a way, it made the next weeks and months easier, providing him with a little wellspring of rage to call on to get through the more trying times. He knew what guys in his company felt like when they got a letter from their girlfriends, dumping them. The best way he could describe the feeling would be to say it gave him an appetite for fighting, and in lieu of gunfire, it turned something otherwise as absurdly geopolitical as a foreign war into the more understandable feeling of a personal grudge. The anger made it easier to eat shit, to tolerate the boredom and the arterial bursts of terror, easier to think about shooting. But it also made things more difficult in that it was now clear that if he didn’t go home, his parents would have no one returning. In the end, he stopped talking about his kid brother, and nobody much noticed. Everyone had his own war going on.

  He looked over to Martin, whose hands moved slowly and systematically, covering over surfaces like a pool vacuum (he had to pay special attention to the hand brake, warding off Martin’s wandering left hand on a couple of occasions). Martin was taller than Brendan had remembered him, now more apparent because his brother was upright for increasingly extended periods of time, his stature exaggerated by the sense of risk that accompanied it, that it was a height his unsteady gait could drop him from at any time. The constant reminder that you could pay a price for the simple wish of standing up straight.