The Measure of Darkness

by Liam Durcan

  “You okay?” asked Brendan.

  “Sure. A little tired.”

  “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “I didn’t think I was going to get any better there.”

  “No. I’m not talking about the Dunes.”

  A silence, during which time Brendan thought that his brother might turn around to face him. But he remained pressed up against the passenger-side door, as if something had been lost in the side-view mirror.

  “Oh. Do we have to talk about this now?”

  “I thought it was as good a time as any.”

  “Thousands of people didn’t go to Vietnam. I thought it was obvious. I didn’t believe in the war.”

  “I suppose I never understood. . . .”

  “I think I need to rest.”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s just that when I left Detroit, it seemed like everything was normal. You felt one way and then you changed. I’m curious about when that happened.”

  “Everything was normal? It was the sixties. Nothing was normal. Do you remember the sixties? It was in the news: marches, sit-ins, upheaval. You do remember the riots, don’t you?”

  “I’m not talking about everybody. Or society. I’m talking about you.”

  “Well, that’s your problem right there. The two things aren’t separate.”

  “I just want to know why.”

  “You don’t talk to me about anything for nearly forty years, and now you’re interested?”

  “I need to know.”

  “Jesus, is this all about closure?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Are you seeing a Feingold?”

  “Forget it, okay?”

  “No, really, are you in therapy? Is this some kind of therapy? I miss America sometimes, you know. You’re a totally sensitive people now. All therapied up.”

  “I don’t know why I even brought this up.”

  “Because you’re still pissed off at me. Because you want to call me a coward or make me feel guilty about how I hurt Mom and Dad. But you don’t want to make accusations, so you’ll bring it up in the hopes that I’ll admit to cowardice or betrayal. You can’t hit me, so you want ‘to talk.’ Sensitive people are like that. You should have sent a bunch of counselors to Iraq; you would have had those Sunni motherfuckers waving white flags by the end of the first week.”

  Martin listened to the words leaving his mouth, the darker pleasures of argument rent by a pang of conscience as he wondered for a moment whether any of Brendan’s sons were dodging improvised explosive devices in some Mesopotamian desert. But Brendan is wealthy, he thought. Save for random catastrophe or the tug of easily obtained vice, a rich man’s children are usually safe inside America, tucked deep inside layers of America. Whatever sympathy Martin had for his brother dissolved as he sensed Brendan formulating the next question.

  “Because whatever happened to you, it never happened to me. I suppose I wanted to know if it was me. Was it just because I went first?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “Did you see something in me that scared you or made you think it was a mistake to go?”

  “No.”

  “Was I scared?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Yeah. Did I seem scared to you? “

  Martin shook his head and looked away. He said “No” plainly to the passenger’s side window. Past the window he thought he could see gray sky taking up more of the horizon than it should and he took off his glasses as the sky began to shift. The sky then fell away completely, its cloud cover now reduced to smudges and smears, the sky nothing more than the aluminum sidewall of a tractor-trailer that was making the same journey at roughly the same speed.

  Chapter 9

  Martin reached for the one of the precision controls on the car’s door and tickled it into giving him a little more air through the window. A thin jet of warmth, even at this hour in the morning. Late July outside, flooding into the car, building with an energy he could appreciate even as they cleaved through it like a speedboat.

  He thought about Feingold’s advice back at the Dunes, how unnecessary it was for her to ask him to concentrate on the linear; hell, the linear wouldn’t leave him alone. But he imagined it would be a linear stretching forward, something created by him. He would have his office at F/S+H back and have another chance to get out to the consulate site. He had allowed himself the fantasy of Susan as his surrogate, an extension of him, someone he could trust to tell him how things were progressing.

  But instead, the linear streamed off like contrails behind him: things said a minute before, some sensory experience, a memory of all the things he was trying to convey about Melnikov, the sound of Brendan’s voice, the threads of linear arranging themselves into some odd fabric of a life that had some semblance to his. All it took was one innocent statement to start him off now, get him rolling down some hill into a pasture of mysteriously retrieved memories. He was neither happy nor sad that Brendan had dredged up the past, but simply amazed at the ease with which memories emerged from what was said. He could not stop the linear now.

  A summer day in Montreal, crowds swarming around him, separating him from his family. Martin stood almost exactly between the United States and the Soviet Union. If he faced one way, he could see Buckminster Fuller’s huge geodesic dome that acclaimed America. The other direction offered the swooping roof of the Soviet pavilion. He had a memory of being able to appreciate both pavilions at the same time if he positioned himself between them on the footbridge that connected Ile Sainte-Hélène and Ile Notre-Dame. But that seemed impossible now, he thought to himself, that memory must have been a construction itself.

  His mother and father were off somewhere at another pavilion, probably eating something exotic whose name neither could pronounce. They had all agreed to meet on this particular bridge at 2:30 if they were separated. Brendan had been beside him just a moment before, but they had lost sight of each other, and now Martin stood alone, feeling like a stone in a stream of people. The sun shone: How was it that he could not recall the brightness of the day, but only the heat on his skin? Why was it that memory was registered in such a way? Always heat more than light. He stood there on the bridge, afraid to be alone and at the same time exhilarated by the movement of the crowd around him.

  They had driven up to Montreal from Detroit two days before, checked into the motel that night, and arrived at the Expo gates at dawn to meet the throngs with identical plans. He had spent weeks reading about Expo, the islands that had been dredged into existence to form the site in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, the monorails and pavilions and endless streams of visitors. The experience disoriented him; it was one of the few times in his life that reality dwarfed expectations. He could not have envisaged the scale or the pace or the beauty, and he spent that first day dumbfounded, getting lost and found, staring at buildings whose shapes were impossible and inevitable at the same time. He spent an hour on the banks of the nearby Cité de Havre, studying the heaping cubed miracle of l’Habitat, built by some architecture student a little more than ten years older than he. He lined up to pass through the pavilions that seemed to alternate between defying gravity or convention or both and the limits of imagination. He walked across islands where none had existed five years earlier. This was all normal; this was progress. This was the future. His future.

  Brendan then appeared beside him, facing away, oblivious to how close they were, mesmerized by the crowd, as well. His neck was recognizable to Martin; formerly pale from the recent shave he’d gotten, a neck now reddening in the sunlight of the day. A neck thickly muscled. A man ready for battle. His brother, he remembered hearing his father say, had a military bearing. In two weeks, Brendan would test that notion, shipping out to Camp Pendleton before flying across the Pacific. The trip to Expo had been Brendan’s concession to their parents, a last family gathering. It had taken some
fast talking at the border crossing at Sarnia to get Brendan across the border, the thought of a soon-to-be infantryman slipping into Canada just before deployment to Vietnam was bound to rouse some suspicion, but who dodges the draft with their parents and little brother in tow? Besides, the border guards understood. Maybe Brendan had always been able to charm border guards. Everyone wanted to go to Expo that summer. They were waved through. Have a good trip and Godspeed, they said.

  Brendan turned, registering no surprise that he should find Martin there among the other 100,000 people. “Where’re the folks?” he asked, and Martin just shrugged. Brendan looked relaxed, both hands on the railing of the bridge.

  Finish high school and go to war. It would have seemed arbitrary and harsh to someone else, but to the Fallons, this was simply how the future was constructed, a plan survived and endorsed by their father. And now Jim Fallon’s boys would serve their country, too. That was the unspoken expectation, and so it was Reserve Officers’ Training Corps for both of them and a call-up now for Brendan. This was more than normal, Martin tried to reassure himself; this had been necessary. This was how his parents had met; this was, indirectly, how he’d come into being. This was the generational experience of Fallons in America, the return from a foreign war to start an adult life. His grandfather had served in the First World War, surviving combat, only to succumb to the Spanish influenza epidemic that swept through the Corktown tenements of Detroit the year after he returned. (In the annals of their family history, his grandfather’s death was nonetheless consecrated as a “military death” for its temporal proximity to the war, along with its absurd fulfillments; the suddenness and randomness, the tragedy of a young family—including Martin’s father, then aged three—left behind.) There was also the vaguer history of a great-uncle enlisting and dying in the Spanish-American War, another story conscripted to reinforce the feeling of some familial destiny, which, to Martin, came to seem more and more like a genetic disorder, expressed as a penchant for uniforms and marching, a resignation to travel for business purposes and a shortened life expectancy.

  With the river below and all the tourists around them, Martin had been able to forget the thought of his brother’s imminent departure, but having Brendan appear beside him was a reminder, his presence paradoxically making his absence more real. Don’t go, Martin wanted to say, but he wasn’t sure if it was for Brendan or for him, the next Fallon in line for a haircut and a chopper ride deep into some jungle. And so they stood on the bridge and looked at the river and said nothing. Martin looked at his watch. It was 2:30 P.M. on July 22, 1967. Their parents would arrive soon.

  They were all likely still asleep in their motel when it started back in Detroit. According to the story—the story, and what was that except the most resilient of all the threads of gossip that emerged?—a police car was dispatched to break up an after-hours party on Twelfth Street, expecting to round up the typical four or five diehards. When they opened the door to the club, one of the officers immediately called for backup, realizing that there must have been more than fifty people inside. Squad cars and paddy wagons arrived and everyone inside the booze can was arrested, causing onlookers in the predominantly black neighborhood to congregate and express their opposition. The police report made reference to a party, an illegal gathering where liquor was being consumed without the proper permit. What no one said at the outset was the reason for the party. This was a lesser thread of the story. Months later, it would come out that it was a welcome-home gathering held for two vets returning from Vietnam.

  Years later, Martin would understand that the cumulative forces of an altercation, the determinants of escalation or resolution, are difficult to gauge immediately. The push and pull of bodies, sheer crowd numbers, the anger of a crowd fed by something as noble as a sense of an injustice unanswered or as banal as too much alcohol and boredom. Police understand all this explicitly; the call for backup is one of the most natural reactions to an acknowledged threat. So are the displays and deployment of the symbols of physical authority. A phalanx of riot shields. Nightsticks, firearms, horses, if you have them. Control the dynamics of the crowd; control the situation. A balance of forces: order versus chaos from one side, repression versus freedom as seen from the other. Something happened on Twelfth Street in Detroit on the morning of the twenty-third that did not allow for the crowd to disperse and that prevented everyone from just going home to their beds. By morning, Detroit was in flames.

  The Fallon family spent that next day, Sunday, July 23, enjoying Expo, oblivious. Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanaugh embargoed the news of their burning city as long as they could (while at the same time appealing to President Johnson to declare a state of emergency and send in federal troops to restore order), and so it wasn’t until Monday, the twenty-fourth, that news of what was going on in Detroit was organized into a story that could be put on the front page of every evening newspaper in the United States. It was Brendan who discovered what was going on, inadvertently, by picking up a copy of the Montreal Star and trying to find out if the Tigers had beaten the Orioles the night before, only to find that the game had been postponed “due to civil emergency.” On the front page, under a story describing the arrival that day of President Charles de Gaulle in Montreal, was a description of the chaos that had engulfed Detroit, accompanied by an aerial photo of the city, showing dense columns of smoke tilting to the northeast.

  That night, with copies of the Star and the Montreal Gazette clamped under his arm, Jim Fallon spent hours on the pay phone in the motel’s parking lot, trying to get hold of anyone who would answer in Detroit to tell him the fate of his electrical-supply store on Highland Avenue. Martin waited beside him, swatting away shadflies under the streetlight as Brendan and his mother packed for their premature trip home. His father phoned the store, and Martin assumed there was no answer, but the look on his father’s face told him that there hadn’t even been the consolation of hearing the phone ring. Brendan came out of the motel to tell them that the television news was reporting that the state police had been called in, and Martin remembered how they’d all stood around, straining to view this as good news.

  They drove the nine hours back to Detroit in a paralytic silence, and it was only years later that Martin found out from his mother that his father had finally gotten through to one of his employees and found out the fate of the store that night—it had been razed, along with twenty square blocks of the Highland Avenue neighborhood where it used to stand. The sky above the Detroit River was the color of charred salmon the morning they arrived, and they were rerouted through an endless maze of barricades, until they arrived at their house in Farmington Hills around noon the next day. Martin’s father disappeared for the rest of the day, taking Brendan with him on his sortie into the city, returning late that evening but refusing to talk, refusing to watch television or answer the phone, which kept ringing. His mother wouldn’t speak, either, as if to honor the pledge her husband had made. The house was silent but buzzed with the unfocused but organizing energy of an electrical storm about to break.

  It was Brendan who told him what he had seen down on Highland Avenue, that even with a National Guard escort, they’d only been able to get within a few blocks of the store site. But what they’d seen had been enough. The block was gone, carbonized, as if it had been downtown Dresden. Looters had ravaged anything that had survived along the periphery. Martin remembered watching Brendan describe what he had seen. It was for the best, Brendan reasoned in that way that riots and darkness seemed to be demanding of people, that the store was already gone. Otherwise, their father would certainly have held vigil in what remained of their store, the sniper fire and specter of looters little more than a nostalgic whiff of his time in the Ninth Army—that is, until they came to the door with their guns, their plans. Yes, in that way, maybe they were lucky. Now, there was no evidence that Fallon’s Electrical had ever existed, Brendan said, and as he said this, Martin paid closer attention, studying his brother, as he c
ould have sworn he saw a trace of satisfaction in the expression he wore, trying to discern if this was some sort of preparatory response to a personal wound, part of a soldier’s training.

  And then, three days later, with his hometown still smoldering and half the population in open revolt, Brendan shipped out for Camp Pendleton. His father wouldn’t hear of his son’s trying to defer the inevitable.

  Over the next few days, a parade of insurance adjusters visited the house, commercial mourners who sat at the kitchen table with their open briefcases and spoke with his father about settlements and time lines. Cutting a check could only soften the blow so much. Jim Fallon’s store was gone; stock was gone. But it was more than that. He had fifteen employees without a place to work or a paycheck for the foreseeable future. Federal troops had arrived—a persistent rumor among the white merchants who lost everything was that Johnson had delayed deployment in an effort to cripple any presidential ambitions Governor Romney might have as they headed into an election year—replacing the weekend soldiers who made up the National Guard. Snipers were flushed out and the city was gradually reclaimed.

  On the radio and television, news reporting ceased and opinions began. The popular verdict at first was that this was simply a criminal insurrection, with any mention of race or poverty absent from the discussion. But almost immediately, new details emerged and alternative analyses arose, none of them as simple or as reassuring to Martin as the thought that this was nothing more than the act of bad men committed against innocent shopkeepers and the forces of order.