The Measure of Darkness

by Liam Durcan

  He already understood that these women were the tastemakers, and had the design of his house still been disputed, their opinion alone, and their desire to enforce it, would have likely carried the day for him with the Residents Association. Perhaps they had always been his supporters, this thigh-mastered troop of Medicis. His boosters. Standing on the patio with them, he felt the desire to show them the house he had built, to take them inside and walk them through it. The word squire came to mind, the verb only slightly more ridiculous than the noun, causing him to pause for a moment until the thought spiraled away like an uncommitted mosquito.

  At the end of the evening, Suzanne Desormais, the friend of Dean “Scooter” and co-owner of the small castle up the road from them, put her hand on his shoulder and whispered, This is visionary. She asked him for his card and told him that she knew his work, said that she knew whoever built the Kingston Library would come up with something exceptional. He remembered how her fingers had run down the back of his arm from the shoulder to his elbow and although this might all have been inadvertent, he knew at that moment, with a sense that can only be called exhilarated despair, that he would eventually sleep with Suzanne Desormais, that he could already see the inevitable series of events that would include the pretense of a renovation project necessitating a personal consultation, a meeting. With the far end of the lake disappearing in the dusk, he could see it all unfolding, the unraveling of his sense of himself as a trustworthy man and faithful husband: He could see her waiting for him and already appreciated the mechanics of their wordless sex, the experience intensified and simplified by the fact that she wanted nothing more of him than it be him, the person who had done what he had done. What he could not foresee, what he would not know until it was over with Suzanne and he had excavated some sort of meaning, aside from the acknowledgment of betrayal and an almost shameful self-contentedness, was what having sex with Suzanne Desormais would evoke in him, that in a conflation of needs his professional work would somehow feel legitimized in extreme sensual pleasure, that he would come to see this woman as his due reward. Meritocratic lust. He remembered looking at Suzanne Desormais at the same moment she touched the inside of his elbow. This is what it would mean to him. He could feel the linear pressure of the tips of her nails against his skin and it only felt inevitable. He thought he could foresee all of this, with Sharon on the other side of the deck with her good mood and tired eyes, and he was uncertain what it would mean to Suzanne Desormais until he realized she has already announced in her codified way what she expected, that he had been commandeered like little more than a capital campaign for lupus research.

  Now, the sun at midafternoon bleached the area behind the house into a white and featureless and deeply desiccated landscape. He squinted, effectively closing his eyes against the glare, and finally found the deck, his hands reaching out as he mounted the last of three stairs. The wood of the deck, thick planks of cedar that had been chosen to age into a color that matched the corrugated metal facade, had been replaced in 1994 and again in 2003. They felt almost combustably hot to the touch. Agnetha had wanted to paint them, and when he’d asked what color, truly mystified and eager to know what color could hope to have the same effect as aging wood, she’d replied: “Oh, I don’t know; any color would do.”

  On all fours, he reached out his right hand to try to find something to sit on, anything to get off the planks of cedar, which could not have been any hotter had Agnetha herself painted them in kerosene and set them alight. He thought of how Agnetha would have appreciated him in a moment like this: prostrate, groveling, and, no doubt adding, happy to be so close to the work of his favorite architect! The fingers of his right hand jammed against something metallic, and after shaking the sting out of them, he reached for the object and pulled the wrought-iron leg of a patio chair close to him.

  He sat on the chair, pulling his legs up into a lotus position, and faced the lake. The brightness of the sunshine turned the lake water into a sheet of almost unnatural cobalt. Between the lake and the sky, he could find only a small seam of green, the stand of pine across the lake, stitching the scene together. He studied the vista closely and tried to identify the docks of adjacent properties or maybe catch a glimpse of a kayak or canoe, a face he could recognize or the semaphore of a solicited wave, but his vision could not settle on a single familiar marker.

  Martin rose from the chair but immediately felt unwell, overmatched by the heat and the effort of maneuvering around the house. He turned around to brace himself against the chair, stooped over with a hand pressed firmly against each armrest. He was able to lift the chair enough that it would move a few inches ahead of him and he repeated this motion, trying not to think of it as a poor substitute for a man who really should be using a walker. In this way, he felt able to go on, satisfied with slow progress, resting after each effort.

  Moving closer to the lake, he thought himself able to discern features, but any sustained effort seemed to produce only a distorted image of what he thought he’d remembered so clearly. He was now only a couple of feet away from the edge of the deck; the lake water was now close enough that he was certain he could see the shadows under the small swells kicked up by the wind. He paused, kneeling on the chair, trying to find what was out there in the water, beyond his reach. It was when he began to move his head back and forth, scanning across the lakefront scene, that he caught a glimpse of something that caused him, almost involuntarily, to turn his head farther to the left. The movement itself, the demand to move, felt clumsy and jarring, like the sense of finding only dead space as one stumbled onto the extra step of a darkened basement. But then later, something beautiful and surprising revealed itself to him: a glimpse of the lake that had up to that moment had been hidden, a pulse of something luridly vivid that collapsed in on itself, disappearing when he turned to the right, and then recurring again when he swiveled his head the other way, looking past the limits of what he thought he could see. It was gone. He could not see it. But it was there.

  Chapter 16

  We are not the same, Brendan repeated to himself as he watched his brother approach. The last four months at the Dunes had been given over to his polite acknowledgment of strangers’ comments about how they looked alike, how even their gestures bore an uncanny similarity (he was uncertain about what this meant, as Martin’s repertoire of gestures for the first two months at the Dunes had been confined to a fairly monotone groaning and pawing at his catheter). And every time Brendan nodded in response to these comments—and he did nod, politely, fraternally—he told himself that they could not be more dissimilar. Just nod, he reminded himself. Nothing more than small talk.

  But what struck him as odd was the fact that whenever a person made a comment like this—occasionally staff but usually a family member of another patient at the Dunes—they were invariably smiling. And not just the restrained smile of shared pleasantries among people going through a difficult situation, but that big loopy grin that under any other circumstance would make a person detour around whomever bore such as expression, as it was a fairly reliable marker for an unresolved (but surely soon-to-be manifest) psychiatric disorder or someone perpetrating a sidewalk scam for a couple of dollars.

  He had gotten used to nodding, to accepting the little banalities that made the day pass more easily. But he had come to think that even if such expressions were cliché, they were so prevalent that they must have some purpose. A doctor friend of his had told him that there was a sociobiological reason comments about resemblance of a newborn were always directed to the father, that it was thought this was some sort of societal way to strengthen paternal bonding at a crucial moment, reassuring the new parent that the child was indeed his (the assurances of maternity never being necessary to a person who had gone through a pregnancy capped by twenty hours of labor). Maybe the smiles he had been subjected to at the Dunes were nothing more than nervousness in the face of terror and despair and the comments were simply the way that families recognized and
reinforced their commitments to their injured kin, that even if their brains had been damaged, they understood, and wanted to know that he understood, that their responsibilities transcended this, that blood was thicker than neurons.

  Martin had appeared at the periphery of his vision as a close-to-the-ground hovering presence, which at first he thought was an animal. It was only after he went up to the window and saw his brother straighten up that he recognized him. He watched in some fascination as Martin mounted the steps that led to the patio before crossing the deck as slowly as the shadow of a sundial.

  Eventually, Martin commandeered a patio chair, which he would alternately push forward a few inches and then kneel on the seat cushion for five minutes of rest. As he knelt on the chair, Martin stared blankly into the house, in Brendan’s general direction, his face pinched into an undecipherable mask.

  Anything that they shared was ultimately nothing more than genetic, something completely outside of what either of them wanted to be. Their similarities were the manifestations of random sorting of the same gene pool. For most of their lives they had shared nothing other than this. And yet he liked to think that when he practiced he could recognize animals that had come from the same litter, that even if they had gone to completely different households, he could sense certain aspects of temperament that were shared and outlasted the world’s efforts to train them away. But those were the relatively uncomplicated lives of dogs. He could honestly say that he was not like his brother.

  Martin moved ever closer to the house, repositioning himself on the chair at an angle to the large central pane of window. From here, he appeared to look into the house at what Brendan assumed must be him. His brother was nothing like him. Brendan approached the window, trying to make out what the hell was going on with Martin now: He was on the other side, a few feet away, perfectly still, sphinxlike, staring through him.

  “What do you want?” Brendan said to the pane of glass. To his brother on the other side. There was no answer, not a flicker of response.

  His brother just continued staring. Brendan shifted his weight from foot to foot, even swaying slightly to see if his brother’s gaze would follow, but it did not. The look on Martin’s face reminded him of an animal stare, something that at one time might have caught his eye from deep inside a cage. Quiet incomprehension as the animal slowly awoke from anesthesia, the power of a stare resting solely on its insistence. He liked to think that there was only imperturbable calm behind the eyes of an animal in this state, an equanimity that at one time he’d longed for. But seeing Martin now, he wasn’t so sure of this.

  “What do you want?” he said again.

  Martin slowly extended his legs and took his knees off the chair, seeming to steady himself for a moment before advancing the chair another few inches along its path. He then resumed his perch, his stare. Brendan looked behind him, roughly gauging Martin’s line of sight to understand what could be so riveting to his brother, but it was a nondescript path that cut through the large living room and led to the kitchen.

  We are not the same, Brendan said to himself, a mantra now as his brother—little more than five feet away—continued to move closer. He looked through the glass at his younger brother and scoffed that anyone could see something in their features that tied them to a common origin. He could keep telling himself that they had turned out to be different men from different countries, strangers really, with nothing in common except for what seemed at that moment to be the increasingly absurd and arbitrary coincidence of a shared last name and childhood address. But of course they shared more, and to watch Martin now, mute and maimed and shuffling along a patio deck, was to remind himself of similar struggle, of the depths that he’d experienced and what appeared to be the unmistakable Fallon penchant for definitive solutions.

  Watching his brother, Brendan told himself that it would be best for everyone if he were to extricate himself entirely from this mess, to lay out to Martin everything he knew or assumed and just go home. Let the psychiatrists and the daughters and the exes deal with it. He was not even needed: Martin had ample funds from his disability insurance, an amount no doubt sweetened by the buyout settlement from the partners, a small portion of which would have easily covered the cost of eminently qualified hired care. He imagined the phone book yielding an endless list of professional nurses—and here an archetype, a smiling, patient woman from the Philippines, appeared to him—infinitely more appropriate for the task than he and encumbered by several dozen fewer carousels’ worth of personal baggage, someone who would not look at his brother as some slowly approaching menace through the window, whose beatific grace or simple economic need would make her agree to deal with the bag of crazy-ass misanthropy and unresolved issues that were quickly coming to characterize his brother’s behavior.

  Martin, whose progress had come to a halt about two feet away from the pane of glass, began to rotate his head to the left and then back to the right in a smoothly repetitive movement, which, given his accompanying affectless expression, seemed like a pretty convincing freestyle tai chi move. Trancelike and oblivious, he continued like this for several minutes, the only hitch in the routine was as his head turned to the most leftward position, where he seemed to get stuck, toggling for a second or two, before his head veered away from whatever had caused its moment of hesitation.

  Martin’s face was frozen, a mask that seemed unreal. Eyes open, but inconsistent with an awake person. Maybe he’s had a seizure, Brendan thought, and studied his brother, but he saw no signs of fluttering of eyelids or twitching of muscles, not a speck of froth at the corners of his mouth. It was just Martin’s mouth, the edges brought up ever so slightly into a smile, one that reminded an unguarded Brendan of his sons, and, as he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the massive pane of glass, forced him to admit it was a smile very much like his own.

  He curled the fingers of his right hand into a loosely held fist and rapped on the window. His brother startled, orienting toward the sound. “Hey,” Brendan said softly, through his own reflection, to his brother outside.

  Chapter 17

  Martin climbed the stairs to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. The room vibrated with a buzzy energy that felt to Martin like the flickerings of a defective fluorescent light, a dirty little flutter against which even shutting his eyes failed to offer escape. He tried to think of what he’d seen on the back patio before Brendan had interrupted, how for a moment he’d been aware of the lake as somehow starkly different from the way it had appeared before, and he was confused about whether the lake seemed deeper or bluer or more expansive. But it was none of those. It was different in a way that unsettled him. He got out of bed and moved to the window, staring out into the lake to see if it would appear to him that way again. He scanned the shoreline, but nothing happened.

  Whatever the change had been, it was one that he could not describe to himself nor even imagine, and so he thought it must have been an illusion or a misperception. It must have been that he’d only believed he’d seen a revelation of something hidden. And yet thinking of what he’d seen in this way seemed untrue. He lay back down on the bed.

  The sound of footsteps—not Norah’s; how had his first consideration been to assume that she had returned?—arrived in the hallway, then a banging on the door that made Martin start. “You okay in there?” Brendan’s voice called out, raised a little. Martin listened to the sound of the mechanism of the doorknob being engaged, slowly, with only enough force, he assumed, for his brother to make sure the door was not locked.

  “I’m fine.”

  Then silence. He was alone. He tried to imagine the bedroom around him and was overcome by the recognition—odd swells of comfort and despair—of the room as a place of retreat. It is natural that I should return here, he thought, and recalled the summer after he’d split up with Sharon, the bruised silences when he decamped to the lake house before finding a place of his own.

  And then, though it was not there, Marti
n remembered the clock on the wall. He remembered the angle of the hands on the clock as he was leaving her on a Friday at quarter past seven in the evening. It wasn’t planned that way, or planned to be remembered in that way, but it was simply the time that it had happened. He sees the clock on the wall. He had a bag already packed and in the trunk of his car, but he knew he didn’t have everything he needed, and as he began to speak to her over the clearing away the dinner dishes, the thought of what he had forgotten intruded. Static on the airwaves that he could clear. She was wordless. And then she slapped him (the intensity best measured not in the mark it left but by the fact that the sound drew Norah from her eighth-grade homework in an adjacent room). He told himself, as he gathered those things he needed, that he would explain it to the girls later.

  He had hoped they would be able to discuss it reasonably. He used the word rationally. He wanted to say that they’d become invisible to each other, invisible in that way that was no one’s fault, but that simply meant they had evolved into something else. The discussion would have proceeded like that, but she asked him, “Who is it, Martin?” and his argument stalled in some distant place. There was the slap and the silence and the question, always the question, because Sharon knew what any wife knows, what any sentient person who regularly comes into contact with the vagaries of human behavior understands, that no one walked away from something as much as ran toward something. Who is it, Martin?

  What he could never explain to her was the odd and shameful and unexpected exhilaration of the moment, the arson of a relationship. After years where their bond changed from the unspoken to the invisible to the forgotten, it finally became real again as he told her he was leaving. I am married to you, he fully realized as he stood there with his aching face and his declarations of having to go still echoing. I was married to her.