The Measure of Darkness

by Liam Durcan

  And then it began, with what could only be described as the sensation of something touching him, but it was more than that; it was the curious moment of information intersecting, of sensation and space and time aligning to tell him that something was touching his left foot. He reflexively kicked his legs and then, without being completely aware, he felt his left hand brushing along the outer aspect of his calf, exploring the sensation, confirming nothing was there, and then the hand dug in its nails for good measure, and he did not feel pain as much as certainty that this was his hand and this was his leg and that he was aware of them in a way that he hadn’t been before.

  He opened his eyes and looked up to the edge of the dock, which was spinning uncontrollably, the early-morning sky capsizing into the water over and over again in such a way that his only response was to clamp his hand onto the dock more tightly. He would have simply closed his eyes and held on, but he felt an urgent and inexplicable need to keep his eyes open.

  The dock had changed. Even as it somersaulted over him—and this was, to Martin, the most amazing thing, that its spinning seemed altogether unremarkable—the dock was clearly different, and not in a way that was immediately discernible. He watched the structure for a few moments, trying to understand just what was so unusual about it now. It seemed to Martin that his vision had changed: The dock was revealed, longer than he had noted a minute before, stretching off into the west, where it sank into the lake. In the distance, several small white triangles had materialized, clustered together at the western edge of the lake, where the wind was good. But at the same time he was able to see more, he became aware that a crescent-shaped shade had been cast across his vision on the left, and he reflexively covered and uncovered his left eye, thinking that something was blocking his vision. Part of the left upper quadrant was blank. Gone. How had he not known? He could see more, but he could see less. He couldn’t understand if this meant he was getting better or worse.

  He log-rolled in the water and twisted his head fully to the left, a movement that felt at first indefinite and then, as he understood what he was looking at, had an ache of certainty. It was clear to him. His left leg and arm materialized beside him, as though the anesthesia that hid them had just worn off. The limbs seemed to announce their presence, gaining heft and volume. Aching. And with this, it seemed to Martin that what he had experienced of his body before, the sense that closing his eyes would return him to normal, seemed ludicrous and naïve, that along with their miraculous appearance, his left leg and arm were also correcting him, chastising him for his presumptuousness. He panicked, thinking he should get to a doctor, that this was a real emergency. He thought about calling out to someone, but he realized he wouldn’t know what to say.

  He stopped moving, stopped struggling, and let himself float on his left side, his right arm still tethering him to the dock. The water around him settled. The world’s spinning slowed enough that when he looked down into the water’s reflection, he saw himself emerge and was shocked to find a mouth that gaped open and hung grimly unbalanced, as though unable to ask the necessary questions about what had happened to him. He closed his eyes, but this gave him no respite from the sense that something was wrong as he became fully aware of his body in a way that he had not experienced before, suddenly aware of it as profoundly imperfect, a left side that seemed to hang dumbly and responded with only grudging acknowledgment. He felt himself breathing deeply, his mouth and nose hissing away, barely above the water-line.

  Martin rolled onto his back and concentrated instead on the pale blue wash of early morning sky. He found comfort in this. The sky did not surprise him, and he imagined being able to concentrate on one small region, one acre of sky, that would sit above him and be his reference point.

  His breathing slowed and he felt as though he could drift into sleep, away from thoughts of his body as anything but normal. It had been a hallucination, he told himself, a dream perhaps, but at any rate something unreal, and any thought of what he had experienced was then not forgotten as much as abandoned for something else more convincing. But he could not lose the sense that something had happened to him, a visceral tug receding ever deeper, echoing away. What remained was a dawning sense of dread. He stood up in the water beside the dock, the dock solid under his right hand. Beside his hand was a foot, which he followed up, to find his brother standing there, looking down at him.

  “You okay?”

  “Never better. Could you help me out, please?”

  “Here, grab my hand,” Brendan said, and crouched, grasping Martin’s hand and then leaning back to hoist him out of the water. Martin hooked a leg up on the dock but could not get to his feet. He rolled onto the platform, breathing heavily as Brendan sat down beside him.

  “What were you doing in there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You were in the lake, Martin. What were you doing?”

  “That’s not important,” Martin said, and heard his brother’s sighing noise.

  “Brendan.”

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to be honest with me.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Martin looked over at Brendan, tried to find his brother’s face, searching for a feature that he could latch onto. But he was lost again, adrift in space whose strangeness was inseparable from its familiarity. He reached out for his brother, his hand falling on Brendan’s left shoulder.

  “Tell me what you know about the night I was in the accident.”

  “I only know what the police told me, Martin.”

  “I want you to be honest with me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you know I was trying to kill myself?”

  Chapter 19

  Brendan sat on the dock beside Martin and told him what he knew about the crash, the details from the police, the thirty-foot length of garden hose and spool of duct tape, receipts of the newly purchased objects still in the bag. He let the inferences settle in the silence that followed and prepared himself for whatever reaction his brother might have. Martin said nothing.

  Brendan led Martin back to the house and into the living room. He peeled Martin's wet pajamas off and helped him stop shivering by rubbing him with a towel. He then eased him onto the couch, watching with some amazement as Martin fell asleep with the fluid rapidity of a small child. Brendan went back to his room and searched through his agenda for the name of the doctor Martin was to see the following week. He called the clinic, only to be told that the doctor was still on vacation and if there was a problem that couldn’t wait, he should take his brother to an emergency room. He had thoughts of calling Feingold or Martin’s daughters, both thoughts so lacking in promise that neither prompted him even to search his phone for their numbers. Uncertain of what he should do, he returned to the living room, where he sat and watched Martin. His brother did not stir.

  Brendan had entered Martin’s room and found the model destroyed, pulverized pieces scattered over the desk and the floor around it. On the nearby bed lay a number of sheets of paper, turned over, as though they’d just been read, and a single sheet, the last one upturned. Brendan shouted for Martin but heard no reply and immediately went to the window. The view from Martin’s room was similar to his, the back patio and the shoreline, with the lake beyond. It was from this vantage point that Brendan caught a glimpse of Martin rooting through the long grass that bordered the water. As Martin waded into the lake, Brendan stood in his brother’s room, edging closer to the window to witness what would happen next. Martin stumbled as he moved deeper into water, and at that moment Brendan recalled the roadside restaurant they had stopped at on their way up to the lake, how Martin had eluded him and gone off wandering, and how he had chased him down just short of the highway. At the time, it seemed to him as though he had pursued his brother without delay, but remembering it from the second floor of the country house, he was suddenly aware of having stood outside the restaurant, coffee cups in hand, watching his brother stagger toward potential doom. He had wa
tched. He had done nothing. He was not certain how long he’d paused, but the intensity of the shame he felt seemed to time it perfectly. It was this shame that propelled him as he pounded down the stairs and raced though the main room toward the sliding door that led to the outside, an eye on the water, an eye on the dock, wanting to do nothing but retrieve his brother.

  And even now, he watched his brother in that way that he recognized was both clinical and brotherly. The scientist, the sentinel. An appeal to both sides of the argument for his being at his brother’s side throughout all this. From a chair across the room, Brendan studied his brother’s breathing. Seemingly untroubled by the conclusions he’d come to, Martin turned and opened his eyes briefly, enough for Brendan to wonder what his brother saw, what he could possibly see. Brendan had told Martin that he had no idea whether he had wanted to end his life that night in February, and this calmed his brother so dramatically that it seemed to be all the rationale he needed to create the lie.

  He wondered what Martin experienced on that highway in February as he pulled his car to a halt. If he saw snow falling through the headlights of traffic in the oncoming lane or just the soft blue-and-orange background buzz of the car’s instrument panel. He wondered if he played with the dials of the radio, looking for music that would ease him into closing his eyes or convince him otherwise. The despair of last acts. This is where we come to a stop.

  God, we are the same, he wanted to say to his brother. We’re the same. There must exist, Brendan thought, a particular gene for destruction for them to have lived entirely different lives and yet come to the same conclusion. A gene was a good explanation. As good as sadness or anomie or a lack of God or a serotonin problem.

  Martin muttered in his sleep. The last things he saw, Brendan thought, did they comfort him? What had he seen?

  Brendan, for his part, remembered that he had seen only red. If he had been asked to describe the color (and no one had asked, not his partners or the Veterinary Disciplinary Board, which reviewed any case where significant amounts of ketamine had gone missing), he would have had to describe it as a buoyant red. Balloon red. Just as well he’d never had to describe it.

  What he could never tell people is that the color was only a herald of the calm that the drug invariably brought, that it was a marker of respite and made the hours pass like minutes, shrinking time in a way that reassured him like nothing else could in the months after Rita’s death.

  And then he remembered awakening. Animals sometimes snapped when they awoke from ketamine, and he always thought that it was the drug itself, the flushing of some synapse that caused them to strike out blindly at something nearby, the triggering of a reflex. But when he awoke, he’d felt none of that. No need to do anything except listen to himself breathe. To feel the air entering his lungs and warming before cycling out again, and Rita somehow wasn’t gone forever, but simply beyond this. The peace that that brought was beyond description. Beyond redness or the obliteration of time or anything else that he experienced when he slipped the catheter under the skin and started running the solution.

  And then came a time when the sting of the catheter was almost as potent as the first swell of the high (thank you, Dr. Pavlov), and then it took only the thin but authoritative embrace of the tourniquet and finally simply opening the door to his office with a bottle in his hand to be sufficient for him to see the first pixels of red, to imagine the color arriving, blossoming as he sat alone in his office. Rita disappeared amid all this, of course. Rita was forgotten first in the red, and then she disappeared in the work it took to procure the ketamine on a regular basis, to fabricate the reasons for needing it and the explanations for suddenly having to go back to his office. But he had been the boss. No one contested his prerogative.

  He wondered whether Martin had felt the same thing on the roadside as he had that last time he sat in a recliner and prepared himself for a final taste of red and relief, whether sadness was just the narrowing of all possibilities into an inevitable last act, an act that paradoxically seemed to offer hope only because all other acts had lost that capacity. Once that calculation happened, it was impossible to escape the logic that followed. He had tired of waking up. The solution was, therefore, not to wake up anymore.

  He opened his eyes in a hospital ICU with a respiratory technologist in greens adjusting the parameters of a ventilator. Later that day, a staff doctor explained what had happened: an infusion error probably, something that would have led to his death had not ketamine been such a damn fine anesthetic agent, with properties that prevented his blood pressure from dropping, carrying him through that long night of colors and the darkness that followed. That had been his only error, a miscalculation that allowed him to survive that last infusion and made it necessary to answer for his actions. The first inquisitor was the psychiatrist who appeared with dismal regularity at his bedside. It seemed easier, and preferable, as he didn’t wish to have anyone’s sympathy, to convince the psychiatrist that he was a reckless junkie rather than a hapless depressive, and so he disavowed any suicidal intent. The psychiatrist nodded and left, another truth revealed.

  He thought, once, in the first few days in the intensive care unit, that he had caught a glimpse of one of his sons, David or Paul, standing at the foot of his bed. It was a purely visual memory, suitably fleeting amid the chuffs and beepings of ventilators and monitors. He was never sure if it was real, and in their brief discussions afterward, it was never discussed.

  There were other repercussions, of course. His former partners, now answering to a corporate head office, had no hesitation in surveying the in-house pharmacy records and thus discovered the pattern that one would expect. After that, it was just the formality of a series of letters informing him of his immediate suspension—not even the visit, he could have told Martin, not even the fruit basket—and going on to say that the matter was being referred to disciplinary committee of their professional association. The only hint of leniency would come with the sentence telling him that “no formal criminal complaint will be pursued.” He was spared having to explain himself at the hearing. A disciplinary panel is no place for a discussion of red or loneliness.

  It was early afternoon when, Martin began to stir. Brendan said nothing as Martin sat up and looked around the room, nothing as his brother’s right hand reached up and touched his left temple, running the fingertips across his forehead to the ridge above his right eye. He wanted to ask Martin what he saw. If he saw anything. Did you see red?

  “I should take you back to Montreal.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Martin said, groaning as he adjusted his position on the couch. “You think I was out there to end it.”

  “I know what they found in your car. Maybe you decided against it. But I do know that finding you in the lake in your pajamas is a bit worrisome.”

  “I didn’t plan that.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “The house isn’t having a great effect on me.”

  “Then let’s get out of here. Let’s head back to Montreal. Besides, you have doctors appointments.”

  “That’s not until next week.”

  “We can head back tonight. Rest up.”

  “I can’t go back right now,” said Martin. “I’m not ready for that. I want to go to Detroit.”

  Part III

  And even I, who would like to keep the two cities distinct in my memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.

  —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  Chapter 20

  Brendan always chose the bridge over the tunnel, and he would think of nothing of traveling the extra distance, as he had done this time, in order to take the Ambassador into Detroit. The waits at Customs were similar, and he was not given to claustrophobia to explain his decision. Maybe it was still the soldier in him, needing to see for himself the territory he would have to negotiate rather than emerging from darkness already behind the
lines.

  The traffic slowed to a stop on the downslope of the bridge and he looked over the city. To the east, he recognized the twin spires of Ste. Anne de Detroit, and looming behind that was the massive rectangular form of the Michigan Central Station. It had not been far from here, one Tuesday morning ten years before, during a visit to his mother, that he happened to be at the correct spot to catch a glimpse of the sun shining through the windows of that abandoned building. He remembered how the building had been transformed from a silhouette to something suddenly illuminated by hundreds of points of light. It had looked to him as though the insides of the building had begun to glow. And then, as the car advanced, he became aware that it was simply sunlight passing through nothingness, through an empty shell. Still, he had found it beautiful, and whenever he had tried to explain why—the contingencies of time of day and the absolutely perfect angle, the transience of the whole thing and just the fact that he had turned his head to the right at precisely the correct moment for some unknown reason—he was always lost for words.

  As he continued down the bridge, the distance he had traveled caused the Central Station to appear to be directly behind the church, its upper floors framed between the spires, in his sights. Farther to the east, the city, in the last moments of a flattering twilight, looked monumental, sentinels of abandonment that could still pass for a skyline. He had awakened Martin, and his brother gamely stared out the window for a moment as Brendan pointed to landmarks they’d both known from their childhoods. But beyond this gesture, there was no interest. The Renaissance Center gave way to the remaining Gothic towers of a jagged downtown. They were home.

  Brendan understood that even if he had wanted to describe Detroit to people back in New York, he could not. It was not for lack of words but because he detested the way the words sounded as they left his mouth. He silently despised the way the name of the city had been revised from De-TROIT to DEE-troit but held his tongue because he knew how this change came about, that it was not through an edict imposed. It was just the name of the city now, ask any of its citizens; if it were some form of tyranny that renamed his hometown, it was the tyranny of demographics, and this thought, and his response to it, made him sink.