The Measure of Darkness

by Liam Durcan

  He nodded, because there was really no way to argue with someone like Feingold. Feingold was power here. Instead, she explained that the nervous system did three things: It received and collated sensory information, created hypotheses about the world, and then tested these hypotheses. The accident had made him unable to ask questions about certain parts of his world. Neglect, she said, meant that the Guggenheim disappeared, and would keep disappearing, along with the East Side, along with everything to one side of him.

  Martin told her he was tired, that he couldn’t concentrate, and tried to give the impression that he didn’t feel like talking about New York architecture if it was only going to be used to humiliate him in some way. But Feingold was not leaving.

  “I’m really exhausted, Dr. Feingold.” It had come to that, he thought, appealing to her sympathy for reprieve. She just sat, unmoved.

  “I wanted to speak to you about the therapists’ opinion,” she said.

  Ah, the therapists. The Dunes was world-renowned for its therapist-to-patient ratio. It’s what got Brendan, his brother, to pay to have him assessed and air-ambulanced down here after he was discharged from the trauma ward of a hospital back in Montreal. Four months of therapists: speech and language, art and music, occupational and physio, earnest missionaries forever intent on rescuing an apostate like him from the baser pleasures of food or sleep, always dragging him off to one of their rooms forested with implements whose uses he could not fathom.

  They’d had meetings, Feingold said. Multidisciplinary meetings. Social workers and the floor’s head nurse joining the fray every Tuesday and Friday morning.

  He had come to realize the multidisciplinary discussions were the absolute highlights of the Dunes experience. He’d sat in on one a month before—a rare treat, and only at Feingold’s insistence—and found the event to have a tone that alternated between an old-time revival meeting and an intervention for some poor drug-addicted cousin, with representatives of the different disciplines occasionally bristling at the presence of rival expertise, all jostling for input, so much worked-up goodwill in the room that it demanded to be used on somebody. Multidisciplined. It meant they felt you were too far gone to really get better, to get normal. It meant that their efforts would be recast. Less search and rescue, more recovery of the body.

  When he spoke to Feingold after that meeting, he asked her what the initial feelings were, even though it was obvious to him. Feingold said she doubted he would ever work again. She paused and qualified her statement: not work at the same level anyway.

  Plateau was now in his lexicon. A word from the occupational therapists and the doctors, part of his geography of newly diminished expectations.

  “I think I know. But you still think I need more therapy.”

  “Well, with work you could be more functionally independent. You’ll need a supervised setting for a while. But with some modifications, we could think about getting you back home. Without anyone there, it would be more difficult, naturally. And when that happens, eventually, you could do outpatient . . .”

  He turned his head in her direction. They’d had this discussion before. He was unrealistic; he was in denial. He could walk, though; didn’t that count for something? How many others could claim to have walked out of the Dunes? His wing of the Dunes hosted residents whose stories hadn’t allowed them to come this far, shrieking, tremulous young men who’d lost their footing on a rooftop or whose motorcycle had found that infamous dream-ending, dream-beginning patch of wet pavement. Bed to bath, bath to chair, chair to bed. He could hear their lives triangulated in these short voyages, in the grunt and groan of the orderlies, whose efforts they needed to move at all. But that wasn’t his life. That wasn’t him.

  He had come to believe that he was nothing to Feingold except the specifications of his condition. And the specs weren’t good, definitely not up to code. His opinion, of course, was moot, whatever progress he made—and he got the feeling it could have been cartwheels or calculus—was nothing next to Feingold’s opinion and the verdict of some committee in the hospital. In some ways, it was like he was starting out again as an architect, submitting a proposal invested with everything he was as an architect, only to suffer the group whims of group taste, always maintaining that rejection didn’t hurt, never admitting the grievous sting.

  The roomful of multidisciplinarians saw him as a man struggling to operate a toaster and falling down stairs and, if they didn’t intercede, planning buildings that would be doomed to collapse and crush everything, including their reputations. Feingold wanted the best for him, to keep him off the floor and far from the toaster, and in a way, he appreciated this. He respected her for it. But at the same time he wanted to reach out and put a finger into that looped earring, to lean over and whisper that she knew nothing of him. How dare she. She couldn’t know what he had, what he was. She couldn’t know what they were taking away.

  He could still talk about buildings, she said. Maybe, with what he knew, he could write or teach. She had spoken to his partners, Feingold said. She knew he’d written articles. He could feel himself grimacing at the thought of Jean-Sebastien or Catherine “confiding” to Feingold about him.

  “I don’t want to write. I’m still an architect.”

  Feingold nodded and told him she enjoyed listening to him talk provenance, about the decisions made to achieve an effect in his buildings and in others. She placed an object on the table and told him that she wanted him to record his thoughts, to listen to the playback every night. He touched the object on the desk, a density and size that identified it as a piece of electronic equipment, a similar heft and feel to the digital recorder he had used before.

  “Was this mine?”

  “No. It’s new. I thought you could use it.”

  “Where’d mine go?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s at home. Maybe it was in the car. This one works. . . .”

  He ran his thumb over the narrow edge of the object and felt what must have been the RECORD button, invariably there, always on the narrower edge of the instrument, designed for a thumb to work it like a rosary bead. “Testing, testing.”

  The PLAYBACK button was more mysteriously located, lost among a minor archipelago of other-functioned buttons, but simply living in an era that demanded mastering successive generations of cell phones and PDAs and BlackBerry devices had trained his thumbs in ways that he could not describe or understand. Three tries until he heard his voice, testing, testing. Testing him.

  He smiled; a machine they trusted him with. This, he understood, was the linear that Feingold was asking him to accept, the only connection he had left to his life, the only lifeline they would allow him. Feingold was making her case for what he would be permitted. He should be grateful to be alive; he should be grateful to be allowed this much. Testing, testing.

  But he wasn’t grateful. He wanted to tell her this was theft. A story about a building was nothing without the building itself—a process that he was being told was now forever beyond him. Without him being at the helm, his practice, which he had built and fostered and sacrificed for, was in jeopardy. When he founded it, his firm had been nothing, a small shop happy to exist on renovation work and retrofitting municipal buildings, and now, because of his work and his name, F/S+H was competing for the sort of projects that were the preliminary markers of a career of distinction. The endowed museum extension. The named research pavilion. And then came the consulate. It was happening. The next ten years were supposed to be a culmination, not spent playing mind games finding the goddamned Guggenheim.

  He wanted to shout at her that they owed him more than this, more of a chance. But you don’t tell this to people like Feingold, he reminded himself; you don’t tell her about how you can understand space more fully with your eyes closed, the brief moments when you’re aware of so much, when space seems full and more beautiful than before. They would never understand. They’ll give you the linear and you will take the linear.

  He called
for the orderlies—Szandor, or the other guy, who was smaller than Szandor—to help get him into bed, and that’s when she started to go on about the next few weeks at the Dunes, how they would consolidate their cognitive rehab program for him. He had already tuned her out, choosing instead to repeat the phrase because the sound of the words, sounding like a means of escape, a method of rehabilitation completely within his own power, had started to please him. Concentrate on the linear.

  Chapter 2

  “Dr. Fallon?”

  Brendan Fallon stopped and slowly turned around in the atrium lobby of the Dunes Rehabilitation Center at the sound of his name. It had been more than a year since he’d retired as a veterinarian, and hearing his name and former title here, in a place where no one should know what he did, made him briefly uncomfortable at the thought of coming face-to-face with a former employee or client whose pet’s name he would not recall.

  Meredith Feingold was waving at him from behind the reception desk, the clattering of bracelets clustered on her right forearm accentuating the gesture, making it seem more urgent, as if that were possible. The sound made by her jewelry stopped as her gesture fluidly morphed into the less emphatic one of beckoning him back from the exit. Several others in the lobby also stopped and looked back at the desk. Perhaps they were Dr. Fallons, as well, Brendan thought, a lobby full of astrophysicists and chiropractors and pediatricians, distant relatives he’d never met. But Feingold was looking at him, and so the others were dismissed to rejoin their faux Fallon lives and doctoral careers. Brendan waved back and reflexively turned his wrist to check the time, which was odd, as he was in no rush, but less odd than the fact that he wasn’t wearing a wristwatch in the first place.

  What he knew of Meredith Feingold came mostly from Martin, whose opinion seemed more dependent on his cycling moods than on her therapeutic performance. Martin was running through a difficult patch, and his current complaint was that all Feingold’s questions were rhetorical. Brendan had briefly come across Dr. Feingold several times during his brother’s stay at the Dunes, a nod and a polite smile as he dropped Martin off at her office or picked him up after the session was over. It was a novelty now to simply see her away from a door frame. Organic, free-range Feingold. She took a step toward him and shook his hand, the type where the otherwise-free hand came up to join the little hand hug at the last second and was deployed, Brendan thought, to convey some deeper emotional meaning than just “Hello” but was forever wasted on people like him who overanalyzed handshakes.

  “I’m sorry for disturbing you, Dr. Fallon, but I wondered if we could talk about your brother,” Feingold said, not waiting for a response before disengaging from the handshake and sweeping her right arm back to show him the way to her office. Rhetorical, Brendan thought, impressed that at least Martin had been paying attention.

  Down a corridor and into the Psychology Department he was led, past the threshold of that familiar door frame, and shown a seat. Feingold opened a file folder that had been sitting on her desk. She must have been waiting for him at the front desk. The office was decorated perfectly, hints of eclecticism but impeccably tidy, Brendan thought. On the wall, just above her left shoulder was a framed print of New York, one of those iconic photos of an eagle-headed gargoyle projecting out from the facade of the Chrysler Building into the abyss of a distant Manhattan. Feingold noticed him looking.

  “Martin tells me that you live in New York.”

  “Upper East Side. Mid-Seventies.”

  “Nice. How do you find Vermont?”

  “It’s so nice and bucolic, I want to throw up.” It pleased him to see her smile.

  Martin is impulsive. Martin is amnestic. Martin has left a lot of people angry at him. Martin is a person who made plans for great buildings that were occasionally built. Martin is a mystery to me. Brendan thinks of all the things that his brother is and was, because he finds the list makes the discussion he is inevitably going to have with Feingold easier. He had gone through similar mental lists, the crib sheets of the unprepared, on those rare occasions when he was cornered into a parent-teacher conference for one or the other of their boys, trying to project some form of parental insight that could pretend to complement Rita’s. The list, he thought, was preparation, a way to reduce the anxiety of being overmatched, and this was necessary to combat the glade of perspiration blossoming in that area between his shoulder blades and the sense of general abdominal discomfort. Now he understood why he was looking at the watch that was never there, an effort to create in Feingold’s mind a sense of his being imposed upon, that he was a person whose clock was ticking and the meeting, as a courtesy, should be both brief and held on his terms.

  “So you’re the family,” Feingold said.

  “I am,” Brendan replied, and tried to smile innocuously as possible, resisting the impulse to tilt his head.

  “You’re okay with that?”

  “Okay with being family? I suppose I don’t have any choice in the matter.”

  “Are you okay with being responsible for him, Dr. Fallon?”

  “I wouldn’t have been here every day for three months if I wasn’t okay with it. I wouldn’t have agreed to be his guardian if I wasn’t comfortable. Besides, it’s been mostly details and paperwork, a few visits back to Montreal to sign things. . . .”

  “I think all of that is admirable,” Feingold said, and as she spoke the index finger of her right hand slowly moved across the surface of the piece of paper in front of her, stopping mid-line, mid-page. “Martin told me, during one of our conversations—outside the context of his sessions, of course—that you hadn’t seen each other in almost thirty years.”

  “That’s true.”

  “That must make everything more difficult for you.”

  “He’s the one who’s been in a coma. Everything else is sort of easy compared to that.”

  Meredith looked at him and smiled. “You don’t like talking about this.”

  “I don’t know what we’re talking about, Dr. Feingold.”

  “I’ve found, in the course of my work, that people who are estranged are often estranged for a reason. There are often real and deeply felt reasons why people who grew up together move apart and stay away from each other—”

  “Look, it’s just pragmatism, Dr. Feingold. I have the time. My kids are grown and I’m retired. Martin’s daughters are busy with their lives and our mother is almost ninety. He has one ex-wife who’s overseas and another who didn’t want anything to do with him before this. . . .”

  “I understand that. I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about you, Brendan. In my experience, people who try to restart relationships under these circumstances are often expecting some resolution. That’s a significant burden to place on a fragile relationship and especially on a person who is recovering from an injury.”

  “I’m here for my brother, that’s all. And I’m fine, really, and I don’t expect anything from this, except for him to get better. But I do appreciate your interest in my welfare.”

  Feingold turned over the page, and Brendan glanced down to see what looked to be a place for signatures. He felt the urge again to consult a clock but understood that in a psychologist’s office all the clock faces would probably be turned away from the client.

  “Martin wants to leave,” Feingold said.

  Brendan nodded. “He’s been talking to me about that.”

  “His attention is better and his reading has improved, but the treatment team doesn’t think that he’s entirely ready to go.”

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s injured his right hemisphere and has what is called ‘neglect.’ It’s hard to explain, but certain parts—the left side of his world—aren’t normal.”

  Brendan nodded, “He’s weak on the left and can’t see very well on that side.”

  “It’s more than that,” Feingold said, and paused. The pen she was holding followed the tracks of a small elliptical doodle on a piece of scrap paper on the desk. �
��Have you ever had that experience where you learn about something, an event, or an artist, or a concept, and you’re amazed that you had never heard of it? And then, of course, after the initial time you hear of it, you hear it referred to all the time; it’s like you can’t avoid it. But it hadn’t existed for you before. It hadn’t seemed possible. The odd thing is to realize how you were making opinions, not just unaware, but unaware you were unaware. Martin is unaware of his deficits, of his visual problems. His world seems full to him. Seamless, in many ways.”

  “Will this get better?”

  “I don’t know. I think I have to agree with the team, but I also think progress for him at the Dunes, in his current state of mind, will be difficult. . . .” Brendan knew what was coming, having shaped conversations like this all through his career, the niceties seguing into heartfelt discussions about an animal’s welfare prior to the brass tacks of price points and the limits of care and waiver after waiver to be signed. But he appreciated her exquisite goddamned professionalism.

  “The best solution, I think, if Martin really insists on leaving, for us as an institution . . . it would be best for us if he left ‘against medical advice,’ and for that we need you to sign that you knew about this decision and agreed to take full legal responsibility for him until he returned to Canada.” With that, Feingold rotated the folder toward Brendan. “We can leave it undated for now.”

  “Sure. I have no problem with that,” Brendan said, and, having had it ready and already used, quickly put his pen away.

  It was Friday, now late afternoon, and the hallway of the Psychology Department was appropriately deserted. Brendan thought they would part ways at her office, expecting Feingold’s customary offer to accompany him to the exit, countered by him politely declining and showing himself out—but after closing and locking the door to her office, she kept walking with him, the sound of their footsteps awkwardly twinned. She could do better with goodbyes, he thought.