The Measure of Darkness

by Liam Durcan

  “Before you go,” she said without turning to face him, “I was wondering if you could give me a little advice. My dog, a Doberman—”

  “How old?” he asked, the mystery of the protracted good-bye now explained, calling on whatever vestiges of professionalism he still had to suppress a look of annoyance.

  “Betsy is four. Really healthy, but she fainted this morning.”

  “When’s your next vet appointment?”

  “In a few months.”

  He paused for a moment. “You should mention it to your vet at your next visit. It happens to this breed. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Thanks.”

  As they neared the exit, Feingold stopped to shake his hand again. More formal now, the send-off shake, a left hand resolutely at her side this time, already having completed its commando task of reeling him in. Feingold presented him with her card in case there were issues, and as he turned to go, he could already imagine her returning to her office to note this in the chart.

  Brendan drove north on Highway 15, through what seemed to be the deepest part of early-summer Vermont, the forest’s canopy strobing blue sky above him in a car-commercial way that occasionally happened in life. Everything along the road was lush, almost a little luridly so, and stood in stark contrast to the suede valleys and snow-hooded hills that had greeted him on arrival a little more than three months before.

  The improvement in Martin’s condition during that time had been startling—even that morning, Brendan had arrived at his brother’s room, to find him casually reading a Dunes pamphlet about fall prevention—and listening to Feingold talk about his eventual departure should have been a culmination. Instead, Brendan was already fighting the swells of anxiety about what would happen next. Getting Martin home, figuring out how to get him fed and to his appointments, the details and the dailyness of Martin care. Then there was the delicate matter of explaining to Martin that he was no longer a partner in his firm. Brendan gently probed his brother with questions about what he recalled, but it was clear from the start of his recovery that Martin remembered nothing of the contract that severed ties with the firm he had founded. Brendan had come across the buyout contract, signed by Martin and his partners a mere week before the crash, sitting on the kitchen table of Martin’s Montreal condo on one of his first trips back there to deal with the legal issues. With this fact erased from his memory, Martin rose from his Dunes bed to give every appearance of wanting, of expecting, to walk through the doors of his now-former company, sit down to work, and start building again. Brendan witnessed firsthand how Martin’s amnesia and eagerness to get back on the job stunned his partners that day they ventured down to the Dunes for a commiserating visit, the lady architect almost speechless and in tears and the other partner reduced to simply nodding and going along with Martin’s rambling plan. Martin—misinterpreting their incomprehension as a simple vote of no confidence—seemed even more triumphant after they left, energized by what seemed to be the need to prove everyone wrong with a full recovery, to win back his life.

  How do you deprive someone of that? Running on the fuel of false assumptions, Martin had begun reading again, was starting to muse about obscure Soviet architects, and was deep into making plans for a triumphant career return, albeit a return to one that had ceased to exist in the way it was imagined, but who was he to debunk his brother’s hope? Back in the tomb, buddy, it turns out you’re actually just a dead carpenter. Brendan had to admire the passion and admit, in a way, that he was more than a little jealous of his brother, recognizing the times in his life he could have profited from a little deluded therapeutic badassery himself. No, Martin Fallon was as happy as Feingold’s Doberman, and Brendan decided he wasn’t going to be the one who stopped either tail from wagging.

  A half hour later, he was back in his suite of the hotel on the outskirts of Burlington, which had become his temporary home, with a view of Lake Champlain and a kitchenette, where he started to prepare an evening meal. Two years of widowhood had made him understand that the silences around a meal without Rita would be filled, one way or another, and that he might as well fill them with the effort to cook. One full, self-prepared meal, every day. This had been his goal, prompted by the suggestion of a psychologist he had seen, his own Feingold, and it had saved him. Brendan had found copies of Rita’s recipes—the originals had been spirited away by his sons, taken out to Portland, where they now served as the foundational documents of La Cucina della Puccio, an Italian food truck they operated and had named in honor of their mother and her family—and he promised himself he would at least attempt a competent approximation of those tastes and textures. The effort of planning and the small, organized tasks of preparation calmed him, and over the course of the last year he had finally begun to experience success consistently. It was gratification at being able to preserve something of value. It was mastery of something that had eluded him and a tribute to the woman he loved. It was good food.

  After dinner, once the dishes were done and he had found a Tigers game on television to drown out the other news, Brendan retrieved Feingold’s card from his pocket. He imagined her response a couple of weeks hence when she found her dog dead. Fainting in a four-year old Doberman was a classic presentation of a heart ailment to which the breed was prone, one that would soon lead to sudden cardiac arrest and death. It was untreatable and unavoidable, and he’d explained the diagnosis, both before and after the terminal event, countless times to shocked and tearful owners. He didn’t know if Feingold, when the time came, would recall his advice and curse him for what she would wrongly assume was either his ignorance or his willful deception. He hoped she might eventually understand that he was trying to give her a few weeks of unweighted companionship with the doomed animal. This was a gift, he thought as he looked out the window for that view of the eastern edges of Lake Champlain, although it was his experience that in the wake of loss, it was a gift rarely appreciated and never acknowledged.

  Chapter 3

  It was clear to Martin that Konstantin Melnikov had awakened him. It was difficult for Martin to remember anything of the Dunes before he had recalled that moment, that thrilling and distorted memory of wading through the weeds in front of Melnikov House with Professor Lanctot. He wondered how a memory just arrived, how one index card of a life was pulled from the roll. Or maybe it was simply random arrival, another effect of a million brain cells being tumbled together, and he was just as likely to have had a memory of a song that Susan or Norah sang or the taste of a spoonful of cornflakes.

  However the memory came, whatever guided it, it was made more meaningful in the way his other thoughts began to array themselves around it, thoughts crystallizing into a thin layer of him. Perhaps, before all this happened, he was aware of being an architect, but he was not aware of the awareness until he stood at the north side of Melnikov House with Lanctot. I am Martin Fallon. What followed was a sequence of declarations, the reassertions of a person lying in a strange bed. He was unsure if he said any of it outloud.

  I am Martin Fallon.

  I am an architect.

  I have been in an accident.

  I have two daughters.

  I would like this catheter taken out.

  He became aware of day and night and then the subsidiary divisions of the day: the nursing shift, with its quickly decaying enthusiasms and own internal rhythms, then the biological satisfactions of meal arrival, and then finally the smaller, more urgent decrements of medication schedules. The swell and trough of narcotics. The effect like a choke chain on a dog. He was suddenly aware that he had preferences, for certain orderlies or nurses—was this a sign of a growing self-awareness? Pickiness? He became more argumentative with nurses, and not just the ones he didn’t like. He started to fall, because, he argued, he was starting to walk. This was a good thing. The medical staff didn’t see it that way.

  It was shortly after he recalled the visit to Melnikov House that he began to remember details of the consulate pr
oject, the commission his firm had been involved with at the time of his accident, and this arrived with a sidecar of panic and frustration, as though something vital to the design still lay unrecovered. And while the specifics of this forgotten detail were achingly just beyond retrieval, for some reason he could easily remember Jean-Sebastien nervously teasing him anytime he obsessed about their consular clients—Don’t worry, Marty, they’re only Russians. What’re a bunch of Russians gonna do to us if we fuck up their consulate?

  Luckily, the anxieties did not arrive alone. He could feel, and then move, his left hand, a triumph occurring so suddenly that he was convinced it was effortless, the hours spent in physio transformed from a futile drudgery to a superfluous one. For a while, every day brought a change, clusters of new functions returning, new aptitudes reemerging, sleeper cells of forgotten skills responding to a mysterious call from afar. He could walk. His energy returned. There was an odd, appealing velocity to all of it. His appetite returned. He could remember who had just spoken to him.

  He began to venture out of his room, edging along the Dunes’s corridors first in a wheelchair, then in a walker, always getting stuck in a certain cul-de-sac, where Szandor invariably found him, saying, Here’s our Mr. Right Turn as they headed into the mysteries of the trip back to his room.

  It was in that room at the Dunes that he realized what exactly had changed about him. As Szandor turned off the light, he became aware of the arms that lay on either side of him, how they felt connected to him now. He closed his eyes to make the darkness more complete, and this was rewarded with an enhanced awareness of the bed around him, a finer, more discriminating sense of the bed as a plane on which he lay. Each hand slowly crab-walked away from his body to the edge, wrists touching the cool chrome of the bed rail. His fingers flexed and he knew where he was, that this was a bed, with its length and breadth; this was where he was, all of it coming to him with a certainty that was absent with the lights on and his eyes open.

  He forced himself to stay awake, easier once he had pushed through the walled cotton of his evening dose of pain medication. His hands traced and retraced the contours of the bed linens, fingers brushing against ridges and seams. The scrubland terrain of a hospital bed. Registering all, reporting all. Martin turned back the sheet and crawled out of his bed with a newfound confidence in his ability, moving silently in the darkness. On all fours, his hands scouring the floor of his room, he moved with surprising authority until he had reached each floorboard and mapped out the territory completely. The bathroom was last, and it felt like a triumph of his senses, able to discern the miniature tiles and grout that hemmed them in. He put his face to the floor and breathed in, telling himself he could sense the slope that led to the center of the floor, running his thumbs over the little grille of the drain cover. Touch the sink, touch the toilet. It all made sense in the dark. The surfaces became real under his hands and the space at once inflated around him, assuming the dimensions of a small room. The room existed again, and this discovery—by necessity made with him on all fours, crouching close enough to the toilet that he could hear the muffled liquid hiss of the waterworks underneath the porcelain skin—made him feel a gratitude so tender that for a moment he felt able to forgive all the indignities he’d been made to endure. In one revelatory moment in the bathroom, he felt certain not only that he had recovered but that he had been granted a quite remarkable experience. A gift. He knelt and wiped his hands of Dunes dust, Dunes dirt.

  This continued for weeks. Every evening, once the night shift had retreated to its garrison of the nurses’ station and the hallway lights were turned down, he would begin the sortie around his room. With increasing ease and a stealth he took pride in, he would reclaim a little more of the Dunes territory for himself each night. And when a particularly ignorant orderly left the light on in his room—a past-due fluorescent that hissed a spray of cold light—it offered him the chance to discover that the light—or darkness—meant nothing, that simply closing his eyes was sufficient to escape into a world of spatial awareness.

  He could have told Feingold about this, about his new appreciation of space, but he suspected that she would regard this as a curiosity. To reintegrate into the world, he suspected she would say, the last thing that he needed to do was to close his eyes. She’d told him he had become well enough to be a danger to himself, stranded in that gray area of recovery that nobody talks about, a trajectory leveling off. The birth of a plateau. And a plateau is nowhere at all.

  And along with all the declarations of who he was, and what he’d been, really, there came what he recognized as some internal engine starting again, an engagement, vague but palpable. Even if he could not immediately understand it, it gave him pleasure, because it felt like appetite. Sitting there listening to Feingold, helpful, useless Feingold, he understood what this appetite was for.

  He didn’t tell Feingold about Melnikov, or the architect’s role in his awakening. This was a good sign, he thought, asserting the need to have a secret as a sign of burgeoning autonomy. Besides, he thought, if Feingold knew, chances were that she would claim Melnikov’s appearance as her own therapeutic victory, as her patient’s first step to creating the linear that she had suggested. He picked up the digital recorder she had left for him and massaged the RECORD button and had a brief conversation with his own voice.

  I am Martin Fallon. Each sentence the laying down of tracks of a personality. I am fifty-six years old. I live in Montreal. I am an architect. I have two daughters. He listened to the voice talk about itself, the echoes of a newly born ghost, and it made him grimace. He ran the message back, stopped, and waited.

  Chapter 4

  It was surprisingly easy to escape the Dunes.

  He had been there long enough that he could imagine the aftermath of going AWOL, how the staff would establish an “estimated time of disappearance” after they couldn’t find him during the morning medication rounds (the chronic care trifecta of narcotic, anti-inflammatory, and laxatives that he’d begun to wean himself off). Or maybe they would notice he was gone when he didn’t show for lunch. People had gone missing before, he was told, wandered away in the spring sunshine or just lost track of time. Lots of Dunes clients were like that. Often it would take nothing more than announcing the missing person’s name over the PA system to rein them in. If there was still no answer—a rare event in his weeks at the Dunes—a search would commence, with pairs of staff going from room to room until the wayward client was located. He tried to imagine the sound of his name on the PA system, echoing in the hallways. But he could not remind himself of the sound of an echo. There was just sound and then less sound and then silence.

  He doubted they would spend much time calling out his name or doing the door-to-door search. They’d have the good sense to check the logbook to find out that Brendan was his last visitor. Having his brother sign him out gave them a grace period of a few hours more. Maybe they would just change the linens and the name over bed 412-C and wouldn’t bother to chase after him at all.

  It was AWOL, though, and that thought made him smile. Not a difference of opinions, not a discharge against medical advice. He was gone. He’d walked out, a statement in itself to Feingold and the rest of the Dunes rehab-industrial complex.

  Brendan hadn’t initially agreed with his decision to leave the Dunes. He repeatedly mentioned the caliber of rehab at the Dunes and more openly questioned Martin’s judgment, asking several times for Martin to sleep on it, raising suspicions in Martin that Brendan was going behind his back to Feingold. Over the course of several visits and endless phone conversations, Martin pleaded his case to Brendan; the humiliation that he might have felt was muted by a pleasant nostalgic pang—that almost-forgotten desire to edge into a world of increasing freedom and danger that was cordoned off by an elder brother. He knew better than to appeal to his brother’s sense of duty and switched to a pragmatic approach. He had recovered, he told Brendan. Can’t you see that? And while he was grateful for all t
hat Brendan had done, for Feingold and the OTs and the physios who walked him until he no longer staggered like a zombie, he was ready to leave. That was the goal, wasn’t it?

  Even after this, Brendan hesitated, perhaps understanding that for any escape he would have to be his brother’s necessary accomplice, beginning to realize that this was a commitment not simply to escort Martin out of the Dunes but to do something potentially more difficult and open-ended. But to the surprise of them both, Brendan did not flinch, even when he got past the notion of aiding and abetting escape. It was Brendan who volunteered to go up to Montreal to help Martin get settled, to pilot the disability-insurance paperwork through proper channels and hold the fort until they could hire someone to stay with him on a more permanent basis.

  They are brothers, Martin overheard one occupational therapist casually mention to another to explain Brendan’s presence. At the Dunes, simple phrases like that were weighted to the point of being foundational truths, conveying meaning as effectively as they suppressed all other meanings. A brother at the bedside trumped all other subsidiary stories, and so all were spared the explanation of the almost thirty-year estrangement, their relationship ruptured by a war that sent Martin to Canada and his elder brother off to Southeast Asia. There are things that social workers never know, and probably shouldn’t care about. Simple, uncontested presence is enough. And so Brendan’s role was accepted with no more explanation than having his parking validated.

  Brendan had been the one constant during his recovery, the unexpected presence as he slowly pieced himself back together at the Dunes. His brother even rented a house an hour from Burlington, so much the better to visit the Dunes daily, and, along with Melnikov, he became a compass point in those early, otherwise-fragmented days (for a brief period, Martin thought that Brendan was the architect himself, sitting down to tea and a conversation). There was also a briefer moment of conflation, when he had confused Brendan with his mentor, Lanctot. Then Brendan’s presence finally merged with the idea of his brother, when his voice became his own at the bedside. Brendan was the man who would be there waiting in Martin’s room when he returned from his morning physiotherapy session. They would spend the first half hour talking, which more often than not involved Brendan just listening and then trying to calm his brother’s fleeting, minor-key obsessions—he assured Martin no one was stealing from him and reassured him that the noises outside his window that greeted him each morning were nothing more ominous than birdsong. Later, usually after a lunch taken in his room or in the large fourth-floor common area, the two men would gravitate to the veranda of the Dunes for an afternoon of sunshine and therapeutic silence, taking their places among the other clients wrapped in thick blankets against the breezes that swooped down from the Green Mountains.