by Liam Durcan
“Great, great. Where did you get all this medication anyway?”
“From your doctors.”
“You told them I was leaving?”
“How else do you think they’d give it to me?”
“They knew I was leaving?”
Brendan nodded, perplexed at his brother’s unease. “You wanted to get out, Martin. I signed a form for you, saying you left against their advice. That’s all. You’re out. Isn’t that what matters?”
Martin nodded in response and felt the gesture arrive naturally, moving his head in agreement as his brother had done, the expression of something deeper than remembrance, something genetic, as he gathered the pills in his hand and waited for Brendan to return with a glass of water. It was an act slower than simply nodding, a movement that Martin felt could be sustained indefinitely, even incorporated into his everyday routine of living outside the Dunes. Useful even for swallowing pills.
The bed was different. Its dimensions, the firmness of the mattress, the smell of the linens. Martin tried not to let nostalgia for the comfort of the Dunes creep into the room. But everything was different. The rhythms of the Dunes had fallen away, the intrusions and interruptions replaced by silence in the night. He gave up on sleep and resigned himself to being stranded for stretches of this first night, admitting to himself that freedom felt like barely suppressed panic.
From where he lay he could hear Brendan sleeping in the other room, the frequent movements and interrupted snores that attested to a person making do on an insufficiently large sofa. At times during the night, Martin wanted to wake him up, to talk or just to break the routine of raspy snarls and snorts his brother had lapsed into, but he never moved from his bed, choosing just to listen to the sound of him. There was a familiarity to this; he had always been the insomniac, his brother the deep sleeper. He was younger by fifteen months, but keenly aware, as only insomniacs are, of the feeling that he was in some way destined to be a sentry for those who slept so deeply under the same roof. The grave responsibility of being conscious when others were not. As a child, he had spent nights awake, cataloging the sounds: the house shifting and the snores of his father (another Fallon bequest, one that he hadn’t evaded, as Agnetha or Sharon could attest to). In those nights in Detroit in the late fifties, he remembered cricket song and the ebbing sounds of traffic and the screech of cats mating in the back-garden darkness. The noises of night, all felt as an additional, secret awareness of the world, a privilege to a child awake in his room.
In the nearly forty years since he’d left Detroit, he had seen Brendan only twice prior to his brother’s reappearance at the Dunes. For Martin, these dates stood memorialized like battlefield engagements in the otherwise-separate history of hermit nations. More ironically, for Martin, whose only recent dealings with religious establishments were to oversee their conversion to condos, both meetings took place in church.
The first: October 1975, an estrangement of seven years already, he spotted Brendan sidling into the last row of the chapel of St. Patrick’s Basilica in Montreal as the first adenoidal strains of Wagner honked out of the organ and Sharon appeared at the end of the aisle on her father Henry’s arm. Martin was embarrassed to admit that at this crucial moment, his full attention had been pulled away from Sharon and instead focused on his brother, funneled into the concentrated effort of trying to gauge something—a condensed history of seven years, a prevailing mood, a rationale for silence and animosity—from a glimpse of another person’s facial features. There had been a moment—again, with Sharon coming down the aisle, the pressure to refocus on her now looming like a moral imperative—of possible eye contact with his brother.
But Brendan’s head was already averted downward, a hand flashing across his brow as it made the sign of the cross, the sudden momentary disappearance as he genuflected, in Martin’s estimation less a gesture of true piety and more the guerrilla tactics of a man trying to look inconspicuous among the other churchgoers. Martin then turned to look at his mother in the first row, to see if she had registered Brendan’s arrival. (At least a glance at his mother was acceptable in the context, preferable to what seemed like random, wanton scanning of the crowd). She stood impassively, exhausted from several days of maintaining the composure required to stand there and explain that her absent husband was not deceased but “indisposed” or “unavailable” which was preferable to the more honest “disinclined to come.” In the chaos outside the church after the service, it had been impossible to find Brendan. He never appeared for their reception.
Less than three years later, in July of 1978, it had been Martin’s turn to appear unannounced at church, his first time back in the States since leaving a decade before, Jimmy Carter’s freshly minted amnesty allowing him to cross the border safely for his father’s funeral, the presidential decree coming into effect late enough that arrest for draft evasion had been the plausible excuse for not attempting a reconciliation with the old man in his hospital bed as he recovered from the operation and the first, fruitless attempt at chemo. Martin had dreaded the thought of the wordless bedside reunion: fraught, overloaded with accrued history, the weight of which would smother any authentic emotion. Added to that, Martin knew his father well enough to understand he would revile a meeting where he was at such a disadvantage. He knew that such a meeting was clearly a fraudulent, performative experience, a gesture to satisfy Brendan and his mother while ignoring the needs of the very people who had to live through it. Torturing both, desired by neither. When the Carter amnesty finally came into effect, he understood the burden of a convenient excuse had been removed, and he’d finally been forced to think about what he would say should his father want to see him. But his father did not ask him to come home, and so he stood his ground.
When the news of his father’s death finally came, it was unexpected, following a couple of weeks where he’d seemed to rally. There was even talk of his father going home from the hospital for a few weeks, a scenario that Martin was able to envision as a more agreeable setting for a sit-down. But a blood clot changed that. From the calf to the lung, and that was it, in Martin’s mind like a suicide bomber’s laden truck, traveling quietly through the streets of the city it would soon transform. Middle of the day and his father just stopped. Found cold in the bathroom.
His promise to himself to maintain distance, all, he repeated to himself, out of respect for his father, collapsed under grief and guilt and the pressure of a harried return from exile. It is one long, choked drive to the border, traffic from Toronto to well past London, an acrid fog of diesel fumes as they sat on the Ambassador Bridge, Susan less than a year old, cradled in Sharon’s arms. He tried to imagine the array of pauses and frowns that would greet him at U.S. Immigrations and Customs.
The trip to St. Clare of Assisi was the last step in a succession of triggered memories, making him realize how bound humans are to place, seeing the tree-lined streets of his neighborhood and high school and the lawn in front of the church. He got out of the car and sent Sharon, exhausted with travel and morning-sick with Norah, off to their hotel rather than face a hot church and the contagion of the congregation’s mood.
“This has all hit your brother very hard,” his mother said to him later, without any irony, as she held a cold cloth to Martin’s face and pinched his nose in the rectory of the church. It was the only explanation she would offer and was what would have to stand as an apology for what Brendan had done after the funeral service. Martin had joined them in their pew during the service, where they sat wordless after a handshake (a small but magnanimous gesture on his part, Martin thought, but still more than anything Brendan had offered at his wedding). Brendan had given the eulogy, looking to Martin like a man unfit for the job, not because of a lack of eloquence or gravitas, but simply because it was evident that the task quite possibly might kill him. His face reddened and his voice heaved and shook and he seemed to approach the point of physical collapse, but he managed to compose himself. He continued, and t
his impressed Martin. Several times during the eulogy, Brendan looked over at their father’s coffin, placed in the center aisle, near the front of the church. Martin found himself glancing at the casket, too—only later, in contemplation specific to younger brothers, wondering if this had been an act of emulation or competition.
Perhaps it was observing how his emotions had almost undone his brother, or that he’d been able to experience vicariously a grief deeper than anything he felt, but the church service had the odd effect of allaying much of Martin’s guilt about not coming home earlier. Despite not seeing his father before he died, he understood that they’d had differences that were not resolvable. He would have liked his father to hold his granddaughter, to know in some human, tactile way that only babies can accomplish that some greater part of him would live on. But the church service seemed to absolve him, made him realize that he had no regrets for the decisions he’d made. If his father hadn’t understood that, then he simply hadn’t understood him, and with that Martin felt vindicated in having stayed away. His father would have respected that. As the service ended, he felt he was able to appreciate the man in a manner more dignified than keening. Martin looked around the church, full of family and friends. This was a life well lived. This was a much-loved man.
Martin passed a half hour at the back of the church greeting and reuniting with people he hadn’t seen since leaving Detroit: cousins from Akron; Mr. Phelps, a friend from the VFW legion who had served with his father in the Ninth Army; even the odd acquaintance from their days in Highland Park. Not exactly the welcome of the prodigal son, but warm enough, enough to make him grin at the thought of any reconnection with this place, this past. No cracks about draft dodgers or veiled comparisons with the brother who had honored his notice to serve.
After the church emptied and Martin finished the surprisingly satisfying process of greeting/reuniting/commiserating with the other mourners, he walked into the rectory and the firm right hand of his brother. It was a jab, not characterized by much power or accuracy (his grazed right collarbone was as sore as his nose) but with a surprising electrical sting to it, followed by the swell and gush of his own blood down his chin, all coupled with Martin’s delayed staggering away from his departing brother.
His mother, who would have been within her rights to have simply sat and wept, did neither. With her two sons disgracing her on the most difficult day of her life, she showed a composure that was one of the more impressive acts of emotional control Martin would ever witness. She would deny it was her nurse's training and claim simple Scots pragmatism, the Glaswegian in her declaring itself among all the wailing and hysterics and now the inevitable flare of male stupidity, simply saying that this needed to get sorted. And so she pinched a handkerchief against the nose of her younger son and joined him there, sitting on the rectory steps, until the bleeding stopped.
Susan was asleep on a foldout cot when he got to the hotel. Sharon dozed at the window, her head leaning against the air conditioner, the grilles having left the impression of horizontal lines across her forehead that looked like the empty staves of an unfinished musical score. And as much as she was shocked to see him—she later described him as wild-eyed, the smell of sweat and tears and blood lacking only the stink of alcohol to complete the typical miasma of the Saturday-night gladiators she stitched up in an evening shift in the emergency room—she was more surprised to hear him say that they should wake up Susan. They were going home to Montreal.
Their mother had been their intermediary, the person from whom Martin had found out that Brendan threw the punch in response to what he saw as his brother’s utter lack of decorum, his apparent frivolity after the funeral Mass. Until their mother’s memory problems diminished her, she had been the way that each brother maintained contact with the other’s life: the children and jobs and divorces, and through it all there was nothing she could do to get either to drop their parallel, perfectly counterweighted grievances: the punch and the reason for the punch.
And now, after almost thirty years and without explanation, Brendan had reappeared. This was Martin’s life now, his brother’s presence just another detail he had awakened to, another fact he could not understand but would have to reconcile. A marriage, a funeral, a punch and no words. He listened to this man breathing, feet away. This stranger. My brother.
The sun is up, Martin Fallon thought, but when he opened his eyes, his room was indistinguishable from its appearance at midnight. He heard neither snoring nor any other sound to suggest that Brendan had awakened in the next room.
A clock radio rested in its sentinel spot on his bedside table—its display a jumble of buzzing red ingots of numerical time that he couldn’t focus on. A simple-stemmed lamp kept it company. The floor was smooth, the give and texture of a finely finished pine, he thought as he edged away from the bed.
On the small desk he found the medication case that rattled with the promise of the coming day’s pharmaceutical victories. Beside this was his watch, which he could not remember wearing, much less having taken off, and his wallet proudly pocketed yesterday for the first time in four months. By the end of the car ride home, it had felt like a bull had gored his right buttock.
He found more objects behind a folding door, clothes that smelled of closeting. Tendrils falling from a tie rack. He rediscovered his personal hierarchy of laundry (shirts according to context of wear: leisure, office, business, presentation; socks garrisoned away from the inexplicably elevated status of underwear). From the suitcase opened at the foot of his bed he removed the clothes he had worn at rehab, the sweat suits whose partnered items were now separated into individual pants and tops that had cycled independently through use and laundry and whose ever-changing permutations comprised the Dunes uniform. He put his nose into the rayon-polyester blend. Who had bought these and why had he not protested? These clothes smelled different. Human use. They smelled stained, of sweat and urine, odors that he hoped were still evident only because of less regular, or rigorous, laundering at the Dunes.
He spent an hour like this, scuttling around, waiting for Brendan to awaken, before he stumbled across the digital recorder that Feingold had given him. He held it loosely, as though gauging its heft and value, the binary considerations of use or disposal.
Chapter 6
There was a hum on the third floor of the architectural firm of St. Joseph/Houde. Martin heard the hum. He was certain he felt it as he sat in the St. Joseph/Houde conference room. He had arrived with Brendan, stopped for a moment on the front steps to study the new sign that had replaced F/S+H, and then entered, announcing to the receptionist that he had arrived for a meeting with Catherine and Jean-Sebastien. This surprised the secretary, whose face and voice were profound mysteries, until she came out from behind her desk, took him gently by the arm, and introduced herself as Elodie. This proximity triggered a memory, a sweet olfactory blush of recollection. Elodie. He knew Elodie. She was whispering to him and he was leaning in and the easy intimacy of the moment—two voices hushed, the cadence of familiarity, the linked arms—along with the scent of her perfume made him wonder how he had ever forgotten her, made him long for a closeness that had systematically evaded him in five years with Agnetha. It was at the stairs that he realized Elodie was not leading him to the partners’ offices, but to the conference room, where she sat him down on a chair. Brendan followed, perhaps too bemused to say anything, and joined him at the big conference table.
He heard scurrying along the bleached pine floors, the sound of activity in cubicles, Elodie no doubt alerting the in-house staff that the founding partner had turned up without warning, briefing them on how and where she had quarantined him. People arrived at the doorway, shadows that merged in the mid-morning glare, paying respects and then drifting away. Perfunctory, curious. If he had intended his arrival to be Napoleonic, his welcome told him this was Elba.
Fifteen years before, F/S+H had bought and gutted a four-story apartment block on avenue de l’Esplanade, just past ru
e Bernard, rented the bottom floor, and kept the top three for their grand reinvention. He and Catherine understood the move was a risk, not because it was pricey—back then Mile End real estate prices reflected the fact that the neighborhood was not yet a place that people wanted to stay in, much less seek out—but because Montreal was in a free fall, in the midst of a recession, stumbling toward another sovereignty referendum. The question was not whether to build, but whether to stay. Once the first question was answered, the second came painlessly. Together, they oversaw the conversion: Walls were knocked down to make a workspace; a staircase opened up to create an inner atrium.
Business doubled, with the new digs featuring prominently in their revamped image, becoming their best advertisement. Jean-Sebastien, then the newest partner, the visionary fresh from a year in Rotterdam, was given free rein to design a rooftop extension, and came up with a plan for a boardroom with a south and east wall of tempered glass to capture a view of the domain they had begun to conquer and what lay before them.
Jean-Sebastien produced a gleaming chamber (stunning, even he and Catherine had to admit). But because the adjoined panels of glass acted like a prism, catching and magnifying the sunlight during a critical period in the path of the sun, it produced a moving microclimate, a well-circumscribed “path” of extraordinary heat in the room for fifteen minutes every morning from April to June. The heat would be upon its victim without warning, making that person feel like an ant twitching under the focused rays of the sun. Two feet away, another person would be fine, left to wonder why their neighbor was suddenly sweating and in such distress. Catherine was the first to recognize the phenomenon and refused to attend morning meetings in the boardroom during those months, citing partner privilege. Martin declined to sign off on changes in ventilation that might have remediated the boardroom “microclimate” situation, just as he vetoed an addition of louvers that would have cut down on the direct sunlight that caused such episodic and reproducible discomfort. This was to be a lesson for Jean-Sebastien, a flaw he was responsible for and one that he would have to continually acknowledge. Hubris, the unaccounted-for variables. Maybe he should have learned that in Rotterdam. Martin himself had forgotten all this, the confluence of place and time in this particular room, but the sun’s rays reminded him. He put the cuff of his sleeve to his forehead.
