The Measure of Darkness

by Liam Durcan

  Now Martin was faced with the assertion that the riot was a reaction to excessive police force or that it was the response to poverty. More personal to the Fallons, who had made the move north of Eight Mile Road ten years before, was the allegation that the riot was the inevitable result of the white middle class’s abandonment of downtown Detroit. Martin had understood their move only in the personal terms of how his parents had explained it: a bigger house for two growing boys, a garden for their mother. Nothing more complicated than the modest success of middle-class America.

  Martin understood, perhaps only fully years later, when the decline of Detroit was an accepted fact, the textbook study of decay and urban blight, that his father viewed the destruction of the Highland neighborhood in general and of Fallon Electrical in particular not just as an act of violence perpetrated against him but also as an act of betrayal. A repayment for the hubris that a person could ignore or perhaps even withstand the reality of demographic change. When Martin had remembered the store on Highland Avenue, he liked to imagine that it was an island of decency, black and white people working together, and that his father treated all who came through the door with all the sincerity and goodwill that a Great Society demanded of its citizens. But he lived in Farmington Hills by then, in a room of his own, with a lawn and a bike and no real working knowledge of the lives of those who lived on Twelfth Street or Highland Avenue.

  Fallon Electrical reopened two months later in a commercial district of Farmington Hills, the newly hired staff as uniformly white as the customers, and no one ever spoke of Highland Avenue again. There was never any mention of the riots or the workers left behind when the Highland Avenue store was razed. Everyone he knew tried to carry on and make reassurances. The lawns of Farmington Hills continued to be watered and mown and, as usual, school started just after Labor Day.

  There must have come a point, Martin thought, when he crossed the line from thinking of his family as blameless victims to understanding that they were not. He wondered if it could be narrowed down to a moment, some impression or word spoken that tipped the scales. But there was nothing. No epiphanies. All he could remember was the silence of his house after Brendan left, the impression that it must have occurred here, in the incubator of that silent house, an awareness dawning.

  He tried to imagine an alternate life for himself, one where he would be allowed to continue to think of his father as a hero, or at least a victim of the July riot. It wouldn’t have been so difficult; many people felt this way in the aftermath. This would have been possible even if his father had said something, but there was only silence, big Fallon silence—and Martin could never be sure how much was caused by the loss of the business and what was due to Brendan’s departure. A more charitable son would have perhaps acknowledged the loss his father felt, would have considered its complicated nature. Maybe, Martin thought, that this was all just a result of confluences, that had his brother not gone off to the war at the same time, or if it had occurred in 1962 and not in 1967, the outcome would have been fundamentally different.

  But Brendan was gone and it was 1967 and his parents and Farmington Hills offered nothing but silence, which seemed, to Martin, ridiculous and servile and deeply false. To have gone on living as they did, Martin would have needed his father to admit that something was deeply wrong with the way they lived, that he would have to have had the strength of character to make such an admission. An act of courage more robust that accepting an insurance check and walking away.

  Martin doubted that he could have been talked out of whatever changes he underwent that year—perhaps a constant argument would have only solidified the newfound opposition to everything his family stood for—but the silence was license. For a seventeen-year-old, the silence was freedom enough to allow him to conclude that the way he felt was not simply opposition but also consciousness, an awareness. It was a consciousness that recast the events of the summer of 1967, showing his parents as part of a society that hadn’t suffered the riot as much as created the conditions that made it inevitable and yet somehow conspired to allow them to claim further victimhood. Detroit, his Detroit, the city he had grown up in and been proud of and believed in, had never really existed. Detroit was an ugly armed camp that he had known nothing about, that he hadn’t cared enough to understand. And at this thought, Farmington, his bedroom, the municipal park greenery and barbecues and suburban idyll all seemed at once a huge conceit, as flawed as their old imaginings of a shining city on the river, more flawed for having no aspiration to justice or anything more noble than the fact that it was miles removed from Detroit.

  Martin Fallon radicalized in the summer and fall of 1967, as suburban teenagers do, minute by poolside minute, emerging with absolute certainties about the world whose veils had had been torn away. Nothing about him had changed, he would argue, except that he felt aware, and that changed everything. The riot was a revolution to him, and no amount of green space or reassurance or insurance money or zombie smiles from his parents could hide the fact that he was now aware of poverty and race. He was aware of force, how it was used, and on whose behalf.

  In the autumn of 1967 he came to understand his country as an imperial power, a devouring beast that fed off the constant sacrifice of its hypnotized citizens, in which people like his parents not only condoned, but demanded that their elder son take innocent life and risk his own in a useless foreign war. And they would demand that Martin go next. For Martin to go to war would be to accept this as right, as moral, as somehow truthful.

  He decided he would not go.

  He told no one. Once the decision was made, the next step meant that Martin would have to leave—he would be forced to register for the draft when his eighteenth birthday came around in August—and when he considered the options, the answer sat conveniently on his desk, a souvenir from his summer vacation, calling out to him in the form of a pamphlet that featured a monorail and a huge metallic sphere and the promise of sanctuary. Sunlight and his brother beside him, studying the brown legs of girls in summer dresses. The necessary other place. Conveniently, another country. He picked up the pamphlet. Even now, he could remember the colors and the shape of the Expo logo, Montreal’s silhouette behind, embracing it. He remembered the slogan, the call to leave everything that he had come to revile, to embrace something larger, to start again: Come visit the world!

  Chapter 10

  Three-quarters of the way through the drive, as the intensity of his brother’s fidgeting began to coincide with the swells of his own impatience, Brendan decided to pull the car off the highway, easing onto the long exit ramp that fed one of the roadside restaurant/gas station clusters that divided the journey into intervals.

  Brendan installed Martin at an outside picnic table and went inside for something to drink, pivoting to check on him from a line whose snaking length seemed more fitting for Stones tickets or some vital commodity made scarce by an inept five-year plan than for two cups of coffee.

  When he returned, Martin was gone.

  Brendan scanned the outdoor eating area around the restaurant, deserted save for an employee emptying a garbage can and a young couple ring-mastering their toddlers into position for a meal. The parking lot was an orderly riot of cars and tractor-trailers. No sign of Martin.

  Brendan doubted his brother would have been able to negotiate that pedestrian no-man’s-land without the trumpet of a car horn to greet him. He reasoned Martin must have gone into the restaurant while he’d been occupied at the register, to look for him, to use the toilet maybe, but a search inside—a lap through the dining room, followed by a quick inventory of footwear visible under the stall doors of the washroom—yielded nothing. How fast could Martin walk? He’d lost visual contact for no more than a few minutes, and even in a straight line Martin didn’t seem capable of mustering the necessary land speed for escape. (This is what he’d been reduced to, he thought, calculating search perimeters like some hapless southern warden, lacking only the yodeling scent-hounds and
a photo of the fugitive.)

  It was when he came back out of the restaurant complex, a cup of coffee still in each hand, that Brendan spotted his brother a hundred yards away, visible in the small gully of space between two tractor-trailers, limping toward a busy highway.

  He put the coffees down and ran, slaloming through the parked cars, all the while trying to keep an eye on Martin, cutting down the distance, when suddenly his brother, out in the open a moment before, disappeared from view.

  He shouted Martin’s name and imagined the family at the picnic table turning around, the kids alert to the novelty of a voice raised at someone else, the parents nostalgic for the containable dramas of a purely adult world. At the edge of the parking lot, Brendan came upon a large grassy ditch that separated the highway from the restaurant complex. Martin stood at the very bottom of the ditch, slowed by waste-high grass, uncertain terrain, and maybe even his brother’s voice.

  “Where are we?” Martin asked.

  Brendan was breathless. He staggered down the embankment. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I just needed to walk.”

  “Onto the highway?”

  “Where are we?” Martin repeated, a tone of desperation in his voice this time, as if Brendan were playing with him.

  “Maybe twenty miles from Hatley,” Brendan said.

  “This is Highway Fifty-five, right?”

  “Yeah. I think we hit the one-oh-eight just up ahead.”

  “It was around here.” Brendan looked around, baffled by his brother. “The accident. You told me it was by the one-oh-eight, that it was around here.”

  “Must have been someone else who told you that. I only know that you were heading west on the one-oh-eight.”

  “Okay,” Martin said, turning in the ditch reeds. He peeked over the crest of the ditch, as if trying to scout out a predator on the distant savanna. “I was headed west, toward Montreal?”

  “Well, not headed west. Pointed west.”

  “Pointed west?”

  “You weren’t headed anywhere. You were parked on the shoulder.”

  Martin turned in Brendan’s general direction. “That makes no sense.”

  “It was a surprise to the guy driving the snowplow, too.”

  “Was he hurt?” Martin asked in a voice that surprised Brendan with its tone of general alarm. Brendan studied the expression on his brother’s face—wide-eyed and unfocused, suggestive of something being played out behind them.

  “He was okay; I’m pretty sure of it. Let’s get out of this ditch.”

  They both sidestepped up the embankment, Brendan behind his brother, an arm extended and a hand opened in preparation for a possible fall.

  “I was coming from the cabin, then.”

  “Probably. Who knows . . .”

  “Did you speak with the police?”

  “I did.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They told me they see it all the time. Some fall asleep; some have had a couple of beers.”

  “But they’re in the ditch. I was pulled over on the shoulder. Why was I stopped?”

  “Look, Martin, I don’t know.”

  “This was February, right?” Brendan nodded. “I almost never go to the cabin in the winter. Did I have car trouble?”

  “The police told me that there were no calls from your cell that night. Maybe you were just tired.”

  “Bullshit. I was a half hour from the lake house. I wouldn’t have stopped. I wouldn’t have stopped on the shoulder.”

  Martin said this as they crested the gully. He stopped and turned, assessing the ditch again, appearing to Brendan as though he were disappointed not to find his car keys in the long grass. “I wouldn’t have stopped. Not here.” Martin’s voice rose, seeming to Brendan to have the same tonal quality, the same visceral timbre, of an animal in distress. It was a sound that touched him, almost more than the fact that it came from his brother. The sound demanded action, or at least an accounting for why that action was not taken. “Someone did this to me.”

  “Stop it, Martin.” Brendan said with enough force that he immediately looked around them and saw that the children of the family at the picnic table were watching the drama, faces frozen, while their parents’ heads snapped back to the lunch on the table before them. “The police told me that the snowplow driver came over a crest. He didn’t see you. He had no warning.”

  “No, not him. I was going someplace at a time I wouldn’t usually be going, I was stopped in a place I would never have stopped. Isn’t that suspicious to you?”

  Brendan listened to his brother, an arm on his shoulder, wordlessly trying to guide him back, coaxing him away from the unrelenting stream of highway traffic and noise. A career as a veterinarian had convinced him of the transformative power of information, just as it had endowed him with what he believed to be a reliable sense of how and when to dispense it. Some people needed to know the truth about the lump in their dog’s neck, and other clients would tell him in innumerable, subtle ways that they couldn’t bear to have that discussion. Not yet. And here, on the side of a highway with Martin, stumbling with his brother through a wasteland of memory and loss and Russian architects, Brendan again weighed the options of telling Martin more. On the day he arrived at the trauma center in Montreal, Brendan had met with a police officer who told him that a roll of duct tape and a garden hose had been found in the trunk of Martin's crumpled BMW, both items still in their cellophane and further sealed in their place by the force of the snowplow’s impact with the vehicle. The officer, a young woman who dropped down into a seat beside Brendan in the ICU's waiting room, reported all these details in matter-of-fact copspeak, as though rehearsing the sequence of details and precise wording of the unabridged report that could have been written, all without advancing any conclusion of her own. Facts. Just the ellipses of circumstances and duct tape and a man alone in his car on the side of a country road on a February night. The officer then left the waiting room, probably assuming whatever family members she spoke to would either have enough insight to infer their loved one’s intention or that they wouldn’t care. Brendan fell into neither category, and so the implications of what was found in the car staggered him: On that highway shoulder back in February, his brother had considered ending his life and had either decided against using the duct tape and hose or had been interrupted before he could put them to use. Had he been in the midst of ending his life or refusing to do so? For Brendan, understanding what had actually happened to his brother was reduced to a dilemma—binary, existential and unknowable now that the only person who truly knew had had his intention scraped clean by the blade of a snowplow.

  And so, in the weeks and months of recovery that followed, Brendan had observed his brother for any sign of that original intention. The awareness of what he had wanted. It will come to him, Brendan thought; it needs to come from him. But no memories emerged. No signs appeared. Martin only stumbled and raged, offering no easy answers, half-blind to the world, fully blind to his predicament.

  Brendan felt he should say something.

  If he said something, it might at least ease Martin’s paranoia or calm the ruminations. But it could also make everything worse—trading confusion for the possibility of despair wasn’t much of a therapeutic victory—and such a roadside revelation to a brain-injured family member was perhaps not the best plan as they all headed out into the deep woods of wherever they were going.

  “Is anything at all coming back from that night?”

  “Not really.”

  They reached the parking lot of tractor-trailers; each vehicle parked a fixed distance from the others. It was quiet, almost contemplative, Brendan thought. A Stonehenge on Highway 55. He looked over, to see his brother studying the asphalt he had to limp across, panting.

  “You okay?”

  “Someone tried to kill me.” He turned to Brendan. “Maybe someone tampered with my car.”

  “For Christ’s sake, listen to yourself talk,
Martin. Besides, you didn’t make any calls. Which you would have done if you had broken down, right?”

  Martin staggered on, not replying, and Brendan could feel a thesis being cobbled together, a web of plots twists from bad television and the rants of sidewalk crazy people. “It was an accident,” Brendan said, curtly enough to slap away any other such thoughts.

  “I wouldn’t have stopped on the side of the road.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “It’s not like me to do that.”

  “Look, you did it,” Brendan said, instantly aware of his scolding tone. Parental. He adjusted his voice: “Let’s say you stopped. No phone calls out. Nothing. You just stop. Why does anybody stop?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People stop at the side of the road because they’re tired, or maybe they’re sick and they need a moment,” Brendan said as they passed by the coffee shop and its epic, unresolved line. “Lots of reasons to stop a car. Maybe you were just fed up, Martin.”

  Martin stopped, his limping gait seeming to seize up in mid-stride. “Fed up? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Depressed about things.”

  “Like all this was all my plan, getting hit by a snowplow?”

  Brendan raised his hands. “Devil’s advocate. You lose your job and give up your partnership, all on the same day that you relinquish control of a project that you had invested yourself in. . . .”

  “This wasn’t the first project I’ve lost. That’s just business. You can’t put your head in an oven just because a job didn’t turn out. And you saw the terms of the buyout, Brendan. I came out on top. I rid myself of partners who obviously wouldn’t back me up. There wasn’t even a noncompete clause in the deal.” Brendan studied his brother as he said this, and for the first time he could imagine Martin in charge of something like building a consulate. It was confidence or charisma, like the sun asserting itself against a cloud bank. “I wasn’t depressed, Brendan. I was free.”