by Liam Durcan
“This is it,” Brendan said, and Martin heard the wheeze of chain link being tugged repeatedly. “Step through.”
Martin complied and stepped into the yard, and that was when he caught sight of the structure. Invisible a moment before, it was now mountainous before him. For a second he thought he could discern the Beaux-Arts details, the facade that had long ago begun to fissure and crack and whose features were now in open revolt. But this was a flash of recognition, and as he stared at the building, he was surprised to see how amorphous it became, as though the details seen a moment before were nothing more than a memory, and that the memory was more real than the building he was looking at.
“I remember it now,” he said to his brother.
They walked around the perimeter of the lot, along the inside of the fence, until Brendan noticed movement close to a corner of the building. He saw a hand raised in the air, motioning him closer.
“Are you Brendan?” a tiny woman said as she waved him over. Even as they approached, she continued to scan the area around her. “Come on,” she said.” There are CP police everywhere.” She spoke with an accent that Brendan thought sounded Eastern European and that made talk of rushed entry and police evasion—whoever the “CP police” were—sound all the more convincing. They squeezed through an opening in a door that looked like an ax had created it and then stepped into darkness so deep, it made Brendan reconsider the wisdom of coming to a place like this. She snapped on a flashlight and they followed the bouncing circle of light, ducking under spiderwebs toward other doorways, registering glimpses of ruin and deep silence around them, reminding Brendan of undersea camera footage from the Titanic.
The tiny woman, whose arms were comprised of small ropes of muscle, marched ahead of him through the darkness and they arrived at a larger and better-lit antechamber, where Norah stood, shouldering her camera. Her attention was directed to filming two other people who were adjusting what looked to Brendan like climbing equipment gathered at their feet, coiled nylon rope and metal loops and clamps. Brendan approached, with Martin behind him; the climbers looked up, but Norah was still too concentrated on filming to notice. When Brendan put his hand on her shoulder, she jumped.
“I thought you were the police,” she said, hugging her uncle. Martin stood in new shadows cast by Norah’s light, watching the two embrace.
“I brought Martin,” Brendan said. Norah turned to face him.
“Didn’t think you’d come.”
“I wanted to see this,” Martin said. “I wanted to see what you do.”
Norah introduced the two of them to the people in climbing gear. The young woman with the build of a gymnast was introduced as Luisa, and as she shook Brendan’s hand, he could imagine her scaling the wall without aid. Next came her bearded friend Carl, who looked like he needed the rope. Another hand jutted out at Brendan, ready to be shaken.
“This is Stefan,” Norah said, and Brendan’s hand was locked in a chalky grip he immediately recognized had potential crushing force. This was defused, partially, by Stefan’s smile. Martin came next, quietly nodding a hello to the group.
“Are you feeling better?” Luisa asked Martin, putting a hand on his shoulder. Martin stepped back from the question and the gesture, and simply replied “No.”
Sensing the awkwardness, Norah turned to Brendan and asked, “Was Grandma wearing the sweater I brought her?”
“It was you,” Martin murmured as Brendan described her resplendent in her cardigan.
“Who wears a sweater in July?” asked Carl.
The sense of light and air and sound. Sensations that were the substance or precursor to a memory of space. All registered in some type of memory that must not have adhered to the rules that govern other memories, as these were memories that denied immediate recollection but were instead incidentally evoked in that same way that a sense of the Michigan Central Station became apparent at that moment for Martin. He wondered how much of what he was feeling was due to this place and how much was borrowed from impressions of Union Station in Toronto and Grand Central, surrogate details stripped away and reconstructed, called into service for the human tendency to span the gaps of what was missing. Model making. An architecture inside his head. Martin’s gaze drifted to the ceiling and then climbed down along the brickwork until it rested on the group of people in front of him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We were looking to get up on the roof,” Stefan replied, “just above the waiting area.” He pointed to a breach where the wall and ceiling would have met. The plaster had fallen away, along with the bricks underneath, and a small rhombus of sky was visible between the beams of supporting metalwork.
“You’re okay to climb it?” Luisa asked, examining the wall as though she were plotting her footholds. She frowned.
“It’s doable, very doable,” said Stefan.
Brendan asked, “What if the police come when you’re in midair?”
“Then they get their ropes and come up and get me,” Stefan said, and smiled in a way that told Brendan he’d made this kind of calculation before.
The main waiting room was an enormous space, and it seemed larger to Brendan for the wreckage it contained. Garbage lay clustered in mysterious rows that ran the length of the hall. Graffiti scrawls and what appeared to be halfhearted attempts at arson marked the walls. A pigeon flew in a tight circular pattern in the vaulted space above them. Doors had been smashed or lifted out of their hinges, radiator covers had been removed, and moldings had been hacked away, all examples to Brendan of vandal erosion, the minimalism that anarchy demanded.
He could remember standing with his parents in the tumult of a crowd, amid the sound of footsteps echoing in the plaza. He recalled sunlight passing into the building. The hall was a testament to debauched beauty, and Brendan could not decide if the knowledge of what it had once been made him feel better or worse.
Luisa backed away and looked at the wall again. She shook her head. “I’m going to try to find my way up a back stairwell. Any takers?”
“I’ll go with you,” said Brendan.
He followed Luisa out of the waiting room and back into the darkness of a warren of rooms that he worried might offer no way out. But Luisa negotiated her way through the clutter and darkness with an ease that relieved his anxiety.
“Have you been here before?”
“A few times,” she replied without looking back. She pushed open a door, revealing a stairwell. She turned and looked at him with a smile that would be described as impish, even in Prague or Sofia.
“Is this your hobby?”
She shook her head. “I was an architect,” she said. “Before. And I want to see these buildings before they’re gone. But it’s good to hang out with people like these; they help you get into a lot of places you wouldn’t otherwise go.”
The stairwell reeked, its walls coated with thick layers of carbonized grime. He was worried that they would stumble upon a body. Luisa was undaunted and climbed, two steps at a time. By the end of the second flight, he was beginning to feel a little winded and needed to stop, choosing to rest with his hand on the stanchion, trying to affect a look of wariness at continuing, should she turn around and see him not climbing. He watched her, and for a moment he thought that she reminded him of Rita. Her hair was similarly short and she did have a certain energy to her step that was familiar. But as he studied her continuing up the stairs, he began to enumerate the ways in which she did not look like Rita. It struck him as an odd ritual need, this declaration and its immediate rebuttal, the reassurances of loneliness.
“You should have told him you were an architect.”
“You think so?” she replied, herself a touch breathless now. They had come to the end of the stairwell, and she reared and drew back her foot.
“Maybe not,” Brendan said as she kicked open the door to daylight. They stepped out of the stairwell and onto the roof. He stayed close to the stairwell doorway while Luisa began to exp
lore the rooftop on her own, stepping gingerly and stopping just short of a hole that he expected led down to the waiting room. He watched as she surveyed the rooftop, taking out a camera and snapping a few pictures of the gaping hole she stood next to. She looked up, saw him watching her, and seemed embarrassed.
“It is a very big hole, worthy of several pictures,” she explained.
He’d expected the sight of Detroit from this height to disappoint him, to be as foul and ugly as anything from street level. But as he stepped farther out onto the rooftop, he felt nothing of what he’d expected. He looked at Detroit for the first time in years without needing to have an emotion. He felt free of the bonds of nostalgia and despair. He held his right hand up to shield his eyes from the sunshine. In this light, it looked quite beautiful.
Brendan and Luisa disappeared just as Stefan began to climb what remained of a pillar in the corner of the waiting room. Martin could not imagine anyone being able to scale such a surface, but Stefan advanced upward, buglike and methodical, with Norah filming his every move. Martin moved up until he was beside his daughter, whose attention was still focused on the young man inching up the wall. He wanted to say something to her, not particularly to apologize or explain himself as much as be near her and have a moment where talk and apologies could occur. They could talk. They could understand each other. He heard a sound like the clearing of her throat and he turned to it, but she was rapt, neck extended and her gaze directed upward. He wanted to reach out and touch her but did not. He wished that she would turn around, that she would put the camera down. They could talk, he thought, without any of the intrusions that always seemed to come between them. He would apologize then. But she was facing in the other direction, and already farther away from him. It made him want to leave.
Above them, Stefan continued to advance, and it wasn’t long before he had disappeared altogether. A short silence was broken by the thwack of a rope dropping to the ground from above.
Carl, whom Martin had forgotten about, called out from the darkness, “Would you like to see it up close?”
“Me? I can’t climb up there.”
“We can hoist you up. We have a harness.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Norah said.
“No, I want to,” Martin replied, and despite Norah’s protests, he stepped into the harness, which cinched around his waste and between his legs. After a briefing from Carl, Martin readied himself.
The pull of the ropes brought back memories of the Dunes, the poolside physio, and Hoyer lifts and the sense of his body as weight that needed constant lifting. Stefan shouted down instructions, telling him to try to maintain his balance with his feet facing the wall as he was being pulled up, but he began to spin slowly, and as his weight made him swing back and forth, he ended up brushing up against the wall with his side and then his back.
“Steady yourself,” Stefan called out from above.
Martin uttered a silent Yes to himself and raised his right arm to brace against the next impact.
He saw the physical evidence of decay, the plaster rotted and gone and the herringbone arrangement of the underlying brickwork. Architecture is a sustained argument with gravity, and gravity will always win. He held out his hand and touched the brick, which was cold with moisture. He looked down and estimated he was a good twenty feet in the air, spinning away from the wall, the volume of the room enlarging below him. He remembered how vast and beautiful a space it had been. Now he was faced with the wall again, a little wrecking ball of a man swinging toward a particularly fragile-looking section of it. A grunt as he made impact.
“Are you okay?” asked Stefan.
“I’m fine.”
In the air, rising with every tug of the rope below him, he began to think of Melnikov’s house, the space in the main rooms, the salon and the study, and how he had come to meet the great architect and found a little man who had been hiding there for forty years. He remembered leaving the house with that vague sense that a twenty-two year-old has of being let down for reasons he can’t quite yet understand. It takes a life to understand that what he felt was not merely disappointment but also a nascent despair, the desire to cry for the knowledge that what he’d thought was integrity was nothing more than being permitted to build one’s own cage, one’s own crypt, and be oblivious to the fact that you had done so. You are a fool, he thought, remembering Melnikov and finishing the tea that Anna had brewed and wanting to run from the place. He reached out again to touch the frayed plaster, but he misjudged the distance and tipped in the direction of the wall. He heard a gasp below that he thought sounded like Norah, but then he righted himself and felt another pull as he was drawn closer to the ceiling. You are a fool. When he had returned to Montreal after the visit to Moscow and described his experiences to Sharon, he did not mention the visit, and when she asked, he denied that it had ever occurred. Denied he had ever met Melnikov. Some bureaucrat had interfered, he had told her, because this could have been true, because this preserved some meaning that he had carried forward and come to believe as the truth. Lanctot had never written about the visit, nor had they discussed it—whether that was due to disappointment on Lanctot’s part or merely pure bafflement was never clear. Melnikov cowering in his palace had been their secret to share and they hadn’t broken confidence.
He was floating now. From this height and angle, he would have thought that he’d have a unique view of the waiting room, but the space would not come to him and he assumed it must be the darkness or dust or just his fatigue. With his right hand, he reached out, this time past the limits of vision, into the darkness to the left of him, digging through the shadows until he felt the sudden rebuke of pain as his fingers jammed against the masonry wall. He twisted away and wanted to be let down, but he was being hoisted farther up into the vault of the waiting room, into the darkness that now seemed so obvious and deep and irrevocable.
The palm of his right hand skidded along the waiting room wall as he tried to balance himself in midair. The pain from contact with the wall made Martin remember opening that desk drawer and finding what he’d written about Melnikov. Not an article or even a valedictory, but a suicide note. He remembered reading the last page and then staring at the model that sat on the desk, and almost before he was able to register his action, his right fist had caved in the ceiling of the Melnikov pavilion. He sat before it, his wrist protruding from of the model like the tail of some decimating comet. After the initial blow, it was a matter of seconds before the rest was splinters and pieces. At the time, it struck Martin as odd that something he believed he treasured could in an instant be erased without a sense of loss or regret. I created this. I can destroy this.
Martin had been pulled up to where Stefan waited at the breach of the ceiling. An extended arm swung toward him, which Martin found and grabbed onto, and in one movement he was pulled to the outside, squinting in the daylight, kneeling on the roof above the waiting room. Martin, trailing the climbing ropes from the harness he wore, struggled to his feet and tried to orient himself on the plateau of the roof. This part of the station was only three or four stories high, but a person could still see the towers of the city from here. Chain link and the scrubland green of Roosevelt Park lay below him. He tried to look at the city, remembering that the city should have been here, clustering around the station, bustling, but instead of sprawling toward Corktown, the city had expanded toward the northeast and the station was effectively abandoned long before the last train left. He put his hands in front of his face and then looked out to the city. He could see now; he saw everything, including a sector of sky darkened by what he now knew was his blindness, the sun in eclipse, the city in darkness.
“This place is hard to get to,” he heard Stefan say, and tried to find the younger man but could not. Martin turned and moved toward the point where Roosevelt Park emerged in his vision, kept from him by a threshold that he recognized was the building’s edge. Behind him, eighteen floors of what had once been
someone’s beautiful intention continued to rot in the summer sunshine, and he did not feel this was a shame or an unfair judgment or anything other than a place that people chose not to return to. This was what things came to. He looked at the tower and he was aware that the left side of it was freshly gone, already demolished for him. He turned back to the edge and wondered if this was despair, just that understanding of emptiness, the kind of silence one experiences inside a car on the side of the highway on winter nights.
He swam in the late-afternoon heat and Melnikov stepped out of this curtained darkness as though this rooftop were his studio and he had plans he intended to share. But the old man offered nothing more, no warning about what is to come. No words of wisdom about the choices to be made, about what must be left behind.
“You are useless,” Martin muttered.
And with this, Melnikov was gone, leaving Martin staggering through empty space. And it was only with the specter of the architect gone that Martin realized that he had been wrong about his subject and himself; where he himself had faltered, Melnikov had only ever prevailed: built according to his ideals, survived the ruinous envy of his colleagues, outlasted an epic foe. He had refused to leave and accepted his fate with an equanimity that, as a young man, Martin Fallon had mistaken for servility and, as an older man, he’d mistaken for despair. He remembered tea in the salon that day in Moscow, the condescension he’d felt for a man who had remained faithful to every meaningful impulse.
“Useless, useless,” he said again. Stefan turned around at the sound.
It was weakness that brought him to the line that separated the building from the greenery of the park below, a form of weakness that bent his knees and pulled him to the edge, another failure of the argument against gravity that sent him tipping. Beyond the edge of the building he could see more clearly what remained of Roosevelt Park’s green expanse, his world divided into night and day. Standing there, forty feet below, was his daughter—a glimpse only, a flashbulb image that echoed amid the darkness—staring up at him with nothing less than horror, and he wanted to step back, because nothing meant more to him than undoing this. But he could not. Gravity cannot be deceived. Gravity wins, regardless of the onlookers’ horror. He saw his daughter’s face again but could not tell if it will be the remembered face of her as a child or that last look of horror that will haunt him. Norah. His arms extended and the wind was kicked from his lungs and Norah was gone again. And now he was as good as blind, the world turned liquid and streaming by, and he wanted to say he understood, but no words arrived, nothing except a force doubling him over and driving him back up to the ledge and hands like the beaks of birds fighting for a grip of his shirt and the pain of a harness cutting at his hips. Finally, when everything became still, there was the almost unbearable brightness of the midday sun and familiar shadows that moved among the rays of sunlight and the terrible pain of that next, first full breath.
