The Measure of Darkness

  First published in the United States in 2016 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2016 by Liam Durcan

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  135798642

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-05-4

  For Thomas Durcan

  Contents

  Part I

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part III

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  Part I

  I would like to see more clearly, but it seems to me that no one sees more clearly

  —Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Prologue

  It started with Martin recalling the surprise he’d felt when he first saw the house. He had expected to glimpse it from the end of the street, to have the luxury to appreciate it from a distance as he approached. But he hadn’t seen it coming. He just looked up and there they were, the professor and Martin, his assistant, in front of Konstantin Melnikov's house on Krivoarbatsky Lane. After the bustle of the early-morning markets at the Arbat, in the center of old Moscow, the atmosphere of Krivoarbatsky Lane was more suitably subdued, dour in a predictable, Soviet way that had obviously lulled him.

  Melnikov House was like nothing else on the street. Like nothing else he’d ever seen. It was two interlocking cylinders—truncated towers, really—with rows of small hexagonal windows honeycombing across its white facade. Professor Lanctot put down the duffel bag that held the camera equipment, and together they stood, staring at the building. It was warm. Martin had been warned that Moscow’s spring weather was as unpredictable as Montreal’s; wet snow was not uncommon this late in April, the tail end of a winter snapping one last time on the city. It was a threat seemingly acknowledged on the face of every Muscovite they’d met in the last week. A grim refusal to be caught out in one’s hope. He looked over, to find Professor Lanctot attaching a lens to his camera, working quickly and silently, as though he were preparing to photograph an animal about to flee. Lanctot glanced at the light meter held in his outstretched hand.

  “Tripod?” Martin said to Lanctot, doing his best to sound collaborative, having to settle for helpful.

  Lanctot did not divert his gaze. “Non. Merci.”

  They were supposed to have met an interpreter at the hotel, but they’d chosen instead to leave early in order to get out and see the Arbat without an official chaperone. Lanctot had left a message at the desk of the hotel, asking whoever was sent by the embassy to meet them at the house. All this struck Martin as unnecessarily risky, but he had discovered that Lanctot was a different man since their arrival in Moscow, transformed from one of the fussier academics in the School of Architecture to a scholarly James Bond, newly unflappable and surprisingly resourceful, a man given to suddenly revising plans, which, in turn, caused the cultural attachés at the embassy to throw up their hands. All it took to liberate him was a repressive regime. And a house here on Krivoarbatsky Lane.

  The problem with Lanctot’s change in plan, of course, was that it meant no one was there to meet them; and without the bureaucratic approval—or the translation skills—of a government official, traipsing up the front walk and banging on the door was plainly out of the question. So they waited. After ten minutes, Lanctot collected his gear and gestured to Martin to follow to the other side of the building.

  “You have to see it from the north. You’ll see. Very impressive.”

  They walked together, wading through a yard overrun by a knee-high crop of nettles. He remembered the thrill of being there with Lanctot, even if he was little more than sidekick to a rogue scholar. He was twenty-two and traveling in Moscow, walking into the backyard of a house he’d already come to know, treading around the seminal work of an architect who had become mythic to him. They had spent the last ten days exploring the city, visiting and photographing Melnikov’s other Moscow works, the Rusakov Club in the Sokolniki District and what remained of the Leyland bus garage, but, perhaps out of a newfound sense of showmanship, Lanctot had decided to save the house for last. Or maybe it was that he wanted to walk through the Arbat along the way, to study the setting for Melnikov’s grand reorganization of the marketplace, which, like so many of the architect’s other plans, never came to fruition. Perhaps that was the lesson that needed to be learned before seeing the house.

  Whatever Lanctot’s motives, the anticipation of seeing the structure was heightened by the promise of an audience with the great architect in his house. Konstantin Melnikov himself. This alone was worth the travel and the visas and the embassy’s having to vet their plans. Martin imagined tea with the architect and his wife in the caverns of the house, along with a vague expression of kinship and some sort of tearful recognition of how far they’d traveled. It embarrassed him now, but yes, he’d expected a measure of gratitude from Melnikov, along with the tea.

  They maneuvered around to the back of the property, nestled more tightly between the neighboring houses than he would have expected. He tried to look at the house, the northern elevation, which Lanctot had found so worthy of special attention.

  But something was wrong: He could not find the house. It seemed to be there and yet it had vanished. And then he looked at Lanctot, and Lanctot had no face. It was like studying the details of a dream. (He knew it was Lanctot simply because it could not have been anyone else, faceless there beside him, scrambling through the nettles).

  Now he could summon only a remembered fragment from inside the Melnikov house, a curious sensation, not related to space or light at all—just the taste of tea, black tea without sugar, served to Lanctot and him as they sat in the main room for a wordless audience with the great man, who had eventually shepherded them in from his front yard, an act less of Russian hospitality than Soviet pragmatism, escorting them into his house and away from whatever surveillance they might have attracted. He remembered the tea. The formal pressure of a china cup’s rim against his lower lip. He remembered the house as beautiful, but this, he thought, must have been a memory, or an assumption, because he could not see it, could not recall the house in its entirety. Melnikov House had not va
nished as much as dissolved in the difficulties of looking at it. Glare. Lens flare. Overexposure.

  And now, more than thirty years after the visit, Martin found himself awakening in a different room—in a different world, really—both with their own relentlessly rectangular windows. He heard another patient across the hall cough. These were morning sounds. It must be morning. He tried to move, but his body objected in that now familiar twisting, visceral way. But none of that mattered. Until this moment, Martin had been unsure whether he could summon any detail of the house. Now he was certain that, in some vital way, it still existed in him. He was certain it would return in full.

  Professor Lanctot had died ten years earlier, Melnikov had been dead more than thirty. But this amended memory lived. The memory announced itself to him there in the hospital bed. And thinking about all of this now, he felt he understood for the first time a pilgrim’s view of the world. Imperceptible truth. Beauty that escaped his ability to describe it. Faith.

  Chapter 1

  Concentrate on the linear. The linear is all you have.

  Dr. Feingold had said it weeks ago. It was after a session—their last session, as it turned out—when she came to visit him, sneaking up on him in that way he suspected was at least partially deliberate. She sat down in a chair in the corner of the room. Martin listened to the deliberateness of a body’s weight being placed into one of those institutional chairs. The grudging rebuttal of the chair. He remembered searching for her, his focus rummaging through the shadows and joists of sunlight, until suddenly she was there.

  “It’s dark in here,” he said, trying to position himself so that she would sit still in his field of vision.

  “The lighting is fine, Martin.”

  They spoke for a while, like they always did, in a way that managed to flatter and perplex him at the same time. She was intelligent. And attractive, he thought, although this impression came from nothing more than her voice, the therapeutic deliberateness in pronunciation, the change in pitch at the end of a sentence, which he suspected was professionally calculated, an allowance for him to say more than he initially wanted. Her voice reining him in and then giving him room.

  His vision clutched at a sliver of reflected light that marked a looped earring. From there, he found an earlobe, then the tight ringlets of her hair. A long march toward Dr. Meredith Feingold began, the angle of her jaw that fed the chin and from there the French curve of her lower lip, followed from its fullness to where it tapered into a point. Trying to understand her eyes was a different matter; he was forever chasing something in the eyes that confused him, that made him arrive back at a starting point. Instead, he’d found himself focused on detached physical facts. The sound of her breathing. Blink rate. Vital signs. But it went beyond this; he was most drawn to the little wall of flesh that made up the arch of her nostril. While it was a nondescript region of only a couple of square centimeters, he’d recently been given to thinking about it quite incessantly, wondering whether this territory of Feingold had ever been pierced with a small metal stud when she was in university or kissed or even considered in passing by those who held her dear, if this beautiful structure had ever been subjected to the type of scrutiny that he’d given it—he viewed this as a sign that heralded recovery, because for the first time he could imagine Feingold in the past, as having a past, or as a person outside of her professional duties. A trail of her, the wake of a personality. These imaginings seemed to explain her better than her features, which, despite his obsessively cataloging them every time he saw her, could not be combined into anything resembling a recognizable face.

  He looked forward to seeing her every day after physio- and occupational therapy. But other than his fractures, which were healing and were none of her concern anyway, he felt fine and couldn’t understand why she was so interested in his case. During their first visits, he was under the impression that she had been sent to help him deal with the aftermath of the accident, but he soon discovered, to his relief, that Dr. Feingold had no interest in talking about the psychic injuries the crash had inflicted. As for his memories of the accident itself, he had been wiped clean. No flashbacks or second-guessing in the moments leading up to the accident, just an amnestic void that stretched weeks before the impact. And while he was frustrated at having a gap in his life, at having no answer for the events leading up to the accident, he had recently understood that having no recollection meant being spared, both living through and reliving, the experience of the trauma. If he could not recall, it was not beyond him to at least imagine the terror of that moment of oncoming headlights, the panic that would come with swift imminence, the helplessness. On the occasion of their last meeting, in his room on the third floor of the Dunes Rehabilitation Center, on the outskirts of Burlington, Vermont, the conversation turned, as it always seemed to do, to his work. Feingold, famously—at the Dunes anyway—was from “New York,” and she was professionally vague about the reasons for her recent New England exile, leaving him to infer that it was part of some sort of exercise in relationship building (a partner trying to scrape out tenure in the classics department at the local university, he surmised). It had to be that; a move to a backwater rehab palace like the Dunes to further one’s own career would have been nothing more than poor judgment. It took no time to discover—even for someone staggering out of the debris field of his own brain injury—that, as a result of the move, Feingold was insatiably nostalgic for New York. She was forever wanting to know more about the buildings she had grown up with and had so loved, so he indulged her, and for hour after hour, in what was likely billed as psychotherapy, they talked about architecture. She would start with a building, asking him to tell her about it. Typical stuff, tourist stuff: the Chrysler, the Seagram, the Flatiron—the first thing he did there was correct her: The Flatiron was properly called the Fuller Building, he said, after the company that first built it and once resided there, and went on to describe his favorite characteristics of architect Daniel Burnham’s work, that sheer wall of limestone he had placed at the base of the Fuller. As he spoke to Feingold, Martin remembered taking his daughter Susan to see the wall, to touch it, on a trip to New York the summer before her last year of high school. She had been talking about her future—industrial-design studies or architecture—and he had wanted to take her to New York, he could admit now, to sway her decision. He felt that she needed to see the buildings, Burnham’s wall, up close. But it was also the summer after he and Sharon had separated, and the trip was mired in a wordless fog of recriminations that no amount of facade touching could hope to dispel. He doubted Susan would remember the trip or the building now, much less appreciate his motives.

  He could feel the texture of the stone as he talked about the Fuller Building, the simplified lines rising from the fussy French Renaissance details of the building’s base. Those beautiful planes of limestone, he told Feingold, were pure Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect who built it, a man whose work was felt to have lost its special flourishes after the death of his partner, John Wellborn Root. He told her he thought Burnham was better for the loss.

  But on this last occasion, their conversation was different. He turned to Dr. Feingold when he heard himself talking, speaking digressively but saying nothing insightful, like a tour guide who could see the details of his day’s journey with his eyes closed. This thought made Martin stop, as though being patronized was something novel, an act that demanded to be appreciated in silence.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “I’m tired. The light is bad.”

  “Tell me what you think is wrong with you.”

  “Boredom. Fluorescent lighting. I want to go.” He watched her. She had been blinking every three to four seconds, gestures flaring a little more freely, the background noise of human movement turned up. Engaged Feingold. Maybe just caffeinated Feingold. And then he sensed her stiffening. “If you ask me, my visual memory is impaired. I can’t hold things in my memory.”

  She asked him to imagi
ne walking north up Fifth Avenue, which he immediately recognized was an excuse to get him to describe the Guggenheim. She asked what he could see, what he remembered, and he accepted the dare, giving her a nice little impromptu lecture about late-period Wright, even surprising himself with how well he could describe the building itself.

  Then she asked him to visualize walking up past the museum, say to Ninetieth Street, and to turn and view Fifth Avenue looking toward the south. She asked him to tell her what he could see. It was as if he were in a different city, that he’d somehow gotten lost in the foliage of Central Park, trapped in a crowd of tourists on the steps of the Met. Where was the Guggenheim? she asked, and he told her he was lost, and lied, saying that he hadn’t been to New York recently, that he was working from memory. “The Guggenheim is there,” she said, “but you’re not looking for it,” which was preposterous to him. “This is what we’ve been talking about; this is neglect,” she said, trying to explain that he might never be the same.

  Neglect. That curious word. A word she used to describe what the accident had done to him, taken from him. When he argued that he felt well, that he could feel himself becoming stronger, that perhaps the Dunes was a therapeutic place after all, she corrected him. She went over again how his right hemisphere had been contused in the accident and because of this he was not aware of his deficits; the key part of the deficit was not to be aware of its extent.

  Feingold said that when he was looking south down Fifth Avenue, the Guggenheim was not just trapped in darkness; it had ceased to exist. He would never look for it, so he would never find it. He argued that it was his visual memory that was impaired, but Feingold said it wasn’t just the Guggenheim: Every morning he ate only what was on the right side of his plate, and did he notice that Szandor, the orderly, had to complete his shave every morning by removing a day's worth of stubble from the untouched left cheek?