The Measure of Darkness Read online

  Martin looked up and his head gave a mackerel jerk as a huge sign-size swath of highway green swooped past his right ear. The seat belt pulled tight across his chest and the world continued to twist and spin with an unsettling carnival quality. He pressed his eyes shut firmly against the light and tried to sleep, waking occasionally to reassure himself with the details of the inside of the car’s passenger-side door. Music filled the car with the cultured jujitsu kicks of some anonymous philharmonic. It was a clearer version of the same sort of music that was forever playing in the Dunes, hosing down the place from morning to night, so pervasive and constant that he assumed the music must be some well-intentioned institutional policy; good for their brains, just like they recommended for babies, more likely to wire properly if exposed to industrial doses of Mozart. The music became inextricable from other aspects of the Dunes, from the labyrinth of corridors and verandas, specifications that he couldn’t understand, dimensions like thirst. To Vivaldi, the clients would be brought out to sit in the sun with their blankets and feeding tubes and special chairs and watch the hills turn that lurid, almost fluorescent green when the trees budded in mid-April. Veranda time was 1:00 to 2:00 P.M., every day, during which he was treated to the spectacle of landscape in that corner of the Green Mountains and the inescapable companion music of the Baroque era. The scenery would carpet-fold and buckle in front of him, a frozen sea. He said nothing to Brendan, but it bothered him. Maybe it was the music.

  Martin awoke some time later, alarmed, not knowing where he was, thinking he was somehow alone. Martin felt an arm reach across his chest and assumed it was Szandor, that he was waking up in his room in the Dunes.

  “You okay?”

  The sound shocked Martin. Not Szandor’s voice at all. He reached up with his own right hand and felt the forearm, followed it toward its elbow, where it was pressed against his own.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m driving you home. We’ll be there soon”

  Martin’s right hand settled into his jacket pocket, finding the digital recorder that Feingold had given to him. A parting gift. Maybe she’d known he would bolt. Of course she’d known. His thumb massaged the edge of the little machine, running over the controlling buttons like it would the backbone of a small animal. Concentrate on the linear.

  “Testing, testing . . .”

  “If my driving is what’s making you think of dictating your will, I can slow down a bit.”

  “It’s just a little exercise. Feingold’s idea.”

  “Like one of those recovery journals?”

  “Well, I suppose that was the point,” Martin said. Recovery journal. Christ, a phrase that practically carried its own air quotes along with all the other carefully balanced baggage carts of self-congratulation and self-pity. It didn’t help that Martin toggled a button on the recorder and was reminded of that small abyss between his recorded voice and how he imagined his voice sounded. His next thought was of opening the window and flinging the little machine and what was left of his voice into a convenient roadside ditch. What stopped him was the deep and undeniable yearning to say something and for that to be registered. To not be forgotten. To have his objections noted. To be heard, if only by himself.

  “It could be therapeutic,” Brendan said, and turned down the volume of the music.

  The idea, when it came to Martin in the brand-new silence of the moving car, arrived so naturally, so specifically, that it were as though he had always had it but simply set it aside for later, for a moment such as this, where it was not only obvious but necessary. Now he knew: He would write about Melnikov. Not a monograph or an article, but just a story.

  “I’m going to write about another architect.”

  “The Russian?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Brendan said nothing more, which was just the endorsement Martin needed. And with that, he raised the recorder to his lips and, after sensing some form of machine life activate in the palm of his hand, felt relief to finally hear the familiar sound of his voice as it started on another man’s story.

  Chapter 5

  “How long have you lived here?” Brendan asked as he struggled with the door, Martin leaning against a wall in a corridor he couldn’t remember. Brendan finally mastered the lock and the smell hit them both, not the smell of him or anything personal, but the generic odor of an enclosed space being discovered.

  “Last year. I moved here when Agnetha and I split up.”

  Martin found the couch and sat down. He watched Brendan walk by with a cardboard boxful of mail, some of it opened, and courier notification slips and small packages, tubes that even Brendan recognized contained blueprints. He set the box on the kitchen table and went to a window. With a grunt, he cracked the seal.

  “Who opened my mail?”

  “It was me. I got the keys from your super and just made sure everything was in order.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t have a dog.”

  “Turn on my computer.”

  “That can wait.” Martin could hear the fridge door being opened. “You have any garbage bags?”

  “Under the sink. I thought Susan would have dealt with some of this.”

  “Does someone clean for you?”

  “I don’t remember. I must’ve had somebody.”

  “I think you need somebody new.”

  “Maybe they thought I was dead.”

  Brendan said nothing. Martin heard a cupboard door snap shut and hoped Brendan had found a garbage bag, because he had no idea if he had any. Not a clue.

  Hours passed. The better part of a day. It felt like a day from the couch. He would have wanted to get up and help, but fatigue from the day’s travel had made it difficult not just to rise but to even change positions. Brendan disappeared and materialized throughout the day, padding around the apartment, accompanied by the sound of sustained housework, the effort required to reopen a cabin after a winter of abandonment. And while he was thankful for Brendan’s efforts, there was something in his brother’s industriousness that irritated Martin and caused him to groan more loudly than necessary as he tried to shift his position on the sofa. After chaperoning him to the bathroom (the door a respectful inch open, with Brendan listening for that unexpected silence that he had come to associate with Martin’s imminent loss of balance and a toppling into the space between the bowl and the wall), Brendan declared he should go to the store for groceries for dinner. Before leaving, he checked several times with Martin about being left alone and was probably reassured, Martin thought, that not seeing Martin move independently in the previous two hours made risky, impetuous movements unlikely.

  With his brother gone, Martin took off his sunglasses and tried to reorient himself in the condo. The main room hovered like a cloud forest around his head, all soft edges and puzzling depths, making it difficult to estimate where the bedroom was. The bathroom that he’d just visited seemed a profound mystery, as well. But that was to be expected, he thought; he hadn’t lived here long enough for it to make an impression on him, occupying it for a scant six months after he and Agnetha split. Even signing for it, he’d recognized it was temporary. This was embarrassing for him to admit as an architect, but he hadn’t cared about any of the condo’s features except that it was available space when he needed nothing more. It was designed by another firm, Hattermas-Provencher, not a bad group, but gone a bit creatively fallow in the last five years, choosing to focus on the low-hanging fruit of loft conversions and never shy about contributing to off-island sprawl.

  He ran his right hand along the surface of the sofa, flattening the folds in the leather upholstery into a more gentle terrain. This was where he lived. Big enough, close to work, a view of the eastern slope of Mount Royal (an extra, something that he wasn’t looking for but which he remembered as an unexpected pleasure), and now as night fell and that view became a gathered plain of lights surrounding the void of mountainside darkness, he was convincing himself t
hat the space felt familiar.

  He closed his eyes and tried to rest but felt only a simmering of anxieties: work undone, plans left to the indifference of others, nothing that could be properly assuaged by lying on a couch. After months away, Martin now understood that he needed more than to simply reoccupy an address that happened to be his. He needed a higher form of physical assurance that this was home, and he understood immediately that it was the artifacts within the space that could grant that. The thought that he had papers and photos, books and mementos—the indisputable accrued sense of a life—that could be reclaimed reassured him almost as much as realizing that these things lay around him now.

  He left the couch and crawled across the hardwood floor, tripodding along with one hand held ahead, reaching out in a continuous slow exploratory wave, occasionally making contact with an object, hesitating for a moment to estimate heft and dimension. To calibrate space and identify. End table. Chair and standing lamp. Walls that marked the far end of the room.

  This is your life, he told himself, something you get to wander through in darkness on your hands and knees.

  He stopped when he came upon a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner of the living room, a little roadside shrine to the impermanence of this place. The reassurances of dry, flat cardboard surfaces bordered by rough edges. Orderly.

  He convinced himself he could discern the faint ridges that hinted at corrugations underneath. His hands moved into the depths of the boxes—many left open, their flaps fluttering quietly under his hands like the wings of caged birds familiar with, and untroubled by, human touch. His thumb rippled up against the contents. Books. He paused on his haunches and suddenly the purposelessness of his actions disappeared. It was here, he thought, among the boxes.

  Martin thought about turning on the lights, but it would be easier in the darkness. He knew it. The Styrofoam peanuts that spilled out of the freshly opened box confirmed he’d been right all along, and from there his hands became twin snouts, rooting down into the depths of the box until he could feel a balsa-wood edge. A few gentle tugs, each accompanied by another spume of tumbling Styrofoam, all of it reminding him of a Christmas morning as his daughters unwrapped something that they had so desired and that Sharon had known to buy and that was more a surprise to him than to anyone else in the room.

  He finally extracted the balsa-wood model and placed it on the floor next to him. It was a model of Melnikov’s pavilion in Paris, the quadrangle-shaped structure so familiar to him, bisected by a staircase that ascended to the center of the pavilion before descending to the opposite corner. Martin remembered having built it in the last year, as much to convince himself that he hadn’t lost the skill—at the firm the task typically fell to a couple of competent junior associates or was subcontracted out.

  Building the model had been deeply, surprisingly satisfying, and the result had pleased him so much that he had toyed with the idea of taking the model to the office. But he’d thought better of it. He didn’t know why—perhaps, he thought, it was the hobbyist aspect of his desire to make the model in the first place—but he hadn’t wanted Jean-Sebastien or Catherine to know about it. This reticence itself had nagged at him; he was the senior partner, the founding partner, and if he wanted to bring a damn model that he’d made into his office, there should have been no obstacle, real or imagined. He was owed this. He owed himself as much. Other architects had no such reservations about indulging themselves in this way or subjecting others to their eccentricities.

  The public’s conception of the most famous names in architecture was often attributable to nothing more than an assemblage of eccentricities—geodesic domes, the unlivable cities, the prototypes never built. But behind the extravagances, there was also the monomaniacal drive and vision and ultimately the beautiful remnants of that talent. It was clear to him that to be truly great, to be accepted as great, one needed that amalgam of style and substance. A catalog and a cultivated persona that allowed one to effortlessly add to that catalog. Once that happened, you were reborn as an adjective. This is a Wright house. This is so Miesian.

  Fallon was not an adjective, he thought. He was pretty much like everybody else in the world of architecture: a noun. A noun that built other nouns. This state was the malaise of moderate, second-tier career accomplishment—and having the firm win a Governor General’s award in architecture three years before only heightened the sense of a ceiling. He had experienced a taste that served only to tell him that a larger appetite remained. Unsatisfied.

  It was a state of being that impelled him to listen for the winner of the Pritzker Prize to be announced, not with hope (even deluded) that it would be him, but with an appetite to formulating the most derisive and succinct critique of the winner should anyone care to ask his opinion. Not the most courageous choice, but fine if deconstruction by numbers is to your taste.

  He came to realize that the antidote to everything—that perpetual sense of being thwarted, his increasingly apparent insecurities, and what he felt amounted to a paltriness of spirit—had been the consulate project. It was a commission that came along once in a career. It could take a firm to the next level. They could open a New York office. More than that, they would need a New York office. But the consulate needed to succeed. And for that, it needed him.

  Martin touched the base of the model and then listened to the delicate zippering sound of his thumbnail as it ran up against the balsa-wood steps. He pressed the pads of his fingers against the walls of the pavilion, able to detect the details of the window frames. Martin’s fingers extended and, with the delicacy of cat whiskers, sought out and made contact with the tower that rose from the north side of the building. He imagined the sound of hammering in that summer of 1925 in Paris, the wooden frame that the unknown architect was erecting. The walls of glass that captivated so many people.

  He had been unable to come up with anything to say about Melnikov to the recorder Feingold had given him. The story of the architect’s life was inside him, already written, but Martin felt unable to access it. Mute in the car, with Brendan listening, he’d simply cleared his throat and put the little machine away for the time when the words would come more easily.

  He put the model aside and resumed his journey across the room, trying to recall where he was, reminded when he felt the reverberating thud as the heel of his hand met a pane of patio glass. He stood up, finally understanding the measure of darkness, finally feeling that he knew where he lived.

  He was back on the couch when Brendan arrived with white plastic bags slung heavy with groceries. He listened but said nothing as the lights were turned on and the cupboards opened and closed and the food was put away. When Brendan was finished, he sat down in a chair opposite. His brother’s face was not as familiar to Martin as it had seemed before. This was fatigue speaking, Martin told himself. This was what happened when you made the leap from Dunes to life. This was what happened when you left your plateau. This is Brendan, he told himself. He squinted and tried to enumerate the features that marked Brendan as a Fallon, but it felt like he was sitting with Feingold again, getting caught up in the shape of the details.

  “You’re awake.” The voice helped. The voice was Brendan’s. “Who made the mess?”

  “Oh, that was me. Just getting my bearings.”

  Brendan nodded, apparently unfazed by the opened boxes and Styrofoam detritus. He was, after all, a vet, Martin thought, and coming home to a mess shouldn’t have been an entirely new experience. Maybe he was even relieved it wasn’t organic.

  “You’ve got to take your medication.”

  “I don’t need the painkillers.”

  “You have other ones you have to take.” Brendan said.

  Martin nodded but the thought of having to still take medication had eluded him. He associated the medication—the little plastic cups, the appalling variety of colors and sizes—strictly in the context of being at the Dunes; and now, like someone returned home from Africa, he assumed he could stop takin
g his malaria pills.

  Brendan brought out a small plastic case with the multiple compartments each capped by tiny lids and placed it on the coffee table between them. If he concentrated, Martin could make out a container with small sealed compartments. A little pill mausoleum. Brendan pried one open one of the crypts and tilted the contents into Martin’s hand.

  “This is Dilantin.” Brendan poked the pills in his palm with his index finger. He picked one up, examining it. It was a capsule, indistinguishable from the others.

  “Yeah, I think I’ve seen that one. What’s it for?”

  “Seizures.”

  “Jesus, I had seizures?”

  “Right after your operation.”

  “But not anymore.”

  “Well, no.”

  “So I don’t have to take it.”

  “The doctor I spoke to said you have to take it for at least a year.”

  “Do you use it? With animals?”

  Brendan stared at him. “No. We have different medications.”

  “These are laxatives. I know these ones,” Martin said, staring intently, positioning his head in front of the capsules in a way that reminded Brendan of a particularly canine form of fascination.

  “Right.”

  Brendan studied the case and turned it over. The contents rattled inside. A week’s worth, Martin thought, imagining a series of plastic cups, stretching out into his past and future.

  “The names and doses are written on the other side. Pain meds, Tylenol and anti-inflammatories. Pantoloc, to protect your stomach. Norvasc, for high blood pressure.” He looked up at Martin. “Well, that’s something we have in common. Thanks, Dad. And this is Apo-Fluoxetine. An antidepressant.”