Halcyon, p.5
Halcyon, page 5
“But why go to the trouble?” Dr. Shields asked. “The chances are infinitesimal.” Ableson coughed thickly into his handkerchief, bending at the waist. He glanced into its center and then returned the handkerchief to his pocket, whatever he’d coughed up having troubled him. He crossed Dr. Shields’s office and removed a single volume from the shelf…
In recounting this part of the story, Dr. Shields went to that same bookshelf and removed that same volume, the Pensées by Pascal. Ableson had given him the treatise on his graduation from medical school. Dr. Shields now turned to a familiar page. “This is Pascal’s wager,” he explained, and began to read:
God is or is not.
A game is being played where heads or tails will turn up.
You must wager, it is not optional.
Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain…
This brought to mind a conversation I’d already had with Ableson over one of our martinis, where he’d explained the nature of his belief, which was that he believed because he had nothing to lose and everything to gain; this was not only his logic of God but of heaven and the afterlife, and I now understood it was why he’d made not only religious arrangements for his death but also scientific ones. And it seemed the scientific arrangements had paid off. “Remarkable, isn’t it?” I said to Dr. Shields.
He slotted the copy of Pascal back onto the shelf, returned to his desk, and grew silent, as if he were for the first time considering whether or not Ableson’s resurrection was remarkable, and, as Pascal put it, “an infinitely happy life to gain.”
Dr. Shields explained how not long after Ableson’s death, a pair of representatives from the Division of Medical and Scientific Research at the National Institutes of Health had arrived at his office. They alerted him that Robert Ableson was a prime candidate for a series of groundbreaking trials on cellular restructuring and regeneration. Because cryonics had so long been relegated to a pseudoscience, the pool of suitable applicants was relatively slim. And so began Ableson’s resurrection.
When I asked how much longer Ableson would live, or if there were any side effects to the treatments he’d undergone, Dr. Shields seemed to possess little insight. He wasn’t being evasive; instead he explained that his role in this wasn’t as Ableson’s physician but rather as the executor of his will, nothing more. I had assumed—falsely, I now realized—that Mary Ableson had asked me to visit with Dr. Shields so he might reveal some secret of her husband’s condition. When I mentioned this to Dr. Shields, he laughed. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid it isn’t anything like that.”
“Then why?” I asked. “Why did she want me to see you?”
Dr. Shields once again steepled his hands together on his desk. “When Mary and Robert met, he was in his early fifties and she was in her late twenties.” He reached behind him to the console, plucking out another framed photograph, in which a college age Dr. Shields stands flanked between the two of them, his hands brooding in the pockets of his flared jeans, while Ableson has his well-muscled arm draped paternally around this young man, and although Ableson’s hair is flecked with gray, it’s mostly that recognizable shade of reddish brown. He’s wearing a pair of Persol sunglasses like the ones Steve McQueen wore in Bullitt, and Mary, his much younger wife with the feathered hair and beaming smile, looks like any one of the ingénues who graced that film set. While I examined the photo, Dr. Shields continued, “Because of the age difference, Mary had thought they’d only get two good decades together. Instead, they got three. She used to say that Robert was fifty until he turned eighty. Those last ten years his deterioration was hard on her, but ultimately it’s what she’d signed up for. Their relationship was based on an agreement. When they’d met, she was a young single mother struggling to raise two little boys. Robert took care of her. When he got older, she would take care of him. Now that he’s back, that balance has again shifted.”
I didn’t understand. “But she’s not even seventy?” I said. “And he’s—” How old was Ableson? I would’ve said ninety, but his age could no longer be calculated by adding up years, and so I settled on “—he’s healthy. They’re both healthy, so why can’t they just enjoy this time together?”
“Because, Martin, both of them aren’t healthy.”
Ableson not healthy? His vigorous constitutionals came to mind, him standing at the guesthouse door, the steam pouring off his body as he’d marched however many miles across his property, only to demand an hour or more of drinking and conversation. I could see his hair, which held a stubborn line against the advance of gray. Could it be that death was overtaking him even as he appeared to possess the stamina of a man two or even three decades his junior? It was like Mary used to say, “He was fifty until he was eighty.”
Incredulous, I described to Dr. Shields this robust figure I had come to admire.
“It’s Mary,” he said, interrupting me. “She’s the one who’s sick.”
“Sick?”
“Cancer,” he added. “That’s why she asked you to come see me.”
TWO
DISEASE
The drive back to Halcyon would take five hours. I traveled the interstate lost in thought, radio off, cars passing me as I hovered at or below the speed limit. I kept replaying the end of my visit with Dr. Shields. I couldn’t even recall what specific type of cancer he’d said that Mary had, only that after he’d explained where it had originated in her body—and the grim itinerary of everywhere else it had traveled—I could no longer remember where he’d started on that journey. “But she doesn’t look sick,” I kept muttering. He said not yet, and when I asked how much time she had left his answer was a vague “months, not years.”
And so, the purpose of my visit had had little to do with Ableson’s condition. He was as he appeared: youthful, energetic, a man of reclaimed vitality in complete possession of his health. It was Mary who was in crisis. Why, I wanted to know, had she asked me to see Dr. Shields instead of simply telling me herself? “She hasn’t told her husband,” he’d explained, “and she doesn’t plan to, at least not yet. In her mind, it’s important that he be the first person she tells. Also, I don’t know if she could’ve told you without getting emotional in a way that’s unacceptable to her. Eventually, though, she won’t be able to keep hiding her condition from him. She mentioned that you’ve become a confidant of Robert’s, that he’s broken his social quarantine to spend evenings with you. When the time comes, Mary didn’t want you to be in the dark about her disease. For Robert’s sake. So that he’ll have someone around to talk to, someone who understands.”
As I continued south down the interstate replaying our conversation, I couldn’t help but conclude that Mary’s keeping her cancer from her husband was a misguided yet generous gesture. Despite Ableson’s vigor—his martinis, his daily constitutionals—and all I’d learned of his life, to include a coda of having defeated death, his wife understood that he was too fragile to carry the burden of her sickness. The time they had remaining together was no longer defined by him, as he had always assumed—but by her. Because she loved him, she would keep her secret as long as she could, to grant them both this last unfettered bit of time.
Before leaving, I had asked the other obvious question, which was about her children. Ableson’s social quarantine meant they didn’t yet know about his return and, as Dr. Shields explained it, they also didn’t know about Mary. And so, the two great secrets of this woman’s life—who until a few days ago I knew only as an acquaintance—now resided with me. When I made this observation to Dr. Shields, he acknowledged the unique circumstances but then reached into his briefcase, where he removed that morning’s newspaper.
“The children will know he’s back soon enough,” and he handed the copy to me. On the front page—above the fold this time, the story having seeped up like a stain—it seemed an enterprising investigative journalist, spurred on by the disclosure of the Lazarus mice, had through carefully placed sources uncovered what they termed “a detailed accounting of the contemporaneous resurrection of individuals,” of which Robert Ableson was one of over one hundred names listed. Dr. Shields had allowed me to keep his copy of the newspaper (he’d bought a dozen that morning) and it sat in the backseat of the Volvo as I drove. Had I turned on the radio, I might have listened to what was now blanket media coverage of the story. I preferred the silence instead.
I wondered who the others were. Who aside from Ableson had been resurrected? He was one of a larger group. This would prevent any single person from becoming sensationalized and would, hopefully, assure Ableson a certain modicum of anonymity. What would it be like for a person near the end of their life—either elderly or sick—to read this story? How many would scramble to become participants in the next round of clinical trials when death ceased being inevitable and instead became treatable. Who a society brought back would say a great deal about it. Would ours, with its split personality, be able to agree on which minds merited eternal preservation?
Pondering who those minds might be, my thoughts turned to my academic hero, Shelby Foote, who had stopped writing years ago due to poor health. I had met him once, at the height of his powers, shortly after he’d achieved celebrity as the star commentator in the Ken Burns–directed PBS documentary The Civil War. That long ago evening, he’d delivered a ninety-minute lecture to a filled auditorium at Tufts. Lucas and I had arrived early, brimming with enthusiasm like two kids traveling to the ballpark to watch their favorite big-league slugger. Foote had spoken without notes, standing not behind but bestride the lectern, his bent elbow resting casually on its edge and his spent pipe cradled in his palm. A slide show of photographs and maps projected behind him, though he never glanced back for reference. He wouldn’t think to, in much the same way a dancer would never think to mouth the count of his steps; Foote was balletic in that way.
He lectured about Stonewall Jackson, his death and the cottage industry of alternate histories that hinged on what if he’d lived. Foote traveled the familiar terrain of events: Jackson’s reentry into his own lines at Chancellorsville after a night reconnaissance; how when he and his staff had identified themselves, Major John Decatur Barry, the commander of the sentries, took them for Union soldiers and replied, “It’s a damn Yankee trick!” firing a fatal volley at Jackson. Foote noted as an aside that Barry would fight on for the remainder of the war, dying in 1867, two years after its end, at the age of twenty-seven, of what his friends called “a broken heart” for what he’d done to Jackson. Foote theorized that what Barry died of was in fact an alternate history. What if Jackson had lived? That very question tortured Barry into an early grave.
“Had Jackson lived,” Foote explained to the auditorium in his languorous Mississippian drawl, “he would not have been Jackson.” The Confederate leadership, according to Foote, had immediately rendered that evening’s debacle into a kalos thanatos, a Greek term of exaltation meaning beautiful death. A mourning public received every detail of Jackson’s final moments from a newspaper account that sold out within minutes on the streets of Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond to name but a few places. The recollection in print was that of Jackson’s attending physician, a Dr. McGuire: “…before he died he cried out in his delirium, ‘Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly! Tell Major Hawks—’ then stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished. Presently a smile of ineffable sweetness spread itself over his pale face, and he said quietly, and with an expression, as if of relief, ‘Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.’ ” In his lecture Foote had asked us to imagine this scene splashed across the Confederate newspapers. We’re only two months before Gettysburg, the “desperate gamble” as Faulkner had written of it, a battle that would prove the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Jackson’s death ceased to be tragic but rather became aspirational for the tens of thousands of Southerners who, as I recall Foote wryly putting it in the auditorium that day, “would soon follow him into the shade of those very same trees.”
The lecture ended and a vast, out-the-door line formed in the direction of the table where Foote signed books. Through snippets of conversation, I could hear how Foote’s remarks had riled those listeners who had become invested in a certain mythologized version of Jackson. “What did you think?” I asked Lucas as we took our place on the sidewalk that night, toward the back of the line. “I still think Jackson would’ve known to take Culp’s Hill. And if he had, Gettysburg would’ve turned out differently.” I didn’t disagree with Lucas but also couldn’t shake the nagging idea that Foote had a point. Where did the myth end and the person begin?
The line was crawling. Lucas had a dinner plan with Annette, who was then his girlfriend. He kept glancing at his watch. If he wanted to leave, I offered to get his books signed for him. Lucas couldn’t quite decide, and years later, when I thought Lucas had compromised himself as a historian, when he would deal in platitudes about history’s need to be “forward looking” to matter, I would always—whether fairly or unfairly—trace the genesis of my disappointment in his methods to the decision he made that night to prioritize dinner with Annette over meeting Shelby Foote.
“I owe you one,” he said, as he handed me his three volumes of The Civil War: A Narrative, which I now cradled along with my own, a total of six thousand pages.
The line in front of me moved slowly and the line behind me dissolved as others, like Lucas, gave up on the idea of having their books personalized by Mr. Foote. After nearly an hour, I was the last one. When I lifted my copies onto his table, Mr. Foote—tired though he must have been—seemed intrigued by their worn spines, running his finger along the heavily creased bindings. “You’ve read this?” he asked, speaking of the work as though it weren’t his own. I told him that I had. He made a slight, respectful nod. “And who is this other copy for?” he asked, removing the cap from his signing pen.
“A friend of mine. He had a dinner date,” I said, self-consciously adding, “He really enjoyed your remarks.”
“Does this friend have a name?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s Lucas Harlow,” and Mr. Foote began to sign, while I told him how much I also enjoyed his lecture.
“And which part of it did you enjoy?” he asked, again with his Mississippian drawl.
“We don’t think enough about the myths we create around people.”
“Are you a student at the university?”
I told him that I was.
“In the history department?”
I nodded.
“Very good,” he said, offering a thin, conspiratorial smile. He got back to work on the books, his whole arm moving as he signed his name to each volume. “When considering Jackson,” he continued, “or any of the dead, it is important to remember that had they survived life itself would have proven their faults, as it does with each of us.” He arrived at the final volume of his series, Red River to Appomattox, which was at the bottom of the pile. He glanced at me once more, and instead of simply a signature I could tell he was crafting a longer inscription. He then shut the volume, ran his fingers down its worn spine a final time, and, passing it back to me, said, “Best of luck with your studies.”
The inscription he’d made was on my mind as I took the exit off the interstate toward Halcyon. It was a little before midnight as I drove past the darkened main house. I then turned onto the single lane road banked with chest-high snow drifts that led to the guest cottage. A car was parked by the front door and the desk lamp glowed softly in the attic. The same desk where I’d left the volume of Foote’s work, the one he’d inscribed:
For Martin,
Never forget, history is what the living think of the dead.
Yours truly,
Shelby Foote
* * *
—
I knocked on what I believed until that moment was my own front door. The single lamp in the attic went out. I heard a half-dozen footsteps inside followed by a minute or more of deliberate silence. I knocked again and this time the downstairs light switched on. Someone peeked through the vestibule blind, a set of eyes appearing and then vanishing. Still, they didn’t answer the door. Despite paying rent, I considered myself a guest of the Ablesons, so didn’t want to barge inside. But it was cold and this person—whoever they were—seemed determined to ignore me.
I slotted my key into the lock.
“Who is it?” came a woman’s voice.
When I pushed the door open, this woman had levered it shut with her shoulder. I gave my name and announced that I had a lease on the cottage. A pause followed, as though she were considering the plausibility of my claim, and I added, “Those are my books about the Civil War on the attic desk…”
The door opened and her silhouette appeared in the lighted rectangle. She introduced herself but hardly needed to; the dark hair, the heavily lidded brown eyes, the long neck and straight back aligned with finishing school precision—the resemblance was apparent. “I didn’t know my parents had a renter,” she said, and what also became apparent in that brief exchange was that Elizabeth Ableson knew about her father’s return; it was her use of the word “parents.”
I told her that they were both up at the main house. No further explanation was required, no acknowledgment on my part of the great experiment in which Robert Ableson had participated. I simply added, “May I come in?” and she nodded apologetically, stepping away from the door. The house was cold, and I was now very awake so offered to start a fire. Elizabeth—or Boose as I couldn’t help but think of her after my many conversations with her father—joined me in the living room, sitting on the battered cushion of the same chair where Ableson typically sat.
