Halcyon

One

Discovery

News of the great discovery trickled out: resurrection, new life, had become a scientific possibility. The story ran below the fold in the Richmond Times-­Dispatch on an unseasonably cold Sunday in April. The two narrow columns of text described how a team of government-­backed geneticists had leveraged findings from the recently mapped human genome to regenerate cells in cryopreserved mice. Weeks and even months after death they were resurrecting these mice.

I had read about the “Lazarus mice” in a rented guest cottage nestled in the foothills of the snowcapped Blue Ridge. My reason for coming here was to escape, among other things, the relentless binges of breaking news that over the years had quietly subverted and replaced what was once known as “the national conversation.” The history department at Virginia College, where I taught (but have since left) had granted me a semester’s writing sabbatical along with a healthy allowance.

After finishing the Times-­Dispatch that morning, I pitched it into the stone hearth at the cottage’s center where a half-­burned back log still glowed; that is, I pitched all of it except the story on the Lazarus mice. I held on to that, choosing to save it for later that day, when my landlord, Robert Ableson, would come around for one of his early-­evening visits. These visits proved a pleasant interlude after tedious, unproductive hours spent alone at my desk. I had rented the cottage from Ableson’s wife, Mary, who was more than twenty years his junior. This age difference, he admitted, had proven quite the scandal amidst the prudery of decades past—­less so now. Mary was an old soul and Ableson was anything but, which caused her to joke that he was, in fact, her younger man. Handsome in a minor key, with clear bluish-­gray eyes and carefully groomed hair still flecked with strands of reddish brown, his appearance belied his ninety years. His face was high-­boned, his cheeks rosy and vital, his features distinct. He would have been a natural for a caricature except caricature freezes, and his face was a paradigm of fluid expression. He was possessed by a vigor that he insisted was the result of his daily walks. He called these his “constitutionals.”

It was after these constitutionals that Ableson would typically pay his visit, mixing us each one of his signature four-­olive martinis, and we would settle in on the cottage’s lumpy furniture. Our talks would range in topic, animated by a collision of interests. My work: a study of postbellum attitudes on the Civil War. His life: service in the Second World War, a career as a prosecutor, and the behind-­schedule and above-­budget renovation of the property’s main house, a white brick neoclassical with a wraparound porch they called Halcyon, the name itself linked to the estate for as long as anyone could remember and conjuring a nostalgia for better days. We’d drain our glasses and the hours would pass while we exchanged our drink-­inspired truths. Inevitably, the conversation would turn to the headlines, which was why that evening I had saved the story about the mice.

Before I get to Ableson’s reaction to those mice, the year itself, 2004, is a necessary digression; that year and the confluence of forces harnessed to create its zeitgeist are as much an actor in Ableson’s story as any one person. For those of us who lived through it, we can remember that it was a time when a frenzy pervaded our national psyche, with its liberal and conservative personalities conspiring against our collective sanity. From the political left and from the political right, America had learned over the years to binge on scandal (the Clinton conviction), on piety (September 11th), and on wrath (bin Laden’s body dragged from a cave in Tora Bora on Christmas Day). We had lost our ability to disaggregate our values from our rage. Opinion mattered. Accusation mattered. In recent memory had there been a greater epoch of either? Had there been a time when a single word (anonymous or otherwise) possessed greater potential to undo the old order on which we’d once relied? Destruction and creation were in the air, and so had there been a greater time of freedom? Didn’t our flawed society need to evolve? And, if we did evolve, would any of this associated destruction have been wrong? We didn’t know. Anything could happen. Nothing was sacred. All thinking became absolute. We congregated to the poles of leftward and rightward consciousness. We hollowed out the center of our political life, unraveling the braid of our societal obligations to one another only to awaken and realize with wonder that none of those obligations were—­or ever had been—­any stronger than a single strand of thread.

It was on those threads that Ableson’s life would come to depend, but that night the story of the mice was foremost in my mind. Had it appeared in the paper five or even ten years ­earlier—in a different time, which is to say a saner time—­I wonder whether Ableson would have regarded it with such hostility. Once he’d finished reading, he handed me back the page with a flick of the wrist. “Utter nonsense,” he’d said as I took it from him. Did he think the report was a fabrication? “Martin,” he added, “I haven’t survived the better part of a century by believing every word put into print.” The doubt he’d introduced into something I had so readily believed left me feeling a tinge inferior. He went on, “You have to be careful with these scientists. They get their jollies playing God.”

I knew from our other conversations that Ableson wasn’t a particularly religious man. On a different night, after he’d lingered over too many martinis, that weighty subject had come up. I had confessed to Ableson that although I was born Jewish, I no longer practiced and wasn’t sure I even believed in God anymore. But I also knew it felt wrong to say God did not exist. “When people cease to believe in God,” he had answered, “they come to believe not in nothing but in anything.” For Ableson, God wasn’t a belief so much as a defense mechanism against other, more frightening forms of belief. Also, he thought he had little to lose by believing in God. If the other side of death was, truly, nothing, what did it matter if he believed. But if there was something on that other side, he had everything to gain. This was Ableson’s logic of heaven.

And now, gently, in service of the present conversation I reminded him of our previous one and its logic. “Is it so bad,” I asked, “if some scientists want to play God with mice? You’ve said it yourself: we’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

Ableson brooded by the fire. In the weeks since I’d met him, it was the first time he’d seemed uncomfortable furthering an argument. Eventually, he rose from his seat. He announced it was time for him to make his way back to Halcyon. The evening had turned overcast. The thermometer dipped below freezing. I offered Ableson a thicker coat for his return; however, he declined. He passed through my front door and made fresh tracks home through a curtain of steadily falling snow. As I watched him go his breath rose in a fine mist, crowning his head, and I marveled at his resilience to the cold.

Inches turned to feet as all night long the snow came down. I had finished off the shaker’s worth of martinis left behind by Ableson and this led to an obliterating sleep followed by an equally obliterating hangover the next morning, and when I finally awoke it was to a landscape transformed. The sky was a bracing chlorine blue, featureless and sublime. The snow was pristine, without a track—­animal or human. Standing at my kitchen window, mug of coffee in hand, I felt as if I were witness to the very dawn of creation. This reverie, however, was interrupted by the realization that the single-­lane dirt road connecting my guest cottage to Halcyon had vanished entirely.

I headed upstairs and sat at my desk, which was pushed to the gabled attic window. My vast, unfinished work was spread before me. My eyes ranged over it, and this only added to an intruding sense of isolation. Regrettably, this isolation had done little for my productivity. My project—­a book, which that spring I was considering abandoning altogether—­had to do with the Civil War and what the historian Shelby Foote termed “the great compromise,” a cultural reconciliation between North and South that followed those blood-­soaked years. Before departing on sabbatical, my department chair had called me into her office to express “certain reservations,” as she’d put it. Foote’s interpretation of the war had fallen from favor, and she felt that the selected topic—­particularly for a lapsed-­Jewish divorcé of Ukrainian descent, like me—­was problematic. I listened and, after giving her concerns the consideration they merited, replied: “How is my being a divorcé problematic?”

The idea of writing closer to my own experience had once occurred to me, but it’d proven a non-starter. As an undergraduate, when I’d asked my great-­uncle Seymour the name of our family’s ancestral village in Ukraine, he’d said it was “Anatevka,” whistled a few bars of “If I Were a Rich Man,” and told me to focus on being American. So I’d chosen to study the Civil War and Foote had become my fixation. On C-­SPAN Book TV, in a July 26, 1994, interview, he had said, “In the Civil War, there’s a great compromise as it’s called. It consists of Southerners admitting, freely, that it’s probably best that the Union wasn’t divided. And the North admits, rather freely, that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. That is a great compromise and we live with that and it works for us.”

How, at times, I wished I could un-­see that clip.

It had become the contentious seed from which my tangled work germinated. I had become obsessed with the role of compromise in the sustainment of American life, as well as our relatively recent departure from it as an American virtue. I had my theories on what contributed to our current plague of polarization: gerrymandering, the shifting media landscape, campaign finance laws; however, identifying the causes wasn’t enough, it would do nothing to ease our grim national mood, which I would have diagnosed as rage-­ennui. I had once shared these views with Ableson, who through the wisdom of his many years identified a different source of America’s blight. “Sex,” he’d said, “the conflict between the male and the female, it is the conflict from which all others derive.” He was, of course, referring to our recently disgraced president. When I said as much, he made a little negative wave of his hand. His reference went far deeper than that, traveling backward well beyond Clinton or even my specialization, the Civil War. “The ancients fought about Helen of Troy. We fight about Monica Lewinsky. It’s all the same; it’s all sex.”

In my own work, I was, admittedly, searching for a theory as universal as what Ableson prescribed. However, no such theory had presented itself as I plowed through thousands of pages of nineteenth-­century American history and increasingly found myself haunted by the ghost of Shelby Foote. If American life was in the past defined by the reconciliation of its divergent parts—­“to form a more perfect Union” as the Constitution framed the endeavor—­today American life had become defined by absolutes, and an absolute theory of this blight would, likely, forever elude me.

Below came a knock. Out my window, a string of footprints disturbed the otherwise unblemished snow and led to my front door, ending at the stoop. With my forehead pressed to the cold, mottled glass, I tried to see who stood there, but the angle wasn’t quite right. I could only make out a single set of diminutive shoulders no wider than the handles of a child’s scooter. Again, there was the insistent knocking. Whoever was at the door knew I was inside; and so I resigned myself to answering, taking the stairs carefully as my head continued to throb from last night’s martinis. “Be right there,” I called out; still the knocks came, a percussive torture. When I finally swung open the door, I was met by my landlady, Mary Ableson. “Mind if I come in?”

Whether I minded or not, Mrs. Ableson crossed the threshold, taking off her fur-­lined parka and tossing it over the arm of a recliner as though she owned the place (which of course she did despite my rent being paid through August). As she entered—­giving me a bit of her shoulder in the process—­I once again noticed her height, how the top of her head ended exactly where the bottom of my chin began, as though we fit into each other in some way, like nesting dolls. At six-­feet (five-­foot-­eleven-­and-­three-­quarters, if we’re being stingy), my proportions are that of an unremarkable man of this new century. Mrs. Ableson, a tiny doll-­like woman, was smaller but not in the normal way, and her miniaturized silhouette suggested another time, like those of mannikins in a museum’s display of costumes from one or even two centuries past. Her silver hair pulled back into a chignon retained a metallic luster. It was the hair of a woman determined to age gracefully and I doubt very much if she’d ever colored it in her life. She took off her leather gloves finger by finger, while rotating her neck in a panoramic arc as she examined the cottage. Her eyes, narrow and bright, pointed to the kitchen. I had left out the shaker and martini glasses from the night before. Her vision traced a direct line from the glasses to me. “Chilly in here, isn’t it?”

I nodded, crossed to the hearth at the center of the room, and began knotting pages of newspaper as I built another fire. Two sofas flanked the hearth with a coffee table between them. She sat on one and, having lit the fire, I settled down companionably on the sofa opposite hers. Observing her red-­burnished cheeks and the continued heavy rise and fall of her chest plus a rapid succession of sniffles, I understood how she’d exhausted herself to reach me through the heavy snow. The subject she’d come to discuss must’ve been urgent.

“Was it much trouble walking out here?” I asked.

Mrs. Ableson stared vacantly at the purring fire, fingering a pendant around her neck. I could see it was a dime. But it wasn’t Roosevelt’s profile minted on the coin. This dime was of an older vintage, set on the pendant in what looked like platinum. Her eyes diverted from the fire to me, and they were wide and brown but not brown in a plain way; rather, in the way any collection of vibrant colors when blended together turns to brown. If you looked closely—­as I was drawn to do—­you could detect blues, greens, even hints of red in her gaze. “We need to discuss my husband,” she began. “I understand he’s been paying you visits.” She paused, employing a single beat of silence as an accusatory tool of rhetoric. She was, after all, the wife of a litigator. I could imagine a younger Mr. Ableson sequestered in his bedroom with Mary rehearsing his closing arguments, which she would edit down to the last gesture. With a similar precision, her gaze returned again to the martini glasses in the kitchen. “It’s not the drinking that worries me,” she said, her tone softening, from that of inquisitor to concerned wife. “What worries me is the newspaper story you showed him last night.”

“Newspaper story?” The day had yet to come into focus. I placed a fingertip to a sudden ache in my temple. Last night’s conversation with Ableson blurred with those of other nights.

“Yes, the story about the mice,” she said impatiently. “I’d like to see it.”

I glanced at the fire. Had I already taken a match to yesterday’s paper? I then recalled that I’d left the story on my desk before heading to bed. When I went to the attic to retrieve it, Mrs. Ableson followed.

“It’s here ... somewhere,” I muttered, ransacking my things.

Mrs. Ableson seemed in no rush. She leaned against the window frame, gazing out at her property, her eyes following the tracks of her journey here. I was prepared for her to comment on my books, my notes, on the clutter that I would—­if asked—­assure her passed for serious academic work. But she proved incurious. Spread face down on my desk was the first volume of Foote’s three-­volume The Civil War: A Narrative, subtitled Fort Sumter to Perryville. When I picked it up, I found the article about the mice beneath.

“Here we are.” I spread the crumpled sheet of newsprint flat on my desk, as though Mary and I might read the story together. She had no such plans and plucked it up by the corner like a tissue from its box. She returned downstairs, seemingly unconcerned whether I might follow, which of course I did. She stood by the edge of the fire and, leaning against the mantel, silently mouthed the words of the article as she read. I sat on the sofa, watching her. Then she sighed, saying, “Remarkable, isn’t it?” and crumpled up the story, pitching it into the flames. “I guess now it’s only a matter of time.”

I offered my uninformed opinion that resurrecting lab mice from the dead was one thing but performing a similar feat on a more complex organism—­like a human—­was a task of a different magnitude, one that if ever plausible would be decades away and fraught with unforeseen complexities. However, while I was speaking, Mary had reached into her pocket and removed another article. It was preserved in a plastic sheath and the paper had yellowed with age. This was also from the Times-­Dispatch, an obituary: Beloved husband, father, veteran of the Second World War and renowned litigator Robert Ableson passed away in his sleep last night. The cause of death was complications from pneumonia. He is survived by his wife, Mary, as well as their daughter and two stepsons. In lieu of flowers please send ...

“I don’t understand ... but he’s not ... ?”

Arms crossed, chin slightly elevated, Mary interjected, “He’s not what? ... dead?” She offered a look of slight disappointment, as though inviting me to be more intrepid with what I imagined possible. She continued, “These scientists and the government agencies that fund them can’t simply announce what they’ve discovered. They can’t hold a press conference and say they’ve conquered death. They need a rollout plan, a media strategy. The public has to get comfortable with this breakthrough, has to evolve into it, so it feels more like an inevitability. Hence the first article about the mice. The rest will follow.”

I struggled to comprehend what she was telling me, muttering only “But Mr. Ableson is alive ... I saw him last night.”

She inhaled deeply and then, very slowly, with special emphasis on each word, said: “They’ve—brought—­people—­back. They’ve already done it. Robert was one of their ...” and she fished for the phrase to describe what he was to them “... was one of their test cases. My husband has spent the last year under social quarantine until news of the discovery becomes public. I suppose he couldn’t take being cooped up with me anymore, that’s why he sought you out.”

Whatever minor hostility I felt from Mary wasn’t specific to me. Her husband had hurt her by breaking the rules of his quarantine. He had needed someone that wasn’t his wife to talk to, a confidant of sorts, and this idea wounded her. I interrupted: “Mrs. Ableson, so you know, when your husband visits it’s only because he wants to chat. My work, stories of his old court cases, his time in the war, even your renovation of Halcyon. Stuff like that.”

She nodded appreciatively, saying, “Last night, after you showed him the article about the mice, he thought we needed to tell you the rest before someone else did. Since his”—­and she stumbled in choosing her word—­“since his return, the isolation has been hard on him. There is, however, one other person we’ve both been able to confide in.” She crossed the room, to where she’d placed her coat over the chair. From its pocket, she removed a business card: Dr. Charles Shields MD, with a listing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center. “I’d like you to pay him a visit. It’s important you hear his take on our situation.”

I was behind in my writing, having already blown past several self-­imposed deadlines. I did, however, have a trip to Gettysburg planned for later in the month. I could visit Dr. Shields then.

“Or perhaps you could move up your trip?” She wasn’t asking but telling me this was what I should do. Although I needed the time at my desk, I was paying a very reasonable rent for her guesthouse and felt I shouldn’t disappoint. I’d visited the battlefield many times before so wasn’t in search of any new facts. I simply enjoyed making the pilgrimage. The ground there hummed. The Peach Orchard. The Devil’s Den. The Bloody Angle. Each was like an instrument’s string pulled long ago that continued to emit a note.

Mrs. Ableson had begun to gather her things. My audience with her was at its end. As we walked to the door, I assured her that I’d make the detour to Philadelphia to meet with Dr. Shields. She thanked me as she finished buttoning her coat. Before she stepped into the snow-­covered meadow to pick her way back to Halcyon, I noticed that she’d left the copy of her husband’s obituary inside. When I offered to retrieve it, she said, “Don’t bother. Do me one last favor, will you? Pitch that thing in the fire.”

The snow didn’t let up for the next week. I considered postponing my trip north but couldn’t stand the thought of Mrs. Ableson discovering me hunkered down in the cottage after I’d assured her I’d pay Dr. Shields a visit. My Volvo station wagon was a reliable all-­wheel drive, so the next afternoon I loaded it with everything I’d need for the excursion and dug it out of the snow. The Volvo was one of the few items of value I’d fought for and won in my divorce. The apartment, the dog, the savings account, these were all battles lost. Perhaps this is why I took such pride in the Volvo’s performance, the way it handled on the ice, the way it got me anywhere that I needed.

Amid the darkening fields, down the freshly shoveled road, I drove past the Ablesons’ house. A light in the top corner was softly burning. I had only ever spent time with the Ablesons individually. I wondered what they were like together. I also wondered about the other rooms in the house, the unlit rooms where he and Mary had raised their children. Over our martinis, Mr. Ableson had mentioned stepsons. There was Doug, a Manhattan-­based financier who “likes to be very helpful to his mother,” as Ableson put it with a trace of judgment. There was also Bobby, a Boston-­based lawyer who “always has plenty of sound advice.” Ableson told a story about a day spent sipping Cokes by the swimming pool when they were little boys, how Bobby (the future lawyer) compulsively got out of the water to use the bathroom and how Doug (the future financier) never once got out, only interrupting his fun to give Ableson an occasional, guilty look from the shallow end.

Youngest of all was his daughter, Elizabeth. His only biological child was born more than a decade after her two half brothers. Ableson called her “Caboose” or simply “Boose” for short. Of the children, she was the only one he’d shown me a photograph of. “That’s about six years ago,” he’d said with some pride of this girl in her cap and gown. The recessed brown eyes, which you could read and then reread for a different meaning, the high cheekbones that mimicked her mother’s, and her hair—­a reddish brown—­like those hints that remained in Ableson’s hair, despite his ninety years. “Who’s that man she’s with?” I asked. Beside her in the photo, clutching Elizabeth’s hand like a cane, was an ancient and sickly looking fellow with prune-­dark eyes, their lids pouched and houndlike, and white hair that was merely a suggestion blown across his pockmarked scalp. “That’s me,” said Ableson defensively. He made a second, examining glance at the photo and added, “I wasn’t well back then,” before tucking it away. “And what does she do?” I asked, changing the subject. “Boose?” Ableson had said fondly, as if his daughter’s occupation infrequently occurred to him. “She’s still figuring it out.”

As I passed by Halcyon, I wondered whose room was whose. I also got another look at the scope of the renovation, which seemed a stop-­and-­start effort. The backhoe parked on the front yard hadn’t moved since weeks before when I’d last driven past; neither had the pallets of roofing materials, the stacks of plywood, or the sacks of cement. If what Mary had told me was true, and her husband had quarantined all this time, that meant “helpful” Doug and Bobby with the “sound advice” likely didn’t know about the renovation of their childhood home. Neither did Boose. To say nothing of what they didn’t know about Ableson. As far as they knew, their father was still dead.

I reached I-­81, that six-­lane monstrosity which runs up the Shenandoah Valley, the onetime breadbasket of the Confederacy. This is some of the most beautiful country. It is also some of the most haunted. Although both blue-­ and gray-­clad ghosts certainly stalk the valley, what it is really haunted by are alternate histories. Take for example May 2, 1863. It is the end of the first day of the Battle of Chancellorsville, which Southerners will come to refer to as the Miracle of Chancellorsville. Stonewall Jackson, the architect of that “miracle,” has repelled a Union army twice the size of his own. He is now considering a night counterattack. After making a reconnaissance of the Union lines, he is reentering his when a Confederate sentry fires on him, knocking Jackson from his saddle. Eight days later, after having his left arm amputated, pneumonia sets in and kills Jackson. But what if that sentry hadn’t fired? Jackson then would’ve been at Gettysburg the following July. Jackson, aggressive as he was, would have known to seize the high ground on Culp’s Hill on the battle’s first day. With Culp’s Hill in Confederate hands, Gettysburg might have ended very differently, a conclusion acknowledged by both Foote and his contemporary, the historian James McPherson, a century later. And if Gettysburg had ended differently, if the Confederates had successfully invaded Pennsylvania, European powers like Britain would have likely intervened. Lincoln’s government wouldn’t have survived the debacle. George McClellan, Lincoln’s old rival and the Democratic nominee of 1864, would have swept into office with promises to end the war. This would have involved recognizing the Confederacy. The nineteenth century would have been transformed. As would the twentieth. And the twenty-­first, even now only at its inception. All because of an accidental gunshot. What’s more remarkable is that you can stand where that shot was fired. This pivot point in the history of mankind is situated right after a rest stop with both a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Subway franchise. Exit 130B off the interstate.

I drove by exit 130B lost in these strange imaginings. What, I wondered, were the minor events of today that would forever change the trajectory of the future? Was some other sentry firing an equivalent gunshot at this moment as I drove north? Likely so. Twenty-­first-­century life far outpaced that of others, and so it followed that events like the gunshot that killed Jackson occurred today with greater frequency. Identifying those moments usually required the maturation of time and the work of historians. However, certain recent events needed no such distance. This was where my thoughts now turned.

Specifically, I was thinking of Bill Clinton. What if he hadn’t installed a recording device in the Oval Office like Nixon did? Then the tapes of him with Ms. Lewinsky never would’ve surfaced. How did Clinton think he’d be able to control those tapes when Nixon couldn’t? How did he expect a different outcome? Those tapes, his heavy breathing as he told Ms. Lewinsky what he wanted, her halting consent—­it’s what assured his conviction in the Senate. Clinton’s resignation, which jubilant Republicans believed assured them the next election, allowed Gore to fill his presidential shoes for a year before his own candidacy. It’s difficult to imagine how Gore would’ve narrowed out Bush in Florida had he not possessed the advantages of an incumbent. It seemed the dust on the recount had hardly settled when September 11th hit. Our response was swift and decisive, bin Laden dead by Christmas and our troops home by Easter. Would Bush have possessed Gore’s forbearance in the Middle East? I’ve often wondered.

At last my headlights crossed the exit for Gettysburg. Outside of town, I passed the sprawling campus of Gettysburg College. Inside of town, snow clogged the unplowed roads. I crept past the redbrick David Wills House where Lincoln had crafted his famous address. I parked my Volvo in a backlot of the historic six-­story, forty-­eight-­dollars-­per-­night Gettysburg Inn. I grabbed my duffel and headed into the hotel. The lobby’s tasseled draperies, paisley upholstered wing chairs, and polished oak tables were a paean to the Civil War era’s Victorian aesthetic. Historical accuracy aside, the décor was kitsch—­in much the same way battlefield reenactments are kitsch and selling cap guns and blue and gray uniforms to kids is kitsch; however, when I searched for last-­minute reservations, the Gettysburg Inn posted the best rate.

The off-­hours receptionist—­a kid with acne scars in the hollows of his cheeks and greasy black hair—­offered to upgrade me to a corner king-­sized room on the sixth floor with a view of Lincoln Square. He needed a moment to modify my reservation but assured me the upgrade was well worth it. While he clacked on his keyboard, he asked what I’d come to town for. Exhausted from my drive, and still without a room key, I had an inclination to reply sarcastically but could think of nothing to say. I noticed an open textbook spread next to the receptionist’s computer, its title: Principles of Business Management. That combined with the dark circles beneath his eyes, and I could easily imagine this kid working the hotel night shift, making do with two or three hours’ sleep, before trudging off to his first morning class at the college; and so I answered, “To visit the battlefield.”

“Have you got a tour planned?”

“I know my way around,” I said, and was about to add—­obnoxiously—­I’m a historian, when the receptionist pointed to a framed notice on the counter. The National Park Service, it seemed, had closed the battlefield because of the heavy snow. “Unless you have a guide registered with the NPS, they won’t let you in,” and then he asked, “Will you need one or two room keys?”

I sat on the edge of the bed. Through the sheer drapes I could make out the vague lamplight of Lincoln Square. This was one of the nicest rooms in the hotel, which must have been empty, or next to empty. The digital clock on my bedside table read 10:04 p.m. I needed to place a phone call if I was going to be able to tour the battlefield the next day. It was already late and the longer I waited the more impolite that call would be. I half hoped my old friend Lucas Harlow wouldn’t answer, then my decision would be made for me and I could drive on to Philadelphia and this curious appointment with Dr. Shields. Instead, Lucas Harlow answered on the first ring.

“Wait, you’re here?” he asked after an exchange of hellos.

“It’s last minute, I know, but I wondered if you wanted to tour the battlefield tomorrow. I thought we could catch up.”

“You’re asking because you need a certified guide.”

I said nothing.

Then he laughed. “That’s okay. I’ll take whatever time we can get. I’m teaching an eleven o’clock class. Could we meet at your hotel at seven? How’s your car handle in snow?”

“I’ve got the Volvo.”

“Still? How haven’t you scrapped that thing?” He kept laughing, and behind him I could hear his wife, Annette, ask who he was talking to. “Tomorrow at seven then,” he said and hung up. No goodbye.

My trip to Gettysburg had not only given me a reason to visit Dr. Shields but it had also given me a reason to spend a morning with Lucas. Although I had never heard of the National Parks Service restricting access to the battlefield, a part of me that I didn’t want to acknowledge—­something in my subconscious, perhaps—­must have known that coming here in the aftermath of a blizzard would force me to call Lucas, who I hadn’t spoken to in years, not since my divorce.

His wife, Annette, and my ex-­wife, Virginia—­or Ginny as everyone called her—­were cousins. And so, when my divorce went through, Lucas’s loyalty to his wife and her family eclipsed our friendship. There were no hard feelings on my part, but this explained why he’d hung up so abruptly; his wife likely wouldn’t have approved of us rekindling that friendship. Lucas and I had met nearly two decades before as graduate students at Tufts, in a snobbish history department that was keenly aware it wasn’t Harvard (a fifteen-­minute drive south on Massachusetts Avenue). Among the doctoral candidates in the department, Lucas was perhaps the most promising and the only Southerner. Broad-­shouldered, auburn-­haired, he had been a nose tackle of some distinction as an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi, where in a team photo he stands a head taller than the other players with two lines of eye black concealing a smatter of boyhood freckles across his cheeks; the reputation that followed him to Tufts was that he was the biggest nerd who ever played Ole Miss football and the coolest guy to ever step into its undergraduate history department. His graduate work, which was a thoroughly investigated study of former Confederate soldiers who’d gone on to prominent postwar careers in the Union, was well received by the coterie of professors at Tufts who—­guided by their prejudices against Southern scholars of the Civil War—­had first underestimated him. When his dissertation was published, it won him a departmental medal, a book deal with an academic press, and eventually a tenured position at Gettysburg College. Despite these accolades, his intelligence at times made him insufferable, like a man who sits beside you on the morning train and looks over your shoulder to solve your crossword puzzle.

The morning after checking into the hotel, I was down in the lobby with minutes to spare. Seven o’clock came and went. It was nearly half past the hour when Lucas finally barreled through the double doors. As we loaded my Volvo, he was tripping over himself with apologies. He could’ve easily blamed his late arrival on the snow-­clogged roads, or on any one of his three small children. But he was honest with me, as he was with most everyone. “Annette asked where I was going so early and I told her to meet you and we had a fight.”

I nodded grimly.

“So,” he began as we pulled out of town, “where to first?”

We passed through a checkpoint manned by a single park ranger slumped drowsily in her police cruiser. Lucas flashed her his guide certification and we were on our way. The first spot I wanted to visit was Little Round Top. With the vast expanse of snow-­blanketed battlefield completely to ourselves, we took Sedgwick Avenue (named for one general) to Hancock Avenue (named for another), which remained unplowed. The Volvo lost traction and began to stutter on the ice, so I suggested that Lucas and I walk the last couple of hundred yards. He shouldered his backpack and we made fresh tracks through the calf-­high snow. Neither of us spoke as we climbed the mellow hill, weaving our way through granite boulders, some of which still exhibited the gouges and nicks made by fifty-­caliber minié balls on that July day in 1863. Even at its busiest, when the battlefield teemed with tourists, the crowds would intuitively fall silent after arriving at this hillock, where the 20th Maine Volunteers held off the 15th Alabama Infantry, securing the left flank of the entire Union army.

“Holy of holies,” said Lucas as we stood where Chamberlain, the commander of the 20th Maine, had staked his regimental colors. We both knew the spot, though the granite marker commemorating it was blanketed beneath the fresh snow. That Lucas could come here, Mississippian that he was, and declare in a southern drawl that the place where the Union held was “holy” proved in my mind the efficacy of Foote’s great compromise.

Lucas pulled a thermos of coffee from his backpack. Perched on a twin pair of boulders we sipped from two steaming cups. Above us the wind passed through the high, heavily whispering trees. Had either of us been here with a group of students, or even tourists, we would have had much to say. We could’ve traced Chamberlain’s defenses on the now vacant ground. We might have mentioned that if you drew a straight line from the logging towns of central Maine—­where most of the defending 20th was recruited—­to the rural counties of southeastern Alabama—­where most of the attacking 15th was recruited—­the midpoint of that line was the summit of Little Round Top. However, Lucas and I already knew these things. There was no point in speaking them to one another. Eventually, he asked about my sabbatical. He’d heard from his wife, who had heard from my ex-­wife, that I was living in seclusion in a cabin.

“It’s a cottage,” I said defensively. “I’m renting it from an older couple.”

“A cottage . . . well, that sounds nice. Who’s the couple?”

I didn’t quite know how to categorize the Ablesons, so after mentioning their name and some vague details, I changed the subject. I asked Lucas if he had seen an article in the paper a few days ago, one about a certain experiment that had resuscitated some dead mice.

“Those Lazarus mice, right?” he answered. “Yeah, I read about them. My colleagues in the philosophy department are pretty worked up about it.”

“Why the philosophy department?”

“It’s the ethics behind this, it’s all new and has caught them off guard. The geneticists, the biologists, they’ve seen this coming for a while, ever since we mapped the human genome.” Lucas took another long pull on his coffee, which he clutched between both hands. “What was that? Five years ago? If you can map out genetic structures, then you can map out cellular ones. Which means it isn’t so big a step to go from engineering to re-­engineering cells. The building blocks have existed for years. Someone’s finally put it all together. Geneticists, cytogeneticists, even oncologists, most weren’t too surprised to hear about the mice. It’s the ethicists—­those dinosaurs in philosophy departments—­they’re the ones who hadn’t been watching. They’ve got no idea how to respond. One day you’re resurrecting mice, the next day people. What are the ethical implications? They don’t have a clue.”

I didn’t say anything. Lucas allowed the question to linger as we continued to gaze out over the battlefield. The sky had turned a profound and thoughtful blue. The snow shone with a particle glitter. “Where to next?” he eventually asked, glancing at his watch. It was a little after nine o’clock. I suggested we drive over to Seminary Ridge, to the woods where the Army of Northern Virginia had staged before Pickett’s Charge. Lucas shook his head. “Those roads are in bad shape and probably snowed in. The monument’s in bad shape, too.” The monument to which Lucas referred was the Virginia Monument. Four stories in height and funded by the state’s General Assembly in Richmond, it featured a mounted General Lee atop a granite pedestal with seven soldiers of the Confederacy deployed at its base. For decades—­to include the years of my study—­it was one of the most venerated sites on the battlefield. Of that ground where the monument stood, no less than Faulkner had written:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-­year-­old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago . . .

When I mentioned the Faulkner, Lucas shrugged. “Too much has changed. People hardly visit there anymore.” He spoke to me gently, as though revealing the terminal sickness of a mutual friend. He went on: “There’s a movement among some of the students and faculty at the college to petition the Virginia state authorities for a replacement monument that’s, well . . . more appropriate.”

“More appropriate?”

“Less grandiose.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “That monument is one of the most—­if not the most—­significant on the battlefield. You know that better than anyone. Did you tell them about the battle’s fiftieth anniversary, when Pickett’s veterans set out from the monument’s site to re-­walk their charge? Have they seen the photo at the stone wall from that day? When the Confederate and Union veterans shook hands across it, right at the Bloody Angle? Destroy the monument?”—­I had become exasperated—“They should be mobilizing to renovate the monument, not tear it down. You’re one of their top professors. Aren’t they listening to you?”

Lucas hunched his massive shoulders and stared down at his hands, his face wore a look like prayer. He offered to take my now empty cup. “Whaddya say we go. I’m getting cold. Coming up here was nice, though . . . I’m glad we had a chance to catch up.”

“Why don’t you and I both weigh in?” I offered, as Lucas was already finding his way back to my car. “These ideas of reconciliation, of compromise in American life, this is exactly what my work is about. We could partner on this.”

Lucas remained with his one hand on the car door handle as he waited for me to unlock it. “It’s me,” he finally said. “I’m the one petitioning to take it down . . . C’mon, Martin . . . our thinking on this needs to change. It has to evolve past Lee on his horse and Pickett waving his saber on his doomed but glorious charge.” Lucas sighed, and the noise of that exhale carried like wind through a chasm. “It’s the same as those Lazarus mice and the reason the philosophy departments are up in arms. Every ethicist knows that death isn’t such a bad thing. For mice. For people. Or for certain ideas.”

Lucas climbed into the car. We drove back toward town. At the crossroads on Cemetery Ridge, he began telling me about one of his students, a brilliant young woman double majoring in both pre-­med and history who’d chosen to write her senior thesis on the aftermath of the battle, instead of on the battle itself. “It’s energizing,” Lucas said, “to see young people pushing past the traditional narrative. Before the battle, Gettysburg’s population wasn’t even three thousand. After fighting, the two armies left behind seven thousand dead. The public health implications proved profound, yet there’s hardly anything written about it. We might even get her study published in ...”

But I’d stopped paying attention to Lucas. My stare lingered in the Volvo’s rearview mirror. Hovering at the jagged border of the leafless treetops, I could discern the Virginia Monument, specifically the bronze crown of Lee’s head caught in a spread of light cast by the late morning sun. Then, with total clarity, I could imagine a wrecking ball flung back on its chain, hurtling toward Lee, poised to deliver the decapitating blow Lucas was advocating for, when his voice interrupted my daydream, as if he were speaking from down a tunnel: “... people had to abandon their homes. For years they couldn’t come back. Can you imagine what it was like?”

“What what was like?”

“Gettysburg, after the battle. The dead in the fields. The townspeople left to clean them up.”

I then imagined the carnage, my mind fixating on a single image among the vast ruin of bodies: mice, a frenzy of mice.

When I pulled up to Lucas’s office on campus, he didn’t get out of the car right away. “It’s not that I don’t agree with the premise of your work,” he said, sitting in the passenger’s seat as we idled curbside. “Foote has influenced me as well, and I still assign certain of his writings to my students. But when you commemorate Southern courage, who is asking who to compromise? Who is benefiting? And who isn’t? You just want to be cautious. The study of history shouldn’t be backward looking. To matter, it has to take us forward. You understand?”

Did I understand? No, I didn’t. By definition history was backward looking.

By this point in the morning, I could hardly contain my frustration with Lucas and what I felt was, through equivocations, the corruption of a thinker I’d once so admired. As of yet, I didn’t say any of this to him, or agree with his seemingly absurdist assertion that the study of history should be forward looking, and so answered, “Please give my best to Annette.” He nodded once disappointedly and stepped out of the car.

After picking up my bag from the inn, I traveled east on I-­76. A low sky weighed on the earth, gradually absorbing the distance into a fog. After a couple of hours in the car, the rolling Pennsylvania countryside yielded to the gritty outskirts of Philadelphia, this old city of our Republic. Slick high rises confronted one another across the humped and uneven sidewalks. Filth-­encrusted slush replaced pristine meadows of snow and this transition mirrored what felt like a transition in time, from the pastoral life of other centuries to the urban life of this new one. While on the road, I had received a voicemail from Mrs. Ableson. She’d arranged a room for me at the Four Seasons on Arch and 19th Streets. At nearly four hundred dollars per night, it was a gesture of extreme generosity.

The hotel receptionist, a well-­groomed and pomaded ­gentleman—­a facsimile employed by five-­star hotels the world over—­checked me in. When I offered my debit card for incidentals, he waved it away. “It’s all covered,” he insisted. Unlike the Gettysburg Inn, there was no complimentary upgrade; however, when the bellman led me to my room, I struggled to conceive of a way that any upgrade could have possibly improved my accommodations; these included a panoramic view of Logan Square, a bath and waterfall shower, sitting area and stocked mini fridge with a complimentary bottle of seven-­year-­old Château Haut-­Brion.

My appointment with Dr. Shields wasn’t until the following morning. I settled into the couch, poured myself some of the wine, and began to scroll through the pay-­per-­view selections. After drinking deeply from my glass, an unsettling—­if obvious—­thought occurred. What service was I doing for the Ablesons that necessitated such a display of generosity? Had I, perhaps, gotten in over my head? And was this room evidence of that? Before I could follow this strand much further my phone rang. It was my ex-­wife, Ginny.

“Annette called. She says you’re in town.”

“Hi, Ginny.”

“Well, are you?”

Even though I was Ginny’s ex, she was competitive and didn’t like that Annette knew I was in town before she did. I checked my watch. It was nearing three o’clock. On her side of the line, I could hear voices in the background. Ginny must have been at her law firm’s downtown office. When we’d met, she’d been a public defender. By the time we split, she’d transitioned to matrimonial law. Which didn’t work out well for me. The judge had awarded her everything that two twenty-­somethings with pristine credit who’d convinced themselves they were in love could accumulate. In acknowledgment of the disparity between our future earnings potential, the judge had ordered Ginny to pay me one year of alimony—­“occupational rehabilitation” was the euphemism—­but that had backfired, hurting my dignity far more than it ever hurt her pocketbook. I suggested we meet that night for a drink, “just to catch up.”

“Sorry, I’ve got plans with Daryl.” This was her latest boyfriend, an associate at the law firm where Ginny had already made partner.

“Then why’d you call me?”

“Annette said you paid Lucas a visit and that you’re working on a book.”

“What else did she say?”

There was a pause. “Maybe that it wasn’t going so well.”

Lucas was one of those friends who had the annoying habit of telling his wife everything, which was only a problem if that wife had the habit of passing along the information—­which Annette did. A familiar tension settled in my jaw. I took a deep breath and again became aware of my surroundings: how beautiful this room was and that the entire reason I’d traveled to Philadelphia had nothing to do with my academic work (increasingly I believed myself to be the only one persuaded of its merits). “Things are going well,” I said, “great actually,” making an effort not to overdo the enthusiasm. “Come by for a drink. Bring Daryl.”

There was a pause on the line. “Where are you staying?”

“The Four Seasons downtown. Meet at the bar at seven?”

“The Four Seasons—­very nice.”

“I told you. Things are going well.”

I arrived at six thirty to make sure we got a decent table. I sat facing the door, in a corner booth reserved for guests of the hotel. Blue clouds of cigarette smoke rose in slow drifts. Every corner hummed with indistinct shreds of conversation. Above a mirrored bar lined with backlit bottles, a television played the news on mute with closed captions. Unnamed sources had recently reported that President Gore was on the cusp of issuing a pardon for Bill Clinton, a prospect that polled poorly. Two political commentators on the screen—­one Democrat, the other Republican—­were debating this eventuality so soon after Clinton’s conviction. The Republican, a silver-­haired and dandyish gentleman with a shotgun blast of patriotic lapel pins above a neatly folded silk pocket handkerchief the color of his tie, spoke of the severity of Clinton’s crimes and how he had debased the office of the presidency, and then, smirking, so a finely engraved parenthesis framed his lips, he asserted that his objection to a Clinton pardon was based on principle alone because it ran counter to his own best interests, seeing as a pardon by Gore would assure the Republicans the next election. The Democrat, a woman—­simply yet impeccably dressed—­stared down the camera as though she were a sprinter staring down the track. When the Republican finished, she fired off a list of suspect Republican pardons under their last president, H. W. Bush, to include those for the perpetrators of Iran-­Contra. If selling illicit arms to the Iranians merits a pardon, doesn’t a blow . . . bob? The censorious close caption wouldn’t form the entirety of the phrase, editing out the final word so clearly formed by her mouth; however, it hardly mattered. I could see those two words vault off her lips, as well as the other commentator’s expression, as if a flashbulb had gone off in his face when she said the words live on national television.

The camera cut back to the anchor, who led into the next segment: ... which is a story we’ve been tracking the last few days: A team of scientists has managed to bring lab mice back from the dead. Could human application be closer than we think? Our correspondent investigates ... The program cut to a commercial and Ginny walked into the bar.

We hugged awkwardly. A divorce without children is really little more than a very bad breakup. Through the experience of our failed marriage, the two of us had inherited each other. Ginny, despite our history—­or perhaps because of it—­had come to feel like a sister.

She ordered us another round of drinks and then got right to the point. “What’s with all this?”

“With all what?”

“The fancy hotel. The eighteen-­dollar drinks.”

“I’m here for work,” I said evasively.

“You mean your book?” She crossed her arms and leaned slowly back into her seat, daring me to lie to her, which of course I couldn’t. Instead, I stammered away not only about my book, but also my trip to Gettysburg and Lucas’s evolving views on the appropriateness of certain monuments. But the evaded point was swelling. I relented, explaining that I’d really traveled all this way as a favor to a friend, the one who had arranged for this hotel. “That’s some friend,” she said as the waiter brought over our brightly colored drinks. “Who is it?”

“My seventy-­year-­old landlady.”

“Annette told me about your landlady,” said Ginny. “You know, her husband, Robert Ableson, he was a big deal in the legal world. What’s the favor you’re doing her?”

Not wanting to answer, my eyes wandered to the television behind Ginny, where the segment on the Lazarus mice was playing. I pointed up to the screen. “Have you seen this?”

She turned in her chair. “The Lazarus mice? Yeah, I saw. Pretty amazing.” We sipped our drinks and watched the remaining seconds of the segment, in which a geneticist explained that the team working on resurrective technologies was making vast strides, and at an unprecedented pace. The one certainty of life is death, read the closed caption beneath the geneticist. And now? came the correspondent’s question, to which the geneticist shrugged, only to answer: Now, nothing is certain.

The segment ended. Ginny and I were left sipping our drinks. “Pretty amazing,” she said again, though her tone was flat, as if she weren’t quite sure. “If we’re able to bring more than mice back from the dead, Gore deserves a lot of the credit. The ultra-­conservatives on the religious right would’ve killed this research. Imagine if Bush had become president in 2000? His judges would’ve blocked all of this from the bench. You still haven’t answered my question. What’s this favor?”

“A meeting with a doctor.”

“Are you sick?” I detected a hint of panic in her voice, one which flattered me and which she must have noticed too because she grew silent, as though momentarily embarrassed by her concern.

“No, nothing like that. The doctor is a friend of Mrs. Ableson ...” I came slightly forward in my seat and, taking a sip of my drink, hid my mouth with the glass. Ginny had always been able to get whatever she wanted out of me, which was one of the ways she’d convinced me to confess to the minor infidelity that had led to the dissolution of our marriage. I could feel my resolve slipping, as if the segment I’d seen on television with the mice might even have been a sign that confiding in her about Robert Ableson could be the right decision. I would explain everything to Ginny and she, with her good judgment, could advise me what to do next. I had no idea what Dr. Shields would tell me at our meeting but felt as though I would want Ginny to help me make sense of it, whatever the it was. I was thinking of ways to convince her to stay for dinner when her phone rang.

“You’re where?” she said, her free hand cupping her ear. “We’re in the bar, not the restaurant ... Wait, you’re in the bar? ...” Then she stood, squinting out at the crowd. “Hold on, I see you,” and she waved overhead toward a tall, broad-­shouldered guy in a charcoal suit with a flop of blond hair. His back was toward us. “Daryl, I’m behind you. Turn around.” He executed a full pirouette. “No,” she said. “Turn halfway around.” He was looking straight at us now, but Ginny didn’t seem to register to him, and so he dumbly stood there. She exhaled sharply, flipped her phone shut, and marched toward the door. When she touched his arm, he still hadn’t seen her. Then, with a big stupid smile on his big stupid face, he threw out both his hands in a gesture that said Taddah! as though he himself had made her appear. What did it say about me that she had chosen to be with him? Which is another way to say that I hated him before he’d even sat down.

He scooted up an extra chair to our table. “Really good to fi­nally meet,” he said magnanimously, as though he was the one who’d stolen Ginny from me and welcomed this chance to clear up some imagined rivalry between us. The reality was I possessed no greater rival than myself and had long ago ruined my marriage without his help and didn’t appreciate any insinuation to the contrary. “Ginny mentioned you’re in town for work,” he added. “You’re a history teacher, right?”

“Historian,” I said.

His confused expression mimicked that of a moment before, when he was looking straight at Ginny but still couldn’t find her. He glanced at his watch. “I hate to break things up,” he said to Ginny, “but we should probably get going.” He turned to me. “Wish we had more time, but Virgie and I got an eight o’clock reservation at the Hungry Pigeon.” I shot Ginny a look—­no one called her “Virgie”—­but she dipped her eyes away, as if too embarrassed to acknowledge Daryl’s pet name. The two of them stood. When Ginny offered to pay, I refused. She thanked me with a dry kiss on the cheek, and I could feel Daryl monitoring us. His response was a crushing handshake as we parted. The two left and as I sat back at my table, I wished that I’d told Ginny about Mr. Ableson. Everlasting life had become a reality—­or at least it seemed so—­and the burden of that knowledge had become too strange to carry on my own.

I ordered dinner, ate alone, and continued to watch television from across the bar as I sipped my coffee. The segment on the Lazarus mice ran once more on a different news channel. People entered and exited, slowly filling the tables, unaware that the fabric of their existence had forever altered. Eventually, a woman approached. Her eyes shined like new coins and her smile was kind, the type a good-­natured stranger offers to a lost child. As she covered the half-­dozen steps between us, I imagined possibilities. Could the kindness of a stranger be what I needed? “I am so sorry to bother you,” she began, to which I answered hopefully, “No bother at all,” and added my own smile, gesturing for her to sit down if she wanted. She shook her head with awkward hesitation, and then asked if I was using the extra chair. I wasn’t. “Would you mind?” “No.” And she took it.

Finally, I went back to my room. That night I had perhaps the worst sleep of my life in the most comfortable bed I’d ever known.

At a little after nine a.m. the next morning, I found myself sitting on a leather tufted sofa across from Dr. Shields. Aside from welcoming me, he had yet to say anything. We shared the silence as he glanced down at the inches-­thick manila folder spread across his immense desk. Photographs of his wife, his children, and his infant grandchildren rested on the console behind him. Framed degrees crowded two walls of his corner office. On the other two walls, floor-­to-­ceiling windows boasted views of the ambling Schuylkill River.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I’m not sure where to begin.” He steepled his hands together. His fingers were thick and stubby, akin to a butcher’s, not a surgeon’s, and his skin bulged around his wedding band, the only jewelry he wore. His jaw was square, long and flat of the nutcracker type, and his white eyebrows formed a ridge above his eyes; these were dark and dense with thought like a marksman sighting down a rifle barrel. “Why don’t you tell me what you know.” This I proceeded to do, explaining how I’d come to rent the guest cottage, the nature of my academic research, and my visits with Mr. Ableson.

“What do the two of you talk about?” he asked gently.

“My work, his renovation of Halcyon, his work, a bit about the war.”

“The war,” answered Dr. Shields. “Let’s start there.” From the back of the console, he lifted a sepia-­toned portrait in a silver frame. It was of a man in uniform wearing a garrison cap tilted jauntily back to reveal a bristly military-­style haircut. Uniform and haircut notwithstanding, the man appeared to be a younger version of himself. “That’s my father, Jim Shields. Have you heard about him?”

I had.

By this point, Robert Ableson and I had shared enough drinks on enough evenings in the guest cottage that I had heard most—­if not all—­of his war stories. This chapter of Ableson’s life began in 1941, in those feverish days after Pearl Harbor (“feverish” being Ableson’s adjective, not mine), he had through his extensive and WASP-­ish family connections earned a commission in the infantry despite being north of thirty-­five years old. At first, the war proved uneventful for him. He had rotated between stateside training camps and clerical duties on large staffs. Soon enough, however, bloody campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific had ground up the ranks of younger officers and he eventually found himself on a landing craft, sea spray hitting his face from over the front ramp, at the head of a rifle company on June 14, 1944, as it crossed Red Beach 1, onto Japanese-­held Saipan. That island—­a speck on the map in the vast Pacific—­would come to haunt Ableson for the remainder of his life. The troops he led were mostly down-­and-­outers from hick towns and ghettos (as Ableson put it), none of whom he would have ever known had he been ten years younger, a captain in the Marines or the Screaming Eagles, or any outfit with a pedigree more illustrious than that of the 27th Infantry Division.

They had loaded ships in San Francisco Bay and their journey had lasted five weeks as they bounced between transports and staging camps. Ableson would explain that the deep bonds forged by fighting men only solidified after the events themselves, often through a process of tearful and boozy reunions, so that during the fighting your comrades were barely known to you, strangers really. They died as strangers too. It was only if they lived that they became friends. This was how Ableson found himself crouching in a foxhole on the third day of the fighting alongside Jimmy Shields, the company medic, whom he hardly knew at all.

Before then, Ableson had only one other interaction with Shields: his physical aboard the transport as they steamed westward. This requirement of a physical before a battle—­in which being maimed, crippled, or killed were all likely outcomes—­was one of many such contradictory requirements imposed by the military bureaucracy, and it involved Shields drawing several vials of his commanding officer’s blood. “Relax, Doc,” Ableson had said when he noticed the tremble in Shields’s hands as he searched for a vein. In an effort to calm this nervous medic armed with his beveled needle, Ableson had tried to talk with him about something else—­anything really—­and noticed his gold wedding band. He asked whether the young medic had children. “One,” said Doc Shields, “a little boy.” Then he stuck Ableson, missing the vein entirely and painfully hitting muscle. Ableson winced and then calmly took the needle from Doc Shields. In a gesture of incredible competence, which shocked the medic, his commanding officer stuck himself, piercing the vein and drawing a gusher of his own blood that he emptied expertly into a first and then second vial, until Doc Shields composed himself enough to take over. More than a month later, when the pair found themselves sharing a foxhole, Ableson still had a bruise on the tender inside of his elbow given to him by Doc Shields.

Ableson had once before told me the story of the medic who had fumbled taking his blood, with the punch line being how he’d wound up taking his own blood instead, a neat trick. He hadn’t given the story any greater context than that, and now Dr. Shields, renowned oncologist and son of that very same army medic, filled in the rest. That night, Ableson’s company was holding a portion of the defenses around Alito airfield, a strategic objective on the island. The 27th Division along with the Marines had pushed the Japanese into the jungle earlier in the day and were waiting for the inevitable counterattack. At a little after midnight, from the canopy of trees beyond the runway, came the noise of bugles followed by shouts and jeers from the opposing Japanese. This was the overture to the inevitable banzai charge. A dense human wave then broke on top of them, isolating each defending pair within its foxhole. The battle proved an intimate affair, like a series of knife fights settled in individual telephone booths, their dozens of outcomes across the defensive line ultimately determining which side would hold the airfield by morning.

Doc Shields and Ableson fired at the onslaught of muzzle flashes and voices that surged toward them (by morning Ableson would preside over a carpet of bodies). Soon both had emptied their rifles, so they fired their pistols into the black night. When one of the charging Japanese leapt into their foxhole, Ableson caved in his face with the flat side of a rock. Then, amidst this ever-­heightening chaos, a grenade landed at their feet, a stem of acrid smoke uncoiling as its fuse fizzled down. Thousands of rifles were firing at once but Ableson and Shields heard it land with a hollow thud. As Ableson remembered it, Shields gave him a reckless look, an insane look. In the glare of the fires that burned around them, Ableson recognized it as the look of a man who was about to give everything away and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise.

Doc Shields flung himself belly down on the grenade.

Ableson, stunned by the gesture, didn’t dive to the ground to protect himself; instead, he stood frozen over Shields, whose body lifted in the air as if it were tied at the waist to an invisible, upward raised tether as it absorbed the blast.

This part of the story was new to me. I didn’t know quite what to say, so after an extended silence settled on “Did they award your father a medal?”

Dr. Shields shook his head, no. Ableson had filled out a recommendation to that effect, specifically the Medal of Honor; but, when Doc Shields’s wife got wind of it, she asked him to withdraw her husband’s name. “She was upset at my father,” Dr. Shields explained. “She didn’t think he’d needed to do what he had done. Maybe she thought he could’ve jumped in one direction and Ableson could’ve jumped in the other and they might have escaped with little more than some cuts and bruises. Truthfully, I don’t really know what my mother thought as she didn’t like to discuss my father, at least not with me. My father sacrificed everything, tossed it all away on a gesture. In her mind, I think she believed my father had chosen Ableson over her. To the day she died, I don’t think she ever forgave my father.”

“Did you feel the same?”

Dr. Shields returned the photograph to the console. He placed it in its spot among the family he himself had created, the children and infant grandchildren of a man whose own father had been too frightened to take a vial of his commanding officer’s blood but who had possessed enough courage to jump on a grenade for that same person. “Robert Ableson is the best man I know,” answered Dr. Shields. “I don’t think my father would mind me saying this, but he probably did a better job helping raise me than my father would have done had he lived. In that way, I sometimes wonder if my father knew exactly what he was doing when he jumped on that grenade.”

As I sat across from Dr. Shields, admiring the view from his corner office, surrounded by his impressive and calligraphed credentials, it was obvious that without Ableson’s support and guidance the son of an army medic never would’ve ascended to these vaunted heights within the medical establishment. Dr. Shields owed his life to Ableson just as Ableson owed his life to Doc Shields, whose single, selfless act precipitated everything that followed. This is why Dr. Shields had begun our conversation by speaking of the war.

“After what my father did,” Dr. Shields explained, “I don’t think Robert ever again felt that he was living simply for himself. Every day he believed he had to earn what my father sacrificed. Look at his career as a litigator. Robert managed nearly twice the caseload of his peers, to say nothing of his pro bono work and the role he played as a surrogate father in my life. Mary’s always believed his career is why he waited so long to start a family of his own. Have you met his stepsons, Bobby and Doug? If you get a chance, ask those two about his work habits, his impossible standards. What I’m trying to say is, knowing him as I did, knowing how he’d lived his life after the war, always trying to make good on my father’s sacrifice for him, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d do anything to gain himself a little more time. The only part of this that’s surprising is that it has worked.”

Dr. Shields described in some detail how a decade before, when Ableson’s health had begun to deteriorate and it became obvious his years were dwindling to their end, he’d taken a great interest in a specific series of legal briefings. These arguments, submitted by attorneys within the Clinton Justice Department, and thus discoverable by a simple Freedom of Information Act request, explored the implications of the Human Genome Project’s research across myriad fronts, from cloning to cellular restructuring to cryonics. Contemporaneous to the scientific work done by the NIH, HHS, DOE, and an alphabet soup of other government agencies, was the administration’s legal work. Clinton wasn’t going to allow the application of these scientific breakthroughs to become stalled in the increasingly right-­wing, conservative courts. By following the progress of these legal arguments, Ableson could follow the progress of the geneticists’ work. This is what led him into Dr. Shields’s office a year before his death with a somewhat obscure legal briefing on cryonics.

On that visit, Ableson sat on the very same sofa where I now sat, the two of us divided by a decade but facing out toward the Schuylkill River that churned toward the Atlantic. It was obvious Ableson wasn’t well, and as he reached across the desk to show Dr. Shields the legal brief, his suit was baggy at the shoulders from where he’d begun to lose weight, as if with more time he might vanish entirely into its folds. Ableson had highlighted whole sections of the brief and his cramped notes assiduously crowded the margins, often in different colored pens, as though he’d read the document many times over. “Cryonics ... the possibility of cellular restructuring through reverse biochemistry ... resurrection ...” Dr. Shields became increasingly agitated as he read. “This is pseudo­science garbage,” he told Ableson. “I hope you don’t believe a word of it.” He swatted the paper down onto his desk as though killing a fly with it.

“Why would attorneys at the Department of Justice put to­gether this briefing at great energy and expense if this wasn’t a possibility?” asked Ableson as he returned the brief to its folder.

“What are you suggesting?”

“I want you to help me make the appropriate preparations ... in case the breakthroughs in these pages actually happen.” Ableson already had most of his plans figured out. He’d selected a reputable cryonics carrier. He’d arranged the recurring payments. He’d even drafted and signed a secondary will, which outlined his wishes in the event that he was at some later date “resuscitated.” He simply needed Dr. Shields to act as his executor.

“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 teenage 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.”