Halcyon, page 23
The drive was smooth and silent. The disembodied voice of the Tesla’s onboard navigation system couldn’t find the museum; the software it relied on didn’t seem to acknowledge its existence and so we navigated to a nearby address instead. When we arrived, there was no sign out front. We pulled into the parking lot and found the museum’s address on the side of a multistoried warehouse. From the driver’s seat, my ride leaned over his steering wheel, craning his neck upward, as he said that he’d always heard about this place but had never thought to visit. When I invited him inside, he shook his head in a mild panic. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’d rather not,” and his Tesla was out of the parking lot and back on the road before I had reached the front door.
Inside, a ticket counter stood to my front and the glassed-in façade of a gift shop to my right. A stand near the counter offered brochures and a map of the museum. My flight that night departed at a little after eight o’clock and the museum shut at six. This gave me a couple of hours to wander around. A large book was spread open next to the cash register, which I recognized immediately. It was the final volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. Whoever was reading it would soon return, and after a few moments a door opened from what appeared to be the gift shop stockroom.
“My apologies,” said a young man who stepped behind the counter. Clear-eyed, square-jawed, with shoulders built sturdy and wide as rafter beams, he was college-aged, wore an open-collared shirt and linen sports coat. He appeared convinced of himself, assured, and in this manner of conviction and assurance he very much reminded me of Lucas Harlow. He tucked his marker into the volume of Shelby Foote and offered to sell me a ticket. I asked him about the book, and he mentioned that he was enrolled in a graduate program in American history. When I mentioned how glad I was to learn that they still assigned Shelby Foote, he shook his head. “They don’t,” he said. “I’m reading it on my own.” He issued me a ticket and then removed a map of the museum from the stand. His knowledge of the relics inside proved encyclopedic as he recommended certain exhibits. “How long have you worked here?” I asked, tucking my ticket stub into my pocket. He explained that it was simply a summer job; next year, he’d receive his degree and after that he planned to teach. I made a comment about summer jobs being difficult to find and mentioned some of the horrible ones I’d once held as a graduate student. To which he replied that working at this museum had been, in fact, his first choice. “What type of a historian would I be,” he said, “if I refused to understand every side of an issue, no matter how odious.” He glanced over his shoulder, into the cavernous maw of Confederate regalia behind him. “By the way, it’s just me around here,” he added. “So please make sure you’re out by six.” When he finished speaking, I couldn’t help but think—with a mix of satisfaction and also grim resignation—that nothing has been settled, that no enduring conclusion has been reached, that Lucas Harlow would, at some later date, have to contend with this doppelgänger of his, with this future self that tended to the monuments he had torn down. Then the young man disappeared, withdrawing back into the stockroom to continue whatever inventory I had so clearly interrupted.
I advanced into the dim-lit depths of the museum, where I wandered among the displays of rifles, glinting cavalry sabers, tattered regimental flags, uniformed mannikins, and dioramas of famous battles—Chickamauga, Fort Donelson, Big Bethel, the Siege of Corinth—all entombed in glass. To save power, motion sensors controlled the lights so that my progress illuminated the path. Speakers clamped to the rigging in the ceiling played “The Bonnie Blue Flag” on a loop, the volume set to a low background murmur. Several times, I grew disoriented, unable to situate my place on the map among the labyrinthine and seemingly endless corridors that housed this collection, which was arrayed in no discernible order aside from the order in which the museum had acquired it. Marked on a far corner of my map was the Virginia Monument.
The motion sensors above the monument triggered when I stepped inside the four-story bay that housed its bronze edifice. A cluster of lights shined down on General Lee, Traveller, and the seven soldiers gathered at the monument’s base. The museum had needed something to place the monument on and so had commissioned a replica of the original pedestal, except instead of granite it was cast in far less expensive poured concrete. Around the monument the museum had also erected a four-story scaffold. The result was quite democratic, allowing visitors to view the statue from every angle, not just from the ground staring up.
I climbed the scaffold to its fourth story. The higher I went, the closer I came to the overhead lights, which cast a gloomy halo over Lee, and soon I was standing face-to-face with the old general. He appeared different from this angle, not like the venerated Lee, but more like any man who I might recognize in a crowd. When I leaned on the scaffolding’s railing, the two of us were separated by such a minor distance that it seemed as if I were leaning forward to hear him better as we shared a table at a crowded restaurant. While I considered his bronze face, I wondered what other expressions it had been capable of. How often had it formed into laughter, into rage, or even into apology? That was what he’d done after all, when the survivors of Pickett’s Charge had crossed back over the field; he’d apologized, telling them, “It’s all my fault,” and he’d spent the five short years of his life that remained after the war uttering a string of similar apologies. It was Lee himself who’d argued against erecting any monuments to his misbegotten cause. And yet here he was, preserved in bronze.
On the scaffolding’s landing was a bench. I sat on it, resting the back of my head against the railing. I had hardly slept the night before and, in the last two days, had traveled hundreds of miles by car and still had an ocean to cross. Exhaustion set in when I thought of the overnight flight ahead of me. “The Bonnie Blue Flag” played on its incessant loop from the speakers above and, just for a moment, I decided to shut my eyes…
* * *
—
When I awoke, it was to a vast darkness and silence. Four stories beneath me, at the base of the scaffolding, I heard the metallic clatter of wheels. A noise like a mop bucket proceeded in my direction. When whoever was below triggered a motion sensor, the glaring overhead light that hung above me shined down, reillumining the bronze contours of Lee’s face. His expression no longer seemed apologetic but accusatory as I blinked my eyes, struggling to adjust them out of the darkness.
Footsteps ascended the scaffolding. With them came the hollow sound of whistling, the same song that had looped all day across the speakers, “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” a tune engineered to get in your head and stay there. The whistling grew closer. In a burst of panic, I checked my watch. The museum had closed thirty minutes ago. If I left now I could—maybe and with a bit of luck—still make my eight o’clock flight. I stood from the bench but hadn’t taken a single step before the janitor appeared on the fourth-story landing, clutching his bucket with one hand and his mop handle with the other. He set both down clumsily, a splash of water spilling across the stairs.
When he saw me, he startled and took a step back, his ring of keys jangling on his hip. I apologized, explaining my mistake and that I wasn’t a burglar or any kind of criminal but that I’d simply fallen asleep. He was an older man in coveralls with a thick but well-groomed beard, much like Lee’s, and with a similar dignity in posture, though I did notice how his eyes refused mine at every glance. Frozen to his spot atop the scaffold, he blocked my way. I fished around in my pocket, hunting for my ticket stub, as if this might convince him of the sincerity of my mistake. When I produced it, his eyes finally met mine; they looked as though they had seen a battle and in them, I recognized the cold gaze of Robert Ableson.
“You’re alive…?”
Whether it was the beard or simple proximity to the statue, the man’s resemblance to both Abelson and Lee was uncanny. Like the old general, the man’s gaze proved equally perplexing, a mix of rage, defeat, defiance, and also apology.
“I visited Boose…and Mary…and Susan. I saw the peonies…I knew you’d left them on their graves…I knew it was you…” I spoke in a stammer, each word tripping over the other like those of a madman as I hoped to prod some response out of him, some acknowledgment that what I suspected was true: that he’d never died and, perhaps, never would. “You’re living down here…? How long have you worked here…? How often do you visit Halcyon…?”
The janitor threw down his mop handle, tipping over his bucket so that it blocked my path. With this head start he sprinted down the scaffolding, taking the steps two at a time.
“Wait!” I shouted, chasing after him.
With water pouring over the stairs, I also took them two at a time and soon slipped, landing painfully on my side. When I arrived at the scaffold’s bottom, the janitor had already vanished into the depths of the museum. I followed him but quickly became turned around and then lost entirely among this endless accumulation of memorabilia. Down a nearby corridor, I heard what sounded like a door flung open. Then, out of the silence, an alarm thundered from every speaker in the museum. When I eventually made it to the emergency exit, the janitor was nowhere to be found.
I stepped through the door he’d left open, out the back of the museum and into the heat of a stifling night. Off in the distance, I could see clusters of orbiting siren lights already traveling both ends of the road in my direction. I would miss my flight and would, likely, miss my celebration of the Bastille Day fireworks with Amélie, which I had so long anticipated, and had hoped might prove my first memory of a different life made in a new country. All those plans seemed suddenly quite foolish.
I had no car, no means of escape, so I sat on the curb and waited for the police to arrive. I wondered what crime, if any, they would charge me with.
My thanks, as ever, to PJ Mark,
and to Diana Miller,
and, of course, to Lea Carpenter.
a note about the author
Elliot Ackerman is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels 2034, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoirs The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan and Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a Marine veteran, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.
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Elliot Ackerman, Halcyon
