Notes From a Cemetery

America has two national holidays that honor those who have served, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The former is for the living; the latter is for the dead. How we remember, honor, and judge the dead was on my mind as I wrote Halcyon, a novel that imagines an alternate America in which a scientific breakthrough has allowed a few of those dead to again wander among us. What follows is an excerpt that foregrounds questions of national memory, in which the novel’s narrator, Martin Neumann, encounters the World War II hero and renowned lawyer Robert Ableson considering his military service and the symbolism of our national cemeteries. Halcyon is about the intersection of individual and national memory, which is what Memorial Day is about too.

Oak Ridge Cemetery was as its name described. The headstones were interspersed among the ancient trees, and the ridge was one of many that bracketed the northeast-by-southwest-running Shenandoah Valley.