Station Eleven

19

SOMETIMES THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night. At other times it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it, especially at times when they had to camp between towns, when they were turned away at gunpoint from hostile places, when they were traveling in snow or rain through dangerous territory, actors and musicians carrying guns and crossbows, the horses exhaling great clouds of steam, times when they were cold and afraid and their feet were wet. Or times like now when the heat was unrelenting, July pressing down upon them and the blank walls of the forest on either side, walking by the hour and wondering if an unhinged prophet or his men might be chasing them, arguing to distract themselves from their terrible fear.

“All I’m saying,” Dieter said, twelve hours out of St. Deborah by the Water, “is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek.” He was walking near Kirsten and August.

Survival is insufficient: Kirsten had had these words tattooed on her left forearm at the age of fifteen and had been arguing with Dieter about it almost ever since. Dieter harbored strong anti-tattoo sentiments. He said he’d seen a man die of an infected tattoo once. Kirsten also had two black knives tattooed on the back of her right wrist, but these were less troubling to Dieter, being much smaller and inked to mark specific events.

“Yes,” Kirsten said, “I’m aware of your opinion on the subject, but it remains my favorite line of text in the world.” She considered Dieter one of her dearest friends. The tattoo argument had lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met.

Midmorning, the sun not yet broken over the tops of the trees. The Symphony had walked through most of the night. Kirsten’s feet hurt and she was delirious with exhaustion. It was strange, she kept thinking, that the prophet’s dog had the same name as the dog in her comic books. She’d never heard the name Luli before or since.

“See, that illustrates the whole problem,” Dieter said. “The best Shakespearean actress in the territory, and her favorite line of text is from Star Trek.”

“The whole problem with what?” Kirsten felt that she might actually be dreaming at this point, and she longed desperately for a cool bath.

“It’s got to be one of the best lines ever written for a TV show,” August said. “Did you see that episode?”

“I can’t say I recall,” Dieter said. “I was never really a fan.”

“Kirsten?”

Kirsten shrugged. She wasn’t sure if she actually remembered anything at all of Star Trek, or if it was just that August had told her about it so many times that she’d started to picture his stories in her head.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Star Trek: Voyager,” August said hopefully. “That episode with those lost Borg and Seven of Nine?”

“Remind me,” Kirsten said, and he brightened visibly. While he talked she allowed herself to imagine that she remembered it. A television in a living room, a ship moving through the night silence of space, her brother watching beside her, their parents — if she could only remember their faces — somewhere near.

The Symphony stopped to rest in the early afternoon. Would the prophet send men after them, or had they been allowed to leave? The conductor sent scouts back down the road. Kirsten climbed up to the driver’s bench of the third caravan. A dull buzz of insects from the forest, tired horses grazing at the side of the road. The wildflowers growing by the roadside were abstract from this vantage point, paint dots of pink and purple and blue in the grass.

Kirsten closed her eyes. A memory from early childhood, before the collapse: sitting with a friend on a lawn, a game where they closed their eyes and concentrated hard and tried to read one another’s minds. She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle. Charlie, where are you? She knew the effort was foolish. She opened her eyes. The road behind them was still empty. Olivia was picking flowers below.

“A little farther,” the conductor was saying, somewhere below, and the horses were being harnessed again, the caravans creaking into motion, the exhausted Symphony walking onward through the heat until hours later they set up camp by the roadside, the ones who remembered the lost world thinking longingly of air-conditioning even after all these years.

“It just came out of a vent?” Alexandra asked.

“I believe so,” Kirsten said. “I’m too tired to think.”

They’d walked for all but five of the eighteen hours since they’d left St. Deborah by the Water, through the night and morning and deep into the afternoon, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the prophet. Some of them took turns trying to sleep in the moving caravans, others walking and walking until their thoughts burned out one by one like dying stars and they fell into a fugue state wherein all that mattered or had ever existed were these trees, this road, the counterpoint rhythms of human footsteps and horses’ hooves, moonlight turning to darkness and then the summer morning, caravans rippling like apparitions in the heat, and now the Symphony was scattered here and there by the roadside in a state of semi-collapse while they waited for dinner to be ready. Half the Symphony had set off in pairs to hunt rabbits. The cook fire sent a plume of white smoke like a marker into the sky.

“Air-conditioning came out of a vent,” August confirmed. “You’d press a button, and whoosh! Cold air. I had one in my bedroom.”

Kirsten and August were setting up tents, and Alexandra, whose tent had been set up already, was lying on her back staring up at the sky.

“Oh,” Alexandra said. “So it was electricity, or gas?”

August looked at the tuba, who was sitting nearby with his daughter half-asleep in his arms. Olivia had announced that she was too tired to wait for dinner, so he’d been telling her a bedtime story about a mermaid while Lin set up their tent.

“Electricity,” the tuba said. “Air conditioners were electric.” He craned his neck to see his daughter’s face. “Is she asleep?”

“I think so,” Kirsten said. This was when she heard the exclamation from the third caravan—“What the fuck,” someone said, “goddamnit, what is this?”—and she stood up in time to see the first cello haul a girl out of the caravan by the arm. Olivia sat up, blinking.

“A stowaway.” August was grinning. He’d been a stowaway himself once. “We haven’t had a stowaway in years.”

The stowaway was the girl who’d followed Kirsten in St. Deborah by the Water. She was crying and sweaty, her skirt soaked with urine. The first cello lifted her to the ground.

“She was under the costumes,” the first cello said. “I went in looking for my tent.”

“Get her some water,” Gil said.

The conductor swore under her breath and looked off down the road behind them while the Symphony gathered. The first flute gave the girl one of her water bottles.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I’m so sorry, please don’t make me go back—”

“We can’t take children,” the conductor said. “This isn’t like running away and joining the circus.” The girl looked confused. She didn’t know what a circus was. “Incidentally,” the conductor said to the assembled company, “this is why we check the caravans before we depart.”

“We left St. Deborah in kind of a hurry,” someone muttered.

“I had to leave,” the girl said. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything, just—”

“Why did you have to leave?”

“I’m promised to the prophet,” the girl said.

“You’re what?”

The girl was crying now. “I didn’t have any choice,” she said. “I was going to be his next wife.”

“Jesus,” Dieter said. “This goddamn world.” Olivia was standing by her father, rubbing her eyes. The tuba lifted her into his arms.

“He has more than one?” asked Alexandra, still blissfully ignorant.

“He has four,” the girl said, sniffling. “They live in the gas station.”

The conductor gave the girl a clean handkerchief from her pocket. “What’s your name?”

“Eleanor.”

“How old are you, Eleanor?”

“Twelve.”

“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?”

“He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.”

“Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?”

“Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said. “Hell, if I were a prophet—”

“Your parents allowed this?” the conductor asked, simultaneously making a Shut up motion in the direction of the clarinet and Sayid.

“They’re dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Were you spying on me in St. Deborah?” Kirsten asked.

The girl shook her head.

“No one told you to watch us?”

“No,” she said.

“Did you know Charlie and the sixth guitar?”

Eleanor frowned. “Charlie and Jeremy?”

“Yes. Do you know where they went?”

“They went to the — to the Museum of Civilization.” Eleanor said museum very carefully, the way people sound out foreign words of whose pronunciation they’re uncertain.

“The what?”

August whistled softly. “They told you that’s where they were going?”

“Charlie said if I could ever get away, that’s where I could find them.”

“I thought the Museum of Civilization was a rumor,” August said.

“What is it?” Kirsten had never heard of it.

“I heard it was a museum someone set up in an airport.” Gil was unrolling his map, blinking shortsightedly. “I remember a trader telling me about it, years back.”

“We’re headed there anyway, aren’t we? It’s supposed to be outside Severn City.” The conductor was peering over his shoulder. She touched a point on the map, far to the south along the lakeshore.

“What do we know about it?” the tuba asked. “Do people still live there?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“It could be a trap,” the tuba murmured. “The girl could be leading us there.”

“I know,” the conductor said.

What to do with Eleanor? They knew they risked accusations of kidnapping and they had long adhered to a strict policy of non-intervention in the politics of the towns through which they passed, but no one could imagine delivering a child bride back to the prophet. Had a grave marker with her name on it already been driven into the earth? Would a grave be dug if she returned? Nothing for it but to take the girl and press on into the unknown south, farther down the eastern shore of Lake Michigan than they’d ever been.

They tried to engage Eleanor in conversation over dinner. She’d settled into a wary stillness, the watchfulness of orphans. She rode in the back of the first caravan, so that she’d be at least momentarily out of sight if anyone approached the Symphony from the rear. She was polite and unsmiling.

“What do you know about the Museum of Civilization?” they asked.

“Not very much,” she said. “I just heard people talk about it sometimes.”

“So Charlie and Jeremy had heard about it from traders?”

“Also the prophet’s from there,” she said.

“Does he have family there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell us about the prophet,” the conductor said.

He’d come to St. Deborah by the Water not long after the Symphony had left Charlie and Jeremy there, the head of a sect of religious wanderers. The sect had moved into the Walmart at first, a communal encampment in what had once been the Lawn and Garden Department. They told the townspeople they’d come in peace. A few people were uneasy about them, this new population with vague stories about travel in the south, in the territory once known as Virginia and beyond — rumors held that the south was exceptionally dangerous, bristling with guns, and what might they have done to survive down there? — but the new arrivals were friendly and self-sufficient. They shared their meat when they hunted. They helped with chores and seemed harmless. There were nineteen of them, and they mostly kept to themselves; some time passed before the townspeople realized that the tall man with blond hair who seemed to be their leader was known only as the prophet and had three wives. “I am a messenger,” he said, when introduced to people. No one knew his real name. He said he was guided by visions and signs. He said he had prophetic dreams. His followers said he was from a place called the Museum of Civilization, that he’d taken to the road in childhood to spread his message of light. They had a story about setting out in the early morning and then stopping for the day only a few hours later, because the prophet had seen three ravens flying low over the road ahead. No one else had seen the ravens, but the prophet was insistent. The next morning they came upon a collapsed bridge and a riverside funeral, women singing, voices rising over three white shrouds. Three men had died when the bridge fell into the river. “Don’t you see?” the prophet’s followers said. “If not for his vision that would have been us.”

When the winter fever struck St. Deborah by the Water, when the mayor died, the prophet added the mayor’s wife to his collection and moved with his followers into the gas station in the center of town. No one had quite realized how much weaponry they had. Their stories about travel in the south began to fall into place. Within a week it became obvious that the town was his. Eleanor didn’t know why the prophet’s dog was named Luli.

20

TWO DAYS OUT OF St. Deborah by the Water, the Symphony came upon a burnt-out resort town. A fire had swept through some years ago and now the town was a meadow with black ruins standing. A sea of pink flowers had risen between the shards of buildings. The charred shells of hotels stood along the lakeshore and a brick clock tower was still standing a few blocks inland, the clock stopped forever at eight fifteen.

The Symphony walked armed and on full alert, Olivia and Eleanor in the back of the lead caravan for safety, but they saw no signs of human life. Only deer grazing on overgrown boulevards and rabbits burrowing in ashy shadows, seagulls watching from lampposts. The Symphony shot two deer for dinner later, pried the arrows from their ribs, and strung them over the hoods of the first two caravans. The lakeshore road was a complicated patchwork of broken pavement and grass.

On the far side of town they reached the limits of the fire, a place where the trees stood taller and the grasses and wildflowers changed. Just beyond the fire line they found an old baseball field, where they stopped to let the horses graze. Half-collapsed bleachers slumped into tall grass. Three banks of floodlights had stood over this field, but two had fallen. Kirsten knelt to touch the thick glass of a massive lamp, trying to imagine the electricity that it had conducted, the light pouring down. A cricket landed on her hand and sprang away.

“You couldn’t even look directly at them,” Jackson said. He hadn’t liked baseball much but had gone a few times as a child anyway, sitting dutifully in the stands with his father.

“You going to stand there all day?” Sayid asked, and Kirsten glared at him but returned to work. They were cutting grass for the horses, to carry with them in case there was a place farther down the road where there was nothing for the animals to eat. Eleanor sat by herself in the shade of the first caravan, humming tunelessly, braiding and unbraiding pieces of grass. She’d spoken very little since they’d found her.

The scouts reported a school, just beyond the trees at the edge of the field. “Take a couple of the others and check the school for instruments,” the conductor told Kirsten and August. They set out with Jackson and the viola. It was a degree or two cooler in the shade of the forest, the ground soft with pine needles underfoot.

“I’m glad to get out of that field,” Viola said. She’d had a different name when she was younger, but had taken on the name of her instrument after the collapse. She sniffled quietly. She was allergic to grass. The forest had crept up to the edges of the school parking lot and sent an advance party out toward the building, small trees growing through cracks in the pavement. There were a few cars parked on flat tires.

“Let’s watch for a moment,” August said, and they stood for a while at the edge of the woods. The saplings in the parking lot were stirred by a breeze, but otherwise nothing moved in the landscape except birds and the shimmer of heat waves. The school was dark and still. Kirsten brushed sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

“I don’t think anyone’s here,” Jackson said finally. “The place looks desolate.”

“I don’t know,” Viola muttered. “Schools give me the creeps.”

“You volunteered,” Kirsten said.

“Only because I hate cutting grass.”

They skirted the building first, looking in windows, and saw only ruined classrooms with graffiti on the walls. The back door gaped open into a gymnasium. Sunlight poured through a hole in the ceiling, a few weeds growing in the debris where light touched the floor. This place had been used as a shelter, or possibly a field hospital. A jumble of cots had been piled in a corner of the room. Later someone had built a fire under the hole in the ceiling, old ashes mixed with animal bones. Easy to read the broad outlines of the room’s history, the shelter that had later become a place where people cooked meals, but as always all of the details were missing. How many people had stayed here? Who were they? Where had they gone? On the opposite side of the gym, a set of doors opened into a corridor lined with classrooms, sunlight spilling across the floor from the broken-down front door at the end.

This had been a small school, six classrooms. The floor strewn with broken glass, unidentifiable garbage, the remains of binders and textbooks. They picked their way between rooms, searching, but there was only wreckage and disarray. Layers of graffiti, unreadable names in puffy dripping letters across blackboards, old messages: “Jasmine L., if you see this, go to my dad’s lake house. — Ben.” Overturned desks. A fire had darkened a corner of a classroom before someone had put it out or it had died on its own. The band room was immediately identifiable as such by the heap of twisted music stands on the floor. The sheet music was gone — perhaps used to start the cooking fire in the gymnasium — and there were no instruments. But Viola found half a jar of rosin in a closet, and Kirsten found a mouthpiece for a flute buried under trash. Words spray-painted on the north wall: “The end is here.”

“Creepy as hell,” Viola said.

Jackson appeared in the doorway. “There’s a skeleton in the men’s room.”

August frowned. “How old?”

“Old. Bullet hole in the skull.”

“Why would you look in the bathroom?”

“I was hoping for soap.”

August nodded and disappeared down the hall.

“What’s he doing?” Viola asked.

“He likes to say a prayer over the dead.” Kirsten was crouched on the floor, poking through the debris with a broken ruler. “Help me check the lockers before we go.”

But every student locker had been emptied, doors hanging askew. Kirsten picked up a couple of mildewed binders to study the stickers and the Sharpie incantations—“Lady Gaga iz da bomb,” “Eva + Jason 4 evah,” “I ♥ Chris,” etc. — and on a cooler day she might have spent more time here, interested as always in any clues she could find about the lost world, but the air was foul and still, the heat unendurable, and when August emerged from the men’s room it was a relief to walk out into the sunlight, the breeze, and the chatter of crickets.

“Christ,” Jackson said, “I don’t know how you two can stand going into these places.”

“Well, we don’t go into public bathrooms, for starters,” August said.

“I just wanted some soap.”

“Yeah, but it’s a dumb move. Someone always got executed in the bathroom.”

“Yeah, like I said, I don’t know how you stand it.”

We stand it because we were younger than you were when everything ended, Kirsten thought, but not young enough to remember nothing at all. Because there isn’t much time left, because all the roofs are collapsing now and soon none of the old buildings will be safe. Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone. But it seemed like too much to explain all this, so she shrugged instead of answering him.

The Symphony was resting under the trees by the side of the road. Most of them were napping. Eleanor was showing Olivia how to make a daisy chain. The clarinet was moving languidly through a series of yoga poses while the conductor and Gil studied a map.

“A mouthpiece!” the first flute said, when August revealed their discoveries, and August was the person in the Symphony who irritated her the most, but she actually clapped her hands and threw her arms around his neck.

“What was in the school?” Alexandra asked, when the horses were harnessed and the Symphony had set out again. She wanted very much to go into buildings with Kirsten and August, but Kirsten never let her join them.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” Kirsten said. Carefully not thinking about the skeleton in the men’s room, her eyes on the road. “Just that flute piece and a lot of debris.”

21

THE INTERVIEW IN Year Fifteen, continued:

FRANÇOIS DIALLO: Now, I believe you were very young when the Georgia Flu came, when the collapse happened.

KIRSTEN RAYMONDE: I was eight.

DIALLO: Forgive me, this is a fascination of mine when I speak with people who were children back then, at the time of the collapse, and I’m not sure how to phrase this, but I want to know what you think about when you consider how the world’s changed in your lifetime.

RAYMONDE: [silence]

DIALLO: Or to phrase it differently—

RAYMONDE: I understood the question. I’d prefer not to answer.

DIALLO: Okay. All right. I’m curious about your tattoo.

RAYMONDE: The text on my arm? “Survival is insufficient”?

DIALLO: No, no, the other one. The two black knives on your right wrist.

RAYMONDE: You know what tattoos like this mean.

DIALLO: But perhaps you could just tell me—

RAYMONDE: I won’t talk about it, François, and you know better than to ask.

22

WHEN KIRSTEN THOUGHT of the ways the world had changed in her lifetime, her thoughts always eventually circled back to Alexandra. Alexandra knew how to shoot, but the world was softening. There was a fair chance, Kirsten thought, that Alexandra would live out her life without killing anyone. She was a younger fifteen-year-old than Kirsten had ever been.

Now Alexandra walked quietly, sullen because she hadn’t been allowed to join the expedition to the school. The Symphony walked through the end of the day, clouds gathering and the air pressing down from above, rivulets of sweat running down Kirsten’s back. The sky low and dark by late afternoon. They were moving through a rural area, no driveways. Rusted-out cars here and there along the road, abandoned where they’d run out of gas, the caravans weaving carefully around them. Flashes of lightning and thunder, at first distant and then close. They waited out the rainstorm in the trees by the side of the road at twilight, pitched their tents on the wet ground when it was over.

“I dreamt last night I saw an airplane,” Dieter whispered. They were lying a few feet apart in the dark of his tent. They had only ever been friends — in a hazy way Kirsten thought of him as family — but her thirty-year-old tent had finally fallen apart a year ago and she hadn’t yet managed to find a new one. For obvious reasons she was no longer sharing a tent with Sayid, so Dieter, who had one of the largest tents in the Symphony, had been hosting her. Kirsten heard soft voices outside, the tuba and the first violin on watch. The restless movements of the horses, penned between the three caravans for safety.

“I haven’t thought of an airplane in so long.”

“That’s because you’re so young.” A slight edge to his voice. “You don’t remember anything.”

“I do remember things. Of course I do. I was eight.”

Dieter had been twenty years old when the world ended. The main difference between Dieter and Kirsten was that Dieter remembered everything. She listened to him breathe.

“I used to watch for it,” he said. “I used to think about the countries on the other side of the ocean, wonder if any of them had somehow been spared. If I ever saw an airplane, that meant that somewhere planes still took off. For a whole decade after the pandemic, I kept looking at the sky.”

“Was it a good dream?”

“In the dream I was so happy,” he whispered. “I looked up and there it was, the plane had finally come. There was still a civilization somewhere. I fell to my knees. I started weeping and laughing, and then I woke up.”

There was a voice outside then, someone saying their names. “Second watch,” Dieter whispered. “We’re up.”

The first watch was going to sleep. They had nothing to report. “Just goddamned trees and owls,” the tuba muttered. The second watch agreed on the usual arrangement: Dieter and Sayid would scout the road a half mile behind them, Kirsten and August would keep watch at the camp, the fourth guitar and the oboe would scout a half mile ahead. The scouts set off in their separate directions and Kirsten was alone with August. They circled the camp perimeter and then stood on the road, listening and watching for movement. Clouds breaking apart to reveal the stars overhead. The brief flare of a meteor, or perhaps a falling satellite. Is this what airplanes would have looked like at night, just streaks of light across the sky? Kirsten knew they’d flown at hundreds of miles per hour, inconceivable speeds, but she wasn’t sure what hundreds of miles per hour would have looked like. The forest was filled with small noises: rainwater dripping from the trees, the movements of animals, a light breeze.

She didn’t remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she’d gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn’t remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother’s face. She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family. Here on this road in the forest two decades later, clouds shifted to reveal the moon and August glanced at her in the sudden light.

“Hair on the back of my neck’s standing up,” he murmured. “You think we’re alone out here?”

“I haven’t heard anything.” They made another slow circle of the camp. Barely audible voices from inside one or two of the tents, the sighs and soft movements of horses. They listened and watched, but the road was still.

“These are the times when I want to stop,” August whispered. “You ever think about stopping?”

“You mean not traveling anymore?”

“You ever think about it? There’s got to be a steadier life than this.”

“Sure, but in what other life would I get to perform Shakespeare?”

There was a sound just then, a disturbance passing over the surface of the night as quickly as a stone dropped into water. A cry, cut off abruptly? Had someone called out? If she’d been alone, Kirsten might have thought she’d imagined it, but August nodded when she looked at him. The sound had come from somewhere far down the road, in the direction from which they’d come. They were still, straining to hear, but heard nothing.

“We have to raise the third watch.” Kirsten drew her two best knives from her belt. August disappeared among the tents. She heard his muffled voice—“I don’t know, a sound, maybe a voice down the road, I need you to take our places so we can go check it out”—and two shadows emerged to replace them, yawning and unsteady on their feet.

August and Kirsten set off as quickly and quietly as possible in the direction of the sound. The forest was a dark mass on either side, alive and filled with indecipherable rustlings, shadows like ink against the glare of moonlight. An owl flew low across the road ahead. A moment later there was a distant beating of small wings, birds stirred from their sleep, black specks rising and wheeling against the stars.

“Something disturbed them,” Kirsten said quietly, her mouth close to August’s ear.

“The owl?” His voice as soft as hers.

“I thought the owl was flying at a different angle. The birds were more to the north.”

“Let’s wait.”

They waited in the shadows at the side of the road, trying to breathe quietly, trying to look everywhere at once. The claustrophobia of the forest. The first few trees visible before her, monochrome contrasts of black shadow and white moonlight, and beyond that an entire continent, wilderness uninterrupted from ocean to ocean with so few people left between the shores. Kirsten and August watched the road and the forest, but if anything was watching them back, it wasn’t apparent.

“Let’s walk farther,” August whispered.

They resumed their cautious progress down the road, Kirsten gripping her knives so tightly that her heartbeat throbbed in the palms of her hands. They walked far beyond the point where the scouts should have been, two miles, three, looking for signs. At first light they returned the way they had come, speechless in a world of riotous birdsong. There was no trace of the scouts, nothing at the edges of the forest, no footprints, no signs of large animals, no obviously broken branches or blood. It was as though Dieter and Sayid had been plucked from the face of the earth.

23

“I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND,” the tuba said, midmorning, after several hours of searching for Sayid and Dieter. No one understood. No one responded. The disappearances were incomprehensible. They could find no trace. The Symphony searched in teams of four, grimly, methodically, but the forest was dense and choked with underbrush; they could have passed within feet of Dieter and Sayid and not known it. In those first hours there were moments when Kirsten caught herself thinking that there must have simply been some misunderstanding, that Dieter and Sayid must have somehow walked by them in the dark, somehow gone the wrong way down the road, that they’d reappear with apologies at any moment, but scouts had gone back and forth on the road for miles. Again and again Kirsten stopped still in the forest, listening. Was someone watching her? Just now, had someone stepped on a branch? But the only sounds were of the other search teams, and everyone felt watched. They met in the forest and on the road at intervals, looked at one another and said nothing. The slow passage of the sun across the sky, the air over the road unsteady with heat waves.

When night began to fall they gathered by the lead caravan, which had once been an extended-bed Ford pickup truck. “Because survival is insufficient,” words painted on the canopy in answer to the question that had dogged the Symphony since they’d set out on the road. The words were very white in the rising evening. Kirsten stood by Dieter’s favorite horse, Bernstein, and pressed her hand flat against his side. He stared at her with an enormous dark eye.

“We have traveled so far together,” the conductor said. There are certain qualities of light that blur the years. Sometimes when Kirsten and August were on watch together at dawn, she would glance at him as the sun rose and for a fleeting instant she could see what he’d looked like as a boy. Here on this road, the conductor looked much older than she had an hour earlier. She ran a hand through her short gray hair. “There have been four times,” she said, “in all these years, when Symphony members have become separated from the Symphony, and in every single instance they have followed the separation protocol, and we’ve been reunited at the destination. Alexandra?”

“Yes?”

“Will you state the separation protocol, please?” It had been drilled into all of them.

“We never travel without a destination,” Alexandra said. “If we’re ever, if you’re ever separated from the Symphony on the road, you make your way to the destination and wait.”

“And what is the current destination?”

“The Museum of Civilization in the Severn City Airport.”

“Yes.” The conductor was quiet, looking at them. The forest was in shadow now, but there was still some light in the corridor of sky above the road, the last pink of sunset streaking the clouds. “I have been on the road for fifteen years,” she said, “and Sayid’s been with me for twelve. Dieter for even longer.”

“He was with me in the beginning,” Gil said. “We walked out of Chicago together.”

“I leave neither of them willingly.” The conductor’s eyes were shining. “But I won’t risk the rest of you by staying here a day longer.”

That night they kept a double watch, teams of four instead of two, and set out before dawn the following morning. The air was damp between the walls of the forest, the clouds marbled overhead. A scent of pine in the air. Kirsten walked by the first caravan, trying to think of nothing. A sense of being caught in a terrible dream.

They stopped at the end of the afternoon. The fevered summers of this century, this impossible heat. The lake glittered through the trees. This had been one of those places that wasn’t quite suburbia but wasn’t quite not, an in-between district where the houses stood on wooded lots. They were within three days of the airport now. Kirsten sat on a log with her head in her hands, thinking, Where are you, where are you, where are you, and no one bothered her until August came to sit nearby.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I think they were taken,” she said without raising her head, “and I can’t stop thinking about what the prophet was saying in St. Deborah, that thing about the light.”

“I don’t think I heard it. I was packing up.”

“They call themselves the light.”

“What about it?”

“If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?”

“I suppose.”

“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”

He sighed. “We can only remain hopeful,” he said. “We have to assume that the situation will become more clear.”

But four teams set out in search of dinner, and only three and a half returned.

“I turned and she was gone,” Jackson said of Sidney, the clarinet. He’d returned to the camp alone and shaken. They’d found a stream, Jackson said, about a quarter mile down the road in the direction from which they’d come. He’d knelt on the bank to fill the water container, and when he looked up she had vanished. Had she fallen in? No, he said, he would have heard a splash, and he was downstream, so she would have passed him. It was a small stream and the banks weren’t steep. There was just the woods all around him, a sense of being watched. He called her name but she was nowhere. He noticed then that the birdsong had stopped. The woods had gone still.

No one spoke for a moment when he’d finished telling the story. The Symphony gathered close around him.

“Where’s Olivia?” Lin asked suddenly. Olivia was in the back of the first caravan, playing with a rag doll. “I want you in my sight,” Lin whispered. “Not just within sight, within reach. Do you understand?”

“She was close with Dieter,” the first oboe said. This was true, and they were all silent, thinking of the clarinet and searching their memories for clues. Had she seemed like herself lately? None of them were sure. What did it mean to seem like yourself, in the course of such unspeakable days? How was anyone supposed to seem?

“Are we being hunted?” Alexandra asked. It seemed plausible. Kirsten looked over her shoulder into the shadows of the trees. A search party was organized, but the light was gone. Lighting a fire seemed too dangerous so they ate dinner from the preserved food stores, rabbit jerky and dried apples, and settled in for an uneasy night. In the morning they delayed for five hours, searching, but they couldn’t find her. They set off into another searing day.

“Is it logical that they could have all been taken?” August was walking beside Kirsten. “Dieter, Sayid, the clarinet?”

“How could anyone overpower them so silently?” There was a lump in her throat. It was difficult to speak. “Maybe they just left.”

“Abandoned us?”

“Yes.”

“Why would they?”

“I don’t know.”

Later in the day someone thought to search the clarinet’s belongings, and found the note. The beginning of a letter: “Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.” It ended there. The date suggested that either it had been written eleven months earlier or that the clarinet didn’t know what year or month it was, one or the other. Neither scenario was unlikely. This was an era when exact dates were seldom relevant, and keeping track required a degree of dedication. The note had been folded and refolded several times, soft along the creases.

“It seems more theoretical than anything,” the first cello said. “Like she wrote it a year ago and then changed her mind. It doesn’t prove anything.”

“That’s assuming she wrote it a year ago,” said Lin. “She could’ve written it last week. I think it shows suicidal intent.”

“Where were we a year ago? Does anyone remember?”

“Mackinaw City,” August said. “New Petoskey, East Jordan, all those little places down the coast on the way to New Sarnia.”

“I don’t remember her seeming different a year ago,” Lin said. “Was she sad?”

No one was sure. They all felt they should have been paying more attention. Still the scouts reported no one behind or ahead of them on the road. Impossible not to imagine that they were being watched from the forest.

What was the Symphony without Dieter and the clarinet and Sayid? Kirsten had thought of Dieter as a sort of older brother, she realized, perhaps a cousin, a fixture in her life and in the life of the Symphony. It seemed in some abstract way impossible that the Symphony continued without him. She had never been close with the clarinet, but the clarinet was conspicuous in her absence. She only spoke with Sayid to argue with him now, but the thought of him having come to harm was sheer agony. Her breath was shallow in her chest and the tears were silent and constant.

Late in the day, she found a folded piece of paper in her pocket. She recognized August’s handwriting.

A fragment for my friend—

If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you

Silent, my starship suspended in night

She’d never seen his poetry before and was impossibly moved by it. “Thank you,” she said when she saw him next. He nodded.

The land became wilder, the houses subsiding. They had to stop three times to clear fallen trees. They used two-handed saws, working as quickly as possible with sweat soaking through their clothes, scouts posted here and there watching the road and the forest, jumping and aiming their weapons at small sounds. Kirsten and August walked out ahead over the conductor’s objections. A half mile beyond the stalled caravans, they came upon a rolling plain.

“A golf course,” August said. “You know what that means.” They’d found two full bottles of scotch and a can of miraculously still-edible cocktail olives in a golf-course clubhouse once, and August had been trying to replicate the experience ever since.

The clubhouse was at the end of a long driveway, obscured behind a bank of trees. It was burnt out, the roof draped like fabric from the three remaining walls. Golf carts were toppled over on their sides in the grass. The sky was darkening now and it was hard to see much of the clubhouse interior in the pre-storm light, just glints of shattered glass where the windows had been. Too dangerous to go in with the roof half-fallen. On the far side they found a small man-made lake with a rotted pier, a flicker of movement under the surface. They walked back to the caravans for the fishing equipment. The first and third cellos were sawing at the last fallen tree.

Back at the golf-course pond there were so many fish that it was possible to catch them with the net alone, scooping them up from the overcrowded water. The fish were small brownish things, unpleasant to the touch. Thunder in the distance and then a short time later the first drops of rain. August, who carried his instrument at all times, wrapped his violin case in a plastic sheet he kept in his bag. They worked through the downpour, Kirsten dragging the net through the water, August gutting and cleaning. He knew she couldn’t stand to gut fish — something she’d seen on the road that first year out of Toronto, a fleeting impression of some vision that she couldn’t exactly remember but that made her ill when she tried to consider it — and he’d always been kind about it. She could hardly see him through the rain. For a moment it was possible to forget that three people were missing. When the storm at last subsided they filled the net with fish and carried it back along the driveway. Steam was rising from the road. They found the place where the fallen trees had been cut and pulled off the road, but the Symphony had departed.

“They must’ve passed by on the road while we were fishing,” August said. It was the only reasonable conclusion. They’d confirmed the route with the conductor before they’d returned to the golf course with the fishing net. The pond had been far enough off the road that they wouldn’t have seen the Symphony, hidden as they were behind the clubhouse, and the sound of the Symphony’s passing would have been lost in the storm.

“They moved fast,” Kirsten said, but her stomach was clenched, and August was jingling the handful of change in his pocket. It didn’t entirely add up. Why would the Symphony travel in a downpour, unless there was some unexpected emergency? The storm had washed the road clear of tracks, leaves and twigs in swirled patterns over the pavement, and the heat was rising again. The sky had a broken-apart look about it now, patches of blue between the clouds.

“The fish will go bad fast in this heat,” August said.

This was a quandary. Every cell in Kirsten’s body ached to follow the Symphony, but it was safer to light a fire in daylight, and they’d eaten nothing but a strip or two each of rabbit jerky that morning. They gathered wood for a fire but of course everything was wet and it took a long time to spark even the slightest flame. The fire smoked badly, their eyes stinging while they cooked, but at least the smoke replaced the stench of fish from their clothes. They ate as much fish as they could and carried the rest with them in the net, set off half-sick down the road, past the golf course, past a number of houses that had obviously been ransacked years earlier, ruined furniture strewn about on the lawns. After a while they jettisoned the fish — it was turning in the heat — and sped up, walking as quickly as possible, but the Symphony was still out of sight and surely by now there should have been some sign of them, hoofprints or footprints or wheel marks on the road. They didn’t speak.

Near twilight, the road crossed under a highway. Kirsten climbed up to the overpass for a vantage point, hoping that the Symphony might perhaps be just ahead, but the road curved toward the distant shine of the lake and disappeared behind the trees. The highway was miles of permanent gridlock, small trees growing now between cars and thousands of windshields reflecting the sky. There was a skeleton in the driver’s seat of the nearest car.

They slept under a tree near the overpass, side by side on top of August’s plastic sheet. Kirsten slept fitfully, aware each time she woke of the emptiness of the landscape, the lack of people and animals and caravans around her. Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

24

ON THEIR SECOND DAY without the Symphony, Kirsten and August came upon a line of cars, queued along the shoulder of the road. It was late morning and the heat was rising, a hush falling over the landscape. They’d lost sight of the lake. The cars cast curved shadows. They’d been cleaned out, no bones in backseats or abandoned belongings, which suggested someone lived near here and traveled this route. An hour later they reached a gas station, a low building alone by the road with a yellow seashell sign still standing, vehicles crowded and blocking one another at the pumps. One was the color of melted butter, black lettering on the side. A Chicago taxicab, Kirsten realized. Someone in the very final days had hailed one of the last taxis in the rioting city, negotiated a price and fled north. Two neat bullet holes in the driver’s side door. A dog barked and they froze, their hands on their weapons.

The man who came around the side of the building with a golden retriever was in his fifties or sixties, gray hair cut very short and a stiff way of moving that suggested an old injury, a rifle held at his side. He had a complicated scar on his face.

“Help you?” he asked. His tone wasn’t unfriendly, and this was the pleasure of being alive in Year Twenty, this calmer age. For the first ten or twelve years after the collapse, he would have been much more likely to shoot them on sight.

“Just passing through,” Kirsten said. “We mean no harm. We’re headed for the Museum of Civilization.”

“Headed where, now?”

“The Severn City Airport.”

August was silent beside her. He didn’t like to speak to strangers.

The man nodded. “Anyone still out there?”

“We’re hoping our friends are there.”

“You lose them?”

“Yes,” Kirsten said. “We lost them.” August sighed. The absence of the Symphony from this route had been obvious for some time. They had passed over patches of soft earth with no tracks. No horse manure, no recent wheel ruts or footprints, no sign at all that twenty-odd people, three caravans, and seven horses were ahead of them on this road.

“Well.” The man shook his head. “Bad luck. I’m sorry to hear that. I’m Finn, by the way.”

“I’m Kirsten. This is August.”

“That a violin case?” Finn asked.

“Yes.”

“You run away from an orchestra?”

“They ran away from us,” Kirsten said quickly, because she saw the way August’s fist clenched in his pocket. “You here alone?”

“Of course not,” Finn said, and Kirsten realized her error. Even in this calmer era, who would admit to being outnumbered? His gaze rested on Kirsten’s knives. She was finding it difficult not to stare at the scar on the side of his face. Hard to tell at this distance, but it seemed like a deliberate pattern.

“But this isn’t a town?”

“No. I couldn’t call it that.”

“Sorry, just curious. We don’t come across too many like you.”

“Like me?”

“Living outside a town,” Kirsten said.

“Oh. Well. It’s quiet out here. This place you mentioned,” he said, “this museum. You know anything about it?”

“Not really,” Kirsten said. “But our friends were going there.”

“I heard it’s supposed to be a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved,” August said.

The man laughed, a sound like a bark. His dog looked up at him with an expression of concern. “Artifacts from the old world,” he said. “Here’s the thing, kids, the entire world is a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved. When was the last time you saw a new car?”

They glanced at one another.

“Well, anyway,” Finn said, “there’s a pump behind the building if you’d like to fill your water bottles.”

They thanked him and followed him back. Behind the gas station were two small children, redheaded twins of eight or nine years old and indeterminate gender, peeling potatoes. They were barefoot but their clothes were clean, their hair neatly trimmed, and they stared at the strangers as they approached. Kirsten found herself wondering, as she always did when she saw children, if it was better or worse to have never known any world except the one after the Georgia Flu. Finn pointed to a hand pump on a pedestal in the dirt.

“We’ve met,” Kirsten said. “Haven’t we? Weren’t you in St. Deborah by the Water two years ago? I remember little twins with red hair, following me around town when I went out for a walk.”

Finn tensed, and she saw in the twitch of his arm that he was on the point of raising his rifle. “Did the prophet send you?”

“What? No. No, it’s nothing like that. We’ve only passed through that town.”

“We got out as fast as we could,” August said.

“We’re with the Traveling Symphony.”

Finn smiled. “Well, that explains the violin,” he said. “I remember the Symphony, all right.” He relaxed his grip on the rifle, the moment passed. “Can’t say I was ever much for Shakespeare, but that was the best music I’d heard in years.”

“Thank you,” August said.

“You leave town after the prophet took over?” Kirsten asked. August was working the pump while Kirsten held their bottles under the spout, cool water splashing her hands.

“Craziest damn people I ever met in my life,” he said. “Dangerous as hell. A few of us took our kids and fled.”

“Did you know Charlie and Jeremy?” Kirsten recapped the bottles, put them away in her knapsack and August’s bag.

“Musicians, weren’t they? She was black, he was Asian?”

“Yes.”

“Not well. I knew them to say hello. They left with their baby a few days before I did.”

“You know where they went?”

“No idea.”

“Can you tell us what’s down the road?”

“Nothing for miles. Couple of abandoned towns, no one there anymore so far as I know. After that, just Severn City and the lake.”

“Have you been there?” They were walking back to the road. Kirsten glanced at the side of the man’s face, and the scar snapped into focus: a lowercase t with an extra line, the symbol she’d seen spray-painted on buildings in St. Deborah by the Water.

“Severn City? Not since the collapse.”

“What’s it like,” Kirsten asked, “living out here, outside of a town?”

“Quiet.” Finn shrugged. “I wouldn’t have risked it eight or ten years ago, but except for the prophet, it’s been a very quiet decade.” He hesitated. “Look, I wasn’t quite straight with you before. I know the place you’re talking about, the museum. Supposed to be a fair number of people there.”

“You weren’t tempted to go there yourself, when you left St. Deborah?”

“The prophet’s supposedly from there,” he said. “Those people at the airport. What if they’re the prophet’s people?”

Kirsten and August walked mostly in silence. A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?

“His scar,” August said.

“I know. And where’s the Symphony? Why would they change the route?” August didn’t answer. There were a dozen reasons why the Symphony might have deviated from the planned route. They were threatened in some way and decided to take a less direct path. They decided upon closer consideration that another route was quicker and expected Kirsten and August to meet them at the airport. They took a wrong turn and vanished into the landscape.

August found a driveway in the early afternoon. They’d been resting in the shade when he rose and walked across the road. Kirsten had noticed the stand of young trees there, but had been too tired and heat-stunned to consider what it might mean. August dropped to one knee to prod at the ground.

“Gravel,” he said.

It was a driveway, so overgrown that it had nearly disappeared. The forest opened into a clearing with a two-story house, two rusted-out cars and a pickup truck slumped on the remains of their tires. They waited a while at the edge of the trees, watching, but detected no movement.

The front door was locked, an unusual detail. They circled the house, but the back door was locked too. Kirsten picked the lock. It was obvious from the moment they stepped into the living room that no one else had been here. Throw pillows were arranged neatly on the sofa. A remote control lay on the coffee table, blurred by dust. They looked at one another with eyebrows identically raised over the rags they’d tied over their faces. They hadn’t come across an untouched house in years.

In the kitchen Kirsten ran her finger over the row of plates in the dish rack, took a few forks for later use. Upstairs, there was a room that had once belonged to a child. The child in question was still present, a husk in the bed — Kirsten pulled a quilt over its head while August was still going through the downstairs bathroom — and there was a framed photograph on the wall of a boy with his parents, all of them beaming and resplendent with life, the boy in a Little League uniform with his parents kneeling on either side. She heard August’s footsteps behind her.

“Look what I found,” he said.

He’d found a metal Starship Enterprise. He held it up in the sunlight, a gleaming thing the size of a dragonfly. That was when Kirsten noticed the poster of the solar system over the bed, Earth a small blue dot near the sun. The boy had loved both baseball and space.

“We should keep moving,” Kirsten said after a moment. August’s gaze had fallen to the bed. She left the room first so he could say one of his prayers, although she wasn’t actually sure if prayer was the right word for it. When he murmured over the dead, he seemed to be talking only to them. “I hope it was peaceful at the end,” she’d heard him say. Or, “You have a really nice house. I’m sorry for taking your boots.” Or, “Wherever you are, I hope your family’s there too.” To the child in the bed, he spoke so quietly that Kirsten couldn’t hear. The only words she caught were “up in the stars,” and she moved quickly on to the master bedroom so that he wouldn’t catch her eavesdropping, but she saw that August had been there already — the boy’s parents had died in their bed, and a cloud of dust hung in the air above them from when August had pulled up the blankets to cover their faces.

In the en suite bathroom, Kirsten closed her eyes for just a second as she flipped the light switch. Naturally nothing happened, but as always in these moments she found herself straining to remember what it had been like when this motion had worked: walk into a room, flip a switch and the room floods with light. The trouble was she wasn’t sure if she remembered or only imagined remembering this. She ran her fingertips over a blue-and-white china box on the bathroom counter, admired the rows of Q-tips inside before she pocketed them. They looked useful for cleaning ears and musical instruments. Kirsten looked up and met her own gaze in the mirror. She needed a haircut. She smiled, then adjusted her smile to lessen the obviousness of her most recently missing tooth. She opened a cabinet and stared at a stack of clean towels. The one on top was blue with yellow ducks on it and had a hood sewn into a corner. Why hadn’t the parents taken the boy into their bed, if they’d all been sick together? Perhaps the parents had died first. She didn’t want to think about it.

The door to the spare bedroom had been closed, the window open a crack, so the carpet was ruined but the clothes in the closet had escaped the smell of death. She found a dress she liked, soft blue silk with pockets, and changed into it while August was still in the boy’s bedroom. There was also a wedding gown and a black suit. She took these for costumes. What the Symphony was doing, what they were always doing, was trying to cast a spell, and costuming helped; the lives they brushed up against were work-worn and difficult, people who spent all their time engaged in the tasks of survival. A few of the actors thought Shakespeare would be more relatable if they dressed in the same patched and faded clothing their audience wore, but Kirsten thought it meant something to see Titania in a gown, Hamlet in a shirt and tie. The tuba agreed with her.

“The thing with the new world,” the tuba had said once, “is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.” He knew something about elegance. He had played in a military orchestra with the conductor before the collapse. He talked sometimes about the military balls. Where was he? Don’t think of the Symphony. Don’t think of the Symphony. There is only here, she told herself, there is only this house.

“Nice dress,” August said, when she found him downstairs in the living room.

“The old one smelled like smoke and fish guts.”

“I found a couple suitcases in the basement,” he said.

They left with a suitcase each, towels and clothing and a stack of magazines that Kirsten wanted to go through later, an unopened box of salt from the kitchen and various other items that they thought they might use, but first Kirsten lingered for a few minutes in the living room, scanning the bookshelves while August searched for a TV Guide or poetry.

“You looking for something in particular?” he asked after he’d given up the search. She could see he was thinking of taking the remote. He’d been holding it and idly pressing all the buttons.

“Dr. Eleven, obviously. But I’d settle for Dear V.”

The latter was a book she’d somehow misplaced on the road two or three years ago, and she’d been trying ever since to find a replacement. The book had belonged to her mother, purchased just before the end of everything. Dear V.: An Unauthorized Portrait of Arthur Leander. White text across the top proclaimed the book’s status as a number-one best seller. The cover photo was black-and-white, Arthur looking over his shoulder as he got into a car. The look on his face could have meant anything; a little haunted, perhaps, but it was equally possible that someone had just called his name and he was turning to look at him or her. The book was comprised entirely of letters written to a friend, the anonymous V.

When Kirsten had left Toronto with her brother, he’d told her she could bring one book in her backpack, just one, so she’d taken Dear V. because her mother had told her she wasn’t allowed to read it. Her brother had raised an eyebrow but made no remark.

25

A FEW OF THE LETTERS:

Dear V.,

It’s cold in Toronto but I like where I’m living. The thing I can’t get used to is when it’s cloudy and about to snow, the sky looks orange. Orange. I know it’s just reflected light from the city but it’s eerie.

I’ve been going on long walks lately, because after rent and the laundromat and groceries I can’t really afford transit, found a penny shining in the gutter yesterday and decided it was a lucky charm. I’m taping it to this letter. Unnaturally shiny, right? For my 19th birthday last night I went downtown to a dance club with a $5 cover charge. Irresponsible to spend $5 on cover when I’m getting so few hours at the restaurant, but whatever, I like dancing even though I have no idea what I’m doing and probably look like I’m having a seizure. I walked home with my friend Clark and he was talking about this experimental thing he’d seen where the actors wore giant papier-mâché masks, which sounded cool but kind of pretentious. I told C. that and he said, you know what’s pretentious? Your hair, and he wasn’t trying to be mean but in the morning I made breakfast for one of my roommates in exchange for a haircut and it’s not bad, I think. My roommate’s in hairschool. The ponytail’s gone! You wouldn’t recognize me! I love this city and also hate it and I miss you.

— A.

Dear V.,

I dreamt last night we were in your house again, playing mah jong (sp?) with your mother. I think in real life we only played it that one time and I know we were both stoned, but I liked it, those little tiles. Anyway. This morning I was thinking about the thing I liked about your house, that optical illusion re: the ocean, the way it looked from the living room like the ocean was right there at the end of the front lawn but then when you went outside there was the cliff between the grass and the water, with that rickety staircase thing that always scared the hell out of me.

I’m not exactly homesick but not exactly not. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Clark, who’s in my acting class, who I think you’d like. C. has punk-rock hair half-shaved, pink on the non-shaved side. C.’s parents want him to go to business school or at least get a practical degree of some kind and C. told me he’d rather die than do this, which seems extreme but on the other hand I remember when I thought I’d rather die than stay on the island so I told him I understood. I had a good class tonight. I hope things are good with you. Write soon,

— A.

Dear V.,

You remember when we used to listen to music in your room in the cliff house? I was thinking about what a nice time that was, even though I was about to leave for Toronto so it was also sad. I remember staring at the leaves outside your window and trying to imagine I was staring at skyscrapers and what would that be like, would I miss the leaves, etc., and then I get to Toronto and there’s a tree right outside my window so all I see are leaves. It’s a gingko, though, nothing I’d ever seen out west. It’s pretty. The leaves are shaped like little fans.

— A.

Dear V.,

I’m a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you.

— A.

Dear V.,

Do you remember that night we stayed up to see the comet? Comet Hyakutake, that really cold night in March with frost on the grass, I remember we whispered the name over and over again, Hyakutake, Hyakutake. I thought it was pretty, that light just hanging there in the sky. Anyway I was thinking of it just now and wondered if you remembered that night as well as I do. You can’t really see the stars here.

— A.

Dear V.,

I didn’t tell you this but last month in acting class the instructor told me he felt I was a little flat, which is his way of saying he thinks I’m a terrible actor. He said something vague and almost kind about how difficult it can be to improve. I said, watch me, and he looked surprised and sort of blinked at me and then mostly ignored me for the next three weeks. But then last night I was doing my monologue and when I looked up he was watching me, really watching me, and he said goodnight to me for the first time in weeks and I felt like there was hope. I’m like a man in a wheelchair watching other people run. I can see what good acting is but I can’t quite reach it but I’m so close sometimes, V. I’m really trying.

I was thinking about the island. It seems past-tense somehow, like a dream I had once. I walk down these streets and wander in and out of parks and dance in clubs and I think “once I walked along the beach with my best friend V., once I built forts with my little brother in the forest, once all I saw were trees” and all those true things sound false, it’s like a fairy tale someone told me. I stand waiting for lights to change on corners in Toronto and that whole place, the island I mean, it seems like a different planet. No offense but it’s weird to think you’re still there.

Yours,

— A.

Last letter, dear V., because you haven’t answered any of my letters in four months and haven’t written anything longer than a postcard in five. Today I stepped out and the trees were exploding with spring flowers, did I dream you walked beside me through these glittering streets? (V., sorry, my roommate came home in a generous mood with some excellent pot and also I’m a little deranged and lonely, you don’t know what it’s like to be so far from home because you’ll never leave, V., will you?) I was thinking earlier that to know this city you must first become penniless, because pennilessness (real pennilessness, I mean not having $2 for the subway) forces you to walk everywhere and you see the city best on foot. Anyway. I am going to be an actor and I am going to be good, that’s the important thing, I want to do something remarkable but I don’t know what. I told that to one of my roommates last night and he laughed and called me young, but we’re all getting older and it’s going so fast. I’m already 19.

I’m thinking about auditioning for an acting program in New York.

Something I’ve been thinking about, which will sound harsh and I’m sorry: you said you’d always be my friend but you’re not, actually, are you? I’ve only realized that recently. You don’t have any interest in my life.

This is going to seem bitter but I don’t mean it that way, V., I’m just stating a fact here: you’ll only ever call me if I call you first. Have you noticed that? If I call and leave a message you’ll call me back, but you will never call me first.

And I think that’s kind of a horrible thing, V., when you’re supposed to be someone’s friend. I always come to you. You always say you’re my friend but you’ll never come to me and I think I have to stop listening to your words, V., and take stock instead in your actions. My friend C. thinks my expectations of friendship are too high but I don’t think he’s right.

Take care, V. I’ll miss you.

— A.

V.,

It’s been years (decades?) since I’ve written but I’ve thought of you often. It was good to see you at Christmas. I didn’t know my mother was planning on inviting people over. She always does that when I’m there, I think to show me off in a way, even though if it had been up to her I’d never have left the island and I’d be driving my father’s snowplow. Awkward to be thrown into a room together, but wonderful to see you again and to talk to you a little after all this time. Four kids! I can’t imagine.

It’s been years since I’ve written to anyone, actually, not just you, and I confess I’m out of practice. But I have news, big news, and when it happened you were the first one I wanted to tell. I’m getting married. It’s very sudden. I didn’t mention it at Christmas because I wasn’t sure yet, but now I am and it seems perfectly right. Her name’s Miranda and she’s actually from the island, but we met in Toronto. She’s an artist who draws strange beautiful comic strip type things. She’s moving to L.A. with me next month.

How did we get so old, V.? I remember building forts with you in the woods when we were five. Can we be friends again? I’ve missed you terribly.

— A.

Dear V.,

Strange days. The feeling that one’s life resembles a movie. I have such disorientation, V., I can’t tell you. At unexpected moments find myself thinking, how did I get here? How have I landed in this life? Because it seems like an improbable outcome, when I look back at the sequence of events. I know dozens of actors more talented than me who never made it.

Have met someone and fallen in love. Elizabeth. She has such grace, beauty, but far more important than that a kind of lightness that I didn’t realize I’d been missing. She takes classes in art history when she isn’t modeling or shooting films. I know it’s questionable, V. I think Clark knows. Dinner party last night (very awkward and ill-advised in retrospect, long story, seemed like good idea at time) and I looked up at one point and he was giving me this look, like I’d disappointed him personally, and I realized he’s right to be disappointed. I disappoint myself too. I don’t know, V., all is in turmoil.

Yours,

— A.

Dear V.,

Clark came over for dinner last night, first time in six months or so. Was nervous about seeing him, partly because I find him less interesting now than I did when we were both nineteen (unkind of me to admit, but can’t we be honest about how people change?), also partly because last time he was here I was still married to Miranda and Elizabeth was just another dinner guest. But Elizabeth cooked roast chicken and did her best impression of a 1950s housewife and he was taken with her, I think. She kept up her brightest veneer through the whole evening, was completely charming, etc. For once she didn’t drink too much.

Do you remember that English teacher we had in high school who was crazy about Yeats? His enthusiasm sort of rubbed off on you and I remember for a while you had a quote taped to your bedroom wall in the lake house and lately I’ve been thinking about it: Love is like the lion’s tooth.

Yours,

— A.

26

“PLEASE TELL ME YOU’RE JOKING,” Clark said when Elizabeth Colton called to tell him about the book. Elizabeth wasn’t joking. She hadn’t seen the book yet — it wouldn’t be released for another week — but she’d been told by a reliable source that both of them were in it. She was furious. She was considering litigation, but she wasn’t sure who to sue. The publisher? V.? She’d decided she couldn’t reasonably sue Arthur, as much as she’d like to, because he apparently hadn’t known about the book either.

“What does he say about us?” Clark asked.

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “But apparently he talks about his marriages and friendships in detail. The word my friend used was unsparing.”

“Unsparing,” Clark said. “That could mean anything.” But probably nothing good, he decided. No one’s ever described as being unsparingly kind.

“He liked to describe the people in his life, apparently. At least he had the grace to be upset about it when I called him.” A fizz of static on the line.

“It’s called Dear B.?” Clark was writing this down. This was three weeks before the pandemic. They still had the indescribable luxury of being concerned about a book of published letters.

“Dear V. She’s his friend Victoria.”

“Former friend, I’d imagine. I’ll call him tomorrow,” Clark said.

“He’ll just start rambling and deflecting and obfuscating,” she said. “Or maybe that’s just how he talks to me. Do you ever talk to him and get the sense that he’s acting?”

“I actually have to run,” Clark said. “I’ve got an eleven a.m. interview.”

“I’m coming to New York soon. Maybe we should meet and discuss this.”

“Okay, fine.” He hadn’t seen her in years. “Have your assistant talk to my admin and we’ll set something up.”

When he hung up the phone, Dear V. was all he could think about. He left the office without meeting anyone else’s gaze, mortified in a way that somehow precluded talking to his colleagues — had any of them read the book? — and stepped out onto Twenty-third Street. He wanted to track down Dear V. immediately — surely he knew someone who could get him a copy — but there wasn’t time before his meeting. He was conducting a 360° assessment at a water-systems consulting firm by Grand Central Station.

Over the past several years, these assessments had become his specialty. At the center of each stood an executive whom the client company hoped to improve, referred to without irony as the target. Clark’s current targets included a salesman who made millions for the company but yelled at his subordinates, an obviously brilliant lawyer who worked until three a.m. but somehow couldn’t meet her deadlines, a public-relations executive whose skill in handling clients was matched only by his utter ineptitude at managing his staff. Each of Clark’s assessments involved interviewing a dozen or so people who worked in close proximity to the target, presenting the target with a series of reports consisting of anonymized interview comments — positive comments first, to soften the blow of the takedowns — and then, in the project’s final phase, a few months of coaching.

Twenty-third Street wasn’t busy — a little early for the lunch crowd — but he kept getting trapped behind iPhone zombies, people half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screens. He jostled two of them on purpose, walking faster than usual, upset in a fundamental way that made him feel like punching walls, like running full-speed, like throwing himself across a dance floor although he hadn’t done that in two decades. When Arthur danced he’d had a way of flailing just on the edge of the beat. A young woman stopped abruptly at the top of the subway stairs and he almost crashed into her, glared as he brushed past — she didn’t notice, enraptured by her screen — and he stepped aboard a train just before the doors closed, the day’s first small moment of grace. He stewed all the way to Grand Central Station, where he took the stairs two at a time to a marble corridor just off the main concourse, passed briefly through the spiced air of Grand Central Market and down a connecting passage to the Graybar Building.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said to his interviewee, who shrugged and gestured him into the visitor’s chair.

“If you think two minutes counts as late, we’re not going to get along very well.” Was that a Texas accent? Dahlia was in her late thirties or early forties, with a sharp-edged haircut and red-framed glasses that matched her lipstick.

Clark went into the usual introduction and preamble about the 360° they were doing, her boss as the target, the way he was interviewing fifteen people and it would all be anonymous, comments split off and categorized into separate reports for subordinates, peers, and superiors with a minimum of three in each group, etc. He listened to his voice from a distance and was pleased to note that it sounded steady.

“So the point,” she said, “if I’m understanding correctly, is to change my boss?”

“Well, to address areas of potential weakness,” Clark said. Thinking of Dear V. again as he said this, because isn’t indiscretion the very definition of weakness?

“To change him,” she insisted with a smile.

“I suppose you could see it that way.”

She nodded. “I don’t believe in the perfectibility of the individual,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. The thought that crossed his mind was that she looked a little old to be talking like a philosophy undergrad. “How about the improvement of the individual, then?”

“I don’t know.” She leaned back in her chair, arms folded, considering the question. Her tone was light, but he was beginning to realize that there was nothing flippant about her. He was remembering some of the offhand comments her colleagues had made about her in previous interviews, when his questions had come around to the team. Someone had called her a little different. Someone else, he remembered, had used the word intense. “You’ve been doing this for a while, you said?”

“Twenty-one years.”

“These people you coach, do they ever actually change? I mean in any kind of lasting, notable way?”

He hesitated. This was actually something he’d wondered about.

“They change their behaviors,” he said, “some of them. Often people will simply have no idea that they’re perceived as needing improvement in a certain area, but then they see the report …”

She nodded. “You differentiate between changing people and changing behaviors, then.”

“Of course.”

“Here’s the thing,” Dahlia said. “I’ll bet you can coach Dan, and probably he’ll exhibit a turnaround of sorts, he’ll improve in concrete areas, but he’ll still be a joyless bastard.”

“A joyless …”

“No, wait, don’t write that down. Let me rephrase that. Okay, let’s say he’ll change a little, probably, if you coach him, but he’ll still be a successful-but-unhappy person who works until nine p.m. every night because he’s got a terrible marriage and doesn’t want to go home, and don’t ask how I know that, everyone knows when you’ve got a terrible marriage, it’s like having bad breath, you get close enough to a person and it’s obvious. And you know, I’m reaching here, but I’m talking about someone who just seems like he wishes he’d done something different with his life, I mean really actually almost anything — is this too much?”

“No. Please, go on.”

“Okay, I love my job, and I’m not just saying that because my boss is going to see my interview comments, which by the way I don’t believe he won’t be able to tell who said what, anonymous or not. But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think — this will maybe sound weird — it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front-row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite—”

“I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that.”

“You don’t think he likes his job, then.”

“Correct,” she said, “but I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. “Do you think he’d describe himself as unhappy in his work?”

“No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?”

“No, please elaborate.”

“Okay, say you go into the break room,” she said, “and a couple people you like are there, say someone’s telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone’s so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don’t know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o’clock the day’s just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o’clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that’s what happens to your life.”

“Right,” Clark said. He was filled in that moment with an inexpressible longing. The previous day he’d gone into the break room and spent five minutes laughing at a colleague’s impression of a Daily Show bit.

“That’s what passes for a life, I should say. That’s what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they’re like sleepwalkers,” she said, “and nothing ever jolts them awake.”

He got through the rest of the interview, shook her hand, walked out through the vaulted lobby of the Graybar Building to Lexington Avenue. The air was cold but he longed to be outside, away from other people. He took a long and circuitous route, veering two avenues east to the relative quiet of Second Avenue.

He was thinking of the book, and thinking of what Dahlia had said about sleepwalking, and a strange thought came to him: had Arthur seen that Clark was sleepwalking? Would this be in the letters to V.? Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he’d jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them — I’m sorry, I’ve just realized that I’m as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge — and also he wanted to call every target of every 360° report and apologize to them too, because it’s an awful thing to appear in someone else’s report, he saw that now, it’s an awful thing to be the target.