Station Eleven

38

WHEN KIRSTEN AND AUGUST left the house in the woods, when they dragged and carried their new suitcases through the trees to the road, there was a moment when Kirsten stood looking back at the overgrown driveway while August made some adjustments — moving the poetry books and the water bottles from his backpack to the wheeled suitcase, to ease the weight on his back — and if not for the physical evidence, the suitcases filled with towels and shampoo and that box of salt they’d found in the kitchen, the blue silk dress she wore and the bulge of the Starship Enterprise in August’s vest pocket, she might have thought they’d imagined the house.

“A non-ransacked house,” August said, once they’d resumed walking. The suitcase wheels were stiff and Kirsten didn’t like the sound they made on the road, but otherwise the suitcases were perfect. “I never thought I’d see another one.”

“It was incredible. I almost wanted to lock the door behind us.” That’s what it would have been like, she realized, living in a house. You would leave and lock the door behind you, and all through the day you would carry a key. Dieter and Sayid probably remembered what it was like to live in houses and carry keys. All thoughts led back to them.

August believed in the theory of multiple universes. He claimed this was straight-up physics, as he put it, or if not exactly mainstream physics then maybe the outer edge of quantum mechanics, or anyway definitely not just some crackpot theory he’d made up.

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea,” the tuba had said, when Kirsten had asked him for confirmation a few years back. No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended. Gil had offered an uncertain reminiscence about an article he’d read once, something about how subatomic particles are constantly vanishing and reappearing, which meant, he supposed, that there’s someplace else to be, which he imagined might suggest that a person could theoretically be simultaneously present and not present, perhaps living out a shadow life in a parallel universe or two. “But look,” he’d said, “I was never a science guy.” In any event, August liked the idea of an infinite number of parallel universes, lined up in all directions. Kirsten imagined this arrangement as something like the successive planes formed when two mirrors reflect one another, the images shifting greener and cloudier with each repetition until they vanish toward infinity. She’d seen this once in a clothing store in a deserted shopping mall.

August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes, there had to be one where there had been no pandemic and he’d grown up to be a physicist as planned, or one where there had been a pandemic but the virus had had a subtly different genetic structure, some minuscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted. They were discussing this at the top of an embankment in the late afternoon, where they were resting and flipping through a stack of magazines that Kirsten had taken from the house.

“In an alternate universe,” August said, “you might’ve been in the tabloid pictures. Isn’t this one of your actor’s wives?”

“Is it?” She took the magazine from him. There was Arthur’s third wife, Lydia, shopping in New York City. She was wearing precarious shoes and carried a dozen shopping bags. The pandemic would reach North America in less than a month. The sighting was interesting, but not interesting enough to add to the collection.

In the last magazine, Kirsten found another ex-wife. A photograph of a woman in her late thirties or early forties with a hat pulled low, glaring at the camera as she exited a building:

Rekindling the Flame???

WHY, HELLO, MIRANDA! MIRANDA CARROLL, SHIPPING EXECUTIVE AND FIRST WIFE OF ACTOR ARTHUR LEANDER, RAISED QUESTIONS WITH A FURTIVE DEPARTURE FROM THE STAGE DOOR OF THE TORONTO THEATER WHERE LEANDER IS PERFORMING IN KING LEAR. AN EYEWITNESS REPORTS THAT THEY WERE IN LEANDER’S DRESSING ROOM ALONE FOR NEARLY AN HOUR! “WE WERE ALL A LITTLE SURPRISED,” THE EYEWITNESS SAID.

“I think I was there,” Kirsten said. “I might’ve been in that building at that moment.” Behind Miranda she saw only a steel door, the stone wall of a building. Had she passed through that door? She must have, she thought, and wished she could remember it.

August studied the photo, interested. “Do you remember seeing her there?”

An impression of a coloring book, the smell of pencils, Arthur’s voice, a warm room with a red carpet, electric light. Had a third person been in the room? She couldn’t be sure.

“No,” she said. “I don’t remember her.” She tore the photograph with its caption from the page.

“Look at the date,” August said. “Two weeks till the apocalypse!”

“Well, it’s nice that at least the celebrity gossip survived.”

Nothing else in the rest of the magazines, but this find was remarkable, this was enough. They kept two magazines to start a fire later and buried the other three under leaves.

“It would’ve been you in those tabloid pictures,” he said, picking up the parallel-universes theme. “I mean, it is you in those pictures, in a parallel universe where the collapse didn’t happen.”

“I still think you invented the parallel-universe theory,” she said, but one of the few things that August didn’t know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

“A parallel universe where space travel was invented,” August said. This was a game they’d been playing for a decade. They were lying on their backs now, sedated by heat. Birch branches swayed in the breeze, sunlight filtering through green. Kirsten closed her eyes and watched the silhouettes of leaves float away under her eyelids.

“But space travel was invented, wasn’t it? I’ve seen pictures.” Her hand drifted up to the scar on her cheekbone. If there were better universes, then there were probably much worse ones. Universes where she remembered her first year on the road, for instance, or where she remembered what had caused the scar on her face, or where she’d lost more than two teeth.

“We just went up to that gray moon,” August said. “Nowhere else, we never went farther. I mean the kind of space travel you’d see in TV shows, you know, other galaxies, other planets.”

“Like in my comic books?”

“Your comics are weird. I was thinking more like Star Trek.”

“A parallel universe where my comics are real,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a parallel universe where we boarded Station Eleven and escaped before the world ended,” Kirsten said.

“The world didn’t end,” he said. “It’s still spinning. But anyway, you’d want to live on Station Eleven?”

“I think it’s beautiful. All those islands and bridges.”

“But it’s always night or twilight, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think I’d mind.”

“I like this world better,” August said. “Does Station Eleven even have an orchestra? Or would it just be me standing there by myself on the rocks in the dark, playing my violin for giant seahorses?”

“Okay, a parallel universe with better dentistry,” she said.

“You aim high, don’t you?”

“If you’d lost any teeth, you’d know how high I’m aiming.”

“Fair enough. I’m sorry about your teeth.”

“A parallel universe where I have no knife tattoos.”

“I’d like to live there too,” August said. “A parallel universe where Sayid and Dieter didn’t disappear.”

“A parallel universe where telephones still work, so we could just call the Symphony and ask them where they are, and then we’d call Dieter and Sayid and all of us would meet up somewhere.”

They were quiet, looking up at the leaves.

“We’ll find them,” Kirsten said, “we’ll see the Symphony again,” but of course they couldn’t be sure.

They dragged their suitcases down the embankment to the road. They were very close to Severn City now. At twilight the road curved back to the lakeshore, and the first houses of Severn City appeared. Young birch trees between the road and the lake but otherwise no forest, just overgrown lawns and houses submerged in vines and shrubbery, a beach of rocks and sand.

“I don’t want to do this at night,” August said. They chose a house at random, waded through the backyard and made camp behind a garden shed. There was nothing to eat. August went exploring and came back with blueberries.

“I’ll take the first watch,” Kirsten said. She was exhausted but she didn’t think she could sleep. She sat on her suitcase, her back against the wall of the shed, a knife in her hands. She watched the slow rise of fireflies from the grass and listened to the water on the beach across the road, the sighing of wind in the leaves. A beating of wings and the squeak of a rodent, an owl making a kill.

“Remember that man we met at the gas station?” August asked. She’d thought he was asleep.

“Of course. What about him?”

“That scar on his face.” He sat up. “I was just thinking about it, and I realized what it is.”

“The prophet marked him.” The memory was agitating. She flicked her wrist and her knife split the cap of a white mushroom a few feet away.

“Yes, but the symbol itself, the pattern of the scar. How would you describe it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, retrieving her knife. “It looked like a lowercase t with an extra line through the stem.”

“A shorter line. Toward the bottom. Think about it. It isn’t abstract.”

“I am thinking about it. It looked abstract to me.”

“It’s an airplane,” August said.

39

TWO WEEKS BEFORE the end of commercial air travel, Miranda flew to Toronto from New York. It was late October, and she hadn’t been back to Canada in some months. She’d always liked the descent into this city, the crowded towers by the lakeshore, the way an infinite ocean of suburbia rushed inward and came to a point at the apex of the CN Tower. She thought the CN Tower was ugly up close, but unexpectedly lovely when viewed from airplane windows. And as always, the sense of Toronto existing in layers: the city that had shocked her with its vastness when she’d arrived here from Delano Island at seventeen still existed, but it occupied the same geographical space as a city that now seemed much smaller to her, a place diluted by the years she’d spent moving between London, New York, the harbor cities of Asia. The plane descended into the suburbs. She passed through passport control without incident, the Canada Border Services agent struggling to find an unstamped corner in the pages of her passport, and boarded a waiting car to the Toronto headquarters of Neptune Logistics, where she wished the driver a good day and passed him a twenty-dollar bill over the back of the seat.

“Thank you,” he said, surprised. “Would you like some change?”

“No, thank you.” She had been overtipping for as long as she’d had money. These small compensations for how fortunate she’d been. She pulled her carry-on suitcase into the Neptune Logistics lobby, cleared building security and took the elevator to the eighteenth floor.

She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here. A twenty-three-year-old Miranda with the wrong clothes and her hair sticking up, washing her hands and peering anxiously at herself in the ladies’ room mirror; a twenty-seven-year-old recently divorced Miranda slouching across the lobby with her sunglasses in place, wishing she could disappear, in tears because she’d seen herself on a gossip website that morning and the headline was agonizing: IS ARTHUR SECRETLY CALLING MIRANDA? (Answer: no.) Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. “I regret nothing,” she told her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, and believed it. That day, she attended a series of meetings, and in the late afternoon another car delivered her to a hotel. She still had an hour or two to kill until it was time to see Arthur again.

He’d called her in the New York office in August. “Will you take a call from Arthur Smith-Jones?” her assistant had asked, and Miranda had frozen momentarily. The name was from an inside joke that she and Arthur had batted around when they were first married. All these years later she had no recollection of why the name Smith-Jones had been funny, but she knew it was he.

“Thank you, Laetitia, I’ll take the call.” A click. “Hello, Arthur.”

“Miranda?” He sounded uncertain. She wondered if her voice had changed. She’d used her most self-assured addressing-large-meetings voice.

“Arthur. It’s been a while.” A moment of silence on the line. “Are you there?”

“My father died.”

She swiveled in her chair to look out at Central Park. In August the park had a subtropical quality that entranced her, a sense of weight and languor in the lushness of the trees.

“I’m sorry, Arthur. I liked your father.” She was thinking of an evening on Delano Island, the first year of their marriage and the only time they’d gone back to Canada for Christmas together, Arthur’s father talking with great animation about a poet he’d just been reading. The memory had dimmed since she’d last retrieved it, imprecision creeping in. She no longer remembered the name of the poet or anything else about the conversation.

“Thanks,” he said indistinctly.

“Do you remember the name of the poet he liked?” Miranda heard herself asking. “A long time ago. When we were there for Christmas.”

“Probably Lorca. He talked about Lorca a lot.”

There was a person in the park wearing a bright red T-shirt that contrasted magnificently with all the green. She watched the T-shirt vanish around a curve.

“He drove a snowplow and did carpentry all his life,” Arthur said. Miranda wasn’t sure what to say to this — she’d known what Arthur’s father’s occupations were — but Arthur didn’t seem to require a response. They were quiet for a moment, Miranda watching to see if the T-shirt would reappear. It didn’t.

“I know,” she said. “You showed me his workshop.”

“I just mean, my life must’ve seemed unfathomable to him.”

“Your life’s probably unfathomable to most people. Why did you call me, Arthur?” Her tone as gentle as possible.

“You were the one I wanted to call,” he said, “when I got the news.”

“But why me? We haven’t spoken since the last divorce hearing.”

“You know where I’m from,” he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we’ve built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it wasn’t for you. And aside from that, she realized, he was currently wifeless.

Arthur was starring in King Lear, presently in previews at the Elgin Theatre. They’d arranged to meet there, because Arthur was in divorce proceedings with his third wife, Lydia, and he feared any restaurant he entered would attract a flock of cameras.

The paparazzi had long since gotten bored of the nonstory of Miranda’s continued post-Arthur existence and had stopped following her, but nonetheless Miranda spent some time on her appearance before she left the hotel room, trying to make herself look as little like her old self as possible. She pinned and slicked her hair into a shiny helmet — in her Hollywood and tabloid lives she’d had a mass of curls — and dressed in her favorite suit, dark gray with white piping. Expensive white high-heeled shoes, of a type she often wore to meetings but that the Hollywood wife Miranda would never have considered.

“You look like an executive,” she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.

Miranda set out in the early twilight. The air was clear and sharp, a cool wind off the lake. The familiarity of these streets. She stopped for a decaf latte at a Starbucks and was struck by the barista’s brilliant green hair. “Your hair’s beautiful,” she said, and the barista smiled. The pleasure of walking cold streets with a hot coffee in her hand. Why did no one on Station Eleven have green hair? Perhaps someone in the Undersea. Or one of Dr. Eleven’s associates. No, the Undersea. When she was three blocks from the theater, she put on a knit hat that covered her hair, and dark glasses.

There were five or six men outside the theater, zoom-lens cameras on straps around their necks. They were smoking cigarettes and fiddling with their phones. Miranda felt a deathly stillness come over her. She liked to think of herself as a person who hated no one, but what did she feel for these men if not hatred? She tried to glide by as unobtrusively as possible, but wearing sunglasses after sundown had been a tactical error.

“That Miranda Carroll?” one of them asked. Fucking parasite. She kept her head down in an explosion of flashes and slipped in through the stage door.

Arthur’s dressing room was more properly a suite. An assistant whose name she immediately forgot ushered her into a sitting room, where two sofas faced off across a glass coffee table. Through open doors she glimpsed a bathroom and a dressing room, with a rack for costumes — she saw a velvet cloak — and a mirror ringed in lights. It was from this second room that Arthur emerged.

Arthur wasn’t old, but he wasn’t aging very well. It was disappointment, it seemed to her, that had settled over his face, and there was a strained quality about his eyes that she didn’t remember having seen before.

“Miranda,” he said. “How long has it been?”

This seemed to her a silly question. She’d assumed, she realized, that everyone remembers the date of their divorce, the same way everyone remembers their wedding date.

“Eleven years,” she said.

“Please, have a seat. Can I offer you something?”

“Do you have any tea?”

“I have tea.”

“I thought you would.” Miranda shed her coat and hat and sat on one of the sofas, which was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked, while Arthur fussed with an electric kettle on a countertop. Here we are, she thought. “How are the previews going?”

“Fine,” he said. “Better than fine, actually. Good. It’s been a long time since I’ve done Shakespeare, but I’ve been working with a coach. Actually, I guess coach isn’t the right word. A Shakespeare expert.” He came back to the sofas and sat across from her. She watched his gaze flicker over her suit, her gleaming shoes, and realized he was performing the same reconciliations she was, adjusting a mental image of a long-ago spouse to match the changed person sitting before him.

“A Shakespeare expert?”

“He’s a Shakespearean scholar. University of Toronto. I love working with him.”

“It must be quite interesting.”

“It is. He has this extremely impressive pool of knowledge, brings a lot to the table, but at the same time he’s completely supportive of my vision for the part.”

Supportive of my vision? He’d adopted new speech patterns. But of course he had, because since she’d last seen him there had been eleven years of friends and acquaintances and meetings and parties, travel here and there, film sets, two weddings and two divorces, a child. It made sense, she supposed, that he would be a different person by now. “What a great opportunity,” she said, “getting to work with someone like that.” Had she ever in her life sat on a less-comfortable sofa. She pressed her fingertips into the foam and barely made an impression. “Arthur,” she said, “I’m so sorry about your father.”

“Thank you.” He looked at her, and seemed to struggle to find the right words. “Miranda, I have to tell you something.”

“This doesn’t sound good.”

“It isn’t. Listen, there’s a book coming out.” His childhood friend Victoria had published the letters he’d sent her. Dear V.: An Unauthorized Portrait of Arthur Leander would be available for purchase in a week and a half. A friend who worked in publishing had sent him an advance copy.

“Am I in it?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, Miranda.”

“Tell me.”

“I mentioned you sometimes, when I wrote to her. That’s all. I want you to know that I never said anything unpleasant about you.”

“Okay. Good.” Was it fair to be as angry as she was? He couldn’t have known Victoria would sell the letters.

“You might find this difficult to believe,” he said, “but I have some sense of discretion. It’s actually one of the things I’m known for.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but did you just say you’re famous for your discretion?”

“Look, all I mean is, I didn’t tell Victoria everything.”

“I appreciate that.” A strained silence, during which Miranda willed the kettle to start whistling. “Do you know why she did it?”

“Victoria? I have to assume it was the money. The last I heard, she was working as a housekeeper in a resort on the west coast of Vancouver Island. She probably made more on that book than she’d made in the previous decade.”

“Are you going to sue?”

“It would just be more publicity. My agent thinks it’s better if we just let the book run its course.” The kettle whistled at last; he stood quickly, and she realized he’d been willing the water to boil too. “Hopefully when it comes out it’s only a story for a week or so, then it sinks and disappears. Green tea, or chamomile?”

“Green,” she said. “It must be infuriating, having your letters sold.”

“I was angry at first, I’m still angry, but the truth is, I think I deserved everything I got.” He carried two mugs of green tea to the coffee table, where they left rings of steam on the glass.

“Why do you think you deserved it?”

“I treated Victoria like a diary.” He lifted his mug, blew on the surface of his tea, and returned the mug very deliberately to the table. There was a studied quality to the movement, and Miranda had an odd impression that he was performing a scene. “She wrote to me at first, in the very beginning. Maybe two letters and three postcards, back when I first started writing to her from Toronto. Then a couple of quick notes telling me about changes in address, with a cursory note at the beginning, you know, ‘Hi, sorry for not writing more, I’ve been busy, here’s my new address.’ ”

“So all the times I saw you writing to her,” Miranda said, “she never wrote back.” She was surprised by how sad this made her.

“Right. I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter.” He looked up — and here, a pause in which Miranda could almost see the script: “Arthur looks up. Beat.” Was he acting? She couldn’t tell. “The truth is, I think I actually forgot she was real.”

Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy.

“It sounds like you’ve had a difficult year,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. It hasn’t been easy, but I keep reminding myself, people have much worse years than mine. I lost a few battles,” he said, “but that isn’t the same thing as losing the war.”

Miranda raised her mug. “To the war,” she said, which elicited a smile. “What else is happening?”

“I’m always talking about myself,” he said. “How’s your life?”

“Good. Very good. No complaints.”

“You’re in shipping, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I love it.”

“Married?”

“God, no.”

“No children?”

“My position on the subject hasn’t changed. You had a son with Elizabeth, didn’t you?”

“Tyler. Just turned eight. He’s with his mother in Jerusalem.”

There was a knock at the door just then, and Arthur stood. Miranda watched him recede across the room and thought of their last dinner party in the house in Los Angeles — Elizabeth Colton passed out on a sofa, Arthur walking away up the stairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing here.

The person at the door was very small.

“Hello, Kiki,” Arthur said. The visitor was a little girl, seven or eight years old. She clutched a coloring book in one hand, a pencil case in the other. She was very blond, the sort of child who appears almost incandescent in certain lighting. Miranda couldn’t imagine what part there could possibly be in King Lear for a seven- or eight-year-old, but she’d seen enough child actors in her time that she could recognize one on sight.

“Can I draw in my coloring book here?” the girl asked.

“Of course,” Arthur said. “Come in. I’d like you to meet my friend Miranda.”

“Hello,” the girl said without interest.

“Hello,” Miranda said. The girl looked like a china doll, she thought. She looked like someone who’d been well-cared-for and coddled all her life. She was probably someone who would grow up to be like Miranda’s assistant Laetitia, like Leon’s assistant Thea, unadventurous and well-groomed.

“Kirsten here likes to visit sometimes,” Arthur said. “We talk about acting. Your wrangler knows where you are?” In the way he looked at the girl, Miranda saw how much he missed his own child, his distant son.

“She was on the phone,” Kirsten said. “I sneaked out.” She sat on the carpet near the door, opened her coloring book to a half-completed page involving a princess, a rainbow, a distant castle, a frog, unpacked her pencils and began drawing red stripes around the bell of the princess’s dress.

“Are you still drawing?” Arthur asked Miranda. He was noticeably more relaxed with Kirsten in the room.

Always. Yes. When she traveled she carried a sketchbook in her luggage, for the times when she was alone in hotel rooms at night. The focus of the work had gradually shifted. For years Dr. Eleven had been the hero of the narrative, but lately he’d begun to annoy her and she’d become more interested in the Undersea. These people living out their lives in underwater fallout shelters, clinging to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored. The Undersea was limbo. She spent long hours sketching lives played out in underground rooms.

“You’ve actually just reminded me. I brought you something.” She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table.

“Your work.” Arthur smiled. “These are beautiful. The cover of this first one was on the studio wall in L.A., wasn’t it?”

“You remember.” An image that Arthur had once said was like the establishing shot for a movie: the sharp islands of the City, streets and buildings terraced into the rock, high bridges between. Far below in the aquatic darkness, the outlines of the airlock doors that led to the Undersea, massive shapes on the ocean floor. Arthur opened the first issue at random to a two-page spread, ocean and islands linked by bridges, twilight, Dr. Eleven standing on a rock with his Pomeranian by his side. Text: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.

“He was on a space station,” Arthur said. “I’d forgotten that.” He was turning the pages. “Do you still have the dog?”

“Luli? She died a couple years back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. These are beautiful,” he said again. “Thank you.”

“What is that?” the little girl on the carpet asked. Miranda had forgotten about her for a moment.

“Some books my friend Miranda made,” Arthur said. “I’ll show you later, Kiki. What are you working on there?”

“The princess,” Kirsten said. “Matilda said I couldn’t color her dress with stripes.”

“Well,” Arthur said, “I can’t say I agree with her. Is that why you snuck out of your dressing room? Were you fighting with Matilda again?”

“She said it wasn’t supposed to have stripes on it.”

“I think the stripes are perfect.”

“Who’s Matilda?” Miranda asked.

“She’s an actor too,” Kirsten said. “She’s sometimes really mean.”

“It’s an unusual staging,” Arthur said. “Three little girls on the stage at the beginning, playing childhood versions of Lear’s daughters, and then they come back as hallucinations in the fourth act. No lines, they’re just there.”

“She thinks she’s better than everyone because she goes to the National Ballet School,” Kirsten said, returning the subject to Matilda.

“Do you dance too?” Miranda asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be a dancer. I think ballet’s stupid.”

“Kirsten told me she wants to be an actor,” Arthur said.

“Oh, how interesting.”

“Yeah,” Kirsten said without looking up. “I’ve been in a lot of things.”

“Really,” Miranda said. How does one talk to an eight-year-old? She glanced at Arthur, who shrugged. “Like what?”

“Just things,” the girl said, as if she hadn’t been the one to bring these things up in the first place. Miranda was remembering that she’d never liked child actors.

“Kirsten went to an audition in New York last month,” Arthur said.

“We went in an airplane.” Kirsten stopped coloring and considered the princess. “The dress is wrong,” she said. Her voice quavered.

“I think the dress looks beautiful,” Miranda said. “You’ve done a beautiful job.”

“I have to agree with Miranda on this one,” Arthur said. “The stripes were a good choice.”

Kirsten turned the page. Blank outlines of a knight, a dragon, a tree.

“You’re not going to finish the princess?” Arthur asked.

“It isn’t perfect,” Kirsten said.

They sat for a while in silence, Kirsten filling in the dragon with alternating green and purple scales, Arthur flipping through Station Eleven. Miranda drank her tea and tried not to overanalyze his facial expressions.

“Does she visit you often?” Miranda asked softly, when he’d reached the last page.

“Almost daily. She doesn’t get along with the other girls. Unhappy kid.” They sipped their tea for a moment without speaking. The scratching of the little girl’s pencils on the coloring-book page, the steam rings that their mugs left on the glass of the coffee table, the pleasant heat of the tea, the warmth and beauty of this room: these were things that Miranda remembered in the last few hours, two weeks later, when she was drifting in and out of delirium on a beach in Malaysia.

“How long are you in Toronto?” Arthur asked.

“Four days. I leave for Asia on Friday.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Working out of the Tokyo office, mostly. There’s some possibility of my transferring there next year. Meeting with local subsidiaries in Singapore and Malaysia, visiting a few ships. Did you know,” she said, “that twelve percent of the world’s shipping fleet is moored fifty miles out of Singapore Harbor?”

“I didn’t know that.” He smiled. “Asia,” he said. “Can you believe this life?”

Miranda was back in her hotel before she remembered the paperweight. She dropped her handbag on the bed and heard it clink against her keys. It was the paperweight of clouded glass that Clark Thompson had brought to a dinner party in Los Angeles eleven years ago, and she’d taken it that night from Arthur’s study. She’d meant to give it back to him.

She held the paperweight for a moment, admiring it in the lamplight. She wrote a note on hotel stationery, put her shoes back on, went downstairs to the concierge desk, and arranged to have it sent by courier to the Elgin Theatre.

40

TWO WEEKS LATER, just before the old world ended, Miranda stood on a beach on the coast of Malaysia looking out at the sea. She’d been delivered back to her hotel after a day of meetings, where she’d spent some time finishing a report and eating a room-service dinner. She’d planned on going to bed early, but through the window of her room she could see the lights of the container-ship fleet on the horizon, and she’d walked down to the water for a closer look.

The three nearest airports had closed in the previous ninety minutes, but Miranda didn’t know this yet. She’d been aware of the Georgia Flu, of course, but was under the impression that it was still a somewhat shadowy health crisis unfolding in Georgia and Russia. The hotel staff had been instructed to avoid alarming the guests, so no one mentioned the pandemic as she crossed the lobby, although she did notice in passing that the front desk seemed understaffed. In any event, it was a pleasure to escape the coffin chill of the hotel air-conditioning, to walk down the well-lit path to the beach and take off her shoes to stand barefoot in the sand.

Later that evening she would find herself troubled and at moments even a little amused by the memory of how casually everyone had once thrown the word collapse around, before anyone understood what the word truly meant, but in any event, there had been an economic collapse, or so everyone called it at the time, and now the largest shipping fleet ever assembled lay fifty miles east of Singapore Harbor. Twelve of the boats belonged to Neptune Logistics, including two new Panamax-class vessels that had yet to carry a single cargo container, decks still gleaming from the South Korean shipyards; ships ordered in a moment when it seemed the demand would only ever grow, built over the following three years while the economy imploded, unneeded now that no one was spending any money.

Earlier that afternoon, in the subsidiary office, Miranda had been told that the local fishermen were afraid of the ships. The fishermen suspected a hint of the supernatural in these vessels, unmoving hulks on the horizon by day, lit up after dark. In the office the local director had laughed at the absurdity of the fishermen’s fears, and Miranda had smiled along with everyone else at the table, but was it so unreasonable to wonder if these lights might not be quite of this earth? She knew the ships were only lit up to prevent collisions, but it still seemed to her as she stood on the beach that evening that there was something otherworldly in the sight. When her phone vibrated in her hand, it was Clark Thompson, Arthur’s oldest friend, calling from New York.

“Miranda,” he said after some awkward preliminaries, “I’m afraid I’m calling with some rather bad news. Perhaps you should sit down.”

“What happened?”

“Miranda, Arthur died of a heart attack last night. I’m so sorry.”

Oh, Arthur.

Clark hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. He worked at the kind of firm where doors are never closed unless someone’s getting fired, and he was aware that by now he was no doubt the topic of speculation all over the office. Drama! What could possibly be happening in Clark’s office? He had ventured out once, for coffee, and everyone had arranged their faces into neutral yet concerned expressions as he passed — that “no pressure, but if there’s anything you need to talk about …” look — and he was having one of the worst mornings of his life, but he derived minor satisfaction from saying nothing and depriving the gossips of fuel. He drew a line through Miranda Carroll’s name, lifted the receiver to call Elizabeth Colton, changed his mind and went to the window. A young man on the street below was playing a saxophone. Clark opened his window and the room was flooded with sound, the thin notes of the saxophone on the surface of the oceanic city, a blare of hip-hop from a passing car, a driver leaning on his horn at the corner. Clark closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the saxophone, but just then his assistant buzzed him.

“It’s Arthur Leander’s lawyer again,” Tabitha said. “Shall I tell him you’re in a meeting?”

“Bloody hell, does the man never sleep?” It had been Heller who’d left the voice mail at midnight in Los Angeles, three a.m. in New York—“an urgent situation, please call me immediately”—and Heller who’d been up and working when Clark called him back at six fifteen a.m. in New York, three fifteen in L.A. They’d agreed that Clark should be the one to call the family, because Clark had met Arthur’s family once and it seemed kinder that way. Clark had decided to also notify the ex-wives, even the most recent one whom he didn’t like very much, because it seemed wrong to let them read about it in the newspaper; he had an idea — too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it — that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn’t like one another anymore.

Heller had called him again a half hour later to confirm that Clark had notified the family, which of course Clark hadn’t, because three forty-five a.m. in Los Angeles is also three forty-five a.m. on the west coast of Canada, where Arthur’s brother lived, and Clark felt that there were limits to how early one should call anyone for any reason. Now it was still only nine a.m. in New York, six a.m. on Heller’s coast, and it seemed obscene that this man who’d apparently been up all night was still up and working. Clark was beginning to imagine Heller as a sort of bat, some kind of sinister night-living vampire lawyer who slept by day and worked by night. Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark’s thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend at a dance club and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight.

“You want to take the call?” Tabitha asked.

“Fine. Put him through, please.”

For just a beat Tabitha did nothing, and after seven years of working together in close quarters he knew that this particular brand of silence meant “Tell me what’s going on, you know I like gossip,” but he didn’t oblige, and he knew her well enough to catch the note of disappointment in the perfectly professional “Hold for your call, please” that followed.

“Clark? Heller here.”

“So I gathered,” Clark said. There was something obnoxious, he thought, in people who introduced themselves by their surnames while calling one by one’s first. “How are you, Gary? We haven’t spoken in a solid ninety minutes.”

“Hanging in, hanging in.” Clark mentally added this to his private list of most-hated banalities. “I went ahead and notified the family,” Heller said.

“Why? I thought we’d agreed—”

“I know you didn’t want to wake up the family, but with this kind of thing, a situation like this, you have to wake up the family. You actually want to wake the family, you know? Actually more decent. You want the family to know before someone leaks something, a photo, video, whatever, and then Entertainment Weekly calls the family for comment and that’s how they find out about it. Think about it, I mean, the man died onstage.”

“Right,” Clark said. “I see.” The saxophonist had disappeared. The gray of the November sky reminded him that he was about due for a visit to his parents in London. “Has Elizabeth been notified?”

“Who?”

“Elizabeth Colton. The second wife.”

“No, I mean, she’s hardly family, is she? When we talked about notifying family, I really just meant Arthur’s brother.”

“Well, but she is the mother of Arthur’s only child.”

“Right, right, of course. How old is he?”

“Eight or nine.”

“Poor little guy. Hell of an age for this.” A crack in Heller’s voice, sadness or exhaustion, and Clark revised his mental image from hanging-upside-down bat lawyer to sad, pale, caffeine-addicted man with chronic insomnia. Had he met Heller? Had Heller been at that ghastly dinner party in Los Angeles all those years ago, just before Miranda and Arthur divorced? Maybe. Clark was drawing a blank. “So hey, listen,” Heller said, all business again, but a faux-casual style of all-business that Clark associated overwhelmingly with California, “in your time with Arthur, especially recently, did he ever mention anything about a woman named Tanya Gerard?”

“The name’s not familiar.”

“You’re sure?”

“No. Why? Who is she?”

“Well,” Heller said, “just between the two of us, seems our Arthur was having a little affair.” It wasn’t delight in his voice, not exactly. It was importance. This was a man who liked to know things that other people didn’t.

“I see,” Clark said, “but I admit I fail to see how that’s any of our—”

“Oh, of course,” Heller said, “of course it isn’t, you know, right to privacy and all that, none of our business, right? Not hurting anyone, consenting adults, etcetera, and I mean I’m the most private, I don’t even have a Facebook account for god’s sake, that’s how much I believe in it, in privacy I mean, last guy on earth without a Facebook account. But anyway, this Tanya person, seems she was a wardrobe girl on King Lear. I just wondered if he’d mentioned her.”

“No, Gary, I don’t believe he ever did.”

“The producer told me it was all very secret, apparently this was the girl who did costumes or actually maybe it was babysitting, something to do with the child actresses, costumes for the child actresses? I think that was it, although child actors in Lear? That one’s a head scratcher. But look, anyway, he …”

Was that sunlight on the other side of the East River? A beam had pierced the clouds in the far distance and was angling down over Queens. The effect reminded Clark of an oil painting. He was thinking of the first time he’d seen Arthur, in an acting studio on Danforth Avenue in Toronto. Arthur at eighteen: confident despite the fact that for at least the first six months of acting classes he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, or so the acting instructor had pronounced one night over drinks at a bar staffed exclusively with drag queens, the instructor trying to pick up Clark, Clark offering only token resistance. And beautiful, Arthur was beautiful back then.

“So the question, obviously,” Heller was saying, “is whether he intended to leave this girl anything in the will, because he emailed me last week about changing the will, said he’d met someone and he wanted to add a beneficiary and I have to assume that’s who he meant, really what I’m thinking about here is the worst-case scenario, where there’s a shadow will somewhere, some informal document he drew up himself because he wasn’t going to see me for a few weeks, that’s what I’m trying to get to the bottom of here—”

“You should’ve seen him,” Clark said.

“I should’ve seen … I’m sorry, what?”

“Back at the beginning, when he was just starting out. You’ve seen his talent, his talent was obvious, but if you’d seen him before any of the rest of it, all the tabloids and movies and divorces, the fame, all those warping things.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at here, I—”

“He was wonderful,” Clark said. “Back then, back at the beginning. I was so struck by him. I don’t mean romantically, it was nothing like that. Sometimes you just meet someone. He was so kind, that’s what I remember most clearly. Kind to everyone he met. This humility about him.”

“What—”

“Gary,” Clark said, “I’m going to hang up now.”

He stuck his head out the window for a fortifying breath of November air, returned to his desk, and called Elizabeth Colton. She let out her breath in a long sigh when he told her the news.

“Are there funeral arrangements?”

“Toronto. Day after tomorrow.”

“Toronto? Does he have family there?”

“No, but his will was very specific apparently. I guess he felt some attachment to the place.”

As Clark spoke, he was remembering a conversation he’d had with Arthur over drinks some years ago, in a bar in New York. They’d been discussing the cities they’d lived in. “You’re from London,” Arthur had said. “A guy like you can take cities for granted. For someone like me, coming from a small place … look, I think about my childhood, the life I lived on Delano Island, that place was so small. Everyone knew me, not because I was special or anything, just because everyone knew everyone, and the claustrophobia of that, I can’t tell you. I just wanted some privacy. For as long as I could remember I just wanted to get out, and then I got to Toronto and no one knew me. Toronto felt like freedom.”

“And then you moved to L.A. and got famous,” Clark had said, “and now everyone knows you again.”

“Right.” Arthur had been preoccupied with an olive in his martini, trying to spear it with a toothpick. “I guess you could say Toronto was the only place I’ve felt free.”

Clark woke at four a.m. the next morning and took a taxi to the airport. These were the hours of near misses, the hours of miracles, visible as such only in hindsight over the following days. The flu was already seeping through the city, but he hailed a taxi in which the driver wasn’t ill and no one contagious had touched any surface before him, and from this improbably lucky car he watched the streets passing in the pre-dawn dark, the pale light of bodegas with their flowers behind plastic curtains, a few shift workers on the sidewalks. The social-media networks were filled with rumors of the flu’s arrival in New York, but Clark didn’t partake of social media and was unaware.

At John F. Kennedy International Airport he passed through a terminal in which he managed by some choreography of luck to avoid passing too close to anyone who was already infected — there were several infected people in that particular terminal by then — and managed not to touch any of the wrong surfaces, managed in fact to board a plane filled with similarly lucky people — the twenty-seventh-to-last plane ever to depart from that airport — and through all of this he was so sleep-deprived, he’d stayed up too late packing, he was tired and caught up in thoughts of Arthur, in listening to Coltrane on headphones, in working halfheartedly at the 360° reports once he found himself at the departure gate, that he didn’t realize he was on the same flight as Elizabeth Colton until he glanced up and saw her boarding the plane with her son.

It was a coincidence, but not an enormous coincidence. On the phone the other day he’d told her about the flight he was planning on taking — seven a.m., to get to Toronto before the predicted snowstorm arrived and snarled the airports — and she’d said she would try to get on the same flight. And then there she was in a dark suit, her hair cut short but instantly recognizable, her son by her side. Elizabeth and Tyler were in First Class and Clark was in Economy. They said hello as Clark walked past her seat and then didn’t speak again until an hour and a half after takeoff, when the pilot announced that they were being diverted into some place in Michigan that Clark had never heard of and everyone disembarked, confused and disoriented, into the Severn City Airport.

41

AFTER CLARK HAD DELIVERED the news of Arthur’s death, Miranda remained on the beach for some time. She sat on the sand, thinking of Arthur and watching a small boat coming in to shore, a single bright light skimming over the water. She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees. She was very tired, she realized, not feeling quite well, the beginnings of a sore throat, and tomorrow was another day of meetings. She’d forgotten to ask Clark about funeral arrangements, but her next thought was that of course she wouldn’t want to go — the idea of being pinned between the paparazzi and Arthur’s other ex-wives — and this was what she was thinking of as she rose and walked up the path to the hotel, which from the beach looked a little like a wedding cake, two tiers of white balconies.

The lobby was oddly empty. There was no front-desk staff. The concierge wore a surgical mask. Miranda started to approach him, to ask what was going on, but the look he gave her was one of unmistakable fear. She understood, as clearly as if he’d shouted it, that he wanted very badly for her not to come near him. She backed away and walked quickly to the elevators, shaken, his gaze on her back. There was no one in the upstairs corridor. Back in her room, she opened her laptop and, for the first time all day, turned her attention to the news.

Later Miranda spent two hours making phone calls, but there was no way to leave by then. Every nearby airport was closed.

“Listen,” a fraying airline representative finally snapped at her, “even if I could book you on a flight out of Malaysia, are you seriously telling me you’d want to spend twelve hours breathing recirculated air with two hundred other people in an airplane cabin at this point?”

Miranda hung up the phone. When she leaned back in the chair, her gaze fell on the air-conditioning vent above the desk. The thought of air whispering through the building, propelled from room to room. It wasn’t her imagination, she definitely had a sore throat.

“It’s psychosomatic,” she said aloud. “You’re afraid of getting sick, so you feel sick. It’s nothing.” She was trying to reframe the story as an exciting adventure, the time I got stuck in Asia during a flu outbreak, but she was unconvinced. She spent some time sketching, trying to calm herself. A rocky island with a small house on it, lights on the horizon of Station Eleven’s dark sea.

Miranda woke at four in the morning with a fever. She fought it off with three aspirin, but her joints were knots of pain, her legs weak, her skin hurt where her clothes touched her. It was difficult to cross the room to the desk. She read the latest news on the laptop, her eyes aching from the light of the screen, and understood. She could feel the fever pressing against the thin film of aspirin. She tried calling the front desk and then the New York and Toronto offices of Neptune Logistics, followed by the Canadian, American, British, and Australian consulates, but there were only voice-mail greetings and ringing phones.

Miranda rested the side of her face on the desk — the perfection of the cool laminate against her burning skin — and considered the poverty of the room. Poverty not in the economic sense, but in the sense of not being enough for the gravity of the moment, an insufficient setting — for what? She couldn’t think of this just yet — and she was thinking about the beach, the ships, the lights on the horizon, if it would be possible to get there when she felt so ill, related thoughts that perhaps if she could get there, someone on the beach might help her, that if she stayed here in the room she’d only get sicker and there was apparently no one at the front desk or in the consulates, all telephones unmanned. If she became any sicker she’d eventually be stranded here, too ill to get out of this room. There might be fishermen on the beach. She rose unsteadily. It took a long time and considerable concentration to put on her shoes.

The corridor was silent. It was necessary to walk very slowly, her hand on the wall. A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead — I see you, I see you — and hoped this was enough.

The lobby was empty now. The staff had fled.

Outside the air was heavy and still. A greenish light on the horizon, the beginnings of sunrise. A feeling of moving in slow motion, like walking underwater or in a dream. It was necessary to concentrate carefully on each step. This terrible weakness. She followed the path to the beach, walking very slowly, her outstretched hands brushing the palm fronds on either side. At the bottom of the path, the hotel’s white chaise longues lay in a row on the sand, unoccupied. The beach was empty of people. She collapsed into the nearest chaise longue and closed her eyes.

Exhaustion. She was desperately hot, then wracked with chills. Her thoughts were disordered. No one came.

She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn’t have been exposed to the flu. Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.

Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets and its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.