Station Eleven

42

AT FIRST THE PEOPLE in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded. This was difficult to explain to young people in the following decades, but in all fairness, the entire history of being stranded in airports up to that point was also a history of eventually becoming unstranded, of boarding a plane and flying away. At first it seemed inevitable that the National Guard would roll in at any moment with blankets and boxes of food, that ground crews would return shortly thereafter and planes would start landing and taking off again. Day One, Day Two, Day Forty-eight, Day Ninety, any expectation of a return to normalcy long gone by now, then Year One, Year Two, Year Three. Time had been reset by catastrophe. After a while they went back to the old way of counting days and months, but kept the new system of years: January 1, Year Three; March 17, Year Four, etc. Year Four was when Clark realized this was the way the years would continue to be marked from now on, counted off one by one from the moment of disaster.

He’d known for a long time by then that the world’s changes wouldn’t be reversed, but still, the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.

Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, “I was there,” and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration.

“It’s hard to explain,” he caught himself saying sometimes to young people who came into his museum, which had formerly been the Skymiles Lounge in Concourse C. But he took his role as curator seriously and he’d decided years ago that “It’s hard to explain” isn’t good enough, so he always tried to explain it all anyway, whenever anyone asked about any of the objects he’d collected over the years, from the airport and beyond — the laptops, the iPhones, the radio from an administrative desk, the electric toaster from an airport-staff lounge, the turntable and vinyl records that some optimistic scavenger had carried back from Severn City — and of course the context, the pre-pandemic world that he remembered so sharply. No, he was explaining now, to a sixteen-year-old who’d been born in the airport, the planes didn’t rise straight up into the sky. They gathered speed on long runways and angled upward.

“Why did they need the runways?” the sixteen-year-old asked. Her name was Emmanuelle. He had a special fondness for her, because he remembered her birth as the only good thing that had happened in that terrible first year.

“They couldn’t get off the ground without gathering speed. They needed momentum.”

“Oh,” she said. “The engines weren’t that powerful, then?”

“They were,” he said, “but they weren’t like rocket ships.”

“Rocket ships …”

“The ships we used to go to space.”

“It’s incredible,” she said, shaking her head.

“Yes.” Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. This was how he arrived in this airport: he’d boarded a machine that transported him at high speed a mile above the surface of the earth. This was how he’d told Miranda Carroll of her ex-husband’s death: he’d pressed a series of buttons on a device that had connected him within seconds to an instrument on the other side of the world, and Miranda — barefoot on a white sand beach with a shipping fleet shining before her in the dark — had pressed a button that had connected her via satellite to New York. These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around them.

By the end of the Second Decade most of the airport’s population was either born there or had walked in later, but two dozen or so people remained who had been there since the day their flights had landed. Clark’s flight landed without incident, diverted from Toronto for reasons no one seemed immediately able to explain, and taxied to a gate in Concourse B. Clark looked up from his edits of the 360° Subordinates report and was struck by the variety of planes on the tarmac. Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Air France, enormous jets parked end to end.

When Clark emerged from the jet bridge into the fluorescent light of Concourse B, the first thing he noticed was the uneven distribution of people. Crowds had gathered beneath the television monitors. Clark decided that whatever they were looking at, he couldn’t face it without a cup of tea. He assumed it was a terrorist attack. He bought a cup of Earl Grey at a kiosk, and took his time adding the milk. This is the last time I’ll stir milk into my tea without knowing what happened, he thought, wistful in advance for the present moment, and went to stand with the crowd beneath a television that was tuned to CNN.

The story of the pandemic’s arrival in North America had broken while he was in the air. This was another thing that was hard to explain years later, but up until that morning the Georgia Flu had seemed quite distant, especially if one happened not to be on social media. Clark had never followed the news very closely and had actually heard about the flu only the day before the flight, in a brief newspaper story about a mysterious outbreak of some virus in Paris, and it hadn’t been at all clear that it was developing into a pandemic. But now he watched the too-late evacuations of cities, the riots outside hospitals on three continents, the slow-moving exodus clogging every road, and wished he’d been paying more attention. The gridlocked roads were puzzling, because where were all these people going? If these reports were to be believed, not only had the Georgia Flu arrived, but it was already everywhere. There were clips of officials from various governments, epidemiologists with their sleeves rolled up, everyone wan and bloodshot and warning of catastrophe, blue-black circles under bloodshot eyes.

“It’s not looking promising for a quick end to the emergency,” a newscaster said, understating the situation to a degree previously unmatched in the history of understatement, and then he blinked at the camera and something in him seemed to stutter, a breaking down of some mechanism that had previously held his personal and professional lives apart, and he addressed the camera with a new urgency. “Mel,” he said, “if you’re watching this, sweetheart, take the kids to your parents’ ranch. Back roads only, my love, no highways. I love you so much.”

“It must be nice to have the network at your disposal,” a man standing near Clark said. “I don’t know where my wife is either. You know where your wife is?” His voice carried a high note of panic.

Clark decided to pretend that the man had asked him where his boyfriend was. “No,” he said. “I have no idea.” He turned away from the monitor, unable to bear another second of the news. For how long had he been standing here? His tea had gone cold. He drifted down the concourse and stood before the flight-status monitors. Every flight had been canceled.

How had all of this happened so quickly? Why hadn’t he checked the news before he left for the airport? It occurred to Clark that he should call someone, actually everyone, that he should call everyone he’d ever loved and talk to them and tell them all the things that mattered, but it was apparently already too late for this, his phone displaying a message he’d never seen before: SYSTEM OVERLOAD EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY. He bought another tea, because the first one had gone cold, and also he was beset now by terrible fears and walking to the kiosk seemed like purposeful action. Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn’t noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn’t yet known that everything was coming undone.

“Can you tell us more about the … well, about what people should be looking out for, the symptoms?” the newscaster asked.

“Same things we see every flu season,” the epidemiologist said, “just worse.”

“So, for example …?”

“Aches and pains. A sudden high fever. Difficulty breathing. Look,” the epidemiologist said, “it’s a fast incubation period. If you’re exposed, you’re sick in three or four hours and dead in a day or two.”

“We’re going to take a quick commercial break,” the newscaster said.

The airline staff had no information. They were tight-lipped and frightened. They distributed food vouchers, which by power of suggestion made everyone hungry, so passengers formed lines to buy greasy cheese quesadillas and nacho plates at Concourse B’s only restaurant, which was ostensibly Mexican. The two young women in the kiosk continued to serve hot drinks and mildly stale baked goods, frowning every so often at their useless phones. Clark bought his way into the Skymiles Lounge and found Elizabeth Colton in an armchair near a television screen. Tyler sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, killing space aliens on a Nintendo console.

“It’s crazy,” Clark said to Elizabeth, words falling hopelessly short.

She was watching the news, her hands clasped at her throat.

“It’s unprecedented,” Elizabeth said. “In all of human history …,” she trailed off, shaking her head. Tyler groaned softly; he’d suffered a setback in the alien wars. They sat for a while in silence, watching, until Clark couldn’t watch anymore and excused himself to find more nachos.

A final plane was landing, an Air Gradia jet, but as Clark watched, it made a slow turn on the tarmac and moved away from instead of toward the terminal building. It parked in the far distance, and no ground crew went to meet it. Clark abandoned his nachos and went to the window. It occurred to him that the Air Gradia jet was as far away from the terminal as it could possibly go. This was where he was standing when the announcement came: for public-health reasons, the airport was closing immediately. There would be no flights for the indefinite future. All passengers were asked to collect their bags at Baggage Claim, to leave the premises in an orderly fashion, and to please not flip out.

“This can’t be happening,” the passengers said to each other and to themselves, over nacho platters and in angry clusters in front of vending machines. They swore at airport management, at the TSA, at the airlines, at their useless phones, furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting. Beneath the fury was something literally unspeakable, the television news carrying an implication that no one could yet bring themselves to consider. It was possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak, but it wasn’t possible to comprehend what it meant. Clark stood by the terminal’s glass wall in the Mexican restaurant, watching the stillness of the Air Gradia jet in the far distance, and he realized later that if he didn’t understand at that moment why it was out there alone, it was only because he didn’t want to know.

The workers at the restaurants and the gift shop chased out their customers and locked down steel shutters and gates, walked away without looking back. The passengers around Clark began departing too, an exodus that merged with the slow processions leaving the other two concourses. Elizabeth and Tyler emerged from the Skymiles Lounge.

“Are you leaving?” Clark asked. It still wasn’t entirely real.

“Not yet,” Elizabeth said. She looked a little deranged, but so did everyone else. “Where would we go? You saw the news.” Everyone who’d been watching the news knew that roads everywhere were impassable, cars abandoned where they’d run out of gas, all commercial airlines shut down, no trains or buses. Most of them were leaving the airport anyway, because the voice over the intercom had said that they should.

“I think I’ll stay here for the moment,” Clark said. A few others apparently had had the same thought, and some who’d left returned after a half hour with reports that there was no ground transportation. The others had set out walking for Severn City, they said. Clark waited for an airport official to come and chase all of them away, the hundred-odd passengers who remained at the terminal, but none did. An Air Gradia agent was in tears by the ticket counter. The screen over her head still read AIR GRADIA FLIGHT 452 NOW ARRIVING, but when her radio crackled Clark heard the word quarantine.

Half of the remaining passengers had tied scarves or T-shirts over their mouths and noses, but it had been hours by now, and if they were all going to die of flu, Clark thought, wouldn’t at least some of them be sick already?

The passengers who remained in the airport were mostly foreign. They looked out the windows at the airplanes on which they’d arrived — Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air France — parked end to end on the tarmac. They spoke in languages Clark didn’t understand.

A little girl did cartwheels up and down the length of Concourse B.

Clark walked the length of the airport, restless, and was stunned to see that the security checkpoints were unmanned. He walked through and back three or four times, just because he could. He’d thought it would be liberating but all he felt was fear. He found himself staring at everyone he saw, looking for symptoms. No one seemed sick, but could they be carrying it? He found a corner as far from his fellow passengers as possible and stayed there for some time.

“We just have to wait,” Elizabeth said, when he came to sit with her again. “Surely by tomorrow morning we’ll see the National Guard.” Arthur had always liked her optimism, Clark remembered.

No one emerged from the Air Gradia jet on the tarmac.

A young man was doing push-ups by Gate B20. He’d do a set of ten, then lie on his back and stare unblinking at the ceiling for a while, then another ten, etc.

Clark found a discarded New York Times on a bench and read Arthur’s obituary. Noted film and stage actor, dead at fifty-one. A life summed up in a series of failed marriages — Miranda, Elizabeth, Lydia — and a son, whose present absorption in his handheld Nintendo was absolute. When Arthur collapsed onstage, someone from the audience had performed CPR, the obituary said, but that audience member remained unidentified. Clark folded the paper into his suitcase.

Clark’s grasp of Midwestern American geography was shaky. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was. He’d gathered from the items on offer at the souvenir shop that they were somewhere near Lake Michigan, which he could picture because he retained an internal bird’s-eye snapshot of the Great Lakes from his time in Toronto, but he’d never heard of Severn City. The airport seemed very new. Beyond the tarmac and the runways he could see only a line of trees. He tried to pinpoint his location on his iPhone, but the map wouldn’t load. No one’s phones were working, but word spread that there was a pay phone down in Baggage Claim. Clark stood in line for a half hour and then dialed all his numbers, but there were only busy signals and endless ringing. Where was everyone? The man behind him in line sighed loudly, so Clark gave up the phone and spent some time wandering the airport.

When he was tired of walking he returned to a bench he’d staked out earlier by Gate B17, lay on his back on the carpet between the bench and a wall of glass. Snow began to fall in the late afternoon. Elizabeth and Tyler were still in the Skymiles Lounge. He knew he should be sociable and talk to them, but he wanted to be alone, or as alone as he could be in an airport with a hundred other terrified and weeping people. He ate a dinner of corn chips and chocolate bars from a vending machine, spent some time listening to Coltrane on his iPod. He was thinking of Robert, his boyfriend of three months. Clark wanted very much to see him again. What was Robert doing at this moment? Clark stared up at the news. Around ten p.m. he brushed his teeth, returned to his spot by Gate B17, stretched out on the carpet and tried to imagine he was home in his bed.

He woke at three in the morning, shivering. The news had worsened. The fabric was unraveling. It will be hard to come back from this, he thought, because in those first days it was still inconceivable that civilization might not come back from this at all.

Clark was watching NBC when a teenager approached him. He’d noticed her earlier, sitting by herself with her head in her hands. She looked about seventeen and had a diamond nose stud that caught the light.

“I’m sorry to ask,” she said, “but do you have any Effexor?”

“Effexor?”

“I’ve run out,” she said. “I’m asking everyone.”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t any. What is it?”

“An antidepressant,” the girl said. “I thought I’d be home in Arizona by now.”

“I’m so sorry. How awful for you.”

“Well,” the girl said, “thanks anyway,” and Clark watched her walk away to make inquiries of a couple only slightly older than she was, who listened for a moment and then shook their heads in unison.

Clark was thinking ahead to a time when he’d sit with Robert in a restaurant in New York or London and they’d raise a glass of wine to their tremendous good fortune at having made it through. How many of their friends would have died by the time he saw Robert again? There would be funerals to go to, memorial services. Probably a certain measure of grief and survivor’s guilt to contend with, therapy and such.

“What a terrible time that was,” Clark said softly to an imaginary Robert, practicing for the future.

“Awful,” Imaginary Robert agreed. “Remember those days when you were in the airport, and I didn’t know where you were?”

Clark closed his eyes. The news continued on the overhead screens, but he couldn’t bear to watch. The stacked body bags, the riots, the closed hospitals, the dead-eyed refugees walking on inter-states. Think of anything else. If not the future, the past: dancing with Arthur when they were young in Toronto. The taste of Orange Julius, that sugary orange drink he’d only ever tasted in Canadian shopping malls. The scar on Robert’s arm just above the elbow, from when he’d broken his arm very badly in the seventh grade, the bouquet of tiger lilies that Robert had sent to Clark’s office just last week. Robert in the mornings: he liked to read a novel while he ate breakfast. It was possibly the most civilized habit Clark had ever encountered. Was Robert awake at this moment? Was he trying to leave New York? The storm had passed, and snow lay deep on the wings of airplanes. There were no de-icing machines, no tire tracks, no footprints; the ground workers had departed. Air Gradia 452 was still alone on the tarmac.

There was a moment later in the day when Clark blinked and realized he’d been staring into space for some time. He had intimations of danger, that there was hazard in allowing his thoughts to drift too loosely, so he tried to work, to read over his 360° reports, but his thoughts were scattered, and also he couldn’t help but wonder if the target of the 360° and all the people he’d interviewed were dead.

He tried to reread his newspapers, on the theory that this required less concentration than the reports, came across Arthur’s New York Times obituary again and realized that the world in which Arthur had died already seemed quite distant. He’d lost his oldest friend, but if the television news was accurate, then in all probability everyone here with him in the airport had lost someone too. All at once he felt an aching tenderness for his fellow refugees, these hundred or so strangers here in the airport. He folded his paper and looked at them, his compatriots, sleeping or fretfully awake on benches and on carpets, pacing, staring at screens or out at the landscape of airplanes and snow, everyone waiting for whatever came next.

43

THE FIRST WINTER in the Severn City Airport:

There was a frisson of excitement on Day Two, when someone recognized Elizabeth and Tyler and word spread. “My phone,” Clark heard a young man say in frustration. He was about twenty, with hair that flopped in his eyes. “God, why won’t our phones work? I so wish I could tweet this.”

“Yeah,” his girlfriend said, wistful. “You know, like, ‘Not much, just chilling with Arthur Leander’s kid at the end of the world.’ ”

“Totally,” the man said. Clark moved away from them in order to maintain his sanity, although later, in a more charitable moment, it occurred to him that they were probably in shock.

By Day Three all the vending machines in the airport were empty of snacks, and the battery on Tyler’s Nintendo console was dead. Tyler wept, inconsolable. The girl who needed Effexor was very sick by then. Withdrawal, she said. No one in the airport had the drug she needed. A raiding party went through every room, the administrative offices and the TSA holding cell, everyone’s desk drawers, and then they went outside and broke into the dozen or so cars abandoned in the parking lot, pawed through glove boxes and trunks. They found some useful items in their searches, extra pairs of shoes and some warm clothes and such, but on the pharmaceutical front they uncovered only painkillers and antacids and a mysterious bottle of pills that someone thought might be for stomach ulcers. In the meantime the girl lay across a bench, shivering and drenched in sweat, and she said her head sparked with electricity every time she moved.

They called 911 from the pay phone in baggage claim, but no one picked up. They wandered outside and stared at the snowed-in parking lot, the airport road disappearing into the trees, but what could possibly be out there aside from the flu?

The television newscasters weren’t exactly saying that it was the end of the world, per se, but the word apocalypse was beginning to appear.

“All those people,” Clark said to Imaginary Robert, but Imaginary Robert didn’t reply.

That evening they broke into the Mexican restaurant and cooked an enormous dinner of ground meat and tortilla chips and cheese with sauces splashed over it. Some people had mixed feelings about this — they’d obviously been abandoned here, everyone was hungry and 911 wasn’t even operational; on the other hand, no one wants to be a thief — but then a business traveler named Max said, “Look, everyone just chill the fuck out, I’ll cover it on my Amex.” There was applause at this announcement. He removed his Amex card from his wallet with a flourish and left it next to the cash register, where it remained untouched for the next ninety-seven days.

On Day Four the food from the Mexican restaurant ran out, also the food from the sandwich place in Concourse C. That night they lit their first bonfire on the tarmac, burning newspapers and magazines from the newsstand and a wooden bench from Concourse A. Someone had raided the Skymiles Lounge. They got drunk on Skymiles Lounge champagne and ate Skymiles Lounge oranges and snack mix. Someone suggested that perhaps a passing plane or helicopter might see the fire and come down to save them, but no lights crossed the cloudless sky.

The realization, later, that that had possibly been his last orange. This orangeless world! Clark said to himself, or perhaps to Imaginary Robert, and laughed in a way that prompted concerned glances from the others. That first year everyone was a little crazy.

On Day Five they broke into the gift shop, because some people had no clean clothes, and after that, at any given moment half of the population was dressed in bright red or blue Beautiful Northern Michigan T-shirts. They washed their clothes in the sinks, and everywhere Clark turned he saw laundry hanging to dry on the backs of benches. The effect was oddly cheerful, like strings of bright flags.

The snacks from the Concourse B gift shop were gone by Day Six. The National Guard still hadn’t arrived.

On Day Seven the networks began to blink off the air, one by one. “So that all of our employees may be with their families,” a CNN anchor said, ashen and glassy-eyed after forty-eight hours without sleep, “we are temporarily suspending broadcast operations.” “Good night,” NBC said an hour later, “and good luck.” CBS switched without comment to reruns of America’s Got Talent. This was at five in the morning, and everyone who was awake watched for a few hours — it was nice to take a quick break from the end of the world — and then in the early afternoon the lights went out. They came back on almost immediately, but what it probably meant, a pilot said, was that the grid had gone down and the airport had switched to generator power. All of the workers who knew how the generators worked had left by then. People had been trickling out since Day Three. “It’s the waiting,” Clark had heard a woman say, “I can’t take the waiting, I have to do something, even if it’s just walking to the nearest town to see what’s going on.…”

A TSA agent had remained at the airport, just one, Tyrone, and he knew how to hunt. By Day Eight no one new had come to the airport and no one who’d left had returned, no more planes or helicopters had landed, everyone was hungry and trying not to think about all the apocalypse movies they’d seen over the years. Tyrone set off into the trees with a woman who’d formerly been a park ranger and two TSA-issue handguns, and they returned some time later with a deer. They strung it between metal chairs over the fire and at sunset everyone ate roasted venison and drank the last of the champagne, while the girl who needed Effexor slipped out through an entrance on the other side of the airport and walked away into the trees. A group of them tried to find her, but couldn’t.

The girl who needed Effexor had left her suitcase and all of her belongings behind, including her driver’s license. She looked sleepy in the picture, a slightly younger version of herself with longer hair. Her name was Lily Patterson. She was eighteen. No one knew what to do with the driver’s license. Finally someone put it on the counter of the Mexican restaurant, next to Max’s Amex card.

Tyler spent his days curled in an armchair in the Skymiles Lounge, reading his comic books over and over again. Elizabeth sat near him with her eyes closed, lips moving constantly, rapidly, in some repeated prayer.

The televisions displayed silent test patterns.

On the twelfth day in the airport, the lights went out. But the toilets would still flush if one poured water into the bowls, so they collected plastic trays from the security checkpoints and filled them with snow, carted these to the restrooms to melt. Clark had never thought much about airport design, but he was grateful that so much of this particular airport was glass. They lived in daylight and went to bed at sundown.

There were three pilots among the stranded. On the fifteenth day in the airport, one of them announced that he’d decided to take a plane to Los Angeles. The snow had melted, so he thought he could maybe make do without de-icing machines. People reminded him that Los Angeles had looked pretty bad on the news.

“Yeah, but everywhere looked bad on the news,” the pilot said. His family was in L.A. He wasn’t willing to accept the possibility of not seeing them again. “Anyone wants to come with me,” he said, “it’s a free flight to Los Angeles.” This alone seemed like proof that the world was ending, because this was the era when people were being charged extra for checked bags, for boarding early enough to cram baggage into overhead bins before the bins filled up, for the privilege of sitting in exit rows with their life-or-death stakes and their two extra inches of legroom. The passengers exchanged glances.

“The plane’s fueled up,” the pilot said. “I was flying Boston to San Diego when we got diverted, and it’s not like it’ll be a full flight.” It occurred to Clark that if the entire population of the airport went with him, there would still be empty seats on the plane. “I’m going to give you all a day to think about it,” the pilot said, “but I’m flying out tomorrow before the temperature drops again.”

There were of course no guarantees. There had been no news from the outside world since the televisions went dark and there were reeling moments when it seemed possible — not likely! But possible! — that the seventy-nine of them left there in the airport might be the last people alive on earth. For all anyone knew LAX was a heap of smoking rubble. Agonized calculations were performed. Almost everyone who lived west of the Rockies approached the pilot. Most of the people who lived in Asia opted to take the flight, which would still leave an ocean between themselves and their loved ones but would at least bring them two thousand miles closer to home.

At noon the next day, the passengers boarded via a wheeled staircase they’d found in a hangar, and a crowd gathered on the tarmac to watch the plane depart. The sound of the engines was startling after these days of silence. There was a long period when nothing happened, the engines roaring, before the plane worked its way out of the line of parked aircraft with a series of delicate lurching turns — it left a gap between the Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa jets — and made a slow curve to the runway. Someone — impossible to see who at this distance — was waving in one of the windows. A few people waved back. The plane started down the runway, gathered speed, the wheels left the ground, and the watchers held their breaths for the moment of ascent, but the machine didn’t falter, it rose instead of falling, and as it receded into the clear blue sky Clark realized he had tears on his face. Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky. Clark watched until it disappeared.

That night no one had much to say around the fire. Fifty-four of them now, the ones who’d decided against Los Angeles. The venison was too tough. Everyone chewed silently. Tyler, who seemed to almost never speak, stood close by Elizabeth and stared into the flames.

Clark glanced at his watch. The plane had departed five hours ago. It was nearing the western edge of the continent, or it had been forced to land on an unlit runway somewhere short of California, or it had plummeted into some dark landscape in flames. It would land in Los Angeles and the passengers would walk out into a different world, or it would land and be overcome by a mob, or it would crash into runways clogged with other planes. The passengers would find their families again, or they wouldn’t. Was there still electricity in Los Angeles? All those solar panels in the southern light. All his memories of that city. Miranda at the dinner party, smoking outside while her husband flirted with his next wife. Arthur sunning himself by the pool, a pregnant Elizabeth dozing by his side.

“I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” she said now, shivering in the firelight, and Clark could think of absolutely nothing to say.

The departure of the Los Angeles flight left two pilots, Stephen and Roy. Roy announced his intention to fly out the day after the Los Angeles flight departed.

“Just reconnaissance,” he said. “I figure I’ll fly up to Marquette — I’ve got a buddy up there — I’ll take a look around, try to get some information on what’s going on, maybe get some supplies, and come back.”

He left alone the next morning in a small plane. He didn’t return.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Elizabeth insisted. “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?”

“Well,” Clark offered, “it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?” They were sitting together in the Skymiles Lounge, where Elizabeth and Tyler had set up camp.

“I don’t know.” Elizabeth spoke slowly, looking out at the tarmac. “I’ve been taking art history classes on and off for years, between projects. And of course art history is always pressed up close against non-art history, you see catastrophe after catastrophe, terrible things, all these moments when everyone must have thought the world was ending, but all those moments, they were all temporary. It always passes.”

Clark was silent. He didn’t think this would pass.

Elizabeth began telling him about a book she’d read once, years ago when she’d been stuck — but not this stuck, obviously — in an airport, and it was a vampire book, actually, not her usual sort of thing, but it had a device she kept thinking of. The setup was post-apocalyptic, she said, so you naturally assumed as you were reading it that the world had ended, all of it, but then it became clear through an ingenious flash-forward device that actually it wasn’t all of civilization that was lost, it was just North America, which had been placed under quarantine to keep the vampirism from spreading.

“I don’t think this is a quarantine,” Clark said. “I think there’s actually really nothing out there, or at least nothing good.”

There were in fact a number of solid arguments against the quarantine theory, namely that the pandemic had started in Europe, the last news reports had indicated chaos and disarray on every continent except Antarctica, and anyway how would one even go about isolating North America in the first place, given air travel and the fact that South America was after all more or less attached?

But Elizabeth was unshakable in her convictions. “Everything happens for a reason,” she said. “This will pass. Everything passes.” Clark couldn’t bring himself to argue with her.

Clark was careful to shave every three days. The men’s rooms were windowless, lit only by an ever-dwindling supply of scented candles from the gift shop, and the water had to be warmed over the fire outside, but Clark felt it was worth the effort. Several of the men in the airport weren’t shaving at all anymore, and the effect was wild and also frankly unflattering. Clark disliked the general state of unshavenness, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because he was a believer in the broken-windows theory of urban-crime management, the way the appearance of dereliction can pave the way for more serious crimes. On Day Twenty-Seven he parted his hair neatly down the middle and shaved off the left side.

“It’s the haircut I had from ages seventeen through nineteen,” he told Dolores when she raised an eyebrow at him. Dolores was a business traveler, single, no family, which meant that she was one of the saner people in the airport. She and Clark had an agreement: she’d promised to tell him if he began showing signs of having lost his mind, and vice versa. What he didn’t tell her was that after all these years of corporate respectability, the haircut made him feel like himself again.

The maintenance of sanity required some recalibrations having to do with memory and sight. There were things Clark trained himself not to think about. Everyone he’d ever known outside the airport, for instance. And here at the airport, Air Gradia 452, silent in the distance near the perimeter fence, by unspoken agreement never discussed. Clark tried not to look at it and sometimes almost managed to convince himself that it was empty, like all of the other planes out there. Don’t think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don’t think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don’t think about those last few hours on board.

Snow fell every few days after Roy left, but Elizabeth insisted on keeping a runway clear at all times. She was beginning to stare in a terrible way that made everyone afraid of her, so at first she was out there alone, shoveling the snow on Runway Seven by the hour, but then a few people went out to join her because celebrity still carried a certain currency and there she was all alone out there, gorgeous and single — and also, why not? Physical labor outdoors was preferable to wandering the same hatefully unchanging concourses or sitting around thinking about all the beloved people they were never going to see again or convincing themselves they heard voices coming from the Air Gradia jet. Eventually there were nine or ten people maintaining the runway, a core group who attracted volunteers from the periphery every now and again. Why not, though, really? Even if Elizabeth’s quarantine theory was too wonderful to be true — the idea that somewhere things continued on as before, untouched by the virus, children going to school and to birthday parties and adults going to work and meeting for cocktails in some other place, everyone talking about what a shame it was that North America had been lost but then the conversation eventually turning to sports, politics, the weather — there was still the military, with its secrets and its underground shelters, its stockpiles of fuel and medicine and food.

“They’ll need a clear runway to land on when they come for us,” Elizabeth said. “They’re going to come for us. You know that, right?”

“It’s possible,” Clark said, trying to be kind.

“If anyone was coming for us,” Dolores said, “I think they’d be here by now.”

But they did see an aircraft after the collapse, just one. On Day Sixty-five a helicopter crossed the sky in the far distance, the faintest vibration of sound moving rapidly from north to south, and they stood staring for some time after it passed. They kept up a vigil for a while after that, waiting outside in teams of two with brightly colored T-shirts to flag down aircraft in daylight, a signal fire burning all night, but nothing crossed the sky except birds and shooting stars.

The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes. When Clark first noticed this, he wondered if he was possibly hallucinating. He assumed he held deep reservoirs of unspeakable damage that might at any moment blossom into insanity, the way his grandmother’s bone cancer had bloomed dark over the X-rays in her final months. But after a couple of weeks he felt that the thing with the stars was too consistent to be a hallucination — also too extreme, the way the airplanes cast shadows even when the moon was only a sliver — so he risked mentioning it to Dolores.

“It’s not your imagination,” Dolores said. He’d begun to think of her as his closest friend. They’d spent a pleasantly companionable day indoors, cleaning, and now they were helping build a bonfire with branches someone had dragged in from the woods. She explained it to him. One of the great scientific questions of Galileo’s time was whether the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. Impossible to imagine this ever having been in question in the age of electricity, but the night sky was a wash of light in Galileo’s age, and it was a wash of light now. The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark’s spine.

“The lights will come back on someday,” Elizabeth kept insisting, “and then we’ll all finally get to go home.” But was there actually any reason to believe this?

The citizens of the airport had taken to meeting at the bonfire every night, an unspoken tradition that Clark hated and loved. What he loved was the conversation, the moments of lightness or even just silence, the not being by himself. But sometimes the small circle of people and firelight seemed only to accentuate the emptiness of the continent, the loneliness of it, a candle flickering in vast darkness.

It’s surprising how quickly the condition of living out of a carry-on suitcase on a bench by a departure gate can begin to seem normal.

Tyler wore a sweater of Elizabeth’s that went to his knees, the increasingly filthy sleeves rolled up. He kept to himself mostly, reading his comic books or Elizabeth’s copy of the New Testament.

They traded languages. By Day Eighty most of the people who’d arrived without English were learning it, in informal groups, and the English speakers were studying one or more of the languages carried here by Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Air France. Clark was learning French from Annette, who’d been a Lufthansa flight attendant. He whispered phrases to himself as he went about the chores of daily existence, the hauling of water and washing of clothes in the sink, learning to skin a deer, building bonfires, cleaning. Je m’appelle Clark. J’habite dans l’aeroport. Tu me manques. Tu me manques. Tu me manques.

A rape on the night of Day Eighty-five, the airport woken after midnight by a woman’s scream. They tied the man up until sunrise and then drove him into the forest at gunpoint, told him if he returned he’d be shot. “I’ll die out here alone,” he said, sobbing, and no one disagreed but what else could they do?

“Why has no one come here?” Dolores asked. “That’s what I keep wondering. I don’t mean rescue. I just mean people wandering in.” The airport wasn’t especially remote. Severn City was no more than twenty miles away. No one walked in, but on the other hand, who was left? Early reports had put the mortality rate at 99 percent.

“And then one has to account for societal collapse,” Garrett said. “There might be no one left.” He was a businessman from the east coast of Canada. He’d been wearing the same suit since his flight had landed, except now he was pairing it with a Beautiful Northern Michigan T-shirt from the gift shop. He was bright-eyed in a way that Clark found disconcerting. “The violence, maybe cholera and typhoid, all the infections that were cured by antibiotics back when it was possible to obtain antibiotics, and then things like bee stings, asthma … Does anyone have a cigarette?”

“You’re funny,” Annette said. She’d run out of nicotine patches on Day Four. During a particularly rough stretch a few weeks back, she’d tried to smoke cinnamon from the coffee kiosk.

“Was that a no? And diabetes,” Garrett said, apparently forgetting the cigarette. “HIV. High blood pressure. Types of cancer that responded to chemotherapy, when chemotherapy was available.”

“No more chemotherapy,” Annette said. “I’ve thought of that too.”

“Everything happens for a reason,” Tyler said. Clark hadn’t noticed his approach. Tyler had been wandering the airport of late, and he had a way of moving so quietly that he seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He spoke so rarely that it was easy to forget he was there. “That’s what my mom said,” he added when everyone stared at him.

“Yeah, but that’s because Elizabeth’s a fucking lunatic,” Garrett said. Clark had noticed that he had a filter problem.

“In front of the kid?” Annette was twisting her Lufthansa neck scarf between her fingers. “That’s his mother you’re talking about. Tyler, don’t listen to him.” Tyler only stared at Garrett.

“I’m sorry,” Garrett said to Tyler. “I was out of line.” Tyler didn’t blink.

“You know,” Clark said, “I think we should consider sending out a scouting party.”

The scouts left at dawn on Day One Hundred: Tyrone, Dolores, and Allen, a schoolteacher from Chicago. There was some debate over whether the scouting party was actually a good idea. They’d been able to kill enough deer to live on and they had what they needed here, barely, except for soap and batteries, which they’d run out of, and what could possibly be out there except the pandemic? Nonetheless, the scouting party set out armed with Tyrone’s TSA handgun and some road maps.

The silence of Day One Hundred. Waiting for the scouting party to return with supplies, or return carrying the flu, or return trailing unhinged survivors who wanted to kill everyone, or not return at all. It had snowed the night before and the world was still. White snow, dark trees, gray sky, the airline logos on the tails of grounded airplanes the only splashes of color in the landscape.

Clark wandered into the Skymiles Lounge. He’d been avoiding it lately, because he’d been avoiding Elizabeth, but it was a reliably quiet corner of the airport and he liked the armchairs with the views over the tarmac. He stood looking out at the line of planes and for the first time in a while he found himself thinking of Robert, his boyfriend. Robert was a curator — had been a curator? Yes, probably Robert existed in the past tense along with almost everyone else, try not to think about it — and when Clark turned away from the window, his gaze fell on a glass display case that had once held sandwiches.

If Robert were here — Christ, if only — if Robert were here, he’d probably fill the shelves with artifacts and start an impromptu museum. Clark placed his useless iPhone on the top shelf. What else? Max had left on the last flight to Los Angeles, but his Amex card was still gathering dust on the counter of the Concourse B Mexican restaurant. Beside it, Lily Patterson’s driver’s license. Clark took these artifacts back to the Skymiles Lounge and laid them side by side under the glass. They looked insubstantial there, so he added his laptop, and this was the beginning of the Museum of Civilization. He mentioned it to no one, but when he came back a few hours later, someone had added another iPhone, a pair of five-inch red stiletto heels, and a snow globe.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

The scouting party returned the next day, exhausted and cold, with three steel carts from an industrial kitchen, piled high with supplies. They’d found a Chili’s that no one had looted yet, they said, and they’d spent the night shivering in booths. They had toilet paper, Tabasco sauce, napkins, salt and pepper, enormous tins of tomatoes, dinnerware and bags of rice, gallons of pink hand soap.

They said that just out of sight along the road there was a roadblock, a sign warning of quarantine. No one had come to the airport because the sign said the flu was here, sick passengers, keep out. Beyond the roadblock, abandoned cars as far as they could see, some with bodies inside. They’d come upon a hotel near the airport and had debated going in for sheets and towels, but the smell was such that they’d known what was waiting in the darkened lobby and had decided against it. Then the fast-food restaurants a little down the road. They’d seen no other people.

“What was it like out there?” Clark asked.

“It was silent,” Dolores said. She’d been surprised by the emotion that had overtaken her on the return, when the scouting party had struggled past the roadblock with their carts of supplies, their napkins and their clinking bottles of Tabasco sauce, up the airport road and then the airport had come into view between the trees. Home, she’d thought, and she’d felt such relief.

A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”

But the first man who walked in under low gray skies seemed less dangerous than stunned. He was dirty, of indeterminate age, dressed in layers of clothes, and he hadn’t shaved in a long time. He appeared on the road with a gun in his hand, but he stopped and let the gun fall to the pavement when Tyrone shouted for him to drop it. He raised his hands over his head and stared at the people gathering around him. Everyone had questions. He seemed to struggle for speech. His lips moved silently, and he had to clear this throat several times before he could speak. Clark realized that he hadn’t spoken in some time.

“I was in the hotel,” he said finally. “I followed your footprints in the snow.” There were tears on his face.

“Okay,” someone said, “but why are you crying?”

“I’d thought I was the only one,” he said.

44

BY THE END OF Year Fifteen there were three hundred people in the airport, and the Museum of Civilization filled the Skymiles Lounge. In former times, when the airport had had fewer people, Clark had worked all day at the details of survival; gathering firewood, hauling water to the restrooms to keep the toilets operational, participating in salvage operations in the abandoned town of Severn City, planting crops in the narrow fields along the runways, skinning deer. But there were many more people now, and Clark was older, and no one seemed to mind if he cared for the museum all day.

There seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones with their delicate buttons, iPads, Tyler’s Nintendo console, a selection of laptops. There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange. There were three car engines in a row, cleaned and polished, a motorcycle composed mostly of gleaming chrome. Traders brought things for Clark sometimes, objects of no real value that they knew he would like: magazines and newspapers, a stamp collection, coins. There were the passports or the driver’s licenses or sometimes the credit cards of people who had lived at the airport and then died. Clark kept impeccable records.

He kept Elizabeth and Tyler’s passports open to the picture pages. Elizabeth had given them to him the night before they’d left, in the summer of Year Two. He was still unsettled by the passports, after all these years.

“They were unsettling people,” Dolores said.

A few months before Elizabeth and Tyler left, back in Year Two, Clark was breaking up sticks for kindling when he looked up and thought he saw someone standing by the Air Gradia jet. A child, but there were a number of children in the airport and he couldn’t tell who it was at this distance. The plane was strictly off-limits, but the children liked to scare one another with stories of ghost sightings. The child was holding something. A book? Clark found Tyler standing by the nose of the plane, reading aloud from a paperback.

“ ‘Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her,’ ” he said to the plane as Clark approached. He paused and looked up. “Do you hear that? Plagues. ‘One day her plagues will overtake her. Death, mourning, and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.’ ”

Clark recognized the text. For three months in his Toronto days he’d had a formerly evangelical boyfriend who’d kept a Bible by the bed. Tyler stopped reading and looked up.

“You read very well for your age,” Clark said.

“Thank you.” The boy was obviously a little off, but what could anyone do for him? In Year Two everyone was still reeling.

“What were you doing?”

“I’m reading to the people inside,” Tyler said.

“There’s no one in there.” But of course there was. Clark was chilled in the sunlight. The plane remained sealed, because opening it was a nightmare no one wanted to think about, because no one knew if the virus could be contracted from the dead, because it was as good a mausoleum as any. He’d never been this close to it. The plane’s windows were dark.

“I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.”

“Look, Tyler, some things just happen.” This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming.

“But why did they die instead of us?” the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking.

“Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren’t. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that’s all there is.”

“What if we were saved for a different reason?”

“Saved?” Clark was remembering why he didn’t talk to Tyler very often.

“Some people were saved. People like us.”

“What do you mean, ‘people like us’?”

“People who were good,” Tyler said. “People who weren’t weak.”

“Look, it’s not a question of having been bad or … the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Okay,” Tyler said. Clark turned away, and Tyler’s voice resumed almost immediately behind him, softer now, reading aloud: “ ‘She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.’ ”

Elizabeth and Tyler were living in the First-Class cabin of the Air France jet. He found her sitting in the sunlight on the rolling staircase that led up to the entrance, knitting something. He hadn’t spoken with her in a while. He hadn’t been avoiding her, exactly, but he certainly hadn’t sought her company.

“I’m worried about your son,” he said.

She paused in her knitting. The manic intensity of her first days here had dissipated. “Why?”

“Right now he’s over by the quarantined plane,” Clark said, “reading aloud to the dead from the Book of Revelation.”

“Oh.” She smiled, and resumed her knitting. “He’s a very advanced reader.”

“I think maybe he’s picked up some strange ideas about, well, about what happened.” He still had no words for it, he realized. No one spoke of it directly.

“What kind of strange ideas?”

“He thinks the pandemic happened for a reason,” Clark said.

“It did happen for a reason.”

“Well, right, but I mean a reason besides the fact that almost everyone on earth caught an extremely deadly swine-flu mutation. He seems to think there was some sort of divine judgment involved.”

“He’s right,” she said. She stopped knitting for a moment to count her rows.

He felt a touch of vertigo. “Elizabeth, what reason could there possibly be for something like this? What kind of plan would possibly require …?” He realized that his voice had risen. His fists were clenched.

“Everything happens for a reason,” she said. She didn’t look at him. “It’s not for us to know.”

Later that summer a band of religious wanderers arrived, headed south. The precise nature of their religion was unclear. “A new world requires new gods,” they said. They said, “We are guided by visions.” They said vague things about signals and dreams. The airport hosted them for a few uneasy nights, because this seemed less dangerous than running them off. The wanderers ate their food and in return offered blessings, which mostly involved palms on foreheads and muttered prayers. They sat in a circle in Concourse C and chanted at night, in no language anyone in the airport had ever heard. When they left, Elizabeth and Tyler went with them.

“We just want to live a more spiritual life,” Elizabeth said, “my son and I,” and she apologized for leaving everyone, as though her leaving was some sort of personal abandonment. Tyler looked very small as they left, trailing at the back of the group. I should have done more for her, Clark thought. I should have pulled her back from the edge. But it had taken everything he had to stay back from the edge himself, and what could he have done? When the group disappeared around the curve of the airport road, he was certain he wasn’t alone in his relief.

“That kind of insanity’s contagious,” Dolores had said, echoing his thoughts.

In Year Fifteen people came to the museum to look at the past after their long days of work. A few of the original First-Class lounge armchairs were still here, and it was possible to sit and read the final newspapers, fifteen years old, turning brittle pages in gloves that Clark had sewn inexpertly from a hotel sheet. What happened here was something like prayer. James, the first man who’d walked in, came to the museum almost every day to look at the motorcycle. He’d found it in Severn City in Year Two, and had used it until the automobile gas went stale and the aviation gas ran out. He missed it very much. Emmanuelle, the first child born in the airport, came in often to look at the phones.

There was a school here now, in Concourse C. Like educated children everywhere, the children in the airport school memorized abstractions: the airplanes outside once flew through the air. You could use an airplane to travel to the other side of the world, but — the schoolteacher was a man who’d had frequent-flyer status on two airlines — when you were on an airplane you had to turn off your electronic devices before takeoff and landing, devices such as the tiny flat machines that played music and the larger machines that opened up like books and had screens that hadn’t always been dark, the insides brimming with circuitry, and these machines were the portals into a worldwide network. Satellites beamed information down to Earth. Goods traveled in ships and airplanes across the world. There was no place on earth that was too far away to get to.

They were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended. This is the yellow mass of land in the shape of a mitten; this pin here on the wall is Severn City. That was Chicago. That was Detroit. The children understood dots on maps—here—but even the teenagers were confused by the lines. There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain.

In the fall of Year Fifteen, something remarkable happened. A trader came through with a newspaper. He’d been coming to the airport since Year Six, and his specialties were cookware, socks, and sewing supplies. He camped for the night in the Air France jet, and came to Clark in the morning before he left.

“I’ve got something I thought you might like,” he said, “for that museum of yours,” and he handed over three sheets of rough paper.

“What is this?”

“It’s a newspaper,” the trader said.

Three consecutive issues, a few months out of date. It was published irregularly out of New Petoskey, the trader said. There were announcements of births and deaths and weddings. A column for bartering: a local man was seeking new shoes in exchange for milk and eggs; someone else had a pair of reading glasses that she was hoping to trade for a pair of jeans, size 6. There was a story about a group of three ferals who’d been sighted to the southwest of town, a woman and two children. Residents were urged to avoid them and, in case of accidental contact, to speak gently and avoid making any sudden movements. Something called the Traveling Symphony had just come through town, although Clark gathered that they weren’t just a symphony orchestra. There was a rapturous write-up of a performance of King Lear, with particular mention of performances by Gil Harris as Lear and Kirsten Raymonde as Cordelia. A local girl wished to announce that she had a litter of kittens to give away and that the kittens’ mother was a good mouser. There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine.

The librarian, François Diallo, was also the newspaper’s publisher, and it appeared that when he had empty space in the newspaper he filled it with text from his collection. The first issue had an Emily Dickinson poem, the second an excerpt from a biography of Abraham Lincoln. The entire back of the third issue — it had apparently been a slow month for news and announcements — was taken up by an interview with the actress who’d played Cordelia, Kirsten Raymonde. She’d left Toronto with her brother at the time of the collapse, but she only knew this because her brother had told her. Her memories were limited, but there was a night just before the end that she remembered in detail.

RAYMONDE: I was onstage with two other girls in the production, and I was behind Arthur, so I didn’t see his face. But I remember there was some commotion up front, just in front of the stage. And then I remember hearing a sound, this sharp “thwack,” and that was Arthur hitting his hand on the plywood pillar by my head. He’d sort of stumbled back, his arm flailed out, and then a man from the audience had climbed up on the stage and was running toward him—

Clark stopped breathing for a moment when he read it. The shock of encountering someone who knew Arthur, who had not only known him but had seen him die.

The newspapers were passed hand to hand around the airport for four days. They were the first new newspapers anyone had seen since the collapse. When the papers were returned to the museum, Clark held them in his hands for a long while, reading the interview with the actress again. The mention of Arthur aside, he realized, this was an extraordinary development. If there were newspapers now, what else might be possible? In the old days he’d taken quite a few red-eye flights between New York and Los Angeles, and there was a moment in the flight when the rising sunlight spread from east to west over the landscape, dawn reflected in rivers and lakes thirty thousand feet below his window, and although of course he knew it was all a matter of time zones, that it was always night and always morning somewhere on earth, in those moments he’d harbored a secret pleasure in the thought that the world was waking up.

He hoped for more newspapers in the years that followed, but none came.

45

THE INTERVIEW IN Year Fifteen, continued:

RAYMONDE: Do you have any more questions?

DIALLO: I do have more questions, but you didn’t want to answer them.

RAYMONDE: I’ll answer if you don’t record me.

François Diallo set his pen and notebook on the table.

“Thank you,” Kirsten said. “I’ll answer your questions now if you’d like, but only if these ones don’t go in your newspaper.”

“Agreed. When you think of how the world’s changed in your lifetime, what do you think about?”

“I think of killing.” Her gaze was steady.

“Really? Why?”

“Have you ever had to do it?”

François sighed. He didn’t like to think about it. “I was surprised in the woods once.”

“I’ve been surprised too.”

It was evening, and François had lit a candle in the library. It stood in the middle of a plastic tub, for safety. The candlelight softened the scar on Kirsten’s left cheekbone. She was wearing a summer dress with a faded pattern of white flowers on red, three sheathed knives in her belt.

“How many?” he asked.

She turned her wrist to show the knife tattoos. Two.

The Symphony had been resting in New Petoskey for a week and a half so far, and François had interviewed almost all of them. August had told him about walking away from his empty house in Massachusetts with his violin, falling in with a cult for three years before he walked away again and stumbled across the Symphony. Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half-feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. The third cello had buried his parents after both died in the absence of insulin, and then spent four years holed up in the safety and boredom of their remote cottage on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, set out finally because he feared he’d lose his mind if he didn’t find another human being to talk to, also because you can eat only so much venison before you’d give your right arm to eat almost anything else, made his way south and east and over the Mackinac Bridge ten years before the bridge’s center section collapsed, lived on the outskirts of the close-knit band of fishermen in Mackinaw City until the Symphony passed through. When it came down to it, François had realized, all of the Symphony’s stories were the same, in two variations. Everyone else died, I walked, I found the Symphony. Or, I was very young when it happened, I was born after it happened, I have no memories or few memories of any other way of living, and I have been walking all my life.

“Now tell me yours,” she said. “What do you think about?”

“When I think of how the world’s changed, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“My apartment in Paris.” François had been on vacation in Michigan when air travel had ceased. When he closed his eyes, he could still see the intricate moldings of his parlor ceiling, the high white doors leading out to the balcony, the wood floors and books. “Why do you think of killing?”

“You never had to hurt anyone in the old world, did you?”

“Of course not. I was a copywriter.”

“A what?”

“Advertising.” He hadn’t thought about it in a long time. “You know, billboards and such. Copywriters wrote the words on them.”

She nodded, and her gaze drifted away from him. The library was François’s favorite place in his present life. He had accumulated a sizable collection over the years. Books, magazines, a glass case of pre-collapse newspapers. It had only recently occurred to him to start a newspaper of his own, and thus far the project had been invigorating. Kirsten was looking at the improvised printing press, massive in the shadows at the back of the room.

“How did you get that scar on your face?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I’ve actually no idea. It happened during that year I don’t remember.”

“Your brother never told you, before he died?”

“He said it was better if I didn’t remember. I took his word for it.”

“What was he like, your brother?”

“He was sad,” she said. “He remembered everything.”

“You’ve never told me what happened to him.”

“The kind of stupid death that never would’ve happened in the old world. He stepped on a nail and died of infection.” She glanced up at the window, at the failing light. “I should go,” she said, “it’s almost sunset.” She stood, and the handles of the knives in her belt glinted in the half-light. This wire of a woman, polite but lethal, who walked armed with knives through all the days of her life. He’d heard stories from other Symphony members about her knife-throwing abilities. She was supposedly able to hit the center of targets blindfolded.

“I thought tonight was just the musicians.” Reluctant as always to see her go.

“It is, but I told my friends I’d come.”

“Thank you for the interview.” He was walking her to the door.

“You’re welcome.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, why didn’t you want that last part recorded? It isn’t the first time I’ve heard confessions of this nature.”

“I know,” she said. “Almost everyone in the Symphony … but look, I collect celebrity-gossip clippings.”

“Celebrity gossip …?”

“Just about that one actor, Arthur Leander. Because of my collection, the clippings, I understand something about permanent records.”

“And it isn’t something you want to be remembered for.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Are you coming to the performance?”

“Of course. I’ll walk with you.” He went back to blow out the candle. The street had fallen into shadow now, but the sky was still bright over the bay. The Symphony was performing on a bridge a few blocks from the library, the caravans parked off to the side. François heard the first notes, the cacophony of musicians practicing their sections and tuning up. August was playing the same two measures over and over, frowning. Charlie was studying the score. Earlier, a few of the townspeople had carried benches down the hill from the town hall, arranged now in rows facing the bay. Most of the benches were occupied, the adults talking among themselves or watching the musicians, the children spellbound by the instruments.

“There’s some space in the back row,” Kirsten said, and François followed her.

“What’s the program tonight?”

“A Beethoven symphony. I’m not sure which one.”

At some undetectable cue, the musicians stopped practicing and tuning and talking among themselves, took their places with their backs to the water, and fell silent. A hush came over the assembled crowd. The conductor stepped forward in the stillness, smiled at the audience and bowed, turned without a word to face the musicians and the bay. A seagull glided overhead. The conductor raised her baton.

46

THAT NIGHT, IN THE SUMMER OF Year Fifteen, Jeevan Chaudhary was drinking wine by a river. The world was a string of settlements now and the settlements were all that mattered, the land itself no longer had a name, but once this had been part of the state of Virginia.

Jeevan had walked a thousand miles. In Year Three he’d wandered into a settlement called McKinley, named by the town’s founders. There had been eight of them originally, a sales team from the marketing firm of McKinley Stevenson Davies, stranded on an isolated corporate retreat when the Georgia Flu swept over the continent. A few days out of the retreat they’d found an abandoned motel on a disused stretch of road far from major highways, and it had seemed as good a place to stop as any. The sales team had moved into the rooms and stayed there, at first because those early years were terrifying and no one wanted to live too far from anyone else; later out of habit. There were twenty-seven families here now, a peaceful settlement across the road from a river. In the summer of Year Ten, Jeevan had married one of the settlement’s founders, a former sales assistant named Daria, and this evening she was sitting with him and a friend of theirs on the riverbank.

“I don’t know,” their friend was saying now. “Does it still make sense to teach kids about the way things were?” His name was Michael, and he’d been a truck driver once. McKinley had a school, ten children who met daily in the largest motel room, and his eleven-year-old daughter had come home crying that afternoon, because the teacher had let slip that life expectancies were much longer before the Georgia Flu, that once sixty hadn’t been considered particularly old, and she was scared, she didn’t understand, it wasn’t fair, she wanted to live as long as people used to.

“I’m honestly not sure,” Daria said. “I think I’d want my kid to know. All that knowledge, those incredible things we had.”

“To what end, though?” Michael accepted the wine bottle from her with a nod. “You see the way their eyes glaze over when anyone talks to them about antibiotics or engines. It’s science fiction to them, isn’t it? And if it only upsets them—” He broke off to drink wine.

“Maybe you’re right,” Daria said. “I suppose the question is, does knowing these things make them more or less happy?”

“In my daughter’s case, less.”

Jeevan was only half-listening. He wasn’t quite drunk. Just pleasantly at ease, after what had actually been a fairly ghastly day: a neighbor of theirs had fallen off a ladder that morning, and Jeevan, as the closest thing to a doctor in a one-hundred-mile radius, had had to set the man’s broken arm. Horrible work, the patient drunk on moonshine but still half-crazed with pain, moans escaping around the piece of wood clamped between his teeth. Jeevan liked being the man to whom people turned in bad moments, it meant a great deal to him to be able to help, but the physical pain of the post-anesthesia era often left him shaken. Now fireflies were rising from the tall grass on the riverbank, and he didn’t want to talk, not really, but it was pleasant to rest in the company of his friend and his wife, and the wine was blunting the worst of the day’s memories — sweat beading on the patient’s forehead as Jeevan set the broken bone — as was the gentle music of the river, cicadas in the trees, the stars above the weeping willows on the far bank. Even after all these years there were moments when he was overcome by his good fortune at having found this place, this tranquility, this woman, at having lived to see a time worth living in. He squeezed Daria’s hand.

“When she came home crying today,” Michael said, “I found myself thinking, maybe it’s time we stopped telling them these crazy stories. Maybe it’s time we let go.”

“I don’t want to let go,” Jeevan said.

“Is someone calling you?” Daria asked.

“I hope not,” Jeevan said, but then he heard it too.

They followed him back to the motel, where a man had just arrived on horseback, his arm around a woman slumped over in the saddle.

“My wife’s been shot,” he said, and in the way he spoke, Jeevan understood that he loved her. When they pulled the woman down she was shivering despite the heat of the evening, half-conscious, her eyelids fluttering. They carried her into the motel room that served as Jeevan’s surgery. Michael lit the oil lamps and the room filled with yellow light.

“You’re the doctor?” the man who’d brought her asked. He looked familiar, but Jeevan couldn’t place him. He was perhaps in his forties, his hair braided in cornrows that matched his wife’s.

“Closest thing we’ve got,” Jeevan said. “What’s your name?”

“Edward. Are you saying you’re not a real doctor?”

“I trained as a paramedic, before the flu. I apprenticed to a doctor near here for five years, till he decided to move farther south. I’ve picked up what I can.”

“But you didn’t go to med school,” Edward said in tones of misery.

“Well, I’d love to, but I understand they’ve stopped accepting applications.”

“I’m sorry.” Edward wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief. “I’ve heard you’re good. I mean no offense. She’s just, she’s been shot—”

“Let me see if I can help.”

Jeevan hadn’t seen a gunshot wound in some time. By Year Fifteen, the ammunition was running low, guns used rarely and only for hunting. “Tell me what happened,” he said, mostly to distract Edward.

“The prophet happened.”

“I don’t know who that is.” At least the wound was fairly clean, a hole where the bullet had entered her abdomen, no exit wound. She’d lost some blood. Her pulse was weak but steady. “What prophet?”

“I thought the man’s legend preceded him,” Edward said. He was holding his wife’s hand. “He’s been all over the south.”

“I’ve heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It’s not an uncommon occupation.” Jeevan found a bottle of moonshine in the cupboard.

“You sterilizing the equipment with that?”

“I sterilized the needle in boiling water earlier, but I’m going to sterilize it again in this.”

“The needle? You’re sewing her up without getting the bullet out?”

“Too dangerous,” Jeevan said softly. “Look, the bleeding’s just about stopped. If I go in there looking for it, she might bleed out. Safer to leave it in.” He poured some moonshine into a bowl and rubbed his hands with it, ran needle and thread through the alcohol.

“Can I do anything?” Edward was hovering.

“The three of you can hold her still while I’m sewing. So there was a prophet,” he said. He’d found it best to distract the people who came in with his patients.

“He came through this afternoon,” Edward said. “Him and his followers, maybe twenty of them altogether.”

Jeevan remembered where he’d seen Edward before. “You live up on the old plantation, don’t you? I went up there with the doctor a few times, back in my apprenticeship days.”

“Yes, the plantation, exactly. We’re out on the fields, and a friend of mine comes running, says there’s a group of twenty or twenty-two approaching, walking down the road singing some kind of weird hymn. After a while I hear it too, and eventually they reach us. A group of them, smiling, walking all together in a clump. By the time they reach us, they’ve stopped singing, and there are fewer of them than I’m expecting, maybe more like fifteen.” Edward was silent for a moment as Jeevan poured alcohol over the woman’s stomach. She moaned, and a thin trickle of blood left the wound.

“Keep talking.”

“So we ask them who they are, and their leader smiles at me and says, ‘We are the light.’ ”

“The light?” Jeevan drew the needle through the woman’s skin. “Don’t look,” he said, when Edward swallowed. “Just hold her still.”

“That’s when I knew who he was. Stories had reached us, from traders and such. These people, they’re ruthless. They’ve got some crazy theology, they’re armed and they take what they want. So I’m trying to stay cool, we all are, I can see my neighbors have realized what we’re dealing with too. I ask if there’s something they need or if this is just a social call, and the prophet smiles at me and says they have something we want, and they’d be willing to trade this thing we want for guns and ammunition.”

“You still have ammo?”

“Did until today. There was a fair stockpile at the plantation. And as he’s talking, I’m looking around, and I realize I don’t know where my kid is. He was with his mother, but where’s his mother? I ask them, ‘What is it you have that you think we want?’ ”

“Then what?”

“Then the group parts down the middle, and there’s my son. They’ve got him. The kid’s five, okay? And they’ve got him bound and gagged. And I’m terrified now, because where’s his mother?”

“So you gave them the weapons?”

“We gave them the guns, they gave me my boy. Another group of them had taken my wife. That’s why there were fifteen there in front of me and not twenty. They’d taken her off down the road ahead as a kind of, I don’t know, insurance policy”—his voice thick with disgust—“and they tell us if no one comes after them, my wife will come walking down the road in an hour or two, unharmed. They say they’re traveling out of the area, headed north, and this is the last we’ll see of them. All the time smiling, so peaceful, like they’ve done nothing wrong. So we get the boy, they leave with the guns and ammo, and we wait. Three hours later she still hasn’t come down the road, so a few of us go after them and we find her shot on the roadside.”

“Why did they do it?” The woman was awake, Jeevan realized. She was crying silently, her eyes closed. One last stitch.

“She said the prophet wanted her to stay with them,” Edward said, “go north with them and become a wife to one of his men, and she said no, so the prophet shot her. Not to kill her, obviously, at least not quickly. Just to cause her pain.”

Jeevan clipped the thread and pressed a clean towel to the woman’s stomach. “A bandage,” he said to Daria, but she was already by his side with strips of an old sheet. He wrapped the woman carefully.

“She’ll be okay,” he said, “provided it doesn’t get infected, and there’s no reason to think it will. Bullets are self-sterilizing, the heat of them. We were careful with the alcohol. But you two should stay here for a few days.”

“I’m grateful,” Edward said.

“I do what I can.”

When he’d cleaned up and the woman had fallen into a fitful sleep, her husband by her side, Jeevan put the bloody needle in a saucepan and crossed the road to the river. He knelt in the grass to fill the pan with water and returned to the motel, where he lit the makeshift oven in front of the room he lived in and set the saucepan on top of it. He sat on a nearby picnic table to wait for the water to boil.

Jeevan filled a pipe with tobacco from his shirt pocket, a soothing ritual. Trying to think of nothing but the stars and the sound of the river, trying not to think about the woman’s pain and her blood and the kind of people who would shoot out of spite and leave her lying there on the roadside. McKinley was south of the old plantation. If the prophet was true to his word then he and his people were moving away from McKinley, headed into the unsuspecting north. Why north, Jeevan wondered, and how far would they go? He was thinking of Toronto, of walking through snow. Thoughts of Toronto led inevitably back to thoughts of his brother, a tower by the lake, ghost city crumbling, the Elgin Theatre still displaying the posters for King Lear, the memory of that night at the beginning and the end of everything when Arthur died.

Daria had come up behind him. He started when she touched his arm. The water was boiling and had been for some time, the needle probably sterile by now. Daria took his hand in her own and kissed it gently. “It’s late,” she murmured. “Come to bed.”

47

CLARK AT SEVENTY, in Year Nineteen: he was more tired than he had been, and he moved slowly. His joints and hands ached, especially in cold weather. He shaved his entire head now, not just the left side, and wore four rings through his left ear. His dear friend Annette had died of an unknown illness in Year Seventeen, and he wore her Lufthansa neck scarf in memory. He wasn’t specifically sad anymore, but he was aware of death at all times.

There was an armchair in the museum from which he could see almost the entire tarmac. The preparation area where the hunters hung their deer and boar and rabbits from a rack improvised on the underside of the wing of a 737, carving meat for the people and feeding innards to the dogs. The graveyard between Runways Six and Seven, each grave marked by an airplane tray table driven into the ground, details of the deceased carved into the tray’s hard plastic. He’d left some wildflowers on Annette’s grave that morning and he could see them from here, a splash of blue and purple. The line of jets parked end to end on the periphery, streaked now with rust. The gardens, half-hidden from view by the airplanes parked at gates. The cornfield, Air Gradia 452 alone in the distance, the chain-link perimeter fence with its coils of concertina wire and beyond that the forest, the same trees he’d been staring at for two decades.

He’d recently made all of the Water Inc. 360° reports available for public viewing, on the theory that everyone involved was almost certainly dead. The former executives in the airport read these with great interest. There were three reports altogether, one each for the subordinates, peers, and superiors of a probably long-deceased Water Inc. executive named Dan.

“Okay, take this for example,” Garrett said, on one of their afternoons in the airport, late July. They’d become close friends over the years. Garrett found the reports particularly fascinating. “You have the heading here, ‘Communication,’ and then—”

“Which report are you looking at?” Clark was sunk deep into his favorite armchair, eyes closed.

“Subordinates,” Garrett said. “Okay, so under ‘Communication,’ here’s the first comment. ‘He’s not good at cascading information down to staff.’ Was he a whitewater rafter, Clark? I’m just curious.”

“Yes,” Clark said, “I’m certain that’s what the interviewee was talking about. Actual literal cascades.”

“This one’s my other favorite. ‘He’s successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it’s low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn’t drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities.’ ”

Clark winced. “I remember that one. I think I may have had a minor stroke in the office when he said that.”

“It raises questions,” Garrett said.

“It certainly does.”

“There are high altitudes, apparently, also low-hanging fruit, also grains of something, also drilling.”

“Presumably he was a miner who climbed mountains and actionized an orchard in his off-hours. I am proud to say,” Clark said, “that I never talked like that.”

“Did you ever use the phrase ‘in the mix’?”

“I don’t think so. No. I wouldn’t have.”

“I hated that one especially.” Garrett was studying the report.

“Oh, I didn’t mind it so much. It made me think of baking. My mother would buy these cookie mixes sometimes when I was a kid.”

“Do you remember chocolate-chip cookies?”

“I dream of chocolate-chip cookies. Don’t torture me.”

Garrett was quiet for so long that Clark opened his eyes to make sure he was still breathing. Garrett was absorbed in watching two children playing on the tarmac, hiding behind the wheels of the Air Canada jet and chasing one another. He’d become calmer over the years but remained prone to episodes of unfocused staring, and Clark knew by now what his next question would be.

“Did I ever tell you about my last phone call?” Garrett asked.

“Yes,” Clark said gently. “I believe you did.”

Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he’d ever made was to his boss. The last words he’d spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate clichés, seared horribly into memory. “Let’s touch base with Nancy,” he remembered saying, “and then we should reach out to Bob and circle back next week. I’ll shoot Larry an email.” Now he said the words “Circle back next week” under his breath, perhaps not consciously. He cleared his throat. “Why did we always say we were going to shoot emails?”

“I don’t know. I’ve wondered that too.”

“Why couldn’t we just say we were going to send them? We were just pressing a button, were we not?”

“Not even a real button. A picture of a button on a screen.”

“Yes,” Garrett said, “that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“There was not, in fact, an email gun. Although that would’ve been nice. I would’ve preferred that.”

Garrett made his fingers into a gun and aimed it at the tree line. “Ka-pow!” he whispered. And then, louder, “I used to write ‘T-H-X’ when I wanted to say ‘thank you.’ ”

“I did that too. Because, what, it would’ve taken too much time and effort to punch in an extra three letters and just say thanks? I can’t fathom it.”

“The phrase ‘circle back’ always secretly made me think of boats. You leave someone onshore, and then you circle back later to get them.” Garrett was quiet for a moment. “I like this one,” he said. “ ‘He’s a high-functioning sleepwalker, essentially.’ ”

“I remember the woman who said that.” Clark wondered what had happened to her.

He’d been spending more time in the past lately. He liked to close his eyes and let his memories overtake him. A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films: the school play when he was nine, his father beaming in the front row; clubbing with Arthur in Toronto, under whirling lights; a lecture hall at NYU. An executive, a client, running his hands through his hair as he talked about his terrible boss. A procession of lovers, remembered in details: a set of dark blue sheets, a perfect cup of tea, a pair of sunglasses, a smile. The Brazilian pepper tree in a friend’s backyard in Silver Lake. A bouquet of tiger lilies on a desk. Robert’s smile. His mother’s hands, knitting while she listened to the BBC.

He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever. He straightened in the armchair, blinking. Garrett was gone. The last light of the day angled in through the glass and caught the chrome perfection of the motorcycle.

“Did I wake you?” Sullivan asked. He was the head of security, a man of fifty who’d walked in a decade earlier with his daughter. “I’d like to introduce you to our latest arrivals.”

“How do you do,” Clark said. The arrivals were a man and a woman, perhaps in their early thirties, the woman carrying a baby in a sling.

“I’m Charlie,” the woman said. “This is Jeremy, my husband, and little Annabel.” Tattoos covered almost every inch of her bare arms. He saw flowers, musical notes, names in an elaborate scroll, a rabbit. Four knives tattooed in a row on her right forearm. He knew what this tattoo meant, and when he looked he saw a counterpart on her husband’s skin, two small dark arrows on the back of his left wrist. She’d killed four people, then, and he’d killed two, and now they’d just dropped in with their baby, and by the absurd standards of the new world — there was a part of him that never stopped exclaiming at the absurd standards of the new world — this was all perfectly normal. The baby smiled at Clark. Clark smiled back.

“Will you be staying here awhile?” Clark asked.

“If you’ll have us,” Jeremy said. “We’ve been separated from our people.”

“Wait till you hear who their people are,” Sullivan said. “You remember those newspapers out of New Petoskey?”

“The Traveling Symphony,” Charlie said.

“These people of yours,” Sullivan was wiggling his fingers at the baby, Annabel, who stared past his fingers at his face. “You didn’t tell me how you lost them.”

“It’s a complicated story,” Charlie said. “There was a prophet. He said he was from here.”

From here? Had the airport ever had a prophet? Clark felt certain he’d remember a prophet. “What was his name?”

“I’m not sure anyone knows,” Jeremy said. He began describing the blond-haired man who had held sway over the town of St. Deborah by the Water, ruling with a combination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation. He stopped when he saw the look on Clark’s face. “Is something wrong?”

Clark rose unsteadily from the armchair. They stared at him as he made his way to the museum’s first display case.

“Is his mother still alive?” Clark was looking at Elizabeth’s passport, at its photograph from the inconceivable past.

“Whose mother? The prophet’s?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “I never heard anything about her.”

“There’s no old woman there with him?”

“No.”

What became of you, Elizabeth, out there on the road with your son? But what, after all, had become of anyone? His parents, his colleagues, all his friends from his life before the airport, Robert? If all of them had vanished, uncounted and unmarked, why not Elizabeth too? He closed his eyes. Thinking of a boy standing on the tarmac by the ghost plane, Air Gradia Flight 452, Arthur Leander’s beloved only son, reading verses about plagues aloud to the dead.