Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
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.
“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 child
“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.’ ”