Station Eleven

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite—”

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

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

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

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

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

  “No, please elaborate.”

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

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

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

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

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

  27

  THERE WAS A MOMENT ON EARTH, improbable in retrospect and actually briefer than a moment in the span of human history, more like the blink of an eye, when it was possible to make a living solely by photographing and interviewing famous people. Seven years before the end of the world, Jeevan Chaudhary booked an interview with Arthur Leander.

  Jeevan had been working as a paparazzo for some years and had made a passable living at it, but he was sick to death of stalking celebrities from behind sidewalk planters and lying in wait in parked cars, so he was trying to become an entertainment journalist, which he felt was sleazy but less sleazy than his current profession. “I know this guy,” he told an editor who’d bought a few of his photos in the past, when the subject of Arthur Leander came up over drinks. “I’ve seen all his movies, some of them twice, I’ve stalked him all over town, I’ve photographed his wives. I can get him to talk to me.” The editor agreed to give him a shot, so on the appointed day Jeevan drove to a hotel and presented his ID and credentials to a young publicist stationed outside a penthouse suite.

  “You have fifteen minutes,” she said, and ushered him in. The suite was all parquet floors and bright lighting. There was a room with canapés on a table and a number of journalists staring at their phones, another room with Arthur in it. The man whom Jeevan believed to be the finest actor of his generation sat in an armchair by a window that looked out over downtown Los Angeles. Jeevan, who had an eye for expensive things, registered the weight of the drapes, the armchair’s sleek fabric, the cut of Arthur’s suit. There was no reason, Jeevan kept telling himself, why Arthur would know that Jeevan was the one who’d taken the photograph of Miranda, but of course there was: all he could think of was how stupid he’d been to tell Miranda his name that night. The whole entertainment-journalist idea had been a mistake, it was obvious now. As he crossed the parquet floor he entertained wild thoughts of faking a sudden illness and fleeing before Arthur looked up, but Arthur smiled and extended a hand when the publicist introduced them. Jeevan’s name seemingly meant nothing to Arthur, and his face apparently didn’t register either. Jeevan had taken pains to alter his appearance. He’d shaved off the sideburns. He’d taken out his contact lenses and was wearing glasses that he hoped made him look serious. He sat in the armchair across from Arthur and set his recorder on the coffee table between them.

  He had rewatched all of Arthur’s movies over the previous two days, and had done substantial additional research. But Arthur didn’t want to talk about the movie he was shooting, or his training or influences, or what drove him as an artist, or whether he still saw himself as an outsider, as he’d said in one of his first interviews some years back. He responded in monosyllables to Jeevan’s first three questions. He seemed dazed and hungover. He looked like he hadn’t slept well in some time.

  “So tell me,” he said, after what seemed to Jeevan to be an uncomfortably long silence. His publicist had deposited an emergency cappuccino into his hands a moment earlier. “How does a person become an entertainment journalist?”

  “Is this one of those postmodern things?” Jeevan asked. “Where you turn the tables and interview me, like those celebrities who take photos of the paparazzi?” Careful, he thought. His disappointment at Arthur’s disinterest in talking to him was curdling into hostility, and beneath that lurked a number of larger questions of the kind that kept him up at night: interviewing actors was better than stalking them, but what kind of a journalism career was this? What kind of life? Some people managed to do things that actually mattered. Some people, his brother Frank for example, were currently covering the war in Afghanistan for Reuters. Jeevan didn’t specifically want to be Frank, but he couldn’t help but feel that he’d made a number of wrong turns in comparison.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said, “I’m just curious. How’d you get into this line of work?”

  “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

  The actor frowned as if trying to remember something. “Gradually, and then suddenly,” he repeated. He was quiet for a moment. “No, seriously,” he said, snapping out of it, “I’ve always wondered what drives you people.”

  “Money, generally speaking.”

  “Sure, but aren’t there easier jobs? This whole entertainment-journalism thing … I mean, look, I’m not saying a guy like you is the same as the paparazzi”—Thank you for paying so little attention, Jeevan thought—“I know what you do isn’t the same thing as what they do, but I’ve seen guys …” Arthur held up a hand—hold that thought—and swallowed half his cappuccino. The infusion of caffeine made his eyes widen slightly. “I’ve seen guys climb trees,” he said. “I’m not kidding. This was during my divorce, around the time Miranda moved out. I’m washing the dishes, I look out the window, and there’s this guy balancing up there with a camera.”

/>   “You wash dishes?”

  “Yeah, the housekeeper was talking to the press, so I fired her and then the dishwasher broke.”

  “Never rains but it pours, right?”

  Arthur grinned. “I like you,” he said.

  Jeevan smiled, embarrassed by how flattered he was by this. “It’s an interesting line of work,” he said. “One meets some interesting people.” One also meets some of the most boring people on the face of the earth, but he thought a little flattery couldn’t hurt.

  “I’ve always been interested in people,” Arthur said. “What drives them, what moves them, that kind of thing.” Jeevan searched his face for some sign of sarcasm, but he seemed utterly sincere.

  “Me too, actually.”

  “I’m just asking,” Arthur said, “because you don’t seem like most of the others.”

  “I don’t? Really?”

  “I mean, did you always want to be an entertainment guy?”

  “I used to be a photographer.”

  “What kind of photography?” Arthur was finishing his cappuccino.

  “Weddings and portraits.”

  “And you went from that to writing about people like me?”

  “Yes,” Jeevan said. “I did.”

  “Why would you?”

  “I was sick of going to weddings. The pay was better. It was less of a hassle. Why do you ask?”

  Arthur reached across the table and turned off Jeevan’s tape recorder. “Do you know how tired I am of talking about myself?”

  “You do give a lot of interviews.”

  “Too many. Don’t write that I said that. It was easier when it was just theater and TV work. The occasional profile or feature or interview or whatever. But you get successful in movies, and Christ, it’s like this whole other thing.” He raised his cup in a cappuccino-signaling motion, and Jeevan heard the publicist’s heels clicking away on the floor behind him. “Sorry,” he said, “I know it’s a little disingenuous to complain about a job like mine.”

  You have no idea, Jeevan thought. You’re rich and you’ll always be rich and if you wanted to you could stop working today and never work again. “But you’ve been doing movies for years,” he said in his most neutral tone.

  “Yeah,” Arthur said, “I guess I’m still not used to it. It’s still somehow embarrassing, all the attention. I tell people I don’t notice the paparazzi anymore, but I do. I just can’t look at them.”

  Which I appreciate, Jeevan thought. He was aware that his fifteen-minute allotment was trickling away. He held up the recorder so Arthur would notice it, pressed the Record button and set it on the coffee table between them.

  “You’ve had considerable success,” Jeevan said. “And with that comes, of course, a certain loss of privacy. Is it fair to say that you find the scrutiny difficult?”

  Arthur sighed. He clasped his hands together, and Jeevan had an impression that he was gathering his strength. “You know,” Arthur said clearly and brightly, playing a new, devil-may-care individual who wouldn’t sound in the playback like he was pale and obviously sleep-deprived with dark circles under his eyes, “I just figure that’s part of the deal, you know? We’re so lucky to be in this position, all of us who make our living as actors, and I find complaints about invasion of privacy to be disingenuous, frankly. I mean, let’s be real here, we wanted to be famous, right? It isn’t like we didn’t know what we’d be facing going in.” The speech seemed to take something out of him. He wilted visibly, and accepted a new cappuccino from his publicist with a nod of thanks. An awkward silence ensued.

  “So you just flew in from Chicago,” Jeevan said, at a loss.

  “Yes I did.” Arthur reached and turned off Jeevan’s recorder again. “Tell me something,” he said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Jeevan Chaudhary.”

  “If I tell you something, Jeevan Chaudhary, how long do I have before it appears in print?”

  “Well,” Jeevan said, “what do you want to tell me?”

  “Something no one else knows, but I want twenty-four hours before it appears anywhere.”

  “Arthur,” the publicist said from somewhere behind Jeevan, “we live in the information age. It’ll be on TMZ before he gets to the parking lot.”

  “I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be.

  “What does that mean?” Arthur asked.

  “It means I do what I say I’m going to do.”

  “Okay, look,” Arthur said, “if I tell you something …”

  “Guaranteed exclusive?”

  “Yes. I’ll tell no one else, on condition that you give me twenty-four hours.”

  “Fine,” Jeevan said, “I could give you twenty-four hours until it runs.”

  “Not just until it runs. Twenty-four hours until you tell another living soul, because I don’t want some intern at wherever the hell you work leaking it themselves.”

  “Okay,” Jeevan said. “Twenty-four hours before I tell another living soul.” He was pleased by the intrigue.

  “Arthur,” the publicist said, “could I speak with you for a moment?”

  “No,” Arthur said, “I have to do this.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

  “I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan repeated. This sounded a little sillier the second time.

  “You’re a journalist,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Arthur—”

  “Okay, look,” Arthur said, to Jeevan, “I came here directly from the airport.”

  “Okay.”

  “I came here two hours early, almost three hours actually, because I didn’t want to go home first.”

  “Why didn’t …?”

  “I’m leaving my wife for Lydia Marks,” Arthur said.

  “Oh, my god,” the publicist said.

  Lydia Marks was Arthur’s costar on the film that had just wrapped in Chicago. Jeevan had photographed her coming out of a club once in Los Angeles, bright-eyed and almost supernaturally put-together at three in the morning. She was the sort of person who liked the paparazzi and sometimes actually called them in advance. She had flashed him a winning smile.

  “You’re leaving Elizabeth Colton,” Jeevan said. “Why?”

  “Because I have to. I’m in love with someone else.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m moving in with Lydia next month,” he said, “and Elizabeth doesn’t know yet. I flew here a week ago when I had the day off from filming, specifically to tell her, and I just couldn’t do it. Look, here’s what you have to understand about Elizabeth: nothing bad has ever happened to her.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Don’t write that in your piece. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. The point is, I haven’t been able to tell her. I couldn’t do it any of the times we spoke on the phone, and I couldn’t do it today. But if you tell me that this story will appear tomorrow, then that forces my hand, doesn’t it?”

  “It’ll be a sensitive story,” Jeevan said. “You and Elizabeth are still friends and you wish only the best for her, you have no further comment and you desire for her privacy to be respected at this difficult time. That about it?”

  Arthur sighed. He looked somewhat older than forty-four. “Can you say it was mutual, for her sake?”

  “The split was mutual and, uh, amicable,” Jeevan said. “You and Elizabeth remain friends. You have considerable … considerable respect for one another and have decided mutually that it’s best for you to go your separate ways, and you wish for privacy in this, I don’t know, in this difficult time?”

  “That’s perfect.”

  “Do you want me to mention the …?” Jeevan didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. Arthur winced and looked at the ceiling.

  “Yes,” he said in a strained voice, “let’s mention the baby. Why not?”


  “Your first priority is your son, Tyler, who you and Elizabeth are committed to coparenting. I’ll make it less awkward than that.”

  “Thank you,” Arthur said.

  28

  ARTHUR THANKED HIM, and then what? On his brother’s sofa in a tower on the south edge of Toronto, eight days after Arthur’s death, Jeevan stared at the ceiling and tried to remember how it had played out. Had the publicist offered him a cappuccino? No, she had not, although that would’ve been nice. (Jeevan had been thinking of cappuccinos a great deal, because cappuccinos were among his favorite things and it had occurred to him that if everything was as bad as the television news suggested, he might never drink another. The things we fixate on, he thought.) Anyway, the publicist: she’d escorted him out without looking at him and closed the door in his face, and somehow this was already seven years ago.

  Jeevan lay on the sofa, entertaining flashes of random memory and thinking of things like cappuccinos and beer while Frank worked on his latest ghostwriting project, a memoir of a philanthropist whose name he was contractually forbidden from mentioning. Jeevan kept thinking of his girlfriend, his house in Cabbagetown, wondering if he was going to see either of them again. Cell phones had stopped working by then. His brother had no landline. Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall.

  29

  HE’D KEPT HIS WORD, THOUGH. This was one of the very few moments Jeevan was proud of in his professional life. He had told no one about Arthur and Elizabeth’s split, absolutely no one, for a full twenty-four hours after the interview.

  “What are you smiling about?” Frank asked.

  “Arthur Leander.”

  In a different lifetime Jeevan had stood outside Arthur’s house by the hour, smoking cigarettes and staring up at the windows, dazed with boredom. One night he’d tricked Arthur’s first wife into an unflattering photograph, and he’d made good money on the shot but he still felt bad about it. The way she’d looked at him, stunned and sad with the cigarette in her hand, hair sticking up in all directions, the strap of her dress falling off her shoulder. Strange to think of it now in this winter city.