Station Eleven

  “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 ti
me 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.

  48

  THREE DAYS AFTER Kirsten and August became separated from the Symphony, behind a garden shed in an overgrown backyard on the outskirts of Severn City, Kirsten woke abruptly with tears in her eyes. She’d dreamt that she’d been walking down the road with August, then she turned and he was gone and she knew he was dead. She’d screamed his name, she’d run down the road but he was nowhere. When she woke he was watching her, his hand on her arm.

  “I’m right here,” he said. She must have said his name aloud.

  “It’s nothing. Just a dream.”

  “I had bad dreams too.” He was holding his silver Starship Enterprise in his other hand.

  It wasn’t quite morning. The sky was brightening, but night lingered below in the shadows, gray light, dewdrops suspended in the grass.

  “Let’s wash up,” August said. “We might meet people today.”

  They crossed the road to the beach. The water mirrored the pearl sky, the first pink of sunrise rippling. They bathed with some shampoo Kirsten had found in that last house—it left a scent of synthetic peaches on their skin and floating islands of bubbles on the lake—and Kirsten washed and wrung out her dress, put it on wet. August had scissors in his suitcase. She cut his hair—it was falling in his eyes—and then he cut hers.

  “Have faith,” he whispered. “We’ll find them.”

  Resort hotels stood along the lakeshore, the windows mostly broken and their shards reflecting the sky. Trees pushed up through the parking lots between rusted cars. Kirsten and August abandoned their suitcases, the wheels too loud on rough pavement, made bundles out of bedsheets and carried the supplies over their shoulders. After a mile or two they saw a sign with a white airplane hanging askew over an intersection, an arrow pointed toward the center of town.

  Severn City had been a substantial place once. There were commercial streets of redbrick buildings, flowers riotous in planters, and the roots of maple trees disrupting the sidewalks. A flowering vine had taken over most of the post office and extended across the street. They walked as silently as possible, weapons in hand. Birds moved in and out of broken windows and perched on sagging utility wires.

  “August.”

  “What?”

  “Did you just hear a dog bark?”

  Just ahead was the overgrown wilderness of a municipal park, a low hill rising beside the road. They climbed up into the underbrush, moving quickly, threw their bundles aside and crouched low. A flash of movement at the end of a side street: a deer, bounding away from the lakeshore.

  “Something startled it,” August whispered. Kirsten adjusted and readjusted her grip on a knife. A monarch butterfly fluttered past. She watched it while she listened and waited, wings like bright paper. A faint buzz of insects all around them. She heard voices now, and footsteps.

  The man who appeared on the road was so dirty that Kirsten didn’t immediately recognize him, and when she did she had to stifle a gasp. Sayid was gaunt. He moved slowly. There was blood on his face, an eye swollen shut. His clothes were filthy and torn, several days’ beard on his face. Two men and a boy followed a few paces behind him. The boy carried a machete. One of the men carried a sawed-off shotgun, the barrel pointed at the ground. The other held a bow, half-drawn, an arrow at the ready and a quiver on his back.

  Kirsten, moving very slowly, drew a second knife from her belt.

  “I have the gunman,” August whispered. “Get the archer.” His fingers closed around a stone the size of his fist. He rose and sent it sailing in an arc over the road. The stone crashed into the wall of a half-collapsed house and the men started, turning toward the sound just as August’s first arrow caught the gunman in the back. Kirsten was aware of footsteps receding, the boy with the machete running away. The archer drew his bow and an arrow whistled past Kirsten’s ear, but the knife had already left her hand. The archer sank to his knees, staring at the handle protruding from between his ribs. A flock of birds rose up above the rooftops and settled into the sudden quiet.


  August was cursing under his breath. Sayid knelt on the road, his head in his hands. Kirsten ran to him and held his head to her chest. He didn’t resist. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, into his blood-caked hair, “I’m so sorry they hurt you.”

  “There’s no dog,” August said. His jaw was clenched, a sheen of sweat on his face. “Where’s the dog? We heard a dog bark.”

  “The prophet’s behind us with the dog,” Sayid whispered. “He’s got two men with him. We split up to take different roads about a half mile back.” Kirsten helped him to his feet.

  “The archer’s still alive,” August said.

  The archer was lying on his back. His eyes followed Kirsten, but he made no other movement. She knelt beside him. He’d been in the audience when they’d performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at St. Deborah by the Water, applauding in the front row at the end of the performance, smiling, his eyes wet in the candlelight.

  “Why did you take Sayid?” she asked him. “Where are the other two?”

  “You took something that belongs to us,” the man whispered. “We were going to do a trade.” Blood was spreading rapidly over his shirt and dripping down the creases of his neck, pooling beneath him.

  “We took nothing. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” August was going through the men’s bags. “No ammunition for the gun,” he said, disgusted. “And it was unloaded.”

  “The girl,” Sayid said. His voice was a dry rasp. “He’s talking about the stowaway.”

  “The fifth bride,” the archer whispered. “It was my duty. She was chosen.”