There were 320 people living in the Severn City Airport that year, one of the largest settlements Kirsten had seen. August took Sayid to the infirmary, and Kirsten lay dazed in Charlie’s tent.
By the beginning of Year Two the occupants of the airport had been sick of looking at one another but on the other hand they hadn’t wanted to sleep too far apart, so they’d constructed a double line of tents down the length of Concourse B. The tents were of varying sizes, with frames made of branches dragged in from the woods, squares of about twelve feet by twelve feet with peaked roofs. They’d raided the airport offices for staplers, stapled sheets over the frames. There’d been some debate over whether this was the best use of the mountain of sheets they’d salvaged from the nearby hotels, but there was such a longing for privacy by then. In Charlie and Jeremy’s tent there was a bed, two plastic crates for clothes and diapers, their instruments. A watery light filtered through the cloth. Luli crowded in and lay by Kirsten’s side.
“I’m so sorry about Dieter,” Charlie said. “August told me.”
“It doesn’t seem real.” Kirsten wanted to close her eyes, but she was afraid of what she’d dream of if she slept. “Is there a tattooist here, Charlie?”
Charlie brushed her fingertips over Kirsten’s right wrist, the two black knives inked two years apart. “How many?”
“One. An archer on the road.”
“There’s a tattooist who lives in the Lufthansa jet. I’ll introduce you tomorrow.”
Kirsten was watching an ant cross the roof of the tent on the outside, the shadow of its tiny body and the pinpoint impressions of its legs on the fabric. “I’ve been thinking about the nursery,” she said.
A few years ago, they’d been going through a massive country house near the mouth of the St. Clair River, Kirsten and Charlie and August, a place that had been picked over more than once but not for years or maybe a decade, dust everywhere, and eventually August had said something about getting back to the Symphony. Kirsten had gone upstairs in search of Charlie and found her in a room that had obviously been a nursery once, staring at a porcelain tea set sized for dolls. She didn’t look up when Kirsten said her name.
“We should go, Charlie,” she’d said. “We’re a mile from the road.” But Charlie gave no sign of having heard her. “Come on,” Kirsten had said, “we can take it with us,” gesturing to the tea set, which had been set up with improbable precision on a miniature table. Charlie still said nothing. She was staring at the tea set as if in a trance. August called their names from downstairs, and all at once Kirsten had the impression that someone was watching them from a corner of the room, but except for Kirsten and Charlie, the room was empty. Most of the furniture in the nursery was gone, nothing remaining except this little table set for dolls and there, in the corner, a child-size rocking chair. How could this table have remained set, when the rest of the house was ransacked and in disarray? Now that Kirsten looked, she realized there was no dust on the tea set. The only footprints in the dust were hers and Charlie’s, and Charlie wasn’t sitting close enough to the table to touch it. What small hand had placed the doll’s teacups on the table? It was very easy to imagine that the rocking chair was moving, just slightly. Kirsten tried not to look at it. She wrapped the tiny plates and saucers in a pillowcase as quickly as possible while Charlie watched, still not speaking, and then Kirsten stuffed the bundle into Charlie’s bag, took her hand and led her downstairs, out to the overgrown lawn, where Charlie blinked and came back to herself slowly in the late-spring light.
“The nursery was just a strange moment,” Charlie said now, all these years later in her airport tent. “A strange moment in a lifetime of strange moments. I can’t explain what came over me.”
“Is that all? Just a strange moment?”
“We’ve talked about this a hundred times. There was no one else in the room with us.”
“There was no dust on the tea set.”
“Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”
“Of course not. Imagine how many there’d be.”
“Yes,” Kirsten said, “that’s exactly it.”
“Close your eyes,” Charlie murmured. “I’ll sit here with you. Try to sleep.”
There was music that night, August with Charlie and the sixth guitar. Sayid slept in the infirmary downstairs in Baggage Claim, his injuries cleaned and bandaged. Charlie played the cello with her eyes closed, smiling. Kirsten stood at the back of the crowd. She tried to concentrate on the sound, but music had always unmoored her, and her thoughts drifted. Dieter. The prophet, the only other person she’d ever met who had been in possession of Station Eleven. The archer on the road, her knife in his chest. Dieter as Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dieter brewing his fake coffee in the mornings, Dieter arguing with her about tattoos. Dieter the night she met him in central Ohio, when she was fourteen and Dieter was in his late twenties, half a lifetime ago.
On her first night with the Symphony he’d served her dinner by the fire. She’d been so alone since her brother’s death, and when the Symphony agreed to let her join them it had seemed like the best thing that had ever happened to her, and that first night she’d been almost too excited to eat. She remembered Dieter talking to her about Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s works and family, Shakespeare’s plague-haunted life.
“Wait, do you mean he had the plague?” she asked.
“No,” Dieter said, “I mean he was defined by it. I don’t know how much schooling you’ve had. Do you know what that means, to be defined by something?”
Yes. There was a new heaven and a new earth. Kirsten turned away from the light and the music. The terminal’s south wall was almost entirely glass, the smudges of children’s handprints here and there at waist height. Night was falling, airplanes luminous in starlight. She heard the distant movements of the airport’s four cows, sequestered in a loading dock for the night, the clucking of hens. A liquid movement below on the tarmac; a cat, hunting in the shadows.
An old man was sitting on a bench some distance from the performance, watching her approach. He’d shaved off all his hair and wore a silk neck scarf tied in a complicated knot. She saw a glint of earrings, four loops in his left earlobe. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, but by the time she saw him it was too late to turn away without being rude, so she nodded to him and sat at the far end of his bench.
“You’re Kirsten Raymonde.” He retained the traces of a British accent. “Clark Thompson.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “we were introduced earlier, weren’t we?”
“You were going to let me take you on a tour of my museum.”
“I’d like to see it. Maybe tomorrow. I’m so tired tonight.”
“I understand.” They sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the music. “I’m told the Symphony will arrive soon,” he said.
She nodded. It would be a different Symphony now, without Dieter. All she wanted was to sleep. There was a clicking of claws on the floor as Luli came to find her. He sat by her side and rested his chin on her lap.
“That dog seems devoted to you.”
“He’s my friend.”
Clark cleared his throat. “I’ve spent a great deal of time with Charlie, this past year. She mentioned that you have an interest in electricity.” He stood, leaning on his cane. “I know you’re tired,” he said. “I understand you’ve had a difficult few days. But there’s something I think you’d like to see.”
She considered this for a moment before she accepted. She wasn’t in the habit of following strangers, but he was elderly and moved slowly and she had three knives in her belt. “Where are we going?”
“The air traffic control tower.”
“Outside?”
He was walking away from her. She followed him through a steel door near the entrance to the museum, down an unlit flight of stairs and into the night. The singing of crickets, a small bat darting on a hunt. From the tarmac, the conce
rt was a smudge of light in Concourse C.
Up close the airplanes were larger than she would have imagined. She looked up at the dark windows, the curve of wings. Impossible to imagine that machines so enormous had ever taken to the air. Clark walked slowly. She saw the cat again, running fast and low at the base of the air traffic control tower, heard the squeak of a rodent when it pounced. The tower’s steel door opened, and she found herself in a small room where a guard kept watch through a peephole, candlelight glinting on elevator doors. The door to the stairwell was propped open with a rock.
“It’s nine stories,” Clark said. “I’m afraid this may take some time.”
“I’m not in a hurry.” It was peaceful, climbing the stairs with him. He seemed to expect no conversation from her. A slow ascent between shadowed stairs and moonlit landings, the tapping of his cane on steel. His breathing was labored. At every landing they stopped to rest, once for so long that Kirsten was almost asleep before she heard him pull himself up on the railing. The dog lay down and let out a theatrical sigh at each landing. There were open windows on every floor, but there was no breeze that night and the air was hot and still.
“I read that interview you gave a few years back,” he said on the sixth floor.
“That newspaper in New Petoskey.”
“Yes.” Clark was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. “I want to talk to you about it tomorrow.”
On the ninth landing, Clark rapped a pattern with his cane on a door and they were admitted into an octagonal room with walls of glass and arrays of darkened screens, four people with binoculars watching the tarmac, the terminal, the shadows of the gardens, the barrier fence. The dog sniffed around in the shadows. It was disorienting, being so high off the ground. The airplanes gleamed pale under the stars. The concert in Concourse C seemed to have ended.
“Look there,” Clark said, “to the south. It’s what I wanted to show you.” She followed the line of his finger, to a space on the southern horizon where the stars seemed dimmer than elsewhere in the sky. “It appeared a week ago,” he said. “It’s the most extraordinary thing. I don’t know how they did it on such a large scale.”
“You don’t know how who did what?”
“I’ll show you. James, may we borrow the telescope?” James moved the tripod over and Clark peered through, the lens aimed just below the dim spot in the sky. “I know you’re tired tonight.” He was adjusting the focus, his fingers stiff on the dial. “But I hope you’ll agree this was worth the climb.”
“What is it?”
He stepped back. “The telescope’s focused,” he said. “Don’t move it, just look through.”
Kirsten looked, but at first she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. She stepped back. “It isn’t possible,” she said.
“But there it is. Look again.”
In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity.
52
KIRSTEN STARES THROUGH the telescope at the town with electric light.
In the terminal building, Charlie and August sit by Sayid’s bed in the Baggage Claim infirmary and tell him about the concert, and he smiles for the first time in a number of days.
A thousand miles to the south of the airport, Jeevan is baking bread in an outdoor oven. He rarely thinks of his old life anymore, although he has dreams sometimes about a stage, an actor fallen in the shimmering snow, and other dreams where he’s pushing shopping carts through blizzards. His small son kneels by his feet, playing with a puppy. This boy born into the new world, his mother resting indoors with the baby.
“Frank,” Jeevan says to his son, “go see if your mother’s hungry.” He lifts the pan with the bread from the oven, which in a previous incarnation was an oil drum. His son runs indoors, the puppy close at his heels.
It’s a warm night, and he hears a neighbor laughing. A scent of gardenias carries on the breeze. In a moment he will go down to the river to retrieve the preserved meat cooling in an old coffee can in the water, he’ll make sandwiches for his small family and offer some bread to their neighbors, but for now he lingers to watch the silhouettes of his wife and children behind the thin curtains of the room where they live. Daria leans down to lift the baby from the crib, stoops again to blow out the candle and in that movement she vanishes, the silhouettes blinking out, and Frank runs ahead of her out onto the grass.
“Come check the bread,” he says, and little Frank kneels by the bread with a grave expression, pokes at it with one finger, leans in close to inhale the warmth.
“He seems better,” Daria says. Frank had a fever the night before. She sang him soft lullabies while Jeevan pressed cold compresses to his forehead.
“Back to normal,” Jeevan says. “How’s that bread looking, Frank?”
“I think it’s too hot to eat.”
“We’ll let it sit for a moment.” The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan’s brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.
Far to the north, in a place so distant that in this flightless world it might as well be another planet, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony are arriving at the Severn City Airport.
53
ON HIS LAST MORNING on earth, Arthur was tired. He’d laid awake until sunrise and then drifted out of a twilight half-sleep in the late morning, sluggish and dehydrated, a throbbing headache behind his eyes. Orange juice would’ve helped, but when he looked in the fridge there was only a mouthful left in the bottom of the carton. Why hadn’t he bought more? He had had insomnia for the past three nights, and his exhaustion was such that this was enough to send him spiraling into something not far from fury, the fury contained with difficulty by breathing deeply and counting to five, soothed by the cold air on his face. He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast—scrambled eggs—and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he’d have time to linger with a newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favorite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life.
The weather reports had been full of an approaching snowstorm and he sensed it in the air, in the dove-gray weight of the late-morning sky. He’d definitely decided: when Lear closed, he was moving to Israel. The idea was exhilarating. He would shed his obligations and belongings and start over in the same country as his son. He would buy an apartment within walking distance of Elizabeth’s house and he’d see Tyler every day.
“Looks like snow,” the girl in the coffee shop said.
Arthur nodded hello to the hot-dog guy who always stood on the same corner halfway between the hotel and the theater. The hot-dog guy beamed. A pigeon walked in circles near the base of the hot-dog stand, hoping for dropped garnishings and crumbs. The beauty of the pigeon’s luminescent neck.
He arrived at the theater at noon for notes, but the notes devolved into an extended argument and went on well past schedule. Arthur tried to pay attention, but the coffee wasn’t performing as well as he’d hoped. In the late afternoon he lay on a sofa in his dressing room, hoping to revive himself with a nap, but for all his exhaustion the room seemed oppressive. His thoughts raced. He eventually gave up and left the theater. Ignoring the bored photographers outside the stage door, who took pictures and called out questions about Miranda while he waved at passing taxis. Had he dragged her back into the tabloids when she’d visited two weeks ago? He felt the old guilt. She’d never asked for any of it.
“Queen West and Spadina,” he told the driver of an orange-and-green cab, and rested his forehead on the glass to watch their passage down Queen Street. This had been one of his neighborhoods once, but all the shops and cafés he’d known were gone. He was thinking of a diner near Queen West and Spadina, a place he’d frequented with
Clark when they were seventeen. He couldn’t recall exactly where it was but he found it eventually, a little farther east than expected.
All these decades later, the place was eerily unchanged. The same line of red upholstered booths, stools down the length of the counter, an ancient clock on the wall. Could this possibly be the same waitress? No, he was misremembering, because the fiftyish woman who’d served him burnt coffee when he was seventeen couldn’t possibly still be fiftyish. He remembered being here with Clark at three or four or sometimes five in the morning, during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream. The dream lasted just a moment, but the moment was bright: both of them taking acting classes, Arthur working as a waiter while Clark burned through a small inheritance. Clark had been magnificent, actually, in retrospect. Six foot two and skinny with a penchant for vintage suits, half his hair shaved off and the other half floppy and dyed pink or occasionally turquoise or purple, eye shadow on special occasions, that captivating British boarding-school drawl.
Arthur’s grilled cheese sandwich arrived. He thought of calling Clark, a quick “You’ll never guess where I’m calling from!” moment, but decided against it. He wanted to call his son, but it was four a.m. in Israel.
Arthur finished his dinner and took a cab back to the theater, where there was still a little time remaining. He sat on a sofa in his dressing room and looked over the script—he knew his lines backward and forward, but it was his habit to try to pick up some of everyone else’s lines too, because he liked to know what was coming—but before the end of the first act there was a knock on the door. When he rose the room didn’t spin, exactly, but it wasn’t as steady as it should have been. Tanya brushed past him into the room.