Station Eleven

“Sure,” she said. He’s been saying this ever since she registered with the temp agency, but what she hasn’t told him is that she went from temporary to permanent at the end of her sixth week on the job. Leon likes her. He appreciates how calm she always is, he says, how unflappable. He even introduces her as such, on the rare occasions when he’s in the office: “And this is my unflappable assistant, Miranda.” This pleases her more than she likes to admit to herself.

“I’m going to sell those new paintings,” Pablo said. He was half-naked in the bed, lying like a starfish. After she got up he always liked to see how much of the bed he could sleep on at once. “You know there’s a payday coming, right?”

“Definitely,” Miranda said, giving up on the blouse and trying to find a T-shirt that might look halfway professional under her twenty-dollar blazer.

“Almost no one from that last show sold anything,” he said, talking mostly to himself now.

“I know it’s temporary.” But this is her secret: she doesn’t want it to end. What she can never tell Pablo, because he disdains all things corporate, is that she likes being at Neptune Logistics more than she likes being at home. Home is a small dark apartment with an ever-growing population of dust bunnies, the hallway narrowed by Pablo’s canvases propped up against the walls, an easel blocking the lower half of the living room window. Her workspace at Neptune Logistics is all clean lines and recessed lighting. She works on her never-ending project for hours at a time. In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life.

She receives five emails from Thea this morning, forwarded flight and hotel confirmations for Leon’s upcoming trip to Asia. Miranda spends some time on the Asian travel itinerary. Japan, then Singapore, then South Korea. She likes looking up maps and imagining traveling to these places herself. She has still never left Canada. With Pablo not working or selling any paintings, she’s only making minimum interest payments on her student loans and she can barely cover their rent. She inserts the Singapore-to-Seoul flight information into the itinerary, double-checks the other confirmation numbers, and realizes that she’s run out of tasks for the day. It’s nine forty-five a.m.

Miranda reads the news for a while, spends some time looking at a map of the Korean peninsula, realizes that she’s been staring blankly at the screen and thinking of the world of her project, her graphic novel, her comic-book series, her whatever-it-is that she’s been working on since she graduated from art school. She retrieves her sketchbook from its hiding space under the files in her top desk drawer.

There are several important characters in the Station Eleven project, but the hero is Dr. Eleven, a brilliant physicist who bears a striking physical resemblance to Pablo but is otherwise nothing like him. He is a person from the future who never whines. He is dashing and occasionally sarcastic. He doesn’t drink too much. He is afraid of nothing but has poor luck with women. He took his name from the space station where he lives. A hostile civilization from a nearby galaxy has taken control of Earth and enslaved Earth’s population, but a few hundred rebels managed to steal a space station and escape. Dr. Eleven and his colleagues slipped Station Eleven through a wormhole and are hiding in the uncharted reaches of deep space. This is all a thousand years in the future.

Station Eleven is the size of Earth’s moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it’s a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. The station’s artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven’s surface it is always sunset or twilight or night. There was also damage to a number of vital systems involving Station Eleven’s ocean levels, and the only land remaining is a series of islands that once were mountaintops.

There has been a schism. There are people who, after fifteen years of perpetual twilight, long only to go home, to return to Earth and beg for amnesty, to take their chances under alien rule. They live in the Undersea, an interlinked network of vast fallout shelters under Station Eleven’s oceans. There are three hundred of them now. In the scene Miranda’s presently sketching, Dr. Eleven is on a boat with his mentor, Captain Lonagan.

Dr. Eleven: These are perilous waters. We’re passing over an Undersea gate.

Captain Lonagan: You should try to understand them. (The next panel is a close-up of his face.) All they want is to see sunlight again. Can you blame them?

After these two panels, she decides, she needs a full-page spread. She’s already painted the image, and when she closes her eyes she can almost see it, clipped to her easel at home. The seahorse is a massive rust-colored creature with blank eyes like saucers, half animal, half machine, the blue light of a radio transmitter glowing on the side of its head. Moving silent through the water, beautiful and nightmarish, a human rider from the Undersea astride the curve of its spine. Deep blue water up to the top inch of the painting. On the water’s surface, Dr. Eleven and Captain Lonagan in their rowboat, small under the foreign constellations of deep space.