Station Eleven (Page 40)
At John F. Kennedy International Airport he passed through a terminal in which he managed by some choreography of luck to avoid passing too close to anyone who was already infected—there were several infected people in that particular terminal by then—and managed not to touch any of the wrong surfaces, managed in fact to board a plane filled with similarly lucky people—the twenty-seventh-to-last plane ever to depart from that airport—and through all of this he was so sleep-deprived, he’d stayed up too late packing, he was tired and caught up in thoughts of Arthur, in listening to Coltrane on headphones, in working halfheartedly at the 360° reports once he found himself at the departure gate, that he didn’t realize he was on the same flight as Elizabeth Colton until he glanced up and saw her boarding the plane with her son.
It was a coincidence, but not an enormous coincidence. On the phone the other day he’d told her about the flight he was planning on taking—seven a.m., to get to Toronto before the predicted snowstorm arrived and snarled the airports—and she’d said she would try to get on the same flight. And then there she was in a dark suit, her hair cut short but instantly recognizable, her son by her side. Elizabeth and Tyler were in First Class and Clark was in Economy. They said hello as Clark walked past her seat and then didn’t speak again until an hour and a half after takeoff, when the pilot announced that they were being diverted into some place in Michigan that Clark had never heard of and everyone disembarked, confused and disoriented, into the Severn City Airport.
41
AFTER CLARK HAD DELIVERED the news of Arthur’s death, Miranda remained on the beach for some time. She sat on the sand, thinking of Arthur and watching a small boat coming in to shore, a single bright light skimming over the water. She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees. She was very tired, she realized, not feeling quite well, the beginnings of a sore throat, and tomorrow was another day of meetings. She’d forgotten to ask Clark about funeral arrangements, but her next thought was that of course she wouldn’t want to go—the idea of being pinned between the paparazzi and Arthur’s other ex-wives—and this was what she was thinking of as she rose and walked up the path to the hotel, which from the beach looked a little like a wedding cake, two tiers of white balconies.
The lobby was oddly empty. There was no front-desk staff. The concierge wore a surgical mask. Miranda started to approach him, to ask what was going on, but the look he gave her was one of unmistakable fear. She understood, as clearly as if he’d shouted it, that he wanted very badly for her not to come near him. She backed away and walked quickly to the elevators, shaken, his gaze on her back. There was no one in the upstairs corridor. Back in her room, she opened her laptop and, for the first time all day, turned her attention to the news.
Later Miranda spent two hours making phone calls, but there was no way to leave by then. Every nearby airport was closed.
“Listen,” a fraying airline representative finally snapped at her, “even if I could book you on a flight out of Malaysia, are you seriously telling me you’d want to spend twelve hours breathing recirculated air with two hundred other people in an airplane cabin at this point?”
Miranda hung up the phone. When she leaned back in the chair, her gaze fell on the air-conditioning vent above the desk. The thought of air whispering through the building, propelled from room to room. It wasn’t her imagination, she definitely had a sore throat.
“It’s psychosomatic,” she said aloud. “You’re afraid of getting sick, so you feel sick. It’s nothing.” She was trying to reframe the story as an exciting adventure, the time I got stuck in Asia during a flu outbreak, but she was unconvinced. She spent some time sketching, trying to calm herself. A rocky island with a small house on it, lights on the horizon of Station Eleven’s dark sea.
Miranda woke at four in the morning with a fever. She fought it off with three aspirin, but her joints were knots of pain, her legs weak, her skin hurt where her clothes touched her. It was difficult to cross the room to the desk. She read the latest news on the laptop, her eyes aching from the light of the screen, and understood. She could feel the fever pressing against the thin film of aspirin. She tried calling the front desk and then the New York and Toronto offices of Neptune Logistics, followed by the Canadian, American, British, and Australian consulates, but there were only voice-mail greetings and ringing phones.
Miranda rested the side of her face on the desk—the perfection of the cool laminate against her burning skin—and considered the poverty of the room. Poverty not in the economic sense, but in the sense of not being enough for the gravity of the moment, an insufficient setting—for what? She couldn’t think of this just yet—and she was thinking about the beach, the ships, the lights on the horizon, if it would be possible to get there when she felt so ill, related thoughts that perhaps if she could get there, someone on the beach might help her, that if she stayed here in the room she’d only get sicker and there was apparently no one at the front desk or in the consulates, all telephones unmanned. If she became any sicker she’d eventually be stranded here, too ill to get out of this room. There might be fishermen on the beach. She rose unsteadily. It took a long time and considerable concentration to put on her shoes.
The corridor was silent. It was necessary to walk very slowly, her hand on the wall. A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead—I see you, I see you—and hoped this was enough.
The lobby was empty now. The staff had fled.
Outside the air was heavy and still. A greenish light on the horizon, the beginnings of sunrise. A feeling of moving in slow motion, like walking underwater or in a dream. It was necessary to concentrate carefully on each step. This terrible weakness. She followed the path to the beach, walking very slowly, her outstretched hands brushing the palm fronds on either side. At the bottom of the path, the hotel’s white chaise longues lay in a row on the sand, unoccupied. The beach was empty of people. She collapsed into the nearest chaise longue and closed her eyes.
Exhaustion. She was desperately hot, then wracked with chills. Her thoughts were disordered. No one came.
She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn’t have been exposed to the flu. Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.
Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets and its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.
42
AT FIRST THE PEOPLE in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded. This was difficult to explain to young people in the following decades, but in all fairness, the entire history of being stranded in airports up to that point was also a history of eventually becoming unstranded, of boarding a plane and flying away. At first it seemed inevitable that the National Guard would roll in at any moment with blankets and boxes of food, that ground crews would return shortly thereafter and planes would start landing and taking off again. Day One, Day Two, Day Forty-eight, Day Ninety, any expectation of a return to normalcy long gone by now, then Year One, Year Two, Year Three. Time had been reset by catastrophe. After a while they went back to the old way of counting days and months, but kept the new system of years: January 1, Year Three; March 17, Year Four, etc. Year Four was when Clark realized this was the way the years would continue to be marked from now on, counted off one by one from the moment of disaster.
He’d known for a long time by then that the world’s changes wouldn’t be reversed, but still, the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.
Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, “I was there,” and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration.
“It’s hard to explain,” he caught himself saying sometimes to young people who came into his museum, which had formerly been the Skymiles Lounge in Concourse C. But he took his role as curator seriously and he’d decided years ago that “It’s hard to explain” isn’t good enough, so he always tried to explain it all anyway, whenever anyone asked about any of the objects he’d collected over the years, from the airport and beyond—the laptops, the iPhones, the radio from an administrative desk, the electric toaster from an airport-staff lounge, the turntable and vinyl records that some optimistic scavenger had carried back from Severn City—and of course the context, the pre-pandemic world that he remembered so sharply. No, he was explaining now, to a sixteen-year-old who’d been born in the airport, the planes didn’t rise straight up into the sky. They gathered speed on long runways and angled upward.