Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven

The pleasure of being alone for once, away from the clamor of the Symphony. It was possible to look up at the McDonald’s sign and fleetingly imagine, by keeping her gaze directed upward so that there was only the sign and the sky, that this was still the former world and she could stop in for a burger. The last time she’d been here, the IHOP had housed three or four families; she was surprised to see that it had been boarded up, a plank hammered across the door with an inscrutable symbol spray-painted in silver — something like a lowercase t with an extra line toward the bottom. Two years ago she’d been followed around town by a flock of children, but now she saw only two, the boy with the toy car and a girl of eleven or so who watched her from a doorway. A man with a gun and reflective sunglasses was standing guard at the gas station, whose windows were blocked by curtains that had once been flowered sheets. A young and very pregnant woman sunbathed on a lounge chair by the gas pumps, her eyes closed. The presence of an armed guard in the middle of town suggested that the place was unsafe — had they recently been raided? — but surely not as unsafe as all that, if a pregnant woman was sunbathing in the open. It didn’t quite make sense. The McDonald’s had housed two families, but where had they gone? Now a board had been nailed across the door, spray-painted with that same odd symbol.

The Wendy’s was a low square building with the look of having been slapped together from a kit in an architecturally careless era, but it had a beautiful front door. It was a replacement, solid wood, and someone had taken the trouble to carve a row of flowers alongside the carved handle. Kirsten ran her fingertips over the wooden petals before she knocked.

How many times had she imagined this moment, over two years of traveling apart from her friend? Knocking on the flowered door, Charlie answering with a baby in her arms, tears and laughter, the sixth guitar grinning beside her. I have missed you so much. But the woman who answered the door was unfamiliar.

“Good afternoon,” Kirsten said. “I’m looking for Charlie.”

“I’m sorry, who?” The woman’s tone wasn’t unfriendly, but there was no recognition in her eyes. She was about Kirsten’s age or a little younger, and it seemed to Kirsten that she wasn’t well. She was very pale and too thin, black circles under her eyes.

“Charlie. Charlotte Harrison. She was here about two years ago.”

“Here in the Wendy’s?”

“Yes.” Oh Charlie, where are you? “She’s a friend of mine, a cellist. She was here with her husband, the sixth — her husband, Jeremy. She was pregnant.”

“I’ve only been here a year, but maybe someone else here would know. Would you like to come in?”

Kirsten stepped into an airless corridor. It opened into a common room at the back of the building, where once there’d been an industrial kitchen. She saw a cornfield through the open back door, stalks swaying for a dozen yards or so before the wall of the forest. An older woman sat in a chair by the doorway, knitting. Kirsten recognized the local midwife.

“Maria,” she said.

Maria was backlit by the open door behind her. It was impossible to see the expression on her face when she looked up.

“You’re with the Symphony,” she said. “I remember you.”

“I’m looking for Charlie and Jeremy.”

“I’m sorry, they left town.”

“Left? Why would they leave? Where did they go?”

The midwife glanced at the woman who’d shown Kirsten in. The woman looked at the floor. Neither spoke.

“At least tell me when,” Kirsten said. “How long have they been gone?”

“A little more than a year.”

“Did she have her baby?”

“A little girl, Annabel. Perfectly healthy.”

“And is that all you’ll tell me?” Kirsten was entertaining a pleasant fantasy of holding a knife to the midwife’s throat.

“Alissa,” Maria said, to the other woman, “you look so pale, darling. Why don’t you go lie down?”

Alissa disappeared through a curtained doorway into another room. The midwife stood quickly. “Your friend rejected the prophet’s advances,” she whispered, close to Kirsten’s ear. “They had to leave town. Stop asking questions and tell your people to leave here as quickly as possible.” She settled back into her chair and picked up her knitting. “Thank you for stopping by,” she said, in a voice loud enough to be heard in the next room. “Is the Symphony performing tonight?”

“ A Midsummer Night’s Dream . With orchestral accompaniment.” Kirsten was having trouble keeping her voice steady. That after two years the Symphony might arrive in St. Deborah by the Water to find that Charlie and Jeremy had already left was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her. “This town seems different from when we were here last,” she said.

“Oh,” the midwife said brightly, “it is! It’s completely different.”

Kirsten stepped outside and the door closed behind her. The girl she’d noticed in a doorway earlier had followed her here and was standing across the road, watching. Kirsten nodded to her. The girl nodded back. A serious child, unkempt in a way that suggested neglect, her hair tangled, her T-shirt collar torn. Kirsten wanted to call out to her, to ask if she knew where Charlie and Jeremy had gone, but something in the girl’s stare unnerved her. Had someone told the girl to watch her? Kirsten turned away to continue down the road, wandering with studied casualness and trying to convey the impression of being interested only in the late-afternoon light, the wildflowers, the dragonflies gliding on currents of air. When she glanced over her shoulder, the girl was trailing behind her at some distance.

Two years ago she’d done this walk with Charlie, both of them delaying the inevitable in the final hours before the Symphony left. “These two years will go quickly,” Charlie had said, and they had gone quickly, when Kirsten considered it. Up to Kincardine, back down the coastline and down the St. Clair River, winter in one of the St. Clair fishing towns. Performances of Hamlet and Lear in the town hall, which had previously been a high-school gymnasium, The Winter’s Tale, Romeo and Juliet , the musicians performing almost every night, then A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the weather grew warmer. An illness that passed through the Symphony in spring, a high fever and vomiting, half the Symphony got sick but everyone recovered except the third guitar — a grave by the roadside outside of New Phoenix — and we continued onward, Charlie, like always, all those months, and always I thought of you here in this town.

There was someone on the road ahead, walking quickly to meet her. The sun was skimming the tops of the trees now, the road in shadow, and it was a moment before she recognized Dieter.

“We should be getting back,” she said.

“I have to show you something first. You’ll want to see this.”

“What is it?” She didn’t like his tone. Something had rattled him. She told him what the midwife had said while they walked.

He frowned. “She said they’d left? Are you sure that’s what she said?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why?” At the northern edge of town a new building had been under way at the very end, the foundation poured just before the Georgia Flu arrived. It was a concrete pad, bristling with metal bars, overgrown now with vines. Dieter stepped off the road and led her down a path behind it.

All towns have graveyards, and St. Deborah by the Water’s had grown considerably since she’d wandered here two years ago with Charlie. There were perhaps three hundred graves, spaced in neat rows between the abandoned foundation and the forest. In the newest section, freshly painted markers blazed white in the grass. She saw the names at some distance.