Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven

“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 concert 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.

KIRSTEN STARES THROUGHthe 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.”