Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven

When Kirsten was in the houses, she searched for celebrity-gossip magazines, because once, when she was sixteen years old, she’d flipped through a magazine on a dust-blackened side table and found her past:

Happy Reunion: Arthur Leander Picks Up Son Tyler in LAX

SCRUFFY ARTHUR GREETS SEVEN-YEAR-OLD TYLER,

WHO LIVES IN JERUSALEM WITH HIS MOTHER,

MODEL/ACTRESS ELIZABETH COLTON.

The photograph: Arthur with a three-day beard, rumpled clothes, a baseball cap, carrying a small boy who beamed up at his father’s face while Arthur smiled at the camera. The Georgia Flu would arrive in a year.

“I knew him,” she’d told August, breathless. “He gave me the comics I showed you!” And August had nodded and asked to see the comics again.

There were countless things about the pre-collapse world that Kirsten couldn’t remember — her street address, her mother’s face, the TV shows that August never stopped talking about — but she did remember Arthur Leander, and after that first sighting she went through every magazine she could find in search of him. She collected fragments, stored in a ziplock bag in her backpack. A picture of Arthur alone on a beach, looking pensive and out of shape. A picture of him with his first wife, Miranda, and then later with his second wife, Elizabeth, a malnourished-looking blonde who didn’t smile for cameras. Then with their son, who was about the same age as Kirsten, and later still with a third wife who looked very similar to the second one.

“You’re like an archaeologist,” Charlie said, when Kirsten showed off her findings. Charlie had wanted to be an archaeologist when she was little. She was the second cello and one of Kirsten’s closest friends.

Nothing in Kirsten’s collection suggested the Arthur Leander she remembered, but what did she actually remember? Arthur was a fleeting impression of kindness and gray hair, a man who’d once pressed two comic books into her hands—“I have a present for you,” she was almost certain he’d said — and sometime after this moment, the clearest memory she retained from before the collapse: a stage, a man in a suit talking to her while Arthur lay still on his back with paramedics leaning over him, voices and crying and people gathering, snow somehow falling even though they were indoors, electric light blazing down upon them.

THE COMICS ARTHUR LEANDERgave her: two issues from a series no one else in the Symphony has ever heard of, Dr. Eleven , Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven , Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit . By Year Twenty, Kirsten has them memorized.

Dr. Eleven is a physicist. He lives on a space station, but it’s a highly advanced space station that was designed to resemble a small planet. There are deep blue seas and rocky islands linked by bridges, orange and crimson skies with two moons on the horizon. The contrabassoon, who prior to the collapse was in the printing business, told Kirsten that the comics had been produced at great expense, all those bright images, that archival paper, so actually not comics at all in the traditionally mass-produced sense, possibly someone’s vanity project. Who would that someone have been? There is no biographical information in either issue, initials in place of the author’s name. “By M. C.” In the inside cover of the first issue, someone has written “Copy 2 of 10” in pencil. In the second issue, the notation is “Copy 3 of 10.” Is it possible that only ten copies of each of these books exist in the world?

Kirsten’s taken care of the comics as best she can but they’re dog-eared now, worn soft at the edges. The first issue falls open to a two-page spread. Dr. Eleven stands on dark rocks overlooking an indigo sea at twilight. Small boats move between islands, wind turbines spinning on the horizon. He holds his fedora in his hand. A small white animal stands by his side. (Several of the older Symphony members have confirmed that this animal is a dog, but it isn’t like any dog Kirsten’s ever seen. Its name is Luli. It looks like a cross between a fox and a cloud.) A line of text across the bottom of the frame: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth .

THE SYMPHONY ARRIVED INSt. Deborah by the Water in the midafternoon. Before the collapse, it had been one of those places that aren’t definitely in one town or another — a gas station and a few chain restaurants strung out along a road with a motel and a Walmart. The town marked the southwestern border of the Symphony’s territory, nothing much beyond it so far as anyone knew.

They’d left Charlie and the sixth guitar here two years ago, Charlie pregnant with the sixth guitar’s baby, arrangements made for them to stay in the former Wendy’s by the gas station so she wouldn’t have to give birth on the road. Now the Symphony came upon a sentry posted at the north end of town, a boy of about fifteen sitting under a rainbow beach umbrella by the roadside. “I remember you,” he said when they reached him. “You can set up camp at the Walmart.”

The Symphony moved through St. Deborah by the Water at a deliberately slow pace, the first trumpet playing a solo from a Vivaldi concerto, but what was strange was that the music drew almost no onlookers as they passed. In Traverse City the crowd following them down the street upon their arrival had swelled to a hundred, but here only four or five people came to their doors or emerged from around the sides of buildings to stare, unsmiling, and none of them were Charlie or the sixth guitar.

The Walmart was at the south end of town, the parking lot wavering in the heat. The Symphony parked the caravans near the broken doors, set about the familiar rituals of taking care of the horses and arguing about which play to perform or if it should just be music tonight, and still neither Charlie nor the sixth guitar appeared.

“They’re probably just off working somewhere,” August said, but it seemed to Kirsten that the town was too empty. Mirages were forming in the distance, phantom pools on the road. A man pushing a wheelbarrow seemed to walk on water. A woman carried a bundle of laundry between buildings. Kirsten saw no one else.

“I’d suggest Lear for tonight,” said Sayid, an actor, “but I don’t know that we want to make this place more depressing.”

“For once I agree with you,” Kirsten said. The other actors were arguing. King Lear , because they’d been rehearsing it all week — August looked nervous — or Hamlet , because they hadn’t performed it in a month?

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Gil said, breaking an impasse. “I believe the evening calls for fairies.”

“Is all our company here?”

“You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.” Jackson had been playing Bottom for a decade and was the only one who’d managed to go off-book today. Even Kirsten had to look at the text twice. She hadn’t played Titania in weeks.

“This place seems quiet, doesn’t it?” Dieter was standing with Kirsten just outside the action of the rehearsal.

“It’s creepy. You remember the last time we were here? Ten or fifteen kids followed us through town when we arrived and watched the rehearsal.”

“You’re up,” Dieter said.

“I’m not misremembering, am I?” Kirsten was stepping into the play. “They crowded all around us.”

Dieter frowned, looking down the empty road.

“… But room, fairy!” said Alexandra, who was playing Puck, “here comes Oberon.”

“And here my mistress,” said Lin, who was playing the fairy. “Would that he were gone!”