Emily Mandel - Station Eleven

Also by Emily St. John Mandel

Last Night in Montreal

The Singer’s Gun

The Lola Quartet

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2014 by Emily St. John Mandel

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

St. John Mandel, Emily, 1979–

Station eleven : a novel / Emily St. John Mandel. —First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-385-35330-4 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-385-35331-1 (eBook)

1. Actors—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9199.4.S727S83 2014 813’.6—dc23 2014003560

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental .

Front-of-jacket photograph by Michael Turek/Gallery Stock

Jacket design by Abby Weintraub

v3.1

IN MEMORY OF EMILIE JACOBSON

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness

And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,

And for me, now as then, it is too much.

There is too much world.

—Czeslaw Milosz

The Separate Notebooks

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1. The Theater

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

3. I Prefer You With a Crown

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

4. The Starship

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

5. Toronto

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

6. The Airplanes

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

7. The Terminal

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

8. The Prophet

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

9. Station Eleven

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

1

THE KING STOODin a pool of blue light, unmoored. This was act 4 of King Lear , a winter night at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. Earlier in the evening, three little girls had played a clapping game onstage as the audience entered, childhood versions of Lear’s daughters, and now they’d returned as hallucinations in the mad scene. The king stumbled and reached for them as they flitted here and there in the shadows. His name was Arthur Leander. He was fifty-one years old and there were flowers in his hair.

“Dost thou know me?” the actor playing Gloucester asked.

“I remember thine eyes well enough,” Arthur said, distracted by the child version of Cordelia, and this was when it happened. There was a change in his face, he stumbled, he reached for a column but misjudged the distance and struck it hard with the side of his hand.

“Down from the waist they are Centaurs,” he said, and not only was this the wrong line but the delivery was wheezy, his voice barely audible. He cradled his hand to his chest like a broken bird. The actor portraying Edgar was watching him closely. It was still possible at that moment that Arthur was acting, but in the first row of the orchestra section a man was rising from his seat. He’d been training to be a paramedic. The man’s girlfriend tugged at his sleeve, hissed, “Jeevan! What are you doing ?” And Jeevan himself wasn’t sure at first, the rows behind him murmuring for him to sit. An usher was moving toward him. Snow began to fall over the stage.

“The wren goes to’t,” Arthur whispered, and Jeevan, who knew the play very well, realized that the actor had skipped back twelve lines. “The wren …”

“Sir,” the usher said, “would you please …”

But Arthur Leander was running out of time. He swayed, his eyes unfocused, and it was obvious to Jeevan that he wasn’t Lear anymore. Jeevan pushed the usher aside and made a dash for the steps leading up to the stage, but a second usher was jogging down the aisle, which forced Jeevan to throw himself at the stage without the benefit of stairs. It was higher than he’d thought and he had to kick the first usher, who’d grasped hold of his sleeve. The snow was plastic, Jeevan noted peripherally, little bits of translucent plastic, clinging to his jacket and brushing against his skin. Edgar and Gloucester were distracted by the commotion, neither of them looking at Arthur, who was leaning on a plywood column, staring vacantly. There were shouts from backstage, two shadows approaching quickly, but Jeevan had reached Arthur by now and he caught the actor as he lost consciousness, eased him gently to the floor. The snow was falling fast around them, shimmering in blue-white light. Arthur wasn’t breathing. The two shadows—security men—had stopped a few paces away, presumably catching on by now that Jeevan wasn’t a deranged fan. The audience was a clamor of voices, flashes from cell-phone cameras, indistinct exclamations in the dark.

“Jesus Christ,” Edgar said. “Oh Jesus.” He’d dropped the British accent he’d been using earlier and now sounded as if he were from Alabama, which in fact he was. Gloucester had pulled away the gauze bandage that had covered half his face—by this point in the play his character’s eyes had been put out—and seemed frozen in place, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Arthur’s heart wasn’t beating. Jeevan began CPR. Someone shouted an order and the curtain dropped, a whoosh of fabric and shadow that removed the audience from the equation and reduced the brilliance of the stage by half. The plastic snow was still falling. The security men had receded. The lights changed, the blues and whites of the snowstorm replaced by a fluorescent glare that seemed yellow by comparison. Jeevan worked silently in the margarine light, glancing sometimes at Arthur’s face. Please, he thought, please. Arthur’s eyes were closed. There was movement in the curtain, someone batting at the fabric and fumbling for an opening from the other side, and then an older man in a gray suit was kneeling on the other side of Arthur’s chest.

“I’m a cardiologist,” he said. “Walter Jacobi.” His eyes were magnified by his glasses, and his hair had gone wispy on the top of his head.

“Jeevan Chaudhary,” Jeevan said. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been here. People were moving around him, but everyone seemed distant and indistinct except Arthur, and now this other man who’d joined them. It was like being in the eye of a storm, Jeevan thought, he and Walter and Arthur here together in the calm. Walter touched the actor’s forehead once, gently, like a parent soothing a fevered child.