Station Eleven

“I love this place,” he says, but six months later when they’re breaking up she throws the line back at him—“You love this place but you’ll never belong here and you’ll never be cast as the lead in any of your stupid movies”—and by this point he’s twenty-eight, time speeding up in a way that disconcerts him, the parties going too late and getting too sloppy, waiting in the ER on two separate occasions for news of friends who’ve OD’d on exotic combinations of alcohol and prescription medications, the same people at party after party, the sun rising on scenes of tedious debauchery, everyone looking a little undone. Just after his twenty-ninth birthday he lands the lead in a low-budget film about a botched bank robbery and is pleased to learn that it’s filming in Toronto. He likes the idea of returning to Canada in triumph, which he’s aware is egotistical but what can you do.

Arthur’s mother calls one night and asks if he remembers Susie, that woman who was a waitress at the General Store Café when he was a kid. Of course he remembers Susie. He has vivid memories of Susie serving him pancakes in the café. Anyway, Susie’s niece came to live with her a few years back, for reasons that remain buried despite the dedicated excavation efforts of every gossip on the island. The niece, Miranda, is seventeen now and just very driven, very together. She recently moved to Toronto to go to art school, and could Arthur maybe take her to lunch?

“Why?” he asks. “We don’t know each other. She’s a seventeen-year-old girl. It’ll be kind of awkward, won’t it?” He hates awkwardness and goes to great lengths to avoid it.

“You have a lot in common,” his mother says. “You both skipped a grade in school.”

“I’m not sure that qualifies as ‘a lot.’ ” But even as he says this, he finds himself thinking, She’ll know where I’m from. Arthur lives in a permanent state of disorientation like a low-grade fever, the question hanging over everything being How did I get from there to here? And there are moments—at parties in Toronto, in Los Angeles, in New York—when he’ll be telling people about Delano Island and he’ll notice a certain look on their faces, interested but a little incredulous, like he’s describing an upbringing on the surface of Mars. For obvious reasons, very few people have heard of Delano Island. When he tells people in Toronto that he’s from British Columbia, they’ll invariably say something about how they like Vancouver, as though that glass city four hours and two ferries to the southeast of his childhood home has anything to do with the island where he grew up. On two separate occasions he’s told people in Los Angeles that he’s from Canada and they’ve asked about igloos. An allegedly well-educated New Yorker once listened carefully to his explanation of where he’s from—southwestern British Columbia, an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland—and then asked, apparently in all seriousness, if this means he grew up near Maine.

“Call Miranda,” his mother says. “It’s just lunch.”

Miranda at seventeen: she is preternaturally composed and very pretty, pale with gray eyes and dark curls. She comes into the restaurant in a rush of cold air, January clinging to her hair and her coat, and Arthur is struck immediately by her poise. She seems much older than her age.

“How do you like Toronto?” Arthur asks. Not merely pretty, he decides. She is actually beautiful, but it’s a subtle kind of beauty that takes some time to make itself apparent. She is the opposite of the L.A. girls with their blond hair and tight T-shirts and tans.

“I love it.” The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom. She starts telling him about her boyfriend Pablo, also an artist, and Arthur forces himself to smile as he listens. She’s so young, he tells himself. She’s tired of talking about herself and asks about him, and he tries to explain the surrealism of this world he’s stepped into where people know him when he doesn’t know them, he talks about how much he loves Los Angeles and how simultaneously the place exhausts him, how disoriented he feels when he thinks about Delano Island and compares it to his current life. She’s never been to the United States, although she’s lived within two hundred miles of the border all her life. He can see that she’s straining to imagine his life there, her thoughts probably a collage of scenes from movies and magazine shoots.

“You love acting, don’t you?”

“Yes. Usually I do.”