Station Eleven

“What a wonderful thing, to get paid for doing what you love,” she says, and he agrees with this. At the end of the meal she thanks him for paying the check and they leave together. Outside the air is cold, sunlight on dirty snow. Later he’ll remember this as a golden period when they could walk out of restaurants together without anyone taking pictures of them on the sidewalk.

“Good luck on the movie,” she says, boarding a streetcar.

“Good luck in Toronto,” he replies, but she’s already gone. In the years that follow, he’s often successful at putting her out of his mind. She is far away and very young. There are a number of movies, an eighteen-month relocation to New York for a Mamet play, back to Los Angeles for a recurring role in an HBO series. He dates other women, some actresses, some not, two of them so famous that they can’t go out in public without attracting photographers who swarm like mosquitoes. By the time he returns to Toronto for another movie, he can’t go out in public without being photographed either, partly because the movie parts have gotten much bigger and more impressive, partly because the photographers got used to taking his picture when he was holding hands with more famous people. His agent congratulates him on his dating strategy.

“I wasn’t being strategic,” Arthur says. “I dated them because I liked them.”

“Sure you did,” his agent says. “I’m just saying, it didn’t hurt.”

Did he actually date those women because he liked them, or was his career in the back of his mind the whole time? The question is unexpectedly haunting.

Arthur is thirty-six now, which makes Miranda twenty-four. He is becoming extremely, unpleasantly famous. He wasn’t expecting fame, although he secretly longed for it in his twenties just like everyone else, and now that he has it he’s not sure what to do with it. It’s mostly embarrassing. He checks into the Hotel Le Germain in Toronto, for example, and the young woman at the registration desk tells him what an honor it is to have him staying with them—“and if you don’t mind me saying so, I adored that detective film”—and as always in these situations he isn’t sure what to say, he honestly can’t tell if she really did enjoy the detective film or if she’s just being nice or if she wants to sleep with him or some combination of the above, so he smiles and thanks her, flustered and not sure where to look, takes the key card and feels her gaze on his back as he walks to the elevators. Trying to look purposeful, also trying to convey the impression that he hasn’t noticed and doesn’t care that half the population of the lobby is staring at him.

Once in the room he sits on the bed, relieved to be alone and unlooked-at but feeling as he always does in these moments a little disoriented, obscurely deflated, a bit at a loss, and then all at once he knows what to do. He calls the cell number that he’s been saving all these years.

14

MIRANDA IS AT WORK when Arthur Leander calls her again. She’s an administrative assistant at a shipping company, Neptune Logistics, where she spends quiet days at a desk shaped like a horseshoe in a private reception area outside her boss’s office door. Her boss is a young executive named Leon Prevant, and his door is almost always closed because he’s almost always out of town. There are acres of gray carpeting and a wall of glass with a view of Lake Ontario near her desk. There’s rarely enough work to keep her occupied for more than an hour or two at a time, which means she can often spend entire afternoons sketching—she’s working on a series of graphic novels—with long coffee breaks, during which she likes to stand by the glass wall and look out at the lake. When she stands here she feels suspended, floating over the city. The stillness of the water, the horizon framed by other glass towers and miniature boats drifting in the distance.

A soft chime signifies an incoming email. During the long period when her position was staffed by an incompetent temp—“The winter of our discontent,” Leon Prevant calls it—Leon took to outsourcing his travel planning to his subordinate Hannah’s administrative assistant Thea, who is impeccable in a smooth, corporate way that Miranda admires, and who has just forwarded Leon’s flight confirmation emails for next month’s trip to Tokyo. In Thea’s presence she feels ragged and unkempt, curls sticking up in all directions while Thea’s hair is glossy and precise, her clothes never quite right whereas Thea’s clothes are perfect. Miranda’s lipstick is always too gaudy or too dark, her heels too high or too low. Her stockings all have holes in the feet and have to be worn strategically with specific pairs of shoes. The shoes have scuffed heels, filled in carefully with permanent marker.