Station Eleven

“Well,” she says—one thing she is very good at is forcing her voice to remain calm when she’s angry—“as I’ve mentioned before, Leon was very clear when he hired me. He wants me at my desk until seven p.m. when he’s traveling, and if he’s here, I’m here. He texts me when he comes in on weekends, and then I have to be here too.”

“Oh, he texts you.”

The problem is that she’s colossally bored with the conversation, and also bored with Pablo, and with the kitchen on Jarvis Street where she knows he’s standing, because he only makes angry phone calls from home—one of the things they have in common is a mutual distaste for sidewalk weepers and cell-phone screamers, for people who conduct their messier personal affairs in public—and the kitchen gets the best reception of anywhere in the apartment.

“Pablo, it’s just a job. We need the money.”

“It’s always money with you, isn’t it?”

“This is what’s paying our rent. You know that, right?”

“Are you saying I’m not pulling my weight, Miranda? Is that what you’re saying?”

It isn’t possible to continue to listen to this, so she sets the receiver gently on the cradle and finds herself wondering why she didn’t notice earlier—say, eight years ago, when they first started dating—that Pablo is mean. His email arrives within minutes. The subject header is WTF. Miranda, it reads, what’s going on here? It seems like you’re being weirdly hostile and kind of passive-aggressive. What gives?

She closes it without responding and stands by the glass wall for a while to look out at the lake. Imagining the water rising until it covers the streets, gondolas moving between the towers of the financial district, Dr. Eleven on a high arched bridge. She’s standing here when her cell phone rings. She doesn’t recognize the number.

“It’s Arthur Leander,” he says when she answers. “Can I buy you another lunch?”

“How about dinner instead?”

“Tonight?”

“Are you busy?”

“No,” he says, sitting on his bed in the Hotel Le Germain, wondering how he’ll get out of dinner with the director this evening. “Not at all. It would be my pleasure.”

She decides it isn’t necessary to call Pablo, under the circumstances. There is a small task for Leon, who’s about to board a plane to Lisbon; she finds a file he needs and emails it to him and then returns to Station Eleven. Panels set in the Undersea, people working quietly in cavernous rooms. They live out their lives under flickering lights, aware at all times of the fathoms of ocean above them, resentful of Dr. Eleven and his colleagues who keep Station Eleven moving forever through deep space. (Pablo texts her: ??did u get my email???) They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.

Miranda is drawing Leon Prevant’s reception area before she realizes what she’s doing. The prairies of carpet, the desk, Leon’s closed office door, the wall of glass. The two staplers on her desk—how did she end up with two?—and the doors leading out to the elevators and restrooms. Trying to convey the serenity of this place where she spends her most pleasant hours, the refinement of it, but outside the glass wall she substitutes another landscape, dark rocks and high bridges.

“You’re always half on Station Eleven,” Pablo said during a fight a week or so ago, “and I don’t even understand your project. What are you actually going for here?”

He has no interest in comics. He doesn’t understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats. When sober, he suggests that she’s squandering her talent. When drunk, he implies that there isn’t much there to squander, although later he apologizes for this and sometimes cries. It’s been a year and two months since he sold his last painting. She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat.

“You don’t have to understand it,” she said. “It’s mine.”

The restaurant where she meets Arthur is all dark wood and soft lighting, the ceiling a series of archways and domes. I can use this, she thinks, waiting at the table for him to arrive. Imagining a room like this in the Undersea, a subterranean place made of wood salvaged from the Station’s drowned forests, wishing she had her sketchbook with her. At 8:01 p.m., a text from Pablo: i’m waiting. She turns off her phone and drops it into her handbag. Arthur comes in breathless and apologetic, ten minutes late. His cab got stuck in traffic.

“I’m working on a comic-book project,” she tells him later, when he asks about her work. “Maybe a series of graphic novels. I don’t know what it is yet.”

“What made you choose that form?” He seems genuinely interested.