Station Eleven

“I used to read a lot of comics when I was a kid. Did you ever read Calvin and Hobbes?” Arthur is watching her closely. He looks young, she thinks, for thirty-six. He looks only slightly older than he did when they met for lunch seven years ago.

“Sure,” Arthur says, “I loved Calvin and Hobbes. My best friend had a stack of the books when we were growing up.”

“Is your friend from the island? Maybe I knew him.”

“Her. Victoria. She picked up and moved to Tofino fifteen years ago. But you were telling me about Calvin and Hobbes.”

“Yes, right. Do you remember Spaceman Spiff?”

She loved those panels especially. Spiff’s flying saucer crossing alien skies, the little astronaut in his goggles under the saucer’s glass dome. Often it was funny, but also it was beautiful. She tells him about coming back to Delano Island for Christmas in her first year of art school, after a semester marked by failure and frustrating attempts at photography. She started thumbing through an old Calvin and Hobbes, and thought, this

. These red-desert landscapes, these skies with two moons. She began thinking about the possibilities of the form, about spaceships and stars, alien planets, but a year passed before she invented the beautiful wreckage of Station Eleven. Arthur watches her across the table. Dinner goes very late.

“Are you still with Pablo?” he asks, when they’re out on the street. He’s hailing a cab. Certain things have been decided without either of them exactly talking about it.

“We’re breaking up. We’re not right for each other.” Saying it aloud makes it true. They are getting into a taxi, they’re kissing in the backseat, he’s steering her across the lobby of the hotel with his hand on her back, she is kissing him in the elevator, she is following him into a room.

Texts from Pablo at nine, ten, and eleven p.m.:

r u mad at me??

??

???

She replies to this—staying w a friend tonight, will be home in morning & then we can talk—which elicits

u know what dont bother coming home

And she feels a peculiar giddiness when she reads this fourth text. There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant.

At six in the morning she takes a taxi home to Jarvis Street. “I want to see you tonight,” Arthur whispers when she kisses him. They have plans to meet in his room after work.

The apartment is dark and silent. There are dishes piled in the sink, a frying pan on the stove with bits of food stuck to it. The bedroom door is closed. She packs two suitcases—one for clothes, one for art supplies—and is gone in fifteen minutes. In the employee gym at Neptune Logistics she showers and changes into clothes slightly rumpled by the suitcase, meets her own gaze in the mirror while she’s putting on makeup. I repent nothing

. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn’t true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn’t give it to them means that she’s too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here. There are tears in her eyes now. Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult.

“I don’t know,” Arthur says, at two in the morning. They are lying in his enormous bed at the Hotel Le Germain. He’s here in Toronto for three more weeks and then going back to Los Angeles. She wants to believe they’re lying in moonlight, but she knows the light through the window is probably mostly electric. “Can you call the pursuit of happiness dishonorable?”

“Surely sleeping with film stars when you live with someone else isn’t honorable, per se.”

He shifts slightly in the bed, uncomfortable with the term film star, and kisses the top of her head.

“I’m going to go back to the apartment in the morning to get a few more things,” she says sometime around four a.m., half-asleep. Thinking about a painting she left on her easel, a seahorse rising up from the bottom of the ocean. They’ve been talking about plans. Things have been solidifying rapidly.

“You don’t think he’ll do anything stupid, do you? Pablo?”

“No,” she says, “he won’t do anything except maybe yell.” She can’t keep her eyes open.

“You’re sure about that?”

He waits for an answer, but she’s fallen asleep. He kisses her forehead—she murmurs something, but doesn’t wake up—and lifts the duvet to cover her bare shoulders, turns off the television and then the light.

15