Station Eleven

“Come in.” Miranda is surprised to realize that she’s more curious than anything. A memory of the first night at the Hotel Le Germain in Toronto, lying beside Arthur, the awareness of a beginning. And now here’s the ending standing in her doorway half-drunk, legs like pipe cleaners in her skinny jeans, tousled and in disarray—smudges of mascara under her eyes, a sheen of sweat on her nose—but still beautiful, still one of the finest specimens of her kind in Los Angeles, of Los Angeles in a way Miranda knows she never will be, no matter how long she stays here or how hard she tries. Elizabeth steps forward and sinks unexpectedly to the floor. By some small miracle she’s managed not to spill the water.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m a little wobbly.”

“Aren’t we all,” Miranda says, but as usually happens when she tries to say something funny, her audience seems not to catch the joke. Elizabeth and the dog are both staring at her. “Please don’t cry,” she says to Elizabeth, whose eyes are shining. “Don’t, really, I’m serious. It’s too much.”

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth says for the third time. That infuriatingly small voice. She sounds like a different person when she’s in front of a camera.

“Stop apologizing.”

Elizabeth blinks. “You’re working on your secret project.” She is looking all around the room. She falls silent, and after a moment Miranda succumbs to curiosity and sits on the floor beside Elizabeth to see the room from her vantage point. Paintings and sketches are pinned to the walls. Notes on structure and chronology cover a massive board. There are four pages of story outlines taped to the windowsill.

“What happens next?” Miranda asks. It’s easier to talk to Elizabeth when they’re sitting side by side, when she doesn’t have to look at her.

“I don’t know.”

“You do know.”

“I wish I could tell you how sorry I am,” Elizabeth says, “but you’ve already told me to stop apologizing.”

“It’s just an awful thing to do.”

“I don’t think I’m an awful person,” Elizabeth says.

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

“I think this is happening because it was supposed to happen.” Elizabeth speaks very softly.

“I’d prefer not to think that I’m following a script,” Miranda says, but she’s tired, there’s no sting in her words, it’s past four in the morning and too late in every sense. Elizabeth says nothing, just pulls her knees close to her chest and sighs.

In three months Miranda and Arthur will sit in a conference room with their lawyers to work out the final terms of their divorce settlement while the paparazzi smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk outside, while Elizabeth packs to move into the house with the crescent-moon light by the pool. In four months Miranda will be back in Toronto, divorced at twenty-seven, working on a commerce degree, spending her alimony on expensive clothing and consultations with stylists because she’s come to understand that clothes are armor; she will call Leon Prevant to ask about employment and a week later she’ll be back at Neptune Logistics, in a more interesting job now, working under Leon in Client Relations, rising rapidly through the company until she comes to a point after four or five years when she travels almost constantly between a dozen countries and lives mostly out of a carry-on suitcase, a time when she lives a life that feels like freedom and sleeps with her downstairs neighbor occasionally but refuses to date anyone, whispers “I repent nothing” into the mirrors of a hundred hotel rooms from London to Singapore and in the morning puts on the clothes that make her invincible, a life where the moments of emptiness and disappointment are minimal, where by her midthirties she feels competent and at last more or less at ease in the world, studying foreign languages in first-class lounges and traveling in comfortable seats across oceans, meeting with clients and living her job, breathing her job, until she isn’t sure where she stops and her job begins, almost always loves her life but is often lonely, draws the stories of Station Eleven in hotel rooms at night.

But first there’s this moment, this lamp-lit room: Miranda sits on the floor beside Elizabeth, whose breath is heavy with wine, and she leans back until she feels the reassuring solidity of the door frame against her spine. Elizabeth, who is crying a little, bites her lip and together they look at the sketches and paintings pinned to every wall. The dog stands at attention and stares at the window, where just now a moth brushed up against the glass, and for a moment everything is still. Station Eleven is all around them.

16

A TRANSCRIPT OF AN INTERVIEW conducted by François Diallo, librarian of the town of New Petoskey, publisher and editor of the New Petoskey News, twenty-six years after Miranda and Arthur’s last dinner party in Los Angeles and fifteen years after the Georgia Flu: