Station Eleven

“I turned and she was gone,” Jackson said of Sidney, the clarinet. He’d returned to the camp alone and shaken. They’d found a stream, Jackson said, about a quarter mile down the road in the direction from which they’d come. He’d knelt on the bank to fill the water container, and when he looked up she had vanished. Had she fallen in? No, he said, he would have heard a splash, and he was downstream, so she would have passed him. It was a small stream and the banks weren’t steep. There was just the woods all around him, a sense of being watched. He called her name but she was nowhere. He noticed then that the birdsong had stopped. The woods had gone still.

No one spoke for a moment when he’d finished telling the story. The Symphony gathered close around him.

“Where’s Olivia?” Lin asked suddenly. Olivia was in the back of the first caravan, playing with a rag doll. “I want you in my sight,” Lin whispered. “Not just within sight, within reach. Do you understand?”

“She was close with Dieter,” the first oboe said. This was true, and they were all silent, thinking of the clarinet and searching their memories for clues. Had she seemed like herself lately? None of them were sure. What did it mean to seem like yourself, in the course of such unspeakable days? How was anyone supposed to seem?

“Are we being hunted?” Alexandra asked. It seemed plausible. Kirsten looked over her shoulder into the shadows of the trees. A search party was organized, but the light was gone. Lighting a fire seemed too dangerous so they ate dinner from the preserved food stores, rabbit jerky and dried apples, and settled in for an uneasy night. In the morning they delayed for five hours, searching, but they couldn’t find her. They set off into another searing day.

“Is it logical that they could have all been taken?” August was walking beside Kirsten. “Dieter, Sayid, the clarinet?”

“How could anyone overpower them so silently?” There was a lump in her throat. It was difficult to speak. “Maybe they just left.”

“Abandoned us?”

“Yes.”

“Why would they?”

“I don’t know.”

Later in the day someone thought to search the clarinet’s belongings, and found the note. The beginning of a letter: “Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.” It ended there. The date suggested that either it had been written eleven months earlier or that the clarinet didn’t know what year or month it was, one or the other. Neither scenario was unlikely. This was an era when exact dates were seldom relevant, and keeping track required a degree of dedication. The note had been folded and refolded several times, soft along the creases.

“It seems more theoretical than anything,” the first cello said. “Like she wrote it a year ago and then changed her mind. It doesn’t prove anything.”

“That’s assuming she wrote it a year ago,” said Lin. “She could’ve written it last week. I think it shows suicidal intent.”

“Where were we a year ago? Does anyone remember?”

“Mackinaw City,” August said. “New Petoskey, East Jordan, all those little places down the coast on the way to New Sarnia.”

“I don’t remember her seeming different a year ago,” Lin said. “Was she sad?”

No one was sure. They all felt they should have been paying more attention. Still the scouts reported no one behind or ahead of them on the road. Impossible not to imagine that they were being watched from the forest.

What was the Symphony without Dieter and the clarinet and Sayid? Kirsten had thought of Dieter as a sort of older brother, she realized, perhaps a cousin, a fixture in her life and in the life of the Symphony. It seemed in some abstract way impossible that the Symphony continued without him. She had never been close with the clarinet, but the clarinet was conspicuous in her absence. She only spoke with Sayid to argue with him now, but the thought of him having come to harm was sheer agony. Her breath was shallow in her chest and the tears were silent and constant.

Late in the day, she found a folded piece of paper in her pocket. She recognized August’s handwriting.

A fragment for my friend—

If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you

Silent, my starship suspended in night

She’d never seen his poetry before and was impossibly moved by it. “Thank you,” she said when she saw him next. He nodded.

The land became wilder, the houses subsiding. They had to stop three times to clear fallen trees. They used two-handed saws, working as quickly as possible with sweat soaking through their clothes, scouts posted here and there watching the road and the forest, jumping and aiming their weapons at small sounds. Kirsten and August walked out ahead over the conductor’s objections. A half mile beyond the stalled caravans, they came upon a rolling plain.