Station Eleven

Days slipped past and the news went on and on until it began to seem abstract, a horror movie that wouldn’t end. The newscasters had a numb, flattened way of speaking. They sometimes wept.

Frank’s living room was on the corner of the building, with views of both the city and the lake. Jeevan preferred the view of the lake. If he turned Frank’s telescope toward the city he saw the expressway, which was upsetting. Traffic had inched along for the first two days, pulling trailers, plastic bins and suitcases strapped to roofs, but by the third morning the gridlock was absolute and people had started walking between the cars with their suitcases, their children and dogs.

By Day Five Frank was working on his ghostwriting project instead of watching the news, because he said the news was going to drive them both crazy, and by then most of the newscasters weren’t even newscasters, just people who worked for the network and were seemingly unused to being on the other side of the camera, cameramen and administrators speaking haltingly into the lens, and then countries began to go dark, city by city—no news out of Moscow, then no news out of Beijing, then Sydney, London, Paris, etc., social media bristling with hysterical rumors—and the local news became more and more local, stations dropping away one by one, until finally the last channel on air showed only a single shot in a newsroom, station employees taking turns standing before the camera and disseminating whatever information they had, and then one night Jeevan opened his eyes at two a.m. and the newsroom was empty. Everyone had left. He stared at the empty room on the screen for a long time.

The other channels were all static and test patterns by then, except for the ones that were repeating a government emergency broadcast over and over, useless advice about staying indoors and avoiding crowded places. A day later, someone finally switched off the camera on the empty newsroom, or the camera died on its own. The day after that, the Internet blinked out.

Toronto was falling silent. Every morning the quiet was deeper, the perpetual hum of the city fading away. Jeevan mentioned this to Frank, who said, “Everyone’s running out of gas.” The thing was, Jeevan realized, looking at the stopped cars on the highway, even the people who hadn’t run out of gas couldn’t go anywhere now. All the roads would be blocked by abandoned cars.

Frank never stopped working. The philanthropist’s memoir was almost complete.

“He’s probably dead,” Jeevan said.

“Probably,” Frank agreed.

“Why are you still writing about him?”

“I signed a contract.”

“But everyone else who signed the contract …”

“I know,” Frank said.

Jeevan was holding his useless cell phone up to the window. A NO SERVICE AVAILABLE message flashed on the screen. He let the phone fall to the sofa and stared out at the lake. Maybe a boat would come, and …

On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.

There was a stupid moment or two when he stood near the front door, flipping the light switches. On/off, on/off.

“Stop it,” Frank said. He was taking notes in a margin of his manuscript in the gray light that seeped in through the blinds. “You’re driving me crazy.” Frank was hiding in his project, Jeevan had realized, but he couldn’t begrudge Frank the strategy. If Jeevan had had a project, he’d have hid in it too.

“It could just be us,” Jeevan said. “Maybe just a blown fuse in the basement?”

“Of course it isn’t just us. The only remarkable thing is that the lights stayed on as long as they did.”

“It’s like the tree house,” Frank said. This was sometime around Day Thirty, a few days after the end of running water. Whole days passed when they didn’t speak, but there were inexplicable moments of peace. Jeevan had never felt so close to his brother. Frank worked on the philanthropist’s memoir and Jeevan read. He spent hours studying the lake through the telescope, but the sky and the water were empty. No planes, no ships, and where was the Internet?