Station Eleven

“I don’t know. A town somewhere. A farm.”

“A farm? Are you a farmer? Even if it weren’t the middle of winter, Jeevan, do farms even work without electricity and irrigation systems? What do you think will grow in the spring? What will you eat there in the meantime?”

“I don’t know, Frank.”

“Do you know how to hunt?”

“Of course not. I’ve never fired a gun.”

“Can you fish?”

“Stop it,” Jeevan said.

“After I was shot, when they told me I wouldn’t walk again and I was lying in the hospital, I spent a lot of time thinking about civilization. What it means and what I value in it. I remember thinking that I never wanted to see a war zone again, as long as I live. I still don’t.”

“There’s still a world out there,” Jeevan said, “outside this apartment.”

“I think there’s just survival out there, Jeevan. I think you should go out there and try to survive.”

“I can’t just leave you.”

“I’ll leave first,” Frank said. “I’ve given this some thought.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, but he knew what Frank meant.

33

RAYMONDE: Do you still have that obituary of Arthur Leander? I remember you showed it to me, years ago, but I don’t remember if it had the name—

DIALLO: Do I still have the second-to-last edition of the New York Times? What a question. Of course I do. But no, it doesn’t have the name. That man from the audience who performed CPR on Leander, he’s unidentified. Under normal circumstances there would’ve been a follow-up story, presumably. Someone would have found him, tracked him down. But tell me what happened. Mr. Leander fell, and then …

RAYMONDE: Yes, he collapsed, and then a man came running across the stage and I realized he’d come from the audience. He was trying to save Arthur, he was performing CPR, and then the medics arrived and the man from the audience sat with me while they did their work. I remember the curtain fell and I was sitting there onstage, watching the medics, and the man from the audience spoke with me. He was so calm, that’s what I remember about him. We went and sat in the wings for a while until my minder found us. She was a babysitter, I guess. It was her job to look after me and the other two children in the show.

DIALLO: Do you remember her name?

RAYMONDE: No. I remember she was crying, really sobbing, and it made me cry too. She cleaned my makeup off, and then she gave me a present, that glass paperweight I showed you once.

DIALLO: You’re still the only person I know who carries a paperweight in her backpack.

RAYMONDE: It’s not that heavy.

DIALLO: It seems an unusual gift for a child.

RAYMONDE: I know, but I thought it was beautiful. I still think it’s beautiful.

DIALLO: That’s why you took it with you when you left Toronto?

RAYMONDE: Yes. Anyway, she gave it to me, and I guess eventually we quieted down, I remember after that we stayed in the dressing room playing cards, and then she kept calling my parents, but they never came.

DIALLO: Did they call her back?

RAYMONDE: She couldn’t reach them. I should say I don’t really remember this next part, but my brother told me. Eventually she called Peter, my brother, who was at home that night. He said he didn’t know where they were either, but said she could bring me home and he’d look after me. Peter was much older than me, fifteen or sixteen at the time, so he looked after me a lot. The woman drove me home and left me there with him.

DIALLO: And your parents …?

RAYMONDE: I never saw them again. I have friends with similar stories. People just vanished.

DIALLO: They were among the very first, then, if this was Day One in Toronto.

RAYMONDE: Yes, they must have been. I wonder sometimes what happened to them. I think perhaps they got sick in their offices and went to the ER. That seems to me the most likely scenario. And then once they got there, well, I can’t imagine how anyone could have survived in any of the hospitals.

DIALLO: So you stayed at home with your brother and waited for them to come back.

RAYMONDE: We didn’t know what was happening. For the first little while, waiting seemed to make sense.

34

“READ ME SOMETHING,” Jeevan said, on the fifty-eighth day. He was lying on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, and he’d been drifting in and out of sleep. It was the first thing he’d said in two days.

Frank cleared his throat. “Anything in particular?” He hadn’t spoken in two days either.

“The page you’re working on now.”

“Really? You want some overprivileged philanthropist’s thoughts on the charity work of Hollywood actors?”

“Why not?”

Frank cleared his throat. “The immortal words of a philanthropist whose name I’m not allowed to divulge but who you’ve never heard of anyway,” he said.