Station Eleven

“Tonight? No, I had theater tickets. Actually, you wouldn’t believe what happened, I—”

“Wait, listen, I need you to tell me honestly, will it send you into one of your panic attacks if I tell you something really, really bad?”

“I haven’t had an anxiety attack in three years. My doctor said that whole thing was just a temporary stress-related situation, you know that.”

“Okay, you’ve heard of the Georgia Flu?”

“Sure,” Jeevan said, “you know I try to follow the news.” A story had broken the day before about an alarming new flu in the Republic of Georgia, conflicting reports about mortality rates and death tolls. Details had been sketchy. The name the news outlets were going with—the Georgia Flu—had struck Jeevan as disarmingly pretty.

“I’ve got a patient in the ICU,” Hua said. “Sixteen-year-old girl, flew in from Moscow last night, presented with flu symptoms at the ER early this morning.” Only now did Jeevan hear the exhaustion in Hua’s voice. “It’s not looking good for her. Well, by midmorning we’ve got twelve more patients, same symptoms, turns out they were all on the same flight. They all say they started feeling sick on the plane.”

“Relatives? Friends of the first patient?”

“No relation whatsoever. They all just boarded the same flight out of Moscow.”

“The sixteen-year-old …?”

“I don’t think she’ll make it. So there’s this initial group of patients, the Moscow passengers. Then this afternoon, a new patient comes in. Same symptoms, but this one wasn’t on the flight. This one’s just an employee at the airport.”

“I’m not sure what you’re—”

“A gate agent,” Hua said. “I’m saying his only contact with the other patients was speaking with one of them about where to board the hotel shuttle.”

“Oh,” Jeevan said. “That sounds bad.” The streetcar was still trapped behind the stuck car. “So I guess you’re working late tonight?”

“You remember the SARS epidemic?” Hua asked. “That conversation we had?”

“I remember calling you from Los Angeles when I heard your hospital was quarantined, but I don’t remember what I said.”

“You were freaked out. I had to talk you down.”

“Okay, I guess I do remember that. But look, in my defense, they made it sound pretty—”

“You told me to call you if there was ever a real epidemic.”

“I remember.”

“We’ve admitted over two hundred flu patients since this morning,” Hua said. “A hundred and sixty in the past three hours. Fifteen of them have died. The ER’s full of new cases. We’ve got beds parked in hallways. Health Canada’s about to make an announcement.” It wasn’t only exhaustion, Jeevan realized. Hua was afraid.

Jeevan pulled the bell cord and made his way to the rear door. He found himself glancing at the other passengers. The young woman with groceries, the man in the business suit playing a game on his cell phone, the elderly couple conversing quietly in Hindi. Had any of them come from the airport? He was aware of all of them breathing around him.

“I know how paranoid you can get,” Hua said. “Believe me, you’re the last person I’d call if I thought it was nothing, but—” Jeevan banged the palm of his hand on the door’s glass pane. Who had touched the door before him? The driver glared over his shoulder, but let him out. Jeevan stepped into the storm and the doors swished shut behind him.

“But you don’t think it’s nothing.” Jeevan was walking past the stuck car, wheels still spinning uselessly in the snow. Yonge Street was just ahead.

“I’m certain it isn’t nothing. Listen, I have to get back to work.”

“Hua, you’ve been working with these patients all day?”

“I’m fine, Jeevan, I’ll be fine. I have to go. I’ll call you later.”

Jeevan put the phone in his pocket and walked on through the snow, turned south down Yonge Street toward the lake and the tower where his brother lived. Are you fine, Hua my old friend, or will you be fine? He was deeply unsettled. The lights of the Elgin Theatre just ahead. The interior of the theater was darkened now, the posters still advertising King Lear, with Arthur gazing up into blue light with flowers in his hair and the dead Cordelia limp in his arms. Jeevan stood for a while looking at the posters. He walked on slowly, thinking of Hua’s strange call. Yonge Street was all but deserted. He stopped to catch his breath in the doorway of a store that sold suitcases and watched a taxi ease its way slowly down the unplowed street, the storm caught in its headlights, and this vision, snow in lights, transported him back for a moment into the stage-effect storm of the Elgin Theatre. He shook his head to dispel the image of Arthur’s blank stare and moved on in an exhausted daze, through the shadows and orange lights under the Gardiner Expressway to Toronto’s glassy southern edge.

The snowstorm was wilder down on Queens Quay, wind cutting across the lake. Jeevan had finally reached Frank’s building when Hua called again.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” Jeevan said. “Is it really—”

“Listen,” Hua said, “you have to get out of the city.”

“What? Tonight? What’s going on?”