Station Eleven

“Right. I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter.” He looked up—and here, a pause in which Miranda could almost see the script: “Arthur looks up. Beat.” Was he acting? She couldn’t tell. “The truth is, I think I actually forgot she was real.”

Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy.

“It sounds like you’ve had a difficult year,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. It hasn’t been easy, but I keep reminding myself, people have much worse years than mine. I lost a few battles,” he said, “but that isn’t the same thing as losing the war.”

Miranda raised her mug. “To the war,” she said, which elicited a smile. “What else is happening?”

“I’m always talking about myself,” he said. “How’s your life?”

“Good. Very good. No complaints.”

“You’re in shipping, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I love it.”

“Married?”

“God, no.”

“No children?”

“My position on the subject hasn’t changed. You had a son with Elizabeth, didn’t you?”

“Tyler. Just turned eight. He’s with his mother in Jerusalem.”

There was a knock at the door just then, and Arthur stood. Miranda watched him recede across the room and thought of their last dinner party in the house in Los Angeles—Elizabeth Colton passed out on a sofa, Arthur walking away up the stairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing here.

The person at the door was very small.

“Hello, Kiki,” Arthur said. The visitor was a little girl, seven or eight years old. She clutched a coloring book in one hand, a pencil case in the other. She was very blond, the sort of child who appears almost incandescent in certain lighting. Miranda couldn’t imagine what part there could possibly be in King Lear for a seven- or eight-year-old, but she’d seen enough child actors in her time that she could recognize one on sight.

“Can I draw in my coloring book here?” the girl asked.

“Of course,” Arthur said. “Come in. I’d like you to meet my friend Miranda.”

“Hello,” the girl said without interest.

“Hello,” Miranda said. The girl looked like a china doll, she thought. She looked like someone who’d been well-cared-for and coddled all her life. She was probably someone who would grow up to be like Miranda’s assistant Laetitia, like Leon’s assistant Thea, unadventurous and well-groomed.

“Kirsten here likes to visit sometimes,” Arthur said. “We talk about acting. Your wrangler knows where you are?” In the way he looked at the girl, Miranda saw how much he missed his own child, his distant son.

“She was on the phone,” Kirsten said. “I sneaked out.” She sat on the carpet near the door, opened her coloring book to a half-completed page involving a princess, a rainbow, a distant castle, a frog, unpacked her pencils and began drawing red stripes around the bell of the princess’s dress.

“Are you still drawing?” Arthur asked Miranda. He was noticeably more relaxed with Kirsten in the room.

Always. Yes. When she traveled she carried a sketchbook in her luggage, for the times when she was alone in hotel rooms at night. The focus of the work had gradually shifted. For years Dr. Eleven had been the hero of the narrative, but lately he’d begun to annoy her and she’d become more interested in the Undersea. These people living out their lives in underwater fallout shelters, clinging to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored. The Undersea was limbo. She spent long hours sketching lives played out in underground rooms.

“You’ve actually just reminded me. I brought you something.” She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven

comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table.

“Your work.” Arthur smiled. “These are beautiful. The cover of this first one was on the studio wall in L.A., wasn’t it?”

“You remember.” An image that Arthur had once said was like the establishing shot for a movie: the sharp islands of the City, streets and buildings terraced into the rock, high bridges between. Far below in the aquatic darkness, the outlines of the airlock doors that led to the Undersea, massive shapes on the ocean floor. Arthur opened the first issue at random to a two-page spread, ocean and islands linked by bridges, twilight, Dr. Eleven standing on a rock with his Pomeranian by his side. Text: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.

“He was on a space station,” Arthur said. “I’d forgotten that.” He was turning the pages. “Do you still have the dog?”

“Luli? She died a couple years back.”