Station Eleven

Was that sunlight on the other side of the East River? A beam had pierced the clouds in the far distance and was angling down over Queens. The effect reminded Clark of an oil painting. He was thinking of the first time he’d seen Arthur, in an acting studio on Danforth Avenue in Toronto. Arthur at eighteen: confident despite the fact that for at least the first six months of acting classes he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, or so the acting instructor had pronounced one night over drinks at a bar staffed exclusively with drag queens, the instructor trying to pick up Clark, Clark offering only token resistance. And beautiful, Arthur was beautiful back then.

“So the question, obviously,” Heller was saying, “is whether he intended to leave this girl anything in the will, because he emailed me last week about changing the will, said he’d met someone and he wanted to add a beneficiary and I have to assume that’s who he meant, really what I’m thinking about here is the worst-case scenario, where there’s a shadow will somewhere, some informal document he drew up himself because he wasn’t going to see me for a few weeks, that’s what I’m trying to get to the bottom of here—”

“You should’ve seen him,” Clark said.

“I should’ve seen … I’m sorry, what?”

“Back at the beginning, when he was just starting out. You’ve seen his talent, his talent was obvious, but if you’d seen him before any of the rest of it, all the tabloids and movies and divorces, the fame, all those warping things.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at here, I—”

“He was wonderful,” Clark said. “Back then, back at the beginning. I was so struck by him. I don’t mean romantically, it was nothing like that. Sometimes you just meet someone. He was so kind, that’s what I remember most clearly. Kind to everyone he met. This humility about him.”

“What—”

“Gary,” Clark said, “I’m going to hang up now.”

He stuck his head out the window for a fortifying breath of November air, returned to his desk, and called Elizabeth Colton. She let out her breath in a long sigh when he told her the news.

“Are there funeral arrangements?”

“Toronto. Day after tomorrow.”

“Toronto? Does he have family there?”

“No, but his will was very specific apparently. I guess he felt some attachment to the place.”

As Clark spoke, he was remembering a conversation he’d had with Arthur over drinks some years ago, in a bar in New York. They’d been discussing the cities they’d lived in. “You’re from London,” Arthur had said. “A guy like you can take cities for granted. For someone like me, coming from a small place … look, I think about my childhood, the life I lived on Delano Island, that place was so small. Everyone knew me, not because I was special or anything, just because everyone knew everyone, and the claustrophobia of that, I can’t tell you. I just wanted some privacy. For as long as I could remember I just wanted to get out, and then I got to Toronto and no one knew me. Toronto felt like freedom.”

“And then you moved to L.A. and got famous,” Clark had said, “and now everyone knows you again.”

“Right.” Arthur had been preoccupied with an olive in his martini, trying to spear it with a toothpick. “I guess you could say Toronto was the only place I’ve felt free.”

Clark woke at four a.m. the next morning and took a taxi to the airport. These were the hours of near misses, the hours of miracles, visible as such only in hindsight over the following days. The flu was already seeping through the city, but he hailed a taxi in which the driver wasn’t ill and no one contagious had touched any surface before him, and from this improbably lucky car he watched the streets passing in the pre-dawn dark, the pale light of bodegas with their flowers behind plastic curtains, a few shift workers on the sidewalks. The social-media networks were filled with rumors of the flu’s arrival in New York, but Clark didn’t partake of social media and was unaware.

At John F. Kennedy International Airport he passed through a terminal in which he managed by some choreography of luck to avoid passing too close to anyone who was already infected—there were several infected people in that particular terminal by then—and managed not to touch any of the wrong surfaces, managed in fact to board a plane filled with similarly lucky people—the twenty-seventh-to-last plane ever to depart from that airport—and through all of this he was so sleep-deprived, he’d stayed up too late packing, he was tired and caught up in thoughts of Arthur, in listening to Coltrane on headphones, in working halfheartedly at the 360° reports once he found himself at the departure gate, that he didn’t realize he was on the same flight as Elizabeth Colton until he glanced up and saw her boarding the plane with her son.