Station Eleven

“I don’t know, Jeevan. That’s the short answer. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s a flu, that much is obvious, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It is so fast. It just seems to spread so quickly—”

“It’s getting worse?”

“The ER’s full,” Hua said, “which is a problem, because at this point half of the ER staff are too sick to work.”

“They got sick from the patients?”

In the lobby of Frank’s building, the night doorman flipped through a newspaper, an abstract painting of gray and red lit up on the wall above and behind him, doorman and painting reflected in streaks on the polished floor.

“It’s the fastest incubation period I’ve ever seen. I just saw a patient, she works as an orderly here at the hospital, on duty when the first patients started coming in this morning. She started feeling sick a few hours into her shift, went home early, her boyfriend drove her back in two hours ago and now she’s on a ventilator. You get exposed to this, you’re sick within hours.”

“You think it’s going to spread outside the hospital …?” Jeevan was having some difficulty keeping his thoughts straight.

“No, I know it’s outside the hospital. It’s a full-on epidemic. If it’s spreading here, it’s spreading through the city, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’re saying I should—”

“I’m saying you should leave now. Or if you can’t leave, at least stock up on food and stay in your apartment. I have to make some more calls.” He hung up. The night doorman turned a newspaper page. If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word. Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a

before and an after, a line drawn through his life.

It occurred to Jeevan that there might not be much time. He turned away from Frank’s building and passed the darkened coffee shop on the pier, the tiny harbor filled with snow-laden pleasure boats, into the grocery store on the harbor’s other side. He stood just inside for a beat, blinking in the light. Only one or two other customers drifted through the aisles. He felt that he should call someone, but who? Hua was his only close friend. He’d see his brother in a few minutes. His parents were dead, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to talk to Laura. He would wait until he got to Frank’s, he decided, he’d check the news when he got there, and then he’d go through the contacts on his phone and call everyone he knew.

There was a small television mounted above the film development counter, showing closed-captioned news. Jeevan drifted toward it. Shots of a broadcaster standing outside Toronto General in the snow, white text scrolling past her head. Toronto General and two other local hospitals had been placed under isolation. Health Canada was confirming an outbreak of the Georgia Flu. They weren’t releasing numbers at this time, but there had been fatalities and more information would be forthcoming. There were suggestions that Georgian and Russian officials had been somewhat less than transparent about the severity of the crisis there. Officials requested that everyone please try their best to stay calm.

Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies. He started with water, filled one of the oversized shopping carts with as many cases and bottles as he could fit. There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart—was he overreacting?—but he was committed, he’d decided, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow.

“I’m parked just outside,” Jeevan said. “I’ll bring the cart back.” The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a ramp down into a small parklike arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow and slid sideways into a planter.

It was eleven twenty. The supermarket closed in forty minutes. He was imagining how long it would take to bring the cart up to Frank’s apartment, to unload it, the time required for explanations and tedious reassurances of sanity before he could return to the grocery store for more supplies. Could there be any harm in leaving the cart here for the moment? There was no one on the street. He called Hua on his way back into the store.