Station Eleven

“Well,” the girl said, “thanks anyway,” and Clark watched her walk away to make inquiries of a couple only slightly older than she was, who listened for a moment and then shook their heads in unison.

Clark was thinking ahead to a time when he’d sit with Robert in a restaurant in New York or London and they’d raise a glass of wine to their tremendous good fortune at having made it through. How many of their friends would have died by the time he saw Robert again? There would be funerals to go to, memorial services. Probably a certain measure of grief and survivor’s guilt to contend with, therapy and such.

“What a terrible time that was,” Clark said softly to an imaginary Robert, practicing for the future.

“Awful,” Imaginary Robert agreed. “Remember those days when you were in the airport, and I didn’t know where you were?”

Clark closed his eyes. The news continued on the overhead screens, but he couldn’t bear to watch. The stacked body bags, the riots, the closed hospitals, the dead-eyed refugees walking on inter-states. Think of anything else. If not the future, the past: dancing with Arthur when they were young in Toronto. The taste of Orange Julius, that sugary orange drink he’d only ever tasted in Canadian shopping malls. The scar on Robert’s arm just above the elbow, from when he’d broken his arm very badly in the seventh grade, the bouquet of tiger lilies that Robert had sent to Clark’s office just last week. Robert in the mornings: he liked to read a novel while he ate breakfast. It was possibly the most civilized habit Clark had ever encountered. Was Robert awake at this moment? Was he trying to leave New York? The storm had passed, and snow lay deep on the wings of airplanes. There were no de-icing machines, no tire tracks, no footprints; the ground workers had departed. Air Gradia 452 was still alone on the tarmac.

There was a moment later in the day when Clark blinked and realized he’d been staring into space for some time. He had intimations of danger, that there was hazard in allowing his thoughts to drift too loosely, so he tried to work, to read over his 360° reports, but his thoughts were scattered, and also he couldn’t help but wonder if the target of the 360° and all the people he’d interviewed were dead.

He tried to reread his newspapers, on the theory that this required less concentration than the reports, came across Arthur’s New York Times

obituary again and realized that the world in which Arthur had died already seemed quite distant. He’d lost his oldest friend, but if the television news was accurate, then in all probability everyone here with him in the airport had lost someone too. All at once he felt an aching tenderness for his fellow refugees, these hundred or so strangers here in the airport. He folded his paper and looked at them, his compatriots, sleeping or fretfully awake on benches and on carpets, pacing, staring at screens or out at the landscape of airplanes and snow, everyone waiting for whatever came next.

43

THE FIRST WINTER in the Severn City Airport:

There was a frisson of excitement on Day Two, when someone recognized Elizabeth and Tyler and word spread. “My phone,” Clark heard a young man say in frustration. He was about twenty, with hair that flopped in his eyes. “God, why won’t our phones work? I so wish I could tweet this.”

“Yeah,” his girlfriend said, wistful. “You know, like, ‘Not much, just chilling with Arthur Leander’s kid at the end of the world.’ ”

“Totally,” the man said. Clark moved away from them in order to maintain his sanity, although later, in a more charitable moment, it occurred to him that they were probably in shock.

By Day Three all the vending machines in the airport were empty of snacks, and the battery on Tyler’s Nintendo console was dead. Tyler wept, inconsolable. The girl who needed Effexor was very sick by then. Withdrawal, she said. No one in the airport had the drug she needed. A raiding party went through every room, the administrative offices and the TSA holding cell, everyone’s desk drawers, and then they went outside and broke into the dozen or so cars abandoned in the parking lot, pawed through glove boxes and trunks. They found some useful items in their searches, extra pairs of shoes and some warm clothes and such, but on the pharmaceutical front they uncovered only painkillers and antacids and a mysterious bottle of pills that someone thought might be for stomach ulcers. In the meantime the girl lay across a bench, shivering and drenched in sweat, and she said her head sparked with electricity every time she moved.

They called 911 from the pay phone in baggage claim, but no one picked up. They wandered outside and stared at the snowed-in parking lot, the airport road disappearing into the trees, but what could possibly be out there aside from the flu?

The television newscasters weren’t exactly saying that it was the end of the world, per se, but the word apocalypse was beginning to appear.