Station Eleven

If Robert were here—Christ, if only—if Robert were here, he’d probably fill the shelves with artifacts and start an impromptu museum. Clark placed his useless iPhone on the top shelf. What else? Max had left on the last flight to Los Angeles, but his Amex card was still gathering dust on the counter of the Concourse B Mexican restaurant. Beside it, Lily Patterson’s driver’s license. Clark took these artifacts back to the Skymiles Lounge and laid them side by side under the glass. They looked insubstantial there, so he added his laptop, and this was the beginning of the Museum of Civilization. He mentioned it to no one, but when he came back a few hours later, someone had added another iPhone, a pair of five-inch red stiletto heels, and a snow globe.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

The scouting party returned the next day, exhausted and cold, with three steel carts from an industrial kitchen, piled high with supplies. They’d found a Chili’s that no one had looted yet, they said, and they’d spent the night shivering in booths. They had toilet paper, Tabasco sauce, napkins, salt and pepper, enormous tins of tomatoes, dinnerware and bags of rice, gallons of pink hand soap.

They said that just out of sight along the road there was a roadblock, a sign warning of quarantine. No one had come to the airport because the sign said the flu was here, sick passengers, keep out. Beyond the roadblock, abandoned cars as far as they could see, some with bodies inside. They’d come upon a hotel near the airport and had debated going in for sheets and towels, but the smell was such that they’d known what was waiting in the darkened lobby and had decided against it. Then the fast-food restaurants a little down the road. They’d seen no other people.

“What was it like out there?” Clark asked.

“It was silent,” Dolores said. She’d been surprised by the emotion that had overtaken her on the return, when the scouting party had struggled past the roadblock with their carts of supplies, their napkins and their clinking bottles of Tabasco sauce, up the airport road and then the airport had come into view between the trees. Home

, she’d thought, and she’d felt such relief.

A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”

But the first man who walked in under low gray skies seemed less dangerous than stunned. He was dirty, of indeterminate age, dressed in layers of clothes, and he hadn’t shaved in a long time. He appeared on the road with a gun in his hand, but he stopped and let the gun fall to the pavement when Tyrone shouted for him to drop it. He raised his hands over his head and stared at the people gathering around him. Everyone had questions. He seemed to struggle for speech. His lips moved silently, and he had to clear this throat several times before he could speak. Clark realized that he hadn’t spoken in some time.

“I was in the hotel,” he said finally. “I followed your footprints in the snow.” There were tears on his face.

“Okay,” someone said, “but why are you crying?”

“I’d thought I was the only one,” he said.

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