Station Eleven

“Of course. I’ll walk with you.” He went back to blow out the candle. The street had fallen into shadow now, but the sky was still bright over the bay. The Symphony was performing on a bridge a few blocks from the library, the caravans parked off to the side. François heard the first notes, the cacophony of musicians practicing their sections and tuning up. August was playing the same two measures over and over, frowning. Charlie was studying the score. Earlier, a few of the townspeople had carried benches down the hill from the town hall, arranged now in rows facing the bay. Most of the benches were occupied, the adults talking among themselves or watching the musicians, the children spellbound by the instruments.

“There’s some space in the back row,” Kirsten said, and François followed her.

“What’s the program tonight?”

“A Beethoven symphony. I’m not sure which one.”

At some undetectable cue, the musicians stopped practicing and tuning and talking among themselves, took their places with their backs to the water, and fell silent. A hush came over the assembled crowd. The conductor stepped forward in the stillness, smiled at the audience and bowed, turned without a word to face the musicians and the bay. A seagull glided overhead. The conductor raised her baton.

46

THAT NIGHT, IN THE SUMMER OF Year Fifteen, Jeevan Chaudhary was drinking wine by a river. The world was a string of settlements now and the settlements were all that mattered, the land itself no longer had a name, but once this had been part of the state of Virginia.

Jeevan had walked a thousand miles. In Year Three he’d wandered into a settlement called McKinley, named by the town’s founders. There had been eight of them originally, a sales team from the marketing firm of McKinley Stevenson Davies, stranded on an isolated corporate retreat when the Georgia Flu swept over the continent. A few days out of the retreat they’d found an abandoned motel on a disused stretch of road far from major highways, and it had seemed as good a place to stop as any. The sales team had moved into the rooms and stayed there, at first because those early years were terrifying and no one wanted to live too far from anyone else; later out of habit. There were twenty-seven families here now, a peaceful settlement across the road from a river. In the summer of Year Ten, Jeevan had married one of the settlement’s founders, a former sales assistant named Daria, and this evening she was sitting with him and a friend of theirs on the riverbank.

“I don’t know,” their friend was saying now. “Does it still make sense to teach kids about the way things were?” His name was Michael, and he’d been a truck driver once. McKinley had a school, ten children who met daily in the largest motel room, and his eleven-year-old daughter had come home crying that afternoon, because the teacher had let slip that life expectancies were much longer before the Georgia Flu, that once sixty hadn’t been considered particularly old, and she was scared, she didn’t understand, it wasn’t fair, she wanted to live as long as people used to.

“I’m honestly not sure,” Daria said. “I think I’d want my kid to know. All that knowledge, those incredible things we had.”

“To what end, though?” Michael accepted the wine bottle from her with a nod. “You see the way their eyes glaze over when anyone talks to them about antibiotics or engines. It’s science fiction to them, isn’t it? And if it only upsets them—” He broke off to drink wine.

“Maybe you’re right,” Daria said. “I suppose the question is, does knowing these things make them more or less happy?”

“In my daughter’s case, less.”

Jeevan was only half-listening. He wasn’t quite drunk. Just pleasantly at ease, after what had actually been a fairly ghastly day: a neighbor of theirs had fallen off a ladder that morning, and Jeevan, as the closest thing to a doctor in a one-hundred-mile radius, had had to set the man’s broken arm. Horrible work, the patient drunk on moonshine but still half-crazed with pain, moans escaping around the piece of wood clamped between his teeth. Jeevan liked being the man to whom people turned in bad moments, it meant a great deal to him to be able to help, but the physical pain of the post-anesthesia era often left him shaken. Now fireflies were rising from the tall grass on the riverbank, and he didn’t want to talk, not really, but it was pleasant to rest in the company of his friend and his wife, and the wine was blunting the worst of the day’s memories—sweat beading on the patient’s forehead as Jeevan set the broken bone—as was the gentle music of the river, cicadas in the trees, the stars above the weeping willows on the far bank. Even after all these years there were moments when he was overcome by his good fortune at having found this place, this tranquility, this woman, at having lived to see a time worth living in. He squeezed Daria’s hand.