Station Eleven полностью

“Then I must be thy lady.” Lines of a play written in 1594, the year London’s theaters reopened after two seasons of plague. Or written possibly a year later, in 1595, a year before the death of Shakespeare’s only son. Some centuries later on a distant continent, Kirsten moves across the stage in a cloud of painted fabric, half in rage, half in love. She wears a wedding dress that she scavenged from a house near New Petoskey, the chiffon and silk streaked with shades of blue from a child’s watercolor kit.

“But with thy brawls,” she continues, “thou hast disturbed our sport.” She never feels more alive than at these moments. When onstage she fears nothing. “Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, as in revenge, have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs.…”

Pestilential, a note in the text explains, next to the word contagious, in Kirsten’s favorite of the three versions of the text that the Symphony carries. Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now in a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titania turns to face her fairy king. “Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes all the air, that rheumatic diseases do abound.”

Oberon watches her with his entourage of fairies. Titania speaks as if to herself now, Oberon forgotten. Her voice carries high and clear over the silent audience, over the string section waiting for their cue on stage left. “And through this distemperature, we see the seasons alter.”

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

12

THE AUDIENCE ROSE for a standing ovation. Kirsten stood in the state of suspension that always came over her at the end of performances, a sense of having flown very high and landed incompletely, her soul pulling upward out of her chest. A man in the front row had tears in his eyes. In the back row, another man whom she’d noticed earlier—he alone had sat on a chair, the chair carried up from the gas station by a woman—stepped forward and raised his hands over his head as he passed through the front row. The applause faded.

“My people,” he said. “Please, be seated.” He was tall, in his late twenties or early thirties, with blond hair to his shoulders and a beard. He stepped over the half circle of candles to stand among the actors. The dog who’d been lying by the front row sat up at attention.

“What a delight,” he said. “What a marvelous spectacle.” There was something almost familiar in his face, but Kirsten couldn’t place him. Sayid was frowning.

“Thank you,” the man said, to the actors and musicians. “Let us all thank the Traveling Symphony for this beautiful respite from our daily cares.” He was smiling at each of them in turn. The audience applauded again, on cue, but quieter now. “We are blessed,” he said, and as he raised his hands the applause stopped at once. The prophet. “We are blessed to have these musicians and actors in our midst today.” Something in his tone made Kirsten want to run, a suggestion of a trapdoor waiting under every word. “We have been blessed,” he said, “in so many ways, have we not? We are blessed most of all in being alive today. We must ask ourselves, ‘Why? Why were we spared?’ ” He was silent for a moment, scanning the Symphony and the assembled crowd, but no one responded. “I submit,” the prophet said, “that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason.”

The conductor was standing by the string section, her hands clasped behind her back. She was very still.