Station Eleven полностью

“I don’t want to do this at night,” August said. They chose a house at random, waded through the backyard and made camp behind a garden shed. There was nothing to eat. August went exploring and came back with blueberries.

“I’ll take the first watch,” Kirsten said. She was exhausted but she didn’t think she could sleep. She sat on her suitcase, her back against the wall of the shed, a knife in her hands. She watched the slow rise of fireflies from the grass and listened to the water on the beach across the road, the sighing of wind in the leaves. A beating of wings and the squeak of a rodent, an owl making a kill.

“Remember that man we met at the gas station?” August asked. She’d thought he was asleep.

“Of course. What about him?”

“That scar on his face.” He sat up. “I was just thinking about it, and I realized what it is.”

“The prophet marked him.” The memory was agitating. She flicked her wrist and her knife split the cap of a white mushroom a few feet away.

“Yes, but the symbol itself, the pattern of the scar. How would you describe it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, retrieving her knife. “It looked like a lowercase t with an extra line through the stem.”

“A shorter line. Toward the bottom. Think about it. It isn’t abstract.”

“I am thinking about it. It looked abstract to me.”

“It’s an airplane,” August said.

39

TWO WEEKS BEFORE the end of commercial air travel, Miranda flew to Toronto from New York. It was late October, and she hadn’t been back to Canada in some months. She’d always liked the descent into this city, the crowded towers by the lakeshore, the way an infinite ocean of suburbia rushed inward and came to a point at the apex of the CN Tower. She thought the CN Tower was ugly up close, but unexpectedly lovely when viewed from airplane windows. And as always, the sense of Toronto existing in layers: the city that had shocked her with its vastness when she’d arrived here from Delano Island at seventeen still existed, but it occupied the same geographical space as a city that now seemed much smaller to her, a place diluted by the years she’d spent moving between London, New York, the harbor cities of Asia. The plane descended into the suburbs. She passed through passport control without incident, the Canada Border Services agent struggling to find an unstamped corner in the pages of her passport, and boarded a waiting car to the Toronto headquarters of Neptune Logistics, where she wished the driver a good day and passed him a twenty-dollar bill over the back of the seat.

“Thank you,” he said, surprised. “Would you like some change?”

“No, thank you.” She had been overtipping for as long as she’d had money. These small compensations for how fortunate she’d been. She pulled her carry-on suitcase into the Neptune Logistics lobby, cleared building security and took the elevator to the eighteenth floor.

She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here. A twenty-three-year-old Miranda with the wrong clothes and her hair sticking up, washing her hands and peering anxiously at herself in the ladies’ room mirror; a twenty-seven-year-old recently divorced Miranda slouching across the lobby with her sunglasses in place, wishing she could disappear, in tears because she’d seen herself on a gossip website that morning and the headline was agonizing: IS ARTHUR SECRETLY CALLING MIRANDA? (Answer: no.) Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. “I regret nothing,” she told her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, and believed it. That day, she attended a series of meetings, and in the late afternoon another car delivered her to a hotel. She still had an hour or two to kill until it was time to see Arthur again.

He’d called her in the New York office in August. “Will you take a call from Arthur Smith-Jones?” her assistant had asked, and Miranda had frozen momentarily. The name was from an inside joke that she and Arthur had batted around when they were first married. All these years later she had no recollection of why the name Smith-Jones had been funny, but she knew it was he.

“Thank you, Laetitia, I’ll take the call.” A click. “Hello, Arthur.”

“Miranda?” He sounded uncertain. She wondered if her voice had changed. She’d used her most self-assured addressing-large-meetings voice.

“Arthur. It’s been a while.” A moment of silence on the line. “Are you there?”

“My father died.”

She swiveled in her chair to look out at Central Park. In August the park had a subtropical quality that entranced her, a sense of weight and languor in the lushness of the trees.