Station Eleven (24 page)

He’d been walking for five days before he saw anyone else. At first the solitude was a relief—he’d imagined a lawless world, he’d
imagined being robbed of his backpack and left to die without supplies a thousand times—but as the days passed, the meaning of the emptiness began to sink in. The Georgia Flu was so efficient that there was almost no one left.

But on the fifth day he saw three people far ahead on the shore and his heart leapt. They were traveling the same direction as Jeevan. He stayed a mile or so behind them all through the day. At nightfall they built a fire on the beach and he decided to risk it. They heard his footsteps and watched as he approached. He stopped twenty feet away, raised both hands to show he was unarmed, and called out a greeting, waited till one of them beckoned him close. They were two young men of nineteen or twenty and an older woman—Ben and Abdul and Jenny—tired and worn in the firelight. They’d been walking for a day longer than he had, down through the city from the northern suburbs.

“Is there a lot of crime in the city?”

“Sure,” Abdul said. He was thin and nervous, with hair down to his shoulders; he twisted a strand around his finger as he spoke. “Anarchy, right? No police. Fucking terrifying.”

“But actually not as much crime as you’d expect,” Jenny said. “There just aren’t that many people.”

“Did they leave, or they’re all …?”

“If you got sick,” Ben said, “you were gone in forty-eight hours.” He knew something about it. His girlfriend, his parents, and his two sisters had died in the first week. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t dead too. He’d taken care of all of them, because by Day Three all the hospitals had closed. He’d dug five graves in his backyard.

“You must be immune,” Jeevan said.

“Yes.” Ben stared fixedly into the flames. “I’m the luckiest man alive, aren’t I?”

They traveled together for nearly a week, until they reached a point where Jeevan wanted to keep following the lake and the other
three wanted to turn west, toward a town where Jenny’s sister had lived. They debated the matter for an hour or two, Jeevan certain that venturing into a town was a mistake and the others disagreeing with him, Jenny afraid of never seeing her sister again, and in the end they wished one another luck and parted ways. As Jeevan walked on alone he felt himself disappearing into the landscape. He was a small, insignificant thing, drifting down the shore. He had never felt so alive or so sad.

There was a clear morning some days later when he looked up and saw Toronto on the far side of the lake, ghostly with distance. A thin blue spire piercing the sky, glass city. From this distance it looked like something from a fairy tale.

He came upon other travelers sometimes, but so few. Almost everyone was moving south.

“It’s like those disaster movies,” he’d said to Frank, over two months ago now, on the third or fourth night in the apartment. Those were the days before the end of television. They were stunned with horror but it hadn’t entirely sunk in yet, any of it, and that night there was a certain awful giddiness. All evidence suggested that the center wasn’t holding—Was this actually happening? they asked one another—but personally they had food and water, they were at least momentarily secure and not sick. “You know,” Jeevan had said, “in the movie version of this there’s the apocalypse, and then afterward—”

“What makes you think we’ll make it to afterward?” Frank was always so goddamned calm about everything.

This silent landscape. Snow and stopped cars with terrible things in them. Stepping over corpses. The road seemed dangerous. Jeevan avoided it, stayed mostly in the woods. The road was all travelers walking with shell-shocked expressions, children wearing blankets over their coats, people getting killed for the contents
of their backpacks, hungry dogs. He heard gunshots in the towns so he avoided these too. He slipped in and out of country houses, searching for canned goods while the occupants lay dead upstairs.

It was becoming more difficult to hold on to himself. He tried to keep up a litany of biographical facts as he walked, trying to anchor himself to this life, to this earth. My name is Jeevan Chaudhary. I was a photographer and then I was going to be a paramedic. My parents were George of Ottawa and Amala of Hyderabad. I was born in the Toronto suburbs. I had a house on Winchester Street. But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.” He looked up and met the eyes of an owl, watching him from a snow-laden branch.

DIALLO
: And so when you left, you just kept walking with no destination in mind?

RAYMONDE
: As far as I know. I actually don’t remember that year at all.

DIALLO
: None of it?

RAYMONDE
: Absolutely nothing.

DIALLO
: Well, the shock would have been considerable.

RAYMONDE
: Of course, but then we stopped in a town eventually, and I remember everything from that time onward. You can get used to anything. I think it was actually easier for children.

DIALLO
: The children seemed awfully traumatized.

RAYMONDE
: At the time, sure. Everyone was. But two years later? Five years? Ten? Look, I was eight. Nine, when we stopped walking. I can’t remember the year we spent on the road, and I think that means I can’t remember the worst of it. But my point is, doesn’t it seem to you that the people who have the hardest time in this—this current era, whatever you want to call it, the world after the Georgia Flu—doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?

DIALLO
: I hadn’t thought about it.

RAYMONDE
: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.

DIALLO
: But you remember some things.…

RAYMONDE
: But so little. My memories from before the collapse seem like dreams now. I remember looking down from an airplane window, this must have been sometime during the last year or two, and seeing the city of New York. Did you ever see that?

DIALLO
: Yes.

RAYMONDE
: A sea of electric lights. It gives me chills to think of it. I don’t really remember my parents. Actually just impressions. I
remember hot air coming out of vents in the winter, and machines that played music. I remember what computers looked like with the screen lit up. I remember how you could open a fridge, and cold air and light would spill out. Or freezers, even colder, with those little squares of ice in trays. Do you remember fridges?

DIALLO
: Of course. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one used for anything other than shelving space.

RAYMONDE
: And they had light inside as well as cold, right? I’m not just imagining this?

DIALLO
: They had light inside.

WHEN KIRSTEN AND AUGUST
left the house in the woods, when they dragged and carried their new suitcases through the trees to the road, there was a moment when Kirsten stood looking back at the overgrown driveway while August made some adjustments—moving the poetry books and the water bottles from his backpack to the wheeled suitcase, to ease the weight on his back—and if not for the physical evidence, the suitcases filled with towels and shampoo and that box of salt they’d found in the kitchen, the blue silk dress she wore and the bulge of the Starship
Enterprise
in August’s vest pocket, she might have thought they’d imagined the house.

“A non-ransacked house,” August said, once they’d resumed walking. The suitcase wheels were stiff and Kirsten didn’t like the sound they made on the road, but otherwise the suitcases were perfect. “I never thought I’d see another one.”

“It was incredible. I almost wanted to lock the door behind us.” That’s what it would have been like, she realized, living in a house. You would leave and lock the door behind you, and all through the day you would carry a key. Dieter and Sayid probably remembered what it was like to live in houses and carry keys. All thoughts led back to them.

August believed in the theory of multiple universes. He claimed this was straight-up physics, as he put it, or if not exactly mainstream physics then maybe the outer edge of quantum mechanics, or anyway definitely not just some crackpot theory he’d made up.

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea,” the tuba had said, when Kirsten had asked him for confirmation a few years back. No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time
these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended. Gil had offered an uncertain reminiscence about an article he’d read once, something about how subatomic particles are constantly vanishing and reappearing, which meant, he supposed, that there’s someplace else to be, which he imagined might suggest that a person could theoretically be simultaneously present and not present, perhaps living out a shadow life in a parallel universe or two. “But look,” he’d said, “I was never a science guy.” In any event, August liked the idea of an infinite number of parallel universes, lined up in all directions. Kirsten imagined this arrangement as something like the successive planes formed when two mirrors reflect one another, the images shifting greener and cloudier with each repetition until they vanish toward infinity. She’d seen this once in a clothing store in a deserted shopping mall.

August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes, there had to be one where there had been no pandemic and he’d grown up to be a physicist as planned, or one where there had been a pandemic but the virus had had a subtly different genetic structure, some minuscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted. They were discussing this at the top of an embankment in the late afternoon, where they were resting and flipping through a stack of magazines that Kirsten had taken from the house.

“In an alternate universe,” August said, “you might’ve been in the tabloid pictures. Isn’t this one of your actor’s wives?”

“Is it?” She took the magazine from him. There was Arthur’s third wife, Lydia, shopping in New York City. She was wearing precarious shoes and carried a dozen shopping bags. The pandemic would reach North America in less than a month. The sighting was interesting, but not interesting enough to add to the collection.

In the last magazine, Kirsten found another ex-wife. A photograph of a woman in her late thirties or early forties with a hat pulled low, glaring at the camera as she exited a building:

“I think I was there,” Kirsten said. “I might’ve been in that building at that moment.” Behind Miranda she saw only a steel door, the stone wall of a building. Had she passed through that door? She must have, she thought, and wished she could remember it.

August studied the photo, interested. “Do you remember seeing her there?”

An impression of a coloring book, the smell of pencils, Arthur’s voice, a warm room with a red carpet, electric light. Had a third person been in the room? She couldn’t be sure.

“No,” she said. “I don’t remember her.” She tore the photograph with its caption from the page.

“Look at the date,” August said. “Two weeks till the apocalypse!”

“Well, it’s nice that at least the celebrity gossip survived.”

Nothing else in the rest of the magazines, but this find was remarkable, this was enough. They kept two magazines to start a fire later and buried the other three under leaves.

“It would’ve been you in those tabloid pictures,” he said, picking up the parallel-universes theme. “I mean, it
is
you in those pictures, in a parallel universe where the collapse didn’t happen.”

“I still think you invented the parallel-universe theory,” she said, but one of the few things that August didn’t know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and
transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.