Station Eleven

Citation

Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. Harper Perennial, 2014. 9781443434874.

Abstract

One snowy night, a famous Hollywood actor dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend and a young actress with the Travelling Symphony caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame and the beauty of the world as we know it.

Annotations

Epigraph

“There is too much world. —Czeslaw Milosz The Separate Notebooks”

1. The Theatre

“He was thinking about the way the dropped curtain closed off the fourth wall and turned the stage into a room, albeit a room with cavernous space instead of a ceiling, fathoms of catwalks and lights between which a soul might slip undetected” (5)

“Not quite a room, Jeevan thought now, looking around the stage. It was too transitory, all those doorways and dark spaces between wings, the missing ceiling. It was more like a terminal, he thought, a train station or an airport, everyone passing quickly through” (5)

“he was doing the thing he loved best in the world” (8)

“‘It’s the thing I love most in the world too,’ Kirsten said, after some time had passed.
‘What is?’
‘Acting,’ she said” (8)

“At moments when other people could only stare, he wanted to be the one to step forward” (11)

“she’d left him onstage performing CPR” (12)

Commentator’s Note: Performance of profession, step forward.

“gazed at the object and thought it was the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the strangest thing anyone had ever given her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside” (15)

“He’d been searching for a profession for so long now” (16)

“He was aware of all of them breathing around him” (18)

Commentator’s Note: I had a bit of a PTSD response to this section, COVID flashbacks.

“Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life” (20)

“There were suggestions that Georgian and Russian officials had been somewhat less than transparent about the severity of the crisis there” (21)

“Filling another cart with food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place” (23)

“That evening on the beach below her hotel, Miranda was seized by a loneliness she couldn’t explain. She’d thought she knew everything there was to know about this remnant fleet, but she was unprepared for its beauty. The ships were lit up to prevent collisions in the dark, and when she looked out at them she felt stranded, the blaze of light on the horizon both filled with mystery and impossibly distant, a fairy-tale kingdom” (28-29)

“This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth” (30)

“No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars” (32)

2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Twenty years after” (35)

Commentator’s Note: Presumably Mandel was writing this while The Last of Us (2013), which also jumps 20 years from its opening sequence, was finishing development. Interesting serendipity.

“There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was travelling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels” (37)

“The Travelling Symphony moved between the settlements of the changed world … set out into the unknown landscape” (37)

“most people had settled somewhere, because the gasoline had all gone stale by Year Three and you can’t keep walking forever” (37)

“Twenty years after the collapse they were still in motion” (37)

“audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings. ‘People want what was best about the world,’ Dieter said” (38)

“an inventor had rigged an electrical system in an attic … he was looking for the Internet” (38)

“A few of the younger Symphony members … wondered if the Internet might still be out there somehow, invisible pinpricks of light suspended in the air around them” (38)

“He gave me the comics I showed you!” (40)

Commentator’s Note: Again, Ellie in The Last of Us is a collector of comics—Savage Starlight—from the world before.

“She collected fragments [of Arthur Leander], stored in a ziplock bag in her backpack” (40)

“‘You’re like an archaeologist,’ Charlie said” (41)

“THE COMICS ARTHUR LEANDER gave her: two issues from a series no one else in the Symphony has ever heard of, Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit. By Year Twenty, Kirsten has them memorized” (42)

“Dr. Eleven is a physicist. He lives on a space station, but it’s a highly advanced space station that was designed to resemble a small planet. There are deep blue seas and rocky islands linked by bridges, orange and crimson skies with two moons on the horizon. The contrabassoon, who prior to the collapse was in the printing business, told Kirsten that the comics had been produced at great expense, all those bright images, that archival paper, so actually not comics at all in the traditionally mass-produced sense, possibly someone’s vanity project. Who would that someone have been? There is no biographical information in either issue, initials in place of the author’s name. ‘By M. C.’ In the inside cover of the first issue, someone has written ‘Copy 2 of 10’ in pencil. In the second issue, the notation is ‘Copy 3 of 10.’ Is it possible that only ten copies of each of these books exist in the world?” (42)

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth” (42)

“‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Gil said, breaking an impasse. ‘I believe the evening calls for fairies’” (44)

“THE PROBLEM WITH THE Travelling Symphony was the same problem suffered by every group of people everywhere since before the collapse, undoubtedly since well before the beginning of recorded history” (46)

“this collection of petty jealousies, neuroses, undiagnosed PTSD cases, and simmering resentments lived together, travelled together, rehearsed together, performed together 365 days of the year, permanent company, permanent tour” (47)

“what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn’t matter who’d used the last of the rosin on their bow or…” (47)

“who anyone had slept with, although someone—probably Sayid—had written ‘Sartre: Hell is other people’ in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out ‘other people’ and substituted ‘flutes’” (48)

“Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns” (48)

“The Symphony was insufferable, hell was other flutes or other people or whoever had used the last of the rosin or whoever missed the most rehears als, but the truth was that the Symphony was their only home” (48)

“WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away” (57)

“Lines of a play written in 1594, the year London’s theatres reopened after two seasons of plague. Or written possibly a year later, in 1595, a year before the death of Shakespeare’s only son” (57)

“When onstage she fears nothing” (57)

“Plague closed the theatres 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” (57)

“All three caravans of the Travelling Symphony are labelled as such, THE TRAVELLING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient” (58)

“The prophet … Something in his tone made Kirsten want to run, a suggestion of a trapdoor waiting under every word” (59)

“‘I submit,’ the prophet said, ‘that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason’” (59)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. 96, 253.

“‘The flus came every season, but these were weak, inefficient viruses that struck down only the very old, the very young, and the very sick. And then came a virus like an avenging angel, unsurvivable, a microbe that reduced the population of the fallen world by, what?’” (60)

“‘There were no more statisticians by then, my angels, but shall we say ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent? One person remaining out of every two hundred fifty, three hundred? I submit, my beloved people, that such a perfect agent of death could only be divine. For we have read of such a cleansing of the earth, have we not?’” (60)

“‘when we speak of the light, we speak of order. This is a place of order. People with chaos in their hearts cannot abide here’” (61)

“‘Luli’ the prophet called over his shoulder, and the dog trotted after him” (62)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 91.

“Her backpack was child-size, red canvas with a cracked and faded image of Spider-Man, and in it she carried as little as possible: two glass bottles of water that in a previous civilization had held Lipton Iced Tea, a sweater, a rag she tied over her face in dusty houses, a twist of wire for picking locks, the ziplock bag that held her tabloid collection and the Dr. Eleven comics, and a paperweight” (66)

“It was of no practical use whatsoever, nothing but dead weight in the bag but she found it beautiful” (66)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p 15.

“She liked to look through the clippings sometimes, a steadying habit. These images from the shadow world” (66)

“An older picture that she’d found in an attic stuffed with three decades’ worth of gossip magazines, taken before she was born: Arthur with his arm around the pale girl with dark curls who would soon become his first wife, caught by a photographer as they stepped out of a restaurant, the girl inscrutable behind sunglasses and Arthur blinded by the flash” (67)

3. I Prefer You With a Crown

“when divers went after her they couldn’t find the bottom of the lake, or so local children whispered to one another, half-frightened, halfthrilled, although upon reflection, years later, the idea of a lake so deep that divers can’t reach bottom seems improbable” (73)

“It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape” (74)

“in this infinite city” (76)

“the sun rising on scenes of tedious debauchery” (76)

“For obvious reasons, very few people have heard of Delano Island. When he tells people in Toronto that he’s from British Columbia, they’ll invariably say something about how they like Vancouver, as though that glass city four hours and two ferries to the southeast of his childhood home has anything to do with the island where he grew up” (77)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Similar line in The Glass Hotel about Vancouver.

“There’s rarely enough work to keep her occupied for more than an hour or two at a time, which means she can often spend entire afternoons sketching-she’s working on a series of graphic novels” (80)

“‘My poor corporate baby,’ he said. ‘Lost in the machine.’ Pablo talks about metaphorical machines a lot, also the Man. He sometimes combines the two, as in ‘That’s how the Man wants us, just trapped right there in the corporate machine’” (81)

“What she can never tell Pablo, because he disdains all things corporate, is that she likes being at Neptune Logistics more than she likes being at home” (82)

Commentator’s Note: See Neptune in The Glass Hotel.

“In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life” (82)

“and the only land remaining is a series of islands that once were mountaintops” (83)

Commentator’s Note: Archipelago.

“There are people who, after fifteen years of perpetual twilight, long only to go home” (83)

“It is sometimes necessary to break everything” (85)

“They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin” (86)

“She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat. ‘You don’t have to understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s mine’” (87)

“‘What made you choose that form?’ He seems genuinely interested.
‘I used to read a lot of comics when I was a kid. Did you ever read Calvin and Hobbes?’” (87)

“‘Sure,’ Arthur says, ‘I loved Calvin and Hobbes. My best friend had a stack of the books when we were growing up.’
‘Is your friend from the island? Maybe I knew him.’
‘Her. Victoria. She picked up and moved to Tofino fifteen years ago. But you were telling me about Calvin and Hobbes.’
‘Yes, right. Do you remember Spaceman Spiff?’
She loved those panels especially. Spiff’s flying saucer crossing alien skies, the little astronaut in his goggles under the saucer’s glass dome. Often it was funny, but also it was beautiful” (88)

Commentator’s Note: Victoria, who will publish Dear V.

“There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant” (89)

“I repent nothing. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet” (89)

Commentator’s Note: Protagonists will continue remembering striking lines and repeating them in The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility.

“Tonight they’re having a dinner party and Luli, their Pomeranian, is watching the proceedings from the sunroom” (91)

Commentator’s Note: Luli, cf. p. 62.

“These are not her people. She is marooned on a strange planet. The best she can do is pretend to be unflappable when she isn’t” (92)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Vincent in The Glass Hotel.

“‘It’s the work itself that’s important to me.’ Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true? ‘Not whether I publish it or not.’
‘I think that’s so great,’ Elizabeth says. ‘It’s like, the point is that it exists in the world, right?’
‘What’s the point of doing all that work,’ Tesch asks, ‘if no one sees it?’
‘It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it’” (95)

“‘No, it’s just, if everything happens for a reason,’ Elizabeth persists, ‘as personally, I believe that it does, then when I hear a story of how two people came together, it’s like a piece of the plan is being revealed’” (96)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 59.

“he sat across the table from her looking very ordinary in a Toronto Blue Jays cap and she looked at him and thought, I prefer you with a crown, but of course she would never say this aloud” (98)

“the tabloid photo that appeared the following morning, shot as they were leaving the restaurantArthur with his arm around her shoulders, Miranda in dark glasses and Arthur blinded by the flash, which washed her out so mercifully that in the photo version of that moment the bruise was erased” (98)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 67.

“Dr. Eleven has a Pomeranian. She hadn’t realized this before, but it makes perfect sense. He has few friends, and without a dog he’d be too lonely” (100)

“Beside the pool stands a lamp from the 1950s, a crescent moon atop a tall dark pole, placed in such a way that there’s always a moon reflected in the water” (100)

“There’s a brief period most nights when the two moons float side by side on the surface. The fake moon, which has the advantage of being closer and not obscured by smog, is almost always brighter than the real one” (100)

“‘This life was never ours,’ she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. ‘We were only ever borrowing it’” (101)

“Arthur’s latest letter to his childhood friend:
Dear V., Strange days. The feeling that one’s life resembles a movie. Thinking a lot of the future. I have such” (104)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 153.

“Her gaze falls on the gift that Clark brought this evening, a paperweight of clouded glass. When she holds it, it’s a pleasing weight in the palm of her hand. It’s like looking into a storm. She tells herself as she switches off the light that she’s only taking the paperweight back to her study to sketch it, but she knows she’s going to keep it forever” (104)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. pp. 15, 66.

“The first sentence of the assassin’s note rang true: we were not meant for this world. I returned to my city, to my shattered life and damaged home, to my loneliness, and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth. Too long, also melodramatic. She erases it, and writes in soft pencil: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth” (105)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. pp. 42, 215.

“‘I think this is happening because it was supposed to happen.’ Elizabeth speaks very softly.
‘I’d prefer not to think that I’m following a script,’ Miranda says” (106)

“she’s come to understand that clothes are armor; she will call Leon Prevant to ask about employment and a week later she’ll be back at Neptune Logistics” (107)

Commentator’s Note: Leon appears in The Glass Hotel.

“whispers ‘I repent nothing’ into the mirrors of a hundred hotel rooms from London to Singapore and in the morning puts on the clothes that make her invincible” (107)

“Station Eleven is all around them” (107)

“A TRANSCRIPT OF AN INTERVIEW conducted by François Diallo, librarian of the town of New Petoskey” (108)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 263.

“The world’s become so local, hasn’t it?” (108)

“DIALLO: And more than that, well, publishing the newspaper has been an invigorating project, but then I thought, Why stop with a newspaper? Why not create an oral history of this time we live in, and an oral history of the collapse? With your permission, I’ll publish excerpts from this interview in the next edition, and I’ll keep the entirety of the interview for my archives” (108)

“The disorientation of meeting one’s sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls” (111)

“He was performing. Clark had thought he was meeting his oldest friend for dinner, but Arthur wasn’t having dinner with a friend, Clark realized, so much as having dinner with an audience” (112)

“There are towns that are perfectly reasonable, logical systems of governance and such, and then you pass through two years later and they’ve slid into disarray. All towns have their own traditions” (114)

“The more we know about the former world, the better we’ll understand what happened when it fell” (114)

“Nonetheless, I believe in understanding history” (115)

“RAYMONDE … Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous.
DIALLO: In what sense?
RAYMONDE: In the sense that they’re unpredictable. You can’t argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic” (115)

4. The Starship

“SOMETIMES THE TRAVELLING SYMPHONY thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night” (119)

“‘All I’m saying,’ Dieter said, twelve hours out of St. Deborah by the Water, ‘is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek.’ He was walking near Kirsten and August” (119)

“Survival is insufficient: Kirsten had had these words tattooed on her left forearm at the age of fifteen and had been arguing with Dieter about it almost ever since” (119)

“‘Yes,’ Kirsten said, ‘I’m aware of your opinion on the subject, but it remains my favourite line of text in the world’” (119)

“It was strange, she kept thinking, that the prophet’s dog had the same name as the dog in her comic books. She’d never heard the name Luli before or since” (120)

“‘See, that illustrates the whole problem,’ Dieter said. ‘The best Shakespearean actress in the territory, and her favourite line of text is from Star Trek’” (120)

“‘Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Star Trek: Voyager,’ August said hopefully. ‘That episode with those lost Borg and Seven of Nine?’
‘Remind me,’ Kirsten said, and he brightened visibly. While he talked she allowed herself to imagine that she remembered it. A television in a living room, a ship moving through the night silence of space, her brother watching beside her, their parents-if she could only remember their faces-somewhere near” (120)

“Kirsten closed her eyes. A memory from early childhood, before the collapse: sitting with a friend on a lawn, a game where they closed their eyes and concentrated hard and tried to read one another’s minds. She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle. Charlie, where are you? She knew the effort was foolish. She opened her eyes. The road behind them was still empty. Olivia was picking flowers below” (121)

Commentator’s Note: Through art, to Miranda.

“walking and walking until their thoughts burned out one by one like dying stars” (121)

“‘They went to the—to the Museum of Civilization.’ Eleanor said museum very carefully, the way people sound out foreign words of whose pronunciation they’re uncertain.
…
‘I thought the Museum of Civilization was a rumour,’ August said” (124)

“His followers said he was from a place called the Museum of Civilization, that he’d taken to the road in childhood to spread his message of light” (125)

“We stand it because we were younger than you were when everything ended, Kirsten thought, but not young enough to remember nothing at all. Because there isn’t much time left, because all the roofs are collapsing now and soon none of the old buildings will be safe. Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone. But it seemed like too much to explain all this, so she shrugged instead of answering him” (130)

“‘If I ever saw an airplane, that meant that somewhere planes still took off. For a whole decade after the pandemic, I kept looking at the sky’” (134)

“She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people livng out their lives” (135)

Commentator’s Note: Archipelago.

“‘Will you state the separation protocol, please?’ It had been drilled into all of them.
‘We never travel without a destination,’ Alexandra said. ‘If we’re ever, if you’re ever separated from the Symphony on the road, you make your way to the destination and wait’” (138)

“‘I don’t think I heard it. I was packing up.’
‘They call themselves the light.’
‘What about it?’
‘If you are the light,’ she said, ‘then your enemies are darkness, right?’
‘I suppose.’
‘If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do’” (139)

“Later in the day someone thought to search the clarinet’s belongings, and found the note. The beginning of a letter: ‘Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.’ It ended there” (140)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 289.

“August’s handwriting.
A fragment for my friend—
If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night” (141)

“Kirsten slept fitfully, aware each time she woke of the emptiness of the landscape, the lack of people and animals and caravans around her. Hell is the absence of the people you long for” (144)

“‘Artifacts from the old world,’ he said. ‘Here’s the thing, kids, the entire world is a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved. When was the last time you saw a new car?’” (146)

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it” (148)

“They took a wrong turn and vanished into the landscape” (149)

“He’d found a metal Starship Enterprise. He held it up in the sunlight, a gleaming thing the size of a dragonfly. That was when Kirsten noticed the poster of the solar system over the bed, Earth a small blue dot near the sun. The boy had loved both baseball and space” (1950s)

“What the Symphony was doing, what they were always doing, was trying to cast a spell, and costuming helped; the lives they brushed up against were work-worn and difficult, people who spent all their time engaged in the tasks of survival” (151)

“The book was comprised entirely of letters written to a friend, the anonymous V” (152)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 104.

“V, … Her name’s Miranda and she’s actually from the island, but we met in Toronto. She’s an artist who draws strange beautiful comic strip type things. She’s moving to L.A. with me next month” (157)

“Dear V.,
Strange days. The feeling that one’s life resembles a movie. I have such disorientation, V., I can’t tell you. At unexpected moments find myself thinking, how did I get here? How have I landed in this life? Because it seems like an improbable outcome, when I look back at the sequence of events. I know dozens of actors more talented than me who never made it” (157)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 104.

“Love is like the lion’s tooth” (158)

“‘It’s called Dear B.?’ Clark was writing this down. This was three weeks before the pandemic. They still had the indescribable luxury of being concerned about a book of published letters.
‘Dear V. She’s his friend Victoria’” (159)

“‘I don’t believe in the perfectibility of the individual,’ she said” (161)

“‘it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front-row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts’” (163)

“High-functioning sleepwalkers” (163)

“He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he’d jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them—I’m sorry, I’ve just realized that I’m as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge” (164)

5. Toronto

“‘Look, here’s what you have to understand about Elizabeth: nothing bad has ever happened to her’” (173)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 249.

“For a while they’d lived in front of the television news, low volume, a murmured litany of nightmares that left them drained and reeling, drifting in and out of sleep. How could so many die so quickly? The numbers seemed impossible” (176)

“countries began to go dark, city by city-no news out of Mosthen no news out of Beijing, then Sydney, London, Paris, etc., social media bristling with hysterical rumours-and the local news became more and more local, stations dropping away one by one, until finally the last channel on air showed only a single shot in a newsroom, station employees taking turns standing before the camera and disseminating whatever information they had, and then one night Jeevan opened his eyes at two a.m. and the newsroom was empty. Everyone had left. He stared at the empty room on the screen for a long time” (177)

“On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt” (178)

“DIALLO: The mystery audience member who knew CPR. He’s in the New York Times obituary.
RAYMONDE: He was kind to me. Do you know his name?
DIALLO: I’m not sure anyone does” (181)

“‘After I was shot, when they told me I wouldn’t walk again and I was lying in the hospital, I spent a lot of time thinking about civilization. What it means and what I value in it. I remember thinking that I never wanted to see a war zone again, as long as I live. I still don’t.’
‘There’s still a world out there,’ Jeevan said, ‘outside this apartment.’
‘I think there’s just survival out there, Jeevan. I think you should go out there and try to survive’” (183)

“DIALLO: You’re still the only person I know who carries a paperweight in her backpack.
RAYMONDE: It’s not that heavy.
DIALLO: It seems an unusual gift for a child.
RAYMONDE: I know, but I thought it was beautiful. I still think it’s beautiful” (184)

“They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered” (187)

“DIALLO: Did you have a set destination?
RAYMONDE: I don’t think so. No”

Commentator’s Note: Symphony always has a destination, gives destination.

“Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together” (191)

“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” (192)

“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” (193)

“This silent landscape” (193)

“This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air” (194)

“RAYMONDE: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost” (195)

“RAYMONDE: And they had light inside as well as cold, right? I’m not just imagining this?
DIALLO: They had light inside” (196)

6. The Airplanes

“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” (199)

“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” (199)

Commentator’s Note: Multiverse.

“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” (200)

“August liked the idea of an infinite number of parallel universes, lined up in all directions” (200)

“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” (200)

“when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life” (201)

Commentator’s Note: Compare “counter life” in The Glass Hotel.

“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” (202)

“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” (202)

“‘A parallel universe where space travel was invented’” (202)

“‘But space travel was invented, wasn’t it? I’ve seen pictures’” (202)

“‘We just went up to that grey moon,’ August said. ‘Nowhere else, we never went farther. I mean the kind of space travel you’d see in TV shows, you know, other galaxies, other planets.’
‘Like in my comic books?’
‘Your comics are weird. I was thinking more like Star Trek.’
‘A parallel universe where my comics are real,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean a parallel universe where we boarded Station Eleven and escaped before the world ended,’ Kirsten said.
‘The world didn’t end,’ he said. ‘It’s still spinning. But anyway, you’d want to live on Station Eleven?’
‘I think it’s beautiful. All those islands and bridges.’
‘But it’s always night or twilight, isn’t it?’”
“‘I don’t think I’d mind.’
‘I like this world better,’ August said. ‘Does Station Eleven even have an orchestra? Or would it just be me standing there by myself on the rocks in the dark, playing my violin for giant seahorses?’” (202-203)

“‘The prophet marked him … It’s an airplane’” (204)

“She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here” (205)

“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” (206)

“She stopped for a decaf latte at a Starbucks and was struck by the barista’s brilliant green hair. ‘Your hair’s beautiful,’ she said, and the barista smiled. The pleasure of walking cold streets with a hot coffee in her hand. Why did no one on Station Eleven have green hair? Perhaps someone in the Undersea. Or one of Dr. Eleven’s green associates. No, the Undersea” (208)

“‘A Shakespeare expert?’
‘He’s a Shakespearean scholar. University of Toronto. I love working with him.’
‘It must be quite interesting.’
‘It is. He has this extremely impressive pool of knowledge, brings a lot to the table, but at the same time he’s completely supportive of my vision for the part’” (209)

“‘I treated Victoria like a diary’” (211)

“‘So all the times I saw you writing to her,’ Miranda said, ‘she never wrote back.’ She was surprised by how sad this made her.
‘Right. I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter.’ He looked up and here, a pause in which Miranda could almost see the script: ‘Arthur looks up. Beat.’ Was he acting? She couldn’t tell.
‘The truth is, I think I actually forgot she was real.’
Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy” (211)

“She was very blond, the sort of child who appears almost incandescent in certain lighting. Miranda couldn’t imagine what part there could possibly be in King Lear for a seven- or eightyear-old, but she’d seen enough child actors in her time that she could recognize one on sight” (213)

“For years Dr. Eleven had been the hero of the narrative, but lately he’d begun to annoy her and she’d become more interested in the Undersea. These people living out their lives in underwater fallout shelters, clinging to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored. The Undersea was limbo” (213)

“Dr. Eleven standing on a rock with his Pomeranian by his side. Text: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth” (214)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 105.

“‘Kirsten went to an audition in New York last month,’ Arthur said.
‘We went in an airplane’” (215)

Commentator’s Note: Kristin remembers this later (earlier in the book).

“Miranda was back in her hotel before she remembered the paperweight. She dropped her handbag on the bed and heard it clink against her keys. It was the paperweight of clouded glass that Clark Thompson had brought to a dinner party in Los Angeles eleven years ago, and she’d taken it that night from Arthur’s study. She’d meant to give it back to him” (216)

“She held the paperweight for a moment, admiring it in the lamplight. She wrote a note on hotel stationery, put her shoes back on, went downstairs to the concierge desk, and arranged to have it sent by courier to the Elgin Theatre” (216)

“two new Panamax-class vessels that had yet to carry a single cargo container, decks still gleaming from the South Korean shipyards; ships ordered in a moment when it seemed the demand would only ever grow, built over the following three years while the economy imploded, unneeded now that no one was spending any money” (217)

“The fishermen suspected a hint of the supernatural in these vessels, unmoving hulks on the horizon by day, lit up after dark” (218)

“was it so unreasonable to wonder if these lights might not be quite of this earth?” (218)

“‘He was wonderful,’ Clark said. ‘Back then, back at the beginning. I was so struck by him. I don’t mean romantically, it was nothing like that. Sometimes you just meet someone. He was so kind, that’s what I remember most clearly. Kind to everyone he met. This humility about him’” (222)

“‘I guess you could say Toronto was the only place I’ve felt free’” (223)

“They said hello as Clark walked past her seat and then didn’t speak again until an hour and a half after takeoff, when the pilot announced that they were being diverted into some place in Michigan that Clark had never heard of and everyone disembarked, confused and disoriented, into the Severn City Airport” (224)

“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain Hi people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees” (225)

Commentator’s Note: Hell is…

“she looked at him instead I see you, I see you—and hoped this was enough” (227)

“Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe” (227)

“Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent colour, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets and its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky” (228)

7. The Terminal

“Time had been reset by catastrophe” (231)

“Year Four was when Clark realized this was the way the years would continue to be marked from now on, counted off one by one from the moment of disaster” (231)

“Towards the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin” (231)

“not just to have seen the remembered splendours of the former world but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life” (232)

“‘It’s hard to explain,’ he caught himself saying sometimes to young people who came into his museum, which had formerly been the Skymiles Lounge in Concourse C. But he took his role as curator seriously and he’d decided years ago that ‘It’s hard to explain’ isn’t good enough, so he always tried to explain it all anyway, whenever anyone asked about any of the objects he’d collected over the years” (232)

“Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications” (232)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Mumford, Heisenberg.

“These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around them” (233)

“wished he’d been paying more attention” (234)

“Tyler sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, killing space aliens on a Nintendo console” (235)

“furious because fury was the last defence against understanding what the news stations were reporting” (236)

“Clark found a discarded New York Times on a bench and read Arthur’s obituary. Noted film and stage actor, dead at fifty-one. A life summed up in a series of failed marriages—Miranda, Elizabeth, Lydia—and a son, whose present absorption in his handheld Nintendo was absolute” (238)

“The news had worsened. The fabric was unravelling. It will be hard to come back from this, he thought, because in those first days it was still inconceivable that civilization might not come back from this at all” (239)

“thinking ahead to a time … ‘What a terrible time that was,’ Clark said softly to an imaginary Robert, practising for the future.
‘Awful,’ Imaginary Robert agreed” (240)

“The taste of Orange Julius, that sugary orange drink he’d only ever tasted in Canadian shopping malls” (240)

“then a business traveller named Max said, ‘Look, everyone just chill the fuck out, I’ll cover it on my Amex.’ There was applause at this announcement. He removed his Amex card from his wallet with a flourish and left it next to the cash register, where it remained untouched for the next ninety-seven days” (243)

“‘it’s a free flight to Los Angeles.’ This alone seemed like proof that the world was ending, because this was the era when people were being charged extra for checked bags, for boarding early enough to cram baggage into overhead bins before the bins filled up, for the privilege of sitting in exit rows with their life-or-death stakes and their two extra inches of legroom” (246)

“Clark realized he had tears on his face. Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it” (247)

“some dark landscape in flames” (247)

“‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ Elizabeth insisted. ‘Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?’
‘Well,’ Clark offered, ‘it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?’” (248)

“‘Everything happens for a reason,’ she said. ‘This will pass. Everything passes.’ Clark couldn’t bring himself to argue with her” (249)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 173, nothing bad ever happened to her.

“The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes” (251)

“One of the great scientific questions of Galileo’s time was whether the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. Impossible to imagine this ever having been in question in the age of electricity, but the night sky was a wash of light in Galileo’s age, and it was a wash of light now. The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark’s spine” (251)

“sometimes the small circle of people and firelight seemed only to accentuate the emptiness of the continent, the loneliness of it, a candle flickering in vast darkness” (252)

“Tyler wore a sweater of Elizabeth’s that went to his knees, the increasingly filthy sleeves rolled up. He kept to himself mostly, reading his comic books or Elizabeth’s copy of the New Testament” (252)

Commentator’s Note: A prophetic blend of citations…

“‘Everything happens for a reason,’ Tyler said” (253)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 59.

“Robert was a curator—had been a curator? Yes, probably Robert existed in the past tense along with almost everyone else” (254)

“If Robert were here—Christ, if only—if Robert were here, he’d probably fill the shelves with artifacts and start an impromptu museum” (254)

“this was the beginning of the Museum of Civilization” (255)

“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” (255)

“the airport had come into view between the trees. Home, she’d thought, and she’d felt such relief” (256)

“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’” (256)

“BY THE END OF Year Fifteen there were three hundred people in the airport, and the Museum of Civilization filled the Skymiles Lounge” (258)

“Clark was older, and no one seemed to mind if he cared for the museum all day” (258)

“There seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones with their delicate buttons, iPads, Tyler’s Nintendo console, a selection of laptops. There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange. There were three car engines in a row, cleaned and polished, a motorcycle composed mostly of gleaming chrome. Traders brought things for Clark sometimes, objects of no real value that they knew he would like: magazines and newspapers, a stamp collection, coins. There were the passports or the driver’s licences or sometimes the credit cards of people who had lived at the airport and then died. Clark kept impeccable records” (258)

“‘I’m reading to the people inside,’ Tyler said.
‘I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.’
‘Look, Tyler, some things just happen’” (259)

“‘I’m worried about your son,’ he said.
She paused in her knitting. The manic intensity of her first days here had dissipated. ‘Why?’
‘Right now he’s over by the quarantined plane,’ Clark said, ‘reading aloud to the dead from the Book of Revelation’” (260)

“‘He thinks the pandemic happened for a reason,’ Clark said.
‘It did happen for a reason’” (260)

“Later that summer a band of religious wanderers arrived, headed south. The precise nature of their religion was unclear. “A new world requires new gods,” they said. They said, “We are guided by visions.” They said vague things about signals and dreams. The airport hosted them for a few uneasy nights, because this seemed less dangerous than running them off. The wanderers ate their food and in return offered blessings, which mostly involved palms on foreheads and muttered prayers. They sat in a circle in Concourse C and chanted at night, in no language anyone in the airport had ever heard. When they left, Elizabeth and Tyler went with them” (261)

“‘We just want to live a more spiritual life,’ Elizabeth said” (261)

“In Year Fifteen people came to the museum to look at the past after their long days of work” (261)

“What happened here was something like prayer” (262)

“You could use an airplane to travel to the other side of the world” (262)

“these machines were the portals into a worldwide network. Satellites beamed information down to Earth. Goods travelled in ships and airplanes across the world. There was no place on Earth that was too far away to get to” (262)

“They were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended” (262)

“The children understood dots on maps—here—but even the teenagers were confused by the lines. There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain” (262)

“It was published irregularly out of New Petoskey, the trader said” (263)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 108.

“Something called the Travelling Symphony had just come through town, although Clark gathered that they weren’t just a symphony orchestra. There was a rapturous write-up of a performance of King Lear, with particular mention of performances by Gil Harris as Lear and Kirsten Raymonde as Cordelia” (263)

“The entire back of the third issue—it had apparently been a slow month for news and announcements—was taken up by an interview with the actress who’d played Cordelia, Kirsten Raymonde” (263)

“RAYMONDE: I was onstage with two other girls in the duction, and I was behind Arthur, so I didn’t see his face. But I remember there was some commotion up front, just in front of the stage. And then I remember hearing a sound, this sharp ‘thwack,’ and that was Arthur hitting his hand on the plywood pillar by my head. He’d sort of stumbled back, his arm flailed out, and then a man from the audience had climbed up on the stage and was running towards him—
Clark stopped breathing for a moment when he read it. The shock of encountering someone who knew Arthur, who had not only known him but had seen him die” (264)

“a secret pleasure in the thought that the world was waking up. He hoped for more newspapers in the years that followed, but none came” (264)

“RAYMONDE: I’ll answer if you don’t record me.
François Diallo set his pen and notebook on the table.
‘Thank you,’ Kirsten said. ‘I’ll answer your questions now if you’d like, but only if these ones don’t go in your newspaper.’
‘Agreed. When think of how the world’s changed in your lifetime, what do you think about?’
‘I think of killing’” 265

“When it came down to it, François had realized, all of the Symphony’s stories were the same, in two variations. Everyone else died, I walked, I found the Symphony. Or, I was very young when it happened, I was born after it happened, I have no memories or few memories of any other way of living, and I have been walking all my life” (266)

“The library was François’s favourite place in his present life. He had accumulated a sizable collection over the years. Books, magazines, a glass case of pre-collapse newspapers” (267)

“‘How did you get that scar on your face?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘I’ve actually no idea. It happened during that year I don’t remember.’
‘Your brother never told you, before he died?’
‘He said it was better if I didn’t remember. I took his word for it.’
‘What was he like, your brother?’
‘He was sad,’ she said. ‘He remembered everything.’
‘You’ve never told me what happened to him’” (267)

“‘If you don’t mind me asking, why didn’t you want that last part recorded? It isn’t the first time I’ve heard confessions of this nature.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Almost everyone in the Symphony…but look, I collect celebrity-gossip clippings.’
‘Celebrity gossip…?’
‘Just about that one actor, Arthur Leander. Because of my collection, the clippings, I understand something about permanent records.’
‘And it isn’t something you want to be remembered for’” (268)

“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” (269)

Commentator’s Note: Archipelago.

“‘Does it still make sense to teach kids about the way things were?’ …
‘I’m honestly not sure,’ Daria said. ‘I think I’d want my kid to know. All that knowledge, those incredible things we had’”

“‘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?’” (270)

“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” (270)

“‘When she came home crying today,’ Michael said, ‘I found myself thinking, maybe it’s time we stopped telling them these crazy stories. Maybe it’s time we let go’” (270)

“‘I thought the [Prophet’s] legend preceded him,’ Edward said. He was holding his wife’s hand. ‘He’s been all over the south’” (272)

“‘So we ask them who they are, and their leader smiles at me and says, “We are the light.”’
…
‘That’s when I knew who he was. Stories had reached from traders and such. These people, they’re ruthless. They’ve got some crazy theology, they’re armed and they take what they want’” (273)

“He’d recently made all of the Water Inc. 360° reports available for public viewing, on the theory that everyone involved was almost certainly dead. The former executives in the airport read these with great interest. There were three reports altogether, one each for the subordinates, peers, and superiors of a probably longdeceased Water Inc. executive named Dan” (276)

“‘This one’s my other favourite. “He’s successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it’s lowhanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn’t drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities”’” (277)

Commentators Note: Brutal :D.

“‘The phrase “circle back” always secretly made me think of boats. You leave someone onshore, and then you circle back later to get them.’ Garrett was quiet for a moment. ‘I like this one,’ he said. ‘“He’s a high-functioning sleepwalker, essentially”’” (278)

“He’d been spending more time in the past lately. He liked to close his eyes and let his memories overtake him. A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films” (278-279)

“He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal” (279)

“‘I’m Charlie,’ the woman said. ‘This is Jeremy, my husband, and little Annabel.’ Tattoos covered almost every inch of her bare arms” (279)

Commentator’s Note: Everyone drawn here.

“‘It’s a complicated story,’ Charlie said. ‘There was a prophet. He said he was from here.’
From here? Had the airport ever had a prophet? Clark felt certain he’d remember a prophet. ‘What was his name?’
‘I’m not sure anyone knows,’ Jeremy said. He began describing the blond-haired man who had held sway over the town of St. Deborah by the Water, ruling with a combination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation. He stopped when he saw the look on Clark’s face. ‘Is something wrong?’” (280)

“What became of you, Elizabeth, out there on the road with your son? But what, after all, had become of anyone? His parents, his colleagues, all his friends from his life before the airport, Robert? If all of them had vanished, uncounted and unmarked, why not Elizabeth too? He closed his eyes. Thinking of a boy standing on the tarmac by the ghost plane, Air Gradia Flight 452, Arthur Leander’s beloved only son, reading verses about plagues aloud to the dead” (280)

8. The Prophet

“The archer smiled. ‘The virus was the angel,’ he whispered. ‘Our names are recorded in the book of life’” (286)

“the clarinet hated Shakespeare. She’d been a double major in college, theatre and music, a sophomore the year the world changed, lit up by an obsession with twenty-first-century experimental German theatre” (288)

“She wanted to write something modern, something that addressed this age in which they’d somehow landed. Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare” (288)

“She began writing the first act on the shore the next morning, but never got past the first line of the opening monologue, which she’d envisioned as a letter: ‘Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest’” (289)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 140.

“she was aware immediately that the Symphony was nowhere near, a terrible absence” (289)

“‘All of this,’ the prophet said, serene, ‘all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it’s all part of a greater plan.’
‘You’d be surprised at how little comfort I take from that notion’” (290)

“‘In the south?’ the boy was saying. ‘I don’t know, I don’t like to think about it. We did what we had to.’
She didn’t hear Sayid’s reply.
‘It hollows you out,’ the boy said, ‘thinking about it. Remembering what we did, it just guts me. I don’t know how else to put it’” (292)

“She saw the look on August’s face just afterward and realized that the gunman had been his first … she could have told him what she knew: it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life” (296)

“In the morning light there was beauty in the decrepitude, sunlight catching in the flowers that had sprung up through the gravel of long-overgrown driveways, mossy front porches turned brilliant green, a white blossoming bush alive with butterflies. This dazzling world” (296)

“Every sense attuned to the air around her, trying to sense the prophet’s position behind or ahead?-and met only by the racket of the world around them, the cicadas, the birds, dragonflies, a passing family of deer” (297)

“The flu, the snow, the gridlock, the decision: wait in the car, boxed in now by all the cars that have piled up behind, idling to keep the heat on until you run out of gas? Or abandon your car to walk, perhaps with young children, but where exactly? Farther on, towards the airport? Back home?” (297)

“‘Do you see something?’ Sayid spoke in a whisper. August had been supporting him for the last mile or so, Sayid’s arm over his shoulders.
I see everything. ‘It’s nothing,’ Kirsten said. She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who’d sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on string” (297)

“The shock of realizing that this was probably actually the ending, after a lifetime of near misses, after all this time. She walked forward through the radiant world, the sunlight and shadow and green” (300)

“‘I have walked all my life through this tarnished world,’ the prophet said, ‘and I have seen such darkness, such shadows and horrors’” (301)

“She raised her head to look past him at leaves flickering in sunlight, at the brilliant blue of the sky. Birdsong” (301)

“‘This world,’ the prophet said, ‘is an ocean of darkness’” (302)

“‘Whoever they are,’ the prophet said, ‘they’ll arrive too late. You think you kneel before a man, but you kneel before the sunrise. We are the light moving over the surface of the waters, over the darkness of the undersea.’
‘The Undersea?’ she whispered, but the prophet was no longer listening to her. A look of perfect serenity had come over his face and he was looking at her, no, through her, a smile on his lips.
‘“We long only to go home,”’ Kirsten said. This was from the first issue, Station Eleven. A face-off between Dr. Eleven and an adversary from the Undersea. ‘“We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.”’
The prophet’s expression was unreadable. Did he recognize the text?
‘“We have been lost for so long,”’ she said, still quoting from that scene. She looked past him at the boy. The boy was staring at the gun in his hands. He was nodding, seemingly to himself. ‘“We long only for the world we were born into”’
‘But it’s too late for that,’ the prophet said. He drew in his breath and adjusted his grip on the rifle” (302)

“Birds wheeling. The shock of being alive” (303)

“Who were you? How did you come to possess this page? Kirsten knelt by the prophet, by the pool of his blood, but he was just another dead man on another road, answerless, the bearer of another unfathomable story about walking out of one world and into another. One of his arms was outstretched towards her” (304)

“‘Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.’
‘Of course not. Imagine how many there’d be.’
‘Yes,’ Kirsten said, ‘that’s exactly it’”

“Always these memories, barely submerged” (313)

9. Station Eleven

“He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast—scrambled eggs—and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theatre an hour early so he’d have time to linger with a newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favourite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life” (317)

“He remembered being here with Clark at three or four or sometimes five in the morning, during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream. The dream lasted just a moment, but the moment was bright: both of them taking acting classes, Arthur working as a waiter while Clark burned through a small inheritance” (318)

“‘I don’t read comic books,’ Arthur said. ‘She gave me two copies of each, so I sent the other set to my son’” (320)

“‘You told me you’re trying to shed your possessions or something, right?’
‘Exactly. They’re lovely, but I don’t want more things.’
‘I think I understand.’ Tanya was reading. ‘Interesting story line,’ she said, a few pages in.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never really understood the point of it, to be honest.’ There was relief in admitting this to someone, after all these years. ‘The Undersea, especially. All those people in limbo, waiting around, plotting, for what?’
‘I like it,’ Tanya said. ‘The art’s really good, isn’t it?’
‘She liked drawing more than she liked writing the dialogue.’
He was just now remembering this. Once he’d opened Miranda’s study door and watched her work for some minutes before she realized he was there. The curve of her neck as she stooped over the drafting table, her absolute concentration. How vulnerable she’d seemed when she was lost in her work.
‘It’s beautiful.’ Tanya was studying an image of the Undersea, a heavily crosshatched room with mahogany arches from Station Eleven’s drowned forests. The room reminded Arthur of somewhere he’d been, but he couldn’t place it” (320-321)

“‘Wait, I have something for you.’ A glass paperweight had arrived by courier two weeks ago, sent by Miranda from her hotel after he’d seen her. She’d explained in her note that Clark had brought it to the house in Los Angeles and that she regretted taking it, that she felt certain Clark had meant it for Arthur, not her, but when he held the glass lump in his hand he found there were no memories attached to it; he had no recollection whatsoever of Clark having given it to them, and anyway the last thing he wanted in his life was a paperweight” (321)

“‘I looked at the comic books,’ Arthur said, ‘but I don’t think I completely understood what they were about. I was hoping maybe you could explain them to me’” (324)

“‘What happens if a seahorse catches you?’
‘Then it pulls you under,’ Tyler said, ‘and then you belong to the Undersea.’
‘The Undersea?’
‘It’s an underwater place.’ He was talking fast now, caught up. ‘They’re Dr. Eleven’s enemies, but they’re not really bad. They just want to go home’” (325)

“He’d done this before, this loitering on stage while the audience entered, but he realized that the last time he’d done this, he’d been twenty-one years old. He remembered having enjoyed it back then, the challenge of living in the world of the play before the play had properly started, but now the lights were too close, too hot, and sweat poured down his back” (326)

“‘I repent nothing,’ he’d heard her say to her reflection in the mirror. He’d turned and walked away, but the words stayed with him. Years later in Toronto, on the plywood second storey of the King Lear set, the words clarified the problem. He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light” (327)

“The stage lights were leaving trails through the darkness the way a comet had once, when he was a teenager standing on the dirt outside his friend Victoria’s house, looking up at the night, Comet Hyakutake suspended like a lantern in the cold sky” (329)

“snow was falling all around him, shining in the lights. He thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen” (329)

“IN DR. ELEVEN, VOL. 1, NO. 2: The Pursuit, Dr. Eleven is visited by the ghost of his mentor, Captain Lonagan, recently killed by an Undersea assassin. Miranda discarded fifteen versions of this image before she felt that she had the ghost exactly right, working hour upon hour, and years later, at the end, delirious on an empty beach on the coast of Malaysia with seabirds rising and plummeting through the air and a line of ships fading out on the horizon, this was the image she kept thinking of, drifting away from and then towards it and then slipping somehow through the frame: the captain is rendered in delicate watercolours, a translucent silhouette in the dim light of Dr. Eleven’s office, which is identical to the administrative area in Leon Prevant’s Toronto office suite, down to the two staplers on the desk. The difference is that Leon Prevant’s office had a view over the placid expanse of Lake Ontario, whereas Dr. Eleven’s office window looks out over the City, rocky islands and bridges arching over harbours. The Pomeranian, Luli, is curled asleep in a corner of the frame. Two patches of office are obscured by dialogue bubbles:
Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream” (330)

“Yesterday Kirsten had given him one of the two Dr. Eleven comics. He could see that it pained her to part with it, but the Symphony was passing into unknown territory and she wanted to ensure that at least one of the comics would be safe in case of trouble on the road” (331)

“‘When we come back through, I’ll take this one back and leave you with the other one. That way, at least one book will always be safe’” (331)

“On the page, only Miranda is missing, her chair taken by Dr. Eleven” (332)

“What became of Miranda? He hasn’t thought of her in so long. All these ghosts. She went into shipping, he remembers” (332)

“If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain?” (332)

“Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, travelling towards or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity” (332-333)

“He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, towards another world just out of sight” (333)