Station Eleven (11 page)

Dr. Eleven: These are perilous waters. We’re passing over an Undersea gate.

Captain Lonagan: You should try to understand them. (The next panel is a close-up of his face.) All they want is to see sunlight again. Can you blame them?

After these two panels, she decides, she needs a full-page spread. She’s already painted the image, and when she closes her eyes she
can almost see it, clipped to her easel at home. The seahorse is a massive rust-colored creature with blank eyes like saucers, half animal, half machine, the blue light of a radio transmitter glowing on the side of its head. Moving silent through the water, beautiful and nightmarish, a human rider from the Undersea astride the curve of its spine. Deep blue water up to the top inch of the painting. On the water’s surface, Dr. Eleven and Captain Lonagan in their rowboat, small under the foreign constellations of deep space.

On the day she sees Arthur again, Pablo calls her on the office line in the afternoon. She’s a few sips into her four p.m. coffee, sketching out a series of panels involving Dr. Eleven’s efforts to thwart the Undersea’s latest plot to sabotage the station reactors and force a return to Earth. She knows as soon as she hears Pablo’s voice that it’s going to be a bad call. He wants to know what time she’ll be home.

“Sometime around eight.”

“What I don’t understand,” Pablo says, “is what you’re doing for these people.”

She winds the phone cord around her finger and looks at the scene she was just working on. Dr. Eleven is confronted by his Undersea nemesis on a subterranean walkway by Station Eleven’s main reactor. A thought bubble: But what insanity is this?

“Well, I put together Leon’s travel itineraries.” There have been a number of bad calls lately, and she’s been trying to view them as opportunities to practice being patient. “I handle his expense reports and send emails for him sometimes. There’s the occasional message. I do the filing.”

“And that takes up your entire day.”

“Not at all. We’ve talked about this, pickle. There’s a lot of downtime, actually.”

“And what do you do in that
downtime
, Miranda?”

“I work on my project, Pablo. I’m not sure why your tone’s so nasty.” But the trouble is, she doesn’t really care. There was a time
when this conversation would have reduced her to tears, but now she swivels in her chair to look out at the lake and thinks about moving trucks. She could call in sick to work, pack up her things, and be gone in a few hours. It is sometimes necessary to break everything.

“… twelve-hour days,” he’s saying. “You’re never here. You’re gone from eight a.m. till nine at night and then you even go in on
Saturdays
sometimes, and I’m supposed to just … oh, I don’t know, Miranda, what would you say if you were me?”

“Wait,” she says, “I just realized why you called me on the office line.”

“What?”

“You’re verifying that I’m here, aren’t you? That’s why you didn’t call me on my cell.” A shiver of anger, unexpectedly deep. She is paying the entire rent on their apartment, and he’s verifying that she’s actually at her job.

“The hours you work.” He lets this hang in the air till it takes on the weight of accusation.

“Well,” she says—one thing she is very good at is forcing her voice to remain calm when she’s angry—“as I’ve mentioned before, Leon was very clear when he hired me. He wants me at my desk until seven p.m. when he’s traveling, and if he’s here, I’m here. He texts me when he comes in on weekends, and then I have to be here too.”

“Oh, he
texts
you.”

The problem is that she’s colossally bored with the conversation, and also bored with Pablo, and with the kitchen on Jarvis Street where she knows he’s standing, because he only makes angry phone calls from home—one of the things they have in common is a mutual distaste for sidewalk weepers and cell-phone screamers, for people who conduct their messier personal affairs in public—and the kitchen gets the best reception of anywhere in the apartment.

“Pablo, it’s just a job. We need the money.”

“It’s always money with you, isn’t it?”

“This is what’s paying our rent. You know that, right?”

“Are you saying I’m not pulling my weight, Miranda? Is that what you’re saying?”

It isn’t possible to continue to listen to this, so she sets the receiver gently on the cradle and finds herself wondering why she didn’t notice earlier—say, eight years ago, when they first started dating—that Pablo is mean. His email arrives within minutes. The subject header is
WTF. Miranda
, it reads,
what’s going on here? It seems like you’re being weirdly hostile and kind of passive-aggressive. What gives?

She closes it without responding and stands by the glass wall for a while to look out at the lake. Imagining the water rising until it covers the streets, gondolas moving between the towers of the financial district, Dr. Eleven on a high arched bridge. She’s standing here when her cell phone rings. She doesn’t recognize the number.

“It’s Arthur Leander,” he says when she answers. “Can I buy you another lunch?”

“How about dinner instead?”

“Tonight?”

“Are you busy?”

“No,” he says, sitting on his bed in the Hotel Le Germain, wondering how he’ll get out of dinner with the director this evening. “Not at all. It would be my pleasure.”

She decides it isn’t necessary to call Pablo, under the circumstances. There is a small task for Leon, who’s about to board a plane to Lisbon; she finds a file he needs and emails it to him and then returns to Station Eleven. Panels set in the Undersea, people working quietly in cavernous rooms. They live out their lives under flickering lights, aware at all times of the fathoms of ocean above them, resentful of Dr. Eleven and his colleagues who keep Station Eleven moving forever through deep space. (Pablo texts her:
??did u get my email???
) They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.

Miranda is drawing Leon Prevant’s reception area before she realizes what she’s doing. The prairies of carpet, the desk, Leon’s
closed office door, the wall of glass. The two staplers on her desk—how did she end up with two?—and the doors leading out to the elevators and restrooms. Trying to convey the serenity of this place where she spends her most pleasant hours, the refinement of it, but outside the glass wall she substitutes another landscape, dark rocks and high bridges.

“You’re always half on Station Eleven,” Pablo said during a fight a week or so ago, “and I don’t even understand your project. What are you actually going for here?”

He has no interest in comics. He doesn’t understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats. When sober, he suggests that she’s squandering her talent. When drunk, he implies that there isn’t much there to squander, although later he apologizes for this and sometimes cries. It’s been a year and two months since he sold his last painting. 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.”

The restaurant where she meets Arthur is all dark wood and soft lighting, the ceiling a series of archways and domes. I can use this, she thinks, waiting at the table for him to arrive. Imagining a room like this in the Undersea, a subterranean place made of wood salvaged from the Station’s drowned forests, wishing she had her sketchbook with her. At 8:01 p.m., a text from Pablo:
i’m waiting
. She turns off her phone and drops it into her handbag. Arthur comes in breathless and apologetic, ten minutes late. His cab got stuck in traffic.

“I’m working on a comic-book project,” she tells him later, when he asks about her work. “Maybe a series of graphic novels. I don’t know what it is yet.”

“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
?” Arthur is watching her closely. He looks
young, she thinks, for thirty-six. He looks only slightly older than he did when they met for lunch seven years ago.

“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. She tells him about coming back to Delano Island for Christmas in her first year of art school, after a semester marked by failure and frustrating attempts at photography. She started thumbing through an old
Calvin and Hobbes
, and thought,
this
. These red-desert landscapes, these skies with two moons. She began thinking about the possibilities of the form, about spaceships and stars, alien planets, but a year passed before she invented the beautiful wreckage of Station Eleven. Arthur watches her across the table. Dinner goes very late.

“Are you still with Pablo?” he asks, when they’re out on the street. He’s hailing a cab. Certain things have been decided without either of them exactly talking about it.

“We’re breaking up. We’re not right for each other.” Saying it aloud makes it true. They are getting into a taxi, they’re kissing in the backseat, he’s steering her across the lobby of the hotel with his hand on her back, she is kissing him in the elevator, she is following him into a room.

Texts from Pablo at nine, ten, and eleven p.m.:

She replies to this—
staying w a friend tonight, will be home in morning & then we can talk
—which elicits

And she feels a peculiar giddiness when she reads this fourth text. 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.

At six in the morning she takes a taxi home to Jarvis Street. “I want to see you tonight,” Arthur whispers when she kisses him. They have plans to meet in his room after work.

The apartment is dark and silent. There are dishes piled in the sink, a frying pan on the stove with bits of food stuck to it. The bedroom door is closed. She packs two suitcases—one for clothes, one for art supplies—and is gone in fifteen minutes. In the employee gym at Neptune Logistics she showers and changes into clothes slightly rumpled by the suitcase, meets her own gaze in the mirror while she’s putting on makeup.
I repent nothing
. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn’t true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn’t give it to them means that she’s too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here. There are tears in her eyes now. Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult.

“I don’t know,” Arthur says, at two in the morning. They are lying in his enormous bed at the Hotel Le Germain. He’s here in Toronto for three more weeks and then going back to Los Angeles. She wants to believe they’re lying in moonlight, but she knows the light
through the window is probably mostly electric. “Can you call the pursuit of happiness dishonorable?”

“Surely sleeping with film stars when you live with someone else isn’t
honorable
, per se.”

He shifts slightly in the bed, uncomfortable with the term
film star
, and kisses the top of her head.

“I’m going to go back to the apartment in the morning to get a few more things,” she says sometime around four a.m., half-asleep. Thinking about a painting she left on her easel, a seahorse rising up from the bottom of the ocean. They’ve been talking about plans. Things have been solidifying rapidly.

“You don’t think he’ll do anything stupid, do you? Pablo?”

“No,” she says, “he won’t do anything except maybe yell.” She can’t keep her eyes open.

“You’re sure about that?”

He waits for an answer, but she’s fallen asleep. He kisses her forehead—she murmurs something, but doesn’t wake up—and lifts the duvet to cover her bare shoulders, turns off the television and then the light.

LATER THEY HAVE
a house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There are photographers who follow Arthur and Miranda in the street, who keep Miranda forever anxious and on edge. Arthur’s name appears above the titles of his movies now. On the night of their third anniversary, his face is on billboards all over the continent.

Tonight they’re having a dinner party and Luli, their Pomeranian, is watching the proceedings from the sunroom, where she’s been exiled for begging table scraps. Every time Miranda glances up from the table, she sees Luli peering in through the glass French doors.

“Your dog looks like a marshmallow,” says Gary Heller, who is Arthur’s lawyer.

“She’s the cutest little thing,” Elizabeth Colton says. Her face is next to Arthur’s on the billboards, flashing a brilliant smile with very red lips, but offscreen she wears no lipstick and seems nervous and shy. She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her. She is very soft-spoken. People are forever leaning in close to hear what she’s saying.

There are ten guests here tonight, an intimate evening to celebrate both the anniversary and the opening weekend figures. “Two birds with one stone,” Arthur said, but there’s something wrong with the evening, and Miranda is finding it increasingly difficult to hide her unease. Why would a three-year wedding anniversary celebration involve anyone other than the two people who are actually married to one another? Who are all these extraneous people at my table? She’s seated at the opposite end of the table from Arthur, and she somehow can’t quite manage to catch his eye.
He’s talking to everyone except her. No one seems to have noticed that Miranda’s saying very little. “I wish you’d try a little harder,” Arthur has said to her once or twice, but she knows she’ll never belong here no matter how hard she tries. 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.