Station Eleven (27 page)

“Does she visit you often?” Miranda asked softly, when he’d reached the last page.

“Almost daily. She doesn’t get along with the other girls. Unhappy kid.” They sipped their tea for a moment without speaking. The scratching of the little girl’s pencils on the coloring-book page, the steam rings that their mugs left on the glass of the coffee table, the pleasant heat of the tea, the warmth and beauty of this room: these were things that Miranda remembered in the last few hours, two weeks later, when she was drifting in and out of delirium on a beach in Malaysia.

“How long are you in Toronto?” Arthur asked.

“Four days. I leave for Asia on Friday.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Working out of the Tokyo office, mostly. There’s some possibility of my transferring there next year. Meeting with local subsidiaries in Singapore and Malaysia, visiting a few ships. Did you know,” she said, “that twelve percent of the world’s shipping fleet is moored fifty miles out of Singapore Harbor?”

“I didn’t know that.” He smiled. “Asia,” he said. “Can you believe this life?”

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.

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.

40

TWO WEEKS LATER
,
just before the old world ended, Miranda stood on a beach on the coast of Malaysia looking out at the sea. She’d been delivered back to her hotel after a day of meetings, where she’d spent some time finishing a report and eating a room-service dinner. She’d planned on going to bed early, but through the window of her room she could see the lights of the container-ship fleet on the horizon, and she’d walked down to the water for a closer look.

The three nearest airports had closed in the previous ninety minutes, but Miranda didn’t know this yet. She’d been aware of the Georgia Flu, of course, but was under the impression that it was still a somewhat shadowy health crisis unfolding in Georgia and Russia. The hotel staff had been instructed to avoid alarming the guests, so no one mentioned the pandemic as she crossed the lobby, although she did notice in passing that the front desk seemed understaffed. In any event, it was a pleasure to escape the coffin chill of the hotel air-conditioning, to walk down the well-lit path to the beach and take off her shoes to stand barefoot in the sand.

Later that evening she would find herself troubled and at moments even a little amused by the memory of how casually everyone had once thrown the word
collapse
around, before anyone understood what the word truly meant, but in any event, there had been an economic collapse, or so everyone called it at the time, and now the largest shipping fleet ever assembled lay fifty miles east of Singapore Harbor. Twelve of the boats belonged to Neptune Logistics, including 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.

Earlier that afternoon, in the subsidiary office, Miranda had been told that the local fishermen were afraid of the ships. The fishermen suspected a hint of the supernatural in these vessels, unmoving hulks on the horizon by day, lit up after dark. In the office the local director had laughed at the absurdity of the fishermen’s fears, and Miranda had smiled along with everyone else at the table, but was it so unreasonable to wonder if these lights might not be quite of this earth? She knew the ships were only lit up to prevent collisions, but it still seemed to her as she stood on the beach that evening that there was something otherworldly in the sight. When her phone vibrated in her hand, it was Clark Thompson, Arthur’s oldest friend, calling from New York.

“Miranda,” he said after some awkward preliminaries, “I’m afraid I’m calling with some rather bad news. Perhaps you should sit down.”

“What happened?”

“Miranda, Arthur died of a heart attack last night. I’m so sorry.”

Oh, Arthur.

Clark hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. He worked at the kind of firm where doors are never closed unless someone’s getting fired, and he was aware that by now he was no doubt the topic of speculation all over the office. Drama! What could possibly be happening in Clark’s office? He had ventured out once, for coffee, and everyone had arranged their faces into neutral yet concerned expressions as he passed—that “no pressure, but if there’s anything you need to talk about …” look—and he was having one of the worst mornings of his life, but he derived minor satisfaction from saying nothing and depriving the gossips of fuel. He drew a line through Miranda Carroll’s name, lifted the receiver to call Elizabeth Colton, changed his mind and went to the window. A young man on the street below was playing a saxophone. Clark opened his window and the room was flooded with sound, the thin notes of the saxophone on the surface of the oceanic city, a blare of
hip-hop from a passing car, a driver leaning on his horn at the corner. Clark closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the saxophone, but just then his assistant buzzed him.

“It’s Arthur Leander’s lawyer again,” Tabitha said. “Shall I tell him you’re in a meeting?”

“Bloody hell, does the man never sleep?” It had been Heller who’d left the voice mail at midnight in Los Angeles, three a.m. in New York—“an urgent situation, please call me immediately”—and Heller who’d been up and working when Clark called him back at six fifteen a.m. in New York, three fifteen in L.A. They’d agreed that Clark should be the one to call the family, because Clark had met Arthur’s family once and it seemed kinder that way. Clark had decided to also notify the ex-wives, even the most recent one whom he didn’t like very much, because it seemed wrong to let them read about it in the newspaper; he had an idea—too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it—that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn’t like one another anymore.

Heller had called him again a half hour later to confirm that Clark had notified the family, which of course Clark hadn’t, because three forty-five a.m. in Los Angeles is also three forty-five a.m. on the west coast of Canada, where Arthur’s brother lived, and Clark felt that there were limits to how early one should call anyone for any reason. Now it was still only nine a.m. in New York, six a.m. on Heller’s coast, and it seemed obscene that this man who’d apparently been up all night was still up and working. Clark was beginning to imagine Heller as a sort of bat, some kind of sinister night-living vampire lawyer who slept by day and worked by night. Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark’s thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend at a dance club and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight.

“You want to take the call?” Tabitha asked.

“Fine. Put him through, please.”

For just a beat Tabitha did nothing, and after seven years of working together in close quarters he knew that this particular brand of silence meant “Tell me what’s going on, you know I like gossip,” but he didn’t oblige, and he knew her well enough to catch the note of disappointment in the perfectly professional “Hold for your call, please” that followed.

“Clark? Heller here.”

“So I gathered,” Clark said. There was something obnoxious, he thought, in people who introduced themselves by their surnames while calling one by one’s first. “How are you, Gary? We haven’t spoken in a solid ninety minutes.”

“Hanging in, hanging in.” Clark mentally added this to his private list of most-hated banalities. “I went ahead and notified the family,” Heller said.

“Why? I thought we’d agreed—”

“I know you didn’t want to wake up the family, but with this kind of thing, a situation like this, you
have
to wake up the family. You actually
want
to wake the family, you know? Actually more decent. You want the family to know before someone leaks something, a photo, video, whatever, and then
Entertainment Weekly
calls the family for comment and that’s how they find out about it. Think about it, I mean, the man died onstage.”

“Right,” Clark said. “I see.” The saxophonist had disappeared. The gray of the November sky reminded him that he was about due for a visit to his parents in London. “Has Elizabeth been notified?”

“Who?”

“Elizabeth Colton. The second wife.”

“No, I mean, she’s hardly family, is she? When we talked about notifying family, I really just meant Arthur’s brother.”

“Well, but she is the mother of Arthur’s only child.”

“Right, right, of course. How old is he?”

“Eight or nine.”

“Poor little guy. Hell of an age for this.” A crack in Heller’s voice, sadness or exhaustion, and Clark revised his mental image from hanging-upside-down bat lawyer to sad, pale, caffeine-addicted man with chronic insomnia. Had he met Heller? Had Heller been at that ghastly dinner party in Los Angeles all those years ago, just before Miranda and Arthur divorced? Maybe. Clark was drawing a blank. “So hey, listen,” Heller said, all business again, but a faux-casual style of all-business that Clark associated overwhelmingly with California, “in your time with Arthur, especially recently, did he ever mention anything about a woman named Tanya Gerard?”

“The name’s not familiar.”

“You’re sure?”

“No. Why? Who is she?”

“Well,” Heller said, “just between the two of us, seems our Arthur was having a little affair.” It wasn’t delight in his voice, not exactly. It was importance. This was a man who liked to know things that other people didn’t.

“I see,” Clark said, “but I admit I fail to see how that’s any of our—”

“Oh, of course,” Heller said, “of
course
it isn’t, you know, right to privacy and all that, none of our business, right? Not hurting anyone, consenting adults, etcetera, and I mean I’m the most private, I don’t even have a
Facebook
account for god’s sake, that’s how much I believe in it, in privacy I mean, last guy on earth without a Facebook account. But anyway, this Tanya person, seems she was a wardrobe girl on
King Lear
. I just wondered if he’d mentioned her.”

“No, Gary, I don’t believe he ever did.”

“The producer told me it was all very secret, apparently this was the girl who did costumes or actually maybe it was babysitting, something to do with the child actresses, costumes for the child actresses? I think that was it, although child actors in
Lear
? That one’s a head scratcher. But look, anyway, he …”

Was that sunlight on the other side of the East River? A beam had pierced the clouds in the far distance and was angling down
over Queens. The effect reminded Clark of an oil painting. He was thinking of the first time he’d seen Arthur, in an acting studio on Danforth Avenue in Toronto. Arthur at eighteen: confident despite the fact that for at least the first six months of acting classes he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, or so the acting instructor had pronounced one night over drinks at a bar staffed exclusively with drag queens, the instructor trying to pick up Clark, Clark offering only token resistance. And beautiful, Arthur was beautiful back then.

“So the question, obviously,” Heller was saying, “is whether he intended to leave this girl anything in the will, because he emailed me last week about changing the will, said he’d met someone and he wanted to add a beneficiary and I have to assume that’s who he meant, really what I’m thinking about here is the worst-case scenario, where there’s a shadow will somewhere, some informal document he drew up himself because he wasn’t going to see me for a few weeks, that’s what I’m trying to get to the bottom of here—”

“You should’ve seen him,” Clark said.

“I should’ve seen … I’m sorry, what?”

“Back at the beginning, when he was just starting out. You’ve seen his talent, his talent was obvious, but if you’d seen him before any of the rest of it, all the tabloids and movies and divorces, the fame, all those warping things.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at here, I—”

“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.”

“What—”

“Gary,” Clark said, “I’m going to hang up now.”

He stuck his head out the window for a fortifying breath of November air, returned to his desk, and called Elizabeth Colton. She let out her breath in a long sigh when he told her the news.

“Are there funeral arrangements?”

“Toronto. Day after tomorrow.”

“Toronto? Does he have family there?”

“No, but his will was very specific apparently. I guess he felt some attachment to the place.”

As Clark spoke, he was remembering a conversation he’d had with Arthur over drinks some years ago, in a bar in New York. They’d been discussing the cities they’d lived in. “You’re from London,” Arthur had said. “A guy like you can take cities for granted. For someone like me, coming from a small place … look, I think about my childhood, the life I lived on Delano Island, that place was so small. Everyone knew me, not because I was special or anything, just because everyone knew everyone, and the claustrophobia of that, I can’t tell you. I just wanted some privacy. For as long as I could remember I just wanted to get out, and then I got to Toronto and no one knew me. Toronto felt like freedom.”