Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.

So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you’d grow old has departed from this earth.

No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room.

wondered if the Internet might still be out there somehow, invisible pinpricks of light suspended in the air around them.

I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.

But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy

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.”

survival is insufficient.

“if you’ve wandered all your life, as I have, through the terrible chaos, if you remember, as I do, everything you’ve ever seen, then you know there’s more than one way to die.”

“This is one of those places where you don’t notice everyone’s dropping dead around you till you’ve already drunk the poisoned wine.”

it’s difficult to explain this next part. Yes, it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.

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.

They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.

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.”

There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again.

Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult.

“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.”

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

and for a moment everything is still. Station Eleven is all around them.

“Of course,” the cabbie said, “you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re going,”

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.

we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone.

“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.”

What did it mean to seem like yourself, in the course of such unspeakable days? How was anyone supposed to seem?

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

I’m not exactly homesick but not exactly not.

everyone knows when you’ve got a terrible marriage, it’s like having bad breath, you get close enough to a person and it’s obvious.

adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

“I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped.

I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?”

He was filled in that moment with an inexpressible longing.

“That’s what passes for a life, I should say. That’s what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they’re like sleepwalkers,” she said, “and nothing ever jolts them awake.”

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

It was becoming more difficult to hold on to himself.

This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.

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

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain 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.

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.

Think of anything else. If not the future, the past:

and in the way he spoke, Jeevan understood that he loved her.

“Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.”

it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.

the murdered follow their killers to the grave,

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

what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream.

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end? Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.

what else might this awakening world contain?

He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.