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.

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.

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.

“Because she’s a raging alcoholic,” Miranda says. His eyes widen. “Really?” “She’s too wasted to drive. You didn’t hear that from me.”

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

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

“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.

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

None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.

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.

The taste of Orange Julius,

“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.

She explained it to him. 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.

He felt a touch of vertigo. “Elizabeth, what reason could there possibly be for something like this? What kind of plan would possibly require …?” He realized that his voice had risen. His fists were clenched. “Everything happens for a reason,” she said. She didn’t look at him. “It’s not for us to know.”

In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity.

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.