Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world. —Czeslaw Milosz The Separate Notebooks

She considered Dieter one of her dearest friends. The tattoo argument had lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met.

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.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Star Trek: Voyager,” August said hopefully. “That episode with those lost Borg and Seven of Nine?”

“We can’t take children,” the conductor said. “This isn’t like running away and joining the circus.” The girl looked confused. She didn’t know what a circus was.

He’d found a metal Starship Enterprise.

Love is like the lion’s tooth.

She nodded. “I don’t believe in the perfectibility of the individual,” she said.

a fairer way of putting this would be to say that 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. Dan’s like that.”

You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”