Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel Read Free Book Online

WITH HIS MOTHER ,
MODEL/ACTRESS ELIZABETH COLTON .
    The photograph: Arthur with a three-day beard, rumpled clothes, a baseball cap, carrying a small boy who beamed up at his father’s face while Arthur smiled at the camera. The Georgia Flu would arrive in a year.
    “I knew him,” she’d told August, breathless. “He gave me the comics I showed you!” And August had nodded and asked to see the comics again.
    There were countless things about the pre-collapse world that Kirsten couldn’t remember—her street address, her mother’s face, the TV shows that August never stopped talking about—but she did remember Arthur Leander, and after that first sighting she went through every magazine she could find in search of him. She collected fragments, stored in a ziplock bag in her backpack. A picture of Arthur alone on a beach, looking pensive and out of shape. A picture of him with his first wife, Miranda, and then later with his second wife, Elizabeth, a malnourished-looking blonde who didn’tsmile for cameras. Then with their son, who was about the same age as Kirsten, and later still with a third wife who looked very similar to the second one.
    “You’re like an archaeologist,” Charlie said, when Kirsten showed off her findings. Charlie had wanted to be an archaeologist when she was little. She was the second cello and one of Kirsten’s closest friends.
    Nothing in Kirsten’s collection suggested the Arthur Leander she remembered, but what did she actually remember? Arthur was a fleeting impression of kindness and gray hair, a man who’d once pressed two comic books into her hands—“I have a present for you,” she was almost certain he’d said—and sometime after this moment, the clearest memory she retained from before the collapse: a stage, a man in a suit talking to her while Arthur lay still on his back with paramedics leaning over him, voices and crying and people gathering, snow somehow falling even though they were indoors, electric light blazing down upon them.

8
    THE COMICS ARTHUR LEANDER gave her: two issues from a series no one else in the Symphony has ever heard of, Dr. Eleven , Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven , Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit . By Year Twenty, Kirsten has them memorized.
    Dr. Eleven is a physicist. He lives on a space station, but it’s a highly advanced space station that was designed to resemble a small planet. There are deep blue seas and rocky islands linked by bridges, orange and crimson skies with two moons on the horizon. The contrabassoon, who prior to the collapse was in the printing business, told Kirsten that the comics had been produced at great expense, all those bright images, that archival paper, so actually not comics at all in the traditionally mass-produced sense, possibly someone’s vanity project. Who would that someone have been? There is no biographical information in either issue, initials in place of the author’s name. “By M. C.” In the inside cover of the first issue, someone has written “Copy 2 of 10” in pencil. In the second issue, the notation is “Copy 3 of 10.” Is it possible that only ten copies of each of these books exist in the world?
    Kirsten’s taken care of the comics as best she can but they’re dog-eared now, worn soft at the edges. The first issue falls open to a two-page spread. Dr. Eleven stands on dark rocks overlooking an indigo sea at twilight. Small boats move between islands, wind turbines spinning on the horizon. He holds his fedora in his hand. A small white animal stands by his side. (Several of the older Symphony members have confirmed that this animal is a dog, but it isn’t like any dog Kirsten’s ever seen. Its name is Luli. It looks like a cross between a fox and a cloud.) A line of text across the bottom of the frame: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth .

9
    THE SYMPHONY ARRIVED IN St. Deborah by the Water in the midafternoon. Before the