Station Eleven Read Online Free PDF

get too many of those here,” the doorman said.
    “That’s what makes it such a good place for this,” Jeevan said, a little wildly.
    “A good place for what?”
    “For survivalism.”
    “I see,” the doorman said.
    Sixty dollars later Jeevan was alone outside his brother’s apartment door, the carts lined up down the corridor. Perhaps, he thought, he should have called ahead from the grocery store. It was one a.m. on a Thursday night, the corridor all closed doors and silence.
    “Jeevan,” Frank said, when he came to the door. “An unexpected pleasure.”
    “I …” Jeevan didn’t know how to explain himself, so he stepped back and gestured weakly at the carts instead of speaking. Frank maneuvered his wheelchair forward and peered down the hall.
    “I see you went shopping,” Frank said.

4
    THE ELGIN THEATRE was empty by then, except for a security guard playing Tetris on his phone in the lower lobby and the executive producer, who’d decided to make the dreaded phone call from an office upstairs. He was surprised when Arthur’s lawyer answered the phone, since after all it was one a.m., although of course the lawyer was in Los Angeles. Did entertainment lawyers normally work until ten p.m. Pacific? The producer supposed their corner of the legal profession must be unusually competitive. He relayed the message of Arthur’s death and left for the night.
    The lawyer, who had been a workaholic all his life and had trained himself to subsist on twenty-minute power naps, spent two hours reviewing Arthur Leander’s will and then all of Arthur Leander’s emails. He had some questions. There were a number of loose ends. He called Arthur’s closest friend, whom he’d once met at an awkward dinner party in Hollywood. In the morning, after a number of increasingly irritable telephone exchanges, Arthur’s closest friend began calling Arthur’s ex-wives.

5
    MIRANDA WAS ON the south coast of Malaysia when the call came through. She was an executive at a shipping company and had been sent here for a week to observe conditions on the ground, her boss’s words.
    “On the ground?” she’d asked.
    Leon had smiled. His office was next to hers and had an identical view of Central Park. They’d been working together for a long time by then, over ten years, and together they’d survived two corporate reorganizations and a relocation from Toronto to New York. They weren’t friends exactly, at least not in the sense of seeing one another outside of the office, but she thought of Leon as her friendliest ally. “You’re right, that was an odd choice of words,” he’d said. “Conditions on the sea, then.”
    That was the year when 12 percent of the world’s shipping fleet lay at anchor off the coast of Malaysia, container ships laid dormant by an economic collapse. By day, the massive boats were gray-brown shapes along the edge of the sky, indistinct in the haze. Two to six men to a vessel, a skeleton crew walking the empty rooms and corridors, their footsteps echoing.
    “It’s lonely,” one of them told Miranda when she landed on a deck in a company helicopter, along with an interpreter and a local crew chief. The company had a dozen ships at anchor here.
    “They can’t just relax out there,” Leon had said. “The local crew chief’s not bad, but I want them to know the company’s on top of the situation. I can’t help but picture an armada of floating parties.”
    But the men were serious and reserved and afraid of pirates. She talked to a man who hadn’t been ashore in three months.
    That evening on the beach below her hotel, Miranda was seized by a loneliness she couldn’t explain. She’d thought she knew everything there was to know about this remnant fleet, but shewas unprepared for its beauty. The ships were lit up to prevent collisions in the dark, and when she looked out at them she felt stranded, the blaze of light on the horizon both filled with mystery and impossibly distant, a fairy-tale