Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets and its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.
42
AT FIRST THE PEOPLE in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded. This was difficult to explain to young people in the following decades, but in all fairness, the entire history of being stranded in airports up to that point was also a history of eventually becoming unstranded, of boarding a plane and flying away. At first it seemed inevitable that the National Guard would roll in at any moment with blankets and boxes of food, that ground crews would return shortly thereafter and planes would start landing and taking off again. Day One, Day Two, Day Forty-eight, Day Ninety, any expectation of a return to normalcy long gone by now, then Year One, Year Two, Year Three. Time had been reset by catastrophe. After a while they went back to the old way of counting days and months, but kept the new system of years: January 1, Year Three; March 17, Year Four, etc. Year Four was when Clark realized this was the way the years would continue to be marked from now on, counted off one by one from the moment of disaster.
He’d known for a long time by then that the world’s changes wouldn’t be reversed, but still, the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.
Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, “I was there,” and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration.
“It’s hard to explain,” he caught himself saying sometimes to young people who came into his museum, which had formerly been the Skymiles Lounge in Concourse C. But he took his role as curator seriously and he’d decided years ago that “It’s hard to explain” isn’t good enough, so he always tried to explain it all anyway, whenever anyone asked about any of the objects he’d collected over the years, from the airport and beyond—the laptops, the iPhones, the radio from an administrative desk, the electric toaster from an airport-staff lounge, the turntable and vinyl records that some optimistic scavenger had carried back from Severn City—and of course the context, the pre-pandemic world that he remembered so sharply. No, he was explaining now, to a sixteen-year-old who’d been born in the airport, the planes didn’t rise straight up into the sky. They gathered speed on long runways and angled upward.
“Why did they need the runways?” the sixteen-year-old asked. Her name was Emmanuelle. He had a special fondness for her, because he remembered her birth as the only good thing that had happened in that terrible first year.
“They couldn’t get off the ground without gathering speed. They needed momentum.”
“Oh,” she said. “The engines weren’t that powerful, then?”
“They were,” he said, “but they weren’t like rocket ships.”
“Rocket ships …”
“The ships we used to go to space.”
“It’s incredible,” she said, shaking her head.
“Yes.” Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. This was how he arrived in this airport: he’d boarded a machine that transported him at high speed a mile above the surface of the earth. This was how he’d told Miranda Carroll of her ex-husband’s death: he’d pressed a series of buttons on a device that had connected him within seconds to an instrument on the other side of the world, and Miranda—barefoot on a white sand beach with a shipping fleet shining before her in the dark—had pressed a button that had connected her via satellite to New York. These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around them.
By the end of the Second Decade most of the airport’s population was either born there or had walked in later, but two dozen or so people remained who had been there since the day their flights had landed. Clark’s flight landed without incident, diverted from Toronto for reasons no one seemed immediately able to explain, and taxied to a gate in Concourse B. Clark looked up from his edits of the 360° Subordinates report and was struck by the variety of planes on the tarmac. Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Air France, enormous jets parked end to end.
When Clark emerged from the jet bridge into the fluorescent light of Concourse B, the first thing he noticed was the uneven distribution of people. Crowds had gathered beneath the television monitors. Clark decided that whatever they were looking at, he couldn’t face it without a cup of tea. He assumed it was a terrorist attack. He bought a cup of Earl Grey at a kiosk, and took his time adding the milk. This is the last time I’ll stir milk into my tea without knowing what happened, he thought, wistful in advance for the present moment, and went to stand with the crowd beneath a television that was tuned to CNN.
The story of the pandemic’s arrival in North America had broken while he was in the air. This was another thing that was hard to explain years later, but up until that morning the Georgia Flu had seemed quite distant, especially if one happened not to be on social media. Clark had never followed the news very closely and had actually heard about the flu only the day before the flight, in a brief newspaper story about a mysterious outbreak of some virus in Paris, and it hadn’t been at all clear that it was developing into a pandemic. But now he watched the too-late evacuations of cities, the riots outside hospitals on three continents, the slow-moving exodus clogging every road, and wished he’d been paying more attention. The gridlocked roads were puzzling, because where were all these people going? If these reports were to be believed, not only had the Georgia Flu arrived, but it was already everywhere. There were clips of officials from various governments, epidemiologists with their sleeves rolled up, everyone wan and bloodshot and warning of catastrophe, blue-black circles under bloodshot eyes.
“It’s not looking promising for a quick end to the emergency,” a newscaster said, understating the situation to a degree previously unmatched in the history of understatement, and then he blinked at the camera and something in him seemed to stutter, a breaking down of some mechanism that had previously held his personal and professional lives apart, and he addressed the camera with a new urgency. “Mel,” he said, “if you’re watching this, sweetheart, take the kids to your parents’ ranch. Back roads only, my love, no highways. I love you so much.”
“It must be nice to have the network at your disposal,” a man standing near Clark said. “I don’t know where my wife is either. You know where your wife is?” His voice carried a high note of panic.
Clark decided to pretend that the man had asked him where his boyfriend was. “No,” he said. “I have no idea.” He turned away from the monitor, unable to bear another second of the news. For how long had he been standing here? His tea had gone cold. He drifted down the concourse and stood before the flight-status monitors. Every flight had been canceled.
How had all of this happened so quickly? Why hadn’t he checked the news before he left for the airport? It occurred to Clark that he should call someone, actually everyone, that he should call everyone he’d ever loved and talk to them and tell them all the things that mattered, but it was apparently already too late for this, his phone displaying a message he’d never seen before: SYSTEM OVERLOAD EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY. He bought another tea, because the first one had gone cold, and also he was beset now by terrible fears and walking to the kiosk seemed like purposeful action. Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn’t noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn’t yet known that everything was coming undone.
“Can you tell us more about the … well, about what people should be looking out for, the symptoms?” the newscaster asked.