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Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.
-
Later they would learn that the ships said: we heard you calling. We came as fast as we could.
Later, the city would speak of the beacons it sent out as soon as it had electricity: we have awoken. Where are you? Tell us we are not alone.
None of this, of course, was made apparent at the start. At the start there was only the harbour, and the light upon it, and everyone running down and down and down, to see.
The ships rolled in like a summer storm. Crackling, bright and glorious. An enormous mass of glittering containers coming in with the tide.
Kirsten shaded her eyes from the shore.The glimmer of it stuck in her eyelashes. "Do you think-"
Clark’s hands were buried in the pockets of his dressing gown. He looked very old, the light settling into the groove of every line in his face. “It’s so bright,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like night, anymore.”
-
In Dr. Eleven, Vol 1, No. 3, Dr. Eleven’s dog, Luli, catches a wounded octopus and drags it into his office. She is not often led to things like this, so Dr. Eleven puts the octopus in a tank and binds up its bitten tentacles with futuristic wound-healing liquid stitch, and feeds it small fish. It looks at him with large, cartoon painting eyes.
The issue is a bottle issue. A breath, a moment to breathe. Dr. Eleven and his dog, and an octopus in a small round fishtank, its tentacles draping over the rim languidly, as if it is about to smoke. As if it has all the time in the world.
Sometimes, a little blood drips down the side of the tank. This blood is electric blue, and shining.
The octopus remains in the tank for three issues, recovering. It is a background feature as Dr. Eleven investigates: firstly, a shipping dispute between a seahorse and a whale; secondly, an Undersea plot to bomb a theatre; thirdly, a new island that has risen out of the ocean, apparently entirely of its own will. None of these lead to a change in the status quo. The whale agrees to give the seahorse certain routes unobstructued and the seahorse returns this favour; the Undersea plot is foiled; the island is disturbing nobody, and Dr. Eleven spends a peaceful night sleeping on its sandy shores.
-
Kirsten had only come to perform The Tempest. It was her turn to play Ariel. When she was younger she had been Miranda, but now that task went to the younger ones. In this performance it would be Isabella, who joined the Symphony from what used to be St Deborah on the Water.
It was not her first time in the city, but it was to be the first time of any length. At first they had been wary, and possessive, but as time passed and the city’s population grew they were gentler.
Clark had come with the Symphony. He had persuaded her that he would be all right; that he wanted to see the world as it was; that he was tired of maintaining things and wanted to see something new. There was this connection between them, and it would not be broken for as long as they both lived.
There was power in the city. There was a hospital, too.
Part of her could not help thinking, he was not getting any younger. She was used to people dying but he felt to her like anything in his museum: something delicate. Something to be preserved.
The ships stayed just off the coast for what felt like forever. The cities were negotiating, with the little electricity they had, the little infrastructure. Everyone was wary.
The fleet of containers did not seem bothered. They settled and gleamed, brighter at night. During the day you could forget that they were there. They hummed dully out in the water, anchored and still, and nobody wanted to go out that far anyway. Not unless they had business.
They were to perform the Tempest for four nights. The city put them up in an old motel recently rewired. Electric lights lit Kirsten’s face in the bathroom, and ran hot water in the bath. Only once every so often, but still. Enough.
Enough to make a person hope that things might be better. Might be back to the way they had been. Even if Kirsten didn’t really remember what that was.
Kirsten looked at her face in the mirror; at the four knives tattooed on her wrist.
“Do you ever just want-” she began, but she closed her mouth over the words, swallowed them down. She could tell the conductor. The conductor would understand. Maybe Clark, or even Sayid.
Not Isabella. Not even Kirsten herself, really, either.
Survival is insufficient.
But you have to start somewhere. And who knew who were on those ships? They all knew what they had done to survive, and that was on land. On land, you could trust your feet, at least. If someone punctured the walls of your home you could still walk.
Not that, on the open sea.
-
The foundation of Dr. Eleven’s office has always been fragile. For the aesthetic: it spirals up and over the deep blue sea.
In Volume 3, Issue 4, a group of Undersea assassins set what are called ice bombs at the base of the tower. Icicles climb up the side of it, frosting over the windows. They crash in an agonizing spiral, spiderweb shattermarks holding still for a moment, before they explode and the whole thing topples into the sea.
The water roars through everything. It sweeps everyone away.
The octopus pulls Dr. Eleven and Luli away, into the sea. Luli holds her breath. Tiny air bubbles drift up to the top of the page.
Dr. Eleven has hit his head. His eyes are closed and a single tentacle wraps around his waist, pulling him onward, onward, onward.
The octopus and the Pomeranian look at each other. The Pomeranian paddles her tiny feet. At last, a speech bubble, in a different colour so it is clear it is not the language of Dr. Eleven: thank you.
-
On the fifth night of the Tempest, the members of the Symphony realized that they were being used as a negotiation tool. A bargaining chip, to show the ships what the city had.
There were thirty ships, in total. Nobody had told the Symphony this, explicitly, but there were city people who had gone out in smaller ships, normally used to fish, to count the distinctive containers that bobbed all the way out in the deep water. Thirty was the consensus. They were all differently coloured, brightly-painted. They had personalities.
There were only four or five of the ship people who had come ashore. They were leaders, from the first ship, the one that lead the fleet; they whispered that it was the one that was gunmetal-grey, the dark of the ocean at night, so it might glide unnoticed. They were very calm. They had done this before many times. Never here, they said. But they were trying to find those they had lost. The world they had lost.
They had to know, of course, that this world was worth meeting. Before they could share anything else. They needed to know that it wasn’t just electricity here in the city, that made it beautiful. That made it alive.
So the city gave them the Symphony. Survival is insufficient.
There was a small outbreak; a minor flu. On the fifth night of the Tempest, one of the ship people collapsed with a fever, and a doctor in the audience rose fearlessly to his feet to help her, with no regard for his own life.
He said, later: we regret the things we don’t do.
They got the woman into the hospital. She had no exposure to the airborne particles, no immunity, so they used experimental drugs they had only just started to manufacture.
But they worked.
And Kirsten said, Have I ever seen you before?
The doctor looked at her, at her blonde hair and missing teeth and round eyes. Have you ever been to Toronto?
The woman from the ship makes a full recovery. She owes the city her life, she says. And they are ready to trade for things that are green. You can only do so much with aquaculture on board a ship. They are sick of algae, she says. And they have had electricity for a long time.
-
The Undersea makes contact with the aliens in Volume 7, Issue 1. The aliens want Dr. Eleven. They will only allow the Undersea to return if Dr. Eleven is brought to them.
It is ominous, his fate. He runs for two issues, with the octopus, whose name is Ariel, and the Pomeranian, Luli. He is told by everyone he meets that the aliens are hunting him. The ghost of Captain Lonagan emerges to tell him: never let them take you alive.
The aliens catch up to him. The only alien with a face is wearing a crown and a cape and looks like an old man. It tells him it has made a shape to reassure him. He is not reassured.
In his arms Luli barks, onomatopoeia darting orange across the page.
It’s not a trick, says the alien. It just wants to watch him. After that, it will let him go.
It shows him Earth. It records every flicker of grief on his face.
The page does not. It shows only his trembling hands.
What would you give to return? It asks.
Not this, says Dr. Eleven.
They let him take his dog and go.
After this Dr. Eleven is stricken, aching. He pilots a submarine into an Undersea base. It looks as though it will be a suicide mission, but then he gets out of the submarine and holds his helmet in his hands, cradling it to his chest.
“I just want to go home,” he says.
This ends the issue on a cliffhanger; he is surrounded by guns and black eyes. The next one opens swiftly, as a girl emerges from the dark, the lightness of her body following the brightness of her eyes.
He is embraced, swiftly. She tells him, all will be forgiven.
But the Undersea cannot trust him without proof; so he submits, after hiding his dog in a safe cavern far beyond advanced radar, to a series of complicated tests to prove his loyalty; to create it if it not there. It involves a lot of drugs and some electricity.
He breaks, on the third day. Runs to the top of a series of turbines and stands there staring into the white rush of water, over the Undersea sprawling beneath him.
The man who is tasked to follow him offers him a cigarette. They smoke quietly above the rushing water, and then he claps handcuffs around Dr. Eleven’s wrists, and takes him down again.
-
The Symphony’s run of the Tempest ended, but by some agreement they did not move on. The conductor said, “We can’t become part of it,” but her eyes were wide and fascinated.
“Why didn’t they just land,” said the oboe. “They had so much. More than anyone else. They had generators.”
“If they started running,” said Sayid, “maybe it felt safer not to stop.”
Clark was in the apartment across from Kirsten’s. He was offered some allowances, as the curator of a renowned museum; they wanted to show him what they had built. They wanted his seal approval; a gift of the old world to the new.
She knew he was worried about it. She knew he felt like it was too much responsibility; like it was a false baton to hold. He told her he had never been anything, really. He wasn’t the person to judge this new city, and all its light. They had seen worse laws, of course.
There were rations, and politics. The conductor knew more than she did, but of course they had been issued special licenses to be here, and so did everyone who visited, and everyone who came to the city walls was evaluated for use to the city, and allocated resources dependent on that use. This value could change as the council changed its opinions; it had little use for artists, and great use for engineers.
It clung to the world as it had been. Tried to recreate things that it didn’t need to; TV shows. Makeup. Clothes.
She had seen worse. He had seen worse, too.
There was no religion in the city. Only the generators.
She had dinner with Jeevan, the doctor. His wife and his two daughters lived in a small house on the outskirts of the city; they had moved with their entire town, when it was swallowed up by the promise of electricity, its kind soothing whir, like the purring of a bright sparking cat. He had been a paramedic in Toronto, and he had been in the audience for King Lear. His older daughter had been given as a gift one of the first replicas of Station Eleven, the ones circulating as a collaborative effort between Marcel Dionne and the city, and Clark and the Museum of Civilization.
“She’ll grow up safe,” Jeevan said, softly.
Kirsten nodded.
-
The drugs that the Undersea give to Dr. Eleven erase his memory and leave him lost and terrified, with no knowledge of what to do, or how to do it. He steals a submarine, provided for him by the boy with the cigarette
In this time Luli and the octopus spend some time exploring an island that has nobody else on it - the octopus in a small dome of water over its head, Luli delicately picking her way through underbrush as her white fur is stained by mud and leaves, but still glows under the endless light of the moons.
Dr. Eleven is found by some quiet people who wear a lot of white and believe that they were placed on Station Eleven for a purpose. That they lost Earth because of some great transgression, and this is their punishment. To make of Station Eleven a home.
They spend their days crafting. Singing. Dr Eleven sings with them. He goes by a different name, Undecim. He wants to stay. He wants to help them rip apart everything Station Eleven was. To rebuild it from scratch.
They must repudiate Earth. They must give up on everything it was and live only in the dark.
Luli and the octopus Ariel discover that the island that rose itself is part of the operating system of Station Eleven. A creaking, tired AI that is trying to do the best it can, but it has been damaged by the war for so long. Now, as it integrates with the people aboard it, it begins to take some of their consciousness; it begins to heal. It becomes something else. Something new.
Luli herself is an example of this new kind of consciousness; she was only a dog, as the octopus was only an octopus, but they fumble their way towards a different kind of thought, to something else that makes them bright. Luli says, what are you?
It says, I don’t know. I wish I did.
It builds them a ship on the island, so that Luli can find Dr. Eleven. They promise to return. To help the island finish healing.
The octopus has no knowledge of the sunrise. Luli is beginning to remember.
Luli brings the man in white a root that grew on the island in the middle of the ocean. He chews it, and swallows, and Dr. Eleven remembers himself.
He leaves the dark swiftly, with tears streaming down his face. He sails into artificial, pale light.
-
On the third day of the third week of the fleet in the harbour, Kirsten woke before the sun and went down to the shore. She hadn’t done it in weeks; it was frowned upon.
She took her shoes off. When she was a little kid, before everything, before anything, her brother took her to the harbour and they watched the ships from that little park with all the musical notes in it. Her brother liked the planes and Kirsten liked the dogs in the park, and watching even that murky city water pool around the pillars that held the piers up. It was only a lake, but it stretched out so long. Almost forever.
She was remembering things, from before. Not many things. Nothing from that lost year, of course. But little things, like the softness of safety; the smell of her mother’s hair.
She saw the ship then, in the sunrise. The light caught it until it gleamed, and that was when she knew. She ran back to the apartment building, so fast her thighs ached, her fingers sore with the fists she’d balled them into.
“Clark,” she said. “Wake up. Come with me.”
-
Miranda’s ship is beautiful. She painted it herself, over twenty years of scrounging paint and begging for days in dry-dock. It’s been a great indulgence, beauty, especially of this kind, in these conditions. But her ship is Station Eleven, and it is the orange of a glowing sunset, and she was suspended with slightly-rusting chains along the side of it for four hours, one especially calm summer day, to paint two illuminated moons along the prow.
It isn’t technically her ship; simply the one she was rescued on, when they found her half-alive on that beach in Malaysia, dreaming of silver light. But it’s been hers since then, her home, where they take their fuel allotment and their fishing lines, and make beautiful things that they trade at ports. Miranda has loved to build Station Eleven from driftwood, and lost plastic, and the bones of fish.
There are other ships in the fleet, of course; with more practical aims, and practical hopes. They are not the only ones who did practical things in the first days, in that first year where they were so alone. Miranda tries not to remember these days.
It has been hard to figure out who they are. They are all running. None of them want to stay on land.
This morning Miranda has been anchored for three and a half weeks without being allowed to go to ground. There is a flu on the shore. A minor one, but Miranda is no longer young, and has already survived beyond reason once.
They have been to many shores before. Some with electricity; most without. Over this time of Miranda’s on board this fleet, they have only come to the places with light. Never has there been light in North America. They have circled these shores so, so many times. Every time Miranda has thought of the spires of Toronto, those tall towers of glass and chrome falling to ruin, to disrepair. They never stop there.
They lose people only to the cities with light. Miranda’s ship takes notes, every time. When they return she sees them, sometimes. Her friends, the people she has lived with. Never anyone from before. She is not sure that she would recognize them; or that they would recognize her.
She searches for Elizabeth, sometimes. Elizabeth was in Israel. There are people on the coasts there, but none of them are her. She doesn’t know what she would say, anyway. I hope things are well with you. I hope your son liked my graphic novel.
There is a sound. A knock, hollow, at the door, and then one of the little girls who makes wind chimes is saying, “there’s a ship coming, Miranda, a little boat,” and so she pulls herself away from her window, away from the morning, and comes out to the deck where there is a little fishing boat, looking hastily borrowed, pulling up against their side.
There is a woman in it; Miranda recognizes her from the pictures the scouts brought back. An actress. One of Miranda’s people, if she was to come to the fleet. She has sharp eyes and she’s looking at the side of the ship in a slow and dawning wonder.
There is a man, too. He’s shaved his head and pierced his ears and there are so many lines in his face, just - so many. So, so many.
“Clark?” Miranda says. She can barely make the word; it comes out a breath, an exhalation, a prayer.
Clark’s hand is over his mouth and he is crying. They were at a dinner party when they were young, when they were the future of the world. He stands up and the boat underneath him rocks, waves crashing over his feet. “Miranda,” he says. “ Praha , I knew I wasn’t the only one-”
And they are both laughing, then; she leans down, and offers him her hand.
-
The last page of Station Eleven is a huge sprawling painting that spreads across the inside of Miranda’s room. In it, Dr. Eleven is standing on the shore of the island that rose itself. He is holding Luli, now old and frail, as she tucks her paws into his shoulder.
In front of them, the barest fingers of orange and gold make their way across the twilight sky. The sun begins to rise.
She painted it the first year, when she was sick and dreaming of sunrise on that beach, when it blurred into Toronto every morning she woke and was still alive , alive, alive. “It’s funny,” she tells the actress. “I stopped because I didn’t know how it would end. Then the world did, and I knew.”