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 she was 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 kingdom. She’d been holding her phone in her hand, expecting a call from a friend, but when the phone began to vibrate she didn’t recognize the number that came up on the screen.
“Hello?” Nearby, a couple was conversing in Spanish. She’d been studying the language for the past several months, and understood every third or fourth word.
“Miranda Carroll?” A man’s voice, almost familiar and very British.
“Yes, with whom am I speaking?”
“I doubt you’ll remember me, but we met briefly some years ago at a party at Cannes. Clark Thompson. Arthur’s friend.”
“We met again after that,” she said. “You came to a dinner party in Los Angeles.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course, how could I forget.…” Of course he hadn’t forgotten, she realized. Clark was being tactful. He cleared his throat. “Miranda,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m calling with some rather bad news. Perhaps you should sit down.”
She remained standing. “Tell me,” she said.
“Miranda, Arthur died of a heart attack last night.” The lights over the sea blurred and became a string of overlapping halos. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want you to find out on the news.”
“But I just saw him,” she heard herself say. “I was in Toronto two weeks ago.”
“It’s hard to take in.” He cleared his throat again. “It’s a shock, it’s … I’ve known him since I was eighteen. It seems impossible to me too.”
“Please,” she said, “what more can you tell me?”
“He actually, well, I hope you won’t find it disrespectful if I suggest he may have found this fitting, but he actually died onstage. I’m told it was a massive heart attack in the fourth act of King Lear.”
“He just collapsed …?”
“I’m told there were two doctors in the audience, they came up onstage when they realized what was happening and tried to save him, but there was nothing anyone could do. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.”
So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you’d grow old has departed from this earth.
The conversation in Spanish went on in the nearby darkness. The ships still shone on the horizon; there was still no breeze. It was morning in New York City. She imagined Clark hanging up the receiver in his office in Manhattan. This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.
6
AN INCOMPLETE LIST:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
7
TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky. It was the end of July, and the twenty-five-year-old thermometer affixed to the back of the lead caravan read 106 Fahrenheit, 41 Celsius. They were near Lake Michig