THE FIRST WINTER in the Severn City Airport:
There was a frisson of excitement on Day Two, when someone recognized Elizabeth and Tyler and word spread. “My phone,” Clark heard a young man say in frustration. He was about twenty, with hair that flopped in his eyes. “God, why won’t our phones work? I so wish I could tweet this.”
“Yeah,” his girlfriend said, wistful. “You know, like, ‘Not much, just chilling with Arthur Leander’s kid at the end of the world.’ ”
“Totally,” the man said. Clark moved away from them in order to maintain his sanity, although later, in a more charitable moment, it occurred to him that they were probably in shock.
By Day Three all the vending machines in the airport were empty of snacks, and the battery on Tyler’s Nintendo console was dead. Tyler wept, inconsolable. The girl who needed Effexor was very sick by then. Withdrawal, she said. No one in the airport had the drug she needed. A raiding party went through every room, the administrative offices and the TSA holding cell, everyone’s desk drawers, and then they went outside and broke into the dozen or so cars abandoned in the parking lot, pawed through glove boxes and trunks. They found some useful items in their searches, extra pairs of shoes and some warm clothes and such, but on the pharmaceutical front they uncovered only painkillers and antacids and a mysterious bottle of pills that someone thought might be for stomach ulcers. In the meantime the girl lay across a bench, shivering and drenched in sweat, and she said her head sparked with electricity every time she moved.
They called 911 from the pay phone in baggage claim, but no one picked up. They wandered outside and stared at the snowed-in parking lot, the airport road disappearing into the trees, but what could possibly be out there aside from the flu?
The television newscasters weren’t exactly saying that it was the end of the world, per se, but the word apocalypse was beginning to appear.
“All those people,” Clark said to Imaginary Robert, but Imaginary Robert didn’t reply.
That evening they broke into the Mexican restaurant and cooked an enormous dinner of ground meat and tortilla chips and cheese with sauces splashed over it. Some people had mixed feelings about this—they’d obviously been abandoned here, everyone was hungry and 911 wasn’t even operational; on the other hand, no one wants to be a thief—but then a business traveler named Max said, “Look, everyone just chill the fuck out, I’ll cover it on my Amex.” There was applause at this announcement. He removed his Amex card from his wallet with a flourish and left it next to the cash register, where it remained untouched for the next ninety-seven days.
On Day Four the food from the Mexican restaurant ran out, also the food from the sandwich place in Concourse C. That night they lit their first bonfire on the tarmac, burning newspapers and magazines from the newsstand and a wooden bench from Concourse A. Someone had raided the Skymiles Lounge. They got drunk on Skymiles Lounge champagne and ate Skymiles Lounge oranges and snack mix. Someone suggested that perhaps a passing plane or helicopter might see the fire and come down to save them, but no lights crossed the cloudless sky.
The realization, later, that that had possibly been his last orange. This orangeless world! Clark said to himself, or perhaps to Imaginary Robert, and laughed in a way that prompted concerned glances from the others. That first year everyone was a little crazy.
On Day Five they broke into the gift shop, because some people had no clean clothes, and after that, at any given moment half of the population was dressed in bright red or blue Beautiful Northern Michigan T-shirts. They washed their clothes in the sinks, and everywhere Clark turned he saw laundry hanging to dry on the backs of benches. The effect was oddly cheerful, like strings of bright flags.
The snacks from the Concourse B gift shop were gone by Day Six. The National Guard still hadn’t arrived.
On Day Seven the networks began to blink off the air, one by one. “So that all of our employees may be with their families,” a CNN anchor said, ashen and glassy-eyed after forty-eight hours without sleep, “we are temporarily suspending broadcast operations.” “Good night,” NBC said an hour later, “and good luck.” CBS switched without comment to reruns of America’s Got Talent. This was at five in the morning, and everyone who was awake watched for a few hours—it was nice to take a quick break from the end of the world—and then in the early afternoon the lights went out. They came back on almost immediately, but what it probably meant, a pilot said, was that the grid had gone down and the airport had switched to generator power. All of the workers who knew how the generators worked had left by then. People had been trickling out since Day Three. “It’s the waiting,” Clark had heard a woman say, “I can’t take the waiting, I have to do something, even if it’s just walking to the nearest town to see what’s going on.…”
A TSA agent had remained at the airport, just one, Tyrone, and he knew how to hunt. By Day Eight no one new had come to the airport and no one who’d left had returned, no more planes or helicopters had landed, everyone was hungry and trying not to think about all the apocalypse movies they’d seen over the years. Tyrone set off into the trees with a woman who’d formerly been a park ranger and two TSA-issue handguns, and they returned some time later with a deer. They strung it between metal chairs over the fire and at sunset everyone ate roasted venison and drank the last of the champagne, while the girl who needed Effexor slipped out through an entrance on the other side of the airport and walked away into the trees. A group of them tried to find her, but couldn’t.
The girl who needed Effexor had left her suitcase and all of her belongings behind, including her driver’s license. She looked sleepy in the picture, a slightly younger version of herself with longer hair. Her name was Lily Patterson. She was eighteen. No one knew what to do with the driver’s license. Finally someone put it on the counter of the Mexican restaurant, next to Max’s Amex card.
Tyler spent his days curled in an armchair in the Skymiles Lounge, reading his comic books over and over again. Elizabeth sat near him with her eyes closed, lips moving constantly, rapidly, in some repeated prayer.
The televisions displayed silent test patterns.
On the twelfth day in the airport, the lights went out. But the toilets would still flush if one poured water into the bowls, so they collected plastic trays from the security checkpoints and filled them with snow, carted these to the restrooms to melt. Clark had never thought much about airport design, but he was grateful that so much of this particular airport was glass. They lived in daylight and went to bed at sundown.
There were three pilots among the stranded. On the fifteenth day in the airport, one of them announced that he’d decided to take a plane to Los Angeles. The snow had melted, so he thought he could maybe make do without de-icing machines. People reminded him that Los Angeles had looked pretty bad on the news.
“Yeah, but everywhere looked bad on the news,” the pilot said. His family was in L.A. He wasn’t willing to accept the possibility of not seeing them again. “Anyone wants to come with me,” he said, “it’s a free flight to Los Angeles.” This alone seemed like proof that the world was ending, because this was the era when people were being charged extra for checked bags, for boarding early enough to cram baggage into overhead bins before the bins filled up, for the privilege of sitting in exit rows with their life-or-death stakes and their two extra inches of legroom. The passengers exchanged glances.
“The plane’s fueled up,” the pilot said. “I was flying Boston to San Diego when we got diverted, and it’s not like it’ll be a full flight.” It occurred to Clark that if the entire population of the airport went with him, there would still be empty seats on the plane. “I’m going to give you all a day to think about it,” the pilot said, “but I’m flying out tomorrow before the temperature drops again.”
There were of course no guarantees. There had been no news from the outside world since the televisions went dark and there were reeling moments when it seemed possible—not likely! But possible!—that the seventy-nine of them left there in the airport might be the last people alive on earth. For all anyone knew LAX was a heap of smoking rubble. Agonized calculations were performed. Almost everyone who lived west of the Rockies approached the pilot. Most of the people who lived in Asia opted to take the flight, which would still leave an ocean between themselves and their loved ones but would at least bring them two thousand miles closer to home.
At noon the next day, the passengers boarded via a wheeled staircase they’d found in a hangar, and a crowd gathered on the tarmac to watch the plane depart. The sound of the engines was startling after these days of silence. There was a long period when nothing happened, the engines roaring, before the plane worked its way out of the line of parked aircraft with a series of delicate lurching turns—it left a gap between the Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa jets—and made a slow curve to the runway. Someone—impossible to see who at this distance—was waving in one of the windows. A few people waved back. The plane started down the runway, gathered speed, the wheels left the ground, and the watchers held their breaths for the moment of ascent, but the machine didn’t falter, it rose instead of falling, and as it receded into the clear blue sky Clark realized he had tears on his face. Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky. Clark watched until it disappeared.
That night no one had much to say around the fire. Fifty-four of them now, the ones who’d decided against Los Angeles. The venison was too tough. Everyone chewed silently. Tyler, who seemed to almost never speak, stood close by Elizabeth and stared into the flames.
Clark glanced at his watch. The plane had departed five hours ago. It was nearing the western edge of the continent, or it had been forced to land on an unlit runway somewhere short of California, or it had plummeted into some dark landscape in flames. It would land in Los Angeles and the passengers would walk out into a different world, or it would land and be overcome by a mob, or it would crash into runways clogged with other planes. The passengers would find their families again, or they wouldn’t. Was there still electricity in Los Angeles? All those solar panels in the southern light. All his memories of that city. Miranda at the dinner party, smoking outside while her husband flirted with his next wife. Arthur sunning himself by the pool, a pregnant Elizabeth dozing by his side.
“I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” she said now, shivering in the firelight, and Clark could think of absolutely nothing to say.
The departure of the Los Angeles flight left two pilots, Stephen and Roy. Roy announced his intention to fly out the day after the Los Angeles flight departed.
“Just reconnaissance,” he said. “I figure I’ll fly up to Marquette—I’ve got a buddy up there—I’ll take a look around, try to get some information on what’s going on, maybe get some supplies, and come back.”
He left alone the next morning in a small plane. He didn’t return.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Elizabeth insisted. “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?”
“Well,” Clark offered, “it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?” They were sitting together in the Skymiles Lounge, where Elizabeth and Tyler had set up camp.
“I don’t know.” Elizabeth spoke slowly, looking out at the tarmac. “I’ve been taking art history classes on and off for years, between projects. And of course art history is always pressed up close against non-art history, you see catastrophe after catastrophe, terrible things, all these moments when everyone must have thought the world was ending, but all those moments, they were all temporary. It always passes.”
Clark was silent. He didn’t think this would pass.
Elizabeth began telling him about a book she’d read once, years ago when she’d been stuck—but not this stuck, obviously—in an airport, and it was a vampire book, actually, not her usual sort of thing, but it had a device she kept thinking of. The setup was post-apocalyptic, she said, so you naturally assumed as you were reading it that the world had ended, all of it, but then it became clear through an ingenious flash-forward device that actually it wasn’t all of civilization that was lost, it was just North America, which had been placed under quarantine to keep the vampirism from spreading.
“I don’t think this is a quarantine,” Clark said. “I think there’s actually really nothing out there, or at least nothing good.”
There were in fact a number of solid arguments against the quarantine theory, namely that the pandemic had started in Europe, the last news reports had indicated chaos and disarray on every continent except Antarctica, and anyway how would one even go about isolating North America in the first place, given air travel and the fact that South America was after all more or less attached?
But Elizabeth was unshakable in her convictions. “Everything happens for a reason,” she said. “This will pass. Everything passes.” Clark couldn’t bring himself to argue with her.
Clark was careful to shave every three days. The men’s rooms were windowless, lit only by an ever-dwindling supply of scented candles from the gift shop, and the water had to be warmed over the fire outside, but Clark felt it was worth the effort. Several of the men in the airport weren’t shaving at all anymore, and the effect was wild and also frankly unflattering. Clark disliked the general state of unshavenness, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because he was a believer in the broken-windows theory of urban-crime management, the way the appearance of dereliction can pave the way for more serious crimes. On Day Twenty-Seven he parted his hair neatly down the middle and shaved off the left side.
“It’s the haircut I had from ages seventeen through nineteen,” he told Dolores when she raised an eyebrow at him. Dolores was a business traveler, single, no family, which meant that she was one of the saner people in the airport. She and Clark had an agreement: she’d promised to tell him if he began showing signs of having lost his mind, and vice versa. What he didn’t tell her was that after all these years of corporate respectability, the haircut made him feel like himself again.
The maintenance of sanity required some recalibrations having to do with memory and sight. There were things Clark trained himself not to think about. Everyone he’d ever known outside the airport, for instance. And here at the airport, Air Gradia 452, silent in the distance near the perimeter fence, by unspoken agreement never discussed. Clark tried not to look at it and sometimes almost managed to convince himself that it was empty, like all of the other planes out there. Don’t think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don’t think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don’t think about those last few hours on board.
Snow fell every few days after Roy left, but Elizabeth insisted on keeping a runway clear at all times. She was beginning to stare in a terrible way that made everyone afraid of her, so at first she was out there alone, shoveling the snow on Runway Seven by the hour, but then a few people went out to join her because celebrity still carried a certain currency and there she was all alone out there, gorgeous and single—and also, why not? Physical labor outdoors was preferable to wandering the same hatefully unchanging concourses or sitting around thinking about all the beloved people they were never going to see again or convincing themselves they heard voices coming from the Air Gradia jet. Eventually there were nine or ten people maintaining the runway, a core group who attracted volunteers from the periphery every now and again. Why not, though, really? Even if Elizabeth’s quarantine theory was too wonderful to be true—the idea that somewhere things continued on as before, untouched by the virus, children going to school and to birthday parties and adults going to work and meeting for cocktails in some other place, everyone talking about what a shame it was that North America had been lost but then the conversation eventually turning to sports, politics, the weather—there was still the military, with its secrets and its underground shelters, its stockpiles of fuel and medicine and food.
“They’ll need a clear runway to land on when they come for us,” Elizabeth said. “They’re going to come for us. You know that, right?”
“It’s possible,” Clark said, trying to be kind.
“If anyone was coming for us,” Dolores said, “I think they’d be here by now.”
But they did see an aircraft after the collapse, just one. On Day Sixty-five a helicopter crossed the sky in the far distance, the faintest vibration of sound moving rapidly from north to south, and they stood staring for some time after it passed. They kept up a vigil for a while after that, waiting outside in teams of two with brightly colored T-shirts to flag down aircraft in daylight, a signal fire burning all night, but nothing crossed the sky except birds and shooting stars.
The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes. When Clark first noticed this, he wondered if he was possibly hallucinating. He assumed he held deep reservoirs of unspeakable damage that might at any moment blossom into insanity, the way his grandmother’s bone cancer had bloomed dark over the X-rays in her final months. But after a couple of weeks he felt that the thing with the stars was too consistent to be a hallucination—also too extreme, the way the airplanes cast shadows even when the moon was only a sliver—so he risked mentioning it to Dolores.
“It’s not your imagination,” Dolores said. He’d begun to think of her as his closest friend. They’d spent a pleasantly companionable day indoors, cleaning, and now they were helping build a bonfire with branches someone had dragged in from the woods. She explained it to him. One of the great scientific questions of Galileo’s time was whether the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. Impossible to imagine this ever having been in question in the age of electricity, but the night sky was a wash of light in Galileo’s age, and it was a wash of light now. The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark’s spine.
“The lights will come back on someday,” Elizabeth kept insisting, “and then we’ll all finally get to go home.” But was there actually any reason to believe this?
The citizens of the airport had taken to meeting at the bonfire every night, an unspoken tradition that Clark hated and loved. What he loved was the conversation, the moments of lightness or even just silence, the not being by himself. But sometimes the small circle of people and firelight seemed only to accentuate the emptiness of the continent, the loneliness of it, a candle flickering in vast darkness.
It’s surprising how quickly the condition of living out of a carry-on suitcase on a bench by a departure gate can begin to seem normal.
Tyler wore a sweater of Elizabeth’s that went to his knees, the increasingly filthy sleeves rolled up. He kept to himself mostly, reading his comic books or Elizabeth’s copy of the New Testament.
They traded languages. By Day Eighty most of the people who’d arrived without English were learning it, in informal groups, and the English speakers were studying one or more of the languages carried here by Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Air France. Clark was learning French from Annette, who’d been a Lufthansa flight attendant. He whispered phrases to himself as he went about the chores of daily existence, the hauling of water and washing of clothes in the sink, learning to skin a deer, building bonfires, cleaning. Je m’appelle Clark. J’habite dans l’aeroport. Tu me manques. Tu me manques. Tu me manques.
A rape on the night of Day Eighty-five, the airport woken after midnight by a woman’s scream. They tied the man up until sunrise and then drove him into the forest at gunpoint, told him if he returned he’d be shot. “I’ll die out here alone,” he said, sobbing, and no one disagreed but what else could they do?
“Why has no one come here?” Dolores asked. “That’s what I keep wondering. I don’t mean rescue. I just mean people wandering in.” The airport wasn’t especially remote. Severn City was no more than twenty miles away. No one walked in, but on the other hand, who was left? Early reports had put the mortality rate at 99 percent.
“And then one has to account for societal collapse,” Garrett said. “There might be no one left.” He was a businessman from the east coast of Canada. He’d been wearing the same suit since his flight had landed, except now he was pairing it with a Beautiful Northern Michigan T-shirt from the gift shop. He was bright-eyed in a way that Clark found disconcerting. “The violence, maybe cholera and typhoid, all the infections that were cured by antibiotics back when it was possible to obtain antibiotics, and then things like bee stings, asthma … Does anyone have a cigarette?”
“You’re funny,” Annette said. She’d run out of nicotine patches on Day Four. During a particularly rough stretch a few weeks back, she’d tried to smoke cinnamon from the coffee kiosk.
“Was that a no? And diabetes,” Garrett said, apparently forgetting the cigarette. “HIV. High blood pressure. Types of cancer that responded to chemotherapy, when chemotherapy was available.”
“No more chemotherapy,” Annette said. “I’ve thought of that too.”
“Everything happens for a reason,” Tyler said. Clark hadn’t noticed his approach. Tyler had been wandering the airport of late, and he had a way of moving so quietly that he seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He spoke so rarely that it was easy to forget he was there. “That’s what my mom said,” he added when everyone stared at him.
“Yeah, but that’s because Elizabeth’s a fucking lunatic,” Garrett said. Clark had noticed that he had a filter problem.
“In front of the kid?” Annette was twisting her Lufthansa neck scarf between her fingers. “That’s his mother you’re talking about. Tyler, don’t listen to him.” Tyler only stared at Garrett.
“I’m sorry,” Garrett said to Tyler. “I was out of line.” Tyler didn’t blink.
“You know,” Clark said, “I think we should consider sending out a scouting party.”
The scouts left at dawn on Day One Hundred: Tyrone, Dolores, and Allen, a schoolteacher from Chicago. There was some debate over whether the scouting party was actually a good idea. They’d been able to kill enough deer to live on and they had what they needed here, barely, except for soap and batteries, which they’d run out of, and what could possibly be out there except the pandemic? Nonetheless, the scouting party set out armed with Tyrone’s TSA handgun and some road maps.
The silence of Day One Hundred. Waiting for the scouting party to return with supplies, or return carrying the flu, or return trailing unhinged survivors who wanted to kill everyone, or not return at all. It had snowed the night before and the world was still. White snow, dark trees, gray sky, the airline logos on the tails of grounded airplanes the only splashes of color in the landscape.
Clark wandered into the Skymiles Lounge. He’d been avoiding it lately, because he’d been avoiding Elizabeth, but it was a reliably quiet corner of the airport and he liked the armchairs with the views over the tarmac. He stood looking out at the line of planes and for the first time in a while he found himself thinking of Robert, his boyfriend. Robert was a curator—had been a curator? Yes, probably Robert existed in the past tense along with almost everyone else, try not to think about it—and when Clark turned away from the window, his gaze fell on a glass display case that had once held sandwiches.
If Robert were here—Christ, if only—if Robert were here, he’d probably fill the shelves with artifacts and start an impromptu museum. Clark placed his useless iPhone on the top shelf. What else? Max had left on the last flight to Los Angeles, but his Amex card was still gathering dust on the counter of the Concourse B Mexican restaurant. Beside it, Lily Patterson’s driver’s license. Clark took these artifacts back to the Skymiles Lounge and laid them side by side under the glass. They looked insubstantial there, so he added his laptop, and this was the beginning of the Museum of Civilization. He mentioned it to no one, but when he came back a few hours later, someone had added another iPhone, a pair of five-inch red stiletto heels, and a snow globe.
Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.
The scouting party returned the next day, exhausted and cold, with three steel carts from an industrial kitchen, piled high with supplies. They’d found a Chili’s that no one had looted yet, they said, and they’d spent the night shivering in booths. They had toilet paper, Tabasco sauce, napkins, salt and pepper, enormous tins of tomatoes, dinnerware and bags of rice, gallons of pink hand soap.
They said that just out of sight along the road there was a roadblock, a sign warning of quarantine. No one had come to the airport because the sign said the flu was here, sick passengers, keep out. Beyond the roadblock, abandoned cars as far as they could see, some with bodies inside. They’d come upon a hotel near the airport and had debated going in for sheets and towels, but the smell was such that they’d known what was waiting in the darkened lobby and had decided against it. Then the fast-food restaurants a little down the road. They’d seen no other people.
“What was it like out there?” Clark asked.
“It was silent,” Dolores said. She’d been surprised by the emotion that had overtaken her on the return, when the scouting party had struggled past the roadblock with their carts of supplies, their napkins and their clinking bottles of Tabasco sauce, up the airport road and then the airport had come into view between the trees. Home, she’d thought, and she’d felt such relief.
A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”
But the first man who walked in under low gray skies seemed less dangerous than stunned. He was dirty, of indeterminate age, dressed in layers of clothes, and he hadn’t shaved in a long time. He appeared on the road with a gun in his hand, but he stopped and let the gun fall to the pavement when Tyrone shouted for him to drop it. He raised his hands over his head and stared at the people gathering around him. Everyone had questions. He seemed to struggle for speech. His lips moved silently, and he had to clear this throat several times before he could speak. Clark realized that he hadn’t spoken in some time.
“I was in the hotel,” he said finally. “I followed your footprints in the snow.” There were tears on his face.
“Okay,” someone said, “but why are you crying?”
“I’d thought I was the only one,” he said.