“Are you busy?”
“No,” he says, sitting on his bed in the Hotel Le Germain, wondering how he’ll get out of dinner with the director this evening. “Not at all. It would be my pleasure.”
She decides it isn’t necessary to call Pablo, under the circumstances. There is a small task for Leon, who’s about to board a plane to Lisbon; she finds a file he needs and emails it to him and then returns to Station Eleven. Panels set in the Undersea, people working quietly in cavernous rooms. They live out their lives under flickering lights, aware at all times of the fathoms of ocean above them, resentful of Dr. Eleven and his colleagues who keep Station Eleven moving forever through deep space. (Pablo texts her: ??did u get my email???) They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.
Miranda is drawing Leon Prevant’s reception area before she realizes what she’s doing. The prairies of carpet, the desk, Leon’s closed office door, the wall of glass. The two staplers on her desk—how did she end up with two?—and the doors leading out to the elevators and restrooms. Trying to convey the serenity of this place where she spends her most pleasant hours, the refinement of it, but outside the glass wall she substitutes another landscape, dark rocks and high bridges.
“You’re always half on Station Eleven,” Pablo said during a fight a week or so ago, “and I don’t even understand your project. What are you actually going for here?”
He has no interest in comics. He doesn’t understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats. When sober, he suggests that she’s squandering her talent. When drunk, he implies that there isn’t much there to squander, although later he apologizes for this and sometimes cries. It’s been a year and two months since he sold his last painting. She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat.
“You don’t have to understand it,” she said. “It’s mine.”
The restaurant where she meets Arthur is all dark wood and soft lighting, the ceiling a series of archways and domes. I can use this, she thinks, waiting at the table for him to arrive. Imagining a room like this in the Undersea, a subterranean place made of wood salvaged from the Station’s drowned forests, wishing she had her sketchbook with her. At 8:01 p.m., a text from Pablo: i’m waiting. She turns off her phone and drops it into her handbag. Arthur comes in breathless and apologetic, ten minutes late. His cab got stuck in traffic.
“I’m working on a comic-book project,” she tells him later, when he asks about her work. “Maybe a series of graphic novels. I don’t know what it is yet.”
“What made you choose that form?” He seems genuinely interested.
“I used to read a lot of comics when I was a kid. Did you ever read Calvin and Hobbes?” Arthur is watching her closely. He looks young, she thinks, for thirty-six. He looks only slightly older than he did when they met for lunch seven years ago.
“Sure,” Arthur says, “I loved Calvin and Hobbes. My best friend had a stack of the books when we were growing up.”
“Is your friend from the island? Maybe I knew him.”
“Her. Victoria. She picked up and moved to Tofino fifteen years ago. But you were telling me about Calvin and Hobbes.”
“Yes, right. Do you remember Spaceman Spiff?”
She loved those panels especially. Spiff’s flying saucer crossing alien skies, the little astronaut in his goggles under the saucer’s glass dome. Often it was funny, but also it was beautiful. She tells him about coming back to Delano Island for Christmas in her first year of art school, after a semester marked by failure and frustrating attempts at photography. She started thumbing through an old Calvin and Hobbes, and thought, this. These red-desert landscapes, these skies with two moons. She began thinking about the possibilities of the form, about spaceships and stars, alien planets, but a year passed before she invented the beautiful wreckage of Station Eleven. Arthur watches her across the table. Dinner goes very late.
“Are you still with Pablo?” he asks, when they’re out on the street. He’s hailing a cab. Certain things have been decided without either of them exactly talking about it.
“We’re breaking up. We’re not right for each other.” Saying it aloud makes it true. They are getting into a taxi, they’re kissing in the backseat, he’s steering her across the lobby of the hotel with his hand on her back, she is kissing him in the elevator, she is following him into a room.