A Good Dream

The novel Station Eleven—an immediate addition to my short list of favorite books—imagines the world after the global political economy has disintegrated. A flu pandemic has killed almost all humans, and the ones who remain inhabit the kinds of traveling bands or small encampments that are only vaguely familiar to most of us. There is no gasoline, no Internet, no electricity.

“I dreamt last night I saw an airplane,” Dieter whispered. They were lying a few feet apart in the dark of the tent. They had only ever been friends—in a hazy way Kirsten thought of him as family—but her thirty-year-old tent had finally fallen apart a year ago and she hadn’t yet managed to find a new one. For obvious reasons she was no longer sharing a tent with Sayid, so Dieter, who had one of the largest tents in the Symphony, had been hosting her. Kirsten heard soft voices outside, the tuba and the first violin on watch. The restless movements of the horses, penned between the three caravans for safety.

“I haven’t thought of an airplane in so long.”

“That’s because you’re so young.” A slight edge to his voice. “You don’t remember anything.”

“I do remember things. Of course I do. I was eight.”

Dieter had been twenty years old when the world ended. The main difference between Dieter and Kirsten was that Dieter remembered everything. She listened to him breathe.

“I used to watch for it,” he said. “I used to think about the countries on the other side of the ocean, wonder if any of them had somehow been spared. If I ever saw an airplane, that meant that somewhere planes still took off. For a whole decade after the pandemic, I kept looking at the sky.”

“Was it a good dream?”

“In the dream I was so happy,” he whispered. “I looked up and there it was, the plane had finally come. There was still a civilization somewhere. I fell to my knees. I started weeping and laughing, and then I woke up.”

Leaving New Orleans by jet yesterday morning only a couple of weeks after reading that book, flying—with wifi on a tablet!—felt miraculous again. As we lifted away from the airport an hour after sunrise on a clear day, I could see a dozen freighters lined up on the Mississippi, a vast industrial plant of some kind billowing steam on the adjacent shore, a railway spreading like capillaries as it ran out of the plant.

As we inhabit that world, it feels inevitable, but it was not. Our political economy is as natural as a termite mound, but it did not have to arise and cohere, to turn out like this—to turn out at all.

Nor does it have to persist. The first and only other time I visited New Orleans was in 2010, for the same conference in the same part of town—the Warehouse District, next to the river. Back then, a little closer to Katrina, visual reminders of the flood that already happened gave that part of the city an eerie feel. I stayed in hotel a half-mile south of the conference venue, and the walk to the Hilton led me past whole blocks that were still mostly empty, fresh coats of bright paint covering the facades that water had submerged five years before.

Now, with pictures in the news of tunnels scratched out of huge snow banks in Boston and Manhattan ringed by ice, it’s the future flood that haunts New Orleans in my mind as I walk back from an excursion to the French Quarter to get the best possible version of a drink made from boiled water and beans grown thousands of miles away, scores of Mardi Gras bead strings still hanging from some gutters. Climate change is “weirding” our weather, rendering the models we use to anticipate events like Katrina less and less reliable. A flood will happen again, probably sooner than we expect, and yet here everybody is, returning and rebuilding and cavorting right where all that water will want to go.