A gripping and hauntingly prescient novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life after a black hole consumes Israel, setting off a chain of global anomalies plunging the world into a time of peril and miracles.
When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as mysterious anomalies spread across the globe, suddenly the world teeters on the brink of chaos. As antisemitic paranoia and violence escalate, Jewish citizens Ethan and Ella find themselves navigating a landscape fraught with danger and uncertainty.
Ella, a dedicated photojournalist, captures the shifting dynamics of their nameless American city, documenting the resilience and struggles of its Jewish residents. Some are drawn to the anomalies, disappearing into an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the world, while others form militias in the south. Yet, Ethan, Ella, and her young son Michael choose to remain, seeking solace in small joys amidst the hostility.
But then thousands of commercial planes vanish from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, an area sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, they form a fragile new society.
Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and brilliantly conceived, Next Stop is a masterful blend of speculative fiction and family drama. Invoking biblical and historical themes in a world eerily similar to our own, it is a profound exploration of memory, identity, and survival.
A gripping and hauntingly prescient novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life after a black hole consumes Israel, setting off a chain of global anomalies plunging the world into a time of peril and miracles.
When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as mysterious anomalies spread across the globe, suddenly the world teeters on the brink of chaos. As antisemitic paranoia and violence escalate, Jewish citizens Ethan and Ella find themselves navigating a landscape fraught with danger and uncertainty.
Ella, a dedicated photojournalist, captures the shifting dynamics of their nameless American city, documenting the resilience and struggles of its Jewish residents. Some are drawn to the anomalies, disappearing into an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the world, while others form militias in the south. Yet, Ethan, Ella, and her young son Michael choose to remain, seeking solace in small joys amidst the hostility.
But then thousands of commercial planes vanish from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, an area sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, they form a fragile new society.
Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and brilliantly conceived, Next Stop is a masterful blend of speculative fiction and family drama. Invoking biblical and historical themes in a world eerily similar to our own, it is a profound exploration of memory, identity, and survival.
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Overview
A gripping and hauntingly prescient novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life after a black hole consumes Israel, setting off a chain of global anomalies plunging the world into a time of peril and miracles.
When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as mysterious anomalies spread across the globe, suddenly the world teeters on the brink of chaos. As antisemitic paranoia and violence escalate, Jewish citizens Ethan and Ella find themselves navigating a landscape fraught with danger and uncertainty.
Ella, a dedicated photojournalist, captures the shifting dynamics of their nameless American city, documenting the resilience and struggles of its Jewish residents. Some are drawn to the anomalies, disappearing into an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the world, while others form militias in the south. Yet, Ethan, Ella, and her young son Michael choose to remain, seeking solace in small joys amidst the hostility.
But then thousands of commercial planes vanish from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, an area sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, they form a fragile new society.
Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and brilliantly conceived, Next Stop is a masterful blend of speculative fiction and family drama. Invoking biblical and historical themes in a world eerily similar to our own, it is a profound exploration of memory, identity, and survival.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781668066638 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 09/10/2024 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter I
ETHAN AND ELLA MET IN a coworking space, one of the airy open-plan offices that were common in their city at that time. Ethan had worked there longer and he liked the office, which was on the twenty-sixth floor of a tall building. It was full of plants and full of light and there was a balcony on the eastern side with a rock garden and benches and he would often sit outside, even in the fall and early spring, and this reminded him of his childhood during the pandemic. He remembered windows, high places, the cold.
During those years they lived in a very tall building in a different city. They were meant to live in that apartment for only six months, while his parents looked for a house, but that was not what happened. Life was predictable and orderly until it was not, and in the end they lived there almost three years, from when he was six until he was eight. He learned to read. His parents argued and reconciled endlessly. His great-grandmother, whom he did not remember, died.
The schools did not reopen for more than a year in that city, and he cycled through many different fixations during that time—dinosaurs, self-portraits, Rube Goldberg machines, unboxing videos, Zoom karate, Cosmic Kids Yoga, Minecraft, making slime. One of the most durable was folding paper airplanes with his father and then throwing them from their balcony and watching them fly out over the lake. They went through reams of paper and the airplanes were scattered everywhere, which bothered his mother and, for a while, every day, she would insist that they gather them into a pile in one corner of the room. And then, without warning, she gave up and the planes—the ones that did not make the one-way trip over the water—came to rest where they would.
Later, when he would visit his parents as an adult, he would often walk by the old building. And once, several years before he met Ella, he knocked on the door of their old apartment, 22E, and asked the couple living there if he could look around. They seemed much older to Ethan, though they really were not, and the wife was pregnant. At first, they regarded him with some suspicion. But Ethan was charming and soft-spoken, and he seemed harmless and a little lost, like a child. “I spent the pandemic here,” he said, and the husband looked at his wife and then said, “Would you like to come in?”
They spent half an hour together. They made coffee and Ethan asked for a few sheets of paper and he showed them how to fold a few airplane models. But none of them flew as far as he remembered.
ETHAN HAD NEVER THROWN AN airplane from the balcony of the office building, even after working there for four years. He thought about it, though.
He wrote for a website that covered tech trends. He did not like his job very much because his performance was tied directly to clicks and he suspected that the other writers—six of them in all—were faster and funnier than he was. And often when he could not think of anything to write about he would go out onto the balcony to look out over the city or up into the sky and sometimes he would think of the apartment on the twenty-second floor.
It was on the balcony that he first saw Ella. He was sitting on a bench in late November, looking up at the knifelike form of a peregrine falcon as it rose into the sky, when he noticed her standing near the rail on the far side. She was wearing a yellow blazer and leggings and to Ethan she looked cold and very small.
She was facing the opposite direction, so she must have assumed she was alone. He had been watching her for only a few seconds when she took a paper airplane from the pocket of her coat. After quickly adjusting the wings, she threw it out over the city. From where he was sitting, he was unable to see its flight.
When she turned, he saw her face, pale and sharp, like the airplane.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“I guess I’m worried it might land on a car and cause an accident.”
“You should worry less,” she said, and she blew air into her cupped hands and went back inside.
ETHAN DID NOT SPEAK WITH Ella again until several weeks later, when they met by chance at one of the office’s four kitchenettes. He had hoped they would talk sooner but she was there only sporadically, twice the week of the airplane, once the following week, and then not at all for two weeks after that. By then the episode on the balcony had taken on a dreamlike quality for Ethan, significant but almost forgotten. And when she came up next to him, he did not immediately recognize her.
She was studying a little packet of jerky, turning it over several times in her hands. Her fingernails were alternating shades of pink and blue—newly painted and glossy—and around her wrist were several silver bracelets, which glittered beneath the overhead lights. Everything about her was small. She had small hands and small shoulders and a small, delicate mouth. But her expression was the same as the expression he remembered from the balcony—severe and searching, and her face had a shadowy quality, despite the paleness of her skin. All of this seemed at odds with the fragile, childlike features, the small hands and the fancifully painted nails, and still she was reading the package.
“They don’t have any weird additives,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, glancing quickly to her left. “It’s not that.”
“What are you looking for?”
“It’s nothing. I was just reading the ingredients.”
“They’re good. I eat too many of those.”
She returned the packet to the jar. “I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said. She turned to leave.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Listen, I might have this wrong, but did we meet a few weeks ago on the balcony? You threw a paper airplane. That was you, right?”
“No,” she said, after a brief pause. “You must be thinking of someone else.”
“Oh,” he said. “I thought it was you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, and instead of the jerky she took a small bag of granola clusters and walked away.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, ELLA SAW him again on the balcony. He was sitting under a heat lamp, his legs beneath a blanket and his laptop balanced on his knees. It was cold outside, but he did not look cold, which she found intriguing. She was not sure why she lied about the airplane. There was no reason to lie. And now she felt guilty, though when she thought about it there really was no reason for that either because likely enough she would never speak to him again. Ella was a freelance photographer and she was stringing for a magazine that rented a few desks in the office. She would be done with the project at the end of the day and tomorrow she was planning to take her son on a train south to meet up with a friend from college. He did not seem to be enjoying his school of late and he had become increasingly anxious at home and Ella hoped that some time in a more pastoral setting would help him reset. She was not planning to return to the city for a month or so, and even then, unless she happened to take another gig at the same magazine, she would not return to that coworking space.
She watched him from behind her desk. Then she went outside. “Here,” she said, handing him an airplane and sitting down on the edge of the bench. “I’m sorry I lied earlier.”
He turned the plane over in his hands. “That’s okay. I wasn’t trying to be creepy.”
“You weren’t creepy.”
“Is this the same plane?”
“No, that one was different.”
“Did it fly well? I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.”
“It started off okay, but then it got caught in some wind and went into a spiral. It was a good one—that design won the world record for distance. This one I designed myself.”
“It feels like the weighting is pretty good.”
“You know about it?”
“I spent most of the pandemic folding airplanes with my father and throwing them from the balcony of our apartment.”
She smiled. “Me too. With my sister. I was lucky not to be an only child.”
He nodded. “That’s a funny coincidence. Did you grow up in the city?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve always lived at the center of the universe.”
“The true provincialism of a native.”
She laughed, an easy, rolling laugh. The sound of it was bright and surprising because he did not think he had said anything particularly funny. He decided that he would try to make her laugh again.
“Did you know I was lying?”
“I think I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I’m Ethan, by the way.”
“Ella.”
They were quiet for a few seconds. Ethan adjusted the wings of the plane. Then he said, “What is it that you like about them? About paper airplanes, I mean,” and she thought for a moment and said, “I guess I like them because they seem very free and very light, even when they crash.”
ETHAN ASKED AROUND BUT NOBODY else on the floor knew Ella. The magazine, he discovered, maintained a few different workspaces in that neighborhood; however, the desks in his office were used only by stringers and so none of the people using them in the weeks that followed could say who she was.
It was a culture magazine, which mostly covered life in the city. He realized that he had heard of it because a few years earlier it ran a buzzy, controversial feature about a Jewish theater company doing experimental shows in the southern part of the city, transforming several abandoned warehouses along the water into venues for immersive theatrical experiences called “the Jewholes.” But he had only read articles about the article, never the feature itself. Hoping to find whatever project she had been working on—or perhaps something she had done in the past—Ethan went to the website and looked through a few recent features, as well as some of the older, archived content. He did not find any Ellas. “Ella” had been a popular girls’ name at the time when they were born and without her last name his search for her byline elsewhere was similarly unsuccessful. And so once again, she began to fade from his mind. Then, one morning, about three weeks later, he went to the magazine’s website again and there it was: “To the Underground” by Ella Halperin.
The photographs were in color, but they were shot mostly at night and the limited blue-gray palette made them look almost black-and-white. This gave the series an otherworldly quality and as he scrolled through he had the sense that he was looking back in time. People running to or from something. People waiting to be born anew. Jews.
Particularly striking was an image of a young family, a mother, father, and two small children. They were seated in their living room, at the opening of a large gray tent, mother and father cross-legged and one child on each lap. To their left, where the flap of the tent draped down, was a neat pile of folded clothing and a line of sneakers, along with several gallon-sized jugs of water. The parents were looking straight at the camera, their eyes wide and limpid. The son was looking toward his sister, his expression simultaneously fearful and defiant; the daughter, a few years older, was holding a calico cat protectively on her lap. Below the photo was a brief description: The Geller family plans to enter the anomaly at the Northlands subway stop at the end of the coming week. When asked about their decision, Sheila and Daniel Geller, both physicians, expressed uncertainty about what they would find but cited concerns about their children’s safety in light of newly proposed restrictions. For the past several days they have practiced sleeping in the tent that they anticipate sharing on the far side. In this image, Lauren and Ezra Geller, 10 and 6, guard the family cat, which they will leave with a cousin.
Ethan was stirred by the images and also very pleased to have found Ella’s name. But because she was a freelancer, the magazine did not offer any direct contact information. And because she did not appear to have any public social media profiles, he decided to try the “Contact us” form on the website.
Hi, if possible, please pass along the following message to Ella Halperin. Thank you—
_________
Hi Ella,
It’s Ethan from the coworking space downtown. I just wanted to reach out to say that I saw your photo essay this morning. It’s so well done, really lovely. I especially liked the portrait of the Geller family. I guess it has a special resonance for me. I’d love to have a chance to ask you about it. Worst-case scenario you get a free cup of coffee. Let me know—
Ethan Block
He concluded with his email address and clicked Send. Then he stood up at his desk and walked a meandering lap around the office. He stopped twice for snacks, though he was not hungry, and both times he nervously chose a small handful of unpleasantly spicy wasabi peas, shaking them in his palm like dice. For the rest of the day he had trouble concentrating. He managed to post once about a video game controller optimized for some of the newer combat systems. But for most of the day he cast around aimlessly and refreshed his email. When Ethan’s boss found him outside looking up at the sky, he asked him, with genuine concern, if everything was all right.
“Yes, fine, absolutely,” he said.
“Because you’re a little behind, you know that, right? I just want to make sure everything is okay. I don’t just mean with work. It’s not easy for us lately.”
“Us?”
His boss lowered his voice. “Us.”
Ethan smiled and said, “Yes, of course. I really appreciate it.”
“I know you can do this,” he said. “You just have to make the decision. There is still the future to think about.”
Ethan nodded. He liked his boss. And he wanted to please him. But as he walked away Ethan had the strange impression that their whole conversation was a memory belonging to someone else, a thing of the past, just like Ella.
ELLA RECEIVED ETHAN’S MESSAGE WHILE she was still in the south. She had not thought of him since they spoke and as she watched her son run through a patch of dandelions, kicking their seeds into the wind and sunlight, she tried to recall his face. She found that she was unable to picture him clearly.
Ella had not dated very much since Michael was born, on a warm morning in early fall six years ago. A few weeks after she found out that she was pregnant, Michael’s father went north, along with many others, and did not come back. At first she was desperately angry. But the anger faded, perhaps more rapidly than she would have expected, and soon enough she felt emptied out. She had intended to terminate the pregnancy. But she kept on delaying the procedure until one morning she woke up and realized that she did not want to have the procedure at all. She still marveled at this fact. It remained shrouded in mystery.
It was a strange feature of life in their city that babies came home in cabs, on buses, on subways, as though they were people and not small gods. Ella’s mother came to the hospital to help her with the labor, which lasted through the night. In her imagination, Michael was born early in the morning, as the sun was rising over the city. This is because the last photograph she took before he was born—a view of the city from her hospital room on the fifteenth floor—was time-stamped at 5:26 a.m. The next image had been taken by her mother—a picture of Michael, still covered in blood, on a scale beneath surgical lamps—and it had the same bluish glow and so the images became entwined in her memory. In reality he was born hours later, at 10:18 a.m., when the sun was already high in the sky. But she remembered him coming at dawn.
Like all children, he disordered and remade her life. When she brought him home, carrying him up three flights of stairs in a detachable car seat, everything about her apartment seemed altered and somehow insubstantial. She said, “This is where you live now. This is your home.”
She brought him from room to room. Then she swaddled him in a blanket the way the nurse had shown her and together they lay down on the bed. His eyes were an indeterminate, watery gray and she tried to imagine how she must look to him, blurry and bright. She thought, For your sake, I would gladly burn the city to the ground, and then she whispered those words over him like a benediction.
Now, almost six and a half years later, he ran over and rested his chin on her forearm. “What are you reading?” he asked.
“Just an email.”
“Are you doing work?”
“No, it’s from somebody who liked some of my pictures.”
“Is it a friend?”
“No,” she said. “Not really. He wants to be.”
“I want you to run with me,” Michael said.
So she got up and ran.
ETHAN AND ELLA MET FOR coffee two weeks after that. The coffee shop was crowded even though coffee had become more expensive in recent years. The barista practiced making hearts on top of cappuccinos. A woman met a man who was not her husband. People sat and talked about their lives, their work, their children. They talked about the situation and the events and the holes or they did not.
Ethan chose a coffee shop near the coworking space where they met because he thought that might be convenient for her. It was not until after they had made the date that he realized he had no idea where she would be coming from. He apologized as soon as she sat down.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he said.
“It’s okay. This neighborhood is all right. I haven’t been over here for a while. Since I finished the project you saw.”
“You mentioned you were in the south for a few weeks—”
“Visiting an old friend.”
“How was it?”
“It was nice. I only wish it was closer. It’s a twelve-hour train ride. We should have flown.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You know, I’m not sure. I guess an intuition that the train would be better somehow.” She took a sip of her coffee, which she had sweetened heavily with agave.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“Uptown. We have a little two-bedroom.”
“You live with a roommate?”
“With my son.”
She watched him as he turned it over in his mind. To her surprise, though he had looked nervous and ill at ease when she first came in, he did not look that way now. He was thinking—calmly, carefully—and as he did she studied his face, brown hair and light brown eyes and a sharp, prominent nose and slightly downturned lips that made him look sad even when he was not. He was handsome, she thought, and though he was a few years older than she was—and though his short, unkempt beard was already showing small flecks of gray—there was a boyishness about his face, a youthful energy tempered by something else, melancholy, perhaps, though she was not sure.
“You have a son?” he said.
“Yes. But not a partner. It’s just us. His father went north when there was that radiation hoax at the hole in Canada. He isn’t Jewish.”
Behind him the espresso machine hissed and sent up a plume of steam. Then he said, “I should know what to ask, but I’m out of my depth.”
She was struck by his persistent calm and she smiled. It was a different smile from what he had seen before. It changed her face.
“His name is Michael,” she said. “He’s in kindergarten.”
“Where is the school?”
“He goes to a little Montessori school near us uptown. In general he really likes it, but recently there have been issues. Some of the kids started excluding him. That’s why we took a break and went south.”
“I’m sorry. I hope things are better now.”
“We’ll see. He’s still the same kid.”
“You mean he’s still Jewish?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
After a pause he said, “I’m Jewish also.”
She laughed. “You didn’t need to tell me that.”
“I know. Of course. I get nervous around pretty girls.”
She rolled her eyes. “How many times have you said that?”
“First time,” he said. Then, “You keep kosher?”
“How do you know that?”
“You didn’t eat the jerky. I realized why a little later.”
“There are some of us who still do,” she said tightly.
“I know.”
“I grew up sort of religious. I guess there are things that are hard to give up. What about you?”
“I had a bar mitzvah. That’s about it.”
“Do you still have non-Jewish friends? I mean, from before.”
“I have a friend from college, Feng. His family is from Taiwan. We talk once in a while.” He tried to gauge her response. Then he said, “So you really do keep kosher?”
“Sometimes. Anyway, that popcorn at your office is pretty good. It’s actually one of Michael’s favorite things.”
He nodded. “Maybe I could bring him a bag sometime.”
“Maybe,” she said.
WHEN THEY WERE FINISHED WITH their coffee they walked in a nearby park. They found that they had a fair amount in common. They had both attended the same university in the city (their graduating class was one of the last that included Jewish students), though they had never crossed paths. They both had parents in academia. In Ella’s case it was her mother and her father who had been professors at the university where Ethan and Ella studied.
As they exited the park, Ella told him that she needed to walk farther downtown to meet with someone about a gig and that he could walk with her if he wanted. It was a Tuesday morning and the sidewalks were busy, though less busy than they would have been only a few years ago. On the corner south of the coffee shop they passed a homeless man with a white cat and a sign that read:
alien inside my toenail riding clouds of acid.
red yellow. waterfall inside.
fuck the jews! fuck the jews! fuck the jews!
snake monsters from the holes.
please help a veteran thank you god bless
Ethan dropped a coin into his cup and Ella looked at him with surprise. He shrugged. “He’s crazy,” he said. “How can it make anything worse?” She nodded and they kept on going south.
As they walked, Ethan told her how much he really did admire her work, that it wasn’t just an excuse to ask her out, and she said that she appreciated it, which she did because she believed him and also because she knew her work was good and she enjoyed it when it was recognized as such. She asked him about his job, if he always wanted to be in journalism, and he said he wasn’t sure what he did counted as journalism and he told her how it made him anxious because he wasn’t fast enough at churning out posts. When they finally talked about the people in her photographs, a few blocks before Ella reached her destination, they disagreed stridently. Ethan thought they were outright crazy. He explained—with an off-putting grandeur that seemed out of character to Ella—that the situation would resolve itself and that the Second Event would fade and things would be fine because they were always fine.
But things weren’t always fine, she said. People leave. People run. Other people come and gather power. Or no one has power and maybe that’s worse. Just last week, she said, there was a car-bombing across the street from their apartment. You can read about it. The windows shook. And she wanted to say that because he did not yet have children he did not understand that death was unacceptable. But she did not say it.
There was still some tension between them when they arrived at the office where she was to have her meeting. Both of them felt sorry for arguing, because what was the point, really, and to make peace, she showed him a picture of Michael holding a dandelion.
“He’s beautiful,” he said. “He looks like you.” Then he asked, “Can I kiss you on the cheek?”
“Maybe next time,” she said, and then she stepped into the revolving door. It turned smoothly, carrying her easily away.
Ethan looked on from the sidewalk as her small, fragile form was blurred by the glass and by the light.