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the Symphony began to move again she climbed up into the back of the second caravan, where Alexandra was resting and mending a costume.
    “Okay,” Alexandra said, picking up an earlier conversation, “so when you saw the computer screen in Traverse City …”
    “What about it?”
    In Traverse City, the town they’d recently left, an inventor had rigged an electrical system in an attic. It was modest in scope, a stationary bicycle that when pedaled vigorously could power a laptop, but the inventor had grander aspirations: the point wasn’t actually the electrical system, the point was that he was looking for the Internet. A few of the younger Symphony members had felt a little thrill when he’d said this, remembered the stories they’d been told about WiFi and the impossible-to-imagine Cloud, wondered if the Internet might still be out there somehow, invisible pinpricks of light suspended in the air around them.
    “Was it the way you remembered?”
    “I don’t really remember what computer screens looked like,” Kirsten admitted. The second caravan had particularly bad shocks, and riding in it always made her feel like her bones were rattling.
    “How could you not remember something like that? It was beautiful.”
    “I was eight.”
    Alexandra nodded, unsatisfied and obviously thinking that if she’d seen a lit-up computer screen when she was eight, she’d have remembered it.
    In Traverse City Kirsten had stared at the
This webpage is not available
message on the screen. She didn’t seriously believe that the inventor would be able to find the Internet, but she was fascinated by electricity. She harbored visions of a lamp with a pink shade on a side table, a nightlight shaped like a puffy half-moon, a chandelier in a dining room, a brilliant stage. The inventor had pedaled frantically to keep the screen from flickering out, explaining something about satellites. Alexandra had been enraptured, the screen a magical thing with no memories attached. August had stared at the screen with a lost expression.
    When Kirsten and August broke into abandoned houses—this was a hobby of theirs, tolerated by the conductor because they found useful things sometimes—August always gazed longingly at televisions. As a boy he’d been quiet and a little shy, obsessed with classical music; he’d had no interest in sports and had never been especially adept at getting along with people, which meant long hours home alone after school in interchangeable U.S. Army—base houses while his brothers played baseball and made new friends. One nice thing about television shows was that they were everywhere, identical programming whether your parents had been posted to Maryland or California or Texas. He’d spent an enormous amount of time before the collapse watching television, playing the violin, or sometimes doing both simultaneously, and Kirsten could picture this: August at nine, at ten, at eleven, pale and scrawny with dark hair falling in his eyes and a serious, somewhat fixed expression, playing a child-size violin in a wash of electric-blue light. When they broke into houses now, August searched for issues of
TV Guide
. Mostly obsolete by the time the pandemic hit, but used by a few people right up to the end. He liked to flip through them later at quiet moments. He claimed he remembered all the shows: starships, sitcom living rooms with enormous sofas, police officers sprinting through the streets of New York, courtrooms with stern-faced judges presiding. He looked for books of poetry—even rarer than
TV Guide
copies—and studied these in the evenings or while he was walking with the Symphony.
    When Kirsten was in the houses, she searched for celebrity-gossip magazines, because once, when she was sixteen years old, she’d flipped through a magazine on a dust-blackened side table and found her past:
    Happy Reunion: Arthur Leander Picks Up Son Tyler in LAX

SCRUFFY ARTHUR GREETS SEVEN-YEAR-OLD TYLER ,
WHO LIVES IN JERUSALEM