On 11 March, 2004, the city of Madrid was hit by a series of devastating train bombings. The attacks and the resulting protests play an important part in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), but the novel is not simply about them. Instead, like this article, it addresses the relationship between literature and politics. Discussing the influence of John Ashbery’s and Allen Grossman’s work on Lerner, this article shows how the novel develops an understanding of literature as an immediate mediation between what is virtual, open, presence, life, event and what is actual, closed, absence, death, nonevent. Responding to Lerner’s challenge to consider “literature now,” the essay then studies the time of the event and the nonevent and, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work on democracy to come, shows how an experience of reading is, for Lerner, an experience of temporality and therefore an experience of exposure to an event to come that requires a decisive, improvised response. Concluding with the novel’s recontextualization of the Spanish government’s response to the Madrid bombings, the essay argues that an experience of literature is an experience of deciding the meaning of what is happening here and now, mirroring an experience of democratic politics.