CZM Book Club: Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy, by Charlie Jane Anders, Part Two

0:01 Cool Zone Media book Club. The Club, The Club, the Club. Hello, I'm welcome to Clozone Media book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. I'm your host, Margaret Kildoy. And this is part two of a two part story, which means that if you didn't listen to part one, you won't have heard half the story. And it's up to you how you feel about that. What I would feel is really negative about that. Personally, maybe you feel differently the story that you're going to hear part two of while I am slightly loopy and recording this at twelve thirty in the morning after running around being yelled at by cops in Minneapolis. The story is called Because Change was the Ocean and we lived by her Mercy

0:56 by Charlie Jane anders Ah. Today was the general stre but I didn't work until after midnight, so it doesn't count, right. I didn't break any general strikes. That's how clever I am. I actually worked all day because I work as a journalist. But whatever, anyway, we won't tell anyone I did work by reporting on the general strike. But whatever, I know you're excited about the story. I'm actually very excited about the story because change was the ocean and we lived by her mercy by Charlie Jane Anders And This story was originally published in Drowned Worlds, a twenty sixteen short story collection edited by Jonathan Stahan. We didn't have enough food for the winter after that, so a bunch of us had to make the trip up north to Marin

1:44 by boat and on foot to barter with some gun crazy farmers in the hills. And they wanted free labor in exchange for food, so we left Weao and a few others behind to work in their fields, drudging back down the hill pulling the first batch of produce and a cart. I kept looking over my shoulder to see our friends staring after us as we left them, surrounded by old dudes with rifles. I couldn't look at the community the same way after that, Yokanda fell into a depression that made here unable to speak or look anyone in the eye for days at a time, and we were all staring at the walls of our poorly repaired dormitory buildings, which looked as though a strong wind could bring them down. I kept remembering myself walking away from

2:30 those farmers the way. I told Leo it would be fine. We'd be back before anyone knew anything. This would be a funny story. Later I tried to imagine myself doing something different, putting my foot down, maybe here saying fuck this, we don't leave our own behind. It didn't seem like something I would ever do, though I had always been someone who went along with what everyone else wanted. My one big act of rebellion was coming here to burn all island, and I wouldn't have ever come if Julia hadn't already been coming. Miranda saw me coming and walked the other way. That happened a couple of times. She and I were supposed to have a fancy evening together.

3:09 I was going to give her a bath, even if it used up half my water allowance, but she canceled. We were on a tiny island, but it kept only seeing her off in the distance in a group of others, but whenever I got closer, she was gone. At last, I saw her walking on the big hill, and I followed her up there until we were almost at eye level with the Trans America Pyramid coming up out the flat water. She turned and grabbed at the collar of my shirt and part of my collar bone. You gotta let me have my day, she hissed. You can't be in my face all the time giving me that look.

3:43 You need to get out of my face. You blame me, I said, Forueo and the others for what happened. I blame you for being a clingy, wet blanket. Just leave me alone for a while. Geees And here, dear listener, I want to apologize for the fact that I'm not really doing voices for I, your narrator. Am exhausted, just really really tired, So I hope you will bear with me.

4:11 Back to the story. And then I kept walking behind her, and she turned and either made a gesture that connected with my chest or else intentionally shoved me. I fell on my butt. I nearly tumbled head over heels down the rocky slope into the water. But then I got a handhold on a dead route. Oh fuck, are you okay?

4:32 Miranda reached down to help me up, but I shook her off. I trudged down the hill alone. I kept replaying that moment in my head. When I wasn't replaying the moment when I walked away with a ton of food and left Wao and the others at gunpoint. I had thought that being here on this island meant that the only past that mattered was the grand, mysterious, rebellious history that was down there under the water in the wreckage of San Francisco, all the wild music submerged between its walls. I had thought my own personal past no longer mattered at all, until suddenly I had no mental energy for anything but replaying those two memories uglier each time around. And then someone came up to me at lunch as I sat and ate some of the proceeds

5:20 from Wayo's and densure Chris Sir Jamie, I forget which, and he whispered, I'm on your side. A few other people said the same thing. Later that day, they had my back. Miranda was a bitch. She had assaulted me. I saw other people hanging around Miranda and staring at me, talking in her ear, telling her that I was a problem and they were with her. I felt like crying, except that I couldn't find enough moisture inside me. I didn't know what to say to the people who were on my side. I was too scared to speak I wished Yukanda would wake up and tell everybody to quit it, to just get back to work and play and stop fomenting.

6:04 The next day, I went to the dining area, sitting at the other end of the long table from Miranda and her group of supporters. Miranda stood up so fast she knocked her own food on the floor, and she shouted at Yasny, just leave me the fuck alone. I don't want you on my side or anybody else. There are no sides. This is none of your business, you people, you goddamn people. What are you people even about. She got up and left, kicking the wall on her way out.

6:34 After that, everybody was on my side. Six The honeymoon was over, but the marriage was just starting. I rediscovered social media. I'd let my friendships with people back in Fairbanks and elsewhere run to seed during all this weird but now I reconnected with people I hadn't talked to in a year or so. Everybody kept saying that Olympia had gotten really cool since I left. There was a vibrant music scene now, and people were publishing zooit books and having storytelling slams and stuff. And meanwhile the government and Fairbanks had decided to cool it on, trying to make the coast fall into line, though there was talk about some kind of loose articles of confederation at some point. Meanwhile, we'd even made serious inroads against the warlords of Nevada.

7:25 I started looking around the dormitory buildings and kitchens and communal play spaces of Bernal, and at our ocean reclamation machines as if I was trying to commit them to memory. One minute, I was looking at all of it as if this could be the last time I would see any of it. But the next minute, I was just making peace with it so I could stay forever. I could just imagine how this moment could be the beginning of a new, more mature relationship with the wrong headed crew, where I wouldn't have any more illusions, but that would make my commitment even stronger. I sat with Yokanda and a few others on that same stretch of shore where we'd all stood naked and launched candles, and we held hands.

8:31 After a while, Yukanda smiled, and I felt like se was coming back to us. So it was like the heart of our community was restored decay as part of the process decay keeps the ocean warm. Today Yokanda had wild hair with some bright colors in it, and a single strand of beard and nodded. Instead of the guilt or fear or selfish anxiety that I've been so aware of having inside me, I felt a weird feeling of acceptance.

9:03 We were strong, we would get through this. We were wrong headed. I went out in a dinghy and sailed around the big island, went up towards the ruins of telegraph. I sailed right past the Newsome spire, watching its carbon fiber cladding flake away like shiny confetti. The water looked so opaque it was like sailing on milk. I sat there in the middle of the city, a few miles from anyone, and felt totally peaceful. I had a kick of guilt at being so selfish, going off on my own when the others could probably use another pair of hands.

9:42 But then I decided it was okay. I needed this time to myself. It would make me a better member of the community. When I got back to Bernaul, I felt calmer than I had in ages, and I was able to look at all the others, even made who still gave me the murder eye from time to time with patient and love. They were all my people. I was lucky to be among them. I had this beautiful moment that night, standing by a big bonfire with the rest of the crew, half of us some level of naked, and everybody looked radiant and free. I started to hum to myself and it turned into a song, one of the old songs that Zell had supposedly brought back from digital extinction. It had this chorus about the wild kids and the war dance and a bridge that doubled back

10:29 on itself, and I had this feeling like maybe the honeymoon is over, but the marriage is just beginning. Then I found myself next to Miranda, who kicked at some embers with her boot. I'm glad things calmed down, I whispered. I didn't mean for anyone to get so crazy. We were all just on edge and it was a bad time. Huh, Miranda said, I noticed you never told your peeps to cool it, even after I told the people defending me to show their faces. Oh, I said, but he actually, And then I didn't know what to say. I felt the feeling of helplessness trapped in the grip of the past coming back again. I mean, I tried, I'm really sorry whatever Miranda said. I'm leaving soon, probably going back to Anheim Diego. I heard they made some progress with

11:23 the Nanomex after all. Oh, I looked into the fire until my rentnas were all blotchy. I'll miss you whatever Miranda slipped away. I tried to mourn her going, but then I realized I was just relieved. I wasn't going to be able to deal with her hanging around like a bruise when I was trying to move forward. With Miranda gone, I could maybe get back to feeling happy here.

11:52 Yokanda came along when we went back into Marin to get the rest of the food from those farmers and collect Wayo and the two others we had left there. We climbed the steep path from the water, and Yokanda kept needing to rest close to the water. Everything was the kind of salty and moist that had gotten used to but after a few miles everything got dry and dusty.

12:13 By the time we got to the farm, we were thirsty and we'd used up all our water, and the farmer saw us coming and got their rifles out. Our friends had run away. The farmer said, way and the others a few weeks earlier, and they didn't know where. They just ran off, left the work half done, so too bad. We weren't going to get all the food we had been promised. Nothing personal. The lead farmer said he had sunburnt cheeks, even though he wore a big straw hat. I watched Yukanda's face pass through shock, anger, misery, and resignation without a single word coming out. The farmers had their guns slung over their shoulders enough of a threat without even needing to aim. We took the cart half full of food instead of all the way full

13:04 back down the hill to our boat. We never found out what actually happened to Wayo and the others. Seven. That's such an inappropriate line of inquiry. I don't even know how to deal. I spent a few weeks pretending I was in it for the long haul and Bernhall Island after we got back from Marin. This was my home.

13:49 I had formed an identity here that meant the world to me, and these people were my family. Of course I was staying, and one day I realized I was just trying to make up my whether to go back to Olympia, or all the way back to Fairbanks. In Fairbanks, they knew how to make thick cut toast with eggs smeared across it. You could go out dancing in half a dozen different speakeasies that stayed open until dawn. I missed being in a real city, kind of. I realized I'd already decided to leave San Francisco a while ago, without ever consciously making the decision. Everyone I had ever had a crush on I had hooked up with already.

14:31 Some of them I still hooked up with sometimes, but it was nostalgia sex rather than anything else. I was actually happier sleeping alone. I didn't want anybody else's knees cramping my thighs in the middle of the night. I couldn't forgive the people who sided with Miranda against me, and I was even less able to forgive the people who sided with me against Miranda. I didn't like to dwell on stuff, but there were a lot of people I had obscure unspoken grudges against all around me. And then occasionally I would stand in the spot where I'd watched Wayo sit and build a tiny raft out of sticks and I would feel that anger rise up all over again at myself. Mostly, I wondered about what Miranda was doing now, and whether we would ever be able

15:17 to face each other again. I'd been so happy to see her go, but now I couldn't stop thinking about her. The only time I even wondered about my decision was when I looked at the ocean and the traces of the dead city underneath it, the amazing heritage that we were carrying on here. Sometimes I stared into the waves for hours, trying to hear the sound waves trapped in them.

15:42 But then I started to feel like maybe the ocean had told me everything. It was ever going to. The ocean always sang the same notes, It always passed over the same streets and came back with the same sad laughter, And staring down at the ocean only reminded me of how we thought we could help to heal her with our enzyme treatments a little at a time. I couldn't see why I had ever believed in that fairy tale the ocean was going to heal on her own sooner or later. But in the meantime, we were just giving her meaningless therapy that made us feel better more than it actually helped. I got up every day and did my chores. I helped to repair the walls and tend the gardens and stuff. But I felt like I was

16:29 just turning wheels to keep a giant machine going so that I would be able to keep turning the wheels tomorrow. I looked down at my own body, at the loose kelp and hemp garments I'd started wearing since I'd moved here. I looked at my hands and forearms, which were thicker, calloused, and more veiny with all the hard work I'd been doing here, but also the thousands of rhinestones in my fingernails glittered in the sunlight, and I felt like I moved differently than I used to. Even with every shitty thing that had happened, I'd learned something here, and wherever I went from now on, I would always be wrongheaded.

17:11 I left without saying anything to anybody, the same way everyone else had. A few years later, I had drinks with Miranda on that new floating platform that hovered over the wasteland of North America. Somehow we floated half a mile above the desert, and the mountaintops don't ask me how, but it was carbon neutral and all that good stuff.

17:33 From up here, the hundreds of miles of parched earth looked like piles of gold. It's funny, right, Miranda seemed to have guessed what I was thinking all that time. We were going on about the ocean and how is our lover and our history and all that jazz. But look at that desert down there. It's all beautiful too.

17:54 It's another wounded environment, sure, but it's also a lovely fragment of the past. All sweated and died for that land, and maybe one day it'll come back.

18:03 You know.

18:05 Miranda was, I guess, in her early thirties, and she looked amazing. She'd got in the snaggle taken out of her teeth, and her hair was a perfect wave. She wore a crisp suit. It seemed powerful and relaxed. She'd become an important person in the world of Nanomex. I stopped staring at Miranda and looked over the railing down at the dunes. We'd made some pretty major progress at rooting out the warlords, but still nobody wanted to live there, and the vast majority of the continent, the desert was beautiful from up here, but maybe not so much up close.

18:43 I heard Yokanda killed herself, Miranda said a while ago, not because of anything in particular that had happened, just the depression I caught up with here. She shook her head. God, see, was such an amazing leader. But hey, the wrong headed community is twice the size it was when you and I lived there, and they expanded onto the Big Island.

19:06 I even heard they got a seat at the table of the Confederation talks. Sucks that Yokanda won't see what Sea built, get that recognition. I was still dressed like a wrongheaded person, even after a few years. I had the loose, flowy garments, the smudgy paint on my face that helped obscure my gender rather than serving as a guide to it, the straight line, thin eyebrows, and sparkly earrings and nails. I hadn't lived on Bernal in years, but it was still a huge part of who I was.

19:36 Miranda looked like this whole other person, and I didn't know whether to feel ashamed that I had moved on, or contemptuous of her for selling out, or some combination. I didn't know anybody who dressed the way Miranda was dressed. Because I was still in an olympia where we were being radical artists. I wanted to say something, an apology or something sentimental about the amazing time we had shared, or I don't even know what. I didn't actually know what I wanted to say, and I had no words to put it into. So after a while I just raised my glass and we toasted to wrong headedness. Miranda laughed that same old, wild laugh as our glasses touched.

20:18 Then we went back down to staring at the wasteland, trying to imagine how many generations it would take before something green came out of it. The thanks at the end of this from the author that are in the original textas thanks to Burrito Justice for the map and Terry Johnson for the biotech insight, and what Charlie Jane Andrews wrote about the story. What the author wrote about the story for her short story collection Even Greater Mistakes quote.

20:49 After I wrote My Breath is a Rudder, a story about people building a seawall to predict San Francisco from rising sea levels, I always meant to go back and write another queer first person story that takes place after San Francisco is claimed by the ocean, enter Jonathan Strahan, who asked me to contribute to a post climate change anthology called Drowned Worlds. I had a lot of fun imagining the San Francisco Archipelago using a map that Brian Stokel and Burito Justice had created of the city following two hundred feet of sea level rise. Still, I had a lot of trouble finding my way into this story because I was feeling burned out on depressing post apocalyptic tales.

21:30 Then my partner Annelie Knwitz asked me why exactly this story had to be depressing or post apocalyptic. Why not write about people who were rebuilding and bouncing back. This insight gave me the breakthrough I needed, and this became a hopeful story about young people living their lives and building something new in the wake of catastrophic climate change.

21:51 That's the end of the piece from Charlie. And it's really funny to me because especially the second half of the story isn't really very helpful to me. Instead of for me, it's this very nostalgic piece. You know this especially thinking about this like being still dressing, wrong headed and hanging out with someone who's like basically a yuppy now, right or are they right? Or they're like presenting that they're like wearing a suit and they seem to have their shit together, right, But it's like interesting because I'm reading what they're claiming to have accomplished, like, ah, we've pushed back the warlords, but no one actually wants to live in the desert. And then I'm like, well, the warlords were living in the desert. I don't know, but

22:30 it's so interesting to me. You know. Maybe it's interesting to me because I'm sitting here wearing my punk clothes.

22:36 Yeah.

22:37 I don't know if I have too much to say about the story that I haven't already said, but it sits in my head, this way of expressing what it feels like to have been part of a culture and moves on. But also, like, my god, the part about WAYO is so dark. It's so dark, Like, but I think about how, you know, getting through those youthful years of like more full subculture where I'm like, oh, this is my family. I'll be in it forever, and I'm like, man, a lot of those people are dead and here I am, and here you are and well, I don't know. Take care of each other, love each other, Meet your neighbors, whether or not you like your neighbors, meet your neighbors.

23:23 We have to keep each other safe. Fuck Ice and I'll talk to you next week.

23:30 It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources where it Could Happen here, updated and monthly at coolzonemedia.

23:45 Dot com slash sources.

23:47 Thanks for listening.