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

Margaret reads you a story about the far-post-apocalypse and the joy we find in one another.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media book Club book Club, book Club book Club.
Hello and welcome to cools On 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 Kiljoy, And this week I have the first of
another two parter called Because Change was the Ocean and

(00:24):
we lived by her Mercy by the One, the only,
Charlie Jane Anders. There's probably not someone else named Charlie
Jane Anders. That's a very specific name. And also she's amazing,
and I'm really excited to be reading a story by
her to you all. And I'm I'm really excited to

(00:45):
read this story in particular to you. You'll probably figure
it out as I read it. Why I feel that way.
This story was originally published in Drown Worlds, a twenty
sixteen short story anthology themed around the futures Will Inherit
when the Oceans Rise, which hooray anyway. It's edited by
Jonathan Stehuan. This story, it's a love letter to San Francisco,

(01:08):
which is not the part I'm excited about. I'm gonna
be honest about that. And in a lot of ways,
it's also a story about falling in and out of
love with the community, and about aging and subculture. And
that's why I'm interested in it. I have no opinions
about that, no experience with that whatsoever, but I'm excited
to hear what you all think. So let's get into it.

(01:30):
Because change was the ocean, and we lived by her
mercy by Charlie Jane anders One. This was sacred, this
was stolen. We stood naked on the shore of Bernal
and watched the candle's float across the bay, swept by
a lazy current off to the north in the direction

(01:52):
of Protrero Island. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat
and a light after half a league, their tiny flame
sames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on
the dark water, alongside the streaks of moonlight. At times
I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto the streets
and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children's toys,

(02:15):
all the water log treasures of long gone people. We
held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the
little candle boats we'd made as they floated away. Ycondo
was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road
here beard full of flowers. We all just held our breath.

(02:37):
I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity
of the moment, like this could be the good time
we'd all remember in the bad times to come. This
was sacred, this was stolen. And then someone, probably Miranda, farted,
And then we were all laughing, and the grown up
seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling

(02:59):
over each other on the right ground and a nude heap,
scraping our knees and giggling into each other's limbs. When
we got our breath back and looked up, the candles
were all gone. Two. I felt like I had always
been wrongheaded. I couldn't deal with life in Fairbanks anymore.

(03:21):
I grew up at the same time as the town,
watched it go from regular city to megacity. As I
hit my early twenties, I lived in an old, decommissioned
solar power station with five other kids, and we tried
to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with
a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We

(03:41):
wanted to shake our cinder block walls and make people
dance until their feet bled but we sucked. We were
bad at music and not quite dumb enough to know it.
We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried
to make our own drums out of dry cloth and
cracked wood, and we read our poetry. On Friday nights.
There were book houses along with stink tanks where you

(04:04):
could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals.
People came from all over because everybody heard that Fairbanks
was becoming the most civilized place on Earth. And that's
when I decided to leave town. At this moment of
looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job
and our cool little scene and feeling like there had

(04:25):
to be more to life than this, I hitched a
ride down south and ended up in Olympia at a
house where they were growing their own food and drugs,
and doing a way better job with the drugs than
the food. We were all staring upwards at the first
cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what
it could mean when you hardly ever saw them, clouds

(04:47):
had to be omens. We were all complaining about our
dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and
I found myself talking about how my parents only liked
to listen to that boring boopop music with the same
three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA bbb
cde cde rhyme scheme, and how my mother insisted on

(05:10):
saving every scrap of organic material we used and collecting
every drop of rain water as fucking pathetic as what
it is. They act like we're still living in the
Great Decimation. They're just super traumatized, said this skinny gender
freak named Julia, who stood nearby holding the bong. It's
hard to even imagine. I mean, we're the first generation

(05:31):
that just takes it for granted we're going to survive
as like a species. Our parents, our grandparents and their grandparents,
they were all living like every day could be the
day the planet finally got done with us. They didn't
grow up having moisture condensers and micoprotein rinses and skin cys. Yeah,
whatever I said, But what Julia said stuck with me
because I had never thought of my parents as traumatized.

(05:54):
I had always thought they were just tightly wound and judgy.
Julia had two cones of dark twisty hair on Zeer
head and a red pajam zut and Ze was only
a year or two older than me, but seemed a
lot wiser. I want to find all the music we
used to have, I said, you know, the weird, noisy
shit that made people's clothes fall off and their hair

(06:15):
light on fire. The rock and roll that just listening
to it turned girls into boys, the songs that took
away the fear of God. I've read about it, but
I've never heard any of it, and I don't even
know how to play it. Yeah, all the recordings and
notations got lost in the dataclysm. Julia said. They were
in formats that nobody can read. They got corrupted where

(06:37):
they were printed on discs made from petroleum. Those songs
are gone forever. I think they're under the ocean, I said,
I think they're down there somewhere. Something about the way
I said that helped Julia reach a decision. Hey, I'm
heading back down to the San Francisco Archipelago in the morning.
I got room in my car if you want to
come with. Julia's carr was an older solar mine that

(07:00):
had to stop every couple of hours to recharge and
the self driving module didn't work so great. My legs
were resting in a pile of old head mods and biofilms,
plus those costumes that everybody used a few summers earlier.
That major skin turned into snake skin that you could
shed in one piece. So the upshot was we had

(07:21):
a lot of time to talk and hold hands and
look at the endless golden landscape stretching off to the east.
Julia had these big, bright eyes that laughed when the
rest of zir face was stone serious, and strong tentative
hands to hold me in place as Zee tied me
to the car seat with fronds of algae. I had
never felt as safe and dangerous as when I crossed

(07:43):
the wasteland with Julia. We talked for hours about how
the world needed new communities, new ways to breathe life
back into the ocean, new ways to be people. By
the time we got to Bernal Island and the wrong
Headed Community, I was in love with Juya deeper than
I had ever felt with anyone before. Julia up and
left Bernal a week and a half later because Z

(08:05):
got bored again, and I barely noticed that Z was gone.
By then, I was in love with a hundred other people,
and they were all in love with me. Bernal Island
was only accessible from one direction from the big island
in the middle, and only at a couple times a
day when they let the bridge down and turned off
the moat. After a few days on Bernal, I stopped

(08:27):
even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone
paying attention to my friends on social media talking about
all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was
constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people and the
wrong headed crew. The ocean is our lover. You can
hear it laughing at us. Yokanda was the sort of

(08:48):
leader here. See. Sometimes had a beard and sometimes a smooth,
round face covered with perfect bright makeup. Her eyes were
as gray as the sea and just as unpredictable. For decades,
sam and Sisco and other places like it had been
abandoned because the combination of seismic instability and a voracious
dead ocean made them too scary and risky. But that

(09:10):
city down there under the waves had been the place
everybody came to from all over the world to find freedom.
That legacy was ours now, and those people had brought
music from their native countries and their own cultures, and
all those sounds had crashed together in those streets night
after night. Yokanda's own ancestors had come from China and Peru,

(09:34):
and here great grandparents had played nine string guitars, melodies
and rhythms that Yokanda barely recalled. Now, listening to hear,
I almost fancied I could put my ear to the
surface of the ocean and hear all the sounds from
generations past, still reverberating. We sat all night, Yokanda, some
of the others and myself and I got to play

(09:55):
on an old school drum made of cowhide or something.
I felt like I had always been wrongheaded, and I
just never had the word for it before. Julia sent
me an email a month or two after Z left Bernal.
The moment I met you, I knew you needed to
be with the rest of those maniacs. I've never been
able to resist delivering lost children to their rightful homes.

(10:17):
It's almost the only thing I'm good at, other than
the things you already know about. I never saw Zero again,
but you'll see us again right after this ad break,

(10:41):
and we're back three I'm so glad I found a
group of people I would risk drowning in dead water for.
Back in the twenty first century, everybody had theories about
how to make the ocean breathe again. Filler with quicklimeb
to realized the acid split the water molecules into hydrogen

(11:03):
and oxygen, and bond the hydrogen with the surplus carbon
in the water to create a clean, burning hydrocarbon fuel released.
Genetically engineered fish with special gilds grow special algae that
was designed to commit suicide. After a while, spray billions
of nanotech balls into her and a few other things.
Now we had to clean up the after effects of

(11:25):
all those failed solutions while also helping the sea to
let go of all that co two from before. The
only way was the slow way. We pumped ocean water
through our special enzyme store and then through a series
of filters until what came out the other end was
clear and oxygen rich. The waste we separated out and

(11:48):
disposed of. Some of it became raw materials for shoe
soles and roof tiles. Some of it the pure organic
residue we used as fertilizer or food for our mycoprotein
I got used to staying up all night playing music
with some of the other wrongheaded kids, sometimes on the
drum and sometimes on an old stringed instrument that was

(12:08):
made of stained wood and had a leering catface under
its fret. Sometimes I thought I could hear something in
the way our halting beats and scratchy notes bounced off
the walls and the water beyond, like we were really
conjuring a lost soundtrack. Sometimes it all just seemed like
a waste. What did it mean to be a real

(12:30):
authentic person in an era when everything great from the
past was twenty feet underwater? Would you embrace prefab newness
or try to copy the images you can see from
the handful of docs we've scrounged from the dataclysm. When
we got tired of playing music an hour before dawn,
we would sit around arguing. In Inevitably, you got to

(12:51):
that moment where you were looking straight into someone else's
eyes and arguing about the past and whether the past
could ever be on land or the past was doomed
to be deep underwater forever. I felt like I was
just drunk all the time on that cheap ass vodka
that everybody chugged in Fairbanks, or maybe on nitrous. My
head was evaporating, but my heart just got more and

(13:13):
more solid. I woke up every day on my bunk
or sometimes tangled up in someone else's arms and legs
on the day bed, and felt actually jazz to get
up and go clean the scrubbers or churn the micoprotein vats.
Every time we put down the bridge to the big
Island and turned off our moat, I felt everything go
sour inside me, and my heart went funnel shaped. People

(13:36):
sometimes just wandered away from the wrong headed community without
much in the way of goodbye. That was how Julia
had gone. But meanwhile new people showed up and got
the exact same welcome that everyone had given to me.
I got freaked out thinking of my perfect home being
overrun by new selfish, blowed fuckers. Joconda had to sit

(13:56):
me down at the big table where seated all the
official business, tell me to get over myself, because change
was the ocean and we lived on her mercy. Seriously, Chris,
I ever see that look on your face, I'm going
to throw you in the microvap myself. You'll kinda stared
at me until I started laughing. And promised to get
with the program. Then one day I was sitting at

(14:20):
her big table, overlooking the streets between us and the
Big Island, staring at Sutro Tower and the taller buildings
poking out of the water here and there, and this
obnoxious skinny bitch sat down next to me, chewing in
my ear and talking about the impudence of impermanence or
some similar Miranda. She introduced herself. I just came up

(14:42):
from anheim. Diego, geez, what a mess they actually think
they could build nanomex and make it scalable. What a
bunch of poutines. Stop chewing in my ear, I muttered.
But then I found myself following her around everywhere she went.
Miranda was the one who convinced me to dive into
the chasm of Fillmore Street in search of a souvenir

(15:03):
from the old Church of John Coltrane as a present
for Yoconda. I strapped on some goggles and a big
apparatus that fed me oxygen while also helping me navigate
a little bit, and then we went out in a
dinghy that looked old enough that someone had actually used
it for fishing. Miranda gave me one of her crooked
grins and studied a wrinkled old map. I think it's

(15:24):
right around here, she laughed. Either that of the Korean
barbecue restaurant where the mayor got assassinated at one time,
not super clear which is which. I gave her a
murderous look and jumped into the water, letting myself fall
into the street at the speed of water resistance. Those
sunken buildings turned into doorways and windows facing me, but

(15:45):
they stayed blurry as the bilge flowed around them. I
could barely find my feet, let alone identify a building
on site. One of these places had been a restaurant,
I was pretty sure. Ancient automobiles lurched back and forth
like maybe even their brakes had rusted away. I figured
the Church of John Coltrane would have a spire like

(16:05):
a saxophone maybe, but all the buildings looked exactly the same.
I stumbled down the street until I saw something that
looked like a church, but it was a caved in
old McDonald's restaurant. Then I tripped over something, a down
pole or whatever, and my face mask cracked. As I
went down. The water was going down, my throat tasting
like dirt, and my vision when all pale and wavy.

(16:28):
I almost just went under, but then I thought I
could see a light up there, way above the street,
and I kicked. I kicked and chopped and made myself float.
I churned up there until I broke the surface. My
arms were thrashing above the water, and I started to
go back down, but Miranda had my neck and one shoulder.
She hauled me up and out of the water and

(16:49):
threw me into the dinghy. I was gasping and heaving
up water, and she sat and laughed at me. You
managed to gavege something, after all. She pointed to something
I'd clutched out on my way up out of the water,
a rusted, barbed old piece of a car. I'm sure
Yokando will love it, oh, I said, Fuck old San Francisco.

(17:11):
It's gross and corroded and there's nothing left of whatever
used to be cool. But hey, I'm glad I found
a group of people I would risk drowning in dead
water for. And do you know who would risk drowning
for you? Who cares so much about you that they're
willing to die for you. No, it's not religion, it's

(17:32):
the products and services that support this podcast. That's Who
and We're back four. I chose to see that as

(17:54):
a special status. Miranda had the kind of long limbed,
snaggled beauty that made you think she was born to
make trouble. She loved a roughhouse and usually ended up
with her elbow on the back of my neck as
she pushed me into the dry dirt. She loved to
invent cute and salting nicknames for me, like Dolly Press
or pre ridiculous. She never got tired of reminding me

(18:17):
that I might be a ninth level gender freak, but
I had all kinds of privilege because I grew up
in Fairbanks and never had to wonder how we were
going to eat. Miranda had this way of making me
laugh even when the news got scary. When the government
back in Fairbanks was trying to re establish control over
the whole West Coast and extinction rose up like the
shadows at the bottom of the sea, I would start

(18:39):
to feel that scab inside my stomach, like the whole, ugly,
unforgiving world could come down on us and our tiny
island sanctuary. At any moment. Miranda would suddenly start making
up a weird dancer inventing a motto for a team
of superhuman mosquitoes, And then I would be laughing so
hard that it was like I was squeezing the fear
out of my insides. Her hand were a massive scar tissue,

(19:02):
but they were as gentle as dried up blades of
grass on my thighs. Miranda had five other lovers, but
I was the only one she made fun of. I
chose to see that as a special status five What
are you people even about? Falling in love with the
community is always going to be more real than any

(19:23):
love for a single human could ever be. People will
let you down, shatter your image of them, or try
to melt down the wall between your self image and theirs.
People one at a time are too messy. Miranda was
my hero and the lover I pretty much dreamed of
since both puberties, but I also saved pieces of my
heart for a bunch of other wrongheaded people. I loved

(19:46):
Yocanda's totally random inspirations and perversions. Like all the art projects,
see started getting me to build out of scraps by
the Sunken City. After I brought back that car piece
from Fillmore Street, Zell was this hyperactive kid with wild
half braids. Why this whole theory about digging up buried
hard drives full of music files from the digital age

(20:07):
so we could reconstruct the actual sounds of Marvin Gay
and the Jenga priests. Wao used to sit with me
and watch the sunset going down over the islands. We
didn't talk a lot, except that Wao would suddenly whisper
some weird, beautiful notion about what it would be like
to live at sea one day when the sea was
alive again. But it wasn't any individual, it was the

(20:29):
whole group. We had gotten in a rhythm together, and
we all believed the same stuff, the love of the
ocean and her resilience in the face of whatever we
had done to her, and the power of silliness to
make you believe in abundance again, openness, and a kind
of generosity that is the opposite of monogamy. But then
one day I looked up and some of the faces

(20:51):
were different again. A few of my favorite people in
the community had bugged out without saying anything, and one
or two the newcomers started getting on my nerves. One person,
Mage just had a nasty temper going off at anyone
who crossed her path. Whenever z was in one of
those moods, and you could usually tell from the unruly
condition of Mage's bleach blonde hair and broke tooth scowl.

(21:15):
Mage became one of Miranda's lovers right off the bat.
Of course, I was just sitting on my hands and
biting my tongue, reminding myself that I always hated change,
and I always got used to it after a little while.
This would be fine. Change was the ocean, and she
took care of us. Then we discovered the spoilage. We
had been filtering the ocean water, removing toxic waste, filtering

(21:37):
out excess gunk, and putting some of the organic byproducts
into our micoprotein vats as a feedstock. But one day
we opened the biggest vat and the stench was so
powerful we all started to cry and wretch, and we
kept crying even after the puking stopped. Shit that was
half our food supply. It looked like our whole filtration
system was off. There were remnants of bucket struck and

(22:00):
the residue we've been feeding to our fungus, and the
fungus was choking on them. Even the fungus that wasn't
spoiled would have minimal protein yield. And this all meant
that our filtration system wasn't doing anything to help clean
the ocean at all, because it was still letting the
dead pieces of bucky crap through. Yokanda just stared at
the mess and finally shook her head and told us

(22:22):
to bury it under the big hillside. And that's where
we're gonna leave it for this week, Hazel says about it.
Hazel's the person who helps me pick stories. Hazel says, quote.
I first read this story maybe a year and a
half ago, and the way that Charlie writes about finding
your people and it just clicking is so real, Like

(22:42):
it feels like you've always been this way but didn't
have words, And that's stuck with me ever since. And
the flip side waking up one day to find that
the people you loved are gone and replaced by people
you don't. The specific combination of annoyance, nostalgia and trying
to hold onto the community that you fell in love
with is just so gripping and honestly, yeah, that's what
gets at me about this story too, like, I haven't

(23:04):
quite been in exactly this wild subculture, but I've been
in some wild subcultures where it just feels like, you know,
this is it, this is my family, this is what
I'm doing, this is everything you know, and how that
changes and how shocking it is. And I really like
how it ties that into this change of the world itself, right,

(23:27):
because we're living in this world and it's so hard
not to have in this intense grief for what's happening
to the climate, and the microcosm of that happening in
like a subculture that's changing kind of almost helps me
handle climate grief, right, because I've survived waking up and

(23:47):
finding out that the micoprotein is changed, and you know,
the person I'm seeing it was five other lovers takes
on a sixth tho I don't like and all of
that stuff, and I've survived that. I don't know that
we're going to sort of climate change, but it's still like,
on some gut level that's reassuring. I don't know. I
find it interesting, I find it beautiful. But we're only

(24:11):
halfway through the story because next week we'll finish it
to hear how our wrongheaded commune deals with losing their
food production. This has been the first part of Because
change was the ocean and we lived by her Mercy
by Charlie Jane Anders. Her latest book is called Lessons
in Magic and Disaster. It's an adult novel about a
young scholar who teaches her mother to be a witch.

(24:33):
You can keep up with her work at her newsletter
called Happy Dancing, which you can find at Buttondown dot
com slash Charlie Jane. Charlie has won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda,
Literary Crawford, and Locus Awards. She co created Escapade, a
transgender superhero for Marvel Comics, and wrote her into the
long running New Mutants comic, and she's currently the science

(24:56):
fiction and fantasy book reviewer for The Washington Post with
Annelie Wentz. She co hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are
Correct And I'm Margaret Kiljoy and you can find me
on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff for I talk
about history every week. And you can also find me
on Substack at Margaret Kiljoid at substock dot com, where

(25:16):
I talk in a newsletter every week. It's almost always free,
except for the more personal posts. And I talk about
the state of the world, and I talk a lot
about the things that this piece makes me think about,
grief and hope and how they relate. And so you
can check that out for free, and you can find
this show here. We also have our own feed too,
So if you're like, ah, I only ever listen to

(25:37):
the book Club, well you can just go and look
up the book Club now because it has its own
feed with its own art by Jonas Goonface and yeah,
you can get it wherever you find your podcasts under
the cool Zone Media book Club. I'll see you next
week for the thrilling conclusion and until then, maybe the
ocean hold you in her infinite grace and love. And
also fuck Ice, love you bye. It could happen here

(26:02):
as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts
from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia 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 monthly at Coolzonmedia dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.