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

Margaret concludes reading you a story about subculture and love and how things change

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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,

(00:23):
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

(00:44):
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
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.

(01:08):
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

(01:28):
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
by boat and on foot to barter with some gun
crazy farmers in the hills. And they wanted free labor

(01:51):
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

(02:11):
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
those farmers the way. I told Leo it would be fine.

(02:34):
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

(02:55):
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.
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

(03:17):
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

(03:38):
let me have my day, she hissed. You can't be
in my face all the time giving me that look.
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

(03:59):
really doing voices for I, your narrator. Am exhausted, just
really really tired, So I hope you will bear with me.
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

(04:21):
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?
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

(04:42):
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

(05:05):
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
from Wayo's and densure Chris Sir Jamie, I forget which,
and he whispered, I'm on your side. A few other

(05:30):
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

(05:50):
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.
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

(06:14):
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.

(06:34):
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

(06:55):
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,

(07:20):
we'd even made serious inroads against the warlords of Nevada.
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

(07:41):
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

(08:24):
a few others on that same stretch of shore where
we'd all stood naked and launched candles, and we held hands.
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

(08:47):
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.
We were strong, we would get through this. We were
wrong headed. I went out in a dinghy and sailed

(09:12):
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

(09:32):
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.
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

(09:54):
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

(10:16):
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
on itself, and I had this feeling like maybe the
honeymoon is over, but the marriage is just beginning. Then

(10:39):
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

(10:59):
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

(11:20):
to Anheim Diego. I heard they made some progress with
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

(11:41):
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.
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

(12:03):
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.
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

(12:25):
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,

(12:49):
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
back down the hill to our boat. We never found
out what actually happened to Wayo and the others. Seven.

(13:36):
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.
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

(13:58):
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

(14:19):
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.
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

(14:42):
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

(15:03):
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
to face each other again. I'd been so happy to
see her go, but now I couldn't stop thinking about her.

(15:25):
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.
But then I started to feel like maybe the ocean
had told me everything. It was ever going to. The

(15:47):
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

(16:09):
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

(16:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
You know.

Speaker 1 (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

(18:27):
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.
I heard Yokanda killed herself, Miranda said a while ago,

(18:48):
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.
I even heard they got a seat at the table

(19:09):
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

(19:29):
earrings and nails. I hadn't lived on Bernal in years,
but it was still a huge part of who I was.
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

(19:51):
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

(20:14):
laughed that same old, wild laugh as our glasses touched.
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

(20:36):
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.
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

(20:58):
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

(21:20):
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.
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

(21:41):
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.
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

(22:02):
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

(22:23):
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
it's so interesting to me. You know. Maybe it's interesting
to me because I'm sitting here wearing my punk clothes.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (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

(23:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (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.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
Dot com slash sources.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Thanks for listening.