Gossamer. We snip threads without seeing them.
I taught him to fish, and he taught me how to sail his little boat around the lagoon so we didn’t have to paddle. He and his wife had left Germany many years ago to see the world together. All he talks about is her, and all I talk about is my two girls. Klaus and I both speak of recent things like they are in the far past, and sometimes the words are hard to get out.
I don’t ask much about Suva. I don’t tell him about my wife. I fear the worst.
A French family was the next to arrive. They came in a catamaran. They’d been living up in Namuka with the villagers there, but said one day the chief came and told them sevusevu was no more. They had to go.
Rumor is that one of their sons was thinking of taking a wife and that this had started an argument. They were bringing back the old ways on Namuka. Shedding their clothes and going back to carrying spears and smearing mud on their faces. Praying to the wrong gods. I think this French family might’ve been lucky to get away with their lives.
One day, I found the young French boy sitting on a rock peering north like he’d left something over the horizon. I knew that look. A hand on his shoulder was all I had to offer.
Clouds of birds dove into the sea out beyond the reef, emerging with flashes of silver on their beaks. We watched the gulls fish and everything seemed so simple if you could forget most of what you knew.
In the weeks that followed, the boy and I began sailing together on Klaus’s boat. We didn’t talk much. We practiced our smiles.
Nobody had touched the longboat for enough months that I decided I could have it. I set it up on the beach behind my house, pushing and tugging with ropes over bamboo rollers, not asking anyone for help because I had to do it myself. And here is where I found my ancestors—not in any cave, or in any religion old or new, but on the beach, fixing a keel to a boat that had never known one, building a rudder where a Yamaha motor had once been, making a mast out of a tree and sails from bedding and laundry.
It was difficult to get to our island, because the trade winds blow without fail. But leaving here would be easy. The wind at my back. It must be how my people first arrived. There must’ve been someone like me who either thought the world was going crazy, or maybe this was the crazy place and it might be better out there if we just go see for ourselves.
And anyway isn’t the wind calling and the sea full of fish?
Klaus and Emanuel took turns visiting my project and offering gestures of advice. Klaus loaned me some old ropes. Emanuel brought a small can of paint and a brush and said I had to name her. I slept on this and the next morning I painted Gossamer on her stern.
Out there, somewhere, the world was going to hell. But I was getting better.
I think my brother was the first to know what I was planning. He stopped making fun of my project after I named the boat. He brought me his favorite lure and helped me clean two dozen coconuts for the journey. We husked without much talking. He tried to give me his knife. I hugged him and could smell our father on us both.
I pushed off the next morning with the sun low. Emanuel came in tears and begged me to take him, to drop him off at Namuka on the way, but I knew he wouldn’t be welcome there and that his parents would miss him. But it was painful to deny a man who wants something that badly. He was my brother in that moment.
Outside the reef, the wind was stronger than I expected. Ropes creaked, and the boat lurched to the side, and I nearly went over the rail and imagined swimming back to shore ashamed and beaten. But the rigging held, and so did I.
It was four days to Suva if I was lucky. I didn’t know what I would find there. Hopefully my children, whom I barely knew. Maybe my Maru, holding on for a final goodbye. The entire world might be gone.
Or maybe it was out there, silently waiting for me.
The wind howled the further I got from land, out of the protection of our small island, and I thought I could see the grandchildren back on the beach. There were regrets all around me. I should never have let Maru leave. Or I should’ve gone with her. I should’ve spent more time with my parents and my children. Generations should not be forgotten.
I sailed north in a frightful wind, the sky half gray and half blue, fear and hope in my breast, the seas lapping at the stern like chasing dogs, just me and my little Gossamer, my mind dipping and soaring like some old rusty prow.
I know it was the perils of the sea making me think this way, and my old age, my time running out. But it shouldn’t have to run out to want to spend it more wisely.
The world shouldn’t have to end to think of all it might be.
AS GOOD AS NEW
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Charlie Jane Anders’ latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She’s also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges And I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. She also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series.
Marisol got into an intense relationship with the people on The Facts of Life, to the point where Tootie and Mrs. Garrett became her imaginary best friends and she shared every last thought with them. She told Tootie about the rash she got from wearing the same bra every day for two years, and she had a long talk with Mrs. Garrett about her regrets that she hadn’t said a proper goodbye to her best friend Julie and her on-again/off-again boyfriend Rod, before they died along with everybody else.
The panic room had pretty much every TV show ever made on its massive hard drive, with multiple backup systems and a fail-proof generator, so there was nothing stopping Marisol from marathoning The Facts of Life for sixteen hours a day, starting over again with season one when she got to the end of the bedraggled final season. She also watched Mad Men and The West Wing. The media server had tons of video of live theatre, but Marisol didn’t watch that because it made her feel guilty. Not survivor’s guilt, failed playwright guilt.
Her last proper conversation with a living human had been an argument with Julie about Marisol’s decision to go to medical school instead of trying to write more plays. (“Fuck doctors, man,” Julie had spat. “People are going to die no matter what you do. Theatre is important.”) Marisol had hung up on Julie and gone back to the premed books, staring at the exposed musculature and blood vessels as if they were costume designs for a skeleton theatre troupe.
The quakes always happened at the worst moment, just when Jo or Blair was about to reveal something heartfelt and serious. The whole panic room would shake, throwing Marisol against the padded walls or ceiling over and over again. A reminder that the rest of the world was probably dead. At first, these quakes were constant, then they happened a few times a day. Then once a day, then a few times a week. Then a few times a month. Marisol knew that once a month or two passed without the world going sideways, she would have to go out and investigate. She would have to leave her friends at the Eastland School, and venture into a bleak world.