Because We Can: Chapter Three
Astrid leaves home—and returns.
Folks, we made it. I am officially a New Yorker again (and as a budding blogger here, there’s officially no beating the Carrie Bradshaw allegations now). I absolutely love my new apartment in the Lower East Side, and I love my new roommates even more. Plenty of life’s uncertainties remain after what felt like so many months of being a bit lost—but it feels really good to know that this little corner of my world is truly working out.
As we reach the penultimate chapter of our story, I want to thank you all for reading along. I’ve spent a lot of time with this story this year, expanding it into the outline of a much more fleshed out version. Being able to re-read and revise the original text for Substack has been a great exercise and just shown me how much better it can be. So I am excited to continue working on it and let others enjoy it in both its current and future state.
Be well,
Ollie
TO RECAP: Astrid is growing up, and Dad is struggling to cope with his daughter’s maturation alongside the world’s deterioration. After finally putting Astrid in school, Dad has a hate-fueled panic attack when he sees children who were born after the report and meets Astrid’s teacher. We also learn that Astrid’s mom, Danielle, took her own life just after Astrid was born,but before the report came out. Later, now working as a mechanic instead of an astrophysicist, Dad and Astrid have their first big fight—which ends in both of them hiding in their rooms, unable to communicate with each other.
Click here to read Chapter One.
Click here to read Chapter Two.
Because We Can, continued.
Things always got better. Those same years were the ones where we explored our changing environment and I was able to impart what little wisdom I had that might help her in a world I barely recognized anymore. We built secret hiding spots in the overgrowth of our backyard. We fished at the lake and talked about old movies, then cooked our spoils at night over campfires. I taught her every constellation in the night sky and told her the ancient stories they inspired. She would ask me questions about what stars actually looked like, how they came to be, and how they went away. Orion was her favorite constellation: the legendary hunter killed by a little scorpion. She thought that was pretty funny. Sometimes we would fall asleep by the fire, lulled by the sound of crickets and the breeze.
Then, when Astrid was sixteen, she ran away for five days. No note. No police to help me. Telecommunication networks were long gone. There was nothing I could do but tear our little town apart looking for her.
I didn’t fix any cars during those five days. When my legs had given out from searching in the scorching heat and my voice had gone from screaming her name, I just sat in our backyard, staring at the dead coals. I wondered whether she was okay and about what I had done to push her away. I thought about what Danielle would do if she were there. Worst of all, I remembered that it was my fault for even bringing her into this depressing world that she was trying desperately to escape.
When she finally returned, I melted like a popsicle onto her. She explained to me how she had gone to my cousin’s house about three miles outside of town. Liam was a Reveler, one of those detached souls who completely rejected social and moral norms and slipped into a lifestyle of pure hedonism. He spent his days painting, walking, and fucking with the rest of them, all without a care for what was left of the world. He lived off scraps and let himself waste away with the world around him. But at that point, I didn’t even care where she had gone, how she had spent those five days with Liam, or why she went there (and I never found out). I was just happy she was back.
Things were okay for a while after that, but eventually it was time for Astrid to leave home. It was another moment that hearkened back to a world that didn’t exist anymore—my baby girl finally growing up and leaving the nest to make a life of her own—even if at the same time it was completely different. She wasn’t admitted to some fancy college like her parents. No big career waiting for her. No white picket fence or pension to look forward to.
There was, however, the Archivist Society. The Archivist Society was a group of humanitarians dedicated to collecting what little historical, cultural, and scientific evidence was left of our civilization to preserve in case some future alien race came to Earth and stumbled upon the remnants of our failed species. They collected books, films, and music; organized catalogs of our history and politics; created encyclopedias of our science and technology; all entombed in makeshift sarcophagi that they would bury underground with magnetically-traced instructions for finding and unsealing them. They even offered to make personal kits for individuals to archive their own junk — as if superintelligent and technologically-advanced aliens were interested in my favorite pair of shoes or a picture of my dead wife.
I had also heard they were, to some degree, a militarily proficient group. For the most part, the Archivist Society were gentle, well-meaning people—far nerdier than they were violent. The only thing I ever faulted them for was wasting their time. But at that point most people were skeptical of any group big enough to call themselves a “society,” and allegedly they were no stranger to skirmishes. I guess there was some resistance to the invasive work of collecting valuable items simply for “the greater good.” It actually made me feel a little better about Astrid joining. Everywhere was dangerous nowadays, but at least she would have protection. In truth, our little town clearly didn’t have anything important enough to archive because I had never seen the Archivists before, so I only knew what I had heard from others.
We got word from some townspeople that they had established a collection center somewhere in the city up north, so Astrid took one of our old cars and went to enlist in the effort. As pointless as I thought it was, I was proud of her. I figured she would learn more about the world than I could ever teach her, maybe even get to travel and see some of it herself.
It was bittersweet to see her leave, just not for the reasons I expected. It hurt knowing I wouldn’t get to spend the end of the world with the only thing that made it worthwhile, but at the same time I felt a heavy weight lift off my shoulders when she left. Somehow I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. It was like I was no longer constantly judged for all the mistakes I had made. At first I thought maybe this would be a good thing, that I could finally be liberated knowing that Astrid and I were on our own paths rather than the ones forced on us. But my guilt didn’t actually subside, it was just replaced with a new and different kind.
When we said goodbye, Astrid promised she would come back. But who was to say how long it would be before I saw her again. There was an informal courier system that had developed over the years where folks were kind enough to pass along messages as they traveled from place to place, just never a guarantee that messages actually got where they were intended. I received one letter from Astrid over the years. It was about a vintage telescope she found in the basement of an abandoned shopping mall. Who knows if she tried sending more, but I was happy to know she thought of me at least once. It’s funny the little things that remind us of others once they’re gone.
Then, after seven more quiet years of the apocalypse, Astrid came home. It was incredible how much she had grown in that time, and judging by her reaction to seeing my disheveled face I think she felt the same. Time and the elements had hardened me over the years, but I still melted just the same when I saw her mother’s eyes and we hugged for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.
I brought her into the garage and she told me about her adventures over tea and snacks. Her initial journey to the city was relatively easy, save for one run-in with some Nomads—more ruthless, wandering versions of Revelers—who gave her a hard time. She said she was able to pay them off with a few boxes of ammunition I had sent her with. Thankfully, it was a woman and a man. She said the thought of two men stopping her in a forest had kept her up at night for a little while after that.
Once she found the Archivist Society, Astrid told me she finally found a home. The house we sat in, she said, would always be her home, but only in the way that you always love family no matter how much they drive you crazy. She explained that the Archivists had a global network sustained from one central communications post somewhere in Northern Europe that offered tips and occasional updates on their work. The group was otherwise subdivided into regional sectors, each of which were split between scavengers and restorationists. The former would go on missions to collect items and establish connections with communities across their region, while the latter would focus on the work of actually preserving what they returned with. But the global network wasn’t actually that big, so each team had a lot of ground to cover.
Astrid said she traveled all across the continent in those years on all sorts of missions with scavengers from different regional sectors. Among them she found lifelong friends, mentors and role models, and even a boy she had fallen in love with. Together, their crew collected everything from old art to dead cell phones, recording as much as possible about every new community they came across, connecting as many dots as they could to piece together some coherent story of humanity for future cosmic explorers. Easier said than done when the internet didn’t exist anymore and people stopped caring about libraries a long time ago.
Throughout their travels they saw the world for what it had become. Environmental devastation had completely ravaged the countryside, changing landscapes and ecosystems. Crops no longer grew where they once could, coastal towns had become underwater graveyards, forests decimated and reduced to sprawling plains of ash and debris.
Despite these seismic climatic shifts, people were resilient. Astrid met folks who dressed and spoke in ways she had never seen or heard, learned lifestyles she had never imagined, and ate meals she didn’t know could be food. It made me realize the privilege of having lived in two different worlds within one lifetime: the first, where everyone had the world at their fingertips and we had lost the true meaning of “foreign” or “exotic”; and the second, where the limits of our familiarity stood sharply at the edge of our physical communities. Astrid hadn’t just grown up in a small town with like-minded and like-looking people; she had lost the imagination of what another community could look like. It was something I didn’t even realize we’d been desensitized to from the onslaught of global content that poured through our screens in the time before the report.
But more importantly, the boy’s name was Jacob. Apparently he had left home for the same reasons as her, coming all the way down to the city from the melting tundras and changing wilderness. By the time he was a teenager, it had gotten so warm that the snow-speckled forests he was born in were permanently green and brown, subject more frequently to wildfires than blizzards. They both shared a desire for a change of scenery and adventure, but in reality were both running from something more than they were running toward something.
This hurt. But I knew it was warranted. More than anything, it made me warm inside to know that she wouldn’t have to experience the end of the world alone like me.
After a few hours, I felt like I had gotten to know an entirely new person. I was so proud of her drive, her resilience, and the fact that she really was making a life for herself despite the worst possible circumstances. I felt the same guilt I had always felt, all balled up in my heart and neatly wrapped in the knowledge of sentencing my own child to a life not worth living, lighten at the thought that… maybe it was.
And then she told me the news that compelled her to come home, and the dark, twisted knot in my soul swelled larger than ever before.
She was pregnant.
I was speechless at first, my insides shattering as her soft, expectant face slowly hardened and her brow furrowed at my silence.
Why?
I couldn’t believe what she had done. All the hardship she had been through, all the mistakes she saw her own father make, experiencing the ways I had ruined her childhood and driven her away, all pitted against a pathetically finite existence. And she wanted to do it all over again.
It was hard to hide my confusion as I stumbled over my words, trying to get an answer from her. Within seconds, we found ourselves in a familiar territory that had long been forgotten, hidden behind the overgrowth of our own abandoned relationship. She grew combative and demanding; I lost my ability to say anything I felt. Amidst the yelling and pacing, all I could coherently squeak out were the words I’ll never forget:
Why would you make the same mistake I did?
There it was. For nearly 25 years Astrid was an innumerable amount of things to me, from playmate to fishing buddy to teacher to student to my wife’s daughter to my best friend and life force in a world that was otherwise lifeless. And in one sentence, I took the only person I had left to love and reduced her to what the darkest recesses of my soul had been whispering to me all along: a mistake.
Astrid left without saying goodbye this time. Much more time would pass before I saw those round blue eyes again.
To be continued…