My mother: young, gorgeous, glowing. She wore gowns that shimmered when she moved. The first time she showed it to me, when I was five, all I noticed was how beautiful she looked.
When I was seven, I asked her if the ocean could kill me.
“There’s no ocean here. We made it up, Rosie.”
That made no sense. I saw it there on the screen, big enough to surround the ship, like liquid, tangible space, a space that could chase you down the street and surround you. She took me down to the soundstage on Eight Deck, where they were filming a movie called Serena. I know now they were still triaging, filming every important movie to the best of their recollection, eight years out from the Blackout, based on scripts rewritten from memory in those first desperate years. Those are the only versions I’ve ever known.
She showed me how a sea was not a sea, a sky was not a sky. I got to sit on a boat that was not a boat, and in doing so learn what a boat was.
“Why are you crying, Mama?” I asked her later that evening, wandering from my bunk to my parents’ bed.
My father picked me up and squeezed me tight. “She’s crying about something she lost.”
“I’m not tired. Can we watch the movie again?”
We sat and watched my young mother as she met and fell in love with someone else, someone pretend. As they raced a rush of water that I had already been assured would never threaten me or my family. As the ship sank—it’s not real, there’s no sea, nothing sinks anymore—and the lifeboats disappeared and the two lovers were forced to huddle together on a floating door until their dawn rescue.
When I was sixteen, my mother joined a cult. Or maybe she started it; NewTime is as direct a rebuttal to my grandmother’s mission as could exist. They advocated erasing the entertainment databases again, forever, in the service of the species.
“We’re spending too much creative energy recreating the things we carried with us,” she said. I listened from my bunk as she calmly packed her clothes.
“You’re a Shakespearean! You’re supposed to recreate.” My father never raised his voice either. That’s what I remembered most about their conversation afterward: how neither ever broke calm.
“I was a Shakespearean, but more than that, I’m an actress. I want new things to act in. Productions that speak to who we are now, not who we were on Earth. Art that tells our story.”
“You have a family.”
“And I love you all, but I need this.”
The next morning, she kissed us both goodbye as if she was going to work, then left with the NewTime for Fourteen Deck. I didn’t know what Advisory Council machinations were involved in relocating the Fourteen Deck families to make room for an unplanned community, or what accommodations had to be made for people who opted out of jobs to live a pure artistic existence. There were times in human history where that was possible, but this wasn’t one of them. Those are questions I asked later. At that moment, I was furious with her.
I don’t know if I ever stopped being angry, really. I never went to any of the original plays that trickled out of the NewTime; I’ve never explored their art or their music. I never learned what we looked like through their particular lens. It wasn’t new works I opposed; it was their idea they had to separate themselves from us to create them. How could anything they wrote actually reflect our experience if they weren’t in the community anymore?
They never came back down to live with the rest of us. My mother and I reconciled when I had Natalie, but she wasn’t the person I remembered, and I’m pretty sure she thought the same about me. She came down to play with Nat sometimes, but I never left them alone together, for fear the separatist idea might rub off on my kid.
The night I saw Natalie’s short-lived band perform, the night I hid in the darkness all those years ago so she wouldn’t get mad at me for coming, it wasn’t until I recognized “Wind Will Rove” that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Theirs wasn’t a NewTime rejection of everything that had gone before; it was a synthesis.
“Wind Will Roam”
Historical Reenactment: Akona Mvovo as Will E. Womack:
My aunt cleaned house for some folks over in West Hollywood, and they used to give her records to take home to me. I took it all in. Everything influenced me. The west coast rappers, but also Motown and pop and rock and these great old-timey fiddle records. I wanted to play fiddle so bad when I heard this song, but where was I going to get one? Wasn’t in the cards.
The song I sampled for “Wind Will Roam”—this fiddle record “Wind Will Rove”—it changed me. There’s something about the way the first part lifts that moves me every time. I’ve heard there’s a version with lyrics out there somewhere, but I liked the instrumental, so I could make up my own words over it. I wrote the first version when I was ten years old. I thought “rove” sounded like a dog, so I called it “Wind Will Roam, ” about a dog named Wind. I was a literal kid.
Second version when I was fifteen, I don’t really remember that one too well. I was rapping and recording online by then, so there’s probably a version out there somewhere. Don’t show it to me if you find it. I was trying to be badass then. I’d just as soon pretend it never existed.
I came back to “Wind Will Rove” again and again. I think I was twenty-five when
