Garrett

Garrett is a businessman from eastern Canada who survives the collapse at Severn City Airport, where he forms a close friendship with Clark Thompson. His history as a copywriter, his lost contact with a wife and young twins in Halifax, and his habit of revisiting the language of his former workplace make him a figure through whom the novel measures the distance between ordinary life and its aftermath. He can discuss the practical causes of societal breakdown, but the past returns most painfully in the small phrases and unfinished connections that have outlasted the world that produced them.

Identity and Arrival

Garrett is introduced at the airport as a Canadian businessman. He has worn the same suit since his flight landed, though he now pairs it with a Beautiful Northern Michigan T-shirt from the gift shop. The combination makes his former professional appearance and the improvised conditions of his present life visible at once: the suit persists, but its original context has disappeared. The account does not specify which flight brought him to the airport or give a detailed history of his arrival.

The airport is a settlement in a world where the systems that once made movement and daily life routine have largely failed. Airplanes remain, but no longer carry passengers in the former pattern of commercial travel; they stand dormant, gather snow, or are repurposed for storage. Against that background, Garrett's continued use of his business clothes is not simply a detail of appearance. It is one remnant of a working life carried into a place where work, travel, and public services have been radically altered.

Reading the Collapse

Garrett offers Clark Thompson a direct, if unsettling, account of what may have followed the pandemic. Early reports had put the mortality rate at 99 percent, and Garrett argues that the scale of death alone may not explain why no one has come to the airport. Society's breakdown would have added further losses: violence, diseases such as cholera and typhoid, and conditions once treatable with antibiotics or other medicines. He also names ordinary dangers and chronic illnesses, including bee stings, asthma, diabetes, HIV, high blood pressure, and cancers that had responded to chemotherapy when treatment was available.

His explanation gives the absence around the airport a grim logic. People may not be coming because there are few left, and those who survived may face threats that the old medical system once managed. Garrett's list moves between epidemic consequences, infection, and conditions of everyday life; the contrast makes clear how much survival had depended on institutions and supplies that could easily go unnoticed while they worked. His question about whether anyone has a cigarette, followed by his return to the catalogue of illnesses, also places a small, familiar craving beside the much larger problem of a world without reliable care.

Work and Friendship

At some point in his conversation with Kirsten Raymonde, Garrett explains that he was a copywriter: he wrote words for advertising, including billboards. It is a concise description of his former occupation, but the novel later gives that work a broader afterlife through his relationship with Clark Thompson. Over the years at the airport, the two become close friends, and Garrett takes a particular interest in Clark's Water Inc. 360-degree reports. Clark has made the three reports public because he believes the people involved are almost certainly dead; they assess an executive named Dan through comments from subordinates, peers, and superiors.

Garrett studies the reports with evident curiosity and turns one of their workplace formulations into a joke. When he reads that Dan was not good at cascading information down to staff, he asks Clark whether Dan was a whitewater rafter. The humor depends on an old professional vocabulary surviving in a radically changed setting. The reports preserve the habits and judgments of a former corporate world, while Garrett's playful reading makes that language newly strange. His interest also gives Clark's stored work a use beyond its original purpose: it becomes material for companionship and conversation.

Family, Memory, and the Last Call

Garrett had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax. His last telephone call was not to them but to his boss; the final words he remembers saying were a string of corporate expressions about contacting colleagues and following up the next week. The account does not establish what happened to his family, and Garrett does not supply a resolution. Instead, it fixes attention on the call's painful mismatch: the ordinary language of scheduling and office communication became his last remembered speech into a telephone.

Years later, Garrett watches two children playing on the tarmac, hiding behind the wheels of an Air Canada jet and chasing one another. He has grown calmer, though he remains prone to spells of unfocused staring. Clark recognizes the pattern and anticipates the question Garrett will ask: whether he has told Clark about his last phone call. Clark says he has, gently. Garrett then murmurs the phrase about circling back next week, perhaps without conscious intention, before wondering why people said they would shoot emails when they were only pressing a button. The exchange moves from a remembered phrase to a joke about the metaphor embedded in it, but the humor does not erase the remembered call. It shows how thoroughly a small piece of workplace speech can carry the weight of an irretrievable personal history.

Narrative Role

Garrett connects the novel's broad account of systemic collapse to the remnants of particular lives. His explanation of disease and social disorder describes why a settlement might remain isolated; his old suit, advertising background, and attachment to office language show what survives when the institutions around a person do not. The contrast between abandoned aircraft and the children playing beside one, and between the old rhetoric of work and the new silence surrounding his family, gives his scenes their distinctive tension.

His characterization is built less through a resolved personal arc than through recurrence. The last call returns in conversation, in the phrase he repeats under his breath, and in his questions about the language people once used without thinking. The novel leaves his family's fate and his own eventual future unstated. What it does show is the persistence of memory among the airport's survivors: Garrett can make his former world's habits briefly comic, but the words remain bound to the life he had before.