Gayle started away from me, but I stopped her. “Wait. First, can you explain something to me? You said Lucy was a friend of my parents. I thought giant squids were, like, super-reclusive. How can one just be floating around by the dock, and how can it be friends with humans?”
To her credit, Gayle didn’t just give me the first answer that popped into her head. She considered it, then said, “How, I don’t know. She just was. She would hang around the ship if your parents were on board. If they weren’t, but were in the waterfront lab, she was there. If they were out in a dinghy or a submersible, she was there. Wherever they were, you’d find Lucy. It was like she was watching out for them. Once they were swimming and a hammerhead came toward them. Lucy got in between them and chased the shark away.”
“Really?” That sounded like anthropomorphizing of the highest order—something Mom and Dr. Dr. Dad had always warned me against.
I guess the doubt was apparent in my tone. “None of us would have believed it, either,” Gayle said. “But Collum got video of the whole thing.”
I couldn’t do anything but shrug. My parents had spent most of their lives in and around the water. If they wanted to make friends with squids, who was I to complain? I’d made friends with the children of corn farmers and Republicans, which to them was every bit as strange. I had managed to get into the football program at the University of Nebraska, where I majored in English, because hey, I already knew English, so how hard could it be? It’s not that I’m not smart—I don’t know any college ball players who are stupid—but I think fish are for eating, not studying.
Gayle gave me a quick tour of the Ricketts. Most of what she showed me involved nautical words I had never heard before. The vessel was 186 feet long, and had a double-hull, like a pontoon boat or catamaran. Gayle said it was a SWATH design, or Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull. The advantages were stability in the sometimes rough waters of the northern Pacific, and a large working deck area. At the back—aft, Gayle said—a crane could lower and raise a three-person submersible, the James Cook II, into and out of the water. Something engines, something else tons, water displacement…it all ran together, meaningless to me. There were eight laboratory spaces, and lots of scientific equipment I didn’t understand.
The crew comprised fourteen people; the remaining berths were for scientists, of whom there could be as many as thirty. When it was full, the cabins were crowded, but for this particular voyage we were largely empty.
Gayle asked if I wanted to bunk in the cabin my parents had used. I looked inside. There was Mom’s bible, on her nightstand. Dad had been reading Graham Greene, in those old Penguin editions with the orange spines. I even recognized the sheets and pillowcases, and the Pendleton blanket they always traveled with.
“Is there anyplace else I can crash?” I asked. I didn’t even want to step into that cabin; it would feel like intruding on a ghost.
“Nick, the ship’s practically empty. You can sleep anywhere you want.”
“Anyplace,” I said. “Doesn’t matter to me. But not here.”
She showed me to another cabin, one with six bunks, two stacks of three, and a desk bolted to the back wall with a computer on it. No portholes. Anonymous, and probably uncomfortable. Perfect. I picked a bottom bunk and tossed my backpack onto it. “This’ll do.”
“You sure?”
“It’s fine,” I said. The trip had never been meant as a sightseeing voyage or a pleasure cruise. I wanted to keep my sights on its real purpose—finding my folks—and nothing else. “Just fine.”
* * *
Chow was served in the crew mess, which had always seemed to me like an unfortunate name for a place where people ate. I sat at a long table between Gayle and a crewmember named Collum Snow, who dressed like a hipster in a plaid shirt, jeans, suspenders, a knit cap. He had a bushy red beard he could have hidden a couple of cans of Bud Light in. But his clothes were worn, his face weathered, and instead of coming across as a hipster he came across as a man used to the ocean, the kind of hard-working soul the hipsters could imitate the look of, but not the spirit.
The others were a diverse lot, some of whom looked like they’d been born to the sea, like Collum, and others—like a scrawny, tattooed longhair named Norman Draper—who looked like they had to be along for scientific expertise instead of nautical knowhow.
A guy named Panut unrolled a map on the table after we’d eaten a meal heavy on fish and kale. He jabbed a finger at a spot out in the Pacific, well off the California coastline. “This is where the original Blob was,” he said, without preamble. Then he traced a much larger circle around the spot, from northern Mexico up into British Columbia. “Basically in here, anyway.”
“What blob?” I asked.
“The Blob was an area of abnormally warm ocean water that showed up a few years back,” a woman named Elyse Geohagen explained. She came up out of her chair and leaned over the chart. “Water temperatures were seven degrees hotter than average—in some spots, the highest temps ever recorded. Eventually it covered an area bigger than the forty-eight contiguous states.”
“Sea life died off in massive numbers,” Panut added, picking up the thread again. “Whales died off Alaska. Sea otters died by the hundreds. Millions of sea stars. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds. Sea lions. Krill. A toxic algae bloom essentially destroyed California’s crab industry. Tropical sea life was found in the North Pacific, way outside natural ranges. The Blob stayed from early 2013 into late 2015.”
“Because of climate change?” I asked.
Panut shrugged. “There are always temperature variations in the Pacific. El Niños and La Niñas flip the water from cooler to warmer all the time. But there’s never been anything like this—the Blob covered a bigger area, went deeper, and with hotter temp-eratures than anything in recorded history. It was unique.”
“Until now,” Gayle said.
“Now? It’s back?” I asked.
“We call it Son of Blob,” she said. She put a finger down near the same spot that Panut had originally stabbed, more or less across from the California/Oregon line, but a little farther north and closer to shore. “It’s smaller, so far, and mostly concentrated in shallower waters. Which is strange. Also, it’s hotter.”
“Much hotter,” Panut added. “Eleven, twelve degrees. That makes a huge difference.”
“It’s in what we call the Ring of Fire,” Gayle said. “There are lots of undersea volcanoes, making the ocean floor uneven, and there are also deep trenches, and some hot vents. It’s crazy active down there.”
“That’s what your folks were investigating when they…disappeared,” Collum said. “I love your parents, man, like they were my own, you know? We all do. I refuse to believe they’re…gone. We’ll find them. That’s what this whole expedition is about, right? Finding them. Son of Blob isn’t going anywhere, so we’ll look at that later. But we need your folks to help make sense of it.”
Even then, I understood the futility of what he was saying. The US Navy had sent a search submarine. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that was—apparently unknowingly—sponsoring this expedition, had sent a couple of submersibles of its own, one manned and the other an undersea robot they called an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV.
Nobody had found a trace of my parents, or the James Cook I, the submersible they’d been in when they vanished. The submersible’s pilot, a Ricketts crewmember named Pauly McBride, was also missing, but so far nobody on the ship had mentioned him in my presence. They undoubtedly missed him, too—the crew seemed as close as family, which I guess made them all my brothers and sisters, if Collum was right about everyone seeing my parents as their own. But in front of me, it was all about my folks, and McBride was an afterthought. Maybe it made me an asshole, but I was okay with that.
* * *
On our second day aboard the Ricketts, I was standing at the rail near the front of the ship, watching the ocean, surprised at how deep it looke
d as the ship plowed through the waves and troughs.
“Look at that!” somebody shouted.
I looked. I saw water. Lots of it.
Then Gayle emerged onto the deck near me. “Do you see them, Nick?”
“See who?”
She grabbed my arm and thrust a finger toward the water, pointing at something maybe forty yards away. I was used to counting by yards, but estimating distance was different on the sea than in a stadium. “I’m not seeing anything,” I said.
“You’re not looking. Look!”
I had thought I was looking, but I guess not. I tried to shift my perception, to focus not on the water itself, but into the water, and then I saw it.
We were passing something, or several somethings, that were many-armed. “Is that Lucy?”
“It’s not a squid,” she said, adding a kind of scoffing sound at the end of it. “It’s an octopus. More than one, actually. Several octopuses. Lots. And others cephs, squid, and even some cuttlefish.”
“Is that rare? Do they usually travel in packs?”
“They don’t usually travel so close to the surface, or in such quantities. Do you remember seeing any yesterday?”
“No,” I said.
“Exactly. How many have you seen in the wild before right now? In your life?”
“One or two, maybe. On the shore, when I was with my folks.”
“Right. You see them if they’re wandering around on the shore, or if you’re diving. And you never see a whole…I don’t know, a school? A pod? I’m not sure there is a collective name for a group of them, because they don’t usually hang around in groups. They’re solitary creatures. It’s a ‘shoal’ of squid, but not for octopuses or for cephalopods in general.”
She was staring across the water, a half-smile on her lips. The intensity of that gaze seemed like it could have turned the water to steam.
“This is really unusual, huh?” I said.
“It’s unheard of. Literally. I mean, during the last Blob, we saw a lot of sea life far outside its normal ranges, so it’s not necessarily surprising in that respect. But so many cephalopods traveling together? Different species, even? That just doesn’t happen. I hope Elyse is getting video. She’s our resident videographer. This is gonna make the front pages.”
“Really?”
“Of the oceanographic journals, anyway.”
“I thought the trip was supposed to be a secret.”
“Your presence is, not the trip itself. So if you see her with a camera, make yourself scarce.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“I’m gonna make sure she’s on it,” Gayle said.
I caught her arm as she started to turn away. “Hey,” I said. “Thanks again. For setting all this up. I appreciate it.”
“It’s not for you,” she replied. “It’s for them. There’s not a person on this ship who wouldn’t do anything in the world for your parents. I mean that.”
“Well, I appreciate it, anyway.”
She shook her arm free and hurried off. I stayed by the rail and watched the water for flashes of tentacle.
* * *
Over the course of that day, we saw more of them. Norman told me they were all cephalopods—which meant head-feet, a name that didn’t make sense to me—of the Coleoidea subclass. The obvious thing they had in common was their appendages, but Norman ran through more: they could change color in a heartbeat, and they had three hearts. They also had the largest brains of any invertebrates and were considered pretty smart, as nonhuman animals went. They had very complex nervous systems, allowing them to control all those arms and tentacles and the individual suckers on them. They could squirt ink. They had huge eyes and good eyesight. Norman talked about them like a car salesman trying to get me to put down money on the priciest set of wheels on his lot.
He, like everyone else, was fascinated. Most of the conversation aboard ship turned to why they were all traveling in the same direction, why there were so many of them, and why they were so close to the surface. Someone suggested they were following us, but that didn’t make sense, since we kept catching up to more; they’d have to be following us from the front, which is pretty hard to do.
“Unless,” Norman said, “they’re all in communication with one another. Then the ones behind us could alert the others any time we changed course.”
“Is that something else that cephalopods can do?” I asked.
“Not that we know of. But they’re tricky, and there’s a ton we still don’t know about them. There are more than 800 distinct species, and we’re still finding new ones all the time.”
He peered out toward the water again, hoping to see more. “We’re witnessing living history,” he said. “You’re a lucky man.”
We were on our way to look for what would probably be the corpses of the people who had given birth to me, raised me, and taught me to follow my dreams, wherever they led.
A bunch of many-limbed sea creatures were kind of cool, I supposed, but I didn’t feel all that lucky.
* * *
That night, we reached Son of Blob.
I didn’t know it until I rolled out of my bunk in the morning and found folks in the crew mess discussing it. The chatter and the clinking of tableware were loud, raucous, like some holiday family breakfasts I’d endured. I poured coffee into a ceramic mug, took some watery scrambled eggs and sausage, and sat at the table between Panut and Elyse.
“We’re there,” Panut said.
“We are?”
“Yes. Haven’t you noticed that we’ve come to a stop?”
I hadn’t. The motion of the sea still rocked the boat, but now that he’d said it, I realized the rocking was gentler than it had been when we were underway, and I didn’t hear the constant thrum of the engines.
“We’re just at the outer edge of it,” Elyse told me. “Surface temperature is seven-point-two degrees above average here.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“It’s a troubling deviation,” Panut said. “Disastrous. Closer to the center, it’s going to be much hotter than that. Sea life will be confused, if not killed. Coral reefs, gone. We might see toxic algal blooms of unheard-of size and scope.”
A burly, heavy-bearded guy whose name I couldn’t remember sat heavily in the chair across from me, bringing his plate down with a clatter. “Fucking humans are determined to roast the planet,” he said. “One ocean at a time.”
“I always thought the oceans were the most resilient part,” I said.
“They are,” the bearded man said. He swallowed his eggs and added, “But the world’s mostly ocean, and it’s all one big system. If you boiled the blood in your veins, it wouldn’t matter how much brain matter you had or how strong your arms were. You fuck with the seas, you’re fucking with everything.”
Collum walked into the mess and fixed me with a steady gaze. “You ready to go down, man?” he asked. “It’s time.”
“Don’t I have to wait thirty minutes after eating to go in the water?”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but the bearded guy exploded in laughter, spewing bits of sausage across the table. Wiping his mouth, he said, “Shit, man, down there it ain’t a cramp that’ll kill you. Plenty of other things will, though.”
Everyone else at the table froze, as if the tactless nature of his comment had hit them all at once. We were, after all, operating under the assumption that something “down there” had killed my parents. I felt like the others were all waiting for my reaction, so I decided to try to lighten the moment. “As long as it’s not a cramp,” I said, throwing in a forced chuckle for effect. “I hate those more than anything.”
Bearded Guy laughed, and the rest joined in.
For me, though, the moment resonated. It felt like an omen of some kind. And not a good one.
* * *
After breakfast, I got my first real look at the James Cook II. Almost twenty-four feet long, half that tall, and a third that wide, it looked almost like a clunky w
hite football, albeit one made for giants. The front end, where the passengers sat, was basically a small sphere. It had three round windows, one on each side, and one directly in the center, peepholes in the world’s weirdest door. The middle one was larger, almost like a windshield on an SUV. Several cameras were mounted around the outside of the submersible and two hydraulic arms sprouted out of its front end like antennae.
“This one’s just like the one my folks went down in?” I asked Gayle, who was busy rattling off the specs on the thing as if I might actually remember them.
“Yup. Basically twins.”
“Then don’t you have video or whatever of what happened to them?” I asked, pointing at the camera arrays. “Don’t those keep transmitting until the mission is over?”
“Ideally, yes. But it’s not that simple. Lots of things can interfere with the cameras. They can get torn off, knocked out of alignment, crushed. Their power supply can get cut, or diverted to more essential functions, like life support.”
“Is that what happened with my parents?”
She gave a little helpless shrug.
“There’s no way to know for sure, Nick, not till we find them. Maybe not even then. All we know is that the cameras show them going into the Blob and then the temperature readings started spiking. There was some kind of rapid motion—if they’d been on the surface, I’d have said it was an earthquake—and then the cameras all went dead at once. I can show you the footage if you want. I don’t know what you’ll see in it that I haven’t.”
I thought about that for a moment. That footage might well show me the last things my parents ever saw. Would I understand what I was seeing? Had they? Had they known what was in store for them? Had they been terrified, or resigned? Or maybe, being scientists, even a little bit curious about what might lie beyond?
No, I decided. If sleeping in their room would have been intruding on a ghost, seeing their last moments from their vantage point would be like tearing the ghost’s sheet off and exposing its spectral nakedness to the world, a violation of a much more personal nature.
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