Word Count: 2188 | Reading Time: 8 min
The rocky crags of the Norway coast were black in the predawn light, but the sea shone darkly luminous as Doctors Vijay and Maanvi Sen made their circuit of the cruise ship deck. Vijay kept his pace slow; Maanvi was still getting used to clomp-clomp-clomping along with her walker. In their retired years they didn’t sleep long, and the Norwegian Sea air would turn balmy with the sunrise, a fact that Maanvi insisted her husband take more seriously.
“But you must admit, Doctor,” Vijay said, “it makes these early walks more pleasant.” Fifty years together, but they could still see the same thing differently, an occasional irritation they’d settled on calling a virtue.
“We’re long past the tipping point,” Maanvi snapped. She’d loved her career, but loathed having become another climate Cassandra. “There’s no saving you now, Doctor.”
Vijay winced at the “you” instead of “us,” as though, in her mind, she was already gone. His wife had wanted to see the fjords, carved by long-vanished glaciers but her recent diagnosis set a timeline. She maintained that cruise ships were “eco-disasters,” but that no longer mattered. Her bucket list was accumulating checkmarks.
The Doctors Sen both looked at the world and saw change, inexorable and accelerating. Maanvi’s career had prepared her to see that kind of change as a race to the end. She hadn’t even needed the second oncologist’s opinion when the first one pointed in the same direction the entire world hurtled. But Vijay saw change simply as the nature of things, unburdened by portentous meaning. He had always been able to intellectualize or compartmentalize notions of finality. Until they struck too close. Inner worlds coloring the outer. Meaning was what one was ready to see.
An unexpected wave rocked the cruise ship. The Doctors Sen both gripped the walker for support, then plopped down into deck chairs to keep from falling. The next wave lifted the ship and then dropped it. Vijay fought the impulse to vomit. Maanvi pressed her hands to her stomach, suddenly aware of how preposterous it was to float what was essentially a small town on the ocean. The ship’s alarm klaxons began blaring.
The sky showed no sign of storms, but the starboard waters heaved. They roiled. Then, in a roar and swell of oceanic froth, something enormous rose to the surface. Its size defied comprehension; it was like watching a newborn island flail and thrash up from the abyssal depths. As dawn spilled over the coastal hills, its frenzy died. At first mottled and ruddy, it began to pale as its vastness quieted and stilled.
From their deck chairs the Doctors Sen stared, both at an uncharacteristic loss for words.
Abruptly, Vijay’s eyes welled with tears. It happened often of late, over small, shared things. A rediscovered photograph of them standing side by side, their young faces bearing unrecognizably serious expressions. An old film song they’d both mocked as sentimental, but still found themselves singing to each other, with all the Bollywood gestures. A book they’d passed between themselves long ago, its cover nearly detached, two bookmarks still holding their last, unfinished positions. Shared things that had acquired crushing meaning.
“Doctor,” he said, “it seems I was wrong about your predictions of doom.”
It took his wife a moment to understand. Their minds moved along different paths, but over a lifetime she’d learned how his inner world colored the outer.
The only thing to do was to chide him.
“This convinces you, Doctor?” Maanvi arched an immaculately threaded eyebrow. “Not the papers and books I published?” She knew her husband had barely skimmed them. Climate science didn’t capture his passions the way it did hers, and he often complained that, at his age, there remained a countable number of books that he would get to read—an intellectual take on mortality. He preferred books that left him inspired and delighted.
Vijay dabbed away his unexpected tears with a pocket kerchief and shrugged. “Well, it’s harder to argue with a literary symbol in the flesh,” he said.
Maanvi had not missed her guess. He did love his English poets.
The ship stabilized on the waves and the deck swarmed with crew members. Soon, passengers—ignoring the emergency protocols they’d learned before they’d set sail—also began filling the deck for a look at the monstrous shape.
“Harder to argue? Truly?” Maanvi asked. “I would think a metaphor for the end of the world, even in the flesh, would be less certain than years of conclusive data. My data were undeniably conclusive.”
Maanvi believed her diagnosis was a perverse sort of karma, a cosmic response to her predicting the death of a human-habitable world. You first, the world seemed to say. A petty reaction, for a world. But if metaphors manifested as her husband believed, this one meant the world was still in the race to end before she did. That annoyed her. She’d thought the matter settled.
“Data is academic,” Vijay muttered, cleaning a smudge off his glasses. An old argument, recited by rote. “Only poetry reaches the heart. Tennyson was undeniably conclusive.”
“You were more an academic than a poet.”
Vijay gave his wife a wounded look. “I always considered cardiology firmly in the domain of the heart.”
Maanvi laughed. She was relieved he was still telling jokes.
The pale thing in the water could have been a snow-covered island except for the one feature that, even at this distance, was unmistakably an eye. Some things were too vast to apprehend in their entirety. They had to be understood piece-wise. With the enormous eye as a reference point, they could resolve the shape’s features: a fin, a long barrel of mantle, a splay of serpentine arms. As the crowds milled and jostled for a view, the Doctors Sen watched the creature’s vast form fade to the ghostly white of cephalopod senescence. A cephalopod of an order that had already used up superlative names—giant, colossal—without anticipating how much size remained to classify. Only legend and myth could provide a name.
“What is it?” asked a girl who pressed against the railing in front of the Doctors’ chairs. She and her brother were small enough, and the creature large enough, that Vijay and Maanvi still had a view. Their parents hovered protectively on either side, as parents these days did. The young family looked Indian, too, but their accents were English.
“It stinks!” the boy said, sounding impressed. An ammonia odor had arrived, accompanied by screaming gulls.
“Have you learned Tennyson in school?” Vijay asked the girl. “The Kraken sleepeth no more.”
The girl gave him a blank look before turning back to the floating carcass.
“Oh! Some kind of squid, then?” her father asked. He seemed excited to have just fit together the pieces.
“Squid or serpent,” Vijay began, latching onto the opportunity to dispense his brand of wisdom to the young. “Tennyson was clearly a Hindu, you see.”
Maanvi sighed as her husband launched into the wry thesis he’d somehow found several occasions to recite.
“For what else could Tennyson’s many-armed Kraken represent than the many-headed Sheshanaga, floating on the Ocean of Milk, upon whose coils Lord Vishnu sleeps and dreams the universe into being?”
The father’s look held no more understanding than his daughter’s had. The mother actually scowled.
Undeterred, Vijay went on. “But the dream of the universe, like all dreams, must inevitably end in an awakening. When Tennyson’s Kraken wakes and climbs to the surface, he does so only to die. The end of the dream. But there is—”
“Oh that’s all we need,” the mother snapped, folding her children under her arm. “More Hindutva doom-sayer rot.” She turned to her husband. “I thought we left your uncles at home.”
It was Vijay’s turn to stare blankly. The woman ushered her children away through the crowd, wrinkling her nose as though Vijay had loudly broken wind.
“Seriously, Kaka,” the father said, moving to follow his family. “You’re looking at something amazing. A never-before-seen zoological wonder—from a cruise ship! Try to enjoy it without the… apocalyptic religious what-not. Everything will be fine.”
Vijay turned to Maanvi, his mouth hanging open in astonishment. “Hindutva? Me? I was comparing cultural symbols! Do these youngsters understand anything at all? About either of their cultures?”
Maanvi laughed. “It sounded like there were some uncles in that family who soured them on cultural symbols,” she said. “Besides, in my career, I’ve found that people routinely assume the worst of a prophet of doom. Welcome to the club, Doctor.”
“It was a joke!” Vijay protested, tears again welling behind his glasses. “About Alfred Lord Tennyson using imagery from Hindu mythology—”
Maanvi gently shushed him, stroking his shoulder. “I know. It’s an esoteric joke, Doctor. And they’re a young family. Their eyes are full of the future. They won’t see what you see now. But please. Do continue explaining how you’ve just now realized I was right.”
Vijay dabbed his handkerchief under his glasses. “Is that how you think I saw you?” he asked. “As a prophet of doom?”
She did, though there was no reason to say so now. It was also how Maanvi had come to see herself. “There is comfort in denial. Goodness knows I’d enjoy that comfort too. But when I’ve accepted a doom on the planetary scale, I’m less inclined to deny it on a smaller one.”
Vijay stared out, even beyond the Kraken.
“Would it be wrong,” he finally asked, “if I took a kind of comfort in planetary doom?” What his wife had said earlier still stung. There’s no saving you now, Doctor.
The air had become warm. The Doctors Sen sat amidst a crowd, all looking out at the same thing, but each seeing something different.
“Yes,” Maanvi said. “No. I think the rules change, here at the end.”
“The end.” Vijay turned from the dead monster to his wife. “Yes. I think I’m finally reconciled.”
Maanvi laid her hand on her husband’s. The Kraken had become a feast for the gulls above, and no doubt sharks below. Eventually it would be gone.
“To me, this animal is a casualty of destructive ocean temperatures,” Maanvi said. “To you, it’s Tennyson’s Kraken, heralding the end of the world. We’re not so far apart.”
Vijay recited the lines from “The Kraken.”
“Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”
“Do you see angels, Doctor?”
Vijay smiled. “Just the one, Doctor.”
Maanvi stroked her husband’s hand. “Remember when you told your joke to that other young couple, in England? They appreciated it.”
Vijay grinned. “I told them cephalopods mated before dying. A new dream would be born. Is samsara predicted by your data?”
Maanvi considered this. “You held hope for humanity, despite my research. People will persist, I suppose. Not the billionaires fleeing Earth—how will they transform Mars when they can’t do anything here? —but the pockets of lucky, adaptable people… Do you regret not having children to persevere into the next turn of the Ages?”
Vijay shrugged. “You and I pursued our passions. We saw the world. We shared a life. I’m content. You? You were adamant against having children.”
Maanvi sniffed. “I’m remarkably consistent.”
“So you are.”
Crowds massed all along the starboard railing. The Doctors Sen wondered if the cruise ship would tip. The tone was excitement and awe, not existential terror, though some wondered what else might lurk in the depths. Some wanted to get closer.
The Doctors Sen watched passengers and crew marvel and snap pictures of the enormous harbinger of the end. It would be on the news tonight, following stories of storms, natural disasters, refugee crises, outbreaks of disease, famine, civil unrest, and international saber-rattling. The Kraken would be a scientific curiosity, a sense-of-wonder story, unrelated to all the other portents. How easy it was, not to connect the dots, when the picture was so vast. Beyond giant and colossal.
“Do you think they understand the significance?” Vijay asked his wife.
Maanvi scoffed. “If they didn’t heed science, why would they heed poetry? Between us, we’re exceptional in that regard.”
“Or maybe it’s just some kind of squid.”
Maanvi snorted at that foolishness.
The twinkle that she so enjoyed appeared in her husband’s eyes. “Should we take this more seriously? Run around and panic a bit? Set the appropriate tone?”
“With this?” She gestured at the walker. “I think I’ll stay here. I’ve wasted years trying to set the appropriate tone. But please, Doctor, don’t let me stop you.”
Vijay grinned but shook his head. “I’ll just keep you company.”
Cameras flashed, passengers chattered, gulls screamed, and the Norwegian air turned balmy. Amidst the din the Doctors Sen held hands within a hush heard only by them, as quiet as a breath released.