The Colossal Squid

            by Wesley Holtermann

 

THE COLOSSAL SQUID: assumed, by scientists, to be very aggressive, lean and muscular, tremendously built, with sharp, ripping hooks on its tentacles and a beak that could crush even diamonds maybe, which cannot, in general, be crushed. Found at depths of over 2,200 meters, where the water pressure is so incredible that it would crumple the human ribcage like paper, they live where it is murky, where it is darker than anything, like outer space only inner, and with temperatures like nothing. Unbearable, is what I’ve heard.

My plan is to go down. To get a submarine and to dive fathoms, leagues. To see this monster first-hand. To surpass the previous depths of human endeavor.

They will tell me, I assume, when I go to see them in their university building, that I have to be a scientist to access the kind of technology that would sink me into the watery chasms of the planet. I have to be a scientist to see that kind of wonder. They will look at each other, this man and this woman, these two very prim, very slender scientists, and they will say, We haven’t even seen a Colossal Squid, like they should be the privileged ones because they have the degrees, and all I have is this drawing of what I think my submarine should look like.

And I will brush past them, down the halls. First I’ll conk their heads together, sling the thin man over my shoulder, and then brush past. These corridors, these university corridors will be filled with waiting shadows, but I, we, the unconscious scientist and I will move by them toward the great and buzzing light at the end, this light being the lab where I will push the man I am carrying’s hand onto the hand-recognition-apparatus and drop him, slumping to the floor, as a heavy automatic door slides open to a circular room with the floodlit submarine in the center like an underwater spaceship.

But probably what will happen is I will ask the scientists and they will say no, I can’t have a submarine, and they will smile and I will smile, and I will brush past them, down the dark university hall, to the men’s room.

 

It was a few weeks ago that I came up with this preposterous idea. I had just inherited eighty-seven-thousand dollars, which, I found, was exactly enough to hire a group of illegal immigrants to build and crew a small schooner bound for the Antarctic, for the small island called Desolation. There, I imagined, I might find the Colossal Squid, an animal I had been obsessed with since seeing its sprawling corpse on the evening news when Japanese fishermen had reeled it in with their stiff, sinewy net full of wriggling blue-fin tuna.

The original idea came about as a kind of distraction. Things had not gone well for me on land. The most recent turn of events, involving my dead dad, had left my insides deflated. We didn't know he was going to die. Not then. His eyes smiled and he kind of glowed from the hospital bed. Obviously we knew he was going to die at some point. What I mean is, of course we could tell it was winding down. He had Dementia. For four years it had plunged him into darkness, until everything he was once familiar with was new and foreign.

In the hospital with my dad I watched the stern, perfect woman, the news anchor for channel fifty-six, mouth things at me from the muted TV. Below her, a string of words in bold capitals crawled across the bottom of the screen. The room was white, and shadows wove into each other at complex and impossible angles. My dad was asleep or knocked out in the cream of wheat bed next to me, tubes hanging from him like tinsel. He had been like this for a day and a half. He was clean-shaven. Perfectly groomed. My mom had asked should she shave him. I said, "Why? Who's he trying to impress?"

"I just want him to look nice," she said. "I want to remember him looking nice."

And I remember thinking it was strange that after four years of him struggling just to remember who we were, we were choosing specifically how we wanted to remember him.

When he died he left me money, thousands of dollars, but I didn't know how to spend it. There was nothing that seemed worthwhile. Nothing noble enough or interesting. I just wanted it gone.

I could still smell him in his old shirts and sweaters, which my mom had given me in a box, and with my face plunged into a cardigan and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain careening through my bare, winter white apartment from the stereo, I dreamt up this plan. In the name of science, I dreamt up this fast, fast boat, which I immediately named the Attenborough.

 

My mom thinks I am a moron. That I should save this money. She tells me there's no chance of me finding the squid. That I would be better off with insurance or a new set of furniture. "I'll even take you," she says. "We'll go together. Pick out chairs and tables and maybe even a space heater. How about that?" I tell her no, mom. I tell her I can't use the money for practical reasons, which makes perfect sense to me, but when she asks me to explain I cannot.

 

I use my friend’s warehouse. It is called a warehouse but basically it is an old train station, or a train something, and I build my boat. Not so much me, mostly Ricardo and Fernando and Geronimo and the other men whose names I do not know because they talk too fast and their accents are like molasses through their salt-and-pepper mustaches. There are only a few words that I think they are comfortable using.

There is also Ben. Ben with strong features. Ben with green eyes and already receding hair that curls and rolls wildly on his head. A tempest of tree bark brown.

Ben designed the boat. Ben is an engineer. I drew the drawing and Ben drew it over so that the boat would float. Ben’s design is better, although mine had a fern garden and an arboretum. “Are you sure, Ben? Are you sure this won’t sink?” I ask.

“Oh no, she’ll float."

Ben is sure. He is positive. He is my best friend. He will build it like a rock.

The warehouse is dirty. Broken. Its soft and rotting wood is draped over skeletal, iron beams. Strained, muddy sunlight streams in through shattered brown windows and covers the fragmented boat like a drop cloth. We work in the days until it gets dark, Ben, the illegal immigrants, and I. We circle the boat. Welding. Hammering. Caulking. We are a machine. Gorgeous and perpetual.

 

 

THEN A MONTH goes by. Three months. It’s Christmas in the city, and the Embarcadero Center across the bay is outlined with golden lights. Five of the original six illegal immigrants now smile at me from Christmas cards. Smiling with their tan families in their tiny Mexican cities, dusty, dilapidated. These five were deported, and now only Geronimo remains.

The squid, now, has been forgotten.

The boat has been built, but mostly we sail it around the bay, “we” being me and Geronimo and sometimes Ben and sometimes even girls. Sometimes dates. When this happens, the Attenborough is cleaned. When there are dates, I cook spaghetti and wear the only shirt I own that I think looks remotely O.K. The only shirt I own that is not a San Jose Sharks shirt or a shirt with a map of the solar system.

One of these dates tells me about her professor. She is stringy and beautiful and a marine biology major, and she tells me that this professor is insane, a brilliant teacher but some kind of wild man. He is obsessed with the colossal squid.

This, I tell her, is phenomenal.

Our dinner thereafter is shaky though, because instead of trying to have sex with her, I won’t stop talking about giant cephalopods.

 

The name of the professor is Doctor John Woodland. On the phone, he is a lunatic. He agrees immediately. He wants to come with us on this expedition, this epic crusade. I ask him does he know who we are? That we have no idea? That we are idiots? I ask will he captain our boat and he says yes, meaning, I assume, that he will.

"God bless you," I say after he hangs up the phone.

I drive up in my Toyota Camry with Gilbert and Sullivan spewing out the side windows and tumbling onto Campbell Street. The professor’s house is in West Oakland. It is bright white on the outside, chipped and dirty with vines growing up the sides with hanging white flowers like tiny wedding dresses. There are three terra cotta pots, bumpy with dried mud like topographical maps, filled with succulents and weeds. They are blocking the blue front door, so I lean over them, acrobatic, elongated, a human bridge, a rubber man, and place my hand over the doorbell. My thumb presses it, and it plays a song: the opening to “Saturday in the Park” by the Chicago Transit Authority. The lock cracks and the rusty hinges wail, twisting inward.

A man with a magnificent black mustache and oil-spill hair smiles toothily at me, eyes sky-blue, sky-wide and peering out of heavy glasses like goldfish out of a dirty bowl. His buttermilk sweater, worn and thick, has holes gnawed with smudges of dirt and blood, blood and black ink. “Come in,” he says, and he sweeps me inside with a motion of his arm.

The house is odd and fish-smelling and strewn with dusty taxidermy. Gazelles and moose heads and mountain lions hang from his walls, sculpted into majestic poses, but with sad, sad eyes, melancholy and made of marbles. There are three black and white pictures in identical frames of the professor with Jacques Cousteau. They are examining a dead octopus on the deck of the Glomar Challenger. “Rad,” I say, and he says,

“I know. Me and Jacques. What a world.”

We talk technology. He is respected at universities. He can get a submarine. Or he can get one built. He's that kind of guy. One with ducted thrusters, he tells me. Two pairs of them. For steering. Nuclear-powered and with incredible endurance because of its steam-generated propulsion. This kind of thing was designed by the Navy, he says. For deep-sea research. It can reach up to six knots before it gets below the surface. “What will we call it?” I say, and he tells me he can also get us scuba gear for shallower dives. Scuba gear and weights and maybe even a tagging gun with darts for tracking. These, he explains, are a scientist’s best friend. “But what will we call the submarine?”

“The Annihilator.”

 

The submarine will be shipped in parts to Santiago, Chile on a series of very fast freight trains. There, we are told, at the university, it will be assembled by scientists, eight or nine of them, with cranes and lifts, and then put on another train headed for the port town of Punta Arenas, where it will be loaded into the water and driven to the tiny island of Desolation, which we will make our headquarters for the time being.

 

Ben and I go shopping for raincoats. We want to match. We want everyone to match. We find a whole shining rack, an ocean of very sharp, navy blue jackets in a gigantic outdoors outlet store.

“How many of these do we need?” Ben asks.

“I don’t know. There’s you, me, John Woodland, Geronimo, and who else. Nobody, right?”

“What about Ann,” he says. Ann is our friend. Ben's friend mostly. Ann is mean, but she looks like one million dollars. Eyes and hair like redwood and soft, soft skin.

“What?” I say.

“Ann,” he says again. “Ann’s hot.”

“No. She has to have a job.”

“What about tactician?”

 “What’s that?”

“Don’t know.”

“Okay. A jacket for Ann,” I say, and Ben grins, hearty and white.

These raincoats are fantastic. Water repellent. Hoods with drawstrings. Underarm ventilation. Velcro cuffs. And there are still things about them to be discovered.

“Holy shit!” Ben yells on the car ride home. “These hoods are detachable!”

 

We have Ann on speakerphone. She says no thanks. She says we won’t make it. The colossal squid? She says we are ignorant. That we can’t just dive down and have a look, because those things are like the fucking Loch ness monster. They’re practically invisible, is what she says. Like ghosts.

“But we're going with a scientist,” we tell her, and she hangs up the phone.

 

 

TODAY IS THE day, we have decided. We have written it down, each of us, in our pocketbooks, which are navy blue, leather, uniform, with The Attenborough typeset in gold on the front. These pocketbooks look magnificent and we pull them out as often as we can. DAY ONE, we have written. THE DAY OF ENDEAVOR.

We set sail. We push off. We untie the thick, splintering ropes from the dock. Estuary water claws at the sides, and the Attenborough sways, rejoicing. Now we are under the Bay Bridge. Silver, iron, bolted at its knuckles, and we pass below while cars rush above us, their tires hissing like running water.

We head out through the Golden Gate. Waves rock us and seagulls laugh wildly at our flailing ship, but the sun glints off of the red-painted bridge and beats into our chests some sort of pride, a feeling of conquest maybe.

 

Fog shifts on deck and grips the Attenborough. It obscures our vision, covering everything more than five feet away, but we float forward with utmost trust.

It is only our second day, and already we long for land. The ocean spray, which at first was invigorating, bracing, is now unbearable. It is cold. It is wet. Our faces are frozen and caked with salt. The boat rolls over waves and our stomachs turn, punch-drunk but acrobatic. The motion of a cement mixer. Slow and churning.

 

It is day four. The Channel Islands disappear behind us, sinking into the crevice between the sea and the sky. We are alone. There is nobody. There is no land. Occasionally there are fishing boats. We wave like children when we pass and are ignored by hardened and weathered men with eyes like glaciers, slow moving and harsh. At night the dolphins swim with our bow. They are bioluminescent, and chemical light ripples like ghosts off of their skin.

But in the light of day the dolphins are gone and we are left alone.

 

Desperation sets in. Madness. Scurvy. Geronimo cheers us all up with an old Mexican song, but that too, like every continent, comes to an abrupt end, leaving us with a vast, black space below, constantly shifting, gyrating, swirling. Burgeoning, we know, with life in its deepest regions, but we, four men, three of us with no kind of background for this sort of thing, can only skim its surface, dipping into its wet, choppy crust with just our hull.

The professor fishes. He has caught a grouper and a giant sea bass, and they lay sideways on the deck with dumb, wide eyes and dumb, blood-dripped mouths, flopping. Slower. Slower. Until they are dead. Geronimo plays his guitar and sometimes reads; I watch the horizon shift from the back of the boat, staring; and Ben, who is green and seasick, vomits over the gunnels and quietly weeps.

Dreary days melt into black nights and then mornings, and, now days past the equator, it is as cold as hell. We are miles away still, but we are inching forward. Rocking. Lurching toward Desolation.

 

The professor gives a yelp. “Land!” he hollers. “This is it! Punta Arenas!” and Geronimo lets out a cry.

The boat rocks into the harbor, swaying into its spot at the dock. We, all four of us, leap onto land, and our legs give out from under us.

“I’ve got jellylegs!” Ben says.

“Me too!”

As we tie up the boat, Punta Arenas melts into focus. The town is very flat. No building rises above two stories. Fishermen walk on the docks, yelling in a language I don’t understand.

 

We have contacted the nine scientists from a payphone at the harbor, and they have brought us our submarine. They have brought it to us laughing, with broad and wicked smiles. They too are doubtful. Skeptical with sideways mouths and rumpled, assuming expressions. They question our credentials. Smirk at our chances. They give us our vessel, deliver it by train, then by truck, all nine of them coming to see these sloppy, sloppy people, this ill-fated crew, by which I mean us.

The submarine is assembled in a giant, flat staging area on the shoreline with cranes and forklifts. With hardhats and work gloves. The submarine is perfect. There are portholes and pressure gauges, knobs, levers. A radar on the top. Black, magnificent. Spinning and humming with pinpoint doplar. Echolocation or whatever. Four barometers, two of them fourteen-karat gold, two of them copper, hang, one from each wall of the tiny, submersible craft, to mark the air pressure in the cabin – "the cabin" is what we are calling the inside of the submarine. They tell us to make sure to check the air pressure. It is a matter of life and death. We are told by these scientists, these smiling, crooked-mouthed people, as if we don't know the danger. As if they are more qualified to weigh our odds.

The Annihilator is forty-two feet long, and they use cranes to lower it into the water. Cranes with heads and bodies. Like animals. Like camels or llamas. These cranes are red, and when they nod, the submarine, which is fastened to a cable, which is fastened somehow to the crane, slips into the water.

 

 

THE JAGGED SURFACE swallows the Annihilator into silence. John and Geronimo had driven it on the surface, alongside Ben and I in the Attenborough, into the middle. Into the deep. We anchored the boat and now we are submerged. Our cots are cramped. A pair of bunk beds, each with linen white like daybreak. The inside of the submarine is dark and cold with thin pipes and thin wires. They are line drawings and they wind around the buzzing, technology-lit cabin.

Outside the window, the water is grey and empty and streaked with sunlight. Down here there is nothing. A shimmer of fish, sardines, a school of them for a second, but now they are gone, and we sink deeper into the crystal cold. A shadow, soft and dark, looms in the deep. "The Humpback," John says, and we stare until it is too far above us. We drop further, now with popping ears and screaming headaches, into the ocean's abyssal zone. Pressure builds and our brains expand into our skulls. All of them heavy. All of them yelling, and everything around us, the Antarctic water, is black.

John pulls a knob, and the submarine stops, suspended; our headaches sigh. Geronimo flips a switch and there is light tunneling, golden, bright white, through the darkness, but it touches nothing.

 

We read. We sleep. For two days down there with nothing but beef jerky and fruit leather. Nothing, yet, has come into the light. Nothing has appeared on the radar. We are still. The Annihilator hangs in the deep water. Silent, unmoving.

Then there is a sound. A light. The sweeping arm of the radar hits something. A dot. Tan on the screen and slow-motion. "What do you think it is?" Ben says. We all look to the professor, but he is quiet, staring out of the window into the crawling gold light.

I grab my disposable camera, eyes peeled to the empty sea. "Are we facing the right direction?" and Geronimo gasps.

Something flickers in the heavy light in front of us. Something moves in the water. Distant. Silent like dust through sunlit air. We forget about everything. We forget as we stare, hearts leaping, expanding. “Was that–” Ben says, and we know. We know beyond any doubt. Fathoms below sunlight, plunged into the unknown, we are more certain than we have ever been before.

My chest is shaking with each breath. The squid lunges. Over and over. It squeezes, contracts with its tentacles and glides through the black water, hanging as if part of a mobile. It swims closer. Our eyes are wrapped around this thing, this monster, and our insides shudder. John grabs a ducted thruster and, I guess, thrusts it. The submarine lurches and all four of us lean and trip, stumbling into a heap.

"Where are we going?" Ben says from the floor. John gives no answer, and the submarine hums forward.

This, obviously, this whale-looking submersible, scares the squid, who whips its tentacles and plunges away from us. John thrusts again, this time with a different ducted thruster. There is something new in his face. In his eyes. They glow wide. Insane.

Now I am really thinking, What the?

We follow the squid further, deeper into the abyssal zone. The pressure from the water outside is loud, pressing the outer walls of the Annihilator. The submarine rattles. It groans. The sea, like giant, crushing molars, gnaws at the sides of our craft. The squid has to have done something. Given a sign. Indicated something really spectacular, otherwise John would not have cracked. John would not be speeding into these depths trying to follow it.

Now I am thinking that we might die.

There is a crunch outside, a pop, and the floodlight vanishes. The propellor slows, grinding the thick, thick ocean, and the squid is, once again, invisible.