In the oceans, sea life grew bold. Sharks leapt into boats, snarling, leapt out. Tuna fish matured to the size of small whales, and packs of seals moved inland, taking the back roads. All along the coasts were suicides, rare and wintry specimens — narwhal, whale sharks, oarfish — beaching themselves, rolling up far (too far, people said), sliding onto the grassier sands, scooting up against the beachfront hotels, the Slurpy huts.
At Cocoa Beach, there was the oversized squid. It was early summer and Florida, and the squid washed smoothly ashore — forty-feet long and pink-flecked — in one extra-foamy wave.
“Architeuthis dux,” people said. “The giant squid.” They were knowledgeable. They had their patterned towels, their wine coolers, and they moved down the beach in a migratory trudge. “First the toe thing, the dog thing,” said one woman, looking around, “last week the toaster, after that the cow, then the ticks, the little apocalypse, the parking lot with the political skater punks, now this squid thing, this squid … thing.”
Her face had gotten red and she lightly slapped it a few times, after which she looked a little better — mollified.
Jed, his dad, and his friend LJ were there. LJ was a girl and she and Jed were nine.
“That’s interesting,” Jed’s dad said. But he wouldn’t look at it—the squid. The three of them had a beach ball, were kicking it, and Jed’s dad just kept kicking. He didn’t know if he was ready for something like that, a thing of such size and agony. He might get obsessed — he was prone to — and also he had lately been practicing, earnestly, a kind of halfhearted Buddhism, with timeouts and the occasional off-day. He was to destroy almost all desires. He wasn’t ready yet to destroy all desires. It scared him, actually, the idea of having no desires — as that in itself was a desire. Or was it? He didn’t know, that was the thing. He was unemployed.
“Why don’t we look at it from closer?” Jed said quietly. He would go himself, but it could be a trick — Venus flytrap or something. He didn’t want to be mauled, not like some deer.
They kept kicking the beach ball.
Between kicks they had to stand there and wait, as the ball, once in the air, seemed to slow down, to take its time up there, enjoying the view.
The sky was blue until you looked into it, then you saw it was more of a lightly polluted gray.
“It’s just a giant squid,” LJ said after a while, having zoned out for some time. She now could see it looming, burrito-y and soulless, in her periphery. “It’s just a giant squid,” she said again. She kicked the ball, and then felt stupid. It’s just a giant squid. What did she mean? She was just a little girl, she knew. “Wait,” she whispered. She blushed. A wind came at her face and she had to blink a few times. A wave came, took back the squid, and deposited in its place a clump of dead jellyfish — the squashed, opaque bags of them like mangled eyes, flayed and beaten, swollen to the size of heads.
Another wave came and put the squid back on the beach.
That night Jed slept over at one of LJ’s houses — she had two. They both dreamt of giant squid.
In Jed’s dream he was a tiny shrimp, a krill. He floated in blackness and was confused. A giant squid went by slowly. Jed saw the eye, which was jazzy and glowing, like a TV and a moon both. He whispered in his krill’s head, hi. He then felt such a crushing kind of weakness that he began to tremble, as if he might soon cease to exist.
In LJ’s dream she kept saying, “It’s just a giant squid.” Each time she said it, she felt a little stupider. Finally, she started to cry. Jed kept kicking the beach ball, but only at his dad, except once at the giant squid; the ball bounced smoothly off, then back to Jed, who kicked it smoothly to his dad. At one point, also, the squid mimicked LJ — unkindly, she thought. It’s just a giant squid, it said. Then it made a noise. LJ was taken aback because the noise was very unsquidlike.
In the morning, the squid was on the local news.
“Lewly,” LJ’s mom said to LJ. “You went here yesterday?” She looked at Jed. She was in love with Jed’s dad. They were both divorced from unmemorable people, and both had high metabolism. They had dated each other awhile — after she won the lottery a few years back, moved from Canada to Florida, and bought two houses — but it hadn’t worked out. “Jed,” she said. She pointed at the TV, which had an aura of rinky-dink, somehow-charming totalitarianism. “You were here yesterday. Don’t lie to me.”
Jed nodded.
“Veteran seafarers have measured them at 200 feet,” the TV was saying. It showed a veteran seafarer, and the newsman grinned. The screen changed. It showed a prostrate man, a school bus, two giant squid — one 60 feet, one 200 feet. At the bottom, it had a row of exclamation marks.
“I like exclamation marks,” LJ said. She wasn’t so sure, though. She only liked them sometimes. “I don’t like exclamation marks,” she said. She shook her head. “No,” she said. Things could bother LJ in this way. Both she and her mom were readers. Her mom claimed to read not for pleasure, but to confirm her worldview. LJ herself had a questionable way of reading. She would flip through, read a sentence here, a sentence there. If she didn’t like a sentence, she’d pick another. Finally, she’d feel done, and then would look, with confidence, at the cover, to make up her own story. She had read much of Vonnegut, and a third of Kafka.
“Nova Scotia,” Jed said slowly. The night before, he and LJ had looked up giant squid on the internet. “Ink sac,” he mumbled.
“Those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “200 feet! Those damn squid!” She was standing. She stood when watching TV, did stretching exercises, sometimes touched the TV screen — usually with a middle finger. “What do they think they’re doing? Jed, what are they doing?”
Things could do what they wanted, Jed thought. “They’re just growing,” he said very quietly.
“You could feed a small country with one of those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “For a week. I bet you could do that. Maybe not. A small town then. A small, Welsh village.” She looked at LJ and smiled, then back at the TV. “You’ve got to be specific,” she said. “A small, seventeenth-century, Welsh village.”
LJ was staring off to the side, eyes unfocused. She was thinking about Nova Scotia. She liked Nova Scotia. Sometimes, in bed, under the covers and comfy, she’d think that she felt very Nova Scotic. She had dreamed, once, of dining Italian with Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia had a small mouth, was a wind-blown arctic wolf, tall and groomed and soft-spoken, and had ordered something with eggplant. LJ had read a book on Nova Scotia.
The three of them stood there, in front of the TV, which had moved on — it had a lot to get to — was now warning of deadly substances that sometimes dripped from rain gutters. A man had been killed, and some animals, allegedly. It showed a photo of a man, a dog, and a hamster that looked, for a hamster, alarmingly distraught.
“My god!” LJ’s mom said. “That hamster!” She loved TV. She really did. TV excited her, rejuvenated her, entered her like something kindhearted and many-handed that held her up, then hardened into a kind of scaffolding. The TV had segued into hamsters and was showing a slideshow of them, each one badly deranged in the face. It kept showing more and more hamsters, and LJ’s mom began to feel sad. As a child, she had one afternoon been diagnosed—condemned, she sometimes thought — with Asperger Syndrome, social anxiety disorder, bipolar disease, and a few other things. It was a turning point, that day, she knew. Her life had been going in one direction, cruising, windows down, but then had turned, taken a left through a redlight, gunned it; had later run out of gas in a kind of desert outside of town. These days she was staying inside mostly. She had won the lottery, moved from Canada to Florida. She was writing a book, actually.