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1 Kraken’s Wake "It's too late." Deidre shook her head, slurped her coffee, and would not meet her son's eye. Outside the Waffle House lightning flashed from underneath Hurricane Quinn. Thunder rumbled close behind. The waitress scurried over, breakfast plates precarious in her arms. Adrian took his from her shaking hands with a smile and a thanks. A food service worker himself, he was scrupulously polite. (At least Deidre was pretty sure that's what he did.) Deidre nodded at the girl and took a knife and fork to her eggs Benedict. Thick yolk oozed out over the English muffin, glossy enough to glimpse her reflection. She looked even older than she felt. She was sure she hadn’t felt this tired the last time she’d seen her son, years ago now. Adrian let his oatmeal steam. "Mom. You need to evacuate. Today." "My window's closed." Deidre caught his eye, felt the corner of her mouth lift, shrugged her little shoulders inside her oversized milsurp jacket. The effect was immediate but miscalculated. Adrian set his spoon down and folded his hands together around his bowl. “Why did you ask me to meet you here today if you just wanted to give me a hard time?” He was trying to keep it cool, keep it together, but his voice was rising toward frightful volumes. He had bristled like this in the early stages of that last fight of theirs. Deidre had replayed that last conversation in her head until it was etched into her forever. “I saw your post about how you were coming to town. And it felt wrong to have left things… as they are.” She smiled up at him, feeling pathetic. She had said awful things to him when he had told her he was going to see his father, and she had meant them. It was no surprise that he had been reluctant to come and see her, even when his work brought him to the same 2 little town she had chosen as the center of her research. But it was good to see him. He was taking care of himself: no more dandruff on his eyebrows, no more stained or rumpled clothes. He sat up straight, kept his nails trimmed, ate healthy. When the waitress showed him to the booth where Deidre had been waiting he slid right in like they met for mother-son catch-up in this exact booth every month. “I see.” Adrian nodded, face unreadable. And then his brow furrowed, and he nodded to a spot over her left breast. "Is that a bullet hole?" "This?" Deidre fingered its ragged edge. She took her time answering. She had never seen her son this way. “I know what it looks like. It’s not. Moth-eaten is all.” She smiled, bright and false. “But I like to think it’s a charm or a ward. Like death will pass over me while I’m wearing it. Silly superstition.” The lights buzzed on and off. It wasn't past nine in the morning but the Maurepas sky was as dark as Deidre had ever seen it, the last three years she'd lived there. "I'm glad we're in agreement." Adrian swept his oatmeal out of the way. His head bobbed on his neck, as though he were made of rubber, and then he found his spine again. "If you do not evacuate before landfall you could die. I cannot be a good son and let that happen." Deidre had never been more proud of her son. More than the degrees on her walls, more than the research piled across her desk and floors and kitchen cabinets, more than the postcards he'd sent her from seventeen states since they'd last sat together, his gentle courage told her on the far side of those years of single motherhood, of worry and regret, that she had done alright. "Adrian." She tried to summon up that motherly timbre once reserved for the most tender moments between them. Found it gone. "I'm not going anywhere." 3 He recoiled as though a childhood pet had bit him. In that instant it started to pour. Somewhere a circuit failed and the Waffle House went dark. They sat there, together, the rest of the world washed away. * * * How to explain it to him? She knew she wanted to start like this: We are Americans, citizens of the Sick Old Man of the twenty-first century. In the same way that the Ottoman Empire’s star had declined through the nineteen hundreds until it was dismembered in the First World War, America’s prognosis is very, very grim. I want to see how he'll die. She wanted to tell him this even though it wouldn't work and she knew this because it had never worked. It had never worked with dates when it got to discussing work and it never worked with friends she might have had when she showed them her library/nest/crazy person house and it had certainly never gotten her tenure but she wanted to tell her son that anyway. She wanted to tell him the truth. She would tell him he was born at a great and terrible point in history (weren't they all?) but the melodrama of it was too much. She would remind him she professed economic sociology most of his adolescence but she would feel like a squid shooting ink. If she told him she only wanted to understand he would consider that a shoddy reason to stand in the path of a hurricane. What could there be to know in Maurepas, under the eye of a hurricane? Deidre would smile at him. Her smile would catch the corners of her eyes like when she taught him the uses of playing cards and people-watching. Oh, so much. 4 Maurepas is average, and that is why she has made her living here. Average income (falling), average life expectancy (falling), typical-for-the-Gulf-Coast demographics (polyglot and multiethnic). The soil, which the town had been built over as the territory was passed like a playing chip between the empires of the Old World and which had been recognized as a part of the United States by act of Congress in 1812, was oh-so-typically sinking into the sea as global temperatures year-after-year rose. And the bonds which might have held it together—social, economic, political, even the churches—were, as in town and cities across the continent, frayed and ready to snap. She wondered if there were people who looked, across the Golden Horn in 1914, out into the Bosporus, or over the dams that held Lake Texcoco from falling on Tenochtitlan in 1521, and hoped to see then what she hoped to see. Some prescient way to hold still and calm a world about to go mad. The world was getting warmer and no one did anything about it: they denied it was warming, or they said they cared and did nothing or next to nothing. Institutions which were supposed to represent the popular will instead worked for oil companies or tech companies or high finance and blamed their incompetence on foreigners or secret cabals. The beneficiaries of and originators of all of these problems used their dragonish hoards of wealth to buy doom bunkers in New Zealand or daydreamed about colonizing Mars with indentured servants—let the rest boil in their billions! America was the epicenter but it was happening everywhere—in Europe, where the European Union dismantled collective welfare states and collective dreams to smooth the way for Brussels banks; in China, where “socialism with Chinese characteristics” looked suspiciously like processes of extractive capitalism which had inspired communist revolt in the first place; in Russia, where rival kleptocrats had waged wars to decide who would get the 5 chance to strip the copper wiring out of the walls since the fall of the Soviet Union. Everywhere under the sun the powerful dreamed of building castles in the sky while the dispossessed squabbled over the last piece of dry land. There were instants when Deidre swore she could see it, bright and fragile as a soap bubble. A way forward, a real future. A theory and a practice that would take into account all the knowns, all the variables in flux, all the variables she for all her reading and theorizing hadn’t even identified yet. A technique to throw back the end of the world. And then it was gone, popped by some fresh piece of data pointing to one of a dozen immutable and interlocking failures overdetermining the death of the world. In her better moods she plays that off as Mad Max hyperbole. Humans are adaptive, and though whatever emerges on the other side of the coming crisis will seem to her a strange cousin they may yet remember her, or more truly her people. And then she saw the wrong report in the news, watched the Maurepas police armored like Robocops beat another protestor, saw another store shuttered with the closing notice hastily scrawled on the back of a clipping announcing Amazon's record profits--and she thought, that won't even be a tenth of it. She could see a hothouse Earth, younger sister to Venus, the masses drowning on top of each other in the murk while the immortal brains of Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos blasted off into space to ruin another world, offering the uncounted dead no more memory than her ancestors did the Native Americans.

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