The Day Comes by Shih-Li Kow
~2600 words, 13 minutes reading time
Issue 1 (Winter, February 2023)
When I took on the job as the singular employee of Kertih Turtle Sanctuary, the Delphi Visionary Forecast prediction for the end of the world was at forty months.
Sekhar did not trust the Delphi forecast. He said it was a gaggle of old scientists who met for golf and beer on Sundays and burped out a prediction on Mondays. He favoured the DCI, the Doomsday Composite Index, with its weighted average basket of three religious prophecies and fifteen technical estimates–they gave us thirty-eight months.
Sekhar and I stopped arguing over which was more accurate. The spread between forecasts issued by different forecasting authorities was +/- twelve months ten years ago, +/- 6 months five years back, and had narrowed to a two-month difference between the DCI and the Delphi. Disagreeing became pointless, like the time our road trip took us through Terengganu and we caught ourselves snapping at each other about which turn to take when the towers of the drawbridge we were heading to were in plain sight. Sekhar was competitive that way; he liked to be right, especially when it involved maps and numbers.
At the Department of Fisheries, the officer in charge of turtle sanctuaries looked at me with a smile and said, “Are you going to wait for the Rapture out there? Is Kertih one of the designated salvation points?”
I said, “No, I’m not pro-Rapture myself. Got nothing against it. I mean, if you are, no offence. My husband and I happen to be agnostics. We figure there are worse places to be when the lights go out. Yourself?”
“I’ll be right here at my desk. Every Monday to Friday.”
“You don’t believe?”
“Depends on what you mean. I believe in lots of things–love, the Almighty, even aliens. I just don’t believe in everything culminating in one galactic coincidence. That’s too convenient.”
“The probability of the conditions coming together for us to exist in the first place was pretty impossible too.” These were tired arguments already wrung dry.
“One anomaly doesn’t beget another. And things don’t change in a day. Change always creeps up on you,” she said, gesturing for me to put my thumb on a fingerprint scanner.
I wanted to say that change had crept up on us. Marched right up to us, and we counted out loud and looked away, playing hide-and-seek with a child who was not interested in hiding. But the officer was friendly and I needed her help. “Will you make sure I get my supplies till the end? And the kibble for my two dogs? We don’t want to be hungry.” I felt a little ashamed, worrying about dog food at a time like this.
“Don’t worry. Once you’re in our database, our drones will deliver a package every week. There’s probably a pile waiting there for you now. The last guy decided to steal a sailboat and disappear.”
“Thanks. You take care now.”
“Come back and thank me in forty months. I’ll be here and you’ll be needing this. My name is Nurhanna, by the way.” She slipped me a leaflet: Post-Doomsday Real Estate and Financial Recovery Services. Somehow, it did not seem at all funny.
•••••••••••••
Sekhar and I moved to Kertih with our two dogs. We settled in a house near the remains of a decommissioned oil refinery. After petroleum tankers stopped docking, leatherback and hawksbill turtles returned like faithful pilgrims to nest on the beach.
The sea in Kertih was opaque and dishwater grey; the waves foamed with silt. A note left by the previous caretaker—the one who had sailed away—warned us about treacherous currents and jellyfish. Sekhar and I did not mind. We were not keen swimmers. We had a glorious, clear horizon to ourselves and that was enough.
Around us, the wind whistled across the tops of old flue-gas stacks, making them hum constantly. The refinery grounds, long abandoned, were claimed by pioneer trees, troops of macaques, and sea eagles nesting in cat ladder landings. It was no tropical beach paradise, but there was a sense of a second life about the place which I liked.
Work in the hatchery kept me busy. I scrubbed the turtle enclosures, adjusted the temperature of the egg incubators religiously, and patrolled the beach every morning to check for nests. On silvery nights, I watched hatchlings bubble out of the sand and toddle to the water’s edge, hundreds of new lives attuned to moonglow and the constellations. If there were runts left behind in the mad rush to the ocean, I nursed them in the hatchery before sending them on their way. Every week, I dispatched my reports to the Department of Fisheries well before my deadlines. The urge to earn my keep had not left me.
I found comfort in employment, even if we were isolated. I liked hearing the brisk, everyday sounds of the words work and job when I spoke to Sekhar. Work was my constant, the source of my peace. I was content to remain an inconspicuous employee, plodding along in the mechanism of civil service. I thought fondly of Nurhanna in her office keeping things running and maybe fielding questions as to why she bothered about turtles when the world was ending. We were not so different.
Like me, Sekhar found respite in work that was challenging and solitary. He started a kelp farm and made the sargassum floats which sheltered the hatchlings from predatory fish and birds as they swam out to the open sea. He built himself a cabana on the old jetty and fished for hours. Most days, he came home without fish.
Our routine was relieved by sporadic whale alerts over our radio that sent us scampering like children to the end of the jetty with our binoculars. Once, we were visited by three native Temuan hunters who had seen a drone drop off our supplies. They had appeared like sprites out of the secondary forest surrounding us and set our dogs barking. I showed them my incubators and the juvenile turtle I was treating for skin tumours. When I asked them what they thought of the Delphi forecast, one of them shrugged and asked for some eggs. The following morning, I found a few yams and a bundle of stink beans on our doorstep, but I never saw them again.
On some nights, the sea gave us extravagant displays of bioluminescence which spread like lightning when our dogs pranced on the water. During the Perseids, Sekhar and I counted meteors and told each other how good it was to be away from the ponderous mourning and crushing panic of the city. How lucky we were to be safe and fed and healthy and above all else, not alone.
We watched the good-news channels: Lake Chini filled up for the first time in decades, tiger cubs and tapir families were spotted in the green corridor that used to be the East-West Highway, the atmospheric CO2 content was the lowest in a hundred years. Sekhar cried when his favourite underdog football team won the final World Cup, renamed End of the World Cup. I cried watching two hundred couples marry in a multi-cultural mass wedding event in Langkawi.
I said, “Why is there so much good in the world now that it’s coming to an end?”
Sekhar said, “Because you’re not watching the other channels.”
I suggested making a trip to town to get matching tattoos of our names on our forearms, but our Toyota had not been used for months and we did not know of a tattoo artist who was still working. It felt like too much of a bother and we did not go.
The months passed. Nurhanna sent me a tear-off calendar with pictures of capital cities. I thought of her and her post-Doomsday financial leaflet each time I ripped off a page with Kabul, Dhaka, Phnom Penh, or Copenhagen on it.
Sekhar talked about making a time capsule with his sturdy, fishing tackle box. I did not ask who he thought he was leaving it for, and that too fell by the wayside. We were not journal writers and had no interesting objects to leave behind except a half-hearted collection of seashells and a gold necklace with my mother’s initials which I wanted to wear when the time came. Sekhar said we could fill the box with recipes and seeds or the few books we had. We never got around to it. We were lulled into a bone-deep inertia that made us quite content to do nothing new.
The gap between the DCI forecast and the Delphi date became six days. The two dates closing in on us squeezed us together like bookends. We went to bed quietly every night. There was little left to discuss.
I was tempted to say that I was happy, that the way this was happening could not be better, but Sekhar would think I was faking it. My positivity was like pouring water down a yam leaf, he would have said. Nothing would stick. Real happiness was our honeymoon, the time we moved into our first home, his promotion to director, and our big trip to Tuscany in autumn. Yet, these last days were calm and luminous with the certainty that our deaths would be together. There was a relief in knowing that there would be no lingering illness, no loneliness, and no mourning by the one left behind. This absence of worry was as uplifting as any period of happiness that I remembered.
On the morning of the DCI-predicted Doomsday, Cairo was on the calendar. I made peanut butter sandwiches while Sekhar watched.
He said, “Trim the crust. We can afford a little luxury.”
I put the cut-offs in a bowl for the birds.
He said, “I didn’t realise you’d been separating the trash the whole time we were here. Not that it matters. I mean, not that it matters if you did or didn’t.”
“Habits, I guess.”
Sekhar’s phone flashed with messages from our friends and people in his DCI group.
“Jazri’s with a motorbike convoy. They’re riding to Bentong to look for durians.”
I laughed. “That sounds like him.”
“He says they can feel the vibrations in the ground. He thinks it’s from the Indonesian volcanoes.”
I took out one of the three bottles of champagne I brought with us when we moved here. The second bottle was a spare. The third was my cowardly secret, hidden in a drawer with Nurhanna’s leaflet in case she was right.
I said, “Do you wish you were there, riding with the guys?”
“No. No. Why would you ask such a thing?”
We took a picture of ourselves with our champagne flutes with the blue-grey sea in the background. Our smiles were wide and spontaneous. We looked tanned and healthy, almost unrecognisable from the time we arrived. Sekhar sent the picture to a few people. We sat and waited. We held hands until our palms became damp.
After a while, I remembered that I had a turtle in the enclosure. “I forgot to let poor Flora out. Come help me. She’s gotten big.”
We lifted Flora onto a wheelbarrow, carried her to the water’s edge, and watched her swim away. We went back to the cabana, sweating rivulets. The reflective glare of the sea hurt my eyes; it was a hot, still day.
Our champagne ran out of fizz and the sandwiches hardened around the edges.
I took a cool shower and a nap back in the house. Sekhar made lunch. Then dinner. A hankering for chocolate mint ice cream came over me, but we did not have any and I held my tongue. At sunset, we went to sit on the beach with our dogs. When we fell into a game of listing the things and people we had loved in our lives, I said, “Chocolate mint ice cream.”
Sekhar said, “My grandmother.”
“You, of course, my dearest.”
“Yes, likewise. You. That goes without saying. A good biryani with masala chai on a rainy day.”
“Our dogs. All of our dogs. These two and all the ones before.”
We went on for a bit and I was glad when five turtles came ashore and we stopped. I already had a list in my head which was different from what I was saying and I thought Sekhar did too. I said, “Do you think they know something we don’t?”
“Of course they do.”
“That one’s digging too close to the waterline. I’ll have to take her eggs into the hatchery tomorrow.”
“If we’re here tomorrow.”
“Yes. If we are.”
We did not die on DCI Doomsday. Sekhar sulked a little after that. He had always been the science guy, the one with the facts. The DCI had let him down.
•••••••••••••
My Delphi forecast said we had five days left. All indicators pointed to Saturday. Krakatao and Vesuvius had started smoking. I saw two waterspouts dance like devils out at sea. Rumour reached us about a golden spaceship landing in the Atacama Desert. Sekhar said it was rubbish, but he heard that the two asteroids heading our way were already visible through hobby telescopes. I snuck frequent glances at the sky. Everything was coming to a head.
I stopped going to the hatchery and spent my time in the kitchen thinking of ways to eat up everything we had in the remaining days. When the delivery drone dropped our package of supplies for the week, I was annoyed. Sekhar thought it was funny, a last joke from the Department of Fisheries.
I tore London off the calendar on Tuesday.
Then Helsinki.
On Saturday, we would sit on the beach the whole day. I planned to bring cheese, crackers, and canned fruit. The second bottle of champagne. Lots of water. Cushions. A hat. All the doggie treats I had stashed away. I would let our dogs lick peanut butter from the jar. I would finally put on my swimsuit and my mother’s necklace. My stomach churned with nervous energy.
On Thursday night, I was awakened by our dogs barking furiously outside.
“Sekhar? The dogs are going crazy.”
He turned on his side and grunted.
I grabbed a torchlight and headed to the beach where the dogs were still making a ruckus. Hundreds of turtles were crawling out of the sea onto the beach. The sea shimmered neon blue, brighter than I had ever seen. The sky was ablaze with stars and so full of birds the air seemed to vibrate.
I ran back to the house, barely breathing. “Sekhar, you must see this. I think tonight’s the night. Everything’s glowing. Everything.”
At the beach, the turtles had oriented themselves to face the sea. Row upon row like stony soldiers at attention with their necks craned upwards.
“What should we do?”
“Sit. Find a spot so we can sit.” Sekhar had our bottle of champagne in his hand.
“Oh, shit. I forgot the glasses. And the cheese and stuff. Our phones.”
“It’s alright.”
“I wanted this to be perfect.”
“It is perfect. Just look at the sky. You can see everything.” He was right. I had never seen a sky like this, so open and boundless. Our dogs laid their heads on our laps and licked our hands. We scratched their velvety ears.
Sekhar popped the champagne. “A toast?”
The moon rose like a white sun. Around us, the wind swirled, raising eddies of sand and sea spray that stung our eyes and skin. The flue-gas stacks sang in harmony, louder and louder. The sea swelled and the waves frothed, silver and electric blue.
I was lifted up and up by water and earth. The backs of the turtles were a cobbled path.
“Sekhar.” There wasn’t time to say anything else before I was borne away, breath and all, but it was alright. All I wanted to say had been said. It was alright.