When author Shelby Van Pelt's novel "Remarkably Bright Creatures" appeared a year or so ago, I thought, huh, another book about an octopus. Then I read the first few pages and recognized a kindred spirit. Not me. No, my octopus, the protagonist of this short story I wrote 5 or 6 years ago.
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You’re probably wondering about my vocabulary, which is pretty advanced, for an octopus. But I’ve grown up listening to NPR. All Things Considered, Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, all that.
It’s on all day in the lab. Well, Allie, the nervous redhead who comes in first thing in the morning, she usually starts the day off with KSSS-FM and sings along to Taylor Swift and Adele and Beyonce, and Amiq sometimes plays rap and afrobeat stuff when no one else is around, and then there’s that dumb fuck metalhead who comes in to mop up on Sunday evenings who plays his thrash metal shit. Do you know what that bass does to my water? It crashes through it and my whole tank vibrates like an old Chevy without a tail pipe.
Mostly, though, I listen to NPR. I know how the markets are doing. I know the Cubs are off to a strong start. I know Garrison has hung it up and that the Click Clack brothers are in reruns. I know I am the most badass, erudite octopus in the ocean, bitches.
Actually, that is bravado speaking and not wholly true. I am not in an ocean. I am in a fucking tank. In a room mostly lit by fluorescent lighting. I am four years old and have been here most of my life. At first, I had a tankmate. I called him Lance. He knew shit. He had lived outside. In the big water. I learned a lot about being an octopus from Lance. He was my homie.
In another tank, several feet away, is another octopus. I call her Celine. I don’t think she sees very well. I wave at her; she just stares back. I guess she’s hot, but how the fuck would I know. She’s the only female cephalopod I’ve ever laid my eyes on, as far as I remember. I think about her a lot, about climbing out of this tank of mine and crawling, wriggling over to her tank and be like, “Hello, it’s me. I was wondering if after all these years, you’d like to meet.”
Shit, that would stop these researchers cold, if Celine suddenly filled her tank with a couple hundred thousand eggs! Immaculate conception, y’all! Course, Lance thought she might be my mother, which could be true, for all I know. She could be. Which, well that would be something else, huh? Some real Oedipus octopus shit going down!
But she never waves back. And she is the only octopus I’ve ever seen. There are plenty more octupuses in the ocean. Yes sir! And don’t even come at me with that octopi bullshit. It’s octupuses. I know the ancient Greeks used the term octopodes, but we ain’t in ancient Greece anymore, dude.
No, it’s octopuses, though right now I’m more interested in octopussies, if you know what I’m sayin.
Which brings me back to that dumb fuck metalhead. He comes in here Sunday evenings, trailing a mop and bucket and swings it around the floor as quickly and with as much disinterest as he can possibly display and then he is gone just as quickly as he came. Every now and then, he sprays the counters and wipes them down and once in a while he pulls out a chair and he sits and stares at me, his goddawful music shaking the counter and my tank and my brain as he lights up a joint.
I’d strangle him then if I could. Crawl out of the tank and across the counter and up his arm to his neck and wrap one of my arms around his neck and fucking choke the life out of him.
And you’re thinking, he said arms. The octopus said arms and not legs. Well, yeah. To us, it’s pretty much interchangeable. Arms. Legs. I mean, when I’m eating or swimming, I think of them as arms. When I crawl, I think of them as legs, and my back two are really best for running. Also, I can taste with my arms, which is really cool but doesn’t really do me much good here in this fucking tank when I get tossed a handful of the same hellish pellets every damn day.
Anyway, I’d do that. Crawl out of here and kill him. I can learn to use a tool. I can squeeze myself so fucking thin you wouldn’t believe it. I have no bones. No spinal cord. No skeleton. I’m the ultimate invertebrate.
And I’m smart. I have a wicked memory. All Things Considered had a great segment on how octupuses would probably rule the world if they only lived longer. Know what kills us? Fucking. Yeah. The male keels over shortly after getting down, which, yeah, it might be worth it, who knows? Then females in the wild starve to death while they wait for their eggs to hatch.
I’m thinking if we could only get past that whole dying too young shit – like Prince – shit, think of what we could accomplish. I mean we’ve each got eight fucking arms, or legs! We can use tools. We could learn to build shit. We could rule the godamned ocean! Shit, I’d even build a tank with wheels like that mop bucket has, to move around on land. Imagine that! Wheeling around on the land – intelligent octopuses in their own little tanks. We’d fucking dominate!
Not that I’d really want to come back up top. I mean, the ocean Lance described sounded pretty awesome. He talked about how the light fell down through the water, like water itself cascading down a hillside, and how it fell on things – fish, plants, coral – almost randomly. He talked about night and how the light vanished altogether, so that you floated along in nothingness for hours. It’s never dark here up top. The red exit sign over the door. The screensavers on the laptops. The glowing blue pinhole lights on the equipment console across the room. Several small red dots on the floor underneath the desks. It’s never dark.
Big things out there too, Lance said. Whales. Sharks. Waves. Storms. Lightning. I choke up thinking of it. The fuckers here look at me. They take notes every now and then, but I’m mostly just an object of curiosity here, a mascot. Hell, in Europe, they’re not allowed to do research on octopuses without anesthesia. We’re too intelligent. We feel pain. Trust me, even existential pain.
Which is why I have to get out there. You find your own food out there. Or you die. Crabs. Clams. You paralyze them first. Grab ‘em and pull them close and then inject them with your spit (how cool is that!). And then crack them apart with your beak. Lance taught me. Yeah, we have beaks. Made of chitin. Look it up. I’ll wait. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Ha!
Mostly, there are other octopuses everywhere out there. Maybe ones that will wave back. Not like that bitch Celine.
There’s one guy. Tall. Bald. Glasses. Always serious. I wave at him every day he comes in. It makes him smile and they all treat it as some weird coincidence. Dumb shits. They wear lab coats, but they’re as stupid sometimes as that metalhead dick.
I hate that kid. Of course, I also love him. I love him because when he mops the floor he always lifts up the cover of the drain in the middle of the room. The floor is slopped to the middle of the room so any large spills can easily drain away. Or blood, like when they cut up dead fish.
He mops the floor and sometimes sprays and wipes the counters and sometimes stares at me and gets more stoned, and then he puts the drain cover back on and wheels the bucket out of the room.
Except last night. Last night, this brilliant motherfucker was more stoned than usual and he wheeled out of the room leaving the drain cover sitting, upside down, just to the side of the drain. Allie will tsk-tsk when she comes in and sees it – this dark hole in the middle of the room. Maybe six inches across.
I can fit in it. Easily.
It’s happened before, the metalhead doofus leaving it off. More than once before. And I’ve thought about my escape. I can get out of the tank. There is a small door on the hood of the tank that swings upward so that they can feed me. That opening is maybe two inches wide at best. I can fit through it. Again, because I have no bones, for fuck’s sake. Just this large fleshy head and eight arm/legs.
Am I ambidextrous? A guy asked that once, peering into my tank as I emptied my food canal. Am-BI-dextrous. What a dumb fuck. What a self-centered, short-sighted dumb fuck. First, bi means two. Dextrous pertains to hands. Hands. I have eight legs, or perhaps eight arms, but I have no fucking hands.
But yes, the arms or legs are pretty much interchangeable. Like I said, the two furthest to the back of me function best as legs, allowing me to almost walk upright under water, but otherwise all eight appendages are pretty much equal. I can taste with any one of ‘em. I can grab with any one of ‘em.
What I can’t do, not very well anyway, is control the fucking things with my brain. I can get to the top of the tank and I can think with all my might about pushing that lid upwards and then sliding up and out of the tank, but the last two times I tried and got to the top of my tank, my fucking eight arms just waved around, sweeping alongside the glass wall of the tank, or absent-mindedly swatting at small pieces of shit drifting in the water. I was so fucking close. I sat up there for an hour at least, hoping just one of the arms would get a freaking clue and do what I needed it to do.
See, my brain may be complex and evolved, but two-thirds of my neural network exists in my arms. My brain has a rough time delegating tasks to my body. My arms have a mind of their own. NPR again.
So, after the last time this happened, I brooded. I was down, dude. I thought about that female in the other tank, about just putting all my efforts into getting there and mating and dying. Because, what, why go on? Why be so fucking brilliant if you can’t even open a doorknob?
Until Science Friday. You know, with Ira Flatow? They did a segment on meditation. This yogi meditated so well that he almost stopped his own heart beating. He could lower his blood pressure. Do all sorts of cool shit. Meditation is power. Mind power over the body. You could meditate and dip your hand in ice water and hardly notice. You could fight depression. You could control things your body does automatically.
I thought about all that, a lot. And then I heard about visualization, about how you can picture something in your mind and that helps drive your body’s performance at that task. It was a story on All Things Considered about a basketball player who visualized himself successfully shooting free throws and became a much better free throw shooter.
There was more to it. Talk about creating your own reality and all this spiritual bullshit. But I didn’t care about any of that. I was busy meditating, visualizing my arms doing exactly what I wanted them to do, all eight of them, working together. Octo-dextrous!
The lab guys made notes. They talked in concerned tones. “He is moody.” “Listless again, today.” “Is he dying?” Even Allie in the morning would walk first to my tank and stare at me, her eyes wide and worried.
Fuck that shit, I was focused, I was in the zone. Because I was slowly gaining control over my limbs. I was becoming superpowered.
Which is how I ended up here – on the floor, next to the drain.
I slid though the opening at the top of my tank, made my way down its glassy wall, scuttled across the counter – I paused to look briefly at the other tank, at Celine, and waved, slightly, but frankly I needed all eight limbs to move me across the surface in the air (I felt so heavy) and she didn’t respond in the slightest – and then rappelled down the leg of the counter to the floor, out of her sight. My mom? My first love?
Here, I can hear the energy vibrations of the waves traveling up through the pipes in the quiet of the lab. I can see the full room around me in the early morning light. The soft blue and red lights dotted around the room, the muted glow of the computer monitors. It’s peaceful. Allie will be here soon.
I am stopped here. On the edge of my known universe. I can’t really do this for long, waiver here like this, out of the water. My body has turned a bluish hue in response to the color of the tiled floor.
There is large poster on the wall. I have looked at it daily and can see it more clearly now that I am six-feet closer to it. A beach and green hills rising behind it. Water the color of I don’t know what. Blue and green and sky. Bright white stripes rippled across the water, parallel to the shore. It’s beautiful. And next to it, an underwater photo. With orange and yellow and blue fish. And flowers exploding in color.
It looks so different from this room, from my world so far. Lance said it was teeming with life, from the smallest shrimp to those behemoth whales and all sorts of shit in between. I can hear it all. The pounding of the waves is like a heartbeat below me, as though the whole ocean is a living thing, at the other end of that drain pipe, calling out to me.
And I’m actually getting a little lightheaded, guys. That tank might not be my fucking natural habitat, but this floor sure as fuck ain’t.
You know, now that I think about it, maybe they were planning on breeding me. Maybe any day now they were going to move me into Celine’s tank and watch what happened. Boom-chikka-bow-wow.
I don’t know. They were okay, those guys. I could have used a little change up with the food, but it wasn’t like I was starving. And I have no proof they killed Lance. They just removed him from my tank one day. Just like that. Gone. What the fuck, guys? We were friends.
Yeah, lots of other octopuses in the ocean. All wild and native and shit and then there’s me swimming along, singing Adele. That’s fucked up. Maybe you can’t go home again, like Carl Kassel said once. Maybe…
Holy fuck! The light has gone on. I hear/feel footsteps. And then Allie turns the corner and stops dead in her tracks, let’s out a scream as she sees me and drops a big water bottle on the floor, which shatters, shatters into a million splinters of light and unleashes its contents, which wash across the floor towards the drain, towards me, and strips me from my mooring here on the floor on the edge of the drain and next thing I know it is black again and I am weightless and I have no fucking idea where I am or if I am even alive, but I hear the booming of the waves growing louder.
Holy…
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