The Soul of an Octopus Page 12

  Everyone in the family seems so eager, almost desperate, for Octavia’s eggs to hatch. In their refrigerator at home, there is surely a carton of unhatched chicken eggs, which produce no such distress. That’s because the mother hen is nowhere in evidence. But this would-be mother is before them. There’s a sweetness to these people’s wish for Octavia’s eggs. They seem happy in their family. No wonder they want Octavia to be happy too.

  The arms farthest from us fluff her eggs. She frills her suckers, cleaning them, and flips upside down. Then she flips back. Two “horns”—actually soft papillae—rise above her eyes.

  “Ew! I bet it feels gross if you touch it!” says a teenage girl. She’s one in a pack of three, all in tight jeans and short jackets and thick eye makeup. I turn to face the speaker. Her young face is contorted with revulsion. “But look,” I say, “did you see her eggs?” I point to the forest of tiny white globes hanging from the ceiling of her lair. “They’re all eggs. There are thousands of them! And she is taking such good care of them all.”

  “No way!” says the girl who spoke first. “Way cool!” says one of her friends. Their expressions soften. Mouths that were twisted in disgust now open slightly; the pupils of their eyes dilate. “Yes—see how she’s fluffing the eggs with her arms? That’s helping to keep them clean and oxygenated.”

  “Aawww!” the girls now coo as if they are watching a puppy. A minute ago, Octavia was a slimy monster. Now that she is a mother, she’s adorable.

  “When will the eggs hatch?” the girls want to know.

  I shake my head and explain that the eggs aren’t fertile. In the eyes of one of the girls, I see a sheen of gathering tears.

  I share a few facts about octopuses that I hope will interest and impress them. I tell them about Octavia’s venom, her beak, her camouflage, but the girls grow silent, their young faces stony. I’m losing them.

  And then Octavia inserts the tip of one arm into her mantle opening. “Maybe she has an itch,” I say. The girls’ expressions grow soft again. “Yeah,” one says, and they share a sweet laugh.

  They don’t want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we’re the same. They know what it’s like to have an itch. They can imagine what it’s like to be a mother. This brief encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus.

  They all take pictures on their cell phones. They thank me before they leave. “Take care of that little momma,” one says to me gently.

  As August arrives, it’s time to get serious about scuba, before New England’s waters get too cold or too rough. Until Anna’s fainting spells are under control, scuba will be too dangerous for her. That leaves Christa and me. I visit the dive shop Scott recommended, United Divers in nearby Somerville, to register for the class, and return to the aquarium at 6:15 p.m., to discover Teen Appreciation Night in progress—a party the aquarium throws each year to honor its young volunteers. I slip through the knots of chatting teens and parents to Octavia’s tank. Octavia is puffed up, her skin not, as usual, creased or crinkled, thorny or warty, but smooth as a blown-up balloon.

  This looks decidedly wrong to me, like a giant tumor or an internal organ bloated with disease. My distress increases when I can’t see her gills, her funnel, or her eyes. She has turned her face to the wall, as a dog or cat often does when suffering. Except for part of one arm, hanging down, all of Octavia’s suckers are facing inward, too, attached to her eggs or to the walls of her den. Her body color, in the red light of my headlamp, seems pale pink, veined with maroon, like spider veins on an old woman’s legs. The webbing between her arms looks gray.

  I’m beside myself with dismay. I’ve never seen her like this. Is she dying? There’s no one I can contact, because there is nothing anyone can do. Female octopuses die within a few months after they lay eggs. No one can stop it.

  But I don’t want to see my friend die.

  Suddenly Wilson is beside me, like an answer to a prayer. His granddaughter, Sophie, is one of the teens the evening program honors tonight. He didn’t know I’d be here. He wanted to check up on Octavia.

  “That is very weird,” he says, looking at the octopus with concern. “I’ve not seen that texture before. But remember, you are seeing the end. If this is it, what are you going to do?”

  I don’t want to burden Wilson with my distress. After all, he is facing the same issue with his wife, whose situation is tragic as well as mysterious.

  Wilson and I stand and watch the octopus, silent. Is Octavia thinking anything at all, and if so, could I understand her thoughts? What is going on in the separate, holy, mysterious, private theater of these minds? Can we ever know the inner experiences of another?

  Learning, attention, memory, perception—these are all measurable, relatively accessible, amenable to study. But consciousness, says Australian philosopher David Chalmers, is “the hard problem,” precisely because it is so private to each inner self. Other philosophers suggest that the self is an idea without basis. “Science does not need an inner self,” writes psychologist Susan Blackmore, “but most people are quite sure we are one.”

  “The self,” Blackmore writes, “is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self,” she argues, “only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion—a useful fiction.” She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction.

  The Buddha denied the existence of persisting selves. At the end of life, the self may dissolve into eternity like salt in the ocean. To some, this might seem distressing. But to lose the lonely self in the ocean of eternity could also be a release, an enlightenment, as the mystics promise.

  At 7:05 p.m., one of Octavia’s arms starts to move, slowly stroking the eggs nearest the window. She is still bloated, face against the wall, and we can’t see her breathing. One of her arms is attached to the roof of her den with a single sucker, like a mosquito net hanging from one nail.

  At 7:25, she has raised some papillae on her body. But they are few and low. Her skin is still smoother than either Wilson or I have ever seen it.

  Then, at 7:40, Octavia suddenly twists around. I can see one eye, the pupil a slit. Wilson and I suck in our breath. Tall warts arise on her body and head. She inserts one arm inside her gill opening. Her arms begin to wave with great vigor; she turns and faces us. And in turning, she reveals her eggs to us—there are thousands of them!

  Octavia seems to have snapped out of her stupor. Suddenly she spins her arms around and around, her white suckers swirling like the frilly petticoat of a can-can dancer. Forcefully she shoots water from her siphon, a typhonic sneeze. Out comes all sorts of whitish fibrous material. What is it? Excrement? Gunk stuck in her gills? And now Octavia resumes actively cleaning her eggs, stroking them with her suckers.

  The crisis past, Wilson leaves to join his granddaughter. At 8:15, Octavia has spread her webbing like a blanket over the eggs and is hanging upside down, looking like a perfectly healthy mother octopus. Only a few of her eggs are visible now, looking like a necklace of tiny seed pearls on black string. At 8:20, she seems settled down to sleep. And soon I will, too. This night, I will stay in the hotel down the street. I want to see her the moment the aquarium opens its doors to the staff in the morning.

  When I return, at seven the next morning, she is super thorny. She does not look anything like she did last night. She has remade herself. Mottled with dark patches, she is radiantly beautiful, the very picture of a healthy octopus and a diligent mother. She fluffs the clusters of eggs nearest the window with one arm, like a mom sitting on a park bench might jiggle a baby buggy. Who knows what she is doing with the other arms and other eggs I can’t see? The lights haven’t yet been turned on in her exhibit; without my headlamp, I would not be able to see her at all.

  “I get so nervous every morning when I come in,” says a voice beside me. It’s one of the interns I haven’t met before. “I’m so afraid I’ll come in and find her dead on
the bottom.” Once a week, she cleans the octopus tank for Bill first thing in the morning, and she’s noticed the eggs are shrinking. Some have fallen to the gravel floor of Octavia’s exhibit. We don’t know if Octavia has noticed this, or if this bothers her.

  Everyone who works here knows the bittersweet news about Octavia’s eggs. All the staff and volunteers now look upon Octavia with exceptional tenderness.

  “Do you think she knows us?” asks the cleaning lady who wipes the glass of her exhibit each morning. “Does she know we’re here?”

  “Yes, I think so,” I reply, “but I don’t know how much she cares, now she has her eggs. What do you think?”

  “I think she notices us. I know they’re very intelligent,” the woman says. “I notice her every day, and I think she notices me back. I can’t say why.”

  Octavia’s one visible eye, coppery now, not silver, faces us. I can’t tell if she is looking at us or staring into space like a person lost in thought. She looks healthy and strong, but seems in a sort of suspended animation. Her breaths come at twenty seconds, twenty-four seconds, fifteen, eighteen. Is Octavia in an “egg zone,” in which little else registers, like some young mothers? So many of my friends, once outgoing and social, are transformed once their babies are born. Women who couldn’t sit through a two-hour concert are held transfixed by their infants, even though the babies do little more than suck, sleep, and cry. Hormonal changes that occur at birth, including a flood of oxytocin, popularly known as “the cuddle hormone,” help make possible this change. Similar hormones might inspire Octavia’s devotion. In fact, octopuses have a hormone so like oxytocin that scientists named it cephalotocin.

  “All the hormones we’ve looked for in octopuses, we’ve found,” Jennifer had told me when we’d met in Seattle. A paper presented at the Octopus Symposium detailed how researchers at the Seattle Aquarium found the hormones estrogen and progesterone in their female octopuses, testosterone in their males, and the stress hormone, corticosterone, in both. A female octopus’s estrogen level spikes when she is of egg-laying age and meets a male. The male’s testosterone levels rise.

  Hormones and neurotransmitters, the chemicals associated with human desire, fear, love, joy, and sadness, “are highly conserved across taxa,” Jennifer said. This means that whether you’re a person or a monkey, a bird or a turtle, an octopus or a clam, the physiological changes that accompany our deepest-felt emotions appear to be the same. Even a brainless scallop’s little heart beats faster when the mollusk is approached by a predator, just like yours or mine would do were we to be accosted by a mugger.

  “Ew! An octopus—disgusting!” a boy about six years old cries behind me. And then another voice at my side: “She looks exceptionally beautiful today to me.” It’s Anna.

  “I used to get here wicked early and spend all my time in front of her tank,” Anna says, as the boy moves away. “That was after my best friend killed herself.”

  “Oh, Anna,” I whisper. “How awful.”

  “She was so successful. She had so many friends. Everyone would have said if any of us would try to kill themselves, it would be me, not her,” Anna continues.

  Anna often feels uncomfortable in her body. She gets excruciating migraines, preceded by awful feelings that caterpillars are crawling up her neck. She has difficulty sleeping. She often has trouble focusing her mind and feels stupid. These are not uncommon problems for people on the autism spectrum. Add to that the hormonal turbulence of puberty, and the feelings can seem unbearable.

  As we stand watching the octopus, she confides that, even before her friend had killed herself, Anna had tried to kill herself, too.

  Shocked, I turn to face Anna as I gesture to Octavia. “You would leave this?”

  “I wasn’t involved with this place then,” Anna says. “I wish I had known then that only five percent of the ocean has been explored. . . .”

  Her voice trails off, but I know what she is thinking. If only she could have conveyed the importance of this fact to her friend, perhaps everything would be different. For who would want to leave this vast, teeming blue world? Surely its waters could wash away all sorrows, heal all brokenness, restore all souls.

  And in a way, for Anna, it has. Later, in an e-mail she wrote me at 2:30 a.m., Anna would tell me more.

  “My best friend’s name was Shaira,” she wrote, “and I had seen her the night before.” But the next morning, Anna was worried; Shaira had told her she was going to spend the night at her boyfriend’s house; told Anna’s parents she was going home; and told her own parents she was staying over at Anna’s. But Shaira had slept at none of these places. And in the morning, Shaira didn’t come home.

  Periodically that Monday, people would call Anna with updates. Anna was feeding the Amazon catfish, Monty, when Shaira’s sister called her cell phone to confirm that Shaira had not gone to her boyfriend’s house. “The arowana bit me right then,” Anna wrote, “but the catfish let me pet him. I was crying.”

  Anna was too upset to work, so her mother picked her up at the aquarium. In the car, Shaira’s sister called to say she had found the suicide note. Shaira’s body was discovered in a small pond ten minutes’ walk from Anna’s house, where she had gone to drown.

  Anna called Scott and Dave to tell them she wouldn’t be volunteering the next day, but they both said the same thing: She should come in if she felt like it might help. So she did. And she came in the day after that, too. She was working that Wednesday in Cold Marine when Dave suggested she might want to play with Octavia. “At that point,” Anna wrote me, “I had already taken her out more times than I could count, and I felt like I knew her pretty well. I think she sensed something was wrong. She was a lot gentler than she usually was, and she had her tentacles on my shoulders. It’s hard to explain why I think she understood. . . . After interacting with an animal lots of times, you get to understand what the usual behavior is and what it does in different situations.

  “I find myself expressing my feelings more when I’m around her,” Anna wrote me. “When I’m sad, my tremor gets worse. My arms get weaker, and my body temperature drops. When she came out, I felt like I could stop holding my breath. I cried, but then I stopped crying, because there was an octopus on me.”

  Except for the day of Shaira’s funeral, Anna never missed a single day volunteering at the aquarium that week, and in fact earned Volunteer of the Month that May.

  The rest of the school year was difficult; occasionally Anna tried to escape from her pain by using drugs. But she would never use drugs at the aquarium; she wouldn’t even think of using drugs the day before coming in to volunteer. “My logic was that, at the aquarium, I didn’t want to be anything but there,” she said.

  “This has been the worst summer of my life,” Anna wrote me, “but my days at the aquarium have been the best days of my life. I’ve learned,” she said, expressing a wisdom way beyond her years, “that happiness and sadness are not mutually exclusive.”

  This names the way we feel as we watch Octavia, our alien, invertebrate friend, caring for her infertile eggs at the end of her life with a tenacity and tenderness at once heartbreaking and glorious.

  In The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett writes of the beauty and solemnity of eggs: “If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end . . . there could have been no happiness, even in that golden springtime air.” Eggs were surely life’s first love, and protecting one’s eggs was surely love’s first urge. Love is that ancient, that pure, that lasting. It has persisted through billions of species, through millions of years. No wonder the sages say that love never dies.

  And Anna well knows this truth. As Octavia tends her infertile eggs, Anna tends her young friend’s grave. She looks for special, beautiful rocks to bring to the cemetery, she tells me. She knows that love lasts through everything, and that not ev
en death can erase it.

  Though Octavia’s eggs will never hatch, it fills us with gratitude that Octavia tends them with diligence and grace. For when she dies, Octavia will do so in the act of loving as only a mature female octopus, at the end of her short, strange life, can love.

  By the end of August, Octavia is still active and strong. Bill tells me that, as he was feeding the anemones and the sea star in her tank, she had reached out her arm and hungrily grabbed two capelin right out of their tentacles and eaten them the day before. “She could last a long time,” Bill says, “and that’s one reason I want something else for Kali.”

  Kali has been, as Wilson puts it, “acting up.” First she was squirting. Next she bit Anna. Then she started demanding fish from us at jet-point. Lately, she has been acting oddly. When we remove the top of her barrel, she ascends to the surface but won’t linger. She sinks back down, turns pale, and watches us from the bottom. I ask Bill if he’s worried about this. “Not yet,” he says.

  This is exactly what she does when Wilson and I visit her. She balloons to the top, her mantle inflated, the webbing between her arms billowing like sails. But she does not show us her underside, asking for a capelin. Wilson flips over one of her arms—her second left arm, known as L2—so the suckers are up. He hands her a fish, and she seems to accept it. But rather than let us watch her eat it, like she used to, she descends. She drops the fish. And strangely, she seems to want to look at us but not interact with us. Wilson closes the lid.

  When Wilson and Christa and I visit her that afternoon, she’s at the top of the tank, waiting for us when the lid comes off. She sucks on our hands gently for half a minute. She pauses when her suckers touch the Band-Aid on my thumb, recognizing this as something new, touching it tentatively. I wonder what the adhesive tastes like to her. She soon lets go of us. As she drops to the bottom, my heart sinks with her. Is she sick? Has she already seen too many people? Is she despairing in her small, bare barrel? Doesn’t she care about us anymore?