The Arm That Tasted the Dark

The last visitors were gone, and the corridor behind the tanks smelled like salt and wet rope. Maya was folding a net wrong. Soren was folding a net right and watching her do it wrong.

"Watch this," said the keeper, a tired woman named Ruth with a bucket of thawed shrimp. "She won't take it from my hand. She has opinions."

The octopus was the color of a stone that couldn't decide. One arm came unspooling out of a rock cleft, slow, feeling along the glass floor toward the shrimp Ruth had dropped.

"She's not looking at it," Maya said.

"What?"

"Her eye. It's pointed up. At you. But the arm's going to the shrimp anyway."

Ruth shrugged. "They multitask."

The arm reached the shrimp, curled around it, and then, strangely, let it go. Picked up a pebble instead. Held the pebble. Dropped it too. Went back to the shrimp.

"She keeps checking things she already touched," Soren said. He had his notebook out and a pen moving. "Why check twice."

Ruth was already walking off toward the filters. "She's picky. That's the whole answer. Fold your nets."

Maya crouched until her nose was level with the glass. "Soren. Her eye is still up. The whole time. She found the shrimp with the arm. Not the eye."

"So she felt it."

"No." Maya said it fast, then slower. "No. Feeling would tell her shape. She dropped the pebble and the shrimp really quick. Same shape, kind of. Round. Squishy-ish. She wasn't sorting them by shape."

Soren stopped writing. "By what, then."

"By something the pebble doesn't have and the shrimp does."

They looked at each other. The word neither of them had said yet was sitting between them like the shrimp.

"Taste," Soren said.

"With her arm," Maya said.

"That's not." Soren flipped a page like the page would argue with him. "You taste with a mouth. Molecules land on a tongue. There are receptors on a tongue."

"Where else could receptors be."

He opened his mouth to say the tongue is the only place, and then didn't, because he had no reason it had to be true. That was the thing about Soren. He would not defend a rule he couldn't back up.

"Anywhere," he admitted. "Receptors could be anywhere you build them."

Ruth came back with a squeeze bottle. "You two still here."

"Can I test something," Maya said. "Can I put a clean shrimp and a shrimp you've dunked in the fish-tank water and see which one she keeps."

Ruth raised an eyebrow. "You think she can tell the water off it."

"I think she's tasting everything her arms touch," Maya said. "The whole floor. The glass. The pebble. She's tasting the pebble right now."

Ruth looked at the octopus. The octopus looked at Ruth. The arm went on feeling along the seam of the tank, sucker after sucker after sucker, each one pressing down and lifting like a slow row of tiny mouths.

"There's about two thousand of those," Ruth said, quieter now. "The suckers."

"Two thousand," Soren repeated, and wrote it, and underlined it, and then just stared at the underline.

Ruth handed Maya two shrimp on a spoon, one plain, one she'd rinsed in the murky filter water. "Don't tell me which is which," Maya said. "Drop them both. Same spot. Let's not know."

Ruth dropped them, a thumb-width apart. Two shrimp, identical to any eye. Identical to Maya's eye. Identical to Soren's.

The arm came. It touched the first shrimp, paused. Touched the second, paused. Then it wrapped the second one and carried it up under the web of arms toward the hidden beak and left the first one lying on the glass like a thing that had failed a test it didn't know it was taking.

"Which one did she take," Maya breathed.

Ruth checked her own hand, the wet thumb. "The dunked one. The one that tastes like her tank."

"She tasted the water off it," Soren said. "With her arm. In the dark, kind of, because she wasn't even looking, her eye was up the whole"

He stopped. He was doing the thing Maya loved, the thing where he stopped mid-sentence because the sentence had gotten too big.

"Say it," Maya said.

"When she reaches into a rock," Soren said slowly, "a hole she can't see into. A crack. She's not feeling around blind. She's tasting the inside of it. She knows if there's a crab in there before she can see the crab. She knows what the walls taste like." He looked at the octopus. "She's licking the whole world with her arms. All the time. Everything she touches, she's tasting it right then."

Maya put her hand flat on the cool glass without pressing, just resting near where the arm worked. "Imagine tasting the doorknob. The table. Every stair."

"Imagine the arm knowing something," Soren said, "before the rest of her does. Like her arm figures out crab and then tells the middle of her."

"Do the arms tell her," Maya asked, "or do they just know on their own."

Ruth opened her mouth. Closed it. "I," she said. "I actually don't know that one. I don't think anybody fully does."

That landed harder than the shrimp had. Maya turned to look at Ruth, and then at Soren, and the corridor felt suddenly enormous, the whole dark building full of tanks full of arms that were tasting the water, the glass, the rock, the shrimp, all night, whether or not anyone watched.

The octopus finished the shrimp. Its arm came back out of the rock and began, unhurried, to explore the abandoned first shrimp again, checking it a second time, then a third, reading it, deciding again what it was.

Soren's pen hovered. "She's checking the one she already rejected."

"Maybe it tastes different now," Maya said. "Maybe the water moved. Maybe everything keeps changing and she keeps re-tasting to keep up."

The arm curled the rejected shrimp, held it in a ring of two hundred small mouths, and this time did not let go.