The Color the Cuttlefish Couldn't See

The lights over the public tanks had gone out an hour ago. Only the tank glow was left, blue and shifting, throwing wobbles of light across the floor.

"Aunt Ravi said fifteen minutes," Soren said. "That was forty minutes ago."

"She's counting jellyfish," Maya said. "You can't rush someone counting jellyfish."

They were standing in front of the cuttlefish. There was one big one near the front glass, hovering over a patch of speckled gravel, its fin rippling like a skirt in a slow wind. Its skin was doing the gravel. Not gray. Not brown. Speckled, exactly, dot for dot.

"Watch," Maya said. She put her hand flat against the glass, and the cuttlefish drifted sideways over a smooth green rock. Its whole body went green and smooth in about a second.

"That's the part I don't get," Soren said. "There was a card on the other tank. It said cuttlefish are colorblind."

"They can't be. Look at it."

"The card said it. One kind of light-catcher in the eye. Not three like us. So they see the world in shades, sort of. No color."

Maya turned and looked at him the way she did when a fact was standing directly on top of another fact and both of them refused to move.

"Then how," she said, "is it green."

Soren didn't answer, because he didn't have one. He got out his notebook and wrote colorblind and then next to it wrote GREEN and drew a line between them and put a question mark on the line.

"Say it again," Maya said. "The eye part."

"The eye catches light with a protein. When light hits it, the protein changes shape, and that's the signal. Ours come in three flavors, one for red-ish, one for green-ish, one for blue-ish. Together that's color. Cuttlefish only have one flavor. So no color. In the eye."

Maya stopped. "You said in the eye twice."

"Did I?"

"Both times. In the eye. Like the eye's the only place you'd keep them."

The cuttlefish drifted back over the speckled gravel and went speckled again, and Maya watched the color arrive across its skin the way frost arrives on a window, moving outward, not all at once.

"It didn't turn its head," she said.

"What?"

"When it went green. Watch again." She waited. Aunt Ravi's clipboard clicked somewhere down the dark hall. The cuttlefish slid over the rock and greened, and its eyes stayed pointed forward, out at them, not down at the rock at all.

"It's not looking at the rock," Maya said. "It's on the rock. It's lying on it. The rock is touching its belly."

Soren looked at his own hand on the cold glass. "You think it feels the color?"

"I think," Maya said slowly, "the color's getting caught somewhere that isn't its eyes." Then he opened the notebook again and under colorblind he wrote one word: skin.

"Say why," Maya said.

"Because the protein isn't magic," he said, and now the words were coming faster than he was choosing them. "It's just a thing that catches light. There's no rule that says it can only live in an eyeball. If your body could grow it in your eye, your body knows the recipe. You could grow it anywhere. You could grow it in your skin."

"So the skin catches the light."

"The skin catches the light off the rock. Green light. And the skin does something about it. Right there. On the spot."

Maya was nodding before he finished. "Without asking the brain."

"It might tell the brain too. I don't know. But it wouldn't have to. If the catcher's in the skin and the color-making's in the skin, the skin could just do it. Belly touches green rock. Green light lands on the belly. Belly goes green. The eyes never have to see anything."

"The eyes couldn't see it anyway," Maya said. "That's the whole thing. The eyes are colorblind and the skin isn't."

They both stopped talking.

The tank hummed. The cuttlefish hung there, doing green, doing it perfectly, a green it would never in its life get to see.

"That's the part," Maya said, and her voice had gone small and strange. "It's making a color it can't see. It can match green and it doesn't know what green looks like. The only part of it that knows is the part with no eyes."

"The skin knows a color the brain has never seen," Soren said.

"Don't just say what I said."

"I'm not. I'm saying it back to check it's real. It's real. There's a piece of this animal, all over the outside of it, that sees. And there's another piece, the piece we'd call the animal, the thinking piece, and that piece is in the dark. Colorwise."

Maya put both hands on the glass now. "So which one is it. Which part is the cuttlefish. The part that sees or the part that thinks it's the cuttlefish."

Soren looked at the notebook, at the word skin, and did not write anything, because there was nothing yet to write.

"Kids." Aunt Ravi's voice, far off, tired. "Two minutes. I mean it this time."

Neither of them moved.

"Do you feel that," Maya said quietly.

"Feel what."

"My arm. Right now. There's light landing on my arm. Green light off the exit sign, look." There was a green sign over the door, and it was laying a faint green wash along her forearm. "It's landing on me and I can't feel it. I can only feel it if it goes in my eyes and comes back around through my head. My skin catches nothing."

"Ours doesn't have the catcher."

"I know. That's what I mean." She held her green-washed arm up in the tank glow. "There's a whole way of knowing where the light is, and this animal has it spread out all over itself, and I'm standing here completely blind everywhere except two little spots on my face."

The cuttlefish rolled and slid off the green rock onto the pale sand, and its whole body drained to pale, edge to edge, the color leaving it like breath fogging off a mirror and clearing.

Maya's arm stayed up in the green light from the sign, and she turned it slowly, watching the green lie on her skin without her skin knowing it was there.