He steps along the planking to the next tank. Everything is covered with beads of dripping moisture. He crouches below the tangled festoons of cable that hang from the ceiling. He has to tread carefully, so as not to lose his footing on the slippery scaffolding and crash down amongst a litany of broken racking, discarded conduit, water piping and half-crushed cable reels. Propped up on besser bricks, a hotchpotch of rust-stained pumps gurgle and belch from amongst the debris. He peers down into the watery contents of the tank.
What if I had a separate heart for each lung. Plus a third to suck the oxygen-rich blood from these lungs and propel it throughout my soft body.
Three hearts.
Would I feel three times the love? Could I have all three hearts broken?
Or would I have three separate containers of love? The first a vessel for Romantic love, a heart that conjures tenderness, poetry and attachment for another of my own kind. Tenderness, you ask? Poetry? The second, a heart that loves a perfectly formed shell or aches when it sees filtered sunlight turning gold the scales of a leafy sea dragon tailed to a clump of seagrass. Sensible of Beauty, you enquire? Yes. And in the third, love for Life itself, providing the impetus to slip the safety of a fist-sized hole in the rocks each day to jig around the pools, chasing, evading, adventuring and playing – jousting with darting fish, with evasive crabs and even with shadows fleeing across the sand.
He squats down to where he can see the public peering into the tanks. They’re on the clean side of the divide. They have paid for their tickets, for the shiny floors, for the brightly informative labels, for the glass kept spotlessly clean, both inside and out, for the nightly removals of dead fish, for the feeding, for the chemicals, for the gravel, for the marine plants, for the boats and divers collecting new stock, for the filtering. They have paid to not see the mess on the other side. They have paid to not see him. They have paid for him to service the tanks. They have paid for him to remain in the stygian netherworld that for them doesn’t even exist.
I have eight lips surrounding my mouth, each extending like an arm and lined with hundreds of suckers, a conveyor belt for my catch. Just think of all the hickeys I could give!
My blood is coppery blue-green. Does that make me an aristocrat? Do I deserve having my head drop into a basket, guillotined into a thousand tiny sections?
My eyes are large and alien. The black rectangle across my iridescent iris like the slot in a Ned Kelly helmet. This viewport always horizontal, regardless of the tilt of my mantle head, a prism that constantly shape-shifts to let through different wavelengths of light for revealing my mega-coloured world. My entire eyeball bulges and shrinks in order to shift focus between a crab in my arms and a shark looming in the distance, shifting the lens back and forward like a camera. I have no blind spot, my sight neurons are tucked behind the light-sensing retina, every one of them.
He shuffles along the planks to the 20,000 litre tank at the end of the section. It’s not the biggest tank by any means, not nearly as voluminous as the tank in section C31, the one that holds the sharks and rays. But it’s big enough.
Two thirds of my intelligence is in my arms. They not only probe, touch and grab, but smell and see as well. They are like eight roving reconnaissance teams, doing their own thing and feeding information back to headquarters.
My third right arm is extra-long with a sperm groove running down it. This sexy arm has a designer tip with erectile tissue for inserting spermatophores into the oviduct of my lover, and can even remove sperm from a previous encounter before I deposit my own! She will try to kill and eat me after she has my sperm. I’m not being judgmental; she needs all the energy she can get for the long fast while incubating our eggs. Even if I escape being eaten by her, I will die soon after, my job done.
He lives with his Mum in a two bedroom apartment. There is mould on the walls. The taps drip. He keeps a bicycle downstairs and cycles to the café for morning coffee and sees people in white scarves walking their dogs and people in black pajamas practicing tai chi in the park.
My skin is a multi-function marvel with photoreceptors, smell receptors and touch sensors. It also has chromatophores for changing colour, so as to blend in with the reef or stand out banded like a venomous sea snake. It includes thousands of little papillae sacs that change the texture of my skin in an instant to bumpy or spiky, so I can look weed-encrusted and shapeless or transform myself into a lionfish.
I can reveal my emotions, if I choose. Shifting patterns of red, yellow, black, white, orange, blue, green and anything between can ripple across my entire body and arms, depending on my mood and level of arousal. I can move fast if I need to, drawing water into my mantle cavity and jetting it out of my siphon. I can move my siphon to quickly change direction. I can disappear behind clouds of black ink.
Leaning against the end wall, he unlaces and removes his steel-capped boots. He pulls off his socks one by one and lays them carefully alongside the boots. He unzips his jacket. Pulls his shirt over his head. Steps out of his jeans. Yanks down his jocks.
The onlookers gasp as the pallid naked body of a man suddenly appears in a large corner tank. He extends his arms like an octopus. The kids giggle and point. He resists the urge to wave. To acknowledge them would be to make them real.