‘I hate this.’
Afternoon.
Cold skyscrapers hid the setting sun with their straight lines and right angles. Mano missed the reassuring ocean depths around her, the protective cocoon of her sub. The bus station was a river, the swarming masses, pieces of driftwood.
She had to make a conscious effort to only move her upper arms as she walked while her other arms fidgeted under her cloak. She prayed to Ganesh that none of her nervous ticks would give her away. She’d become very used to being by herself after all this time, for good or ill. People’s eyes on her felt like so many needles pricking her skin. ‘You don’t care what they think,’ she tried to tell herself, ‘who are they to judge you?’ But the words wavered in her mind, as if she was looking at them through water’s surface. She barely repressed a twitch from the third eyelid in her forehead under her hood.
The world never felt like there was enough space in it. It was built for people with two arms in mind, she often had to be reminded of that. Spaces had people crammed into them, packed like sardines, and herded like cattle, she couldn’t help but think – even though she quite liked cattle, mind you.
‘Beaches, seashells, oceans in my mind, will you drown out the crowd for me?’
Rubbing elbows. She’d rather people didn’t, but she was too polite to say anything. She especially didn’t want people to bump into her and notice her extra arms. Some people would just apologize and move on, but some people wouldn’t, and they had a way of gripping the mind. Cephalopods were considered weird even for fish, and fish had always been a breed apart. There had been milestones in the history of interspecies tolerance. There had even been a time when mammals and reptiles didn’t see each other as ‘people,’ a long time ago. A lot of people took hybrid rights for granted now. Hybrids themselves still knew better than to always expect them.
Even amphibians, like bisexuals and agnostics, had a hard time being accepted by fish or landlubbers, because they belonged to neither of two worlds completely, just as hybrids didn’t. Among bugs, butterflies passed much better than spiders, but anything with extra limbs aroused suspicion. Who could use this many limbs for an honest purpose, people wondered? So Mano feared people, and knew that people feared her. If something bad happened to her, she knew she’d likely be blamed for it. While some parts of the world were worse than others, she often wished she’d had her third eye put in the back of her head, but such was not the way of things.
‘I don’t want to be here.’
Fish didn’t need to sleep. They could sleep, to be sure, and most of them chose to do so now and then to recover energy, but any fish could theoretically have lived their whole life without ever sleeping, with no serious ill effect. People found this unsettling about them. They feared that fish could use this advantage to sneak up on them while they slept. More mundanely, they feared that, if fish could work 24/7 at their jobs, while surface dwellers had to stop working to go home to sleep, fish would have an unfair advantage at work, and steal all their jobs. In practice, fish were hired rarely, fired often, and paid less.
What fish did need was to be able to stay moist. To do this, they had to be able to immerse their bodies in water for about 20 minutes at least three times a day. Some chose to do it more often when they could, but most of them had to skip some more often than they cared for. Missing one was just annoying, in the immediate. It wouldn’t do permanent damage but it was irritating enough to affect your performance. Missing two was when the skin started changing color, mere discomfort jostling with outright pain. Missing three was when the skin would begin to crackle. Missing one repeatedly caused subtler cumulative damage that still added up.
Miss too many, and you could die.
‘Hell is other people, indeed.’
It was rare that fish died of dryness as such, but the knowledge that they would if they were careless still guided their actions. How could it not? Beyond that, dryness could also be a more indirect contribution to their harm, making them more vulnerable to bruising and disease, lowering their life expectancy. Surface dwellers made the most of this. As far as they were concerned, they had fish by the balls, or whatever it was that fish had.
Most workplaces weren’t going to have showers just to make it so fish could work there. It was a cost that they figured that their fish employees weren’t going to be making up for. Most work days were a full eight hours, without counting the time to get there and come back, which could be an hour or two there and back, if not more. Some fish tried to find a nearby gym to go shower at during lunch. Some who couldn’t were so desperate they would bring moist towlettes to work to use them on their bodies in the washroom over the course of the day, but it wasn’t the most effective stopgap measure. Some employers found it easier to simply not hire fish.
‘Not looking forward to the bus ride.’
While some workplaces were open 24/7, since practically none were owned by fish, most were only open during the daytime anyway. Beyond a few places looking for people to work with bats and other nocturnal customers, maybe as a second job, the ability of fish not to sleep wasn’t that much of an advantage after all. Any place where you may have to stay for a long time, like a hospital, without accessible showers or baths was functionally barred to fish. Some of them simply grit their teeth to grin and bear it, sacrificing their health to support themselves. Some of Mano’s friends back in India who had worked in call centers fell into that category.
And those were just the problems faced by fish with only two arms, not even with six.
Stories like Jonas and the whale seemed to her to embody over-grounders’ fear of being ‘engulfed’ by the ocean somehow. When she left the ocean for the bus station, she felt just as though she were being swallowed in the belly of a beast herself. When she was on the bus, she tended to get land-sick, the same way that surface dwellers could get seasick. She clutched the MP3 player with whale songs that she’d brought along with her to ward off the demons of urban cacophony. She wondered if she’d be able to sleep that night without the calming motion of the ocean’s currents around her. The land always felt like it was trying to push her back out.
‘I’d rather be somewhere else, doing something else.’
Mano slept.
When she had been a child she used to choose to stay awake all the time. There had just been so many things to do and to learn about. Why throw away any of her time sleeping when she could have been doing that? Today, she slept, as much or even more than some surface dwellers did sometimes. Living in a sub came with a certain distance from society at times, like a monk living at a remote monastery. You had to buy a lot of what you needed at once to make as few trips as possible. Most fish didn’t have the training to build a sub from scrap metal by themselves the way she had, and even she hadn’t done that all on her own, in a way.
Some of the fish who did manage to live at sea faced national territory issues. Whether or not they lived within certain boundaries affected which government would or wouldn’t protect their rights, if they were endangered. Anyone who lived in international waters was suspect of doing so to evade the law. That could be the price of living where the water was. Paper, electronics and many other conveniences that fish had become used to using could not have existed underwater. Yet when fish slept, they often dreamt of a world built underwater, for their own needs, not for that of over-grounders, where they could have felt like they really belonged.
‘Don’t people know it’s rude to stare?’
Mano had her own dreams. With practice and with the sophisticated mental abilities that octopi like her were known for, she had learned to master lucid dreaming. Dreams were a refuge from the harshness of waking life. There, she could deal with everything that she had to deal with in waking life on her own terms, taking apart and putting back together situations like the engineer she was, forming perspectives too deep under for her social conditioning to prevail.
It was waking life that was her recurring nightmare.
She hoped that seeing Klein again would do her some good. He had his flaws, but he could take her mind off things sometimes. She hadn’t seen him since they’d met in Brazil all that time ago now. She hadn’t heard from him in a while, and wondered how his return to North America had worked out for him. They’d met at an anti-capitalist protest that Mano had been covering as part of her job as a journalist at the time.
‘Can’t people look where they’re going?’
“So, what brings you here?” she’d asked him. “I’m here to exorcise some old inner demons, I guess.” She’d tilted her head at him. “What do you mean by that?” She’d brought the microphone back to him. “Well, this is going to be seen by people, isn’t it?” She’d nodded yes. “I’d rather not say too much as part of the interview, if you don’t mind,” he’d explained. There could be any number of reasons for that, she’d thought, but she could imagine many valid ones.
“What about off the record?” she’d muttered to him with her mic quite away that time. “Maybe I could help.” He tried to stall, wanting to know her better to determine whether or not he could trust her. “In what way?” He’d been deceived enough times to know enough to keep his guard up. “That depends. What brings you here?” She was more used to asking questions than to answering them, but it was interesting to have someone showing an interest. “I work for a leftist paper. I was a war journalist in the Middle East before I moved here with my girlfriend Eli.” That got his attention.
‘I just need some space.’
“You’re with Eli? You mean the Elizabeth?” Mano was always surprised by how much of a minor celebrity her girlfriend had turned into. “The one and only.” Eli had become a well-known poet and spokesperson in social activist circles recently, and her reputation preceded her. She was an outspoken opponent of religious violence, sexual discrimination, environmental destruction, and colonialism, among other things. Her poems had stricken the art world, in an age when poetry was usually tolerated at best. Fans fought over their interpretations of her work. He’d have asked to meet her, if he hadn’t known it would’ve been rude for him to impose.
“Well, then... If you really are dating Eli, I’m gonna assume that you can separate being a journalist from being an activist. Off the record, I’m not even supposed to be here. I hitched a ride on a boat to shed some light on a fabric factory here that’s owned by a big North American clothing corporation that has it coming.” She’d grunted knowingly, and nodded in assent. “I wasn’t kidding about offering to help, you know.” He’d smiled at her. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
‘Is that so much to ask?’
“So how did the two of you meet, anyway?” Mano sighed. “Well...” What a turbulent life they’d led. “It all started in India, several years ago now,” she’d begun, “when we were young...”
