Reefer Madness

Liam bowed his head into the damp gusts raking him as he strode with Maria and Sadie down the length of the rain-slickened pier. Their destination, the tiny, cinder-block aquarium that housed Reefer the octopus, seemed to recede as they advanced.

Dark, sinuous forms plied the slate gray waters on either side of the pier that reflected the close, bruised sky.

He shouted, trying to make himself heard above the wind and the sea’s roaring churn as he related to his companions his octopus reverie of a day earlier.

Whitecaps lashed and clawed at the aged wooden structure.

Pausing to watch monster waves crash over the pier behind him, seemingly cutting off their return, he realized he was hallucinating. Apparently the microdoses he’d scored before leaving Portland were unusually potent.

Or maybe the microdosing was rewiring his neural network.

Or perhaps he was dreaming?

After what seemed like hours, they reached the aquarium; to their dismay, if not utter surprise, it appeared to be closed.

Fusillades of horizontal rain tore at their wraps. Her hooded head drooping wearily, Sadie banged on the battleship gray metal door after trying the handle, which failed to budge.

Liam’s eyes widened as a towering, heavyset Polynesian woman, cloaked head to foot in rain gear, carefully opened the door enough for them to squeeze inside.

“Talofa!” she shouted over the howling wind. “I was beginning to think you’d bailed on me.”

She was expecting us?

“Quickly now,” she urged them. Her meaty mocha hand maintained an iron grip on the door’s lever handle, lest the gale tear it away, as she stepped aside to let them in before muscling the portal closed.

“Welcome, intrepid friends,” she greeted them, beaming, as she tugged her hood back off her salt and pepper braids. In her free hand she grasped a stack of large index cards. “I’m Moana.”

“Moana …?”

“I promise you, I was Moana long before Disney cashed in on her.”

Liam laughed.

“Aloha, Moana,” Liam said. “I’m, uh, … Axel.”

“Of course you are,” she replied drily.

"Talofa!” she repeated to the three. “You’re my first visitors today. ‘Fe‘e and I are so honored and excited that you defied the tempest to meet us.’" She indicated with her hand the large cylindrical tank situated a few feet behind her.

“I thought his name was ‘Reefer,” Sadie said. “It says it right there on his tank.”

“‘Fe‘e is his Samoan name,” she replied with a smile. “Which I think of as his real one.”

“What does ‘Fe‘e’ mean?”

“Oddly enough, it means octopus,” she said with an infectious laugh.

Her three visitors laughed along.

“Reefer is the unfortunate result of a naming contest aimed at stoking the imaginations of local school kids,” she confided in a near whisper. “But it goes down a lot easier with tourists.”

The visitors introduced themselves by their aliases as they shook off their dripping rain gear, spreading it on a bench that sat against one wall.

Eager as they were to meet Fe‘e, they also wished to ingratiate themselves with his minder.

“With all due respect,” Sadie remarked, “I wouldn’t expect many more visitors. Pretty stormy out there.”

“Oh, you never know,” Moana replied cheerfully. “In any event, Fe'e is excited to have some visitors.

“We can get on each other’s nerves.”

Even Maria smiled.

“We were just working on a lesson.” She brandished the stack of index cards.

Lesson?

Affixed to the curving glass wall by its suckers, Reefer stared at them through his huge, narrowed eyes while employing three tentacles to work a large Rubik’s Cube.

Hallucinating. I’m hallucinating …

Liam tried to avert his eyes as the margins of a small octopus tattoo on Moana’s fleshy cheek slowly expanded across her moon face, which lit up when she eyed the hemp octopus dangling from a string about Maria’s neck.

“May I touch it?” she inquired meekly.

“Of course, tia,” Maria replied with a smile.

"Mamā," Moana uttered in apparent awe as she fingered the hemp figure with apparent reverence.

Mama …?

“Pardon a lo‘omatua,” Moana said somberly. “Mamā in Samoan means something like ‘perfect’ in English.

“Like an American mama,” she explained with a smile, “might tell her precious daughter.”

Maria's eyes moistened.

“You made this yourself?”

Maria nodded shyly.

“It is exquisite, teine.”

Tay-neh?

Liam tried not to gape as Moana’s tattoo continued its steady conquest of her physiognomy.

On the plane, Maria had shared with the group a video shot by a local news crew that she’d come across about Moana, an octogenarian volunteer who had almost single handedly rescued the aquarium from its planned closure.

A self-educated marine biologist, the old woman had managed the Tauese P.F. Sunia Ocean Center, a regional National Marine Sanctuary. She was one of thousands of Samoans forced to relocate from her home island of Tutuila as brine from rising seas contaminated the region’s dwindling groundwater.

That situation, in addition to other challenging factors, led to the American Samoa Rising Seas Relocation Act, better known to supporters as AmSamoRSReLoA and to its detractors as AmSamScamA.

Widowed and childless, with few kin to speak of, she’d latched on to the rare octopus, acquired when it was the size of a thumbnail, as a smart, lively companion. She spent most nights at the aquarium, sweeping up, cleaning the exhibits, whether they warranted it or not, and sleeping on a cot in a closet-size excuse for an office. The door to the office was nowhere in sight.

Flouting safety codes, she’d ridden out some big storms in scuba gear trying to protect the exhibit’s marine residents.

“Wouldn’t it be easier on everybody just to let all the fish go?” Tate had inquired on the plane.

“Please take the self-guided grand tour,” the increasingly cephalopodic Moana said with a chuckle as her arms morphed into orange tentacles and the octopus tattoo on her cheek expanded until it replaced her head with a bulbous morphology.

I’m hallucinating …

The space’s rear walls receded as they proceeded to the tanks bolted to the floor that harbored a collection of native Gulf Coast marine life, including neon seahorses performing an exquisite ballet and schools of vibrantly colored fish shimmying rhythmically to a color-shifting strobe pulsing through the brine.

Stealing a glance at Reefer’s tank, Liam found the creature following them with his eyes. Extending a tentacle in Liam’s direction, its tip curled and uncurled toward its amorphous mass, as though beckoning him closer.

Unintelligible rune-like figures streamed across its now scarlet mantle.

I’m hallucinating …

Unsure of what he was actually seeing, Liam shrugged helplessly at Reefer, who comically appeared to ape the gesture.

It’s like he wants to meet us …

Falling quiet, Moana’s evanescent cheeks billowed as she reviewed the cards in her tentacles, now glowing eerily, as her guests scrutinized the aquatic life; each specimen, according to their accompanying interpretive, hand-typed index cards, represented a threatened species.

“It’s time you met the star of the show,” she said after a few minutes, apparently satisfied with the adequacy of their tour. “And don’t think for a moment that he doesn’t know it …”

An ancient metal office chair with a tattered seat cushion stood before Reefer’s tank, to which were taped still more cards offering insights into the creature’s biology, behavior, and conservation challenges. Within his enclosure were rocky crevices, coral, and an artificial cave. The LED lighting simulated ocean conditions, from dawn to the mesmerizing, bioluminescent glow of deep waters.

Reefer held court, as it were, in chameleonic fashion, holding the inquisitive stares of his visitors.

To Liam’s astonishment, a series of what appeared to be numbers and mathematical symbols flashed on and streamed like a chyron across Reefer’s protean, elastic mantle. He exchanged wide-eyed glances with his companions, who were equally rapt.

“He says hello,” Moana informed them happily.

“I believe it,” Sadie muttered in an awed voice.

“Are you being metaphorical,” Liam asked, “or do you actually understand those symbols?”

Moana proffered in a tentacle the index cards she still carried. “I’ve been teaching him, or he me, perhaps, to communicate using alphanumeric octal code.”

Octal code?

“What’s an octal?” Sadie inquired.

“It’s counting in base eight,” Moana replied matter-of-factly.

“Like in the video,” Maria noted.

“That’s right,” Moana affirmed. “Using the numbers zero through eight. In the octal system, each digit represents a power of 8, similar to how in decimal each digit represents a power of 10.”

Sadie’s gaze, Liam noticed, evoked that of a deer in the headlights.

“When Fe’e arrived here, I just fell in love with him,” Moana confided. “He’s the first giant Pacific I’d encountered here. I saw them all the time back on the Islands.

“The warming, shifting ocean currents pushed them up here.”

The digits resolved to be intelligible, unintelligible, and then intelligible anew, as if the octopus was recognizing and correcting errors.

“He’s experimenting with forming the figures on his mantle.”

“Cephalopodic penmanship,” Liam ventured.

His companions looked at him blankly.

“Never mind.”

“When I worked at the Ocean Center in Samoa,” Moana said, “I learned that researchers were studying whether fe’es, having eight limbs, each with its own brain, and possessing an almost alien intelligence, might have the cognitive capability to grasp octals.”

“They tried all kinds of really elaborate codes, like they thought he was some kind of supercomputer or something.”

Moana had hired on as a technical consultant for “My Octopus School,” which required her to sign a nondisclosure agreement, only to quit after she was told to skew some data for dramatic purposes. She asked to speak with Mauritius to express her concerns, but his staff put her off, accepting and shelving, if not tossing, her recommendations.

She heaved a heavy sigh as the building’s spare illumination flickered.

“Been runnin’ on a generator since the power died,” she said. “Overhead on this little slice of marine heaven is breaking me.”

“You shell out of your own pocket to keep this place open!?” Liam exclaimed.

“Donations are voluntary,” she replied. “And I get a grant here and there as well.”

Noting Maria was staring raptly at the tank, Liam and his cephalopodic companion returned their attention to its occupant.

A sequence of numbers, 11014515416040155145, marched slowly across Reefer’s mantle.

I’m hallucinating …

Maria pressed her palms against the tank, while the octopus pressed the tips of two tentacles opposite her digits. Bowing her head, she rested her sloping, indigenous forehead against the tank.

Moana’s hallucinatory avatar stared at the repeating sequence in evident astonishment.

“How does that translate?” Liam asked.

“Oh my god,” Moana said. “It says …”

“ …Release me!” she and Maria cried in concert.

“I never taught him that!” Moana wailed as she fainted, her floppy octopus head splatting against a display tank behind her before she buckled to the floor, morphing back into Moana as she lay prostrate.

A sudden crash jolted Liam from his reverie; sitting bolt upright in his seat, he slid off his sleep mask, blinking rapidly and looking around him. Alarms blared. The craft yawed to the left, pressing Liam forcefully into his seat.

“Are you with me, Avi?” Fatima inquired calmly.

“I wanna play Candy Crush,” Avi replied in a girlish timbre.

“Oh, merde!” Fatima exclaimed.

“What’d she say?” Liam asked.

“She said, oh, shit,” M replied grimly. “W’at up, Fatima?”

“We just got hit by lightning,” the pilot said. “Avi’s hallucinating.”

“Oh, shit,” Liam muttered, unrelieved to realize he was neither dreaming nor hallucinating.

“Left engine’s out, but we have enough juice to bring her in on the other,” Fatima reported. “Gonna be bumpy, though. Ground crews are preparing for an emergency landing.

“Hold on tight and keep your heads down. Que Dieu nous aide.”

The craft listed acutely to port before its nose plunged earthward. Liam grabbed a sickness bag as his stomach vehemently protested. The passengers all eyed each other nervously.

“If she said she’ll land this bird,” M shared with them, “I have absolute confidence in her. She’s a great pilot.”

“There’s a gremlin on the wing!” Ellie shouted, unexpectedly drawing laughs.

Maria appeared to remain in her trance.

The plane continued in what felt like freefall for a few more seconds that crept by like millenia before it gradually leveled off.

Liam and company took a collective deep breath and heartily applauded.

“Ladies and germs,” Avy suddenly announced, “please prepare for landing at Mara LaGaux Regional Airport. I trust you’ve had a pleasant flight.”

Fatima and her passengers guffawed.