It goes like this: We’re both researchers at the International Space Station, studying the effects of microgravity on the bioluminescent microbiota of the Hawaiian bobtail squid. We’re well funded, with many important investigatory questions. For example: How will outer space alter the beneficial relationships between animal and microbes? I spend lots of time watching you float from squid tank to squid tank, writing down—in a cute little notebook—your observations concerning the glow in each bobtail squid’s specialized light organs. There are a thousand radiant baby bobtail squid to tend to, so many that they form a constellation to rival the moons and star stuff outside the space station’s windows. When you’re done making your observations, I go from tank to tank to feed the squid the tiny shrimp they need to survive. Each bobtail squid will grow to be about the size of a golf ball, small and perfect.
In real life, only one hundred twenty baby Hawaiian bobtail squid were launched into space for further study, not enough to create the vista I’m imagining here. In real life, you and I are getting kicked out of our tiny apartment (new landlord, new sky-high rent). In real life, you and I live in a dense coastal city where the postpandemic rebound has led to the lowest amount of available rental housing in over fifty years. In real life, you don’t even like flying and I don’t even like using animal facts as elaborate metaphors to process my human anxiety. Still, in real life we do these things sometimes: fly when we have to, metaphor when we must.
Once I am done feeding all the bobtail squid, I put my space-helmeted head close to your space-helmeted head. (No, astronauts don’t have to wear space helmets and space suits inside the pressurized space station, but somehow I can’t imagine this scenario, you and I floating freely, without both of us thoroughly costumed.) Then we talk about the bioluminescent bacteria that live within our animal charges, disguising the nocturnal squid so that its predators mistake the creature, swimming at night above their hungry heads, for a patch of moving starlight, no squid silhouette but an iridescent lunar sheen. Can you believe such beauty exists on our tiny pellet of a planet? In certain moments it hurts to know these things, but in a nice, expansive, spacious way.
Our big spacesuits conceal our specific curves and juts and longings, diminishing our libidos in much the same way frantically searching for new housing diminishes our libidos.
For undersea creatures, sometimes the camouflage needed is provided by those bioluminescent bacteria. For humans, sometimes it’s provided by clothing. For example: If we bought nicer shoes to meet a broker, could we get the landlord to rent to us even though my freelance work does not provide a regular biweekly paystub? In my non-erotic outer space fantasy, as a bobtail squid researching team, we both get W2s and regular biweekly paystubs direct-deposited into our terrestrial bank accounts, and we don’t worry about nice shoes because everyone at the space station has to wear space boots. Our big spacesuits conceal our specific curves and juts and longings, diminishing our libidos in much the same way frantically searching for new housing diminishes our libidos.
This isn’t to say we have no desires. Sometimes, after I feed the bobtail squid, I whisper to you, “Imagine hosting, within your own body, a constellation of small glowing creatures, holding them so close that you yourself resemble starlight reflecting on water.”
Then you say, “That is very lyrical.”
Then you say, “Maybe we should have a baby.”
Then I say, “Yes! When we’re back on Earth, let’s buy a house and have a baby!” And we joyfully bump our space helmets together, hard enough to see a few stars, but not so hard that the helmets crack. (We don’t think about how, in the coastal city where we live, rising sea levels threaten to create an even more exacerbated housing shortage. We also don’t think about how the bobtail squid might be threatened by coastal development and a warming ocean. All these concerns are earthly, distant.)
Sometimes the fantasy ends with us bumping our helmets together. But sometimes it goes on a little longer. Sometimes we return from space, triumphant with new important data, and we decide to go ahead with our plan, to grow a baby in the city where we live in real life. We find a broker and the broker says, “I do have something that fits your budget, but it’s a little unconventional. Also, top secret. I’m only sharing it with you because you’re such important astronaut-researchers.”
And the broker shows us—in our own city!—an apartment that’s not an apartment, but a gigantic bobtail squid disguised as an apartment. The creature has found a unique way to grow to megafauna size, to pull oxygen from the increasingly humid air, and to adapt within an empty lot that some European scion owns but has forgotten he owns. The bobtail squid is betting that survival rates when camouflaged as midmarket real estate will prove higher than when camouflaged as downwelling moonlight. The broker, who tells us he wanted to be a marine biologist as a kid, says that in the lease agreement there’s a stipulation that each room must contain at least two lamps and that we must pay part of our rent in buckets of tiny shrimp, which we will feed to the squid through what the broker calls an “elegant internal chute.” You whisper to me, “I think he means the squid’s gullet?”
What’s clear is that we’ve found not just an incredible deal, but a resilient organism who also needs us to survive. When we step within the apartment for the tour, we somehow become part of the squid. We begin to understand pieces of its internal life. The shy creature doesn’t want to be the focus of news stories or attention, it just wants to exist. To feel and to live. And it wants us here. We seem, to the squid, to share some of its goals.
So of course we say yes, we’ll take it, and you and I move into the gigantic bobtail squid. Gently we place down our furniture. Gently we look at each other. Gently we turn on the lamps, so that the squid glows like any other rental unit, appearing entirely up to code. Nobody guesses. Concealed inside, we in turn conceal the true nature of the biomass that shelters us, and if, in this fantasy, we resemble bacteria, who cares? The point is, we are safe, sheltered, warm, fed, happy. Every night, we turn on our lights, we shed our clothes in tandem, we breathe deep together, and oh, all at once, how we want.