Radial Symmetry (1 of 10)
Tentacle 1: Maker
" . . . the mating tentacle . . . "

"HAZEL!?!" thundered out of the pay phone handset, loud enough to drive the Z and L up into hisses of overdriven static. Rob jolted, hard, thinking for a moment that he had actually been shocked. The heavy black pay-phone receiver leapt out of his sweaty grip, rebounded as the steel-bound wire came up short, and danced at the end of its cord, like a hanged man jigging on the gallows.

"Shit!" Rob exclaimed, jamming his hands into his armpits and swaying back and forth. "Shit," he quietly repeated, the word forming a puff of vapor in the crisp air.

The morning was sunny and bright, a Michigan October Saturday, cloudless, the sun a spotless, cold gold coin flashing in the sky, the maple trees red and orange and yellow, like frozen fire. Bright, but carrying a cold that bit through Rob's clothes and skin and meat and down to his bone. Rob's hands were numb; with the morning stiffness in his joints and the orange everywhere, he felt like he'd been locked in amber.

"HAZEL!" tore out of the receiver a second time as it swung. The voice was synthesized, the choppy voice of a computer reading input from a teletype, but Rob still recognized it: it was the voice of his old boss, Lord Architeuthis, the Giant Squid.

Rob shivered in the sun. He had left his parents' house, where he was still—again—living in order to make the call, but had gone less than a mile in his rusting white Honda before realizing that his cell phone battery was dead. He'd pulled up to a 7-11, remembering when he was a kid every convenience story had a pay phone bolted to the brick facade, next to automatic doors. There were three holes, one offering a twist of wire like a limp tongue, in the bright square of paint where a pay phone had once been, but when he asked the Chaldean clerk, the man had just laughed at him and shook his head. No, he had no idea where there might be a working pay phone. Rob tried the family restaurant next door—they used to always have pay phones in little fake-wood niches between the doors to the men's and ladies' restrooms. The wooden box was there, as was the phonebook, but the phone was gone, and hadn't even left a twisted pair of wires behind. He cruised around for 20 minutes, and finally wound up standing next to the dumpsters in the back corner of strip mall on Northwestern Highway. The divided highway traffic was just a few hundred feet away, but was Saturday-morning lazy; to Rob it sounded like a stream, far off. Half the shops in the strip-mall were vacant, but the asphalt of the parking lot was so new that the parking place stripes were still a flawless glare yellow, and there wasn't a single ashy-grey leaf-shadow, tannin-bleached into the black hot-top.

He crammed the printed e-mail with the phone number into the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. "Dude!" he shouted at the swinging receiver, cupping his hands around his mouth like a bullhorn, "Volume!"

The receiver went quiet, and Rob picked it up and gingerly brought it to his ear.

"APOLOGIES," whispered from the phone, "Hazel?" The name was spoken so quietly—so small and heartbroken—that Rob took the notion that it wasn't a question—"Is this Hazel calling?"—but more of a prayer.

"Lord A?" he asked, "Is that you?" But he already knew it was; who else could it be?

"ROB?" the synthesized voice croaked, "ROB. I BELIEVE A BAD THING HAS HAPPENED. A MUCH BAD THING."

"Where are you?" and the monster who had loved and tortured Rob for 3 years then abandoned him, gave him the name of a trailer park in Warren, a crumbling suburb north of Detroit, eight miles away but a world apart.

Thirty-minutes later Rob's white Honda sat cooling on the winding gravel drive of the Shady Pines Mobile Home Park. He stood next to his car, and tried to take everything in.

"Fuck," he sighed. He wanted to say it was a lot worse than he'd expected, but he hadn't really expected anything—Lord A was just Lord A, unchanging and forever—and he certainly hadn't expected to find Lord Architeuthis crouching in his steel and chrome land-suit next to a trashed single-wide trailer. The trailer looked to have been new: the siding was clean and rustless white, the screens on windows and doors still straight and intact, the wooden lattice skirt around the base looked like the wood hadn't even fully dried yet, let alone gone grey and splintery with age. If Rob had been forced to guess, he'd say that the trailer, in the center of its neat and trim lot with its rusty little garden shed behind, probably hadn't seen a single winter.

Of course, that was all immaterial now, because it certainly wouldn't protect anyone from the coming winter: the wooden four-step porch leading to the front door was smashed to splinters, leaving behind a ghostly whiff of fresh-cut pine. Although the door was undamaged—not even a nick in the delicate screen door—there was a rough tear from roofline to base just four feet to the right. The wall had then been rolled aside, like the lid to a canned ham, taking one of the small windows with it and revealing the tiny trailer bathroom. The dividing wall had been smashed aside to permit the passage of something big, which had burrowed its way back into the mobile home like a cutworm burrowing in an apple.

"THE TELEPHONE," Lord Architeuthis explained, not rising from his squat in the yard, not even raising his dinner-plate sized, optically perfect eyes from the dirt "SHE WAS A-RINGING, AND I DID BELIEVE PERHAPS IT WAS HAZEL CALLING FOR TO EXPLAIN."

But, more than the trailer's condition, it was the velocitator's condition which worried Rob. During his tenure in the lab, Devo and Spider had always kept the velocitator spotless, running smoothly and silently. What he saw before him was a wreck of the machine's previous glory: the body was dented badly on the left. There were deep gouges in the chrome, which was also pitted with rust. Water trickled ceaselessly from a thousand fissures too tiny to see from across the yard. One of the 10 legs looked to be irreparably mangled, the others tremored as though palsied, and occasionally shot out for no apparent reason, grasping at nothing in particular before curling back to the body. The machine shuddered where previously it had purred. A pump, buried somewhere in the casing, squealed relentlessly, the whine itself climbing in pitch, peaking, and then settling again, like a cat caught in a tractor engine, maimed but not dead, still stuck, left to die of simple exhaustion.

Behind the glass of the anti-bathysphere's dome, the water was murky. Rob could see little particles of something floating in the dull, yellow water, in an obscuring mist.

What it reminded Rob of, most of all, was a spider, half-crushed by the sneaker of a careless kid running home to plop in front of his Xbox, left to ooze and scratch out its own senile, senseless epitaph in the play-yard dirt.

Despite everything that had happened, every cruel joke and thoughtless disproportionate punishment and insane dehumanizing experiment, Rob wanted to sob, looking at the creature's condition.

"What the fuck happened?" Rob asked.

"SHE LEFT," the crippled monster muttered.

"Who left?"

The Squid slid one of his metallic leg forward, and Rob discovered he had not been staring at the dirt, but at a clutch of soiled pieces of paper. Rob picked these up, and found them to be a computer print out, a letter.

"TRAEL, MY BROWN BOY NEIGHBOR AND COMRADE, PRINTED THIS FROM OFF THE LOATHSOME AND TERROR-FILLED INTERNETS, SO THAT I MIGHT KNOW OF WHERE HAZEL HAS GONE."

Rob sorted the pages, arranging them right side up and in order, scanning, but only taking in brief flashes of verbiage: "whore," "letters", "Valium", "McDonald's", "blowjob." That fucking clown and his blowjobs, Rob thought.

"UPON REFLECTION, I KNOW NOT IF THIS WAS INTENDED AS CRUELTY OR KINDNESS."

"Dude, this is, like," Rob shuffled through the pages again, "Thirteen pages. Can you," he searched for the words, "Like, sum-up what's up?"

"HAZEL, WHO I MET AT A NEBRASKA TRUCKSTOP IN RESPONDING TO A PERSONAL ELECTRONIC MAIL HAS EVIDENTLY FLOWN AWAY FROM MY CHERISHING ATTENTIONS IN ORDER TO RETURN TO HER PREVIOUS LINE OF WORK."

The pieces more-or-less fell together in Rob's head.

"So the whore who owns the pla—"

"DO NOT CALL HER THAT, ROB; THE WORD, AS I UNDERSTAND IT, IS UNFLATTERING."

Rob waived off the objection. "Listen, this is no big thing to get busted up about. We'll find you new digs somewhere. I think . . . I mean, this makes no sense for you to be so worked up. I think your fucking mechano-suit is fucked, and your aquarium water has gone all stanky, and you need to get out of that thing and get back to fighting trim. You," Rob looked at the creature long, and thought of the half crushed spider, of a goldfish scooped from his tank and left to suffocate in dry air on a high school bio class lab table, "you don't look good."

"I AM WELL. WELL ENOUGH." The monster seemed to struggle to gain its feet, straining forward, and then slumped back. "WE MUST GO TO . . . TO THE PORT OF HURON? WE MUST FIND HER, SOON. NOW. YOUR GEOGRAPHICAL NAVIGATION SKILLS WILL BE OF THE UTMOST USE, MY NOBLE AND NATIVE GUIDE TO THE ENVIRONS MICHIGANêQUE"

"Dude, forget about this chick. You are cold hurtin' Let's get you to the lab and pull you out of this fuckin'—"

"I HAVE DREAMS, ROB."

"No you don't," Rob said, exasperated, "You don't even sleep; how the fuck do you dream? This is crazy, let's—

"NOT ALL NEED SLEEP TO DREAM, ROB." Lord Architeuthis thundered, "I DREAM, AND IN MY DREAMS I AM NOT SQUID NOR MAN, BUT SOME OTHER THING-IN-THE-MIDDLE, AND SO TOO IS HAZEL NEITHER HUMAN-WOMAN NOR FEMALE SQUID, BUT SOME OTHER THING WHICH IS BOTH, AND WE COME TOGETHER IN THE DREAMS AND OUR BONY FOUR-LIMBS-EACH ADD TO BE EIGHT STRONG ARMS, AND OUR TONGUES STRETCH INTO FIERCE AND TEARING HUNTING TENTACLES, AND WE ARE COMPLETE AND WHOLE, AND WE ROLL ACROSS THE LAND AS ONE, AND THE DREAMS HAVE IN THEM IN ECSTASY, A JOYFUL PLACING OF ONE OUTSIDE ONESELF BECAUSE WE ARE SO THOROUGHLY OF OURSELVES— "

Rob groaned and cradled his head in his hands, "Dude, stop! You're fuckin' tellin' me that you're having wet dreams about fuckin' getting with some fuckin' redneck whore you've shacked up with—"

Rob came up short as the legs of the velocitator seized him, wrapping around him with a liquid quickness, tearing his brown hoody, slapping hard against his back and chest, like being hit with two aluminum baseball bats.

"CAST ASPERSIONS UPON HER AGAIN," the thing in the suit hissed calmly, evenly, "SAY HER WHORE AGAIN." the mechanical arms shook him, and Rob's head snapped back painfully, knocking his baseball cap to the dust and clearing his head, "I HAVE KILLED THOSE WHO I HAVE HATED AND THOSE WHO I HAVE LOVED AND THOSE TO WHOM I HAVE BEEN INDIFFERENT. I HAVE KILLED WITH KINDNESS AND NEGLECT AND WITH GRACELESSNESS AND WITH ILL WILL AND WITH REGRET AND WITH RESPECT. I WILL KILL YOU AS WELL, ROB."

"OK," Rob said. "You can kill me. But you'll never find the Port of Huron," a sneer crept in as Rob said it, "Without me. And you'll never get there in that suit. That suit is straight-up trashed." Rob looked down at the spreading puddle, and saw that in the back of the suit a rubber hose was split and water was spraying out forcefully. "You fucked it worse trashing that place. Shit. Shitshitshit. Put me down! Put me down!" he pounded fists impotently against the steel carapace, "You're gonna be out of agua in 15 minutes if we don't patch that. Shit."

The suit loosened its grip and slumped back to earth. Rob jogged to his car, tore upon the glovebox and scooped out the contents, then popped the trunk. He came back with a roll of rubber radiator tape.

"Listen you daffy fuck," Rob said as he pulled a length of tape and looped it around the high, dry end of the hose, "This thing is halfway between mostly and totally, critically fucked up." He uncoiled the tape, overlapping the edge of each new pass over the prior, slowly bringing the split seam together and cutting off the flow of water, soaking himself in the process. "You can't stay in this suit much longer. It was meant for short journeys away from your tank, not for fucking living in." The cold water stank like a turtle tank that hadn't been cleaned in months, and the cold of it bit into his hands hard and locked its jaws, like an ice pitbull. "We need to get you back to the lab, to your tank, and get your ride fixed." He tied off the tape. Some water oozed out, but no more than from the myriad other leaky seams and cracked gaskets peppering the suits surface. Rob wondered how long his patch job would hold, or how long until the added pressure of not leaking busted something somewhere else, somewhere harder to reach.

"BUT SANG DID EXPLAIN TO ME IN GREAT DETAIL THAT, WHILST I WAS AWAY AT THE HELM OF THIS GREAT AND DURABLE NATION, MY LAB AND ITS TRAPPINGS HAD FALLEN INTO A WOEFUL STATE OF RECEIVERSHIP, TO ULTIMATELY BE DIVVIED UP AMONG THE SLAVERING JAWS OF MY MANY CREDITORS. MY LACK OF FIDUCIARY ACUMEN, IN THIS CASE, IS QUITE REGRETTABLE, AND IS THE DIRECT CAUSE OF MY FALLEN AND SICKLY STATE OF AFFAIRS."

"That's nuts, Lord A." Rob crossed from behind the suit to look into the face of the monster, "I was in the lab, like, two months ago, to get my cubicle stuff and see if they had a number for Devo, 'cause I wanted to get in touch. It's all there, better than ever: new cubes, new staff, a bunch of crazy new shit going on in the Clean Room and Test Chambers 5 and 6. The whole place smells like money. Your tank is still there, too."

The monster shook his huge headsac sadly "NEVER TO RETURN. EVICTED. EXILED. THIS IS MY STATE," he gestured vaguely with one quavering metallic leg, "IN WHICH I SHALL ULTIMATELY FIND MY LONELY DEMISE."

"Lord A., you've gotta call it a night on this pity party. You misunderstood or some shit. It doesn't matter: Sang is still running the lab, and it's still there, high atop the Ren Cen, and so is all your important shit. C'mon, Lord A. Let's go make this right."

The monster struggled to its feet, and Rob turned to hop in his car. "ROB," the creature called from behind him. Rob turned to look at him. "YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MUCH THE FRIEND, AND I MUST NOW ADMIT TO YOU THAT YOU HAVE BEEN THE BUTT OF MY CRUEL BUT HUMOROUS PROCLIVITIES. I AM, IN TRUTH, NO ALIEN OF TREMULON-4, BUT A SIMPLE, GIANT SQUID, COME TO MOCK AND STUDY AND AID YOUR SHIVERING, STERILE SURFACE WORLD."

There was a long pause. Rob tucked his hands into his armpits to warm them. The Giant Squid's suit, though a wreck, still glimmered in the sun, like shards of glass peaking out from among dune grass, or the irresistible, cryptic twists of eldritch alloys at a Roswell crash site. Between them there was a leafy little hawthorne bush were nuthatches hopped and twittering to themselves, oblivious.

Rob sighed.

"I know, Lord A. I just . . ." Rob shrugged, "I mean, it doesn't really change anything, right? If you're an outer-space alien or an under-space alien, it's all sorta the same. Two different worlds, and all that. Listen, we'll go to the lab, we'll get you in your tank and fix your shit up, and then straighten this all out. It'll be as easy as pie."

The Squid furrowed his brow, "HOW EASY IS PI, ROB?"

"Easy, Lord A. It's way fucking easy. Can you walk?"