His next appointment is Wednesday. Wednesday is Charlotte’s favorite day-of-the-week-pencil, which is red. Charlotte is an octopus and also sometimes red. Lucas sat in his blue Toyota at a red light and broke his life down into short sentences, mostly focused on days of the week and color; he knew he was putting category cages around mundane details to help himself feel more in control. It was sort of helping. The light changed to green, his foot on the accelerator, the window down, a pacific breeze mixed with wood smoke—the mountains were still burning, flew in the window and his face. Was smoke good for brain cancer? Maybe he’d discover that pollution activated some sort of carcinogenic wall—a barrier that would stop his brain from destroying itself. He pushed the button, letting the window all the way down, a wave of warm exhaust and just a hint of saltwater took over the car.
 
Charlotte waved when Lucas came in, or he liked to think that. Mostly she splashed at him when he said her name. Her tank was the only one is this lab room and Lucas was her main sidekick, the main scientist designated to Charlotte study. He liked to think of them as a superhero duo, but he knew from his year with Charlotte—she would clearly be the hero. She had three hearts and he had one—with a low-grade murmur. And she could contort beyond reason, as shown in a complicated series of tests for the Funding Fathers, how Lucas viewed the fancy board members who came on short parades through the labs each fiscal quarter. Charlotte could twist and shrink and wring her alien body through any circus set of hoops and tubes. Ta-da! No way Lucas and his midgrade PhD could outshine that. He’d be in the sidecar for sure.
 
It had been December and Lucas bored with fake-festive-outside-the-lab life; he’d come in on a Monday with a White Elephant gift, a packet of Days of the Week pencils. He’d sharpened each one and set them up like a bouquet in an empty National Geographic coffee cup on his desk. Charlotte looked like she was knitting in her tank, two or three of her arms crossing gently back and forth in the water, an invisible shawl spreading across the fake rock beneath her flowery body. Lucas picked up the Wednesday pencil to check off Charlotte’s morning observation. Charlotte rose in the water. Lucas made a note. Charlotte pushed, like she was knocking on a door, on the grid lid on top of her tank. Lucas made a note. The pencil broke. Lucas put it down and picked up Monday—rather pleased with himself to correlate the day to the pencil. Charlotte swept herself up into a beehive shape and disappeared behind the rock. Lucas made a note. The day went on. It took Lucas two weeks to connect Charlotte’s actions to her preference for the day’s pencil. After the third week, he made a note: Charlotte prefers the Wednesday pencil. No matter what day it is. All other pencils, she prefers be used as aligned with their day of the week. The sulking, float and drop, float and drop she did when he’d attempted to use the Tuesday pencil on Friday was just over the top. He secretly wondered if she could read. More likely she’d assigned each color to a day when he’d used them that way, except for the mistake with Wednesday, on the first go round. Lucas was a man of man-made order—after breaking Wednesday, he’d used Monday on Monday, Tuesday on Tuesday and so on. The reaction from Charlotte on Wednesday—the same knocking on her tank lid, had been noted by Lucas. She clearly preferred the Wednesday pencil. He used it now for all her morning observations, and then switched to the correct day after lunch. This seemed to be agreeable to Charlotte.
 
At first he’d thought it was food poisoning, then his cousin, who’d been eating the same fish and chips with him at Andria’s in the harbor, suggested it might be a stroke. His cousin was a painter—so not a great judge, but drove Lucas immediately to the ER. The good doctors at Pacific Health scanned, observed, and took a fair amount of blood. Lucas felt like he was the only contestant on a weird version of Wheel of Fortune; he was nauseous, but his main problem was words. He couldn’t get the right word to come up on the board in his mind—letters would appear and then he’d hear himself say something ridiculous out loud—airplanes instead of vitamins, cellophane instead of cephalopods. Who studies cellophane! He ended up spending the night, mostly because he became irate and knocked over a tray during his third blood draw. As his eyes closed in the strange sterile room, he saw Charlotte weaving gently behind the curtains in the last patch of dead March sunlight.
 
In the morning, a doctor came in to talk with Lucas about the imaging they’d done the day before. The doctor was angular and made Lucas happy that he never wore a lab coat when he observed or talked with Charlotte. Dr. Knott, with neurology, wore bright red glasses that didn’t fit her sharp face and spoke to Lucas like they were on the same team. And that team, from the scans, had already agreed that Lucas had a mass in his brain. Team Lucas would have to biopsy Lucas to be certain what sort of mass, but this explained the nausea and word confusion. Dr. K smiled when she said there’s a chance it could be cancerous. And Lucas wondered which super-villain costume she’d best fit into, something with shoulder pads. The rest of the day was a blur of scheduling appointments and paperwork. Lucas thought his head hurt, but he mostly just wanted out of the room, out of the building, and back to work. He wondered what Charlotte did when he didn’t come back from lunch or even in this morning. Yesterday was Wednesday; she’d have been looking forward to the red pencil for the whole day. His cousin, smelling faintly of varnish, picked him up and Lucas closed his eyes all the way back to his small box apartment. He’d have to take the bus to the lab, since his Toyota was still in the lab’s parking lot. One blue seed in a sea of black, sleek teeth.
 
On the bus, Lucas scrolled through headlines, the fires up north uncontained and spreading, the president still a jackass, the housing market bleak or about to recover, another satellite gone further into space than ever. He skipped anything medical, anything health related, even the article about psychics in Venice who demonstrate a strange pattern of brainwaves—okay, he skimmed that one, until he read brainwaves—then he shut off his phone and went back to looking out the window. He felt like waves in his brain, like the tide was being pulled further out than it usually was. Like a tsunami might be eminent. He pulled the cord to signal his stop and staggered off the bus through the rear exit doors, which were eternally slow to open.
 
Emily was humming at his desk, having rearranged almost every object on the surface, just slightly—as was her habit, to export small distortions. She stood when Lucas came in, and dropped a fist full of paperclips back into his Batman soap dish. Emily was usually confined to a computer—data analysis, not collection. Her spiky hair was blue, like Kool-Aid, and she smelled of Tide pods. Lucas liked that she was usually quiet, and not in his lab. He surveyed the small changes she’d made—everything just slightly off from its normal resting place, a smiley face in the dust next to his coaster. She went over the morning notes and did not ask about his absence. Charlotte fluttered out from behind the rock when Emily was gone. Lucas picked up the yellow, Thursday pencil—and Charlotte disappeared. He blinked a long eye-resting blink, the tide pulled back in his mind; he put Thursday down, picked up Wednesday—red; after all, it was just before 9am. Charlotte was right. And apparently, she had also experienced some uncataloged trauma; Lucas made a note. She twirled before him in her wide tank, the water clear and oxygenated by machine, a section of what he thought of as her right front hand—arm, missing. Lucas blinked again, slowly. The tide was coming in and he felt grateful for the dim restoration of his equilibrium. He took the pill bottle from his pocket, just high strength Tylenol, they’d told him. With an old bottle of water from his desk drawer, Lucas swallowed two chalky capsules and picked up the lab’s hand camera. He made a short video of Charlotte, zooming in on the shortened arm. He went back to his desk, reviewed all the notes from his absence. Emily, or whoever was here yesterday, made no record of any injury. No one found a bit of arm in the day’s tank cleaning. What the hell, I’ll take all the vowels, Pat, thought Lucas. The wheel spun and spun and every time, his peg just caught on a green glittery question mark wedge. Charlotte brushed the rock, flounced back and forth, and watched Lucas lose his mind. He put the Wednesday pencil down and closed his eyes.
 
In a strange series of Wednesday appointments; apparently that is neurosurgeon day at Pacific Health, Team Lucas confirmed that Lucas has a cancerous mass—though it’s hard to be absolutely certain with the brain, even with the multilevel MRI scans. Dr. K was a bit perplexed by the shape and size of the shadow in these scans; see this—this mass has arms, roots, like it latching on. She smiled too much and Lucas wanted to smash her glasses into the computer screen they hunched over to look inside his head. The tide went out. Like a backwards slurp, too fast, and Lucas sat down in a cold sweat. His hands were clammy. Arms. A mass with arms, with his brain for a habitat. His mind a movie set for sci-fi feature film. Dr. K smiled and catalogued the options for Team Lucas, each one a tiny lifeboat, overburdened by screaming risks in a sea of high waves. The tide rushed back in; Lucas leaned quickly to his right and puked into the good doctor’s trashcan.
 
Lucas made notes in the margins of an article on RNA manipulation by cephalopods. He had found out nothing about Charlotte’s missing chunk of arm, though he estimated she’d lost about six inches. He wasn’t sure. And after his initial questioning of Emily and other lab staff, he couldn’t even be sure it happened the day he didn’t come back from lunch. There was a coastal fog over much of his thinking and he wondered if it might be psychosomatic or maybe an effect of the smoke from the burning hillside. Or this thing inside his mind. Charlotte performed as usual in testing; she didn’t seem to miss the chunk of arm, and was still responding to the Days of the Week pencils. She spent more time pushed against the glass when Lucas left his desk to sit next to the tank. He thought maybe she was paying extra attention to him since he’d become endangered. He went through all this appointments, results, scan updates, and potential paths forward aloud, with Charlotte pressing her deep red body to the glass. He felt like she was listening, that her more advanced systems might help transform him into a person who could make the best decisions about his own sputtering brain.
 
Finally, the surgery was scheduled for the following Wednesday and the fires came down the hill, and closed the main road to the lab; only the side streets—right along the beach, remained open. Charlotte was almost purple; she was so deep red, the Tuesday before Lucas went in. Everyone told him to take the day off, but Lucas couldn’t imagine sitting in his cubit-sized apartment all day with his parents who had driven in from the desert. He left them a hand-drawn map to the beach and instructions for the coffee machine.
 
Lucas took forever to get to the lab; he forced order across different quadrants, across each hemisphere of his brain, while idling at stoplights and wondering about the potential undiscovered health effects of wildfire smoke on a brain’s cancerous growth. His next appointment was tomorrow. Tomorrow was Wednesday. Wednesday was Charlotte’s favorite day. Wednesday was red. Charlotte was red. Lucas imagined he might be dead before the following Wednesday. The light changed. The tide went out; Lucas pulled into the intersection, and then took a right into the lab compound’s parking lot. Blue seed, black teeth. His last day of work, for the foreseeable future. The foreseeable future. He wondered, in the hazy April morning light, if Charlotte could see the future of Team Lucas. He wondered if he was already dead.
 
The next morning at 5am, the biological part of Team Lucas arrived together to check Lucas in at Pacific Health. Lucas left his parents, his mauve and gray parents, in the waiting area—they would be there, they said, when he woke. The tide seemed to bubble up; Lucas hugged his mom and dad, picked up the buzzing beeper and walked into the outpatient holding area where he would be prepped for a six-hour surgery. He put his clothes into a plastic shopping bag and unfolded the faded green gown; he shut off his cellphone. Exactly one minute later his phone recorded the first of several text messages that Lucas’s mom will read to him nearly a week later.
 
The warning system at the lab was activated, Charlotte was missing, all precautions for recapture were being taken. The messages go on, eighteen in total. After a while Lucas told his mom to just skip to the end. He felt unable to open his eyes and the ICU room, even with all the shades drawn, was violently bright. Charlotte escaped, they locked down the lab—searched all possible routes, even the plumbing. Nothing. Lucas felt like he might vomit, but there was so little in his stomach, the feeling passed. His mom left and Lucas was alone in the semi-dark with a cold cloth on his eyes, the beeping machines, and the occasional swish of a nurse pulling back the curtain to check on him. He had been left behind. Goodbye Charlotte. Only the sidekick needs the hero, not the other way around. She’s going on to star in her own sequel and no one will remember his name; he thought these things in a slow series of projection slide images. He wanted to cry, but the scheduled dose of hydrocodone took over and then Lucas was floating just under the surface of water; grateful, he sank further into the dark bubbles that gently surrounded him.
 
Team Lucas says they did the best they could. Dr. K clarifies, with her red-rimmed eyes, that she’s never seen anything like this. Lucas thinks he can feel his heart murmur. The mass wasn’t cancer; it was a squid-like conglomeration of cells, almost its own animal, says Dr. K, with a squeak of glee. The surgical team removed as much with their laparoscopic robot knife as they could, not all of it—some arms were too entrenched in different, important, parts of the brain. Lucas is two weeks post surgery, still sensitive to light and asleep most days. This hour long appointment is more time than he’s spent awake and listening to anyone speak in the last fourteen days. He feels Vanna change the board over to the next puzzle before he’s fully able to read the last phrase of each sentence. Not cancer takes a while to comprehend, even though his mom told him that last week. Not cancer, but an animal. In his medicated state, Lucas thinks of this meeting, this beige office as part of his origin story. This animal in his brain, this is how Lucas moves from sidekick to superhero.
 
There are weeks and weeks of rest and dark. Physical, then occupational therapy. Lucas receives a collection of thick creamy metallic get-well cards from the Funding Fathers. His cousin drops off a small painting of Charlotte, done using an old photo from before Lucas’s time at the lab, still available on the lab’s corporate website. Lucas hangs it in the bathroom; he thinks Charlotte would enjoy all the plumbing and watching him brush his teeth. He sees his crazy hockey star scar in the mirror and wonders what Charlotte would think of that—his hair hacked away and this Frankenstein map across the front section. Dashing hero for sure.
 
The first images Lucas sees of what was in his brain, come nearly two months later at a Team Lucas checkup with Dr. K. He thinks the black shadow mass looks like Charlotte. Like a tiny Charlotte, photographed from above, a few legs tucked under. He can finally open his eyes for a couple hours at a time; wearing sunglasses and a hat, he can go outside. He can’t drive, but that’s mostly because he’s still on pain pills. Lucas wants to ask about some weird after-affects; the triple beating he feels in his chest sometimes—did the surgery speed up, triple, his murmur—and why he has this sensation now, that he can taste with his skin—like mostly on his arms, but strange, like how his tongue used to work, but outside his mouth. Then Dr. K shows Lucas the most recent post-op image—the tiny broken off arm of his brain animal, still lodged there. Deep in a crevasse of gray matter, the coral of his brain elegant in this photo, providing shelter to a wounded, magnificent, mostly missing animal. And Lucas holds his questions back, the tide rising gently in him, until he can figure his way out of this room. His name is Lucas, his favorite color is red, today is Wednesday—a voice under his internal ocean says. He imagines the voice belongs to Charlotte and he listens as he swims fluidly to the door.