Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

  “Whoa. Take it easy, Monkey.”

  Lily backs up, adjusts her course, and takes another few steps, again into the wall, but this time a little closer to the kitchen door.

  “Where’s my water?” Lily asks.

  I grab her around the middle and gently guide her through the doorway into the kitchen toward the water. Before I can stop her, she walks into the side of her bowl and water sloshes over the edge and onto her feet.

  “Found it,” she says, lifting her paws away from the puddle, then thirstily lapping at the remaining water in her bowl.

  “Aren’t you supposed to leave now, octopus?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says as Lily continues to drink. “Why?”

  “Releasing your ink sac is what you do so that you can make your escape. It’s what you do to cloud the water to evade a predator.”

  The octopus shakes his head, which throws Lily slightly off balance, but she recovers easily enough. “Oh, so suddenly between the two of us you’re the octopus expert?”

  “Don’t kid yourself into thinking that the instant you fall asleep I’m not reading everything I can about your kind so I can find a way to kill you.” I probably shouldn’t have said that, played that hand in so obvious a fashion, but since Lily’s usually in my lap when I’m doing my research, I figure on some level he already knows.

  Lily finishes drinking and takes a few steps toward her bed and I almost yell at the octopus don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you before remembering he’s only a passenger, and I want Lily to move around to help her orient herself. She knows where her bed is in relation to the water bowl, and she makes it there without incident.

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call this thing a predator,” the octopus answers. He shakes his head in pity as Lily turns her usual three times before lying down.

  “Why don’t you crawl down off her head and see how long you last against that thing.” This may be the only moment that I’m not horrified by Lily’s hunting instincts, her skill in eviscerating plush prey, her innate Germanity. If only she could grab the octopus by his squishy flesh and shake until his insides decorate his outsides.

  “That’s okay. I’m fine where I am.” He smiles a crooked smile. Lily settles her chin over the side of the bed. It’s probably the best thing for her to do, sleep. But part of me wishes she was not giving in to the blinding. Part of me wishes she was charging, head down, at the walls of the kitchen full speed, that she would ram the octopus into submission, making him choke on his hubris.

  “So if she’s not a predator, and you’re not scuttling away, why release your ink?”

  The octopus rolls his eyes. “I thought you were the octopus expert.”

  We glare at each other and I know neither of us is going to back down, just as he knows it, so I answer my own question. “Because sometimes you get bored.”

  The octopus looks surprised, maybe even a little impressed, but he tries to mask that quickly. “Very good.”

  “How long will the ink last? When will she be able to see?”

  The octopus shrugs. I don’t know how he manages it, because an octopus doesn’t have shoulders, but that’s exactly what he does—he shrugs. “I don’t know.” He sounds genuinely baffled.

  “Why not? Why don’t you know? How long does it usually last?”

  “I don’t know because I’m usually long gone by the time it clears.”

  “But you’re still here!” I’m on the verge of pulling my hair out in clumps.

  “You know, I take it back. You really are becoming quite the expert.”

  I turn away from him and place my hand over my mouth to muffle my agonizing scream.

  “Also, I don’t know because I’ve never released my ink sac directly into someone’s brain.” He blows air through his lips, causing them to vibrate, to intonate that it’s anyone’s best guess.

  And just like that, I understand that Lily’s eyesight is not coming back. The octopus took it simply because he was bored and he could. She has seen my face, the world, her world, for the last time. She’s a blind dog now.

  My quiver is emptying of arrows, but I mentally draw one of the few I have left and carefully take aim. “The octopus does have predators, you know.”

  The octopus laughs. “Ha-ha. Yeah. Sharks!” He looks around the kitchen. “I don’t see any sharks here!”

  This time I don’t say what I’m thinking. This time I hold my cards close to the vest. This time I don’t spill what my late nights of worry and reading have taught me. This time I’m one step ahead of him.

  That’s right, sharks. And it’s true, there are no sharks here. But I also have reason to feel emboldened.

  For octopuses have two natural predators:

  Sharks.

  And humans.

  2.

  The sun is hot and it’s burning my eyes, and the tighter I close them the more they itch with heat and sweat. I scrunch my eyelids, then loosen them; a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns floats in front of me. TV static, paisley, comets trailing fiery tails, sunbursts, tornados, violence, calm—all happening in the darkness behind my closed eyes. I wonder if this is what Lily sees, blinded as she is, if she can sense light, if her blindness is rich with colors and patterns. Or is it just darkness, her eyes painted in the total blackness of octopus ink?

  I prop myself up on my elbows and slowly open my eyes to see the blue waters of Trent’s swimming pool. I look over at my friend. He’s lying on his stomach with his sunglasses hanging crooked on his face. I can’t tell if he’s awake or asleep. I reach for the plastic tumbler under the chair in the only shade to be found, but produce a bottle of sunscreen instead. When I find my glass it’s empty.

  “Shall I make us more drinks?” Trent’s voice is groggy and thin and disappears into the ambient sound of the afternoon.

  I turn to Trent, who still hasn’t stirred. “I’ll do it. In a minute.” My body is cemented to the lounge chair. There is no graceful way to get up, and it feels good in the sun. I’m almost relaxed, the most I’ve been in weeks. Lily would like this, the warm afternoon, the soft grass, a quiet backyard filled with smells. But since the octopus took her sight, I can’t trust her around water. A casual stroll across the yard could result in an unexpected dip in the pool.

  Home life has been an adjustment, but we’ve managed. She has the layout of the house down from memory, but she can sometimes miss a doorway by a few inches or so. Our efforts remind me of the old Helen Keller joke: How do you punish Helen Keller? Rearrange the furniture.

  Doogie was not surprised to hear of Lily’s blinding, although there wasn’t anything he or his staff could do to bring her eyesight back; our options are as bleak as ever. Instead, he said to pick a spot in the house to call “home base.” When Lily gets disoriented I’m to place her there, always facing the same direction, and say out loud, “Home base!” It’s like pressing a reset button to instantly orient her again. I always feel stupid doing this (Marco! Polo!), but it seems to work and Lily responds with appreciation. Slowly, we’re figuring this out.

  How did Helen Keller meet her husband? On a blind date. Why was Helen Keller’s leg wet? Her dog was blind, too.

  Over in the grass near the deep end, Weezie slaps around an inflatable beach ball. She’s easy to spot in her orange life vest made specifically for dogs. You don’t usually associate English bulldogs with swimming, and she looks a bit out of place—like Winston Churchill at the beach. I turn my head just in time to see her swat the beach ball into the pool. She watches with dismay as it slowly floats out of reach. Her tongue falls limp and she pants, anxiously begging for the ball to float back her way. It doesn’t, and just as well. If she had been able to get her teeth into it, that would have been the end of the ball.

  “Where do you get your pool toys?”

  Trent groans. He turns his head away from me, knocking the sunglasses completely off his face.

  “Your pool toys. Where do you get them?”

  “Thi
s place on Ventura.” He rolls over onto his back. “I thought you were making more drinks.”

  “Do you think they have sharks?”

  “Sharks?”

  “Inflatable sharks.”

  Trent thinks for a minute. “They have … dolphins.”

  I mull this over before deciding dolphins won’t do. The octopus won’t fall for dolphins. “I need them to be menacing. I need them to be sharks.”

  “Paint teeth on them.”

  “It’s not just the teeth, it’s the blowholes.”

  “What do you need them for?”

  “For the octopus.”

  Trent props himself up on his elbows, fishes for his sunglasses, and puts them back on his face. He looks at me. “You’re buying that thing presents now?”

  “Not presents. Impediments. Octopuses are afraid of sharks.”

  “Are they.” Trent shakes his head and swats his arms wildly at nothing in the air. He’s fearful of bees and swats at the air a lot, even when I don’t see any bees.

  “Never mind. I’ll go make us more drinks.”

  I grab his glass and mine and head for the kitchen. The pool deck is hot and I have to move quickly to avoid burning my feet. Before stepping inside, I catch my reflection in the sliding glass door and it stops me cold. I can feel the concrete burning my soles and I don’t care. My vision, compromised from the sun and the afternoon drinking, registers a reflection that is foggy and hazed. Despite the soft image of my mirrored self, I make out a clear harshness to my face, a disheveled quality to my appearance. I squint and take a step back. There’s almost a double reflection now. Instead of two arms and two legs I have four arms and four legs. Eight.

  I am becoming someone I don’t recognize.

  I am becoming harder, meaner, wilder.

  I am becoming the octopus.

  3.

  I reach into the paper bag containing six cookies and three napkins, pull out an M&M cookie, and take a bite. It’s warm from the bakery’s oven, or from sitting on my dashboard on the car ride over here, or who really cares. All I know is if I have to spend another Friday afternoon in this soft, buttery hell, I am going to eat cookies, and lots of them.

  I do not offer one to Jenny.

  “What are those?” I eyeball the stack of oversized cards in Jenny’s hands skeptically.

  “I thought we’d try something different today.”

  “I don’t like different.” Not right now—certainly not with Jenny.

  Jenny nods, but plows forward anyway. The size and shape of the cards reminds me of the sewing cards I used to do with Meredith when we were kids. I liked a lot of Meredith’s toys more than my own, especially her stuffed animals and anything to do with crafting. One Christmas she received a kit to make animal finger puppets and she just handed it over to me. I wish I had one of those finger puppets now, as I have a particular finger in mind for Jenny.

  “Are you familiar with the Rorschach test?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “Is that a yes?”

  Dammit, Jenny. I take another bite of cookie and speak with my mouth full. “Inkblots.”

  “Have you ever taken this test?”

  “No. And I don’t know why I’m about to now.”

  “It can help me learn about your emotional functioning, thinking processes, internal conflicts, if you’re experiencing any kind of underlying thought disorder …”

  “Like thinking there’s an octopus on my dog’s head? That kind of thought disorder?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s what you meant.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Because I showed you a picture!”

  Jenny leans forward in her chair and attempts to sweep aside my concern with an innocent gesture, but she loses her balance and does something that comes close to genuflection. “I thought it would be fun.”

  I fully realize I’m saying this as someone with his own form of Enclosed World Syndrome, and I realize I’m saying it to someone who knows this, but I can’t stop myself from saying it anyway. “You really should get out more.”

  Jenny smiles and bangs the cards on the table with a certain flair, the way a croupier in a James Bond movie might before cutting the deck. But Jenny doesn’t cut the deck, she just hands me the one on top. “Why don’t we just get started?”

  I hold the last of the cookie between my teeth, shake the crumbs off my hands, and take the card, turning it first left, then right. I haven’t quite figured out if I’m dealing with Old Jenny or New Jenny today, so I decide to just go along. I can practically see my imaginary better therapist encouraging me to participate.

  What do you have to lose? he says.

  What do I have to gain? I ask in return.

  I study the card. Mostly it looks like an inkblot, but when I turn the card upside down I finally see it. “It’s the octopus,” I say with cookie still between my teeth, crumbs falling down my front. I’m reminded of something a friend who works at the White House once told me about the journalist Candy Crowley always having crumbs on her bosom from eating. I don’t know why I think of this other than that I feel like a reporter under rapid fire, doing my best to report what I see.

  Jenny turns the card back around so that she can see it, too. “Most people say bat, or butterfly.”

  I take the cookie out of my mouth. “Most people would be wrong, then. That’s the octopus. I mean, it’s sort of a view from above. What he looks like when you’re looking down on him, which is what I’m doing most of the time, because he’s on top of a dachshund, and dachshunds have short legs.”

  Jenny looks at me skeptically to see if I’m putting her on. I can see that she wants to ask if I’m taking this exercise seriously. I think I need to put us both at ease.

  “Did you know that Hermann Rorschach was hot?”

  “Excuse me?” she asks.

  “The inventor of this test.” My intent is to catch her off guard. Maybe turn the tables a bit.

  Jenny sets the first card down on the table between us and sinks back into her chair. “No, I know who Hermann Rorschach is.”

  “Oh. Well, he was hot. Like crazy next-level Brad Pitt kind of hot. I had to research him once for this writing project I was doing. Turns out he died at the age of thirty-seven. Of peritonitis.”

  Jenny looks at me and jots down a few notes on her pad. Maybe my knowing this is more telling than what I saw in card number one. Maybe she’s writing down the word peritonitis to remind herself to look it up later. I mean, she probably knows what it means, but this is the problem when you have a name like Jenny. People like me tend to assume that you’re dumb.

  “Anyway. You should Google him.” I reach into my bag for another cookie. Cinnamon sugar this time. Normally they’re not my favorite, but I’m in the mood for one today.

  “Let’s just continue with the second card.” Jenny hands me a card similar to the first one, but with the addition of four red splotches. “What do you see?”

  This time I don’t have to study it. I see it right away. “That’s the octopus. Four of his arms dripping in blood.”

  Jenny purses her lips. “Where is the blood coming from?”

  I refuse to answer this. Instead, I just shrug and brush excess cinnamon off my cookie and it gets on my shirt and I have a sudden sympathy for Candy Crowley. I can see peripherally that Jenny is scratching more notes on her pad. Maybe she’s deciding whether to press me for more. If she does, she won’t get anything.

  “Try this one.” She hands me a third card; this one also has splotches of red.

  “Cockroach.”

  “Not octopus?”

  “You can’t ask me leading questions like that. That’s tester projection.”

  “I’m just making sure,” Jenny says.

  “What I see is a cockroach.” I pause for a bite of cookie before adding, “Known in some circles as the octopus of the land.”

  Jenny tosses her pad down in frustrati
on and leans forward in her chair. She rests her chin in her hands and her pen makes a small blue mark on her cheek. “What circles would those be?”

  “Some circles.” I really don’t know the answer. “Among entomologists, perhaps.”

  Jenny sighs.

  “Look. Let me save you some time.” I pick up the stack of remaining cards. “This is the octopus hang gliding. This is the octopus after I pry it free from Lily and sizzle its brains with an electric cattle prod. This is two Tinker Bells kissing.” I pause for a moment and pull the card close to my face, but sure enough, that’s what I see. This time it’s me who makes a mental note. That’s of some concern. The rest of the cards are in color. “That’s the octopus in the ocean pouncing on some unlucky prey, that’s the coral reef where I imagine the octopus lives, and that’s two seahorses holding up the Eiffel Tower.” I toss the cards down onto the table. “I may have missed one.”

  Jenny doesn’t like it when I’m such a smartass, so I open my bag and hold it out for her. “Cookie?”

  She glares at me for a moment, and then I see her face soften and she reaches into the bag and pulls out a chocolate chocolate chip. “What the hell.”

  “C’mon, Jenny. You know as well as I do that this is pseudoscience.”

  Jenny takes a bite of her cookie, then rests it in her lap. “These are good.” She reaches for the discarded stack of cards and puts them back in order. “Rorschach testing has been widely criticized for certain purposes, but it’s still a pretty good indicator of anxiety.” She looks me straight in the eyes. “And hostility.”

  “He blinded her.” I just blurt it out. What I want to say is, Of course I’m anxious, of course I’m hostile, but when I open my mouth, that’s what comes out instead.

  “Lily? Who did?”

  I tap my finger pointedly on the first card, which is sitting on the top of the stack. “I have to act, and I have to act now, and I have no viable options, medically at least, and every hour that passes I hate myself more and more for being so incapable, so helpless, so trapped in a cocoon of the octopus’s spinning.”