Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

  “Do you have nonmedical options?”

  I shrug. I know I set myself up for that question, but I don’t like any of the possible answers. Love? Scented oils? Prayer?

  “Analytically speaking,” Jenny continues, “cocoons aren’t necessarily about entrapment. They can be symbols of growth, of transformation, of metamorphosis.”

  I think of my double reflection, the one I saw outside in Trent’s backyard. I reach into my bag of cookies for another but withdraw empty-handed, and instead I crumple the bag, smashing the remaining cookies to crumbs in my fist, and throw the whole mess on the floor.

  To Jenny’s credit, she remains unfazed. “Why don’t we run through these cards again. This time you can give me real answers, and we can maybe determine something about your emotional functioning and response tendencies.”

  She reaches for the deck without breaking eye contact. We stare at each other resolutely.

  I will give Jenny the answers she wants; I don’t have any more time to waste arguing with her. I’m really using this hour for something else. I’m using all my hours for another purpose. For letting the anger take root in my cocoon.

  It’s perhaps the oldest trope there is, but in this moment there’s no denying its core truth:

  To defeat my enemy, I must become him.

  I look at the bag of cookies, burst and spilling crumbs on the rug.

  A sea change is coming.

  4.

  I visit four different pool stores before I find inflatable sharks that will suffice. I purchase six of them even though they’re not exactly as I pictured. They have two handles on either side of the dorsal fin—I guess to make it easier for children to ride them. Also, their mouth openings are painted red where gnashing teeth should be, which should suggest they’re hungry for blood but instead make them look like they’re wearing lipstick (if sharks even have lips in the first place). They are the right size, though, and should fulfill their intended purpose nicely.

  Lily is asleep when I get home, so I decide to inflate the sharks in the backyard. Blowing them up takes some effort in the heat, and after inflating one, and half of another, I feel light-headed and unsure of my plan and need to sit down. I look at the sharks, one at full attention, the other slumped at half-mast, as if it were suffering from some sort of palsy, and it occurs to me that Lily would have enjoyed these in her youth. Enjoyed destroying them, as she destroyed all of her toys except red ball. When she was a puppy, my dad’s wife had given her a stuffed monkey toy with these oversized orange arms. One day I noticed one of those arms was missing. I searched the house high and low, but it was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t until the next day while walking her with a friend that the arm made a dramatic return.

  “Oh my god, what’s wrong with your dog?”

  I turned to find Lily crouched as she does, an orange monkey hand, then arm, making its way out of her like some sort of hernia exam in reverse.

  “Oh. That happens,” I said, lying, crouching with a plastic bag to pull the rest of it out of her, a magician doing the most disgusting magic handkerchief trick.

  In the little storage space under the house I find an old bicycle pump that belongs to my landlord, and after a few false starts I use that to inflate the remaining sharks. Finished, I sit in a semicircle with my new menacing friends like we’re at the oddest tea party this side of Wonderland. “No room! No room!” cries one of the sharks, playing both the Hatter and the March Hare. Of course, he’s wrong. There’s plenty of room, as we’re sitting in the empty yard.

  “We’re a team, you and I,” I tell the sharks. “Normally we have only each other as enemies, but today we are hunting octopus. Together.”

  “Octopus?” another of the sharks exclaims, before they all start talking over one another, making it difficult to hear.

  “Guys, guys, guys! Only one of you talk.” I look around the circle to see who they will elect to speak. It’s the one sitting next to me on my right.

  “Sure. We could eat some octopus.”

  “Here’s the thing. Now, this is important, so listen up.” I look around the circle to see if any of the sharks have ears, which they don’t, at least not that I can see. “Do you guys have ears?”

  “We have endolymphatic pores.” It’s the shark across from me now. “They are like ears.”

  “Where?”

  The sharks kind of bow down. “Here,” one says. “On top of our heads.” It makes me feel powerful to have all these sharks bowing in front of me. I can just make out these so-called pores near where the plastic handles are attached.

  “Good. Now, listen up. The octopus is stuck to a small dog.”

  “Dog?” they exclaim, and start talking over each other again. “Canine.” “Mongrel?” “Pooch!”

  “Guys!”

  The shark next to me remembers his role as elected speaker. “Sure, we could eat some pooch.” Murmurs of agreement and consensus.

  “Do not eat the pooch!” I clap my hands together loudly and repeatedly to grab their attention. One of them covers his hearing pores, or whatever, with his fins. I wait until I have their attention again. “Do not eat the dog. That is what I’m saying. You may eat the octopus. But I am trusting you to not eat the dog. Does everyone understand?”

  I survey the circle and the sharks nod their agreement.

  I repeat. “Does everyone understand?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Sure!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Octopus!”

  “Dog.”

  “No dog!”

  “No dog.”

  “Good!”

  I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.

  I tiptoe inside, carrying the sharks two at a time, and I place them around Lily’s bed so they’ll be the first thing the octopus sees when he wakes up. It’s a horrific sight. Imagine waking up to a shiver of red-lipped sharks grinning from ear to … well, not ear. Endolymph … whatever … pores. Never mind, that’s a bad example, but you get the picture. I hope it literally scares the octopus to death.

  When everything is set up, I call for Lily with a quick whistle. She lifts her head and shakes her ears and when she stops she stares through the sharks, unfazed. She can’t see them. The octopus, however, screams.

  “Aaaaauuuuugggghhhhh!”

  He covers his eyes with two of his arms.

  I bite my lip with anticipation. Will he have a heart attack? Will he just die of shock? Will his eyes turn to Xs like in a cartoon while his mouth goes slack?

  “Just kidding, governor,” the octopus says, dropping his arms back down to their resting place on Lily’s head. “Nice pool toys.”

  “Those aren’t pool toys, they’re sharks. Real sharks! Right, guys?”

  Instead of murmuring their agreement, this time they all lie silent. In fact, one tips over on its side. Not very menacing. The jig, sadly, is up. “How did you know?”

  The octopus shakes his head. He can’t believe how pathetic I am. “They smell like condoms.”

  “How do you know what condoms smell like?”

  “Oh. Lily and I got in your goodie drawer. I tried a few on.” I look down at Lily, wondering how she could be such an unwitting accomplice. How she could possibly ever team up with this monster. But she’s blind and trusting and sweet, and he may be steering her in ways beyond her control. As if to underscore this new reality, Lily stares blankly into the void. “By the way, there were only nine left in the box and I used eight, so …”

  “And you smelled them?” I’m incredulous.

  “Our smell sensors are at the ends of our arms. Kind of hard not to.”

  I look down at the sharks lying limply at my feet. “I, too, can command the sharks, sir!” I wonder if Cate Blanchett ever said that. To the sharks I yell, “Get him!” I point at the octopus, but nothing. I’m so enraged that I pick up one of the sharks by the dorsal handles and throw it right at the octopus. I yell again. “Get him!”

  T
he shark bops Lily in the nose, and she mistakes the command as being for her. She springs to life, running in circles, bumping into inflatable sharks at every turn. She wrangles one by the caudal fin and swings it around like a wrestler slamming a mismatched opponent. The other sharks make a safety bumper for her mania, and she can run every which way in her hunt to bring the one unlucky shark to its demise and I don’t have to worry about her running headfirst into the stove. This is a first since the octopus blinded her, her having this much fun and my allowing her to have it without constantly interfering to redirect her away from injury.

  Finally her teeth puncture the luckless fish, and it slowly starts to deflate. Lily lies in wait until just enough air has been expelled from its tail, then pounces. She lands between the dorsal handles and her weight slowly presses the air out of her prey, the shark’s creepy red smile melting into a grimace. It occurs to me that to Lily, the inflatable sharks do not smell like condoms. They smell like red ball did when it was new. They smell like adventure. They smell like fun.

  The octopus laughs, and I’m still angry. But I also can’t help but feel joy at watching Lily prance and play. There is still vitality inside of her. There is still grace and jubilation and puppyness and wonder.

  I take a seat in order to fully appreciate her frivolity, her silliness. This may be the last time I see it in her. The last time I appreciate it myself.

  We are both transforming.

  5.

  Lily yawns and stretches awake from her afternoon snooze and struggles to get down from my lap. I place her gently on the floor by my feet; she looks bothered by something, and I’m about to carry her to home base (“Home base!”) to reorient her when she scrambles up my leg and starts humping. This hasn’t really happened before—maybe once or twice in the manic hysteria of puppyhood, but that seemed less sexual and more a function of uncontainable joie de vivre. This, however, is uncomfortable in its single-mindedness of reproductive purpose.

  “Lily, stop that.”

  I’M! HUMPING! YOUR! LEG!

  She grabs my leg tighter with her front paws, doubling down on her thrusting.

  “Lily. No! You’re female!” Meredith would murder me for bringing gender into this. Why can’t girls—dammit—women be sexual thrusters? I have to shake my sister’s voice from my head as I pry Lily off my leg. It’s hard at this angle to pull her free, but I get my hands around her chest and yank. Finally Lily’s front paws release like Velcro and I lift her back up in my lap.

  “What was that about?” I ask.

  Lily shakes her head and her ears flap and she licks her chops. “What was what about?” She is as bewildered as I am.

  The octopus opens an eye and says, “That was embarrassing.”

  “No one is talking to you.” I say it as dismissively as possible, hoping he’ll go dormant again.

  Lily turns three times and then plunks down in my lap with a sigh.

  Puppies sighing.

  “She can’t help herself anymore. It’s Freudian.”

  “Freudian?”

  “Sigmund Freud? He was known as the founding father of …”

  “I know who Sigmund Freud is!” I realize now how obnoxious I sounded when I tried to explain to Jenny who Hermann Rorschach was. “We share the same birthday.” I don’t know why I say that last part, why I engage the octopus in further conversation, but it’s true and I just blurt it out.

  “Tauruses,” the octopus says with a shrug.

  My phone rings. I can hear it but I can’t see it. “Why do you know who he is, is a better question.”

  I spot my phone peeking out from under an accent pillow on the couch and I answer it just as the octopus says, “It’s true that most octopuses are Jungians.”

  I can’t take it anymore. “You’re so full of shit!” And then, into the phone, “Hello?”

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?” It’s my mother.

  “No.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  I can tell my mother is not satisfied with my response and my evasiveness will obstruct any real conversation.

  “Religious people at my door. Jehovah’s Witnesses.” This seems more satisfying, although I probably would never have the courage to tell a Jehovah’s Witness they were full of shit. I heard a rumor that Prince, a known member of the religion, has been spotted going door-to-door in my neighborhood to discuss the faith. I can’t chance yelling at Prince.

  “You should live in the country. They never come out this far.”

  Lily looks up at me expectantly, so I place red ball on the floor by her feet. “Why are you calling?” I realize how rude it sounds as soon as it’s out of my mouth.

  My mother sighs. “I haven’t heard from you in a while. I was wondering if you were okay.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Just busy.” That much is not a lie.

  “Did you hear Meredith’s news?”

  “Pregnant?”

  “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “She’s a good mother,” I say. Red ball glides under the couch and I get down on my knees to retrieve it. Lily, tail wagging, is facing the opposite wall.

  “What does that mean? Meredith is a good mother.” I can tell by her tone she thinks maybe I’m implying that she was not.

  “What does it mean? It means she’s a good mother. That’s all. She’s a good mother, you’re a good mother. Everyone is a good mother.”

  “Well, not everyone.” It sits uncomfortably in the air as we both know her own mother was not. I wonder how often she was chasing her own mother’s affection while I was chasing hers. I picture us both running on a circular track with no beginning and no end. “You used to call me on your dog walks. About this time of day. And then you stopped.”

  I watch Lily sniff around for red ball, even though I placed it right in front of her face. “We don’t go on as many walks anymore.”

  “Why?”

  The octopus looks up at me, grinning. “Yeah. Why?” he repeats.

  I clench my fist and take a step forward, drawing back for the punch. “You stay out of this.”

  “Excuse me?” my mother says.

  “Not you. Not you,” I assure her. I want to kill the octopus, now more than ever.

  “Ted, is there someone else there?”

  “Lily went blind, Mom.”

  “What?”

  “She lost her eyesight.” The explanation sounds dumb to me, like maybe she just misplaced it.

  “How?”

  I glare at the octopus. How much of this do I want to get into? “It’s just, she’s getting old.”

  The octopus looks up at me and rolls his eyes. “Pussy.”

  I swat at a stack of magazines on the coffee table, and a Travel + Leisure and Entertainment Weekly sail onto the floor. “She’s getting older and I don’t really like to talk about it. But we don’t go for as many walks anymore.”

  “I think you should come home.”

  “No. Mom. It’s fine.”

  “Not because of …” My mother trails off and I finish her sentence silently with Lily. “Meredith is coming up with the family next month; it’s been a long time since we’ve seen you. You should think about coming home.”

  I tell her I will think about it without making any promises, and when I hang up the phone I wonder how long it has been since I have been home. Jeffrey and I used to travel to Maine every summer. We would go to the beach and eat lobster and fried clams and I would kayak with my mother while he would read on the riverbank, and then we would all sit on the deck of my mother’s house and drink rosé. It all seems like someone else’s life now.

  But when was the last time my mother came to visit me here? I remember a trip she made, soon after Jeffrey and I broke up. She came for the weekend, almost spontaneously. Very unlike her. I don’t know if I’ve actively pushed this visit from my memory, or it just got lost in the fog of that time. But my mother’s last words on the phone j
ust now ring familiar: “I know you think I don’t worry about you, but I do.”

  I glance over at Lily and the octopus is laughing at me. He’s still amused by Lily humping my leg. “Jungian. You’re such an asshole,” I gripe.

  “We were just conversing.”

  “We are never just conversing. You converse, I plot your death.”

  The octopus chuckles. “How’s that going?”

  “Give me back my dog!”

  Red ball rolls into the dining room and Lily ambles after it, taking the octopus with her. I think about what the octopus was getting at, float through Freudian ideas like free association, transference, and libido, until I land on Oedipal complex. But why does he think Lily suddenly suffers from a desire to sexually possess an opposite-sex parent, at least strongly enough to hump my leg? And what of the call from my own mother—whose love I pursue—right in the middle of the discussion? Coincidence? I sink back onto the couch. It has to be because Lily is blind. Oedipus blinded himself; the octopus blinded Lily. But am I blind to something, too? What is it I cannot see?

  I need to accelerate my transformation.

  6.

  The guy in line in front of me has the hottest tattoos I’ve ever seen on a man. There’s a half sleeve of Japanese water imagery in the style of Hokusai that I imagine extends over his shoulder, as well as the most beautiful tiger on his opposite forearm that’s almost serpentine in the graceful way it drips from his elbow to his wrist. It’s hard to describe; you’d really have to see it to get the full effect.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  The man turns around with a smile. If there was ever anyone’s word I was going to take on a tattoo artist, it would be this guy’s. Even though he’s just some guy in front of me at the supermarket buying Soyrizo, mangoes, lighter fluid, and craft beer.

  “I’m going to grill the mangoes,” he says, his smile turning wry.

  “No, no, no,” I stammer. “Who does your ink?” I wonder if calling it ink makes me sound cool or ridiculously stupid.