Lily and the Octopus(45)

I use my words, my artist’s charcoal, to describe to Kal what I’m thinking. He draws with an imperfect fluidity, pausing only occasionally to shade the drawing with his thumb, or brush the paper with the back of his hand.

He listens and nods and doesn’t interrupt, and when I’m done speaking he looks at the drawing and his eyes get really big. Slowly he turns his pad around for me to see.

My heart stops. And then starts.

“Yes,” I say.

It’s perfect, alive with added detail and beautiful Inuit soulfulness I couldn’t have even imagined sitting outside in my car. My fear is gone. There’s a tingling in my skin, like I can feel the thousand needle pricks to come.

I am alive.

Kal picks up an ink gun and raises it to eye level. He’s as excited as I am. His eyes sparkle, then squint as he prepares to do what he does. “Shall we begin?”





7.


My fingers hovered over the call button for so long I can’t remember pushing the damned thing, and now that the phone is ringing, I’m having second thoughts about dialing. Dial. Why do we still say that? When was the last time anyone used a phone with a dial? It’s midnight and I’m exhausted, and maybe a little delirious, I don’t know. Dial. I associate that word more with soap than with telephones. Or maybe something more sinister. Die-all. And yet the phone is ringing, and the ring itself is mildly comforting. There should be some sort of number that you can call late at night just to hear a phone ring. No one would ever answer, but there would be the promise that someone was out there who would listen to you and all you had to say. Ring. Now, even that word is weird. How can it mean both the circles in a tree stump and the noise a telephone makes? Dial, ring. Dial, ring. Dial, ring. Just as I hear “Hello?” I hang up.

Well, damn. Now I’ve probably woken him up for the pleasure of having someone unceremoniously hang up on him, so I feel committed to calling him back. He answers on the first ring.

“Hey.” It’s Trent.

“Hey.”

Long silence.

“What time is it?” He was asleep. He’s trying to orient himself.

I think about how to phrase what I want to say. “Am I crazy?”

“Huh? Hold on.”

I can hear him get out of bed, probably so as not to wake Matt. Lily is nuzzled into my armpit as I lie on top of the covers in my own bed. She’s radiating heat like the sun, but as long as she’s comfortable I’m not going to move. My sweat is cementing us together. I find the idea of adhesive, the idea of her being tethered to me, comforting. Trent shuffles into the other room. I can hear the squeak of a bedroom door closing behind him.

“Okay.”

“I want to know if I’m crazy. I don’t mean crazy as in silly, or even offbeat. I want to know if you think I’m certifiably insane.”

Long pause.

“I don’t think that. Do you think that?”

This time it’s me who pauses.

“Sometimes.”

“Well, I don’t think that you are.”

“There really is an octopus, you know.”

Pause. “I know.”

“He’s taking her.”

Trent sighs or yawns. “I know that, too.”

We sit quietly for a moment. Trent is the only person I can be on the phone with and not feel pressured to speak. But I suddenly feel terrible for dragging him out of bed—his own bed, with his boyfriend and his healthy dog—to talk to me, in my bed, with an octopus and my sick dog, feeling so very alone.

It brings back this memory of when Lily and I had been together for maybe only a year and a half. It was November. The Leonid meteor shower was going to be spectacular that year; it wouldn’t be that spectacular again until sometime like 2098, or 2131—a year when Lily and I were certain to be stardust ourselves. So I woke us up in the middle of the night, grabbed our pillows and a blanket, and spread them out on the back lawn. I snuggled her in close to me and we lay there looking up at the fire raining across the sky, though she never really understood why we would leave the warmth of our comfortable bed for this weak recreation on the cold, hard ground. I don’t think she got the magic of meteors.

Trent speaks again, since I can’t. “I don’t know what I would do if I ever lost Weezie. The thought to me is . . . unfathomable.”

But you will lose Weezie, I almost say. I no longer live in a world of ifs.

I think of Kal and the tipping point, the point where death is inevitable. Was he right? Is that tipping point actually birth, the beginning of life itself? We will lose everything that matters, or everything that matters will lose us. It is predestined, the nature of life. But I don’t tell this to Trent. I don’t see the point in dragging my friend out of bed to depress him.

“I used to think that way about Lily.”

“And now?”

“Loss is no longer just an idea.”

“Did you see that guy about the thing?”

“Kal. His name was Kal.”

“Did you like him?”

“I did.”

“Was he handsome?”

“Very.”

“And?”

“You’ll see. I’ll show you.”

Lily burrows her head deeper into my armpit, but in that way she does when she’s using me to scratch her nose. In doing this, she raises the octopus toward me—only just the slightest little bit, but I flinch. I hate that I still flinch in his presence.