Lily and the Octopus(54)

Which is an impossible request of any living thing.

There’s a wetness by my side and I’m immediately afraid that the octopus is back, but the culprit this time is me, or more accurately the now empty scotch bottle I find by my side. I reach to wipe my eyes awake but miss and hit my nose.

That’s when I realize I’m drunk.

Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip;

drink deeply, but never too deep.

And remember the night is for hunting,

and forget not the day is for sleep.





I don’t know the rhyme or why that’s in my head, or who said it or where it’s from. Kipling? It doesn’t matter. I just have the overwhelming feeling I’m breaking rules. Laws. Edicts. Things meant to be followed. Things not meant to be broken. Forces not meant to be tested.

Complete darkness falls over our quarters as the moon passes behind a cloud. As are we. Behind a cloud. We’ve lost sight of the journey, our purpose in being here. We are hunters, and the night is for hunting. And here we are drunk and asleep. If the octopus were to strike now, we would be easy prey. Pathetic. Ripe for the killing. How did this happen? How did I allow it to be?

I look at my sleeping love and silently beg her forgiveness. What have I gotten us into? She doesn’t need this. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t understand revenge. And while I prefer to think of our voyage as an offensive maneuver, there’s no denying that’s partly what this is. Revenge. You weighed anchor in our waters, now we sail deeply in yours.

I stumble out of bed in the way drunk people do, clumsily and with great kerfuffle. I stand up too tall and bang my head on the ceiling. I trip over the empty scotch bottle and it sends red ball scooting across the floor with a clang. Quickly I pick up the bottle to silence it. I look at Lily. If anything will wake her, it’s the sound of red ball roaring alive to play and bouncing against the clapboard. Yet she sleeps soundly through it, a sign of our thorough depletion.

I climb the few steps up to the deck and let the night breeze wash over me. I inhale it deeply. The stars I can see number in the thousands; thousands more hang behind the clouds. The boat sways and I nearly lose my balance, so I lie flat on the deck and look up. I am so very small. Physically small, but also petty. Why am I driven more by revenge than by forgiveness?

I think about all the people I need to forgive.

Jeffrey? We loved each other, and yet love alone was not enough. Did he throw it all away with his indiscretions? Or was I never available enough in the relationship to keep his eye from wandering. In the end we were probably equally neglectful of what we had. So why was there so much anger when it was time to walk away?

My mother for not saying she loves me? We’re too often guilty of thinking that our parents arrived on this planet as fully functioning adults on the day that we were born. That they don’t have pasts of their own prior to our birth. That the father is not also a son, that the mother is not also a child. My mother had a tough beginning, enduring things I know little about. And yet I more often discount her pain and overvalue mine. This is suddenly funny to me, ridiculously selfish, and I laugh and the outburst is startling. I lie still as the sound launches skyward like a rocket, reaches the stratosphere, then quietly falls back to earth in the form of a quote I once read: Yours is by far the harder lot, but mine is happening to me. In this moment, I miss my mother.

The octopus? Does he merit my forgiveness? Was he just doing what octopuses do? Would I blame the lioness for taking down the gazelle? Or should I blame the ecosystem—the creation of a world where flesh is food?

The worst of my scorn and derision has always been reserved for me. But what did I do to deserve it, really? Allowed a relationship to fail? Permitted the octopus to come? Tolerated depression without fighting back? Dragged Lily and myself out to sea?

And suddenly I want to turn the boat around. I ache for home; grieve for it as if it were gone. But it’s not gone, it’s just far away. Waiting for us. What are we doing? We’re adrift in the middle of nowhere, and it’s only a matter of time before we run out of food. Why? All I have to do is turn the boat around. Point the compass east instead of west. There are tears in my eyes. It’s what I want. For me. For us.

But I don’t.

Some things are unforgivable. My problem is the opposite of mankind’s: not having gone into battle often enough, not having waged enough war. I’ve always shied from confrontation, more often than not backing down from a fight. Quarreling has always felt silly, bordering on the ridiculous. War, after all, was something that happened to faraway people in faraway places. Not something that is sparked by an eight-armed invasion of your own front lines.

But this, with the octopus, this is war. Guerrilla war. I can’t feel self-conscious about it. I can’t be chastened before the battle begins. We are soldiers now, like it or not. As such, we need to be alert, awake, and on guard. And we need to continue plowing west.

All of this is sobering. I rise again to confront the night—this time my feet are steady, and I remember to sway into the pitch of the boat.

Remember the night is for hunting.

I walk to the deckhouse and flip on the echo sounder. It whirrs to life, transmitting its sound pulses on cue. I chuckle. Three weeks ago I didn’t know how to do any of this and now it’s second nature. I wait for any hydroacoustic data that might signal the presence of our prey, but the pulses return little more than the depth of the trench below.