Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

  After some time, we are led into an examining room to wait for the doctor. I set Lily down on the table and she flinches as her pads make contact with cold metal. I stroke her back to get her to stay calm. This room is also small. On the wall is a poster promoting pet dental care with photos of dog teeth in varying stages of decay. The wallpaper, somewhat ironically, is the color of gum disease.

  The vet enters with a smile. He’s the cutest of the newer staff and I’ve named him Doogie in my head because he looks too young to be a doctor, even an animal doctor, which may (or may not, who really knows?) require fewer years in school. His khakis have pleats and I wonder if I should mention something about how outdated they look, but maybe he wears them in an attempt to look older.

  “What brings you in today?”

  Flabbergasted, I stare at him square in the eye. If he was reading a chart, or looking at notes from Lily’s patient file, that would be one thing. But he’s looking right at my dog with that grin. This is probably where his inexperience cuts against him.

  “Are you serious?” It’s all I can stammer.

  “How is Lily?” He pulls back her lips and stares at her teeth. What’s he getting at? I know they are old. I know they’re rotting. I know both her teeth and her gums are victims of my tight budget and neglect. But are they worse than what’s on her head? Is that really what he’s saying? What is the obsession in this place with teeth?!

  “Well, for starters, she has an octopus on her head.”

  The vet lets go of her jaw, looks at Lily’s head, and blanches.

  “Oh.”

  Yes, oh.

  The vet crouches down to get a better view of the octopus.

  “How long has that been there?”

  “I first noticed him late last week.”

  He grabs Lily by the snout and angles her head around to get a good look at it from all sides. “And an octopus, you’re calling it.”

  “What would you call it?” I begin to scan the room to see if there is a framed veterinary degree of some kind on the wall that might inspire confidence. I remember Internet-stalking Doogie after our last visit because I thought he was handsome. I think he went to school in Pennsylvania, but now I’m not so sure. The pants, his cluelessness. Maybe he just purchased a degree from a fake school in Guam. I won’t be Internet-stalking him again.

  Doogie doesn’t break his study of the octopus. He touches it, taps it, and then reaches for a few gauze squares and tries to squeeze it. “Octopus is as good a word as any.” His tone suggests that he’s trying to keep me calm.

  “Careful,” I tell him. “You’re going to make him angry.”

  He gets his hands fully around the octopus. “I’d say he’s already pretty angry.” Doogie stands up, steps on a lever to open the lid of a covered metal garbage can marked Medical Waste, and tosses the gauze away.

  “Well, what are we going to do about it?”

  “First, we need to know more. I’d like to take Lily into the back and see if I can’t get a needle into it and extract some fluid. Then we can run some tests to see what we’re dealing with.”

  Lily looks up at me, annoyed as I am. This makes me lose my patience.

  “We’re dealing with an octopus!” I’m red in the face and I can feel sweat forming on my back even though I don’t want to be this worked up. So help me god, if he wants to look at the octopus’s teeth.

  “I know that. But the more we know about the octopus, the more we will know how to fight him.”

  This is the first reasonable thing he has said, so I crouch down to speak directly to Lily. “Go with the doctor. He’s going to get a better look at the octopus. I’ll be right out here.”

  Doogie collects a veterinary assistant and they whisk Lily away. Back in the waiting room, I flip through an old copy of Dog Fancy magazine. There are articles like “Five Mutts Who Rose to Fame” and “Spotlight on the English Springer Spaniel.” These don’t interest me. But “Dental Debate Erupts over Teeth Cleaning” does, at least enough to dog-ear the page and hopefully catch the attention of at least one rational thinker in this godforsaken place.

  I pull out my phone and go to my photo archive to look at pictures of Lily before the octopus came. She and I on a cliff overlooking Santa Barbara that one time we took a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway. Her asleep on her paw-print blanket, the sun from the window highlighting the red in her brown coat. Her in the bathtub, wet and annoyed. The two of us in a selfie, exchanging good night kisses in bed before sleep. Her on the sofa sitting like the Great Sphinx of Giza, because I liked the way her coat looked against the gray tweed upholstery. Another selfie—this time we’re in the backyard and she’s wearing a lei I got her on Maui. This one is only a few weeks old, a happier time already long ago.

  Something in the picture catches my eye. I use two fingers to zoom in on the photo until I’m focused on her right temple, and there he is, in his usual perch just above her right eye—the octopus, but smaller, younger, less pronounced. How could I not have seen him then? Did he come back with me from Hawaii? Catch a ride in that lei? Did I somehow pick him up from the beach that day when I walked with Wende and Harlan and Jill collecting sea glass? Or when I was swimming in the ocean, my guard down, my cares floating away? Did I bring this upon us by needing to get away with my friends? Or did he crawl out of the Pacific at Santa Monica Beach while I was not there to stop him? Attach himself to my dog while I was on an island sipping rum thousands of miles away? I’m awash in horrible, stomach-churning feelings of guilt. It was just five nights in Hawaii—how could that come with so huge a cost?

  “Excuse me, hon.” The large woman who answers the phone is trying to retrieve a few cans of diabetic dog food from the shelf near my feet. I sit up in the chair and swing my legs in the other direction. She grunts as she bends down to get them.

  I put my phone away and turn my attention back to Dog Fancy, but I don’t even get into the debate over teeth cleaning before Doogie calls my name.

  “Edward?”

  When I get back to the examining room, Lily is there on the table waiting for me. She looks pained.

  “How did it go?”

  “We weren’t able to get a needle as deeply into the octopus as I would have liked.”

  “He’s a tough sonofabitch,” I concede.

  “We were able to extract a few cells, hopefully enough to tell us if the octopus is malignant. We’ll have to send them out to our lab.”

  I show Doogie the picture of Lily in her lei, with the octopus in his infancy. I tell him about the octopus as I know him, about the seizure Lily had last night. He nods and listens and makes a few notes in his chart. Lily doesn’t add anything, but that’s not unusual. She often clams up at the vet.

  “Once we get the report back from the lab we’ll know more. We can try her on certain medications, an antiseizure medication for one, but you know, our best options for dealing with the …”

  “Octopus.” Why is everyone so stupid?

  “… octopus are probably surgical.”

  I look away, purposefully. It would help if there were a window to gaze out of; instead, I’m confronted with the dental care poster again. I think of the dog-eared copy of Dog Fancy in the waiting room and hope to god someone who works here finds it.

  “How old is Lily again?” The vet flips through her chart for the answer.

  “Twelve,” I say. “And a half.”

  He puts the chart down. “That’s older than optimal for invasive surgery. The anesthesia alone can be a risk for older dogs. But we can discuss our options in more detail midweek.”

  “When you hear back from the lab.” I sound defeated. I feel defeated, especially when I’m asked to pay $285 for the privilege of being told to wait until Wednesday to be given options that aren’t really options at all.

  We get in the car and someone signals their blinker for my parking spot but I emphatically wave them away like they’re after my soul and not just my parking spot and so we sit there fo
r the twelve minutes until the meter runs out. Lily silently crawls from the passenger seat into my lap and curls up in a little ball. She lets out an enormous sigh.

  “You okay, Bean?”

  “They put a needle in my head.”

  “They put a needle in the octopus.”

  Lily looks at me as if they’re one and the same and I wonder if she’s already giving up hope. I feel like I’ve swallowed my own bag of wasabi peas as my throat starts to burn and then close. I try to focus on something, anything, and I choose the spelling of wasabi and how odd it is that I can’t remember if it ends with an ie or just an i. I think it’s just an i. Can that be right? Both ways I can see a squiggly red line underneath, like the word processor in my brain is telling me there’s no correct way to spell it. Is wasabi a proper noun? Should it be capitalized? No, it’s just a plant, isn’t it? I want to run back inside the veterinary office and have them do for me what they did for Lily all those years ago: give me back my ability to breathe. And maybe confirm the spelling of wasabi. I can’t remember the last time I’ve taken a breath, a long, deep, true breath, the kind they talk about in Lamaze classes and on yoga DVDs. Hawaii, I guess. Vacation. When I was free of work and deadlines and dating and the need for anything else but to just be. But the last time at home? Without mai tais easing my circulation? I can’t say.

  I feel a sudden need to forget the morning, to turn the day around. To vomit the wasabi peas.

  To breathe again.

  “You know what we need?” I ask. I don’t even wait for her to guess. Lily perks up; she can tell by the tone of my voice I’m going to say something that she finds exciting. “Ice cream.”

  On the way home, we stop at the corner pet store near our house, the one the Korean family runs, and I select a peanut butter frozen yogurt made especially for dogs. I don’t even wait for us to get home.

  The octopus blinks and asks, “What you got there?” I don’t think I’ll ever get used to hearing him speak.

  “Nothing,” is my reply. I hold the Styrofoam dish for Lily right there in the car and she laps at it hungrily until the frozen treat is gone. Even then she licks the empty dish for another three minutes, her mood brightened.

  The octopus eyes me hungrily the whole time, but I don’t let him have any. I hope not to pay dearly for that later.

  Tuesday

  Lily and I have no standing plans on Tuesday nights, so when Trent calls and says we should go grab a drink by the beach, I agree. It’s night, and I immediately have second thoughts—it feels like a hassle to go all the way to the beach this late when you can’t even see the beach—but Trent is already down there for a business dinner that’s just ending, and the beach always seems like a getaway, a respite, a destination. Even in darkness you can smell the saltwater, hear the crashing waves, feel the cool ocean breeze. These used to be of comfort; now, the ocean is mostly the swamp the octopus crawled out of. Trent wants to know what the vet said about Lily’s prognosis, and since I don’t have Jenny until Friday, it’s probably a good idea for me to talk.

  Trent is feeling nostalgic and suggests this gay bar we went to in the nineties that’s right across the Pacific Coast Highway from Will Rogers Beach, specifically the gay section of Will Rogers Beach known affectionately as Ginger Rogers. Parking is usually a nightmare, but I luck out and find the perfect spot under a broken streetlamp, hidden from drivers in a pool of gloom. It’s maddeningly too small, and after five minutes of trying to fit in the damn thing I have to concede defeat and move on to the next spot I find a good quarter mile away.

  On my hike back to the bar I step in a puddle. It hasn’t rained in weeks, so that’s of some concern. I try to text Trent but my phone is frozen and I have to give it a hard reboot. When I finally make it to the bar, the exterior looks different. It has a nautical theme like I remember, but something is amiss. I guess the bar could look at my haggard face and say the same about me.

  The place is dimly lit, but it’s easy to spot Trent sitting at the bar; he’s one of the few people here. I pull back the stool next to him, wave for the bartender, and take a seat.

  “What made you think of this place?” I ask.

  “Client dinner. The fog of work. Remembering simpler times.”

  The bartender comes over and he’s good looking, but not the threatening kind of good looking that’s usually a job requirement for bartenders in gay bars. I ask Trent what he’s drinking and he says vodka tonic so I order the same.

  “What did the vet say?” Trent asks. “What are the options?”

  The bartender pushes the drink in my direction, at the last second adding a lime. I reach for my wallet before Trent stops me. “I opened a tab.”

  I take a sip of the drink and it’s strong, which I like. “They can either make her comfortable with medications to stop any pain and seizures, or they can put her under, take a bigger sample of the octopus, and devise a more aggressive treatment plan.”

  “What are you going to choose?”

  I shrug and take another sip of my drink. “I dunno. I have to talk it over with Lily.”

  “It’s your decision, though.”

  “Is it?” I look around the deserted bar. “Where is everyone?”

  Trent turns around and flinches, like it’s the first time he’s noticing the emptiness. “Don’t know. I guess it’s a later crowd.”

  The bartender must be eavesdropping because he chimes in. “It picks up after eleven.”

  I take out my phone to check the time, but it’s not rebooting and I plunk it down on the bar. “Great. Fucking Tuesdays.”

  “What’s wrong with Tuesdays?” Trent asks.

  “Everything. Monday’s always Monday, but at least it’s the start of something new. Wednesday is hump day, Thursday’s almost Friday, and Friday brings the weekend. But Tuesday? Nada.”

  Trent looks at me and shakes his head. “What difference does it make? You work at home.”

  “I work from home,” I say, but I don’t know why it makes a difference to me. “My phone is fried, my parking spot was too small, I stepped in”—I look down at my shoe—“urine. I don’t know what to do about Lily. Should I go on?”

  Trent puts his hand on my shoulder. “We need to get you laid.” He surveys the room again, but the prospects are dim.

  “Oh, I got laid.”

  “When?”

  I reach for my phone to check today’s date before remembering it’s dead. “I don’t remember. Recently.” I guess there’s life in me still.

  “Recently?” He sounds skeptical.

  “Yes. Recently.” And then I’m forced to concede, “I think it was recently.” Time runs together.

  “Well, we need to get you laid again. At least some uncommitted lip.” That’s what he calls casual kissing.

  “Maybe after eleven.”

  Why did I have such a distaste for Tuesdays, now that I freelance from home? Trent has a point. If I hated Tuesdays for their sameness when I was part of the world, a member of a more traditional workforce—their lack of anything to help them stand apart—wouldn’t it make sense that I hate everything now? Every morning I rise at eight. It takes a little effort to wake Lily, but not much. I throw on some clothes, usually something that I can wear to the gym as a motivator to go. We head outside for the first of the day’s walks. The morning sun feels just right, not too hot or oppressive. I know this in part because Lily only starts to pant when we round the corner in front of our house, and the panting goes away after she has just a few sips of water. I give Lily her breakfast and I have one (always one) cup of coffee sweetened with Stevia. I bring my laptop from my desk where it has charged overnight and sit in the kitchen in the spot where the glare from the window misses the screen. I write for an hour or maybe two and then have a bowl of Kashi covered with half of a sliced banana (the other half goes in the fridge). Then I allow myself the day’s procrastination: I read the news, I argue with dumb people on websites, I stalk random crushes online. Sometimes I actually m
ake it to the gym; lately not as often. In the afternoons I try to get out of the house, but even then the errands and the distractions have a sameness to them. Groceries for the night’s meal, coffee on Larchmont, a movie at the Arclight I don’t particularly want to see. I get in the car, I park the car, I get out of the car. The driving, the destination, I don’t always remember. Lily and I take a second walk, an evening walk, where we enjoy the soft haze in the sky except at the height of summer when it is still quite bright, or the turn of the winter solstice when it is already dark. Lily gets dinner and a rawhide chew. I have a glass of wine and something to chew on myself, usually dried mango or apricot, but the unsulfured kind that doesn’t give me headaches. I write for a spell. It’s only the evening activities with Lily, game nights and movie nights and pizza, that provide a small respite from the monotony. At night I put my laptop back on my desk, and my phone back on its charger. Lily and I go out one last time. I never set an alarm before bed. I don’t have to: my insides are as tuned in to the sameness as my everything else.

  Someone has taken a seat on the barstool next to Trent and the two of them are talking. Trent gestures back at me. The guy leans in to see past Trent, looks at me, then holds his hand up as if to say “not interested.” Trent turns back to me and shrugs.

  “Who did you hook up with?” It’s an obvious attempt to keep the conversation on my successes.

  “Massage guy. The one who came to my house.”

  “Theodore,” Trent says disapprovingly. He calls me Theodore instead of Edward when he wants to full-name me, because he knows it gets under my skin.