Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

“Are you thinking of getting marked up? You’ve got to see Kal. He has a real philosophical approach.”

  Philosophical approach to what? That would be a natural follow-up question, but instead I just say, “Thanks, man,” when he gives me the name of Kal’s parlor, and we go about our grocery transactions in silence while I try to imagine him shirtless.

  I’m still not sure what a philosophical approach means in this context—philosophical approach to the whole thing? The artistic process? Pain management? I really have no idea. I don’t know why it’s appealing, or even why I would want this. But I do. So I take the mango griller’s recommendation and call and make an appointment, and now here I am, parked on the street in front of a window with imposing designs, afraid to get out of the car.

  What I’m doing at a tattoo parlor is a little unclear even to me, even to someone determined enough to ask for a recommendation from a stranger. Since the octopus blinded Lily with ink, I’ve harbored a growing obsession with getting marked by ink myself, creating a concord between us. Call it sympathy, unanimity, or the desire to mastermind a fraternity with only Lily and me as members, denying the octopus the opportunity to pledge. I’ve flirted with the idea of a tattoo before, but felt I lacked the occasion. This time is different. I feel much more like a soldier getting tattooed in wartime, with an almost ritualistic desire for body modification to mark solidarity to outfit and country. It feels like the rite of passage I need, except I’m not fighting for country and I have no outfit—only one comrade—in this war. I thought of getting Lily’s birth date as my tattoo, perhaps coupled with the day we met—the day I fell in love—but a run of numbers on my arm seemed too evocative of another kind of war tattoo—the markings of war prisoners. One day it could become something to wear with pride, the hallmark of a survivor, but this war is too far from over to take that chance. Still, as I wait here for my appointment, my sitting with the artist named Kal with a philosophical approach, I’m almost giddy to enter this fraternity with Lily, even excited for the pain of the needle.

  Excited to wear the mark of a real man.

  With a few deep breaths, I gather the nerve to get out of my car and enter Kal’s shop. The lobby is painted a stormy ocean green, and it’s decorated with worn black leather furniture that still gives off an intoxicating animal smell. On the walls are photos of tattoos, I suppose ones with their origins here. There’s no wall of suggested designs. It makes me feel like I’ve found the right place, like I’m not going to be modified in some cookie-cutter way that makes my attempt to stand apart backfire, making me even more identifiable as a part of the proletariat. A receptionist who looks like a younger, less angry Janeane Garofalo directs me to another room behind a velvet curtain. I have an appointment with the wizard. I hope he doesn’t think me greedy when I ask for brains and heart and courage. I hope he is more than a fortune-teller scamming me and this tiny emerald city.

  Kal is perhaps more tattooed than not and I find it immediately disarming, the amount of ink his body is able to absorb and, instead of looking marked, radiate empowerment back. He’s handsome and slightly older and gray at the temples. Native American, maybe? But more like Native Canadian. Inuit or Eskimo. He cuts through my awkward attempt at a handshake with an encompassing hug.

  “There is no real word for hello in Inuktitut,” he says, “So we shake hands or hug.”

  “Hugging is good.” At least it is when it’s explained to me what the hug means.

  Kal motions for me to sit on a stool. It’s a slow day, and we talk for a while about life, about nature, about relationships—the ones that are fleeting and the ones that are not. I ask him about the tattoos of his that I find most interesting and he tells me the stories behind them. He can tell that I’m stalling, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  “What’s your favorite thing about tattoos?” It’s such an amateur question, something a third-grader might ask while interviewing him for some school project, although I don’t know what school would assign a project on tattoo artists. Maybe a charter school, or a Montessori.

  “Their permanence,” Kal says.

  “But now there’s laser removal.”

  Kal shrugs. “It still leaves a scar. Like a ghost.” He looks deeper into me than anyone has in a long time.

  “But eventually we die, and the flesh rots away.”

  Kal smiles at me with unwavering eye contact. It’s unnerving, or at least I am unnerved.

  “Let me guess, people leave ghosts, too.”

  “You’re scared. That’s normal for first-timers.”

  I don’t recall mentioning that this is my first time, and I’m fully clothed, and so he can’t possibly see that I am unmarked, but he knows. “I’m scared. But not about the needles or the pain or regret.”

  “About what, then?”

  “About memorializing someone who isn’t gone. That I’m giving up the battle. That I’m surrendering in war.” I can hear Jenny tell me to say what I really mean. I carry my thesis further. “Afraid of death, I guess. And, maybe for the first time, of my own mortality.”

  “Death is a unique opponent, in that death always wins.”Kal offers a small hiccup of a shrug, as if this is of little significance. “There’s no shame in surrender when it’s time to stop fighting.”

  “Comforting.” I say it sarcastically, but I’m not sure sarcasm is a language Kal speaks.

  “Isn’t it?” Kal asks. I don’t think he’s without a sense of humor, but he’s completely serious here. I laugh, but in that nervous way you do when you can’t think of something to say. Kal opens a drawer and pulls out a Polaroid and hands it to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “The last tattoo I did. I don’t like to do quotes. Not much challenge in them for me as an artist. But I like this one, and we were able to do it in an interesting way.”

  I look at the photograph. Across a guy’s rib cage are scrawled the words “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”

  I recognize it immediately. “Peter Pan.”

  “J. M. Barrie,” Kal corrects. “Peter Pan isn’t real.”

  “Isn’t he? I always thought Peter Pan was death. An angel of death who came to collect children.”

  Kal raises an eyebrow. “You’re darker than I thought.”

  “I didn’t used to be.” I am transforming.

  “What is death? Is it the end of photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, homeostasis?” Kal has the rhythm of a poet. “The last heartbeat? The last cell generation? The last breath of air?”

  “Maybe all those things.”

  He has a real philosophical approach.

  “We don’t know, do we? It could be the tipping point, the point in life when extinction is assured.”

  “If that’s the case, isn’t death the moment of birth?”

  “Or conception, even.”

  “Your favorite thing about tattoos doesn’t really exist.” I look down at my feet. I’m almost embarrassed to have to point this out.

  “Permanence?”

  “Not really. Not if we’re all past the tipping point.”

  “Permanence is a relative idea.”

  I smile. “What, really, is permanence anyway?”

  Kal smiles, too. He gets that I’m being cheeky. “Let’s not go too far down that rabbit hole.”

  “It’s hard not to.” But he’s right, we could be here all day and all night. I look at Kal. Not that that would be so bad.

  “If you spend your entire life trying to cheat death, there’s no time left over to embrace life.” He puts his hand on my shoulder and it is warm. “Don’t be afraid. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Kal’s right. I’m done being afraid. Having ink, like the octopus, is the final step in my metamorphosis.

  “Besides,” Kal says. “I have a better idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  Kal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal, and sets them down on a drafting table. “Let’s draw.”

  I smile the way I did
as a child when receiving a fresh box of sixty-four Crayola crayons—unabashedly, showing all my teeth. I remember how much I used to love to draw, and I wonder why I don’t do it anymore. I write, I guess. I draw with words. But when I see Kal’s pad and charcoal, I’m overwhelmed with the feeling that it’s not the same.

  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.

  “I can’t imagine losing Weezie.”

  “Don’t think about that now.” I’ll be there for him when he does.

  “You called wanting to know if I think you’re crazy?”

  “Yeah.” That, and to escape debilitating loneliness.

  “I think you need to do something big. I think you need to grab life and shake things up. Turn the whole world on its head. Stop playing the octopus’s game.” It’s the Ferris Bueller in him talking. Over the years Ferris has become somewhat muted; I like when he bubbles to the surface. “You want to know what I think? I think maybe you’re not crazy enough.”

  When we hang up I stare at the phone for a while, in that strange way you do when you stop taking technology for granted and suddenly you can’t imagine how there was just a voice in there, talking to you, even if that voice couldn’t fully understand you and what’s happening in your world. I feel perhaps even more alone than before I called. Although I’m not alone. Not anymore. I can see the anger gestating inside me, growing exponentially, as surely as if I were holding a sonogram printout. It’s about to erupt in unimaginable ways.

  I lift Lily gently from her sleep and grab a blanket from the linen cabinet and we head outside. I lay the blanket out for us on the grass as best I can with one hand. There is no meteor shower to see tonight, so I turn on the strings of antique lightbulbs that hang decoratively over the yard, the ones I usually only turn on for barbecues and parties, the ones that make my backyard look like a festive catalogue page where plastic people live carefree lives. We lie on the blanket and look up at them.

  “What are we doing?” Lily yawns and nuzzles into me again. The night air is warm and still.

  “We’re creating a memory.”

  “Why?”

  I don’t tell her why. The answer is I need it. I need this memory to hold on to if my plan fails and she is no longer there.

  “Because sometimes it’s nice to have memories. Don’t you have any favorite memories?”

  Lily thinks about this. “All of my memories are my favorite memories.”

  I’m amazed by this. “Even the bad ones?”

  “Dogs don’t remember bad memories.” Envious, I scratch her on the velvet part of her chest. What an incredible way to live.


  “We did this once when you were a puppy. We got out of bed and brought our blanket outside and we lay on the grass looking at stars.”

  “Are those stars?” Lily looks up at the shimmering lightbulbs, and even though she can’t see, I wonder if she can make out just enough light to imagine them.

  “Yes,” I lie. “Those are stars. Their light has traveled for billions of years. Aren’t they magnificent?”

  Lily agrees, because she is small and she’s a dog and to her even little things, even things she can’t see, seem magnificent.

  “We can go back inside in a bit.”

  Lily thinks about this. “No, this is nice.”

  “I’m glad you like the stars; we’re going to be spending a lot more time underneath them.” I pause before telling her my plan, or at least that the time for my plan has come. Trent has confirmed it for me. “We’re leaving here soon, and I don’t know if we’re coming back.”

  “We’re leaving here soon? Where are we going?”

  I squeeze her tight in the way I do when I’m asking her to trust me, to follow me as we leave the only home she probably ever remembers.

  Maybe you’re not crazy enough.

  “We’re going on an awfully big adventure.”

  Death. Death is the awfully big adventure. But not this time. Not this adventure. The greatest adventure, our adventure, is the fight to live.

  I place my hand over the clear plastic bandage that covers my tattoo. I was only supposed to wear it for a few hours, but I figured a few hours more wouldn’t hurt. I peek underneath and see the tips of eight arms dangling to breathe.

  I am done waiting. I am done being walked all over by a spineless intruder. I’m tired of fighting the fight on his terms. Trent was right. I haven’t been crazy enough.

  Haven’t. Been.

  That all stops now. I can feel the change surging inside me—in my nerves, in my organs, in my veins.

  My transformation is almost complete.

  8.

  I’m able to navigate the streets of Chinatown with relative ease, relying on memory, even though I haven’t been here since they closed the Empress Pavilion, a place I used to frequent for dim sum and celebrity sightings. I cruise the streets, trying to distinguish the fish markets from the groceries. I creep along slowly in the outside lane, but no one honks. There are a number of mom-and-pop stores along both Broadway and North Spring, but since the awnings are in Chinese (except for one, which may be a bodega), it’s hard to tell which is what, so I nab a metered spot on Spring to continue my investigative errand on foot.