Jenny looks at me and jots down a few notes on her pad. Maybe my knowing this is more telling than what I saw in card number one. Maybe she’s writing down the word peritonitis to remind herself to look it up later. I mean, she probably knows what it means, but this is the problem when you have a name like Jenny. People like me tend to assume that you’re dumb.
“Anyway. You should Google him.” I reach into my bag for another cookie. Cinnamon sugar this time. Normally they’re not my favorite, but I’m in the mood for one today.
“Let’s just continue with the second card.” Jenny hands me a card similar to the first one, but with the addition of four red splotches. “What do you see?”
This time I don’t have to study it. I see it right away. “That’s the octopus. Four of his arms dripping in blood.”
Jenny purses her lips. “Where is the blood coming from?”
I refuse to answer this. Instead, I just shrug and brush excess cinnamon off my cookie and it gets on my shirt and I have a sudden sympathy for Candy Crowley. I can see peripherally that Jenny is scratching more notes on her pad. Maybe she’s deciding whether to press me for more. If she does, she won’t get anything.
“Try this one.” She hands me a third card; this one also has splotches of red.
“Cockroach.”
“Not octopus?”
“You can’t ask me leading questions like that. That’s tester projection.”
“I’m just making sure,” Jenny says.
“What I see is a cockroach.” I pause for a bite of cookie before adding, “Known in some circles as the octopus of the land.”
Jenny tosses her pad down in frustration and leans forward in her chair. She rests her chin in her hands and her pen makes a small blue mark on her cheek. “What circles would those be?”
“Some circles.” I really don’t know the answer. “Among entomologists, perhaps.”
Jenny sighs.
“Look. Let me save you some time.” I pick up the stack of remaining cards. “This is the octopus hang gliding. This is the octopus after I pry it free from Lily and sizzle its brains with an electric cattle prod. This is two Tinker Bells kissing.” I pause for a moment and pull the card close to my face, but sure enough, that’s what I see. This time it’s me who makes a mental note. That’s of some concern. The rest of the cards are in color. “That’s the octopus in the ocean pouncing on some unlucky prey, that’s the coral reef where I imagine the octopus lives, and that’s two seahorses holding up the Eiffel Tower.” I toss the cards down onto the table. “I may have missed one.”
Jenny doesn’t like it when I’m such a smartass, so I open my bag and hold it out for her. “Cookie?”
She glares at me for a moment, and then I see her face soften and she reaches into the bag and pulls out a chocolate chocolate chip. “What the hell.”
“C’mon, Jenny. You know as well as I do that this is pseudoscience.”
Jenny takes a bite of her cookie, then rests it in her lap. “These are good.” She reaches for the discarded stack of cards and puts them back in order. “Rorschach testing has been widely criticized for certain purposes, but it’s still a pretty good indicator of anxiety.” She looks me straight in the eyes. “And hostility.”
“He blinded her.” I just blurt it out. What I want to say is, Of course I’m anxious, of course I’m hostile, but when I open my mouth, that’s what comes out instead.
“Lily? Who did?”
I tap my finger pointedly on the first card, which is sitting on the top of the stack. “I have to act, and I have to act now, and I have no viable options, medically at least, and every hour that passes I hate myself more and more for being so incapable, so helpless, so trapped in a cocoon of the octopus’s spinning.”
“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
