“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.
