The man looks startled and nearly drops the bag he’s carrying, but he catches it at the last second and sets it down. I can hear the clink of glass bottles; it must be the bag with the scotch. His face takes on an apprehensive expression and he stands and twists, cracking the bones in his spine, his old sweater hanging loose and tattered off his frame. “The waters neither close to the bottom, nor near to the top, nor within reach of any shore.”
“The pelagic zone.” I’ve done my reading. “That’s where our destiny lies.”
The man nods. “What the Greeks would call the open sea.”
I don’t give a damn about the Greeks, but I smile anyway. I only care about one thing. “Will Fishful Thinking make it?”
The man takes another drag on his blue-tipped cigarette and sizes me up and down. He blows vapor into our tight quarters, our shared breathing space. “It’s not the boat I’m worried about.”
I look past the man just in time to see Lily appear on the steps that lead below the deck to where we are. She sits quietly and listens. I wonder if she overheard his concern.
“You don’t need to worry about us,” I say. “We’re adventurers, she and I. This is nothing new. We may not look like much, but we are stout of heart. And we have a mission. The open seas don’t frighten us.” At least not as much as doing nothing, sitting home and waiting for the octopus, or worse, to return. I suppose we had a deal, a truce of sorts, but I’m confident he won’t keep his end of the bargain, so why should I keep mine?
“The sea is full of things not seen, things that don’t care how stout you’ve been.” There’s menace in the rhyme.
“It’s exactly one of those things we are seeking.” And oh, what I’ll do to him when I find him.
The boat rocks gently in the harbor. Not far away, angry gulls are fighting over a scrap of food.
“Suit yourself,” the man says. He can see that there’s no changing our minds.
“We’ll have her back safe,” I say, rapping the walls of the boat with my knuckles. Made of solid bones, she echoes a sturdy reply.
The man takes another puff of vapor. “Either way. I have your deposit,” he says, and cackles a smoker’s laugh, full of phlegm and wheeze. He turns and heads for the deck before stopping. “How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh?”
Is he serious? In my experience, octopuses are foul creatures incapable of the lightness of laughter. Not knowing what else to say, I answer, “Does it matter?”
“Ten—tickles.” The man guffaws until he almost chokes. He bends forward, almost in half, and braces himself on the rail. I tense up, worried I may have to perform CPR—I don’t want to put my mouth anywhere near that old goat. Slowly, he gets himself under control and waves us off. “That’s an old joke.”
On his way up the stairs he pats Lily on the head, and repeats himself to her. “An old joke, that one.”
The whole time Lily doesn’t break wary eye contact with me.
When the man is gone, I do my best to deflect her concern. “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I remembered to pack red ball.”
She looks at me like I’d better have.
The Old Lady and the Sea
No matter which direction you look from our perch inside the deckhouse, there’s nothing to see but sea. There’s blue and there’s gray and there’s green, plus every combination those colors can make, and it’s hard to spot the horizon. I can no longer tell what is water and what is the great expanse of cloudy sky. We’re seventeen days into our journey and I wonder if we’re still alive. The pelagic zone is unyielding.
Lily and I were game at first, keen for the adventure that lay ahead. But around day eight we succumbed to the lethargic nature of life at sea, to the monotony of it all. The deckhouse was closing in on us and could, in the extended days, roast as hot as an oven, the air fouled by our own perspiration and cooking flesh. (The one thing I forgot to pack was sunscreen, and we burned for days until we tanned.) Everything on the boat seemed coated with grime and salt. We took turns with the chores—scrubbing the deck, cleaning up after meals, steering, keeping watch for the octopus. I did most of the food preparation, mostly because Lily has no ability to stop herself from eating whatever rations she can get her paws on before it’s even cooked. At night we traded the watch, sleeping in shifts so we always had two eyes on the water. That lasted three nights before exhaustion settled in and we curled up together, she in the nook behind my knees, the way we would always sleep at home. It was comforting for us both. I kept a logbook of our progress, detailed accounts of the days and how the time ticked by. At least I did at the outset of our journey. The last entry reads simply: Daylight. Head W by S, distance 65 nautical miles. Winds light.
On day six we saw lightning, and the swell rose with an advancing storm. We rode out the worst of it belowdecks playing Crazy Eights, but the game reminded me too much of the octopus and I quickly soured on it. I let Lily win two hands, and while shuffling the discard pile a second time I suggested we play War.
On day nine I took to carving some driftwood we picked out of the sea. I’d read in one of the books on sailing that whalers used to carve ivory and bone (and sometimes coconuts and tortoise shells) in an
