“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?”