This is like that.
Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it, and the octopus transforms Lily’s entire face. A face that has always been so handsome to me, a noble and classic dog profile, betrayed only slightly by a dachshund’s ridiculous body. Still, that face! Perfect in its symmetry. When you pulled her ears back it was like a small bowling pin covered in the softest mahogany fur. But now she looks less like a bowling pin in shape and more like a worn-down bowling pin in occupation; her head sports a lump as if it had actually been the number-one pin in a ten-pin formation.
Lily snorts at me twice with flared nostrils and I realize I’m still holding her snout. I let go of her, knowing she is seething at the indignity of it all.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, tucking her head to gnaw at an itch on her stomach.
“Well, I do want to talk about it.”
Mostly I want to talk about how it could be possible that I’ve never seen it before. How I could be responsible for every aspect of her daily life and well-being—food, water, exercise, toys, chews, inside, outside, medication, elimination, entertainment, snuggling, affection, love—and not notice that one side of her head sports an octopus, alarmingly increasing it in size. The octopus is a master of disguise, I remind myself; its intent is to stay hidden. But even as I say this silently in my head I wonder why I’m letting myself so easily off the hook.
“Does it hurt?”
There’s a sigh. An exhale. When Lily was younger, in her sleep she would make a similar noise, usually right before her legs would start racing, the preamble to a beautiful dream about chasing squirrels or birds or pounding the warm sand on an endless golden beach. I don’t know why, but I think of Ethan Hawke answering the standard questionnaire inspired by Bernard Pivot that ended every episode of Inside the Actors Studio:
“What sound or noise do you love?”
Puppies sighing, Ethan had said.
Yes! Such a wonderful juxtaposition, sighing puppies. As if warm, sleeping puppies felt anything lamentable or had weariness or exasperations to sigh over. And yet they sighed all the time! Exhalations of sweet, innocent breath. But this sigh is different. Subtly. To the untrained ear it might not be noticeable, but I know Lily about as well as I think it’s possible to know another living thing, so I notice it. There’s a heaviness to it. A creakiness. There are cares in her world; there is weight on her shoulders.
I ask her again. “Does it hurt?”
Her answer comes slowly, after great pause and consideration. “Sometimes.”
The very best thing about dogs is how they just know when you need them most, and they’ll drop everything that they’re doing to sit with you awhile. I don’t need to press Lily further. I can do what she has done for me countless times, through heartbreak and illness and depression and days of general uneasiness and malaise. I can sit with her quietly, our bodies touching just enough to generate warmth, to share the vibrating energy of all living things, until our breathing slows and falls into the parallel rhythm it always does when we have our quietest sits.
I pinch the skin on the back of her neck as I imagine her mother once did to carry her when she was a pup.
“There’s a wind coming,” I tell her. Staring down the octopus as much as I dare, I fear there’s more truth to that statement than I’d like. Mostly I am setting Lily up to deliver her favorite line from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Neither of us has actually seen the film, but they played this exchange endlessly in the commercials back when it was in theaters and we both would collapse in fits of laughter at the sound of Cate Blanchett bellowing and carrying on as the Virgin Queen. My dog does the best Cate Blanchett impression.
Lily perks up just a bit and delivers her response on cue: “I, too, can command the wind, sir! I have a hurricane in me that will strip Spain bare if you dare to try me! Let them come with the armies of hell; they will not pass!”
It’s a good effort, one she makes for me. But if I’m being honest, it isn’t her best. Instinctually she probably already knows what is fast becoming clear to me: she is the whelk; she is the crab; she is the snail.
The octopus is hungry.
And it is going to have her.
Camouflage
Friday Afternoon