The Octopus

The window is open and shadows from the ivy plant that wrap around the far wall of the house dapple the walls like lace. Our flesh is blushed pink; our skin smells of dried salt. We lie together, luxuriating in our laziness. Then my husband says, there it is again. The first night it happened, it was a strawberry moon. Knowing I wouldn’t believe him, he grabbed his old Polaroid camera from the hall closet. He shook the photo and I watched as it slowly came into view, the colors like a bloodstain spreading. There it was: a photo of me and my third arm, the shadow of an appendage, curved like the tentacle of an octopus. The photo showed me what I already knew: the arm is the same size as my actual arm but ghostlier, untouched by the sun. It lay like a hibernating starfish or a sea anemone, by all appearances sentient but thrumming with life.

This is how my husband shows he loves me: he rents a summer home, far away from the city. We will be living in this lighthouse for the next few months. I think about how nice it will be. Free of obligations, we will have time to focus on our work. My husband will have time to study the marine life on the island, while I will have time to paint and sculpt and sketch. We can relax on the beach or go swimming and not have to worry about distractions: late night movies with friends and boring appointments penciled in months in advance. 

The first day, we have a picnic. We eat sushi. My teeth gnash against the slipperiness. The gulls and their raucous cries fill the air. They keep swooping up and down, and when I try to follow their patterns in the sky, I grow dizzy. I wear the old-fashioned white hat with pink ribbons my husband bought me, the one we saw in the antique shop on the way. The wind blows and blows. I try to secure my hat with both hands, then realize I forgot to tie the ribbon under my chin.

My hat sails in the air and skims over the sand, then skates into the sea. He chases it and I chase after him. Then he tackles me. The sun is warm against my face and I have never been happier. He traces his finger over the curve of my lips. He cups the side of my face with the palm of his hand and kisses me. He rolls near a bed of kelp. Gnats swarm. The kelp wraps itself around my ankle in a death knot. He frees me from its snare and I stand up, dust sand from my dress. 

The sound of the waves lulls me to sleep. When I open my eyes, a dirty gray bird feather twirls in the water. Flies buzz in clouds over clumps of seaweed and beds of kelp. Gnats bite my ankle, which turns puffy and red. My hair feels sweaty and doused with salt, even though I did not go in the water.

We stay out all day. Nighttime comes. We go to investigate the tide pools. I watch sea crabs scuttle in the sand and reach out to touch the bumpy plated surface of one. A claw grips my pointer finger, pinching the skin. I shake my hand free and the crab scuttles away. I watch the moonlight reflecting bright spots of light on the deep, dark pools, where the glittering starfish and dormant sea urchins lie. I am so entranced I nearly slip and stub my toe on the slick, wet surface of a rock, but he catches my arm. I look at my human arm, which glows eerily in the moonlight. 

“We should go back,” my husband says.

I ignore him and walk into the water.

“It’s not safe,” he says.

I try to understand what emotion he is feeling. Is he fearful or jealous of the sea? My dress billows in the water. A stingray brushes against my leg like a sleek cat, then continues on its way. Another one comes, winding around me in a circle. I hold out my hand and gently pet its skin, soft as velvet.  

“The sea is quiet today,” he says. He means, Look at me. Love me. I take his hand in my own and kiss the spaces between his fingers.  

I say, “The sea is not quiet for long.”

This is what I know: my husband is the type of man who will want a son eventually, but if we have a daughter, he will name her after a jewel or a gem: Pearl, Ruby, Garnet, Emerald, or Amber. He will want the name to signify something beautiful, something he can hold. 

Four days pass, and I realize my husband has no intention  of studying or pursuing scientific inquiry. He has been possessed by a fervor. His eyes glitter like he has a fever, and it soon becomes clear that what he wants to do is study me. I am both his wife and his possession. 

Somewhere deep in my subconscious, there is a ringing sound, like the sound you hear when you set off an alarm in a store because you went through the wrong exit. Still, even though it is chilly, I do as he asks. I lie on the bed. I feel like a wax figure, an Anatomical Venus, exposed and cut open. My husband probes my body with his eyes. He studies me with a clinical interest as if I am not his wife but a scientific curiosity, a specimen that should be cataloged and pinned. If he wanted, he could pluck my organs out, pick them up and examine them one by one. 

He ponders the purpose of the arm. Has it always existed within my body, and if so, why did it decide now to appear? I cannot stop laughing about his possessiveness. The arm is so phallic, reminiscent of male genitalia. I joke that it must be the stress of our marriage. After all, we are still newlyweds. The joke slips by him. He frowns and mutters something too low for me to understand. He keeps pacing, asking questions aloud, then writing them down in a notebook. Does the arm have the capabilities of an octopus, an independent brain? Or does it have the regenerative properties of a starfish? He wonders if the arm is just a vestigial organ, like the appendix, the tail bone or wisdom teeth. Are there other women who have a third arm? Or am I the first, an entirely new discovery? 

“We don’t know its true purpose,” he says in a frustrated tone. His words seem significant. There is an emotion in his voice I haven’t heard before. Then I realize what it is: fear. 

The next morning, the bathroom door is open. Clouds of steam waft out. My husband lies in the tub and says he wanted to surprise me. I slip off my clothes and climb in next to him. It seems our relationship has returned to normal. I think I will pour in bath salts so we can have a bubble bath, or I’ll open a bottle of champagne. Instead, he says he wants to see if the warm water will relax me, and if the third arm will come out, like a baby coaxed from the womb. When the water is tepid and still nothing has happened, he sighs and kisses the side of my neck. The imprint of his lips is cold against my flesh. 

Over the next few days, he conducts his experiments, records what is working and what isn’t. He fills a bowl with tap water and ice cubes and drops in a special thermometer. He waits, checks the reading, and then tells me it’s time. I plunge both hands into the water of my own volition, though at first, I cannot stop myself from reeling back. There is a timer on the wall, counting each second. 

The cold is excruciating; yet, as two minutes pass, then three, a sense of euphoria washes over me. My hands feel like they have become detached from my body. Beneath the surface of the cool water, they are flushed red. They look inert, lifeless, not like starfish, but like rubber gloves that have been filled with water and are beginning to expand. My husband is talking, but when I look at him, I cannot make out what he is saying. 

I wake up to my husband cradling my head, my body half in his lap. He is kneeling. I am lying half on him, half on the floor. My mottled hands tingle with pain. My husband tells me to lie still and breathe slowly. He tells me he caught me before I hit my head. I am suddenly furious that he would do this to me, that all he cares about are his experiments. But then he kisses the palms of my hands, alternating between one and the other, and says he is sorry, so sorry, and my rage vanishes, and I decide to forgive him. 

The next day, in the seclusion of a cave, I watch an octopus in a dark corner, try to entice it by trailing a stick in the water. It does not fall for my tricks. The octopus scrambles clumsily over rocks. Its arm shoots out to grab a crab and then it slips back into the water.

I think about how my husband has always been jealous of inconsequential things, like the time he accused me of falling in love with an octopus. We were participating in a guided tour at an aquarium to see the giant Pacific octopus. I volunteered and in one graceful, sinuous movement, the octopus reached out with a curled arm and held tight, hooking its arm around me. When it finally let go, it left a red circular mark on my skin. 

 I walk slowly home, feet dragging in the sand. It is then that I see my husband. He says he has been searching for me all day. His face is sunburnt, his eyes expectant as he hands me a sand dollar. I cup it gently in my hand, like it is a delicate bauble or an eggshell, then put it in the pocket of my dress. 

Later, after we are back in the lighthouse and have eaten dinner, the waves the only sound between us, I realize that his gift to me has been crushed into little pieces due to my thoughtlessness. Guilt weighs like piles of stones in my pockets. I know that if I tell him, he will be upset, so I keep this secret from him. The next morning, I take a walk along the shore and drop the broken bits one by one, watch as they are washed away by the tide.

I watch sand crabs poke their heads out and then bury themselves back into the sand. Children who live in the neighborhood run on the beach. Their plump feet slap against the water. They kneel down. Their small fingers try to catch the sand crabs, but they are too fast and slippery. The sand crabs disappear, leaving behind a watery bubble on top of the sand.

I work outside as much as possible; I do not like the lighthouse and its white walls. The stairs curve upward in dizzying spirals. The lighthouse looks like it has been sinking in the sand for years. Soon the sand will erode the base and the lighthouse will topple over and fall into the sea. I spend the days listening to the keening of the sea. The strange music makes me long for something I think I used to know. I lift my face to the sun, breath in the scent of salt and sand.

At night, I watch the shadows on the walls, the way they flicker and leap and dance. Lately, though, they have been slinking, morphing into things much more sinister: knife points and dark splotches. I sit in the only patch of light in the room. I cross my wrists so my right hand rests on my left. I spread my fingers and wriggle them. The image is of a bird flying. I imagine it is a hawk, a bird that does not want to be captured, contained. 

The moon is out tonight, a muted white glow. Its twin image hangs suspended, an orb far off in the ocean. The moons stay aligned, one blurry, the other sharp, like a creature with one filmy eye and one clear eye. The pattern on one of the curtains looks like tiny, snarling mouths with sharp rows of spiky teeth. I take the curtain off the rod, and flip it over, then put it back. But this makes it worse. Now all I can see is an afterimage of the mouths, wet and pulsing.

I have always been anxious. When I was a child and kept having bad dreams, my mother stripped the sheets and washed them until they were soft, slipped a lavender satchel under my pillow and hung a dream catcher above my bed. But the dream catcher disturbed me; the feather hung docilely but there was a jewel in the center that glinted like the eye of a nocturnal animal. After I complained, my mother took it down and put it on top of a cardboard box in the garage where it became fuzzy with cobwebs. 

I often saw eyes and mouths in inanimate objects: the headlights of a car, a doorknob, the sleek face of a toaster. Once, during a drive on a familiar road, I passed a faceless house, a house without windows or a door. All the houses faced to the front like they were supposed to, but this one faced backwards. The edge of the house was blackened with mold or burned by a fire, which covered the façade of the house in a pattern of spiky waves. The next time I passed, in its place, there was the same house, except it was facing the right direction as the others. It had two windows and one door. I didn’t call my mother or my husband. I knew they wouldn’t believe me. But I knew what I had seen: a house in the past or perhaps a house in the future. I crawl into bed and bury under the covers, close my eyes. In the morning, the curtains are just ordinary curtains facing backwards. 

One night, half asleep, my feet slap against the pier. The boards are weathered and warped from years of abuse, the pounding of shoes on its surface and waves crashing against its sides. The wind chills my skin. I stand at the edge of the bridge, looking down at the waves. I long to go down, to let the water consume me. My bare feet scrape against the rough surface of the bridge. Some waves curl up, hitting my feet. My hands are full of shells and sand dollars, which I try to hold gently, but they crack as they fall into the sand. I think I can hear a voice calling me. 

My husband slaps my face, hard enough to wake me up, but not hard enough to hurt me and suddenly the spell is broken. The voice fades and I am just a young woman, cold. He touches my wrist gently, as if I am made of velvet.  He tells me he was frightened; he says I was murmuring while I was sleepwalking.

I rest my head against his chest. The fingers attached to the third arm gently wipe the tears from my face, as tenderly as my husband once did. My husband says he will not be able to eat or sleep if I do not tell him my deepest secrets. So I tell him, even though I don’t want to, even though there are some things I’d rather keep to myself. After I am done telling him, he spends the next few nights repeating the stories, drawing out each painful moment as if my life is a dark fairy tale he has composed. And I think about how the arm is like the gift you never wanted, bestowed to you by your fairy godmother. Even when I am sleeping, the fingers are restless. They draw shapes in the air. 

One night, I decide I must do something. If I can get rid of the arm, then I will be a wife again instead of a curiosity. This is all I really want: for my husband to act the way he used to. In the bathroom, there is an expired bottle of painkillers from when my husband sprained his ankle. I unscrew the lid slowly, swallow the pills dry and wait. 

Then, I go outside and let the waves curl and flick against my ankles. The sky undulates like a watercolor painting, the colors bleeding together. I remember a documentary I watched about an octopus that was eating its arm. The researchers speculated the octopus was either bored, stressed, or suffering from an infection. 

My teeth sink into flesh. My third arm thrashes, but I pin it with my other hand. The salty taste of blood fills my mouth. My husband is asleep inside; he cannot stop me. By morning, I’ll know if I have succeeded or failed. Perhaps, like the octopus, my third arm will regrow and become even more monstrous. Or maybe I’ll learn I can breathe underwater. I’ll keep swimming deeper and deeper until there is only me and the ocean, a vast and quiet world where husbands do not go.