“This is where I remember him,” Lucy said. “Where his spirit is. Not a ghost. I don’t mean a ghost. His essence is here.”
I swallowed hard. There was a scuffle, and I imagined that Forest had thrown an arm around Lucy’s shoulders, tugging her close.
“But lately it’s too hard,” she said. “Every morning I wake up. I look around, and everything is the same. Just the way it always was. Every morning I think it was all a dream. The whole terrible mess was some stupid nightmare. I still think that. I still turn over in bed and expect him to be there. The other day I jumped up and ran to make some coffee for him. I got all the way to the kitchen before I remembered.”
Forest’s reply was too low for me to parse. A soothing murmur.
“Anyway,” Lucy said, “now when I wake up, I’ll see right away that things have changed. The room won’t look the same. And I’ll know. Andrew’s gone.”
If I had been superstitious, I might have crossed my fingers or knocked on wood. As it was, I merely shut my eyes tight. My arms had wrapped themselves of their own accord around my midriff. For a moment, everything felt foreign to me. Even my own waist, my hips, seemed altered somehow. I might have been hugging a stranger’s body.
LATER THAT DAY, Oliver appeared in the living room. Lucy set his aquarium on the coffee table, right by my usual reading spot. I reacted to this change with a combination of revulsion and fascination. I was drawn to the octopus as though he were a car accident or a dead bird on the sidewalk: gross, scary, and spellbinding.
Since that day, my interest has overcome my fear. My initial distaste remains unabated — I would not, for example, ever touch the octopus or pick him up — but I often watch him at play. Oliver is always on the move. His goal is to escape or die trying. Before my eyes, he has explored every inch of his tank, coiling his tentacles upward to palpate the screen that fences him in from above. He has eyed me accusingly through the glass. I am intrigued by his skin. He can mimic the mottled brown of the pebbles at the bottom of the tank. When he is angry — and he is often angry — he turns a deep crimson. He is able to change more than his color, too. He can roughen his mantle until it looks like coral. He can make his flesh glisten like silk.
It has taken me a while to understand his shape. The eyes poke up on stalks, each pupil a black, horizontal bar. But the bulbous sac beneath these organs is not, as I originally suspected, his nose. It is, in fact, his body, a squishy balloon that comprises his lungs and stomach. The mouth is hidden at the center of a pinwheel of tentacles. There is a beak in there somewhere. There is venom in that beak. I have done a little reading on the subject, finding an old, battered copy of a Jacques Cousteau manifesto on one of the shelves. Leafing through the pages, I have learned that octopuses are clever. They are more intelligent than dogs. They possess extraordinary powers of disguise. A dead octopus, if moved from a dark surface to a lighter one, will gradually pale, attempting to camouflage itself from beyond the grave.
Watching Oliver, I have learned still more. Lucy has put a rock in his tank, a rudimentary shelter, and Oliver will dig beneath it, scooping armfuls of pebbles to one side. Then he will pour his body into the hole he has made. Gradually he will alter his color and texture, becoming invisible by degrees. When Lucy taps three times on the lid, however — a signal to indicate mealtime — he will balloon upward, a rabbit conjured out of a hat.
I think he has a sense of humor. For a while, Lucy kept a lamp trained on him during the day, an extra measure of heat. But one afternoon, Oliver grew tired of the constant glare. I was on the couch at the time, watching him over the top of my book. Oliver sucked in a mouthful of water. He spouted it upward in a stream, right through the mesh lid. There was a burst of smoke, an acrid smell, and the lamp shorted out.
WE HELD THE Secret Santa a few days before Christmas. As it turned out, not everyone would be present for the holiday itself. Mick, Lucy, and Forest were all planning to return to their homes for a much-needed vacation.
In the morning, we gathered in the living room. I had pulled Lucy’s name out of the hat, which was awkward for me. I considered insisting that I be allowed to pick again, or maybe cornering Mick and begging him to trade. In the end, however, I decided to make a few small presents for Oliver. I saved and squirreled away anything I could picture the octopus playing with in the quiet space of his tank. Now, with everyone watching, Lucy opened my explanatory note, then unwrapped a chain of paperclips, a tiny glass jar, and a ruby-red marble. She lifted each object into the air and examined it. She got to her feet and gave me a one-armed hug, her body as stiff as a board. I honestly couldn’t tell whether she was pleased.
The rest of the gifts were similarly makeshift. A shell pendant on a length of twine. A sand dollar. One of Forest’s shark sketches, stuck into a picture frame that had been salvaged from the mantel-piece. Galen offered up a seal stone — a dark, smooth orb, as heavy as a meteorite. (He has a collection of them in a bucket in his room, amassed over years on the islands.) Mick was the worst. He gave Charlene a can of tuna. There was a great deal of laughter. At lunch that day, Galen wore his new necklace with pride. Charlene insisted upon eating her tuna as a side dish. The conversation was light. Mick, Lucy, and Forest would be leaving as soon as Captain Joe arrived, and they chatted eagerly about what they were looking forward to. For the first time, they were people with somewhere else to go.
20
AND NOW THERE are three. Charlene, Galen, and I are rattling around Southeast Farallon alone. The temperature has dropped and the wind has picked up — an awful combination. I have found myself envying the elephant seals. They frolic in the icy ocean, bundled up beneath layers of blubber.
Galen appears to be equally immune. He often goes for long walks. I will see him through the window, a dandelion of a man, lean and rangy, topped by a plume of silver. He will wander across Marine Terrace and stroll toward Mussel Flat. Eventually he will disappear on the slopes of Lighthouse Hill. I get the feeling that he is looking for something out there. What, I can’t imagine.
Even among the other biologists here, Galen is unique. He has been on the archipelago for a decade. No one else has ever come close to staying so long. Most people average a couple years at most. What’s more, Galen has never once, in all that time, returned to the mainland — not for a day, not for an hour. This is unusual in the extreme. The others voyage home at regular intervals for the sake of their own sanity. But Galen’s sticking power is legendary. I have heard all about it. Forest, Mick, and Lucy have spun yarns about him, like campfire stories.
Galen does not travel to his hometown for the holidays. He does not take weekends in San Francisco. He has even refused to return to the continent for medical care. Periodically, of course, he has suffered sprains, colds, even pneumonia. Mick took Galen’s temperature once, then begged him to call a helicopter and head straight to the hospital. But Galen demurred. Instead, in a creaking voice interspersed with coughing, he described his symptoms over the radiophone. Captain Joe was dispatched with medicine on board the ferry. (This was a few years ago; Mick told us all about it long after the fact.) Once, Galen broke his wrist while at work on the Janus. He marched away to the cabin, set the bone himself. An hour later, wearing a homemade cast, he headed back to work. Once, while in the kitchen preparing dinner, he got word on the radiophone that his brother had passed away. (This was Forest’s story; he had been with Galen at the time, way back when, and he shared it with the rest of us recently, in a whisper.) The funeral took place somewhere on the mainland. But Galen did not attend. Instead, on the morning his brother was put in the ground, he spent the hours in the lighthouse alone, walking back and forth and staring to the east, as though with a little effort he could see all the way to the cemetery.