My Daughter, My Octopus

by Andrew Bertaina

Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze

In my small apartment while the children and I share a quick dinner, we watch, over the course of a couple of nights, My Octopus Teacher. I’d read about it on social media, and I had a keen interest in octopuses after reading two books about them four summers prior. I knew they were extremely intelligent and extremely distinct from human beings. Practically aliens, octopuses, carrying around neurons, mini-brains, at the edge of all eight arms, giving birth to half a million babies who float like bits of stardust in the vast nether of the sea.
        At some point after reading the two books I’d gotten octopus with a companion who loved seafood, eager to share in her love of seafood, and my love of hypocrisy. That’s the only time I’ve eaten octopus, which tasted like a ropey steak, sizzled to perfection, tender and delicate as I bit through those neurons in each of the eight arms. I told my companion about the books, and my feeling, but we still enjoyed that part of the meal.
        The children seem confounded by the movie, mostly because they couldn’t understand why the diver didn’t try to save the octopus when it was grabbed by a small shark. I tried to explain that he had made a commitment, a solemn vow not to involve himself in the undersea drama, even if it meant watching the octopus be eaten. The children don’t understand such strange vows, letting those you love get hurt, lose an arm, a life.
        I don’t tell them I’ve made my own solemn vows, decades ago in a small church, with families watching. But I think I agree with them. Sometimes you break a vow to save an arm, a selfish idea of your life.
        Years ago, my rambunctious daughter liked to be told stories before bed. Many nights, she’d scream and pound the door, breaking into hysterics, wetting herself, if you tried to leave her room before she’d fallen asleep. Thus, my wife and I rotated nights when it came to putting her to bed, trying to soothe her wild need for comfort, for presence, for everything. So, I often found myself lying in her small bed in the evenings after another marathon session of reading a series of Curious George books that ran well over a hundred pages. And thus, like many parents, I’d come to loathe the yellow color of the book, the ridiculous actions of the monkey. Stop fucking up, George! Just bake the damn cake without inviting the dogs in!
        That night, which I still remember, my daughter asked me to tell her a story, her slightly dreamy voice keeping us both awake as we sat on the dock of sleep, darkness lapping at her window, beyond, a tremendously large oak, and the moon hung in its branches.
        This was in the before time, when things in our marriage were foundering but unacknowledged. We watched shows in the evenings, Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, chatted about office dynamics, the quality of the children’s stool, and then drifted into sleep, our bodies almost touching. On weekends when I wasn’t working, we’d tend to the cloth diapers, stiff and rank with pee, use the push mower to lower the lawn or join church friends for a brief get together of beers and complaining over the same things we complained of to one another.
        These were the days when every public event, every after-church picnic, lunch with the in-laws or fireworks, ended when our daughter would become overly tired, and would throw tremendous, ear-splitting fits, such that all I remember is carrying her out under my right arm, an overly long football of shrill menace—mayhem of days.
        But there she was that night, lying next to me, smelling clean, her cheeks still plump and pink with the fat of childhood. This child who used to ask us when she was two for increasingly hard words to pronounce, cackling with delight when she’d say it after us, a-n-t-i-q-u-a-r-i-a-n. She looked at me with glassy eyes, and I was exhausted from work, from closing the library at midnight and going to bed at one before waking up at 6:30 to the cries of children the next morning.
        Okay. There once was an octopus swimming in the ocean.
         My daughter looked at me with glassy eyes.
         I don’t think I’d been learning about octopuses that year. In fact, I read the books about octopuses years later, after I’d moved out, which makes me wonder why I was talking about the ocean that night, about the octopus and the fish.
        They have nine brains and three hearts, eight brains working independently from one another near the edge of each arm. What is it like to have eight brains running the length of your arms, to feel the watery net of the world passing through your long tentacles, over your tenacious suckers? I wonder sometimes, why they aren’t the ones running everything in this mess of a world? Why they didn’t climb wearily out of the ocean and set tentacle upon land to make of it what they will.
        But we are the ones running and making a mess of the world. I leaned into her red-gold hair and kept telling her the story of an octopus and a fish, both of us now, falling into the depths of sleep. In the story, the octopus falls through the greenish depths, where light scatters among the halos of jellyfish, passes through throngs of krill. The octopus keeps swimming, I tell her, releasing ink as he falls, darkness falling into darkness, a path where he can’t be found. I whispered.

                                                                ***

Like the deepest parts of the sea is the subconscious mind. scientists aren’t sure what resides there. Recent papers have argued that the subconscious is the seat of unwanted desires, fears, and shames, the coral reef of the human mind, though less aesthetically pleasing. Another paper argues that the subconscious mind is where we sort out how we should respond to small impulses, an anemone poked, closing sharply. Another paper says it’s where we hide and make sense of our deepest desires, those vast and lurching leviathans that swim beneath the everydayness of our lives and emerge now and again, shocking us.
        I say all this, not because I know how to make sense of it myself. In general, I disdain interpretation, trying to explain the processes of the subconscious mind seems as fruitless as reading an astrology chart or trying to understand the many brains of an octopus. And yet, saying that, I do wonder if my subconscious knew that particular night, what the shape of my life to come was? If it wasn’t, at the edge of sleep, articulating a fact that I hadn’t yet grasped, the movement away from the life I’d created.

                                                                ***

Where did the story emerge from as I clung vaguely to the conscious world as a piece of wreckage left over from the remains of the day? As I told the story, the room seemed to grow darker and darker, her small head tucked tenderly against my chest. Her whole body sighed, settling into a contented sleep.
        But I kept telling the story that night, moon and tree obliterated, just the silent fact of my words tethering me to the world. I said the octopus keeps swimming down, keeps spitting inky darkness, down and down into the deepest parts of the ocean, down and down I chant into the night, falling into a quiet, insane rhythm. Down and down and down into the darkness I say, far away from everything he’s known. Down and down and down, down down down down down down down down.