"Did I catch you at a bad time?" It's my mother.

"No."

"Who were you talking to?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

I can tell my mother is not satisfied with my response and my evasiveness will obstruct any real conversation.

"Religious people at my door. Jehovah's Witnesses." This seems more satisfying, although I probably would never have the courage to tell a Jehovah's Witness they were full of s.h.i.t. I heard a rumor that Prince, a known member of the religion, has been spotted going door-to-door in my neighborhood to discuss the faith. I can't chance yelling at Prince.

"You should live in the country. They never come out this far."

Lily looks up at me expectantly, so I place red ball on the floor by her feet. "Why are you calling?" I realize how rude it sounds as soon as it's out of my mouth.

My mother sighs. "I haven't heard from you in a while. I was wondering if you were okay."

"I'm fine, Mom. Just busy." That much is not a lie.

"Did you hear Meredith's news?"

"Pregnant?"

"Isn't it wonderful?"

"She's a good mother," I say. Red ball glides under the couch and I get down on my knees to retrieve it. Lily, tail wagging, is facing the opposite wall.

"What does that mean? Meredith is a good mother." I can tell by her tone she thinks maybe I'm implying that she was not.

"What does it mean? It means she's a good mother. That's all. She's a good mother, you're a good mother. Everyone is a good mother."

"Well, not everyone." It sits uncomfortably in the air as we both know her own mother was not. I wonder how often she was chasing her own mother's affection while I was chasing hers. I picture us both running on a circular track with no beginning and no end. "You used to call me on your dog walks. About this time of day. And then you stopped."

I watch Lily sniff around for red ball, even though I placed it right in front of her face. "We don't go on as many walks anymore."

"Why?"

The octopus looks up at me, grinning. "Yeah. Why?" he repeats.

I clench my fist and take a step forward, drawing back for the punch. "You stay out of this."

"Excuse me?" my mother says.

"Not you. Not you," I a.s.sure her. I want to kill the octopus, now more than ever.

"Ted, is there someone else there?"

"Lily went blind, Mom."

"What?"

"She lost her eyesight." The explanation sounds dumb to me, like maybe she just misplaced it.

"How?"

I glare at the octopus. How much of this do I want to get into? "It's just, she's getting old."

The octopus looks up at me and rolls his eyes. "p.u.s.s.y."

I swat at a stack of magazines on the coffee table, and a Travel + Leisure and Entertainment Weekly sail onto the floor. "She's getting older and I don't really like to talk about it. But we don't go for as many walks anymore."

"I think you should come home."

"No. Mom. It's fine."

"Not because of . . ." My mother trails off and I finish her sentence silently with Lily. "Meredith is coming up with the family next month; it's been a long time since we've seen you. You should think about coming home."

I tell her I will think about it without making any promises, and when I hang up the phone I wonder how long it has been since I have been home. Jeffrey and I used to travel to Maine every summer. We would go to the beach and eat lobster and fried clams and I would kayak with my mother while he would read on the riverbank, and then we would all sit on the deck of my mother's house and drink rose. It all seems like someone else's life now.

But when was the last time my mother came to visit me here? I remember a trip she made, soon after Jeffrey and I broke up. She came for the weekend, almost spontaneously. Very unlike her. I don't know if I've actively pushed this visit from my memory, or it just got lost in the fog of that time. But my mother's last words on the phone just now ring familiar: "I know you think I don't worry about you, but I do."

I glance over at Lily and the octopus is laughing at me. He's still amused by Lily humping my leg. "Jungian. You're such an a.s.shole," I gripe.

"We were just conversing."

"We are never just conversing. You converse, I plot your death."

The octopus chuckles. "How's that going?"

"Give me back my dog!"

Red ball rolls into the dining room and Lily ambles after it, taking the octopus with her. I think about what the octopus was getting at, float through Freudian ideas like free a.s.sociation, transference, and libido, until I land on Oedipal complex. But why does he think Lily suddenly suffers from a desire to s.e.xually possess an opposite-s.e.x parent, at least strongly enough to hump my leg? And what of the call from my own mother-whose love I pursue-right in the middle of the discussion? Coincidence? I sink back onto the couch. It has to be because Lily is blind. Oedipus blinded himself; the octopus blinded Lily. But am I blind to something, too? What is it I cannot see?

I need to accelerate my transformation.

The guy in line in front of me has the hottest tattoos I've ever seen on a man. There's a half sleeve of j.a.panese water imagery in the style of Hokusai that I imagine extends over his shoulder, as well as the most beautiful tiger on his opposite forearm that's almost serpentine in the graceful way it drips from his elbow to his wrist. It's hard to describe; you'd really have to see it to get the full effect.

"Can I ask you a question?"

The man turns around with a smile. If there was ever anyone's word I was going to take on a tattoo artist, it would be this guy's. Even though he's just some guy in front of me at the supermarket buying Soyrizo, mangoes, lighter fluid, and craft beer.

"I'm going to grill the mangoes," he says, his smile turning wry.

"No, no, no," I stammer. "Who does your ink?" I wonder if calling it ink makes me sound cool or ridiculously stupid.

"Are you thinking of getting marked up? You've got to see Kal. He has a real philosophical approach."

Philosophical approach to what? That would be a natural follow-up question, but instead I just say, "Thanks, man," when he gives me the name of Kal's parlor, and we go about our grocery transactions in silence while I try to imagine him shirtless.

I'm still not sure what a philosophical approach means in this context-philosophical approach to the whole thing? The artistic process? Pain management? I really have no idea. I don't know why it's appealing, or even why I would want this. But I do. So I take the mango griller's recommendation and call and make an appointment, and now here I am, parked on the street in front of a window with imposing designs, afraid to get out of the car.

What I'm doing at a tattoo parlor is a little unclear even to me, even to someone determined enough to ask for a recommendation from a stranger. Since the octopus blinded Lily with ink, I've harbored a growing obsession with getting marked by ink myself, creating a concord between us. Call it sympathy, unanimity, or the desire to mastermind a fraternity with only Lily and me as members, denying the octopus the opportunity to pledge. I've flirted with the idea of a tattoo before, but felt I lacked the occasion. This time is different. I feel much more like a soldier getting tattooed in wartime, with an almost ritualistic desire for body modification to mark solidarity to outfit and country. It feels like the rite of pa.s.sage I need, except I'm not fighting for country and I have no outfit-only one comrade-in this war. I thought of getting Lily's birth date as my tattoo, perhaps coupled with the day we met-the day I fell in love-but a run of numbers on my arm seemed too evocative of another kind of war tattoo-the markings of war prisoners. One day it could become something to wear with pride, the hallmark of a survivor, but this war is too far from over to take that chance. Still, as I wait here for my appointment, my sitting with the artist named Kal with a philosophical approach, I'm almost giddy to enter this fraternity with Lily, even excited for the pain of the needle.

Excited to wear the mark of a real man.

With a few deep breaths, I gather the nerve to get out of my car and enter Kal's shop. The lobby is painted a stormy ocean green, and it's decorated with worn black leather furniture that still gives off an intoxicating animal smell. On the walls are photos of tattoos, I suppose ones with their origins here. There's no wall of suggested designs. It makes me feel like I've found the right place, like I'm not going to be modified in some cookie-cutter way that makes my attempt to stand apart backfire, making me even more identifiable as a part of the proletariat. A receptionist who looks like a younger, less angry Janeane Garofalo directs me to another room behind a velvet curtain. I have an appointment with the wizard. I hope he doesn't think me greedy when I ask for brains and heart and courage. I hope he is more than a fortune-teller scamming me and this tiny emerald city.

Kal is perhaps more tattooed than not and I find it immediately disarming, the amount of ink his body is able to absorb and, instead of looking marked, radiate empowerment back. He's handsome and slightly older and gray at the temples. Native American, maybe? But more like Native Canadian. Inuit or Eskimo. He cuts through my awkward attempt at a handshake with an encompa.s.sing hug.

"There is no real word for h.e.l.lo in Inukt.i.tut," he says, "So we shake hands or hug."

"Hugging is good." At least it is when it's explained to me what the hug means.

Kal motions for me to sit on a stool. It's a slow day, and we talk for a while about life, about nature, about relationships-the ones that are fleeting and the ones that are not. I ask him about the tattoos of his that I find most interesting and he tells me the stories behind them. He can tell that I'm stalling, but he doesn't seem to mind.

"What's your favorite thing about tattoos?" It's such an amateur question, something a third-grader might ask while interviewing him for some school project, although I don't know what school would a.s.sign a project on tattoo artists. Maybe a charter school, or a Montessori.

"Their permanence," Kal says.

"But now there's laser removal."

Kal shrugs. "It still leaves a scar. Like a ghost." He looks deeper into me than anyone has in a long time.

"But eventually we die, and the flesh rots away."

Kal smiles at me with unwavering eye contact. It's unnerving, or at least I am unnerved.

"Let me guess, people leave ghosts, too."

"You're scared. That's normal for first-timers."

I don't recall mentioning that this is my first time, and I'm fully clothed, and so he can't possibly see that I am unmarked, but he knows. "I'm scared. But not about the needles or the pain or regret."

"About what, then?"

"About memorializing someone who isn't gone. That I'm giving up the battle. That I'm surrendering in war." I can hear Jenny tell me to say what I really mean. I carry my thesis further. "Afraid of death, I guess. And, maybe for the first time, of my own mortality."

"Death is a unique opponent, in that death always wins."Kal offers a small hiccup of a shrug, as if this is of little significance. "There's no shame in surrender when it's time to stop fighting."

"Comforting." I say it sarcastically, but I'm not sure sarcasm is a language Kal speaks.

"Isn't it?" Kal asks. I don't think he's without a sense of humor, but he's completely serious here. I laugh, but in that nervous way you do when you can't think of something to say. Kal opens a drawer and pulls out a Polaroid and hands it to me.

"What's this?"

"The last tattoo I did. I don't like to do quotes. Not much challenge in them for me as an artist. But I like this one, and we were able to do it in an interesting way."

I look at the photograph. Across a guy's rib cage are scrawled the words "To die would be an awfully big adventure."

I recognize it immediately. "Peter Pan."

"J. M. Barrie," Kal corrects. "Peter Pan isn't real."

"Isn't he? I always thought Peter Pan was death. An angel of death who came to collect children."

Kal raises an eyebrow. "You're darker than I thought."

"I didn't used to be." I am transforming.

"What is death? Is it the end of photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, homeostasis?" Kal has the rhythm of a poet. "The last heartbeat? The last cell generation? The last breath of air?"

"Maybe all those things."

He has a real philosophical approach.

"We don't know, do we? It could be the tipping point, the point in life when extinction is a.s.sured."

"If that's the case, isn't death the moment of birth?"

"Or conception, even."

"Your favorite thing about tattoos doesn't really exist." I look down at my feet. I'm almost embarra.s.sed to have to point this out.

"Permanence?"

"Not really. Not if we're all past the tipping point."

"Permanence is a relative idea."

I smile. "What, really, is permanence anyway?"

Kal smiles, too. He gets that I'm being cheeky. "Let's not go too far down that rabbit hole."

"It's hard not to." But he's right, we could be here all day and all night. I look at Kal. Not that that would be so bad.

"If you spend your entire life trying to cheat death, there's no time left over to embrace life." He puts his hand on my shoulder and it is warm. "Don't be afraid. That's all I'm saying."

Kal's right. I'm done being afraid. Having ink, like the octopus, is the final step in my metamorphosis.

"Besides," Kal says. "I have a better idea."

"What's that?"

Kal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal, and sets them down on a drafting table. "Let's draw."

I smile the way I did as a child when receiving a fresh box of sixty-four Crayola crayons-unabashedly, showing all my teeth. I remember how much I used to love to draw, and I wonder why I don't do it anymore. I write, I guess. I draw with words. But when I see Kal's pad and charcoal, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that it's not the same.

I use my words, my artist's charcoal, to describe to Kal what I'm thinking. He draws with an imperfect fluidity, pausing only occasionally to shade the drawing with his thumb, or brush the paper with the back of his hand.