Suzuki 32

Octopus Lesson

By Norie Suzuki

The night before you moved to the nursing home, we sat on opposite ends of the sagging couch that had a cigarette burn on the center seat cushion. Having served you a meal, helped you shave, and set your weather-beaten duffle bag beside your Skechers in the hallway, there wasn’t much else to do but watch TV. A giant Pacific octopus floated on the 80-inch screen and waved its tentacles like a gymnast doing a ribbon dance. Armored with chromatophores, the octopus instantly changed from velvety, mossy green to spiky, coral red. A master of camouflage. Because its body is mostly soft tissue, the octopus can wriggle through cracks, hide in shells, and avert danger. And because it feels pain, and its central brain located between the eyes and eight brains in its tentacles remember the ache, the octopus coils away from hurt, lives in solitude. Although it has three blue-blood-pumping hearts, the octopus’s lifespan is only three to five years. So, no learning is passed down from one generation to the next—no accumulation of collective memory.

“What’s for dinner?” you asked, poking at the hole with your finger. A habit you’d acquired a few months earlier. The burn hole on the faded shale-brown sofa was no longer a speck but the size of the age spots on your cheeks.

“Papa, we already had supper. Your favorite—grilled eel rice bowl.”

The start of yet another merry-go-round conversation. I raised the volume of the TV by one notch, hoping the deep tuba notes evoking the imminent danger would distract you. They didn’t, and you kept asking me where Yasuko was, why she wasn’t preparing dinner. I watched the tentacles enwrap a crab as the suckers smelled and tasted the prey. The venom instantly paralyzed the crab, and it disappeared under the ballooning web.

I no longer pointed at Mother’s picture frame on the sideboard cabinet and told you that Yasuko is d-e-a-d, that her Subaru slid on the black ice and crashed into a trailer twenty years earlier.

“Gone to the supermarket,” I answered instead. After the octopus drifted away, what remained of the crab’s hard shell was left on the sand like that smashed cake box on the passenger’s seat, the Happy Sweet Sixteen chocolate plaque covered with shards of glass.

Don’t you remember anything? Don’t you remember me dying my hair punk pink when you didn’t celebrate my seventeenth birthday? Don’t you remember catching me smoking on the sofa the day the school suspended me? I wanted to spit out those questions, but every self-help book warned me not to use the phrase—“Don’t you remember?” When you were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the doctor pointed at the CT scan, at your shriveled hippocampus, and said you could no longer hold onto your memories.

As the male octopus extended its hectocotylus into the female’s mantle cavity, you suddenly stood up and staggered to the door to turn on the porch light, saying, “Yasuko should be back any minute.” When you resettled on the sofa, the male octopus glided away. Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 sounded in the background, and the voice-over explained that octopuses’ senescence begins soon after mating. Ignoring the TV, you repeated emphatically where you kept your legal documents, recited the combination numbers of your safe, and reminded me that you wanted to check in at the Silver Care Home by 10 o’clock.

If it had not been for that incident two months ago, I wouldn’t have looked for a nursing home. At least not yet. I had reverted to biting my nails whenever my phone vibrated in my pocket. Of course, you didn’t remember anything. You wandered to our old neighborhood where we’d lived until I was eight. Without your wallet, you couldn’t have taken the train. Which meant you’d walked for hours until dusk without a coat. Even the police were perplexed at how you had found your way, how you located your former apartment, climbed up three flights, banged on the door until the neighbor complained. Where in your frail body was that energy? And you didn’t stop there. You walked to the park where Mother and I used to picnic while you were on the road selling encyclopedias, and grabbed a stranger’s hand, calling her Yasuko. Mother’s non-look-alike said your grip was so firm she’d panicked. She swung her plastic grocery bag at you, which tore, and tomatoes splattered on your shirt. It was all recorded—the woman shrieking, you pleading Yasuko, Yasuko—on the cell phone of a teenager who had witnessed the scene from his veranda. We were lucky no complaint was filed. Still, I didn’t like that pitiful look on the police or the voice they used, talking down to you as if you were a five-year-old.

You were quiet on our way home, with the seatbelt partially covering the dried, red stain on your shirt. I shouldn’t have yelled at you, but I did, the underwater magma of silence erupting with full force. “If you had cared for Mother, why didn’t you spend more time with her, show her some gratitude? Who stayed up late to reheat your dinner? Who sat alone at my school’s talent show? You didn’t notice when she cut her hair short or put on a new lipstick. You didn’t give a shit about us! No wonder your life went on without missing a beat. And now, you take this middle-aged woman’s hand, a woman so unlike Mother, and whine, Yasuko, Yasuko, like a lost child, and make me bow at the police station until my nose touched my knee. Don’t you even remember how Mother looked?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught you drawing a blank. I hit the gas harder. The car skidded. A truck behind me honked nonstop, splitting the cold air. I clasped my steering wheel as my Civic slid to the guard-railed shoulder. The tires screeched, the metal scraped, the truck rumbled—all ricocheted off in our confined cabin. Then silence. Absolute silence but for my drumming heart. Your eyes were wide open as if you’d seen something invisible.

“The scent,” you said, looking straight at the truck’s tail light as it faded into the darkness.

At the Silver Care Home, the TV is always on in the lounge. The reruns of soap operas and music programs from the 60s babysit the residents in wheelchairs. On your good days, you sit at a table playing shogi with another man. Sometimes, you recognize me and introduce me as your daughter. You even joke, saying I’m no spring chicken, going on forty, but then insist you haven’t given up on finding me a good husband. But on bad days, you see me as a new caregiver. You point to your name tag, which shows 308—your room number—and say you’ll let me know if you need any help.

Today, I find you in your room with the windows slightly open. In the courtyard below, white magnolias are in full bloom. When I sit beside you on a window bench, you hold my hand. I can’t tell whether it’s your good day or not.

“Yasuko, what should we get for Nanami’s birthday? Can you believe she’s turning sixteen? That little girl who begged for piggyback rides.” You sniff my hair and say, “You always smell sweet.”

I squeeze your hand, remembering the magnolia perfume bottle on Mother’s dressing table.

“I ordered a strawberry cream cake for Nanami. Can you pick it up?”

I want to hear more, the replay of who you might have been, but you drift away, become unreachable.

At home, I play the rerun of the documentary we watched together. The octopus spreads its tentacles and floats toward me. Then, it propels backward, blasting water from its siphon, making sand swirl. The octopus shoots inky fluid, and the screen turns murky black. I don’t recall this scene. From the darkness, I hear the narration: the octopus lost one limb to a moray eel, but it will grow back. As the end credits roll, I wonder what will happen to the memories in the lost arm, the memories engraved in those suckers. I dig my finger into the burn hole, feel the soft, frayed fabric, and wonder if mending is not entirely impossible.

Norie Suzuki (she/her) was born and educated bilingually in Tokyo, Japan, where she writes and works as a simultaneous interpreter. She received an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Cutleaf Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received the third prize in the T. Paulo Urcanse Prize for Literary Excellence in 2024.