Invisible Beasts Read online

  “DO I SOUND FUNNY TO YOU?” I demanded, looking up at Helen. She sat on her porch, spinning silk on her hi-tech spinning wheel, a compact disk the height of her knee. Helen and I are cousins many times removed, but we’ve always been close, as the two oddballs in a large clan of scientists: Helen went into the arts, while I, of course, am the invisible-beast spotter. For years, we’ve shared our peculiar ways of seeing things. Helen belongs to a worldwide fiber arts collective called the Fibettes; all around the globe, Fibettes pick sticky cocoons off trees and ship them to other Fibettes, who spin them. Through Helen’s hands pass the silks of many latitudes, to become a single, fine, homespun thread. Except for the modern wheel, my cousin resembles her great-grandmother, a Chippewa-Irish farmer, with black braids down her back, a work-hardened body in a cotton shift, and patient eyes.

  “You sound . . . not yourself, Sophie. What’s wrong?”

  I climbed the porch steps feeling wretched, though it was a lazy July afternoon, and the porch was shaded by a canopy of honeysuckle, pagoda-shaped, fragrant, and loud with floating bees.

  “I’d like your advice,” I said, “and I brought you something.” I held out a basketful of Grand Tour cocoons. Helen stopped her treadle action, lifted her worn fingers from the thread, and took the basket, peering in. I put one of the invisible cocoons in her palm, and soon she was plucking them out by touch alone.

  “Get me a bushel of these and an emperor,” she smiled. “What’s up?” I slumped on the steps, swiping away tears, and confessed how I had lied to my sister Evie when she unearthed an Asian honeybee from the Pleistocene epoch, mysteriously preserved in North America. Because I’d feared for the Keen-Ears’ safety if their existence became generally known, I had not revealed that invisible animals turn visible in death, or that Evie’s puzzling bee had come to the New World with invisible humans who still farmed its descendants for honey.

  Helen listened (patiently, considering the irritating, unnatural voice in which I spoke) and spun. There was going to be a long stretch of invisibility in her thread, where the Grand Tour cocoons spun out, and I wondered what she’d use it for. In her braids’ tips hung some dark, wrapped objects resembling cigars for dolls, and I envied her—artistic, enjoying life, with Truth Bats.

  “I had no choice,” I sniffled. “I deliberately misled Evie about those bees. What else could I do? Was I supposed to open the door to genocide? So I lied. My bats disappeared. All my life I’ve had Truth Bats. Now they’re gone, and anything I say, like ‘all my life I’ve had Truth Bats’—it doesn’t sound true. It sounds like I don’t know what. Helen, you know, the bats are not even comfortable with social fibs, and I’ve gone and told a big lie to my sister. That doesn’t sound true either. God, I want my bats back!”

  “Poor old God,” Helen murmured, guiding her evolving thread. “Well. What will bring your bats back?”

  “Telling Evie the truth. Until I do, my voice is polluted by deceptive stress,” I explained with unnerving glibness.

  “Then tell. Trust Evie. Don’t you trust your sister?”

  “She has an obligation to science.” Helen tut-tutted as if the ambiguous ethics of scientific research were a minor tangle in her skein. Her voice, I noted wistfully, was mild, full, and wholesome as sweetgrass.

  “Sophie, in your shoes, I would figure it this way. I would rather get back my bats, and have Evie find out about the Keen-Ears, than live with a lie and wait for some unknown person to discover them. You know it will come. You can’t hide a natural fact.” She licked her thumbs to feel the invisible thread as it passed through them. I threw back my head, inhaled the honeysuckle scent, and shut my eyes. After a while, the purr of the spinning wheel paused and Helen said, “Why don’t you go down to the barn and call her now?”

  AFTER I’D CALLED EVIE from Helen’s barn, I ran up the porch steps, and my cousin rose to hug me. My joints were trembling as if I’d dropped a loaded barbell, but I had no time to linger. My sister, grasping only that I had urgent business, had said to drop by now, while she had an opportune moment. Helen wished me good luck. As I drove into town and hunted for a parking space around Evie’s campus, I rehearsed aloud phrases of apology and ethical pleas, all of which sounded like excuses and false promises; they left me feeling vaguely felonious as I trotted down the corridors of the Life Science Center, through the noise mix of freezers and centrifuges, past office doors, laboratories, and the absentminded or cordial faces of Evie’s colleagues and students. I found Evie in a small workroom adjacent to her main lab.

  “Come in,” she said. “Let’s talk while I feed the Worm.”

  Entering, my nostrils contracted. The dim room smelled of mold, with substenches that evoked thoughts of continents passing through the guts of earthworms. Around the walls, floor to ceiling, ran shiny brown tubing like a coiled snakeskin: this was the Worm. If you uncoiled it, you’d have a torus—a donut-shaped tube filled with silts, clays, sands, loams, and small wildlife: bacteria, fungi, nematodes. The Worm helped Evie to experiment with soil gases. Its “skin” was her invention, a polymer sheath containing molecular valves and electronic sensors. As soil gases within hit the valves, thumbtack-sized “scales” covering the Worm changed attitude, like ailerons, so that segments of it bristled or lay smooth, in recognizable patterns. Meanwhile, the sensors, through remote pickups, fed blooms of data into a digital console, where my sister sat dangling her short legs from an ergonomic stool. In the artificial twilight, Evie’s white lab coat was an eerie noncolor that reached behind my eyes. Wielding an automatic pipette, she squirted ingredients through a filtering lid into a large glass retort filled with nutrient slurry.

  “Evie,” I declared, “I have an apology to make, and an explanation.”

  “Oh?” said Evie. “Shoot.” While I had my say (sounding much like an inflight announcement of unavoidable delays) she completed her mixture, discarded the filter, screwed the lid tighter on the retort, and set it on a magnetic stirrer. The slurry began to form a sluggish vortex, and the magnet at the retort’s bottom, unseen, made repetitive whacking sounds. After I’d finished talking, Evie turned to me with a bright smile of affection.

  “No problem, I’m glad you told me all this. You’re sweet.”

  For a few moments, I watched my sister’s precise movements as she checked the output of dials and LED displays. Then I asked, “What are you going to do with the information I just gave you?” (The question had a distinct soap-opera tone.)

  “Nothing,” Evie said.

  My thoughts were, to put it mildly, in disarray. I should have been relieved that the first impulse of Evie, and through her, science, was not to spring with full force upon the Keen-Ears . . . Yet, riffling mentally through the images that had driven me to lie—slain Keen-Ears roped to hunters’ trucks, caged Keen-Ears in military labs, their bees scattered in dying colonies—I felt, instead of relief, shock; and as it passed, hopelessness. Ironically enough, my life was premised on the belief that science would someday take over the study of invisible animals. I’d always assumed that this transition would happen, in a vague green future. It had to happen, that was the premise. Someday, somehow, nations would be wiser, and invisible animals would be studied. But if Evie thought nothing of my information—nothing—where did that leave my work and the meaning of my life?

  “But,” I said, in a tone so strange that my sister stopped her activities and drew her sandy brows together.

  “But what.” Evie’s emotions were simple, like four colored stripes: warmth, self-regard, impatience, and curiosity. Right now I was seeing the middle two in her eyes, like half a plaid.

  “I gave you the key to researching invisible animals,” I said. “It doesn’t seem to have registered. Do you think I’m telling fairy tales?”

  “Oh, come on.” One stripe, impatience, glinting. “I don’t deserve this. When did I call ever them ‘fairy tales’? When did I ever not make time to talk with you and give you information?”

  I rubbed my face, in
a sad muddle. Evie was right—whether from our family tradition of tolerance toward the invisible-beast spotter, or sisterly affection, or both, she had always given me her best professional guesses about invisible beasts. She spoke sincerely, I knew, because in her coat pocket’s corner, beside a pair of latex gloves, hung four Truth Bats who must have felt exactly like balls of lint. I apologized again, this time for having doubted her open-mindedness, and my sister—the gold stripe of warmth flashing from her hazel eyes—told me to forget it, shaking her bangs (impatiently) as I made to rise.

  “Sit down, sit! I never see you, Soph. You could be invisible yourself.” I obeyed. My sister tore the wrapper from a sterile nozzle, twisted it into the retort’s lid, popped the nozzle into the pump that supplied the Worm, and began pouring in nutrient slurry. Her students had decorated the Worm’s pump to resemble the dragon’s head in a Chinese New Year parade; its red tongue lolled at Evie, tipping slurry down its throat, like the Hound of the Baskervilles being shown a T-bone steak.

  “Suppose,” I resumed painfully, “suppose I were to trap some invisible bees and bring them here? What would happen?” Evie unhooked the emptied retort, smiling, her four feelings prettily displayed together.

  “Okay—so, like, your invisible bees build a beehive in my office and sting my students. What does that prove?” Evie answered herself. “It proves nothing. Scientists study a huge amount of phenomena that we don’t directly see. Like soil gases.” She nodded at the Worm, its scales rippling from its lunch. “There are theories that explain what soil gases are, and predict their effects. I work with those theories. If I find the right effects and my work is reproducible—great, I get an article in Science. Here’s the long answer to your question, Soph. There isn’t any theory that explains, or predicts, like, invisible bees. If I tried to work on that problem, I’d be a joke. People would totally start calling my lab, like, ‘Ghostbusters Lab’ and ‘Uri Geller Lab,’ and my career would be trashed. I’m not saying your invisibles don’t exist. Just, nobody’s going to touch them. The Keen-Ears are safe! Isn’t that what you want?” She cocked her head. Then a deep, reverberant, bass belch boomed out of the Worm’s speakers, and I gave a startled cry.

  “My students,” said Evie, faintly embarrassed. “They program the Worm’s sound. They call it ‘Smaug.’”

  THE DAY AFTER I’D TALKED to Evie, it rained. I visited Helen in her studio, a barn scented with lanolin from racks of yarn. Baskets dangled from the rafters, containing everything from Japanese ribbons to stacks of felt. Her worktables were crowded with Swiss sewing computers. The kettle was whistling in a corner, and I made mint tea, waiting for Helen to emerge from her partitioned-off “loom room.” The racket from the loom room drowned out the hush of rain. Helen came out, saw me, and arched her back; then she spilled forward to rest her palms and braids on the floor. The backs of weavers always hurt. She rolled her spine straight again with care. We took our teacups and sat on pillows beside a work-in-progress spread on the floor; at first glance, it looked like the reverse side of a scatter rug. Bending closer, I drew an awed breath. Hundreds of small knots formed the fabric, each knot embroidered with an individual face: a yawning baby, a thoughtful old man, a laughing schoolgirl, a glamorous rapper, a tired workman in a blue cap, a worried woman with an eye patch . . . I wanted to lie down on it and join my intractable story to all the others.

  “I thought you’d ask, ‘Where are the animals?’” Helen said. “Then I was going to say, ‘They’re invisible.’” I gazed at her, speechless. “How are your Truth Bats? What? Oh, no.”

  I folded my arms on my knees, dropped my head, and began nodding in despair. “Don’t do that,” Helen admonished. “You have to think. I’ll help you. Try to remember what you said, and what your sister said.” I related my conversation with Evie, ears cringing from the false tone of my voice. “Huh,” Helen murmured. “That’s interesting.”

  “I’m glad you think so.” Even my bitchiness sounded canned. Helen stretched out her right hand and pulled back on it with her left, wincing; then she repeated the stretch on her left hand.

  “Isn’t that what you want?” she asked. “For the Keen-Ears to be left alone? Why are you let down?”

  “Because my bats are still gone. I told Evie the whole truth, and my bats are still gone. I’ve done everything I can.” I sounded like an ad for a weight-loss drug. “I’ve done everything I can!” Now it was an antidepressant.

  “You keep saying that,” Helen pointed out, blowing steam off her tea. “Maybe that’s what they don’t like. Are you sure you’ve done everything you can, to tell the truth about your invisible animals?” I thought hard, while the rainy wind outside disturbed a shingle.

  “What more can I do? I gave a biologist the key to it all. I’m not a scientist.”

  Helen glanced up, and her eyes were cold water over granite. Still cradling her cup in both hands, she unfolded her legs, rose in one movement, and walked away across the barn. I scrambled up and followed. Helen stopped by a worktable, lifted a strip of transparent chiffon, and let it hang quivering as the air nudged it. It was long, trailing over the other side of the table and onto the floor.

  “These are digital lists of the names of soldiers who have been killed in the war,” she said. Looking closer, I saw faint gray lines and characters—printouts of a Web site, names afloat like ghosts. “The idea came from Victorian mourning handkerchiefs, and it’s turning into an installation. I’m not the president,” Helen continued. “I can’t order the war to stop. I’m not in Congress. But I can do this. Here, you look.”

  Helen walked off to the loom room. I understood her message: do what you can do. But what could I do? I stood holding her impalpable memorial on my palms, the names of dead young people sliding across one another; the chiffon whispered. Its whisper brought something back to me. It was the way I’d wake in the morning. When that first, fresh ray peeled off the sun and struck my bed, I’d sit up, so grateful to be delivered from fogs of dreams, and toss back my hair, feeling for the little soft pendants, humming like batteries, threading the air of a new day with inaudible vibrations, unheard pings and pips and pipings . . . that was what I missed most. My bats didn’t know me, as I thought of “me.” But I loved them—those winged, voracious, still small voices who unfailingly returned out of the night, as long as I didn’t fail them. Without them, I was less than myself, cut off. The sound of falsehood in my voice was the sound of disconnection from my fellow creatures. If I loved Truth Bats, it was because they restored me to the authentic weave of being; and how many amateur naturalists like me, in thrall to that connected feeling—bird-watchers, shell collectors, fanciers of mosses, rockhounds, stargazers—had faithfully recorded the odd facts that scientists eventually (when theories allowed) undertook to explain? The love of truth was an animal feeling. For its sake, I must not fail my Truth Bats.

  Laying down my cousin’s work carefully, I paced to the back of the barn, where a dressmaker’s mannequin stood before a three-sided mirror. The stuffed torso was unadorned and full of pins and chalk marks.

  “Helen,” I called, “you’ve given me an idea! For something else I can try.” Now, despite every effort to recall this episode, I can’t remember how my voice sounded when I called out those words. I was so taken by the idea of a book about invisible beasts that I failed to notice. What I do remember is that I glanced automatically at myself in the mirror, then came closer to inspect my hair.

  Like a cluster of black grapes in the tresses of a bacchante, a flock of Truth Bats hung from my crown to my shoulder. With catkin bodies and jet-pointed wings, they made a voluptuous, yet dainty, headdress. I heard a baby bat shrilling for its mother, a sound as fine as a beading needle passing through the eye of a sewing needle. Helen came up behind me in the mirror. Guessing the news immediately from my expression, she grinned and unrolled a length of cloth.

  “See what I made with your invisible thread. Isn’t it nice?”

  And in truth, it was.
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  Cities are growing all the time, and animals evolve with them. Rats chew through lead and cement; songbirds add the sounds of car alarms and construction equipment to their repertoires. Cliff swallows are evolving shorter wings for faster takeoffs from roadways to their nests in overpasses. The evolution of urban nonhumans is so closely tied to our habits that it may yet overturn Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum, “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.” The Wild Rubber Jack has evolved for the urban niche of business districts. He may not have a credit rating yet, but he follows the money.

  The Wild Rubber Jack

  THE WILD RUBBER JACK is commonly found in cities and likes to keep company with humans, having a sociable nature. The Jack (for brevity’s sake) is an invisible American ass. It is, in fact, an invisible offshoot of the revolutionary breed that George Washington created in this country, with the aid of the famous stud “King of Malta,” a gift of the Marquis de Lafayette, at a time when our nation’s development depended on the hard work of powerful jackasses. Thanks to Washington’s improvements, American Mammoth Jacks can stand as tall as a man. To this day, we lead the world in the enormous size of our asses.

  The Wild Rubber Jack, though in every other way a perfect ass—with his wise, gentle eyes, cream velvet nose, and patient demeanor—carries no burdens. It would not be smart to try and ride him. (I use the male pronoun here for the same reason, whatever it might be, that the breed called Mammoth Jack is not called Mammoth Jenny.)

  His joints are the distinguishing characteristic of the Jack: in them, nature displays one of her oddest combinations, giving a mammal the advantages of an insect. Grasshoppers, fleas, mosquitoes, and other insects possess a material in their joints that zoologists call “animal rubber.” Its real name is resilin, a very stretchy and elastic protein. Resilin allows fleas to make prodigious jumps—like having bungee cords in your joints. It allows locusts to save a third of the energy of the wing downstroke for the upstroke, and mosquitoes to expand their abdomens for a large meal, then return to a smaller size. The Wild Rubber Jack has resilin in his croup, hocks, and fetlocks, allowing him to kick much farther than the ordinary ass. Thanks to his rubberized hindquarters, the Jack can kick out his heels some eight to ten feet from where he stands, in an arc of 180 degrees, and keep kicking as long as he feels the need to. The hindquarters of a Wild Rubber Jack are like an invisible cross between Elastic Man and Bruce Lee.