Invisible Beasts Page 6
Nobody noticed at first. The lavender-haired sylphs behind the register greeted me with their usual sweetness. The businesswomen sipped their imported water with lemon slices, imperturbably, at the bar. The old wives who had almost stopped caring, who were here for an hour’s vacation, maternally told their stylists that their hair looked very nice. A row of plastic-draped ladies being shampooed in dark marble sinks, their bare feet elevated on chair rests, did not so much as twitch their freshly lacquered toes when those toes exerted a strong fascination on Wolf, whom I had to drag back by his camouflaged leash. Nobody looked twice. My hairdresser, pinning a cape around my neck as I nestled in her padded chair—with Wolf huddled under her counter, violently sneezing—proceeded to step over his paws, and, as he grew bolder, to dodge his slinking forays around her cart. When he retired again underneath the counter, he assumed such obscurity, such utter unnoticedness, that I almost forgot he was there. My point was proved, I thought.
Then someone saw him.
The witness lay on a settee by the manicurist’s station, to the right of my chair. It was a turquoise suede coat. Abruptly, one of its sleeves jerked forward, while the rest of the coat slewed helplessly, flashing its satin lining.
“No, no!” shouted the coat’s owner, her nails still spread before the eyebrow-hiked manicurist. “Fluffy! Bad girl!” The sleeve, with earsplitting cries, extruded part of a Bichon Frisé, a sort of bubble bath with a nose, who pumped her lamblike forelegs up and down with great vigor, prevented from shooting forth by a sparkly collar. “What’s gotten into her—I’m so sorry,” gasped her owner, untying a turquoise leash, “I’ll take her to the car—excuse me—”
Everyone stared at Fluffy, carried off in frothing disgrace. No one looked at me except my hairdresser, who made a disparaging remark.
“Little yappy dogs, the way they go off about nothing,” she said. I glanced at Wolf, who could have, if he’d wished, inhaled Fluffy. He was glued to the floor, quaking in terror.
MY EXPERIMENT AT THE HAIRDRESSER’S raised more questions than it answered. Why, why did people avoid a dog they could not see? And now that I’d seen the incredible departure from the rule—why did visible animals see an invisible dog? Why did Fluffy, and the bullmastiff who had glared at Tidbit, and the Invies’ littermates, see what humans did not? These questions made my head ache. It was time to call Evie for advice. I picked up the phone and told her all about it.
“Evie,” I entreated, “is there a way that humans can see something, but not be conscious that they do?”
“Oh sure! There’s a documented phenomenon called ‘inattentional blindness.’ In the classic study, they made college students watch a film of a basketball game and count the bounce shots. A woman in a gorilla suit walked onto the court, in the middle of the game, beat her chest—I love that part—and walked off. So, like, only four percent of the students who saw the film noticed the gorilla, which is totally what my students would do. Does that help?”
“Maybe . . . but the people who didn’t see my dog also stepped out of his way.”
“Uh. Just a minute.” I heard a young voice, a student; Evie was talking from her lab. “Yeah, uh . . . actually, that sounds like brain damage. Like people whose vision input doesn’t process normally, so they’re technically blind, but they navigate around things.”
“I’d have to assume that everyone in the salon was brain damaged. And what about the other dog that saw my dog?” I waited, while the student’s whine rose in pitch to a pure primate screech.
“Uh . . . Sophie . . . think strategies, okay? It’s like, they mate with other dogs, that’s a reproductive strategy, but they steal from humans, that’s a survival strategy, okay? Gotta go.”
“Thanksandgoodluck!” I rattled as the cell phone went dead. On a sheet of paper, I scribbled the words inattentional blindness.
WINTER CAME. My original question stayed unanswered. I continued riding out with Lucas. Winter near the Canadian border is a fearful time for dogs whose owners aren’t paying attention. Sometimes at night, I dreamed that the city turned upside down like a chandelier, from whose snow-grimed, crystal-coated chains hung, frozen alive, dogs by the hundreds, creaking as they swayed. The city police visited the Society to inspect the bodies of three spaniels who’d been nicknamed “the dogs of Christmas,” whom I don’t want to remember. Maybe Evie had a point: maybe the human race was brain damaged. My home in the woods, in this season, provided a respite from scenes of neglect and moral abjection. The gelid January sunshine shone brightly there, from snowstorm to snowstorm, and in the drifts I saw necklaces of coyote tracks, circling toward rusty smudges where rabbits had uttered their last screams. Those circular tracks were the pattern of hunting wolves, I knew—coyotes were also called “prairie wolves”—it was the behavior on which shepherd dogs’ training was based. Outside my home, two evolutionary paths showed as distinct as black and white: pethood versus wildness. Inside my home, the path was not so clear. What was Wolf, the invisible shepherd? Science, in the form of my brilliant sister, was not helping.
But I was willing to wait for answers; after all, hadn’t time been on my side where my Wolfie was concerned? We’d come a long way. I had trained him in basic obedience. And he had trained me, revealing a most un-Invie-like fondness for massage. He would fix on me a spangled brown gaze, and in a very eloquent way, fold his ears to expose the petting surface between them. If I didn’t respond, he would thrust his head into my hand, to stimulate it, exploiting a human impulse straight out of some painted cavern in my brain. Whenever I took the time to massage his whole spine, skull to tail, I surfaced from that drenching in animal softness, in likeness and alienness, with the giddy rush that is our vascular reward for petting a dog; the lowered blood pressure that is the upshot of thirty thousand years of mutual evolution. My heart would open down to its molecules. So we shaped each other, and were satisfied. Now, when I lit my fire and sat before it, my dog knew better than to steal my crackers. He took them from my hand and placed each cracker on the floor, to lick it, nudge it, give it some thought. Like his human, he had a contemplative personality. When he finished eating, a wolf’s shadow rippled through the firelight on the wall. Then my dog laid his head on my knee, curled his tail around my other knee, and deposited all his paws in my lap, as if for safekeeping. I ran a finger up his nose, and he shut his eyes. Whatever this invisible dog was, we were family. We were a pack.
ONE WET SPRING MORNING, outside my house, a loud horn honked. A brown UPS truck was parked, the driver’s cap at a strange, stiff tilt.
“Ma’am!” he shouted. “I can’t come down with that attack dog loose.”
“What? What?” As I stepped out, the rest of his words got scrambled in a gust of raindrops and an almighty din, a forceful, ground-ringing noise. An animal was performing a dance in the wet pollen on the driveway, a ferocious, leaping—it was—my God! My dog. He was a vision of tawny muscles and flashing teeth. He sounded like all German shepherds: his bark was law, authorized at state and federal levels. WOOF. My invisible shepherd was visible. And I’d never taught him “heel.”
“Wolf! Sit!” He paused long enough to throw me an incredulous look—“Sit,” in this crisis? The UPS guy blenched, handed me my package, and backed his truck off, with gingerly twists of his tires, followed by the reverberations that Wolf found necessary to add.
“Good boy,” I said, finally. Wolf became a sphere of coarse mist. Then, with a proud grin, he licked my hand and trotted into the hostas. I was laughing. I sat down on the porch step, smacked the soggy oak pollen, and yelped with laughter. The riddle of the past year was finally answered, and like all good riddles, its answer was ridiculously obvious.
The invisible dogs were pessimists, the cynics of dog-dom. They had no faith in pethood. For millennia, as long as dogs and people had shaped each other’s natures, the Invies had trained us. They trained us to disregard them while they scavenged in our homes. Our eyes registered their presence, our unconscious minds
took note; still, we ignored them. Good animal trainers that they were, just as we had refined wolves’ natural hunting patterns, so the Invies had refined our natural penchant for inattentional blindness. For every yard dog licking its frozen chain with a torn tongue, or gasping away hours in the beating sun, an Invie lived in comfort through having trained a human to overlook its very existence. Obediently, we neglected them: we did not pay attention. They knew us better than we knew ourselves.
But Wolf was the exception! He had stopped being invisible because he much preferred massage. He regarded me as a uniquely valuable pack member, well worth protecting against UPS and like carriers, and had cheerfully restored himself to human sight! To reverse millennia of blindness, all it took was a little attention, a little for Christ’s sake love and attention . . .
I sat grinning in the drizzle. I’d been a fool not to see it before. Now that I saw, I was still a fool, thoroughly a fool—the sort you find in the Tarot deck, a vagabond in cap and bells who strides along blindfolded, without stumbling, because he sees through the eyes of the happy dog bounding by his side.
8
In the human body, there are ten times more bacterial cells than human cells. Your body is a wilderness that bacteria colonize and tame. This does not diminish us—quite the contrary, it magnifies us to the dimensions of biomes; and perhaps the key to understanding ourselves as animals among other species is to be able to see the meanings of our lives in such unfamiliar, though accurate, proportions. Air Liners reveal a magnificent portrait of our human selves painted with the pointillistic brush of bacteria.
Air Liners
TO APPRECIATE AIR LINERS you want to be in a bedroom at an intimate moment, and if you can observe invisible creatures, you’ll see an amazing display.
You’ll see something like a greenish-blue, translucent, spherical sculpture, composed of tangled legs, elbows, knees, rising and falling trunks, hands shuttling everywhere on long arms, fanning hair, arched necks, curled feet, and glinting rows of teeth. Although made by only one couple, the sphere is crowded with lots of faces—sprouting from a shoulder, lined up in rows down a flank, or staring out of a buttock, blurring from one intense expression into another, eyes popping open, sparkling, melting, or fiercely shut. The limbs and members of the sphere look hollow, and the blue-green light seems to shape them out of the air, glowing and fading. Erotic acts in which the bodies join happen in visual overlaps, so that the fingers of one body are visible between the hips of the other, locked mouths surround a forked-looking tongue, and the female belly sits atop a telescope. These varied, blue-green, hollow forms of the act of love surround the solid human bodies that produce them, which are scarcely discernible except as a dark core around which the sphere shines and coruscates, like tubes of blown glass continually emerging around a hidden mouth.
You’re looking at Air Liner microbes. Mammals having sex produce biochemical triggers attracting the Air Liners (otherwise, they might be seen around people and animals who aren’t having sex). But if chemistry draws the Air Liners to us, what creates the glowing sculptures in our bedrooms is electricity—specifically, van der Waals forces. These are the most relaxed, mellow forces of electrical attraction. Van der Waals forces get a lot of work done in the world, more by seduction than compulsion—they’re very far from the death grip of strong nuclear forces, or the wedlock of chemical bonds. What van der Waals forces feel like, I’d guess, is like knowing that you can resist something and doing it anyway. Here is what they do for Air Liners.
Imagine a human body passing through air, leaving behind it, very briefly, a human-shaped tunnel. A hand would make a five-fingered tunnel as it traveled. But since air is a dense mix of particles and creatures—dust, spores, bacteria—as our skin passes through this thick mixture, it leaves behind a fleeting electrical wake made of charged molecules. We’re like spoons going through pudding, leaving a sticky, hollow wake. Air Liners get stuck to this electrical wake of our moving bodies by van der Waals forces. Once they’re stuck, the show begins. A few Air Liners sticking to the hollow wake of a human body will explode, in a second, into colonies carpeting the entire tunnel and glowing like wildfire. They are creatures that generate light—bioluminescence—the same light seen during a red tide event, when ocean waves look floodlit from within; the difference is that Air Liners light up the tunnels in air. If the same body passes again through the same spot, backtracking—as people do on the limited area of their beds—the Air Liners will simply carpet the new wake. This accounts for the multiple and overlapping body parts in the glowing spherical sculpture.
Why do Air Liners flock to our bedrooms? The faint charge that we create helps Air Liners depolarize their cell walls, to split themselves into new generations. As we couple in pairs, they divide by the billions. Why do they like mammals? I’d guess the attraction is our fur, or hair, because of what I once noticed after a New Year’s Eve party. Lying in a dark room, before a dying fire, I saw a golden line around the shadowy profile of my body. The same nimbus-like line was tracing my lover’s recumbent form, in which no features could be seen. We were two black forms outlined in a thin thread of energy, two human-shaped eclipses. Squinting hard, I saw that the sparkly look of the line was due to a near-imperceptible flickering where our body down was agitated by air currents. This was my first sighting of Air Liners after the party, so to say—Air Liners whose bioluminescence was fading from blue-green into lower, red-gold frequencies, as they settled like tired migrating birds onto the sturdy stalks of human body down.
There are so many questions about invisible animals that I cannot answer without the help of science. How many species of Air Liners exist? Do their populations differ from place to place, mammal to mammal, even person to person? Might they accompany each individual—be it human, dog, cat, or mouse—in dedicated colonies, throughout his or her sexual life? Imagine that! Your personal Air Liners, like the chorus of a Greek drama in which you played the starring role, revealing the shapes of your secret acts.
But even if people besides me could see these invisible followers, and were curious enough to take notes during the heat of their embraces, I doubt we’d learn much about what we are from Air Liners. They illumine what we were a moment ago. They show the river we have stepped out of. At the core of their airy, translucent sphere is the solid, dark point of our presence—a point always in the present moment, from which we are thrown toward and into each other, in irresistible collisions. Love is always happening for the first time. And whatever makes it like that is a mystery streaming down from our proper persons into the river of all life, in unbroken shadow.
Imperiled and Extinct Invisible Beasts
1
A poem called “The Kraken” by Tennyson describes a monster of the ocean bed, over which loom “huge sponges of millennial growth and height.” It didn’t occur to Tennyson that the Kraken itself might be a sponge, but that is what I deduce from observations and a tiny sample. I discovered the Kraken while on a trip to Antarctica with my sister, who generously invited me to join a research expedition to collect ice core samples. In return for making myself generally useful, I got to observe snorting leopard seals, projectile-pooping penguins, and barnacled whale tails within inches of my nose; and to feel the strange thrill when a ship disappears into the frigid pink dusk, leaving your group to fend for itself. One day, hiking on a glacier, we climbed, one by one, into a deep crevasse—the kind that John Muir was tempted to die in because it resembled the mind of God, assuming that God’s thinking is fluorescent blue. In there—suspended like a spider by ropes, pulleys, and ice screws—I hacked off, with my ice ax, a tiny tip of Kraken. Nobody else in our group saw it; I asked them all, later. Nobody had seen anything like that.
The Antarctic Glass Kraken
ANTARCTICA IS HUGE. Not that other places aren’t huge, too, but this snowbound continent devoid of human cities seems as huge as the winds, bare of any distraction from its icy vastness. To grasp the southern continent’s scale,
and picture the climate changes happening there, we often resort to comparisons with the civilized world. When the Larsen-B Ice Shelf collapsed in 2003, glaciologists groping for the right words said that it was like Rhode Island turning to water. How apt for such times, I thought, when Providence seems all too fluid. And where does a state-sized Antarctic ice mass go when it melts? Into an undersea trough, scientists tell us, that is twice the size of Texas. That figures. Twice Texas must be just the size of hell, so I don’t wonder that by Antarctic standards, it’s getting warm down there.
It’s so warm that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which collapsed during the writing of this book, is the first documented breakup of an Antarctic ice shelf during winter. A short time ago, fifteen thousand square kilometers of Wilkins was clinging to the mainland by a thin beam of ice, like somebody who has stepped out of a fortieth-floor window and is hanging onto a ledge by one arm. Wilkins’s ice arm was a mere three miles wide, but recently it broke up again and is now about one mile wide. So it goes.
When the Antarctic ice melts—when 70 percent of the world’s water, and eight hundred thousand years of its ice-locked memories, turn to flood—we will see the Glass Kraken revealed.
The Kraken is a glass sponge: a Hexactinellida, the most common sea-bottom-dwelling creature in Antarctica’s chilly waters. The ordinary glass sponge is a fairy-tale creature, a glass horn of plenty that spins itself, sometimes extruding branches like diaphanous sleeves. Most are no more than a foot long, but the Kraken is the regal exception. It is very big. Picture a map of Antarctica and you’re looking at the Kraken. It grows from a thin layer of water lying between the base of the Antarctic ice cap and the continental bedrock. The Kraken has been growing for a long time, with ice and snow gradually settling in and around and on top of it; its tallest branches are supported by the ice, which froze into place as they followed the water layer. Possibly, the Kraken began as separate communities of glass sponges that merged into a single, gigantic colonial sponge.