Invisible Beasts Read online

  If you could look through the imblued walls of glacial chasms (and if you could see invisible beasts), you’d be dumbstruck at the vision of the Kraken’s branches sprawling like exurbs and subdivisions off the megalopolis of its body proper. Like all glass sponges, the Kraken conducts electricity, and in the darkness of the bedrock, faint, boreal lights pulse across its webs. In its entirety, it would look like the nighttime panorama from an airplane descending over Manhattan, Tokyo, or some fabled imperial seat—Atlantis City before it drowned.

  Yet the Kraken is merely an animal; a sponge, so primitive it hardly qualifies as an animal. Did I say “its body”? Sponges have no body organs, no muscles, no nerves, no digestive systems. Whereas a microscopic water flea has the same striated muscle cells that you have. Such sophistication is light-years beyond your ordinary sponge, which is, basically, an entropy-reducing pocket in the water that perpetuates itself. And this unconscious thing, this jelly without a belly, makes glass—a major industrial product—the way you make daydreams, effortlessly, under the cold deep ocean.

  How does the Kraken survive in ice? Sponges normally consume organic particles suspended in water. But the Kraken partners with special bacteria that happily coat the undersides of glaciers. These bacteria coat the Kraken’s incurrent canals, and in exchange for safe housing, they supply the Kraken with all the energy it needs. Nothing is impossible if you know the right bacteria—not even a primitive animal the size of a civilization.

  When the polar ice caps become polar puddles, Antarctica’s stony desert will stand naked. Perhaps, by then, others beside myself will confess to seeing invisible beasts. If they do, we should all hire a boat and go have a look at the Kraken. We won’t need rabbit-fur hoods anymore to shield ears from frostbite, and lungs from ice motes. But if the world is still making gas masks, we’ll need them against the poisoned miasma of decayed Kraken. I suspect it will be nighttime, the long night of the Pole. I imagine it like this.

  There’s the dark firmament, and across the stars, the green twisting beams of the southern lights. And the Kraken, exposed. Someone remarks that it looks like acres and acres of construction, all the scaffoldings raised and the beams in place, but smashed by a meteor or an earthquake. Someone else comments, in a morose tone, that while the Kraken looks man-made, it was just an innocent, peaceful animal trying to live in its niche. Our cities, our human civilization, destroyed it. To compare the Kraken to anything man-made is an offense against nature, blurts this morose person. Everybody starts honking out various opinions through the rubber snouts of our gas masks until we feel better or worse. A journalist records our comments. Meanwhile, the boat churns slowly past the view. Silhouetted by the unearthly green aurora, as far as the eye can see, rise the endless, skeletal skylines through which the stars shine.

  2

  In selecting material for this book, it was necessary to exclude my ancestors’ abundant accounts, though I have made use of them. An exception is the following tale compiled from Granduncle Erasmus’s notes. Erasmus was a well-traveled man. Starting out in the merchant marine service at the turn of the twentieth century, he became an itinerant jack-of-all-trades, picking up odd jobs in ports around the world, often trekking inland on the fringes of a scientific expedition—zoological, geological, archaeological. In the notes written on these trips, he always disguised the names of destinations, perhaps to protect the expeditions from rivals or treasure hunters. He would label places with exotic names impossible to find on a map, usually names of women. I chose this tale, not only as a fond tribute to my late predecessor, but also because I was able to see and independently verify the existence of the invisible spider. I have made some additions to fill out and connect his notes, including a comment on the spider I witnessed; the latter is in square brackets and signed “Sophie.” I do not know the location of the city called Theodora, which vaguely resembles Washington, DC.

  The Spiders of Theodora

  THE CITY SWALLOWED by an earthquake was a planned city; the earthquake was not in its plan. Had the city’s story ended there, it would have left us with only a trite human irony. Instead, its legacy is a natural wonder: a lost city imprisoned within the invisible domed web of gladiator spiders.

  If any city had to be taken over by spiders, Theodora fit the bill. It was originally designed in the shape of a web, with broad, radial avenues crisscrossed by concentric rings of streets. The idea was to make the city airy, light, and easily navigable—like a spider’s web; and on many strands of this handsome metropolis glittered, like dewdrops, impressive bronze and alabaster monuments. Equestrian princes, generals with cocked rifles, saints with melded palms stood posturing along every citizen’s daily rounds. Armies marched on a thousand carved pediments above tireless caryatids. Every day in that city dawned through a mist of its memories, and the sun, with a tropical glare, reflected off the faces of the famous dead. Although Theodora was not ancient, it loved to commemorate the past, and did so with youthful exuberance.

  AT THE CENTER OF THEODORA’S urban web was its proudest edifice, the Commonwealth Baths. Modeled on ancient Roman baths, the Commonwealth brought all segments of society together. Any ragpicker who paid admission might leave a tattered T-shirt in the same row of lockers (decorated with cast-iron, dolphin-riding nymphs) where a minister’s valet was hanging a swank suit—although the valet, carefully setting out pumice and brushes on a monogrammed folding bench, would keep a sharp eye on the ragpicker. The Commonwealth was democratic in a middling sort of way, below the standard of the Israeli kibbutz but above the US federal tax code. Everyone’s feet, whether pedicured and sleek or callused and rough, could steep in the scalding baths and prune in the cold plunges together. As in Rome, the baths offered many enjoyments. You could work out at a gym, go shopping, meet friends, make the rounds of taverns. You could hear a political debate or a concert. You could even hire a mechanic to ride out to the magnificent crescent of parking structures surrounding the Commonwealth and give your car a tune-up while you bathed. But these amenities were accessory to the main ceremonial purpose of the baths, which was the promotion of public memory as much as public hygiene. As soon as you stepped out of your clothes and into the warming room, where you sat on a wooden bench as comforting as a loaf out of the oven—to adjust yourself to higher temperatures—your eyes rested on memorial after memorial of the city’s venerable history. Statues of heroes sweated condensation from their straining visages. Philosophers peered into volumes of shining granite from which mists curled. In the cold baths, quaintly lettered texts of the city’s founding principles rippled along the mosaic floors of the clear, echoing pools, obscured by foam thrashed up by the clean-limbed citizenry. In the sauna, each red-hot stone was carved to symbolize a problem that the city had once faced, conquered, and sent (as it were) to hell: a foe, a plague, a deflated currency. The crisp, heavy-weight public towels were bordered with embroidered dates; you wrapped your body in the calendar of the past. What a proud city it was! How it loved to commemorate the past! What a strange fate befell it!

  NOW, AS YOU MIGHT HAVE GUESSED, the city planned in the shape of a web was friendly to spiders. Its folklore celebrated them, in fact, perhaps because so many kinds of spiders lived in the city. If, on a summer’s night, a young couple neared a park bench perfect for kissing where a three-inch wolf spider crouched, the young man did not try to slay the monster. He would wave one hand like a flag of peace, and the wolf spider (who always hides from people) would slink from her hunting perch with a wary air about her eight-leggy figure. A spider’s egg sac in your window was considered good luck; you could buy fake ones. I should add that Theodora was a seat of government, in which the opposition party had always been called the “fishing spiders,” because, like their namesakes, they had to run on water to get back into power. Members of the Sex Workers Union, always an important pacesetter in a political town, liked to wear cleavage-catching pendants in the shape of bolas spiders, who toss hormone-soaked lures in the direction of ma
le moths and rope in their sex-befuddled prey. Spies, of which the city had an abundance, both native and foreign, were creepily nicknamed ant spiders, after the arachnid spooks who infiltrate ant colonies by walking on six of their eight legs, waving two forelegs to simulate antennae. And no garden was considered complete without its plump, spiny, orange orb-weaver spider hanging in the middle of a spiral web, treading along the non-sticky threads, dodging the sticky ones, and adding to that mysterious stripe that looks like a gossamer zipper and cannot be explained by human science. That’s why people liked it.

  IRONICALLY, THEODORA TOOK NO NOTICE of the gladiator spider, a uniquely talented spider that lived there in large numbers. This is not the same as the Namibian Palfuria gladiator, so named for the male’s extra-large palp. No, these gladiator spiders are invisible, which explains why they went unnoticed despite their extraordinary skills. Like the gladiators of ancient Rome, they fight with nets, throwing a web around their prey and imprisoning it in a domed structure. Unlike other net-casting spiders, who wrap their prey like a sandwich, gladiators create domes so tough and rigid that the vibrations of the struggling prey within cannot be sensed by other spiders in the neighborhood. This is a clever way to discourage food thieves. It follows, therefore, that the gladiator spider herself is also exquisitely sensitive to vibrations. For instance, like the fishing spider, she can sense the vibrations created on the surface of the water by small swimming prey. Sometimes she detects and dives for tadpoles or newly hatched minnows, spinning an underwater dome that captures a small air bubble along with the catch, giving the spider an air tank. Gladiator spiders are barely an inch across, but very brave: they eagerly tackle big game. A gladiator spider can, in fact, capture a stag beetle the size of your middle finger.

  [I saw this happen on television during a political debate between two candidates for high office. The mortal combat took place on top of one of the candidate’s toupees—that’s how I could tell that it was a toupee, because anyone with real hair would have felt something. You really can’t have a big angry beetle, waving its claws, imprisoned on the top of your head under a silk yarmulke woven on the spot by a very active spider and continue gabbing on about faith and family and values as if nothing unusual were happening, unless you are wearing a toupee—a stiff one.—Sophie.]

  ON A CLEAR SEPTEMBER DAY, an earthquake swallowed the city whole, from the tips of the obelisks to the bolts on the manholes, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, and the city’s founders, had they still been alive, might have written with a flourish, FINIS; but Mother Nature’s work is never finished.

  In those horrifying first seconds, Theodora came apart in large segments like a dropped layer cake; districts that had been adjacent were now perpendicular. A smothered death-scream tore through the earth, from the mouths of everyone trying to find out where he or she was. The composer never lived who could imagine what it sounded like—and never should. Every creature on two or four feet fell down and slowly asphyxiated. Pigeons, sparrows, hawks, robins, cardinals, orioles, and flycatchers dropped out of the black air like suicides; dogs, cats, raccoons, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, snakes, toads, a few mangy coyotes, and a lone black bear tumbled or crept to their deaths. Even the rats died. Bacteria began their long feast. In the Commonwealth Baths, whose skylights were plugged with total darkness, the spacious, venerable pools and graceful porticos seethed and dripped scum as the clear waters of health became tarry sumps of skeletons.

  Yet, for a time, curiously, Theodora was full of life. Had a human being been able to witness the aftermath of the catastrophe, he or she might have reflected that as Rome was saved by its cackling geese, so this buried city was preserved by its gladiator spiders, in one of the greatest feats any creature has ever performed.

  WHEN THE EARTHQUAKE HIT and the city roared down into the earth’s canyon jaws, the gladiator spiders resorted to their three great gifts: sensitivity, engineering, and courage. Clinging to the city, they sensed its seismic shudders, and they gauged the giant size of this new vibration, while their body hair picked up the scent of edible tissue trapped inside the city’s crumpled architecture. To the spiders, the event felt exactly as if the world’s biggest prey animal had challenged them to a match. Bravely, they rose to the challenge. In an unprecedented move, every gladiator spider joined with its fellows and began to spin a web of scale. Perhaps they’d been social creatures all along but hadn’t needed to band together before—or perhaps it was a fluke, a one-in-a-billion chance that they would all start spinning simultaneously. Either way, the gladiator spiders’ consortium, in the very teeth of catastrophe, spun with as much cool purpose as if every pumping, leaping, twirling little spinner had been possessed by the ghost of Buckminster Fuller. Soon the whole shaking city was encased in a vaulted silk dome with air pinned inside it. There wasn’t enough oxygen to save the people or animals (except for the kinds of worms that breathe the air in dirt). There was enough air, however, to save temporarily the gladiator spiders, thanks to their book lungs. Book lungs are how spiders breathe: layered blocks of tissue, like tiny books, through the “pages” of which gases percolate. In gladiator spiders, the pages are very thin and densely packed, like little Norton anthologies of literature, allowing oxygen to be used more efficiently than in other spiders’ book lungs, which resemble quickly read best sellers. That is the reason why, after the buried city’s other beasts had perished, the gladiator spiders, armed with an encyclopedic breathing apparatus and the courage of intellectuals fighting the death of their ideals, stayed alive. While they lived, they kept spinning. They went after the edible tissue inside the ruins—the corrupt flesh of animals and people—and roped, levered, tugged, and suspended in their silken larders whatever they found to subsist on. Multitudes of skeletons were thus hoisted upward, into the great dome, like bones in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel, who saw a valley of skeletons rise and stand again. But these bones did more than stand. They levitated. Like angels and swans swung through opera theaters on invisible ropes, they hung in the dense mesh of the gladiator spiders’ webs.

  Now, recollect that if you were to see the city inside the earth, you would not see the gladiator spiders or their webs. You would see only the image of a meta-memorial: a memorial to memorials. You would see Theodora’s monuments—those alabaster and bronze statues that used to glitter along its avenues—collapsed in violent heaps where the saint’s nose is rammed against the cracked breast of Justice, and commanding hands, as heavy as motors, point from under buckled pavements and open expressively out of crushed walls. If you will pardon the comparison, imagine a snow globe with the monuments as its plastic scene and the disconnected bones as snow. It’s like that, except that the city doesn’t shake anymore, while the bones, secured by natural causes, float forever in place.

  3

  Animals can teach us, and the Foster Fowl was the most extraordinary teacher alive. It hurts to think that I may have had a hand in its disappearance, and when my conscience starts to prick, I go over the whole episode inch by inch . . . all the way up the “escalator to extinction.”

  The Foster Fowl

  GO OUT ON A JULY DAY, when from a high branch a robin pours out its carol like a general blessing, along with a flycatcher’s whoop, an oriole’s note, and the melody of a song sparrow that springs alike from earth and air. Go out, take a pair of kitchen shears. You can smell the tall milkweeds, with their flowering globes like old-fashioned microphone heads; they’re broadcasting a summer special that brings in the bees, bent double with effort, and the monarch butterflies who have mated tipsily in the air and now, female by female, stately orange and black-deckled, land to lay their eggs. Across your path, a hummingbird arches in an inch-long arabesque—with a diminutive roar she chases off a wren, trailing her battle cry:

  Squeaksneeterie!

  Go to the purple lavender smoking on its naked stems. Respecting the bees, whose business here is more important than yours, cut yourself a bundle, take it home, wash it,
cram it into a clean Ball jar, and fill the jar with honey. Seal it tight and take it across the road to your neighbor’s farmhouse. Exchange it for a half-dozen eggs lifted out from under their mamas, still warm, and take them home on a chipped plate that you set on your porch corner, just inside the screen door. And she’ll come. Or she would till lately.

  You won’t see her actually arrive. If the eggs are placed out for her, she’ll just be there, like the Beatles song about Mother Mary: “When I offer chocolates, she is standing right in front of me.” Although I misheard that song: “In my hour of darkness” were the correct words, but I always thought that Mother Mary would come when you made her an offering suitable to her place in the natural scheme of things. If you put out a golden box of fine chocolates, like the platform of a Byzantine throne, she would appear, drawn to the odor of your prayer, her blue mantle brushing the lid, her eyes piercingly gentle.

  Anyway . . . put the eggs out, and soon, in that humble porch corner, a creature appears like an azure wave from some transparent sea, mantling the eggs and crooning, cro-coo-roc, cro-coo-roc. As you recover from her stunning plumage—peacock, aqua, lacustrine—you see that she’s rather comical. Her build is between a pheasant and a small wild turkey. Her neck is a lapis pipe; she fixes on you a gaze the color of pineapple meat; her short, curved, turquoise beak resembles nothing so much as a pair of plastic-coated sewing scissors. She has no hard feathers, but is entirely covered in iridescent down—a silken mop, a turkey shawled in sapphire threads, and over her head droops a crest like an unraveled pompon. And she’s as soft inside as out: she can’t resist a clutch of foundling eggs. But unlike any other mother bird, she won’t defend her nest.