Invisible Beasts (15 page)

The story begins at my home address.

A
SHINING, FOUR
-
FOOT
-
DEEP
ocean, mighty and pretty as Venus, lies across the continent. Corals flower in the place of cities, and all creatures live and die in sunbeams dusted with tiny crustaceans. The Golden Egg is flat, drifting along like scum on a pot of boiled beans. It isn't much; with ambition, it might have been a sponge. But when a trilobite nibbles its edges, our drifter becomes a revolutionary—it rolls into a ball and spins away, sending ripples of frustration through the trim, fringed chitin of its foe. Now that they're aware of each other, nothing is the same, and all the rest follows, all those irreversible changes that go forward on hunger and a touch (whatever it means, to whomever it is happening) within the balance of life; the changes that will make the Golden Egg the most fortunate of animals. Starting with a major extinction. The first land plant, inching up on its rootlet, dropping its seed, forms forests thirty meters deep whose roots, cracking rock, swell streams with minerals, the first fertilizers—until algae smothers the seas, and the surf falling on all shores is a pounding dirge for three quarters of marine species. That is the price of seeds. The trilobites are diminished; in their absence the Golden Egg dares
to assume its present size, bobbling along more heartily, eating more, being eaten less . . . never to lie flat again, it becomes, like everything, the shape of a relationship. One that's just getting started.

Meanwhile, our ancestors are beginning to make the meeting of a human hand and a Golden Egg possible, as six-foot dragonflies skim the scaled trees snaking up, from roots bedizened with mussels, into the torrential fronds of future coal reserves. Through the shrubbery troop our forebears, four-footed beasts who squat and dig like mad. If your ear was laid to that fat soil, you'd hear the champagne-cork popping of plopping eggs, the rubbery shot with which animals are conquering the land. The price of eggs will be paid in about 290 million years, with another major extinction—look around you! . . . But I digress.

In the saw-blade shade of dripping cycads, the Golden Egg makes progress too. It is still life's simpleton, a mere sphere. Only now its soft skin contains a stony bubble, made by the bacteria that mineralize its wastes. Wrapped around its digested and crystallized experience, it has a tougher style, but must face, very soon, the contradictions lurking in self-containment. Meanwhile the earth, too, becomes hard-hearted. From her equator to her poles sprawls the super-continent, Pangea, with its overheated interior, dynastic droughts, burled deserts, and gravel gorges where half-ton creatures trudge along and wave their creaking dorsal sails. Our friend the Golden Egg sometimes gets carted around in a gizzard, waiting to be
cracked—an extreme approach to the problem it has now, of being as hard, inside, as firebrick. When it feels sexy, it fertilizes its inner cavity (don't ask) and a second Golden Egg begins forming. But until the parent membrane can be shed, its shell cracked, and its young freed, the two concentric beings suffer in limbo, unable to bring new out of old, rebirth out of fulfillment. A breakthrough is needed, so be grateful for genius in the world!

They have class—trilobites do. They
are
a class. An evolutionary elite, from the get-go they never resembled any other creature except their supremely successful selves, beginning as shiny ovals that curl up with a perfectly interlocking fringe. On this they riff. Barbed, smooth, blind, bugeyed, with legs like running mascara, with heads like scimitars, without heads. They go planktonic and float and have Zen; they go big as your arm and whack the hell out of their prey; and through it all, they lust after, cannot stay away from, cannot stop chasing the Golden Egg. Why does the genus
Walliserops
evolve a vicious trident atop its head? “For male display,” suggests a source, but I'm not so sure. Those tridents are Egg forks, the cutlery of the cultist, the maven, the devotee for whom a delicacy holds the very flavor of life. Against the Golden Egg's slippery toughness, the trilobites surpass themselves: gnawing off the outer skin, they let the hard shell turn brittle and crack, and its inner progeny escape. Without their bravura gusto, the Egg has no future; without its toothsome sphere, the trilobites lack temptation. They're made for each other!

But as these things happen, everything changes for the worst.

It cascades like the evil plot that it isn't. Volcanoes spewing lava across Siberia are not foreknown as their basalt cools into black cobbles, the Via Appia of death. Dust clouds are not designed, nor acid rains that foam and pit whatever they touch. When the globe heats up, and methane steams from the seabed, heating the globe even more, and the seas suffocate (again) till the only survivors are sulphur-eating bacteria, so the biosphere can almost be smelled from space—a huge, blue, putrid egg holding a dying 99 percent of species (and for each, there is a last animal who wanders, calling and calling, and lies down by a bank of turf that, for all its strength to rise, may as well be on the moon)—well! None of that is ordained. Nothing can be concluded except the fact that changing the global climate leads to extinction as night speaks unto night.

Yes, I think of Penelope reweaving her web. But there is no going back to zero, there is no going back, period, even reverses and repetitions are forward momentum, life's rhythm of and-because-and-because, the purest form of history.

And the trilobites, with three hundred million years of heritage, ten orders, one hundred and fifty families, five thousand genera, and twenty thousand species—have perished to the last mouthpart. Prolific even in death, their species are still multiplying in the fossil record, being counted and classified by a strange beast with a skimpy
past and uncertain future. The last trilobites are modest, shrunken, like the prints of fingertips.
Requiescant
.

Now the Golden Egg endures a time of supreme trial. It teeters, figuratively, on the narrow, wind-scooped ledge of evolution's dead end. Its numbers plunge. How not, when instead of trilobites that gnawed just so, it has to rely on molar-wielding masticators to spit out its pitlike young, and on constipated sharks? At first, the Golden Egg does what most desperate organisms do: what it used to do. It adjusts the hardness of shells, the action of vents; it courts luck with better conditions for what used to work. With predictable failure. But in time, a mystery flowers: the Golden Egg finds its truth, a truth as unique and necessary as its fair foe, sweet scourge, and dearest dread, the lost trilobites. And not a moment too soon.

Pangea dissolves; ocean beds (again) become cloud-ringed peaks; this earth, not new, not old, thrums under monumental reptiles that mash their chicken tracks into the fossil record. Joy of joys, over conifer forests the maniraptors are aloft! Nine thousand species of birds descend from maniraptor nestlings, their beaks agape, shrilling. Music has evolved in the air. If I had been waiting, I would have been glad I did—though suddenly the sky is dust, ashes, roars, and sandpaper. Under sable clouds, in adamant gloom, the forests rot over the rotting dinosaurs, and for a weird historical moment, terrestrial topography is a Boolean ooze of phosphorescent domes, stalks, fungal shelves, funnels, and wrinkled gills.
Then the ferns grow back as they did in my lifetime on charred Mount Saint Helens. For any age can interpose itself into the calendar of life, if circumstances permit. Any vista can return, any being can reawaken, more or less—the differences are what history is.

The Golden Egg survives the asteroid, alongside newcomers like ducks and regulars like crocodiles; outwardly it appears the same, but inwardly all is changed. Habitat, dry or wet, doesn't matter anymore. Like a sage, it lives by the grace of things beyond the present place and moment. Formerly filled with seawater, it is now filled with semi-heavy water, which, when hit by cosmic rays, emits a burst of cold fusion energy, turned by the Egg's superb bacteria into food. Dinner is served every century or so. Luckily, semi-heavy water, which prolongs the life of fruit flies, works wonders on the simpler organism, allowing it to wait for dinner, and for the withering away of its outer skin—if no animal assists—every forty thousand years. This period is not arbitrary. Like any egg, the Golden Egg needs to be rotated, and though no mother bird turns it with her beak, it has Mother Earth, completing a wobble around her axis every forty millennia. So the Golden Egg's lifecycle matches the tilt of a wandering star. Fortunate beast! It lives at the point of balance among powers: Sol, Earth, bacteria. With boundless energy, it is rich, yet the key to its wealth is balance. Humans can't use natural cold fusion because we demand much more energy—more than we can get without prodding nature into military-grade chain reactions.
That's a problem of balance, not resources: the Golden Egg lives within its means. Yet despite my moralizing on its difference from us, there is a point of closeness, an overlap, where a hand may reach for a Golden Egg, after a last glance at human progress.

Fern forests shrivel, grasslands spread, and over them skim horse-forms faster and faster because a squirrelly tree-leaper grew and grew and now charges their herds in the full cry and majesty of wolfhood. Over grass-foamed savannahs the years blur by until
Equus
, sole surviving horse, running like a tornado on a single, elongated toe, leaps clear into a field of icicles, leaving a glittering chain of hoofprints that do not melt, but meld into a frozen river a mile high in the air. The glacier's rock-hard arm rolls up the forests of Canada like a sleeve and goes to work, seizing North America by its scruff; and in four pulses, changes its grip. At my home address a giant ice talon, clawed with Canadian jaspers, rakes through the stone seabed in one long screech of a million years, leaving, at last, Niagara Falls hissing with rainbows. Solid roads of ice turn cheesy, withdrawing; the gravel spilled into potholes is left, marooned, in mounds, and would you look at this—buried in this mound, here, lies a bit of whelk shell, scraped, scored, and pierced by the agency you are using to hold this page, and I am using to reach, hesitant, toward the Golden Egg. For the polished shell's scratches fit together to make a picture. It depicts an animal, of course. An animal with pricked ears, arched back,
and two eyes in its profiled head, both facing you, because the hand doesn't copy what the eye sees, only the idea of what it sees. The idea of a Glacial Kame person was that if an animal had eyes, they were both meant to look at you.

“I see you,” says the animal.

T
HAT WAS ALMOST YESTERDAY
, and here I stand today . . . thinking about the sybil of Cumae. This prophetess was so old that she dwelt, like a bunch of raisins, in a jar. Her time was spent answering questions that must have been as crushingly repetitious as a march. Will my ships come in? Will I have a child? Should I go to war? Can my sickness be cured? Once, a Roman in the long afternoon of his empire, given to introspection, asked her about herself. Sybil, he asked, what do you want? Her answer was, Death. My palm rests on the scabrous rock, bent fingers casting shadows that could be the bones of a fin, a paw, a wing . . . inside, the Golden Egg. Waiting to be cracked. Like the sibyl, it is full of the past and future at once. And like the sibyl, it knows what is enough.

A lull passes through the insect chorus, except for one voice like the fluttering of an exposed watchspring. There are smells of dried grass and a swampy freshness from the pond, where slimed, peridot rocks crowd the roots of bowing rushes. Okay! Now I have drawn you the picture of an animal. It has no eyes for you, but you can look at it, while I'm off to check my birdhouses.

Rare Invisible Beasts

1

T
hough I strive to explain the ways of invisible beasts, the Oormz resists all but the most superficial observation. This is poignant because I live with an Oormz and observe it daily. It merits description because of its vital connection to us despite its mysteriousness. My main reason for including the Oormz, though, is one that even scientists equipped with invincible theories, high-powered laboratories, and big data find themselves facing. One must accept that some projects are in the hands of a future generation
.

The Oormz