Invisible Beasts (18 page)

I went back for lunch and looked for my family. Erik wasn't on the porch swing. I strode over the lawn, calling
for Leif, and heard my name shouted by a chef at the kitchen entrance, a spike-haired youth in a white apron, calling through cupped hands; and when I pelted up he repeated that Leif had been missing since early morning and a search party had gone out, in Sam's jeep. He apologized for hollering at me, and the kitchen crew gathered, flour paste on their fronts, sweat on their hairlines. I thanked everybody, then went and stood still under the live oaks as pure alarm drained down my muscles and out my soles. Obsession ran in our family. Leif had the gator bug. The missing factor in the equation came to me, the thing my body was trying to tell me. It was what Leif had said, yesterday, when I'd tucked him in for his nap.

“Auntie Sophie,” he'd asked, “could a gator eat a velociraptor?”

“Nope.” But his eyebrows drew together in a miniature version of his father's bristling shelves.

“Could a gator come in a house?” I'd stroked his cheek.

“Nope. We have special alligator alarms that go off, special alligator barriers, electronic barriers that keep them out.” My nephew flung himself on his back and stared at the ceiling.

“Where's the alarm? Is it on the ceiling?”

“It's invisible. The technology is invisible so it won't spoil the pretty rooms. Now go to sleep,” I'd said firmly, and went into the bathroom to put on my makeup for dinner. Leif was murmuring to himself; I'd been pleased that he was finally drifting off. Now I heard the words
that I'd ignored. Leif had murmured, “Safe . . . on the ceiling . . . nice velociraptor.”

It wasn't nonsense, after all.
Leif had been reassuring Toto, a creature on the ceiling, who reminded him of a velociraptor
. That could only mean one thing. My nephew could see invisible beasts. And for the last two evenings, over dinner, he'd heard the adults chaffing Aunt Sophie about the alligator she thought she'd seen on the trail. And alligators were Leif's passion, his obsession, and I began to move toward the forest as a runner heads into a collapsing tunnel . . .

A
FTER WHAT
I
WITNESSED
and experienced at the alligator lair, sleep was out of the question. That night, sleep was a quaint custom belonging to a remote era. I seized a candlestick, wrapped myself in a terry-cloth robe, and crept down four flights, passing closed doors, hearing snores, feeling the wooden weight of the early hours, rubbing my palm over the round banister finial at each landing to make sure I was awake. My candle flickered. I paused until it regained its composure. The inn, at this hour, felt like the backstage of something, a dream maybe, in which a person without gender or identifying complexities drifts, vaguely lit, toward no known end. I froze before crossing the ray that shone from underneath the door to Evie and Erik's room. My sister and her husband were awake, and no wonder. They surely had much to discuss.

I skated on my toes past that tense ray, and finally, with
a sense of dubious triumph, stood in the parlor before the leather armchair where I'd promised myself, a long time ago and several flights up, to spend the wee hours thinking. I set the candle on a mahogany table corner, which it glorified, and got into the armchair, which had unforeseen bumps and angles. But it was good. My thinking, however, was swamped by frog song, the loudest, highest, densest, most vibrant frog song in the universe at that hour. Gradually I grew used to the smudges around the room, reminiscent of their daylight shapes, lyrebacked chairs and ball-footed tables, and the glimmer of windows whose drapes were pinned back to admit the intangible glow of night clouds. Then there was a shadow moving toward me on human feet.

“Hello,” said a voice. Someone bent over me and rested two long, reddened, creased hands on the ends of my armrests. I raised the candle to see, from underneath, its slightly alarming synopsis of Sam's face. We talked in near whispers. He'd seen my light from outside; he kept late hours.

“Usually if I see a light, it's kids getting up to trouble. I'm glad it's you,” he said, and paused. “It was kind of rough, out there at the gator hole. I don't mind fixing a drink, if you'd care for one. Help you sleep,” he added, conscientiously. So Sam fixed us gin and tonics, working with a flashlight and surprisingly few clinks and clatters. Our glasses touched in the candlelight; Sam sat in a twin armchair, on the other side of the illuminated table. We
couldn't see each other, but it didn't matter. He wanted me to explain things he didn't understand about the gator hole
affaire
. I tried, flushed with alcoholic frankness, but it was difficult. You don't keep a secret like invisible beasts your whole life, and then casually confess to the first gin-slinging naturalist who comes along. Also my memories were so muddled that Sam tried to straighten them out with his own version.

“When Erik and I drove up,” he commenced, “there you were on all fours, clutching the boy and yelling, and he looked like he was trying to crawl away from you, and you were both covered in mud.” He paused. “It sounds funny now, but at the time you sounded—I'm sorry, but you sounded like the devil was after you. I honked the horn but you went right on yelling and trying to hold on to Leif. Then your brother-in-law jumped out of the jeep and pulled up a tree. Never seen anything like it. He pulled up a pine sapling and flung it at the gator hole. And he was whooping and hollering like a—well. Remember that?”

“I don't remember anything till I, sort of came to, in the jeep. I'm sorry I was acting so crazy.” Sam laughed slightly.

“There's another thing—how you got in the jeep. Erik slung you under one arm, and the kid under the other, like it was nothing. Threw you both in together. Never saw such a guy. Was he ever in pro wrestling? I don't mean to pry. Look,” Sam urged, in a low voice, “I've really enjoyed meeting you, Sophie, and your folks. I'm just a bit puzzled
what to make of you all.” I stretched my feet into the darkness, toed the leather piping on the footrest, sighed, and said, “We were hypnotized. Leif and I.”

“Hypnotized? By what?”

“By the alligator. No, listen. It had strange eyes. It blinked in a strange way—”

“
Bli-inked?
” Southern incredulity. I tried again. I shut my eyes and did my best to describe the awful picture behind them. It was why I'd given up sleep: when I shut my eyes, the cold, ugly, glowing stones appeared. They blinked, left, left, right, I couldn't stop my mind from following their code, the code to confusion. I remembered that I'd locked onto Leif's kicking body, but a mental mist—like the one when you're about to black out—had kept me from knowing, except in glimpses, if I was still holding on, or if my nephew was gone, crawling to that dreadful pool, summoned. There wasn't even an “I”—just a mosaic of terrors and struggles, the precious glimpses of Leif still with me, still kicking, trying to crawl toward the monster; and through it all those damned eyes, drilling away, blink by blink. Left right right left. Trying to convey this to Sam, I lost courage and drained my glass; it occurred to me that I looked drunk and red-nosed, in a bathrobe, and was grateful for the dark, and for the frogs' singing as the words stumbled out. Sam uttered a soft snort. And the frogs kept singing.

“Tell you what,” Sam said at last, “I hear a lot of ghost stories, on this island. Elf lights. One summer it was all elf
lights. Some family had left their dog toys behind, those balls that glow in the dark? Don't be mad at me because that's not what I think your story is. I don't think so because I did some poking around. I've seen tracks, which proves nothing because gators move around; could be any gator's tracks. But I also found cached prey, stuck in the roots right beside that hole—”

“A baby raccoon.” I sniffled into a cocktail napkin. “I saw it die.”

“Yes, that's right,” Sam said slowly. “There are clear signs of a gator in that hole. You got lucky, seeing him, or unlucky, and maybe he wouldn't have scared you so much if your nephew hadn't tried to get friendly with him. That would scare anybody. Fear does strange things. If you say the animal blinked, well, maybe he did, but there's always a reason for these things. His eyes may be injured.” Suddenly I wanted to look at Sam, not his shadow. I took the candle and slid forward to hold the small light nearer to that voice in the dark. To my surprise, Sam was leaning forward too, elbows on knees, and I startled, having expected air where his face was blooming out, his brow grooved deeply above the smiling eyes. “Don't you feel a little sorry for the fellow, Sophie? Having some sort of, what, ocular discomfort, and no doctor around?” This point of view, the squinting Hypnogator's, hadn't occurred to me, but it did now with an odd soft intensity. I thought about it. Sam's fingers were laced; the heels of his palms met and parted, met and parted like a question—trust her,
don't trust her? I put my hand in his. After that, there was nothing but to go upstairs together.

That night, Sam showed me how alligators make love. It wasn't toothy. They slide against each other, slowly, to their full length. We did a lot of muffled laughing. When I fell asleep, I saw my alligator sliding through the salt marsh, and beside him another, a female, gliding along. Their two armored noses just cleared the water in the moonlight, crisscrossed by sighing rushes. Then I started to laugh in my dream, because instead of cold, hypnotic eyes, I saw two pairs of tortoiseshell eyeglasses, one with rhinestone corners, perched on those saurian snouts! What happens to their glasses when the gators dive?—I wondered and awoke. The bed was covered in moonlight. I spread my fingers in it, and lightly patted the blankets mounded over Sam. The explanation for the alligator's behavior spilled out of my dream and into thought.

My alligator was nearsighted! It squinted and blinked because it was trying to see. At some point in the past eighty million years or so, evolution began to favor invisible alligators who squinted in a particular pattern that had the effect of hypnotizing—not visible prey, who couldn't see its shiny eyes—but invisible prey, who could. My gator probably didn't realize its effect on invisible creatures like that poor Poltergeist Possum: it just squinted at them, perplexed, trying to see why they didn't come closer to its water hole. Not diabolical: myopic! I hugged myself with glee. A gator hypnotist! I dubbed it the Hypnogator. I
whispered its name in the moonlight, which had a swimming feel, as if it flowed from the dream marshes. Impossible to share this with Sam, but something told me that without our night together, I would never have solved the mystery. I slid back under the blankets and into warmth, double-personed, magical; and with it the thought that all rare creatures were happy accidents, and that included the Hypnogator, myself, my Oormz, my Oormz-seeing nephew, my valiant brother-in-law, my indomitable baby sister . . . and my lover, fellow-being, this curled, radiant person whose rough toes I found with my own. There. Who could not love a process that refined raw accidents into rare advantages? Evolution was luck in slow motion, luck abiding by purely formal rules that lent it the helpless beauty of swan songs and the energy of good jokes. Perhaps, if Sam could understand as much as that, I'd find a way to tell him more. And I listened to the tree frogs keep on singing, wave after wave of them, perpetually on key.

3

N
othing is more American than the study of butterflies. We proudly number many butterfly savants in our history, like Samuel Scudder, chronicler of the monarch. Indeed, our Declaration of Independence says that happiness is to be pursued, as one chases butterflies with nets. As a patriotic citizen, I duly add this note concerning invisible butterflies
.

Grand Tour Butterflies