Invisible Beasts (7 page)

“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.'”

T
HE 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.

6

C
ities 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

T
HE
W
ILD
R
UBBER
J
ACK
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.

His favorite haunts are among lunching executives, oblivious to their pockets and handbags, in which he grazes for antacids, breath mints, tobacco, nicotine gum, diet candy, and raw almonds in Ziploc bags. That's why, at lunchtime, the Jack becomes a social menace. If one party makes a deal-breaking remark and the other party sits up abruptly, chafing the Jack's sensitive nose in a trouser pocket, or displacing it from a handbag, the Jack reacts with a back-kick that causes choking, turning purple, and the somersaulting of forks. Worse, and not infrequently, the Jack causes cardiac failure among workers who rush
along corridors carrying lunch back to their desks. Drawn to the smell of food in their sacks, and exasperated by their speed, the Jack lashes out at their chests just to slow them down, and succeeds only too well. It's important not to blame the animal, but to remember that his skittish responses are the heritage of all wild creatures that depend on the global business environment.

Neither my profession nor my tax bracket brings me into the Jack's company very often, but one Jack did make a bad date memorable. I will never forget being taken to dinner by a corporate lawyer who confided, over the white truffle–truffled breast of ruffed grouse, his thoughts on the legal concept of damages.

“All relationships can be translated into money, Sophie,” he said. “This is America.” This made me so sad that I desperately signaled the waiter for the dessert menu, and in doing so jostled a soft palpitant donkey nose with my elbow, and the next thing I knew, there was shiraz on everything, and I never heard from him again.

In the Book of Numbers, a famous ass, a jenny, is beaten by the prophet Balaam because she refuses to trot forward. She sees an angel with a flaming sword barring her way, and being a sensible beast, she balks, then sidles against a brick wall, crushing Balaam's foot, then lies down under the incensed prophet, who has been oppressing her all the while with blows and insults. At this point, two miracles happen. The first is that the jenny speaks to Balaam, asking him if he hasn't noticed anything unusual. The second
is that Balaam, the human, actually pays attention to her. When he does, he too sees the avenging angel. And duly apologizes. How does this story relate to the Wild Rubber Jack? Well, according to Scripture, angels with fiery swords guard the Garden of Eden to keep humanity from creeping back in and parking our trailers. Viewed in that light, the story means that we should accept the inevitable: Eden is closed. The good times are over. Suck it in. Bust your butt. Sweat till you drop. Forward, march! This message of humility in the face of the inevitable, or divine will, or creative destruction, or whatever it cares to call itself, is aptly delivered by a humble ass of the visible sort, used to taking orders and being ridden and beaten.