Invisible Beasts (9 page)

Fortunately, a rich cousin of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous) funds and administers a private archive of my family's records. I visited this chilled, silent repository, and delved deeply into the papers of the invisible-beast spotters who had preceded me in our genealogy. I read till my eyes watered, taking notes. The papers went back centuries; the oldest ones, too fragile for handling, had to be viewed online. Not one of those diaries, legal documents, scholarly articles, newspapers, handbills, scrapbooks, broadsides, or letters (the most plentiful item) explained why people avoided a dog they could not see. On the other hand, I gathered a good deal of interesting information, and was able to piece together a partial portrait of invisible dogs; I call them Invies, for short.

The most suggestive item was that Invies seemed to arrive in normal litters; I found no mention of their breeding true. A recessive trait, perhaps? Equal in interest was the fact that they were scavengers, lurking around dumps and households, in a gray area between wildness and domesticity. And they were quite timid. An Elizabethan ancestor—an irascible barber-surgeon who'd lived with a pack of invisible sheepdogs—described them succinctly as
Cringeing Curs, tho Artful and eke Thievish
. On rare occasions, Invies had formed attachments to my family's invisible-beast spotters. Tidbit, for instance, would not allow herself to be petted, yet had followed my granduncle around the world. Likewise, a nineteenth-century
ancestress—an Ohio schoolmistress who had written a prizewinning monograph on edible cattails—had lived on warm terms with an Invie collie named Hecuba. Recording her cattail honors, this lady wrote in her diary,
Hecuba being so very spoilt, I cannot but reflect how easy a thing it is for that much nearer invisible companion, my Soul, to be as spoilt by worldly Vanities
. Helpfully, this diary also described Hecuba's behavior in the litter where she'd been discovered. The details accorded with other hints about the puppyhood of Invies. They were, in the canine social hierarchy, lower than the lowest—virtual outcasts, not assertive at all: if their littermates merely inhaled with the intention of growling, the little Invies rolled over and piddled on themselves. In adult life, Invies' groveling status and habits gave them advantages. My granduncle had seen Tidbit snatch scraps from under the nose of a bullmastiff, who had given her a glare instead of a shredded ear. These instances, I noted, must mean that visible animals could see invisible dogs—an idea that violated one of my first principles, namely, that only invisible animals could see other invisible animals. An exception to this rule was hard to credit. Yet, if I accepted the anecdotes, it seemed that an Invie's subsocial status canceled dogs' usual responses, giving it a few precious, life-preserving privileges, similar to the position of the fool in a medieval court. And like fools, Invies were highly intelligent; it went with the territory.

I
LEARNED MUCH FROM
the archives, but not what I came for. Why did people avoid a dog that they could not see? The question remained unanswered. A last-resort possibility was, simply, that Wolf
wasn't
invisible. After all, I reasoned, a postal carrier and a raccoon wrangler were not a reliable sample. To test Wolf's invisibility, I should bring him out in public, among lots of random people. I put on a dress with long drippy sleeves, slipped a tote bag over my arm, and secured Wolf by a leash tucked behind my sleeves and the bag. Thus attired, I went with my dog to the hairdresser.

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.

M
Y 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
.

W
INTER 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.

O
NE 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