Part 2 (1/2)
”Bad doggie,” I said, with feeling. ”Bad!” He startled: his ears wilted, his sandy tail melded to his white belly, and he skulked into the kitchen, where, darting at me looks of shock and awe, he trotted into the gap between the sink and the stove, as far as his shoulders, and drooped his head against the wall. He huddled there, rib cage pumping, panting and yawning with stress. A whiff of dog sweat filled the air. What had I done?
What happened next was predictable. I spent the rest of the evening cooking for a dog. I spent the rest of the year training my new dog. I named him Wolf, for wolfing my snacks. And I discovered that he was invisible.
MY DISCOVERY BEGAN when the postal carrier slid out of her car with a packet in hand, and walked straight into a dog sniffing her sneakers. As I opened my mouth to call him, she stepped forward, and kept stepping, exactly where Wolf was not. I stared openmouthed, missing my cue about the nice suns.h.i.+ne we were having.
”I'm so sorry, he isn't trained yet,” I said. She looked puzzled. ”The dog,” I added. ”He's new.”
”You got a dog? I'm glad he's not out, I hate it when dogs get out.” She smiled, getting back into the car as Wolf tried to goose her.
Then Mike, of Mike's Racc.o.o.n Wranglers, came to install s.h.i.+elds in my chimney. Wolf trotted out, tongue shaking like a long jelly, straight toward the braced, separated knees of an unsuspecting Mike, who surveyed my roof . . . and sidestepped, boots suddenly nimble. He unfolded his ladder with the motions, if not the conversation, of a workman avoiding a large dog.
”Sorry about the dog,” I said. Mike looked puzzled. ”See the dog?” I asked. Still holding the ladder, with a slightly defensive air, Mike looked all around me. ”Oh! Never mind,” I apologized rapidly, ”I thought I saw-the neighbor's dog out there, in the yard, but it was only-oh! Never mind, I must have seen the woodchuck.” Mike laughed and climbed the ladder. All the while, Wolf stood leaning on my legs, panting with pleasure. Conclusions framed themselves. But I knew invisible animals, and I knew people, and this was not the proper behavior of people around invisible animals. They should not be avoiding what they could not see.
ALL MY LIFE I HAD KNOWN that there were plenty of invisible dogs around; now I faced the surprising fact that I'd never thought seriously about them. I had known that among the unleashed dogs pa.s.sing me in the street, sniffing behind bushes, or posting liquid messages on trees, a goodly number were not visible to normal humans-but somehow, this had never provoked either wonder, or basic questions. I hadn't paid attention! Perhaps the fault lay with my childhood bedtime stories, which were often about an invisible poodle named Tidbit, who had shyly but persistently dogged Granduncle Erasmus on his extensive travels through Europe, Africa, and what he'd called ”the Orient.” At the bottom of my mind, all invisible dogs were Tidbit, whom I had outgrown, and about whom I had no more questions than I did about swing sets. Shame on me, because the basic questions were burning ones-and Granduncle Erasmus was no longer here to answer them.
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 doc.u.ments, scholarly articles, newspapers, handbills, sc.r.a.pbooks, 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 a.s.sertive 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 s.n.a.t.c.h sc.r.a.ps 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 racc.o.o.n 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.
n.o.body 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. n.o.body 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 a.s.sumed 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, flas.h.i.+ng 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 b.i.+.c.hon Frise, 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.
MY 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 doc.u.mented phenomenon called ainattentional blindness.' In the cla.s.sic 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 a.s.sume 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.
WINTER 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 ma.s.sage. 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 ma.s.sage 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.
ONE 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 G.o.d! My dog. He was a vision of tawny muscles and flas.h.i.+ng 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 coa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.sage. 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.
In the human body, there are ten times more bacterial cells than human cells. Your body is a wilderness that bacteria colonize and tame. This does not diminish us-quite the contrary, it magnifies us to the dimensions of biomes; and perhaps the key to understanding ourselves as animals among other species is to be able to see the meanings of our lives in such unfamiliar, though accurate, proportions. Air Liners reveal a magnificent portrait of our human selves painted with the pointillistic brush of bacteria.
Air Liners TO APPRECIATE AIR LINERS you want to be in a bedroom at an intimate moment, and if you can observe invisible creatures, you'll see an amazing display.
You'll see something like a greenish-blue, translucent, spherical sculpture, composed of tangled legs, elbows, knees, rising and falling trunks, hands shuttling everywhere on long arms, fanning hair, arched necks, curled feet, and glinting rows of teeth. Although made by only one couple, the sphere is crowded with lots of faces-sprouting from a shoulder, lined up in rows down a flank, or staring out of a b.u.t.tock, blurring from one intense expression into another, eyes popping open, sparkling, melting, or fiercely shut. The limbs and members of the sphere look hollow, and the blue-green light seems to shape them out of the air, glowing and fading. Erotic acts in which the bodies join happen in visual overlaps, so that the fingers of one body are visible between the hips of the other, locked mouths surround a forked-looking tongue, and the female belly sits atop a telescope. These varied, blue-green, hollow forms of the act of love surround the solid human bodies that produce them, which are scarcely discernible except as a dark core around which the sphere s.h.i.+nes and coruscates, like tubes of blown gla.s.s continually emerging around a hidden mouth.
You're looking at Air Liner microbes. Mammals having s.e.x produce biochemical triggers attracting the Air Liners (otherwise, they might be seen around people and animals who aren't having s.e.x). But if chemistry draws the Air Liners to us, what creates the glowing sculptures in our bedrooms is electricity-specifically, van der Waals forces. These are the most relaxed, mellow forces of electrical attraction. Van der Waals forces get a lot of work done in the world, more by seduction than compulsion-they're very far from the death grip of strong nuclear forces, or the wedlock of chemical bonds. What van der Waals forces feel like, I'd guess, is like knowing that you can resist something and doing it anyway. Here is what they do for Air Liners.
Imagine a human body pa.s.sing through air, leaving behind it, very briefly, a human-shaped tunnel. A hand would make a five-fingered tunnel as it traveled. But since air is a dense mix of particles and creatures-dust, spores, bacteria-as our skin pa.s.ses through this thick mixture, it leaves behind a fleeting electrical wake made of charged molecules. We're like spoons going through pudding, leaving a sticky, hollow wake. Air Liners get stuck to this electrical wake of our moving bodies by van der Waals forces. Once they're stuck, the show begins. A few Air Liners sticking to the hollow wake of a human body will explode, in a second, into colonies carpeting the entire tunnel and glowing like wildfire. They are creatures that generate light-bioluminescence-the same light seen during a red tide event, when ocean waves look floodlit from within; the difference is that Air Liners light up the tunnels in air. If the same body pa.s.ses again through the same spot, backtracking-as people do on the limited area of their beds-the Air Liners will simply carpet the new wake. This accounts for the multiple and overlapping body parts in the glowing spherical sculpture.
Why do Air Liners flock to our bedrooms? The faint charge that we create helps Air Liners depolarize their cell walls, to split themselves into new generations. As we couple in pairs, they divide by the billions. Why do they like mammals? I'd guess the attraction is our fur, or hair, because of what I once noticed after a New Year's Eve party. Lying in a dark room, before a dying fire, I saw a golden line around the shadowy profile of my body. The same nimbus-like line was tracing my lover's rec.u.mbent form, in which no features could be seen. We were two black forms outlined in a thin thread of energy, two human-shaped eclipses. Squinting hard, I saw that the sparkly look of the line was due to a near-imperceptible flickering where our body down was agitated by air currents. This was my first sighting of Air Liners after the party, so to say-Air Liners whose bioluminescence was fading from blue-green into lower, red-gold frequencies, as they settled like tired migrating birds onto the st.u.r.dy stalks of human body down.
There are so many questions about invisible animals that I cannot answer without the help of science. How many species of Air Liners exist? Do their populations differ from place to place, mammal to mammal, even person to person? Might they accompany each individual-be it human, dog, cat, or mouse-in dedicated colonies, throughout his or her s.e.xual life? Imagine that! Your personal Air Liners, like the chorus of a Greek drama in which you played the starring role, revealing the shapes of your secret acts.
But even if people besides me could see these invisible followers, and were curious enough to take notes during the heat of their embraces, I doubt we'd learn much about what we are from Air Liners. They illumine what we were a moment ago. They show the river we have stepped out of. At the core of their airy, translucent sphere is the solid, dark point of our presence-a point always in the present moment, from which we are thrown toward and into each other, in irresistible collisions. Love is always happening for the first time. And whatever makes it like that is a mystery streaming down from our proper persons into the river of all life, in unbroken shadow.
Imperiled and Extinct Invisible Beasts