Invisible Beasts (16 page)

I
HAVE AN
O
ORMZ THAT LIVES
in the corner of the window behind my desk. In summer, it's ashen blue, like sphagnum moss; in winter, the pale buff of dead leaves. Now, on a cold October day, it's browning around the edges, like the redbud leaves outside the window. It resembles a mohair wrap thrown over the curtain rod. In its brown patches, less fluffy than the blue, I observe the glint of tiny beadlike sensors that lie by the dozens under its nap. Each sensor caps a knotted cluster of the micro-fibers that make it possible for the Oormz to cling to smooth walls and ceilings, just as a gecko does. A gecko's pads don't work by suction. Instead, they're packed with fine, hairlike fibers that adhere to surfaces through sheer electricity. To break the bond, a gecko curls its toes; the Oormz curls its whole body, and then some.

I can call my Oormz by pursing my lips and making kissing sounds. Trained with saucers of sugar water, it now responds to my signal without a reward, like a dog. Of course, a dog acts from habit and affection—but no
one knows what an Oormz feels, or why it does things, or what, precisely, it does. All we know is how they make us feel.

After a few air kisses, I watch it contract like a jelly-fish, its center coiling into a bluish misty rosette, while its edges ripple faster and faster into a buff halo. This activity is quite soundless, and no one knows precisely how the Oormz comes afloat over my head, spreading like oil on water, almost as if it were gliding along fault lines in the air. Then it covers my head—I brush it from my face—and drapes its faint cashmere over my shoulders, catching, incorrigibly, in my eyeglass hinge. It smells like damp sawdust or an old willow-bark basket, though when it seems sick, I've known it to smell like stale vegetable oil. Too delicate to stroke (I might injure its sensors,) almost like a coating of bluish brown dust, it nevertheless has a strong, immediate effect. No sooner has it settled than the pressure wedged in my spine and shoulder joints streams away. My shoulders relax into the memory of a fast swim . . . oh, thirty years ago . . .

As I stood up from the lake, swimsuit dragging, my shoulders were bedecked in a crushing robe of gravity under which they squared, while my knees bent like golden hinges, and the new weight I bore only proved a young animal's strength
. It comes back to me,
the path through cold sand, cocoa-colored from pine needles
, and I remember what sweetness there was in this old life of mine.

That's what an Oormz does. It's like a bandage between
your animal past, sadly forgotten, and your present. I've known periods dominated by pettifogging human order and base human violence, when my Oormz has restored the memory of kneeling by the first spring I'd ever seen, my lips in the same water containing flowers and emerald moss. I wish everyone had a taste of that, and for that matter, I wish everybody had an Oormz.

What else can I say of this creature, with its nonexistent social life and mysterious biology—this merciful enigma, which now, in clear preference for the window corner, levitates and sidles toward it like a stratus cloud? A few papers quiver and flatten; the air's doing something-or-other. I know no more.

Except an old story. According to a speleological legend, deep under one of North America's large cavern systems lies an enormous chamber, a bubble in the earth's mantle, completely sealed. Inside it, like a woodchuck in a snug burrow, lives an Oormz that is miles long yet no thicker than an earlobe, suspended from the roof and walls. Because of its size, the monster is vulnerable to spreading rips and tears, so nature has given it a marvelous failsafe. Instead of having a heart, lungs, digestive tract, or other organs with specific functions, every one of the Oormz's vessels, from its gossamer capillaries to its yard-wide ducts, performs all its life functions in a complex sequence regulated by valves and pumps, from proton pumps and cell vacuoles to muscle valves—a sequence, mind you, that never repeats itself.

To imagine this, suppose you injected the Oormz with a dye that changed color whenever a vessel changed its function. Red dye would mean circulation; blue, respiration; green, endocrine; purple, immune; orange, sensory—and so on. Moments after your dye diffused through the immense mist of the Oormz, you would be standing with your head thrown back and your eyes trying to crawl out of it. The stained-glass windows of all the human cathedrals multiplied by factors of a thousand, set in motion like a kaleidoscope, without a single buttress, arch, or mullion—without, in the stone heart of the earth, anything to interrupt the miles of animal rainbow—is an image suggesting what you would see.

The story has always struck me in its melancholy tone and fanciful humor. A creature of infinite variety, locked in an unchanging dungeon; a creature that comforts us with animal memories, whose nature we cannot fathom. From whom we can learn the worth of our time, never to be repeated.

2

C
an nonhumans feel empathy? The primatologist Frans de Waal adduces many examples. Chimpanzees comfort and pet their peers who have lost fights, and rhesus monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to them if it causes an electric shock to another rhesus monkey. Nor is empathy confined to primates. Rats liberate other rats from cages before helping themselves to chocolate—an impressive feat, as this chocolate-lover must admit. I'm intrigued by the topic because of the Hypnogator. Without the personal events that made me feel a twinge of empathy for this monstrous beast, I would never have solved the puzzle of its evolution. And I would never have understood the creature who revealed the presence of my successor, the next invisible-beast spotter of the twenty-first century
.

The Hypnogator

M
Y SISTER
E
VIE MET
her unusual husband, Erik, the hero of this tale, when she was a graduate student in soil biology and he was a technical assistant in a psychology laboratory, a modest position he still holds. A naturalized US citizen, Erik was born in an obscure whaling station in Greenland. He's a big bruiser with a musclebound stoop, who peers with small, worried blue eyes from under shelving flaxen brows. His hands are like bunches of bleached plantains, and tough as nails. He is also shaggy, covered in pale hair like some frost-coated figure out of Norse myth, as if he hadn't been born but was calved off the side of an ice floe. I've always thought there was something feral about him—a fluidity, his joints seem oiled—conjuring a creature neither man, animal, nor spirit, but all three: an apparition in the smokiest corner of a Viking hall, fists filled with icicles and thunderbolts. Despite this he is very sweet; the gentlest man I know, a devoted husband and father, and a vegetarian. His entrance into the family was somewhat bumpy. I still remember my father grumbling
to my mother something to the effect that his daughter “was not Fay Wray.” My mother countered, in her soothing way, that gorillas made reliable, upstanding mates—not literally upstanding, but he knew what she meant. Then she called Dad “my funny honey monkey,” which he didn't seem to appreciate. But we were all glad to have a man in the family after Dad was killed in a laboratory accident involving his work with high-energy particles. (I've promised not to discuss the details, but readers may get a sense of them at the link
www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhcwebcams.html
.)

Despite our father's misgivings, Evie's marriage transformed her from a thin, pallid, driven girl into a pink-cheeked, exuberantly driven matron, with a double chin the size of her engagement ring's satin cushion. And we discovered Erik's many virtues. He was handy with tools. He enjoyed music. He had a way of stopping sisterly spats by coming between us bodily, searching our faces, a great hand on each upset woman's shoulder; and while we might have resented this in someone else, Erik with his quiet glower seemed to recall us to reason. We felt better for his being among us. He read our favorite periodicals, too—
Nature, Off de Waal Comix
, the
Journal of Irreproducible Results
. And he collected a steady paycheck from the psych lab, where he was evidently prized, with a gift basket of tropical fruit at Christmas. He loved fruit.

Such was the family that encountered the Hypnogator.

Evie had invited me to join her, Erik, and their
seven-year-old son, Leif, for a few days on a Georgia sea isle, where I would have the chance to see new animals—“visible animals,” Evie underlined in that faintly condescending way of hers, as if she really wanted to sigh but had to speak aloud instead.

“You mean babysit while you're at your conference,” I replied, deadpan. Bull's-eye!—her next remarks were full of respectful pleading. Leif was such a handful, he adored his Auntie Sophie, et cetera. I had the feeling that if we'd been gorillas, Evie would have been all over my fur, nit-picking in the best sense, then thrusting her infant into my trusty, hairy arms while she scampered away in search of the analogue to scientific exchange. Maybe I wouldn't have gone, for all her verbal grooming, if my Oormz hadn't drifted down from its corner in the window, sifting over my ear, hand, cell phone, and mouth as if on cue. My Oormz is one of those creatures that are invisible to everyone but me; it looks a little like a smoky blue mohair wrap. Today, it smelled of stale vegetable oil and felt a little threadbare. Toto—as I call my Oormz—seemed to hint that we could both use a change of scene. So I agreed, and disembarked one sweltering July morning onto a soggy dock, with a tote bag, full of Toto, over my shoulder.

“Don't tickle,” I muttered, as my invisible pet crept up my neck, and the young man unloading my overnight bag shot me a strange look. I smacked Toto and smiled. “I have this habit of talking to mosquitoes.”

“Ma'am,” he replied, “they don't listen.” We trekked
uphill. The place was absolutely strange, a throwback to some musty Zanclean, or Clarkforkian, age of the world. We reached a lawn of sand and tough grass infested with inchling cacti that caught in my sandals. The light was a brilliant gloom, coming down through a webwork of live oaks that loomed very tall and very low, tangling with one another's enormous, twisty branches, from which Spanish moss drizzled in an abandon that made me fearful for Toto—if it flew into one of those trees, I could never tell it apart from the ashen draperies. The shadows at our feet might have been copied from the set of
Nos-feratu
, though it was broad daylight, or sweating daylight, for moisture twinkled in the salt air. I was shown to a pleasant room full of ersatz antiques, which reassured and bored at once, a great place to nap. Toto swooped out of the bag and headed for the tufted bedspread where it wriggled contentedly, like a blue Persian cat without the cat attitude or other landmarks. I went out to absorb the scenery before joining my relatives.

A sand trail ringed the island, furrowed by vehicle tires and overgrown by live oaks, moss swags, and palmettos; a jungle tunnel in which wet heat stagnated and my footsteps were muffled. I followed a signpost to “The Beach,” which led me to an abrupt vista of yawning, wind-carved dunes, without shade or animal movement, marching away through hostile, glittering air. The sea was a distant, mercury-colored smear, and the whole place breathed slow death. My fantasy of a quick dip shattered, almost
audibly. I slogged with sinking spirits back to the inn, passed through the giant live-oak grove, and right over my head, something screamed.

“Jesus!” I yelped, looking up at my nephew Leif, who lay on a limb, flapping his little arms. My hand rose to my lips—what if he fell?

“Raaaark! Raaark!” Leif screamed again, “I'm a velociraptor! Better look out! Auntie Sophie, look! Raaark!”