Invisible Beasts

by Sharona Muir

  THE MORNING OF MY DISCOVERY began with a noisy breakfast during which Steggy and Rex fought a battle beside Leif’s glass of orange juice, and toppled it twice. While his parents mopped, I sneaked off into the crepitating palmettos. The trail smelled like arboreal body odor, a musk of indescribable antiquity that made my lungs strain to remember their gillhood. The path fell sharply to either side, rising opposite in a shallow bank, where I spotted a ragged hole. I thought it was an alligator hole. That was exciting. I toed down the steep side, hugging red pines, and rubbernecked as far as I dared. Sure enough, in the dark hole, over a gleam of water, lurked two silver, ghostly eyes, staring from behind a bump of nostrils. The rest of the gator was immersed, waiting. Judging from the hole’s size, this was a smallish animal, maybe ten feet. I was too big a mouthful: otherwise, it would have submerged, hiding under the water that baited its trap, to conceal its shiny, giveaway eyes. It didn’t think me worth catching. But those eyes, fixed on me, gave me chills—and resuming the path, I felt safer. That would have been all, if a rustle hadn’t made me look back. An opossum had emerged from the palm scrub, and was trundling toward the gator hole. Marsupial tragedy and crocodilian lunch were imminent. The opossum, a female, waved her snout, sniffing water. Her face was affecting, with its white heart-shaped mask.

  “Shoo!” I cried, violating Evie’s rule of noninterference with other species. Too bad—I was a mammal chauvinist. “Scat!” She sat, glaring over her furry shoulder. Big ugly human. Then she dismissed me, waving her tight pink nose all around as if tracing fragrant signatures, her paws limp at chest height like a squirrel’s. From her belly pouch hung, of all things, a sock ornamented with a turquoise pompon.

  “Ha,” I breathed. This was no ordinary opossum! She was a Poltergeist Possum, the invisible kind that pilfers human belongings. No wonder she wasn’t afraid of humans. People don’t kill Poltergeist Possums; they just go on looking for their lost socks or car keys. Now, as I stood on the tire-rutted path, suspicions began to stir. Down inside the dark hole, the alligator had not submerged. Its moonstone eyes were fixed . . . on the opossum? No, surely not. The gator couldn’t see the invisible opossum. Only invisible beasts can see other invisible beasts, as a rule. It just happened to be looking in her direction . . . but so fixedly? I sat slowly on my haunches, suspense cracking in every joint. If those shiny optics vanished and the nostrils sank, it could mean that I had discovered an invisible alligator . . .

  Then the unaccountable happened. The opossum gaped, her tooth-tips like ivory pencil points, and growled at the hole. That made no sense. Why was she growling? If threatened she ought to flee, or play dead. The shiny eyes blinked. Left, right, left, right . . . Why was the alligator blinking? Was I dreaming? I shook my head; my thoughts turned misty and scattered as I watched the opossum, with erratic growls, trailed by her ratty tail and turquoise pompon, lurch the rest of the way down the dirt track and—horrible—flail out of sight, under the rocking, glinting water’s surface, with a muted splash. Another splash, a headless blob flung about, water again, an armor-ridged spine . . . Jesus Christ, I thought dimly, I have got to . . . I have got to . . . before I completed the thought, my feet had covered the mile back to the inn. When I tottered up the porch steps, I ran into the Erik and Sam, mulling over a digital camera, checking out its features. They treated me like an emergency.

  “Drink,” Sam declared, tearing the cap off a water bottle. Erik loomed very tall and grimaced, with clenched fists, in the direction I had come. His polo shirt swelled; his icy brows bristled. Whatever was out there had better leave his sister-in-law alone. Between the two of them, I felt much better. I said I’d seen a possum nabbed by a gator and asked Sam to have another look at the hole, which he checked every day and believed to be deserted. The two men zipped off in the jeep, only to return shrugging their shoulders. Any sign Sam knew of, of gators, was not there, but he promised to keep an eye on it; the word eye gave me chills.

  Thus I proved that my alligator was invisible: it could see an invisible opossum, but humans could not see it. The next day, Leif grew bored with velociraptors.

  It was inevitable.

  Near the inn, on its cactus-infested lawn, lay a sunken cement enclosure that was once a fountain’s basin, and all day, guests loitered there viewing a pair of young alligators with jagged smiles. They were four feet long and glowed like lava. At our second dinner together, in the evening, Evie told her little boy that the two alligators were living dinosaurs. We all laughed, watching the potato on the end of Leif’s fork stop in his open mouth, right under his round, shining eyes.

  “That’s right,” Evie said. “Eat your potato. So, you want Mommy to tell you about the gators?” Leif chewed, nodding so violently that Erik performed a calming pass over his son’s head, and began transferring forkfuls of carrots into the little face hidden behind his great snowy hand. I watched our candlelit reflection in the French windows; Erik’s unevenly slouched back was Mont Blanc, Evie’s sharp, sunburnt face was an explorer’s. The longer she talked, the more inferior I felt. I had no solar panel scales on my back, no special palate to open my mouth underwater and continue breathing through my nose above water, no moveable lungs to enhance maneuverability. No bone-digesting stomach full of gastroliths. I could run on two legs? Oh. Alligators ran thirty miles per hour on land. Alligators hydroplaned across water, too. Oh, and survived underwater without breathing for several hours by rerouting their circulation. What was I? What was humanity? Sam entered the dining room; the naturalist caught my eye in the window and made a gesture I liked, something between tipping a hat and showing a palmed card. I pushed back my chair and said good night, busy day tomorrow, not mentioning that my business was with an invisible alligator.

  The next day, I hiked out eagerly, with questions. Did my gator hide its shiny eyes underwater even when its prey couldn’t see it? In other words, did it behave like a visible alligator, or was its behavior modified by invisibility? Another morning’s observation gave me the answer. My gator did not hide its eyes underwater. Like their visible cousins, invisible gators are stealth hunters, but evolution has given them a supreme advantage that makes most stealthy behaviors redundant. My gator submerged only when the prey was caught, to speed its death by drowning. Most of its prey would be visible—yesterday’s Poltergeist Possum, poor thing, was exceptional. I still didn’t understand why she hadn’t fled the spot.

  Now, I have to admit that although I try to love all creatures, my alligator was uphill work. Think of being slammed between those jaws, impaled on eighty teeth, water exploding into your lungs as you’re ripped and shaken into bloody gobbets. Was this a beast, or a torture chamber with a mind? I must admit, shamefully, to some hatred. The hardest moment involved baby raccoons. Young raccoons don’t desert their siblings. That’s why raccoon roadkill often comes in twos: the second one has failed to abandon its dead brother or sister in passing traffic. I should have been consoled by the knowledge that raccoons will cheerfully eat baby alligators. But I wasn’t.

  The first little raccoon—a sooty-faced, ring-tailed puffball—at first scooted free of the water hole and yelled for help as only a raccoon can yell, like a siren being ground in a disposal. My hamstrings yanked and I might have lost my head (or other limbs) racing to its rescue, if a scaly, dripping, blunt snout hadn’t shot out of the hole and whisked back underwater, as an infant yell etched itself through the insensate forest. Minutes died away. Then along came the second little raccoon, Bro or Sis, its potato-sized body vibrating over soft black fingers splayed in the dirt. It chattered like a manual alarm clock being wound, a percussive clucking purr. It searched, argued with itself, searched some more, looked at the sky, nodded back and forth before the gator hole, sniffed in the dirt, went round in a trembling circuit, and seemed at a loss. Meanwhile, two cold moonstones shone in the lair, without any expression a mammal could read. I dabbed at the tears behind my binoculars. To hell with research: I threw stones and shouted to scare off the little racc
oon, but as it retreated, the striped palmetto leaves gave away its position in the brush. It didn’t go far. After I’d straightened up and painfully regained the path, aching in various body and soul parts, the little raccoon probably renewed its search. I didn’t want to know.

  That afternoon I looked for Leif, but instead ran into Sam on the inn’s porch.

  “Leif’s got the gator bug,” Sam informed me, pulling items from his various pockets—a penlight, a calculator, a tube of antibiotic, a chocolate bar—and rearranging them into other pockets. “He’s gone to look at them. I was just heading down there.” He beckoned, circling with his arm, the way a big dog looks around and dips his head in a circle, for you to follow. I liked Sam—nothing seemed to bother him much, except for the misuse of national parklands. We strolled through the moist sunshine to the spot where my nephew lay, beside the fenced enclosure. What made a little boy go belly-down on concrete, propped on his elbows, sneakers butterflied to left and right, showing us the crabapples of his tonsils?

  “Leif, what are you doing?” Leif’s mouth was a clear pink O rimmed with milk teeth. “Leif, aren’t you going to tell me?” I knelt beside him and tweaked his nose. He bit my hand. “Hey!”

  “I’m gaping,” he explained with dignity. “Gators gape to cool off.”

  “Maybe,” Sam demurred. “We don’t really know why they do that.” Leif gaped again and I found I had to yawn. “Now I’m gonna yawn,” said Sam and did. “Yawns are infectious and so is scratching. That’s primate behavior, monkey see, monkey do. Tell you what, Leif—when a monkey sees another monkey grab something, the same cells light up in his brain as if he grabbed it himself, did you know that? Primates are hardwired to imitate others. We pick up the feelings of others by imitation, too. That’s called empathy.” He pitched his voice for my ear. “Women are supposed to be better at it than men.” I glanced up and felt my body send a telegram—and looked hastily down again.

  Leif snapped his jaws, turned red, and bawled through his tears, “Ow, my tongue! Auntie Sopheeee! I bit my tongue and it huuuurts!” I hugged Leif with more than due diligence while Sam assumed a stance of scientific detachment, hands in pockets, and watched the alligators gape, their creamy throats working below immobile, open jaws.

  THAT NIGHT, I FRETTED and tossed, tugged one way by an impression that if I got close to Sam he would smell like warm sand, and the other way by the need to spend my time wisely. How many invisible alligators would I have the chance to observe, back home, versus how many human males? And supposing Sam were unique, a heart-find, what good would it do when he discovered that my house, my car, all my activities, were arranged around invisible beasts? Sam was a devoted naturalist. He lived in a parallel, nonintersecting universe, waiting for a woman who loved visible nature as much as he did. But I tossed and turned, until Toto disengaged from my pillow and plastered itself to the ceiling. Humans love drama. An Oormz wants peace.

  WE HAD TWO DAYS LEFT on the island, and I spent the morning behind binoculars, crouched in the scrub, my notepad on one knee. Rain had stormed through the night, and the ground before the gator hole had liquefied into clay-red puddles, reflecting palmetto fronds. They looked like blades in blood. My gator was having a slow day, since the island’s animals were drinking rainfall. I had to search for its black nostrils, their rims exactly even with the water. This tactic spelled hunger. A gator’s head is covered with sensors that detect the slightest shimmy of the water’s surface; clearly, my gator was maximizing its sensor use. The twin eyes looked a little bleary, I thought. Of course an alligator wouldn’t mind lying in water up to its eyelids, for hours, for a meal, would it? By noon it had caught nothing, while cricket frogs visited the puddles like muddy raindrops. To a ten-foot-long reptile, they meant about as much as a sprinkling of jimmies to a hungry man—and in any case, they weren’t jumping into the lair. They were just rubbing it in.

  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 . . .

  AFTER 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 ad
ded, 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?”