Invisible Beasts

by Sharona Muir

  “I don’t remember anything till I, sort of came to, in the jeep. I’m sorry I was acting so crazy.” Sam laughed slightly.

  “There’s another thing—how you got in the jeep. Erik slung you under one arm, and the kid under the other, like it was nothing. Threw you both in together. Never saw such a guy. Was he ever in pro wrestling? I don’t mean to pry. Look,” Sam urged, in a low voice, “I’ve really enjoyed meeting you, Sophie, and your folks. I’m just a bit puzzled what to make of you all.” I stretched my feet into the darkness, toed the leather piping on the footrest, sighed, and said, “We were hypnotized. Leif and I.”

  “Hypnotized? By what?”

  “By the alligator. No, listen. It had strange eyes. It blinked in a strange way—”

  “Bli-inked?” Southern incredulity. I tried again. I shut my eyes and did my best to describe the awful picture behind them. It was why I’d given up sleep: when I shut my eyes, the cold, ugly, glowing stones appeared. They blinked, left, left, right, I couldn’t stop my mind from following their code, the code to confusion. I remembered that I’d locked onto Leif’s kicking body, but a mental mist—like the one when you’re about to black out—had kept me from knowing, except in glimpses, if I was still holding on, or if my nephew was gone, crawling to that dreadful pool, summoned. There wasn’t even an “I”—just a mosaic of terrors and struggles, the precious glimpses of Leif still with me, still kicking, trying to crawl toward the monster; and through it all those damned eyes, drilling away, blink by blink. Left right right left. Trying to convey this to Sam, I lost courage and drained my glass; it occurred to me that I looked drunk and red-nosed, in a bathrobe, and was grateful for the dark, and for the frogs’ singing as the words stumbled out. Sam uttered a soft snort. And the frogs kept singing.

  “Tell you what,” Sam said at last, “I hear a lot of ghost stories, on this island. Elf lights. One summer it was all elf lights. Some family had left their dog toys behind, those balls that glow in the dark? Don’t be mad at me because that’s not what I think your story is. I don’t think so because I did some poking around. I’ve seen tracks, which proves nothing because gators move around; could be any gator’s tracks. But I also found cached prey, stuck in the roots right beside that hole—”

  “A baby raccoon.” I sniffled into a cocktail napkin. “I saw it die.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Sam said slowly. “There are clear signs of a gator in that hole. You got lucky, seeing him, or unlucky, and maybe he wouldn’t have scared you so much if your nephew hadn’t tried to get friendly with him. That would scare anybody. Fear does strange things. If you say the animal blinked, well, maybe he did, but there’s always a reason for these things. His eyes may be injured.” Suddenly I wanted to look at Sam, not his shadow. I took the candle and slid forward to hold the small light nearer to that voice in the dark. To my surprise, Sam was leaning forward too, elbows on knees, and I startled, having expected air where his face was blooming out, his brow grooved deeply above the smiling eyes. “Don’t you feel a little sorry for the fellow, Sophie? Having some sort of, what, ocular discomfort, and no doctor around?” This point of view, the squinting Hypnogator’s, hadn’t occurred to me, but it did now with an odd soft intensity. I thought about it. Sam’s fingers were laced; the heels of his palms met and parted, met and parted like a question—trust her, don’t trust her? I put my hand in his. After that, there was nothing but to go upstairs together.

  That night, Sam showed me how alligators make love. It wasn’t toothy. They slide against each other, slowly, to their full length. We did a lot of muffled laughing. When I fell asleep, I saw my alligator sliding through the salt marsh, and beside him another, a female, gliding along. Their two armored noses just cleared the water in the moonlight, crisscrossed by sighing rushes. Then I started to laugh in my dream, because instead of cold, hypnotic eyes, I saw two pairs of tortoiseshell eyeglasses, one with rhinestone corners, perched on those saurian snouts! What happens to their glasses when the gators dive?—I wondered and awoke. The bed was covered in moonlight. I spread my fingers in it, and lightly patted the blankets mounded over Sam. The explanation for the alligator’s behavior spilled out of my dream and into thought.

  My alligator was nearsighted! It squinted and blinked because it was trying to see. At some point in the past eighty million years or so, evolution began to favor invisible alligators who squinted in a particular pattern that had the effect of hypnotizing—not visible prey, who couldn’t see its shiny eyes—but invisible prey, who could. My gator probably didn’t realize its effect on invisible creatures like that poor Poltergeist Possum: it just squinted at them, perplexed, trying to see why they didn’t come closer to its water hole. Not diabolical: myopic! I hugged myself with glee. A gator hypnotist! I dubbed it the Hypnogator. I whispered its name in the moonlight, which had a swimming feel, as if it flowed from the dream marshes. Impossible to share this with Sam, but something told me that without our night together, I would never have solved the mystery. I slid back under the blankets and into warmth, double-personed, magical; and with it the thought that all rare creatures were happy accidents, and that included the Hypnogator, myself, my Oormz, my Oormz-seeing nephew, my valiant brother-in-law, my indomitable baby sister . . . and my lover, fellow-being, this curled, radiant person whose rough toes I found with my own. There. Who could not love a process that refined raw accidents into rare advantages? Evolution was luck in slow motion, luck abiding by purely formal rules that lent it the helpless beauty of swan songs and the energy of good jokes. Perhaps, if Sam could understand as much as that, I’d find a way to tell him more. And I listened to the tree frogs keep on singing, wave after wave of them, perpetually on key.

  3

  Nothing is more American than the study of butterflies. We proudly number many butterfly savants in our history, like Samuel Scudder, chronicler of the monarch. Indeed, our Declaration of Independence says that happiness is to be pursued, as one chases butterflies with nets. As a patriotic citizen, I duly add this note concerning invisible butterflies.

  Grand Tour Butterflies

  I CALL THE INVISIBLE BUTTERFLIES “Grand Tours” because of their extensive travels. Monarch butterflies travel three thousand miles in their brief, nine-month lives, but invisible butterflies outdistance them. There are three varieties, of which one is the rarest. You cannot chase it. Once, it chased me—scared the daylights out of me, too, though I adored every minute. That’s how unusual it is. Each variety of Grand Tour defends itself with its wing display, designed to discourage predators (that is, invisible predators, which can see Grand Tours, and are quite as deadly as their more conspicuous counterparts). This is hard to do, because very few animals—whether frogs, mantises, spiders, snakes, wasps, rats, ants, or birds—would not like to eat a tasty, helpless butterfly. Of the three Grand Tour varieties, only one really succeeds in defending itself well; that is the one I can’t catch. The one that came after me. Here they are, in order of their wing patterns.

  1. Aposematically patterned

  These Grand Tours are globe-trotters. They travel in search of food and they’re not picky; liquefied yak dung or Nile mud slurry are fine. They don’t starve, but they do get tired. When thousands of them subside all at once onto a single North American lilac bush, that’s a good time to come creeping up behind the bush, brandishing a net. Some will be picking their way, like women in stiletto heels, over lilac clusters to nose into a blossom. But others will be sunning, spreading their wings. And what do the wings of Grand Tours display? Travel pictures. On one wing appears a tan thumbprint; looking closer, you’ll see a deserted limestone amphitheater in the glare of noon. Another shows on each wing a steep forest, and on the thorax between them a blue river, and reflected in the river, a brass-colored train climbing deeper and deeper into the sky, among snow-covered Alps. Another shows moonlit sand dunes, pocked with thousands of rust-colored meteors, each in its own sickle of shadow, that have fallen over the course of eons and never been viewed
by a human eye. How lucky you are that Grand Tours fly over the Sahara and then perch on your lilacs.

  You can thank their unusual scaling. All butterflies have scales consisting of the flat, hard ends of tiny fibers, arranged like a mosaic. On Grand Tours, instead of a flat mosaic, the fiber ends stack up in a three-dimensional pattern, much like the patterns that produce the 3-D image in the corner of your credit card. Grand Tours, essentially, are flying holograms. This variety depends on aposematic patterning, i.e., colorful patterns that warn predators away. Most butterflies’ colors tell the predator, “You can’t eat me because I taste awful, may be poisonous, and you’re really not that desperate.” The Grand Tour’s travel pictures tell predators, “You can’t eat me because I’m far away in a foreign country.”

  But when you’re in big trouble, pretending that you’re not really here fools nobody. It’s a feeble defense. Most of this type gets eaten.

  2. Aposematically patterned crepuscular

  The crepuscular Grand Tours are seen toward dusk on flowers that stay open all night, like peonies. They have pictures of the universe on their wings, and you can easily spot them if you know a little astronomy. On one pair of black wings, tawny veins depict the brown, boiling dust pillars out of which stars form. Another butterfly exhibits spiral galaxies, one per wing, colliding like squashed, vaporous Ionic capitals. Another is spotted with planets crowned with electric auroras. An uncommon variety, harder to spot in the dimness, shows concentric bands of molecular sludge sloshing away from a diabolical black hole, located on the dorsal abdomen. These planetarium-like displays are perfectly natural; corals and snails also resemble gaseous formations and spiral galaxies, because nature’s physical laws tend to multitask her forms. The defense of the crepuscular Grand Tour butterfly lies in telling the predator, “You can’t eat me because I’m in outer space.”

  This merely makes the predator bemused. It prevents nothing, and isn’t a good defense.

  3. Cryptically patterned chimerical

  Crypsis is camouflage. These Grand Tours made a single summer memorable; since then, I have not seen them—though that might point more to my gullibility than to their absence. They use a social defense by swarming together to produce camouflaging illusions, composed, like jigsaw puzzles, out of many individual butterflies. One of their illusions tells a predator, “You can’t eat us because we’re just a big rock.” I was a victim of this trick. One warm day in July, I brought a book and a cold beer up to my pond, to sit on a boulder in the shadiest spot overlooking the water. I was about to set the beer bottle, nicely sweated, by my feet, as I pressed the book open with my thumb and lowered my backside onto a boulder. It was a big, sun-warmed, striated boulder, complete with lichen. Or so it seemed. I fell in the pond, bumped against a bass, and came up snorting water out of my sinuses while my book drowned, and the rocky bank foamed with good Belgian beer, attracting ants, bees, and wasps precisely where I had to scramble up. Around my head danced—as if in mocking solicitude—a cloud of Grand Tours flashing partial images of weathered striations and lichen. Since then I’ve been as cautious as a dog about where I seat myself. But it was a fair price to pay for seeing the Grand Tours mount a social defense, using the excellent principle of strength in numbers.

  The reason I call this variety “chimerical,” however, has to do with their most striking use of the social defense, by which, once, I was rendered stupid with astonishment. And if they can do that to a Homo sapiens, they can probably stupefy smarter animals too. You might call it the jaw-dropping defense—makes biting much harder for predators . . .

  This defense consists of the Grand Tours massing together in the shape of large, fabulous creatures, too big and too weird to tangle with. On a normal spring afternoon, as you leaf through junk mail before entering the house, you hear a stir overhead, and looking up, you stagger backward onto the porch and collapse against the front door, feeling behind your back for the latch with a nerveless hand from which the junk mail has dropped. A snow-white stallion is charging down your yard at the level of the treetops, in the air. On its back, seated between its sky-blue wings, leans a knight. He is clad in armor so bright it sizzles your retinas. He is aiming his lance straight at you. You are numb with fright, flabbergasted, and singing loudly—no, that comes afterward, after a few drinks. Right now, your jaw is dropping at the sight of the stallion’s streaming white mane—and the violently lashing lion’s tale that sprouts from its equine rump. You can almost hear the butterflies bellowing, “Take that, frogs, mantises, spiders, snakes, wasps, rats, ants, and birds. Take that, you bastards!” You slump onto your threshold, cross your arms over your knees, and give a deep, deep sigh.

  It’s the best defense. Take courage from this. Nothing beats imagination on the wing.

  Invisible Beasts in Print

  1

  The command of symbolic language is what divides humanity from other animals—so goes the common idea, to which there is some truth. But from the sheep whose tanned hides became the bearers of inked words, to the symbols organizing our thoughts today, other species loom large in language. None more so than Think Monkey.

  Think Monkey

  SOME BEASTS ARE GOOD TO EAT, some are good to live with, but all are indispensable for thinking with. We think about ourselves with the help of other animals—we are mulish, catty, busy as bees, cold fish, small fry, dogs in the manger, doves, hawks, bearish, bullish, sheepish, cowed, elephantine; we ferret or worm things out; we horse around, clam up, get crabby; some of us are paid moles, and I, personally, am a real bitch. Lacking a beast that precisely suits the purpose, sometimes we have to invent one. Such is Think Monkey.

  Think Monkey is the reason why we are not conscious of our inmost thoughts; and why genius, as a poet said, is a secret to itself. She is known to neuroscience by the name of homunculus, or “little person.” I have reason to believe she is a ho-monkey-lus, or more concisely, Think Monkey.

  Hey!—you might object—I am conscious of my inmost thoughts.

  Well, no. Think it over. Am I conscious of my basic sensory activity, even? Do I feel a hundred billion calcium concentrations dropping inside my neurons, a hundred million sparks merging in wave fronts? No. What I get, as a result of all that frantic activity, is a banana. My banana is yellow and freckled, smells terrific, tastes the way I remember from my last banana, and that’s what I’m conscious of. My conscious mind is a representation of the brain’s activity. This representation exists so that I can handle the unexpected, which always comes along to threaten a life-form. Handling the unexpected is what nerve cells doing automatic processing jobs can’t do. They can’t reflect on what they’re doing. But I, being conscious, can.

  I can do all sorts of things with my beautiful conscious mind: I can deliberately tear off two more bananas and juggle them—well, no, I can’t juggle them. But it was a conscious act while it lasted. Now, these notions passing through my mind are not my inmost thoughts. Those are inaccessible to my conscious mind. My inmost thoughts are massive computations performed by gelatinous giant molecules like alien spaceships bumping and docking and linking with other kinky, slobbery, organic molecules, inside billions of neurons, all of them simultaneously hammering at trillions of specialized, cross-indexed, and crisscross-indexed, and you’ll-never-live-through-it-indexed, sorts of jobs. That, thankfully, is not what I’m conscious of when I think.

  I am conscious of my self. I can sit here humming cogito ergo sum and peeling this yellow, ripe banana, enjoying the creamy ribbed texture where the peel strips off, mmm . . . and when I’ve taken a resilient, not mushy, first bite, I consciously look forward to seeing whether the banana’s cross-section shows the lucky brown Y or the unlucky three brown dots because I am superstitious. . . Oh, I do love my banana thoughts! Three cheers for the representation! That’s what it is, you know. I am not conscious of my inmost thoughts—and who the hell wants to be? Slimy neurons, yech. Computational functions, brrr. I experience a glorious representation of my inmo
st thoughts. I experience this—

  BANANA!

  Anyway.

  Now, somebody, some agency or other, must be arranging and taking care of my inmost thoughts, since I certainly can’t, I’m totally in the dark about them. Some agency certainly operates my frontal lobe which is responsible for various higher—or more frontal—mental functions. That agency is Think Monkey. Here’s what the brain scientists say about her:

  . . . somewhere in the confines of the frontal lobe are neuronal networks that act to all intents and purposes like a homunculus. This is a non-conscious homunculus . . . Our homunculus acts more like a computational entity . . . it is responsible for many complex operations, such as thoughts, concept formations, intentions, and so on . . .*

  Think Monkey creates my intentions, my concepts, and all the treasures of my human intellect. Now, don’t go objecting that Think Monkey has to have its own Think Monkey, because as the scientist says, Think Monkey is not conscious, so does not require a counterpart. Think Monkey makes thoughts, but does not think. My Think Monkey sleeps, while her dark clever fingers, toes, and prehensile tail operate, at frantic speed, the jungle-cockpit of neuronal computations. She does everything in a sleep that lasts my whole life long. Not even death will wake her; death, least of all. It seems so unfair. Poor Think Monkey! For an entire lifetime she performs such important work, round the clock, without once being able to reflect and say to herself, “I adore bananas.”

  Maybe I’ll have another one, just in case.

  AS I SAID EARLIER, THINK MONKEY has no conscious thoughts: she only makes conscious thoughts, but—paradoxically—she makes conscious thoughts about herself. This is one of the spookier aspects of a human mind. I once read a haunting story about an animal researcher who studied cotton-top tamarin monkeys, a cute species the size of squirrels, with amber-eyed, squashed, grave little mugs, feverish hands, and fluffy white manes. One female tamarin liked the researcher very much, and always cooed at him. We don’t know why. Sometimes that worried him. One night, he dreamed that his little friend skipped over and offered him, in her needling fingers, a book. It was a clothbound textbook, titled Dictionary of the Tamarin Language. This was the Holy Grail of his research—a key to primate communication!—so he was very happy to see it. But when he opened it, it was blank.