Invisible Beasts (10 page)

I
n 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
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Air Liners

T
O APPRECIATE
A
IR
L
INERS
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 buttock, 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 shines and coruscates, like tubes of blown glass continually emerging around a hidden mouth.

You're looking at Air Liner microbes. Mammals having sex produce biochemical triggers attracting the Air Liners (otherwise, they might be seen around people and animals who aren't having sex). 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 passing 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 passes 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 passes 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 recumbent 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 sturdy 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 sexual 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

1

A
poem called “The Kraken” by Tennyson describes a monster of the ocean bed, over which loom “huge sponges of millennial growth and height.” It didn't occur to Tennyson that the Kraken itself might be a sponge, but that is what I deduce from observations and a tiny sample. I discovered the Kraken while on a trip to Antarctica with my sister, who generously invited me to join a research expedition to collect ice core samples. In return for making myself generally useful, I got to observe snorting leopard seals, projectile-pooping penguins, and barnacled whale tails within inches of my nose; and to feel the strange thrill when a ship disappears into the frigid pink dusk, leaving your group to fend for itself. One day, hiking on a glacier, we climbed, one by one, into a deep crevasse—the kind that John Muir was tempted to die in because it resembled the mind of God, assuming that God's thinking is fluorescent blue. In there—suspended like a spider by ropes, pulleys, and ice screws—I hacked off, with my ice ax, a tiny tip of Kraken. Nobody else in our group saw it; I asked them all, later. Nobody had seen anything like that
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The Antarctic Glass Kraken

A
NTARCTICA IS HUGE
. Not that other places aren't huge, too, but this snowbound continent devoid of human cities seems as huge as the winds, bare of any distraction from its icy vastness. To grasp the southern continent's scale, and picture the climate changes happening there, we often resort to comparisons with the civilized world. When the Larsen-B Ice Shelf collapsed in 2003, glaciologists groping for the right words said that it was like Rhode Island turning to water. How apt for such times, I thought, when Providence seems all too fluid. And where does a state-sized Antarctic ice mass go when it melts? Into an undersea trough, scientists tell us, that is twice the size of Texas. That figures. Twice Texas must be just the size of hell, so I don't wonder that by Antarctic standards, it's getting warm down there.

It's so warm that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which collapsed during the writing of this book, is the first documented breakup of an Antarctic ice shelf during winter. A short time ago, fifteen thousand square kilometers of
Wilkins was clinging to the mainland by a thin beam of ice, like somebody who has stepped out of a fortieth-floor window and is hanging onto a ledge by one arm. Wilkins's ice arm was a mere three miles wide, but recently it broke up again and is now about one mile wide. So it goes.

When the Antarctic ice melts—when 70 percent of the world's water, and eight hundred thousand years of its ice-locked memories, turn to flood—we will see the Glass Kraken revealed.

The Kraken is a glass sponge: a
Hexactinellida
, the most common sea-bottom-dwelling creature in Antarctica's chilly waters. The ordinary glass sponge is a fairy-tale creature, a glass horn of plenty that spins itself, sometimes extruding branches like diaphanous sleeves. Most are no more than a foot long, but the Kraken is the regal exception. It is very big. Picture a map of Antarctica and you're looking at the Kraken. It grows from a thin layer of water lying between the base of the Antarctic ice cap and the continental bedrock. The Kraken has been growing for a long time, with ice and snow gradually settling in and around and on top of it; its tallest branches are supported by the ice, which froze into place as they followed the water layer. Possibly, the Kraken began as separate communities of glass sponges that merged into a single, gigantic colonial sponge.

If you could look through the imblued walls of glacial chasms (and if you could see invisible beasts), you'd be dumbstruck at the vision of the Kraken's branches
sprawling like exurbs and subdivisions off the megalopolis of its body proper. Like all glass sponges, the Kraken conducts electricity, and in the darkness of the bedrock, faint, boreal lights pulse across its webs. In its entirety, it would look like the nighttime panorama from an airplane descending over Manhattan, Tokyo, or some fabled imperial seat—Atlantis City before it drowned.

Yet the Kraken is merely an animal; a sponge, so primitive it hardly qualifies as an animal. Did I say “its body”? Sponges have no body organs, no muscles, no nerves, no digestive systems. Whereas a microscopic water flea has the same striated muscle cells that you have. Such sophistication is light-years beyond your ordinary sponge, which is, basically, an entropy-reducing pocket in the water that perpetuates itself. And this unconscious thing, this jelly without a belly, makes glass—a major industrial product—the way you make daydreams, effortlessly, under the cold deep ocean.

How does the Kraken survive in ice? Sponges normally consume organic particles suspended in water. But the Kraken partners with special bacteria that happily coat the undersides of glaciers. These bacteria coat the Kraken's incurrent canals, and in exchange for safe housing, they supply the Kraken with all the energy it needs. Nothing is impossible if you know the right bacteria—not even a primitive animal the size of a civilization.