Free Invisible Beasts by Sharona Muir Page 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.

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    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 .

    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 Waalsforces. 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