Free Invisible Beasts by Sharona Muir Page B

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 wasfading 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.

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 .

    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