The Cage

AUDREY SCHULMAN.

THE CAGE.

I would like to acknowledge the kindness, community and criticism of my writing group: Lauren Slater, Elizabeth Graver and Pagan Kennedy; the patient instruction of my college writing teacher, Louise Rose; and the unending faith of my parents, without whom, for a variety of reasons, none of this would have been possible.

THE CAGE.

CHAPTER 1.

Beryl holds an ice cube in her hand as she sits in her closet. The air is humid with the slow heat of August. The water from the ice drips steadily down her arm. Her palm hurts from the cold. She holds the ice, trying to imagine herself in temperatures of thirty and forty below. She tries to see herself sitting outside in a metal cage, a cage too small to move around in to keep warm.

The wind blows. All sound echoes close and loud. Snow shivers across the ground. She sits, her legs crossed. The only warmth for miles around is contained in the heavy arms of the white bears that mill about her cage, curious, strong and hungry. The snow squeaks beneath their feet. Pale mist blows at her from their black mouths. The bears push their wide white faces forward, against the cage. They suck in her smell, snort out. Steam touches her skin. Her face, like their beards, is covered with frost-it"s moisture from their breath, from her breath.

She understands that if the cage fails in any way, they will kill her. They"ll reach in, rip the biceps from her flailing arms, the bowels from her belly, the tendons from her neck. They"ll bite and tear, swallow. Her body will jerk at first beneath their strength, then slowly slacken. Her neck will roll back for their touch as though for a kiss.

Her eyes watch, dark and small, like theirs.

The ice cube makes the bones of her hand ache.

CHAPTER 2.

Beryl was the only woman hired for the expedition.

Her father asked about the likelihood of danger on this trip. He liked to know the numbers of things-the par on a hole in golf, the average income of a Saudi Arabian, the number of murders daily in New York City. He confidently repeated these numbers to others, nodding, as though that explained the whole situation.

She found it easy to laugh at his question. "Good lord," she replied. "This expedition"s run by Natural Photography. They"re professionals."

She paused, and even though she saw her father nodding in agreement, she added, "They do this sort of thing all the time."

Her mother said nothing when Beryl told her she was going. She simply nodded and touched her hand to the bottom of her belly as though the organs that had borne Beryl had twitched at the news. Her mother was a quiet woman with small infrequent gestures. Each gesture meant something: danger, money worries, happiness. Her mother understood the world as a place much bigger than she was and accepted without a fight all events that she couldn"t change. She lived her life with her hands by her sides, moving them only to express her feeling toward the inevitable when it appeared. Throughout her childhood Beryl had learned to watch for these gestures with the same fear that a person on a dark night feels when she peers at the handle of her door.

Beryl had always been close to her mother, perhaps because she was her only child. Her mother had been forty-one when she got pregnant. Because of her age, the doctors had told her there was some chance the child wouldn"t be normal. After the birth she"d never gotten over her desperate grat.i.tude that Beryl had all her limbs, could breathe on her own, had a normal face. She thought it wise not to ask for too much more and took great care with the child"s safety. About the time Beryl was learning how to bike and skate, her mother"s skin sometimes mysteriously darkened in red blotches, as though large fingers had pinched her hard. Late at night her mother began to sob fierce and angry, the whole house echoing with her cries. Even her walk changed, became more careful, as though she were bearing something immensely valuable between her hips, holding her hands out in front of her and tapping objects in her path to make sure of their distance. Each time Beryl went out to bike around the neighborhood, her mother would sit on the steps in front of the house, turning stark white whenever Beryl took both hands off the handlebars.

Thus Beryl became the first one of her friends called in at night, the one not allowed to go to the skating party, the only one who had to phone home at sleepovers just before she went to bed. Even after she had grown up and moved out, her mother had had her phone in when Beryl took the subway back to her apartment after visiting. Beryl knew if she did somehow manage to kill herself on this trip, then, at the exact moment when her heart stopped shuddering, her mother"s uterus would contract one last time.

Her father reacted to the news of the expedition by taking pictures. Pictures and more pictures, posing her, ten to fifteen rolls of film, painful flashes of light from the moment she"d announced the expedition to the moment she stepped on the plane. He worried in this way. He focused very carefully. He wanted the facts. He wanted to hold the facts in his hand like a flat package of Polaroids.

Her father missed the original image of Beryl"s mother touching her belly because he had rushed off to get his camera. Instead he took posed photographs: pictures of Beryl in her heavy green parka on the lawn by the morning glories, pictures of her and her collection of cameras in her childhood room, pictures of her in front of the polar bear cage at the zoo.

Her father never did manage to get a picture of Beryl with the bear fully visible in its cage. The temperature that day hovered in the nineties, humid. Dogs panted on leads, a young boy whined for ice cream. While her father parked the car, she went ahead to see the polar bear. The cement cage was molded in the shape of ice and snow; a few logs lay in the corner. The pond was thick with green algae. The bear lay on its side, the color of lime Jell-O. A sign in front of the cage explained that polar bears were not normally green, that their coats have no natural color at all. They appear white because of refraction, the same optical illusion that causes clouds to appear white.

The bear"s fur had become infected with algae, the hollow shafts of its hairs filled. The green bear sprawled across the cool cement in the shade, panting, its chest heaving with effort. Beryl knew that its rib cage could encompa.s.s at least four torsos the size of her own. She weighed less than half of a typical seal it would"ve killed and eaten in the wild.

The bear lumbered to its feet and stared directly at her for a moment, thirty feet away, the black skin beneath the fur visible in patches on its elbows and sides. The bear"s haunches stood higher than its front legs, giving the animal the appearance of crouching, preparing to leap. Without the blubber it developed in the cold to survive, it looked bony and desperate, but huge even at this distance. On all fours it was taller at the shoulder than Beryl. The bear"s eyes blinked small, black, calculating. Beryl moved her hand slowly up and down the outer bars of the cage. She watched it, her head tilted.

The bear looked at her for another moment. Then it turned and tottered over to the swimming pool, slid in on its forelegs with a speed that threw half the water out of the pool. The water dribbled slowly across the cement, wetting Beryl"s toes.

The bear sighed.

Her father arrived soon afterward. For the rest of their visit the bear lay in its pool, only the top of its nose and temples showing, still as a waiting alligator, green as AstroTurf. Each time it moved she heard the slap-slap of water on cement.

Her father settled for a picture of Beryl and the green forehead in the swimming pool behind her. As her father focused the camera, the bear"s breathing echoed down to her, as heavy and methodical as the breath of a person making love.

Beryl looked through all the photographs with her father the night before she left, five stacks of them the height of her coffee mug. Should they be unable to find her body, she imagined that her father would bury a life-size glossy of her instead.

A single photograph showed Beryl posed with her mother. A moment before the camera went off Beryl had looked away from those small white hands, from that flat tired face. She looked into the camera instead. She smiled. Her mother looked at Beryl, her hands once again against her belly.

In spite of all his care, her father wasn"t a good photographer. Things got cut off. Perspectives were wrong. Many pictures in the family alb.u.ms had to be explained: "That"s Beryl"s foot in the foreground"; "Aunt Addie"s in the taxi to the left." Beryl had taken up photography because it had looked like such a difficult art. She had continued it because through the camera"s lens, things changed, especially animals. They became bigger, more magical. She liked them better through the eye of her camera. She liked the world better.

The first pictures she managed to sell were of Minsie, her small black pregnant cat. Minsie grew as Beryl stared through the tunnel of the lens at this animal who curled up with her each night. Viewed at her own level, without Beryl"s own hand on her back or head to keep her in perspective, Minsie became the size of a jungle creature. Her wide pregnant belly pushing forward from between her ribs and hips wasn"t a clumsy line or burden. The stomach, covered in black fur, stretched tight as a drum, became magical, secretive and strong. Minsie bowed her head, her neck curved, glimmering as a smooth rock on a beach. She began to clean her chest with the quiet rhythm of the pink tongue, the milky sharp teeth, the half-closed eyes. The black hair gleamed, matted down with self-possession and power. Beryl had focused and shot quickly, filled with awe.

She would be the still photographer for the expedition.

All the other photographers who had made it to the final round of interviews had been men: tall, strong and confident-the ones who regularly went on these trips. They leaned out of a speeding jeep to capture the astonished face of a fleeing rhino. They focused methodically on a charging gorilla, certain of the power of the darts littering its chest. In the interviews each man had crossed his legs, tossed his arm across the backs of two other seats and jiggled his ankle as he talked. At parties this kind of man knocked over other people"s drinks with his wide gestures and stepped backward onto other people"s toes. He thought of manners as things involving forks and knives.

The male applicants had looked at the cage with dismay. Each had backed in awkwardly, crumpling his legs to his chest, bending his head down hopefully.

Beryl stood five foot one in her sneakers, and sitting down in the cage, she would almost have room to stretch out her legs safely. Even allowing for the s.p.a.ce necessary for camera equipment, her parka and radio, she wouldn"t need more than three feet square to sit in the lotus position. That gave her a foot at both the front and back. On the sides she had only five inches.

Though she was a successful professional photographer, she"d gotten the job because of her size. The coordinator of the project had told her so. He was a round busy man with the long tapered fingers of a small monkey. He moved these fingers as he talked, tapping them on the table, pulling on his beard, rolling them in the air to gesture. Beryl found herself watching the unlikely grace of these hands with her photographer"s eye. She would set up the lighting to the left, focus in close. She wanted the fingers open against s.p.a.ce. She didn"t want his weighty clever face in the picture at all.

Professionally, Beryl took pictures only of animals. Animals expanded on the film so much more than humans. Humans didn"t look like they might move suddenly. They understood they were having their picture taken. They smoothed back their hair, looked into the camera, smiled.

The coordinator said, "We were a little umm ... overambitious in creating an inconspicuous cage. We forgot the amount of s.p.a.ce that clothing and cameras would take up." The whole time he talked to her, he kept his brown alert eyes trained on her face as though consciously thinking about the importance of eye contact. Beryl found herself blinking more than she normally did from trying to look as alert.

"The cage," he said, "looked so roomy in the design drawings." He reached forward to touch her sleeve. "Artist"s renderings can be so misleading." He leaned back in his chair, sighed and shrugged with his long spidery fingers spread out against the air. She read the gesture as an acceptance of design flaws and of fate. Later, she would wonder if his movement had instead been an apology to her for this journey.

"You"re the only one," he added, "able to fit into the cage with any reasonable safety factor. You"ll be the first person ever to take pictures of polar bears in the wild without a telescopic lens, at the bears" own level." His bright eyes watched her response.

He said, "I hope you appreciate this opportunity."

CHAPTER 3.

Beryl believed that being small would be a positive attribute in the smaller world of the future. More people could fit in less area, like compact cars. Sometimes, she tried imagining the male photographers in a few more years, as the world ran out of room. They"d have potbellies and touches of gray in their hair. They"d be learning to drink diet soda, to hold their limbs in, lower their voices and eat more grains. They would never fully adjust to their traitorous wide world that had turned itself into a doll"s house.

A year ago she had taken a neighbor"s child to the science museum for an exhibit on the increasing population of the world. A large numerical display on the wall showed the world"s present population. It ticked forward at even intervals with a sharp and definite sound as though the babies were marching in quickly through a door-now you don"t exist, now you do. She knew without asking that it had been built by a man, a man who had stepped back afterward and smiled at the way the numbers clicked forward, at the clean, oiled machine, pleased with his clear example of a principle. She knew he had never seen a birth.

The exhibit had also included a short tunnel, like an enclosed metal detector at an airport. The sign in front explained that at the present rate of population growth, by the year 2055, there would be only one square yard of s.p.a.ce available for each person. She imagined a woman in this s.p.a.ce, a toilet beneath her, a hot plate in front, some books behind. No need for a window-what would she look at? From the outside, the next s.p.a.ce over would look like a large coffin. She wouldn"t want to see the person inside.

The area in Beryl"s cage was a little more than twice this size.

At the time Beryl had been too scared of the future to step through the tunnel, but the neighbor"s child had spun around inside it, holding out her arms, laughing and laughing until she fell over and onto the floor outside.

After Beryl had gotten the job, she began to practice sitting for long periods of time in the lotus position. The first few times she sat in the center of her bedroom, but keeping small and still in the middle of a large room made no sense to her, so she removed the clothes hanging in her closet and sat in there instead, the door shut, the light on. It was about the right width and length and she drew the height line on the wall. A pile of old sweaters and T-shirts sat on a shelf above her. A teddy bear peeked down at her from the top, one eye missing. She inhaled the sweet smell of wool, wood and dust. Twice a day she sat in there, looking from wall to wall, holding her legs in. She put the thick gloves on to practice loading the camera, shooting, changing lenses. She kept her arms away from the walls, her head down, her camera pulled close. She reminded herself not to wrap the camera strap around her neck or arms. She imagined the camera"s buckle caught, her head jerked forward, her final surprised expression.

In the end she cut the straps off all her equipment.

When Beryl was five years old, a man had followed her mother and her through the park. Her mother didn"t tell Beryl what was happening, but held her hand and walked faster and faster, pointing out things of interest just up ahead. Her mother had seemed distracted, but then she was always distracted, worrying about things that could go wrong with anything she needed to do. She was forty-seven then. She wore reading gla.s.ses and she put on a pair of her husband"s jeans to do stretching exercises each day at eleven with a cla.s.s on the television. Beryl hadn"t realized her mother was frightened until she couldn"t walk quickly enough. Her mother scooped her up into her arms walking briskly without saying a word down the deserted path toward home. She could feel how fast her mother was breathing, how sharply her thin hips moved and jarred with each step on the sidewalk. She held on to her mother and looked over her shoulder to see a blond man in jeans walking after them. She had seen him back by the playground that morning.

Beryl watched the man gain on them. Neither he nor her mother ever actually broke into a run. Beryl and her mother reached the steep staircase to the busy street below, the one with narrow steps. Her mother could never run down it holding Beryl. She"d trip or the man would catch them somewhere along its length.

Beryl"s mother stopped. She swung Beryl down to the first step and with her daughter behind her turned to face the man. He slowed. She stood, her head set still and straight and her hands held loose and open at her sides. The man stopped four feet from them. They waited. Beryl stared at his T-shirt with a picture of an ice cream cone; a drip hung just on the rim of the cone. Beryl saw the smallness of her mother against the man. Her mother"s feet were closer to Beryl"s own size than to his. A slow moment pa.s.sed when Beryl understood all that she could lose.

The man exhaled slow and thoughtful and walked by them down the staircase. As he pa.s.sed, he ran his fingers over her mother"s cheek. She pulled in her head only slightly and Beryl saw from the way she accepted that touch the way she would have accepted all other actions.

They watched him descend the stairs until he turned the corner on the street below.

Beryl lived across the river from Boston and got a lot of her better pictures at zoos and pet stores. She tended to photograph small wild creatures: hawks, parrots, lizards, lynx, monkeys and bats. She would shoot them through the clear plastic of their cages, or she"d crouch just on the other side of the zoo moat. Sometimes she included the bars in the photos for contrast. Her pictures were never cute. They were somehow speculative and awed.

She once tried to photograph whales while swimming with them in the wild. She had thought she could do it. She"d been told over and over of the enormous sense of peace people felt around the whales, their majesty and beauty. She concentrated with more fear on the mechanism of the air tank and her wet suit, how she should breath and when, than on the idea of being near whales.

As she swam forward with the guide, listening to the draw and suck of her own breath, proud of her easy progress through the water, the light changed all around her. The water darkened, stilled and then moved forward so that it carried her slightly forward too, and she looked up to see pa.s.sing above her-between her and the boat, blocking the shimmering plane of the surface entirely-a gray smooth body bigger than her apartment, larger than her life. Her first thought was that it would fall, crushing her. That the whale didn"t fall made her understand she was in a foreign world where all the things she had grown up with didn"t exist: arms and legs, hair and gravity, clear light, sharp edges, distinct sound.

The whale glided on above her, twisted slightly in the water to look down at her and the guide. Its enormous face, immobile and heavy as gray rock, spread out so wide that she couldn"t take it in as one object. She searched instead for all expression in the plate-sized eye.

Nothing she knew about existed, had ever existed, was important at all. She felt the weight of its shadow on her skin and she began to breathe too quickly, the bubbles rumbling up out of her.

The guide turned to her smiling, then stopped. In the turbulent wake of the whale she swam Beryl up, with a firm grip helping her to ascend in a slow and graceful exit.

"Polar bears are large," prefaced the lecturer, a naturalist from the Canadian government, at the start of his talk on the bears. He discussed their physiology, habitat and what he called their "ideal population stabilization index." He calculated this index using a long formula into which he plugged the number of square miles of remaining tundra, fluctuating seal population and legal bear quotas for the native Inuit population.

Beryl brought a pad and pencil so the lecturer would think she was taking notes. Instead, she drew. As the slides clicked into place on the screen in the darkened room, she drew polar bears. She wanted to get used to the different anatomy and style of movements. She needed to know what was there before she could begin to photograph it. The more she understood about an animal, the better her pictures. She researched each animal: how its hips went into its back, what it ate, what its closest relation was, how it moved through each of its gaits. She studied each animal and nursed an att.i.tude toward it that would result in the kind of pictures she wanted.

At first her drawings of the polar bears looked like s.h.a.ggy dogs. Only gradually did they become bears. She had the most difficulty getting the flat lowered heads right, the gaze dark and level. The black mouths sliding open, the teeth white and smooth.

She watched the slides closely, the pictures projected on a screen ten feet by eight. She tried to understand that the full-screen pictures showed the bears in their true size. She imagined the illuminated bears moving, stepping down off the screen, posing for a moment by the desk and teacher. The screen was ten yards from her. A bear could cover that distance in three of her heartbeats, its body bunching up then stretching out, front legs reaching. She wouldn"t have time to turn and take her first step.

A white bear with two cubs shone on the screen, the picture taken from behind. "This is a female," said the lecturer. "It is possible to distinguish an adult female by the generally smaller size, the longer guard hairs along the front legs and the wider sway to the walk. Frequently, females will have immature cubs trailing after them, as in this case." The cubs, short and round, trotted quickly after the mother. A man to Beryl"s left said sarcastically, "Kootchie coo."

The projector clicked and whirred. A bear stood on his hind legs, his heavy face wrinkled back in anger.

"This is an adult male. They are generally substantially larger and more aggressive. Solitary." said the lecturer. "However, I"d like to make clear that there is no absolutely certain way to s.e.x a bear from a distance. It"s a matter of an educated guess or a tranquilizer gun." The cla.s.s laughed.

The bear on the screen didn"t seem so large until she saw that the black thing in front of him was a car tire on its side. She knew that large male bears could stand eleven feet tall on their hind legs and weigh almost two thousand pounds. The tallest point in her home was on the staircase leading up to the studio, but at most the ceiling there measured ten feet high. She pictured this big bear in the photo standing on the stairs, its back feet turned sideways on two different treads to allow them enough room, one paw balanced against the wall, its head pushed down by the ceiling.

Beryl had been raised in a city of humans, dogs and cats. As a child she"d sometimes seen horses and cows, but their ma.s.s was raised up on thin stilts of hoofed legs. The horses and cows were domesticated animals that wore halters and saddles. They weren"t wide and solid, clawed, carnivorous, wild. Since her childhood she"d seen big carnivores, but in some essential way she had never gotten used to them. They always seemed unnatural to her. She could no more understand that much dangerous ma.s.s in motion than she could imagine a truck shaking itself into life, its metal skin rippling.

The lecturer touched a b.u.t.ton. The screen went dark and then light. A bear swam patiently through a sea ice blue and deep, land nowhere in sight. The lecturer said, "Bears spend a majority of their lives on the sea, swimming in the water or walking across the ice. They are such powerful swimmers they are sometimes cla.s.sified as marine mammals, like seals or dolphins." His voice was melodic, slightly bored. Beryl wondered how often he had given this speech before.

A click and hum, and a white bear appeared, its chest, paws and face matted down with red blood, a dead seal beneath stripped of its skin. The bear was swiveling its head around to look at the camera with a directness that must have sent the photographer reeling back, then running away to the waiting helicopter. The bear"s eyes were dark and shining above the blood. The photographer in this case would have been using a telephoto lens, probably at least three hundred yards from the bear. Some of the more powerful lenses could clearly show a bear"s nose hairs from a quarter mile, but this created distortions in depth. Natural Photography wanted better than that. Beryl would be photographing the bears from less than three feet, no zoom lens at all. For an hour at a time she would breathe the air warmed by their lungs and live.

The lecturer explained, "This next series of pictures shows a bear"s autopsy. The bear was killed trying to break into a house that contained a woman and five children. The bear was starving. The woman shot it three times in the center of the skull while it struggled through her broken front door.

"In northern Canada," the lecturer continued, "most households contain at least one gun." He turned to look over his shoulder at the slide. "The woman said that before the bear stopped breathing, her children were touching its paws and teeth."

The first slide showed the bear before the operation. It lay on its back across three examination tables, large steel instruments all around. Its head was turned away so that it looked almost as if it were taking a nap, belly up, as they were reported to do when the weather was hot.

The next slide showed the carca.s.s with all the skin stripped off. She heard the shocked grunt from the audience. The bear looked just like a man. A tall naked man, his face turned away. A potbelly, elbows, biceps, flat long feet, knees. Genitals. A male. His flensed body pink and woven with white muscles and tendons. His hands strangely warped. His chest a bit too narrow, his legs and arms overly thick. His hips hooked on wrong. She forced herself to look, to catalog each difference. She didn"t want to be photographing naked men in white bear suits out there. She wanted to see wild bears when she looked at them. Only bears. The face was very different. That flat beast face. The thick muzzle, the curving wide brow. And sharp animal teeth.

For the rest of the autopsy pictures she"d looked away.

"In the Arctic," said the lecturer, reading from his notes, "the bigger the animal, the more easily it can keep a constant body temperature during the winter. Most of the animals are quite large: polar bears, caribou, seals, whales, wolves, muskox. Polar bears live in some of the coldest areas on earth. Areas even now unused to humans" touch."

Beryl imagined them wandering about in the huge white land that covers the top of the world. The wind whistles and the animals lie down, nestling into the drifts. The snow is warmer than the air by twenty degrees. They sleep within their blankets. Their rumps point into the wind, the snow slowly erasing them from sight.

The lecturer flipped to a new card. He looked up once at the audience and then back down to continue to read. Beryl thought he had probably written out the notes as whole sentences. "It is hard to estimate how many polar bears there are in the world, for they wander by nature. Comparatively little is known about them. They pa.s.s easily across the borders of countries and swim out far enough into the oceans to be in international waters. They spend the entire winter on the ice, searching for seals, wandering across time and date zones. It is unusual for a single country to locate a bear again once it has been tagged."

Beryl had seen pictures of a bear swimming twenty miles from sh.o.r.e, stroking onward. The barrel of its head showed, the dark wet nose, twisting ears; behind it, the slow V of its wake rolling out across the water was the only clue to its pa.s.sage.

"A polar bear can catch a seal in the water by rising suddenly from beneath," said the lecturer, shifting his weight to his left foot. "On land it can toss a four-hundred-pound seal up into the air. It can run as fast as a horse and knock the back of a beluga whale"s head off with a single swipe of its paw."

Beryl held out her arm, flexed it. She could, she figured, toss a twenty-pound chair into the air with one arm, maybe even a thirty-pound chair in an emergency. She didn"t know, she"d never tried. Large actions embarra.s.sed her. Unlike the men who"d been her compet.i.tors, she had never tested the limits of her strength. She had concentrated on exactly how much could be given away or lost, and what was the very minimum.

CHAPTER 4.

Beryl had been born with a loneliness she didn"t understand until she was well into college. By age five she"d learned to sit quietly, watching the six o"clock news all the way through with her father. She"d seen scenes of national destruction and confusion flash across the screen, the narrator"s voice serious and deep. She"d learned to go on long walks with her mother, keeping her arms slack and close to her body like her mother, moving them only to grasp things or hold people back from herself in crowds, to make small gestures of acceptance or refusal. She"d been told so frequently of how little her parents could afford, she"d learned to think of herself as an unwise luxury.

During freshman year at college, Beryl met Elsie, an emaciated, graceful woman. Beryl admired Elsie"s tired floating walk, her pared-down body, the way she pulled in her skirts to cut past the lunch line. Elsie sometimes brought back cookies or brownies for Beryl and smiled gently while her friend ate them. Elsie seldom ate, and when she did, she nibbled on the edges of things in a way that suggested she was only eating to be polite. Beryl thought Elsie stronger than anyone she"d ever met, without needs or desires, capable of surviving anywhere.

Beryl began to eat less. She"d come to see all the waste in what she ate and soon, when looking down at her body, she saw all the pale, hanging flesh. Needing less satisfied her. No one could take from her what she didn"t want. She ate only when Elsie did. They went everywhere together, strengthening each other. No man ever came between them, for no man could have fit into the harshness of their regime or the height of their ambition.