The Cage (12 page)

She smiled up at Jean-Claude and realized she only played with a terror he had lived.

“Hey,” Beryl asked, “can you also look at my parka and clothes for the cage? I got everything the magazine recommended but I'm still worried about sitting outside in the wind. Do you mind?” In Maggie's car, even with all her gear on and the heater going full blast, Beryl's feet and fingers went numb, while her back sweated against the seat.

She opened the closet, pulled out everything and laid it across the bed. She'd brought two suits of polypropylene underwear, three flannel shirts, several Icelandic sweaters,
Thinsulate pants, Gore-Tex overpants, the green and gleaming parka that zipped up to a small hole for breathing and vision, two pairs of gloves, three hats, six battery-powered wool socks, boots large enough for moon landings, goggles and a face mask. Each piece of clothing was emblazoned with the insignia of the
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company. She disliked wearing the electric socks the most, for they always smelled lightly of burning wool. She hadn't turned them on after the first day; the smell made her too nervous. She imagined her feet catching fire. The clothing took up an impressive amount of space, much more of the bed than she did when she lay down.

Beside her, Jean-Claude started shaking. At first she thought he trembled from some sort of flashback to an expedition, to the cold and the want. She thought briefly about backing slowly out of the room. Then she looked at his face and saw that he was laughing. He held the back of his hand against his mouth and his face had changed so completely he almost looked like the boy of twenty he was.

She looked back at the pile of clothing and began to smile. When she walked to Maggie's car with all of the clothing on, she breathed as slowly and stiffly as an astronaut.

“I'm sorry,” he said, turning to her. His face grinned young and happy. At that moment she could almost imagine him holding books under his arm and talking about grades. He said, “You could drown in all that. The Inuit clothing is better. Warmer. Come to my room. I have an extra suit.”

Jean-Claude's suit had two separate layers. On the inside was a shirt and pair of pants of caribou skin. The outside was made of wolf hide, with wolverine trim about the face.

“Put the caribou layer against the skin,” Jean-Claude explained. “No clothing underneath. Fur faces out.” He ran his fingers over the nap of the caribou. “Wear the outside layer with the fur facing in. Don't need anything else but socks, boots and gloves. With the body warm, the face can take intense cold. Has to. Masks simply freeze with the moisture from breathing.

“Ice is a problem. Out there.” Jean-Claude's eyes shifted to look out the window. Beryl watched them move slowly back to her. “You sweat and exhale moisture. It freezes to your clothing. This suit is made of fur, doesn't retain ice. If you fall in water or sweat really hard, take it off and shake it. The ice shatters off. It's dry again. Not like wool, where the moisture invades the cloth.”

She went into the bathroom to try the suit on. His shelves were bare except for a toothbrush and toothpaste. She coughed to cover the noise of opening the medicine cabinet. Only a hairbrush. Beneath the sink was a first-aid kit big enough to be a doctor's bag.

She stripped and pulled the suit on. The caribou skin ran down over her chest and arms, supple, soft and light. She pulled on the pants and tied the thongs at the waist. She smelled smoke and leather, the sweat of sled dogs and Jean-Claude, a working smell like bitter wood. The short thick fur of the caribou stood out from her body. She could feel the
stitches on the inside along her belly and shoulders, but they were so small and tight she couldn't see them even when she brushed back the hair. She pulled the outer layer on. The thick fur rustled over her face. As the hood settled into place, she breathed in a musk as thick and sweet as skunk: wolverine or wolf. The smell dissipated almost immediately. She didn't know if she'd gotten used to it already or if it faded quickly in the fresh air.

She stood in the white tiled bathroom, light and flexible. With each movement she made, the fur of the two layers shivered and brushed up against each other. The fur made no sound; rather, it created a distinct feeling like when the hair on her neck stood up, that feeling all across her body, the interlocking and giving of bristles. It seemed she had always waited for this feeling, the soft skin of a caribou brushing up between her legs. She felt strong and big. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was surprised at her new mass, the smells she encompassed. She wondered if this was how the bears felt.

She went into the bedroom to show Jean-Claude how the suit fit. He pulled the hood forward over her head as far as it would go. She could feel the wolf fur against her cheeks. He pulled at the bottom of the parka to make sure it went down far enough, then swept the front of it up and back to look at the way she'd knotted the thongs of the pants.

“No,” he said, “never double-knot these.” Her stomach was exposed. His hand held the material of the parka up against her ribs. If he pulled on the thongs to see how tight they were,
he would see her pubic hair. “You have to untie the pants to shit and pee. If you take off your gloves for the knot, you could lose your fingers.” He let go of the material, stepped back a bit. “It's like the moon out there. Have to think ahead.” He tapped the side of her head. “Think all the time. Can't touch metal. Must protect your eyes. How deep is the snow? Your lips frozen? Hands still work? Should you run to warm up now or will you need that energy later?”

The smells and Beryl's own heat came up to her through the neck of the suit. The sensations melded together into the feeling of a single body. Always before when she had stood, clothed or unclothed, in front of a man's gaze she had felt deficient, too small. Now she stood in the smells and skins of many bodies and felt herself to be larger than she'd ever been.

He told her that if she'd worn the clothing
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recommended into the cage, she wouldn't have been able to move enough in its bulky mass to clap her hands to stay warm. Every year they sent people up here like that, and it was fine so long as they stayed inside heated cars or houses. But when they tried to go out on the snow for a while, things happened.

When Jean-Claude stood up from checking the length of the suit's legs, she found herself blushing. He said he was concerned that the suit might be too tight. He pushed back the hood, reached into the back of the neck to make sure there was enough room for the extra heat to escape. His arm stretched up and over her shoulder, his body leaning forward against the outer fur. She felt the smooth imprint of each of
his three fingers against the bare skin between her shoulder blades. The wolf skin rustled.

Back in the bathroom she pulled the suit off and put her own clothes on with regret. Her clothing seemed scentless, plain and light without the fur. Zippers were inordinately mechanical, buttons foreign. Holding the suit in her arms, she returned to the other room. There was a chair in the corner, but she sat down beside Jean-Claude on the bed. He looked at her, then away. His eyes roved slowly over the blank white walls. She wondered what he looked for. She shifted slightly closer to him on the bed. She wanted to touch his skin, to find out if it was warmer than average. Perhaps he was a small furnace like Maggie.

Jean-Claude said, “When the British explored the Arctic, they wore the normal navy uniform. Weren't allowed anything else. They thought nothing could be as good as two layers of British woolens.”

Beryl was glad he was finally talking. She wanted him to continue. “Didn't they cheat?” she asked. “Once they got here, didn't they ignore the rule?”

“Difficult to smuggle other clothes on board. Certainly couldn't wear them in public. The officers punished that.” Jean-Claude looked at the wall as though he read the words there. She wondered if he cared who he was talking with. She wondered if he had any friends, any siblings. “Each year a boat was trapped in the ice. The ice floes would grind together over the months. The boat's hull would crack. The
men froze or starved slowly. Winter's nine months long here. Most of it's a single night. With no sun, they could be awake at noon or three in the morning. It didn't matter, still dark. They could stay awake for two hours or twenty. Didn't matter. Time passes slowly that way.”

Beryl watched his hands. They lay in his lap, too big and heavy for the rest of his body. They had thickened knuckles and deep calluses. She wondered if they hurt.

He turned to look at her for a moment. “In situations like that,” he said, his words clear and careful, “you've got to understand what you live for, exactly. You've got to be able to hold on to it. If you don't have it, or if you forget, you die.”

He watched her. She wasn't sure how to respond to what he'd said. It seemed he was waiting for something. “It must be a horrible death,” she offered.

He turned away. She couldn't tell if he was satisfied or not. “There was this one Dutch captain. The ship ran into an iceberg. It's easy to do. Some of the floes are the size of city blocks, switching directions with the wind. The captain ran forward, his hands held out like this.” Jean-Claude put his hands up in front of him, his shoulders pushing behind. “Ran up to the floe, placed his hands against the ice. He was sucked down between the ship and floe. His men watched it. He'd been a good captain.” Jean-Claude let his hands fall back into his lap.

“Part of his ship survived. It fell over on the ice with seven men inside. They had no food. They had no wood but the piece of the ship around them. They slowly burnt it in pieces.
They floated about on the ice. They bled one another in turn, drank the blood from a shoe. After a month a man went out onto the ice to kill himself. He saw another ship passing. They were rescued.”

Jean-Claude turned toward her. His face was blank. He held his hands palm up in a gesture she didn't understand.

She reached out and ran her fingertips across his palm. The skin was thick and hard, split open in places. Warm. She pulled her hand back and smiled at him, embarrassed.

Jean-Claude looked at her, confused, suddenly very young.

On their last night in town they all stayed around after dinner talking until late. They drank and looked hungrily about at strangers passing by the table. None of the four attempted to talk to any other people. So far as Beryl knew, only she and Jean-Claude actually knew anyone in town. Jean-Claude seemed to know every person who walked by smelling of dogs and gasoline. Each one looked around at the
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group and then gave Jean-Claude a silent nod. He nodded back.

Most of the people he knew were men, but Beryl noticed one woman. Small with dark eyes. Beryl looked to see how Jean-Claude nodded back. She could tell nothing from him, his patient steady gaze, his precise nod. She realized she was getting quite curious about his life.

David began to talk about his home in southern California. He said, “I live right on the beach with a friend, near San
Diego. We got the place in order to snorkel there. We used to snorkel every day. I like the silence, you know, the light and the fish. So much movement and color in such a small area.” David breathed out through his mouth. “I never filmed that world there. I never wanted to, you know?” He looked about at them.

“In the last few years, though, it's changed. I don't know what happened. It wasn't anything abrupt, not any one thing, just all the developments, all the new towns, a small oil spill.” He picked up his napkin and rubbed his thumb across its edge. “Now when I walk down to the beach, the sound is the same. The sun is the same, the waves. But I wade into the surf and the water is empty.” He put the napkin down.

Beryl watched Butler as David talked. He seemed slightly confused by the story, or perhaps by other clues, by the way David mentioned his “friend.” Butler looked at David's face and then, for some reason, at his hands. He shifted his chair away from David, but not far. He still looked confused.

David pestered Jean-Claude to do some calls of arctic animals. Jean-Claude finally agreed.

“Snow grouse,” he said, pulling his upper lip in and making the clucking and whispering calls of the white bird with the astonished eyes, the bird that slept beneath the drifts each night and in the morning stuck its head up through the snow like a periscope. Space and cold echoed in his calls as physical as a touch on Beryl's face.

Jean-Claude didn't move his hands to make the call. He
simply fixed his eyes on open space, pursed his mouth and made the noise. Beryl assumed he didn't use his hands because when he needed to do these calls outside, his hands would be covered by gloves.

“Arctic fox,” he said next. He barked and yipped the small voice of the scavenger, busy, hungry, constantly complaining.

“The wolf.” He craned his neck upward and Beryl watched the sound roll up from the bones of his chest. A howling, curling call that poured out and quieted the entire dining room at the first note. The sound of speed and power, of loneliness and snow. A roomful of faces turned to look at him.

Jean-Claude put his head down. He blinked at all of them, then around at the dining room. He didn't seem to realize that his imitation would attract any attention. Someone dropped a fork clattering to the floor. With the silence broken, people shifted a little in their seats. The dining room quickly returned to normal.

Beryl asked about the polar bear, what sounds it made.

Jean-Claude turned to her, looking for a second without recognition. Then he spoke. “The polar bear makes no noise. It's a loner. No need to talk to other bears, except in raising cubs or when angry. The only sounds are from its breath.”

She thought of its noises—hissing, chuffing, the snow settling back after its black-bottomed paws have already moved on.