The Cage (15 page)

“Yugh,” David said, pulling down a plate from the cupboard. “What is this shit? I think Holiday Inn and Hallmark cards designed this place.” On the plate was the picture of a dewy-eyed, twig-legged fawn sitting up in a pile of leaves, one leaf still perched on its head. “Hell, these are the kind of people who think childhood is cute and restful.”

Beryl pulled down another plate. The material felt light and cheap. The design showed a young woman walking on a beach at dawn, everything colored pink or beige. The wind pushed the woman's clothes against her front, outlining her breasts. The individuality of her face was erased by her hair. Beryl saw the men this plate was designed for, eating off it, uncovering her body with each mouthful. She dropped the plate back onto the counter. It bounced.

“Hey,” said David. “Neat-o.” He dropped the Bambi plate on the counter. It bounced back almost up into his hands. “This stuff is unreal. It's made for big engineers. I bet it's made from Mylar and metal too. If we get a flat tire we can strap these on.” He dropped the plate onto the floor. It made a sharp click and bounced almost up to his knees. He caught it, whipped it at the floor. It came right back up into his hands.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I was definitely one of those who tested the claims of products: ‘unbreakable,' ‘stainless,' ‘waterproof.' I figured it was an express invitation to me, personally. Once I left my watch for three days at the bottom of my aquarium before it finally filled up and stop working. All the numbers peeled off and floated to the inside of the glass face. Really, quite a neat-looking watch. I wish I had it now. Then, it bummed me out. I wrote a depressed letter to the manufacturer talking of my broken trust and decreased belief in the assurances of adults.” He picked up a glass and dropped it straight down. It twacked against the floor and turned in the air. “He sent me a better watch free.

“Yo,” he continued, “watch this.” He pushed up his sleeves, reached for two more plates and began to juggle. He had skill, but the kitchen was too restricted for the plates to achieve more than a small arc. They kept bouncing off the edge of the cabinets or the hanging pans and spinning in ways David didn't expect. The plates hit him on the nose and shoulder and one hit Beryl on the ear. She held her hands out in front of her face and narrowed her eyes nervously.

“And now,” David said while scooping another pile of
plates from the cupboard, “for the rarely tried and never accomplished triple somersault while juggling an entire setting for eight, including soup bowls. Ladies and gentlemen, silence please. This has the potential to be pretty embarrassing.” Beryl watched amazed as David tossed the plates straight up into the air, where they clattered against the hanging pots and the walls and the cupboards. He immediately bent over to attempt a somersault toward the hall, but he seemed to have forgotten how, and his head got in the way as he tried to roll over on his shoulder. The bowls bounced off every surface around him.

He had balanced partway over on his shoulder and head, as though he were about to do a headstand, when Butler stepped into the doorway of the kitchen and thundered out, “What the hell's going on here?” Butler looked down at David's butt and stepped back quickly. Beryl thought he couldn't have looked more alarmed if David had been nude.

Butler retreated into the front room. “Try to keep it quiet,” he blustered over his shoulder.

David stood back up, and he and Beryl looked at each other. He shrugged and they picked up the dishes.

Past the kitchen, they found the storage areas followed by the sleeping area: two bunk bedrooms on each side, one upper, one lower. Beryl crawled into one, dragging her luggage in behind. It reminded her of an animal's den. A complete room four feet tall with a door she could close for privacy and a dresser built into the wall. She couldn't imagine Butler trying to dress himself within its confines. She sat
down in the center of her room. It was almost the size of her cage.

She put her clothes into the drawers without respect for neatness or order. She wanted this place to feel homey, human. Her socks stuck out of the top drawer. She took a picture of her parents out of her bag. It'd been taken by her father using a timer. He'd gone through two rolls of film trying to get the timing and angle right. In all the pictures he'd either been caught halfway to the chair in awkward positions of fast movement, or he'd been sitting in the chair looking expectant and slightly confused. In this picture of both her parents, her father was blurred and only just looking up from the seat he'd taken. Her mother simply looked patient, still, like an old-time frontier woman with one hand on the shoulder of her man.

Beryl tacked the picture to the wall facing where her head would be when she lay down, then changed it so they looked out the window to the whiteness. Her mother wore a summer dress in the picture. She wore sandals. Leaning close, Beryl could count all of her mother's ten toes.

Above she could hear David unpacking his clothes and closing the drawers. She heard him lie back onto the bed. The springs creaked with his weight. She heard a pause. He sighed.

Ten minutes later, David had fallen asleep. Beryl pulled on his ankle. “Grab your camera and parka,” she said. “We still
have the observation deck to see.” The deck was an unheated glass room on top of the bus. The bus's designers said that on average it would stay twenty degrees warmer than outside. Beryl wore Jean-Claude's Inuit suit. She thought she could test it out in the cold of the deck.

She climbed up behind David's boots. When he opened the hatch to the deck, he gasped. She didn't know if it was from the cold or something else.

Sticking her head over the edge, she moved from the world of confines, small things and color schemes to the world of immense blue-white beauty. Snow was falling. Rolling ground receded into a distance hard to comprehend. The horizon curved gently out, smooth as the lip of a bowl. Closer in, ice walls stood up at broken angles. The puddles beneath them lay black and deep.

Churchill was a slight smudge hanging on the horizon behind them, a frozen gray cloud. Space out here was misleading, perspective difficult to grasp, the scale inhuman. She could have been looking across the breadth of the planet. She could have been looking across the landscape of a single cell.

Snow fell slow and graceful as the universe's spin. David and Beryl raised their cameras to their eyes without a word and began to shoot.

After a few photographs, she noticed the cage tied up on the roof behind them. It hunched dark, heavy-looking and small. The cage had seemed much larger when she'd first seen it, contained within a room. Here it sat hard and compact in
a world white and open, like a squat creature from a dream, the kind that lumbered after her as she windmilled away even slower, trying frantically for the speed that she could only dimly remember.

Within ten minutes on the observation deck they saw their first bear. At first she thought the white world had come alive. A boulder stood up, stretched, then moved slowly across the barren plain toward them. It gained slowly. Curious, investigating. She couldn't yet see the movement of its black nose.

She and David went back down to have lunch. Her toes and hands felt numb. She moved carefully on the ladder, trying not to show the heavy uncertainty of her feet, the weakness of her hands. She went to her room, took her boots off. Everywhere on her feet she'd had frostbite, her skin hummed with a speed like heat, like cicadas on a hot summer day. She realized the difference between this cold and the kind she'd been used to in the States. There, when she went outside, even for the whole day skiing in a bad crosswind, nose running and face red, the center of her still remained quite warm. Here, she felt a deep cold. She shivered and shivered. Long after her skin had warmed up, the cold inside her wouldn't go away. Still, she was impressed with the Inuit suit; the other suit had done as badly even inside the protection of a heated car.

The scabs from her little toes had broken open and bled, probably from walking around, moving her feet around in
her shoes. She washed the blood off, put on new bandages, her fingers awkward and thick. It hurt less than she would have imagined. She slowly walked the twenty feet to the dining room, trying to put her feet down more gently, to ease them into each step. Already she walked with a bit of a sway.

When she tasted the roast beef at lunch, she felt like she'd never eaten meat before, had just realized she was a carnivore. She felt a hunger that overwhelmed her. She wolfed another bite and another. The beef tasted rich like chocolate cake, satisfying like wine. She felt as if beef were the thing she'd been thirsting for her entire life. She swallowed a small curl of fat and it tasted so good she gobbled down the rest of it before continuing with the meat. At home she ate only beans and vegetables, bread and rice. Red meat had frequently made her feel sick, constipated. Now she ate it with a feeling near to starvation. She reached for a second helping.

Everyone was looking at her.

“That's a lot of food for a little tuck like you.” Butler tilted his head to look at her with one eye closed. “Don't have a bun in the oven, do you?”

The others looked at him.

“I'm just kidding,” he said. “Gawd.”

Jean-Claude shook again with his soundless laugh. “She's learned fat is how you stay warm up here. That's how the Inuit do it. Up to ten pounds of seal blubber or caribou a day. Plenty of water too.” He turned to her. “Make sure you drink water. The livers of the Inuit are swollen with toxins like basketballs. David should eat that much too. He's going out there.”

David looked repulsed. Sitting beside him, Beryl saw his hand reach down to touch his flat belly.

“No.” David shook his head. “I'm a vegetarian.” His hand probed his gut, searching already for expanding organs.

Beryl continued to eat.

At two o'clock they arrived at the sea. They actually drove a little out onto it, but the snow was suddenly so choppy that David, who'd been driving while Jean-Claude went to the bathroom, stopped to ask his advice about which way to go next.

Jean-Claude backed up the bus as fast as it could go. Once they were on even ground, he stopped and pointed back to where they'd been. Water was already pooling in over their tracks. They could now make out the open sea eighty feet beyond that, a white solid kind of water Beryl had never seen before. With each wave the water bobbed up and down like a heavy plastic sheet. A thick mist rose from the waves and formed a solid wall of steam nearly sixty feet into the air.

“Arctic mist,” Jean-Claude said. “The air is cold. The sea is warmer.”

By this time four bears were following them. The bears stopped, uncertain, thirty yards back. Noses up, heads moving from side to side, they circled steadily closer to join the three bears already there—one rolled over with its stomach exposed like a huge cat sleeping, another strolling and a third sitting patiently at the edge of the solid ice. They looked to Beryl like people spending the day at the beach, passing time. When the bus had approached, all of them turned, heads up.

From inside the parked bus David and Beryl spent some time picking a location for the cage. They wanted a good view in all directions so they could film the bears on their own level without the telephoto, get the bears as they naturally lived. They delayed setting up the cage until the next day in hopes that the bears would have accepted the bus by then and wandered away far enough for them to move the cage to its location.

They didn't have much to do until morning, so David watched some of the videos that came with the bus's VCR. It was impossible to pick up any TV channels so far out, so they had to rely on prerecorded shows—movies, sports events and even old episodes of “Gunsmoke.”

Butler turned on the stereo and listened to music with the headphones. Jean-Claude began to make dinner. Beryl noticed that they seemed quite comfortable being so close, within ten feet of one another, without talking. She found
their attitude awkward, like being in a subway car with the people staring fixedly at the posters. She wondered if they were able to ignore one another this easily now, what would be happening in another two weeks.

Beryl got dressed and went up on the deck again. She could smell the sea along with the subtle musky scent she knew so well. Sitting in the half-dusk, she could not see how many bears were out there. She could only vaguely make out their lumbering shadows below. They paced in and out of the dark around the bus, looking up at its windows. They leaned against its sides and stretched upward with their paws. They crawled under one side and came out the other. One bear at the back of the bus spotted her and crouched repeatedly, swaying its head up and down to gauge perspective and distance. When it jumped, she simply held her breath. The animal hit the bus somewhere below her. The entire bus resonated. The bear staggered away, dazed.

The bears seemed to be more daring out here, as if they knew, away from town, that humans were the trespassers. Perhaps also, Beryl thought, the bears that went into town were the weaker ones, the ones who needed an easier meal from the dump or an abandoned house. The bears here had never scrounged for food, had never run from an encounter with a human, had never been darted with a tranquillizer and handled like interesting merchandise. These bears were the real things.

Jean-Claude came up to the observation deck. He sat
down beside her, his shoulder against hers. “David found some canned pears. He's making tarts for dessert. Dinner's almost ready,” he said. She enjoyed the feeling of weight and warmth against her shoulder. “This is strange for me,” he said, “being out here in a heated bus. Before I've always been on a snowmobile or sled.”

She couldn't imagine slogging forward through this white desert, dogs yipping, throwing themselves against the harness. Without landmarks, she couldn't imagine picking any one place to bed down at night. Or see herself lying there, listening to herself and her dogs breathe upward, the only movement audible for miles.