The Cage (2 page)

“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.”

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 space available for each person. She imagined a woman in this space, 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 space 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 glasses and she put on a pair of her husband's jeans to do stretching exercises each day at eleven with a class 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 passed when Beryl understood all that she could lose.

The man exhaled slow and thoughtful and walked by them down the staircase. As he passed, 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 passing 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 attitude
toward it that would result in the kind of pictures she wanted.

At first her drawings of the polar bears looked like shaggy 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 sex a bear from a distance. It's a matter of an educated guess or a tranquilizer gun.” The class 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 mass 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 mass in motion than she could imagine a truck shaking itself into life, its metal skin rippling.

The lecturer touched a button. 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 classified 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 carcass 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.