The Cage (3 page)

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 pass 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 shore, 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 passage.

“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 embarrassed her. Unlike the men who'd been her competitors, 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.

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.

Beryl began to understand her own body as the enemy, her hunger as an illusion. She planned out her daily meal each morning, imagining how each morsel would smell in the bowl, feel against her teeth, down her throat, and yet longing even more to be like Elsie and not desire it at all. She kept her hands in her pockets during class so she could touch her belly and thighs, analyzing, appraising. When her hips became those of a young boy's she felt happy; when her face changed to something elegant and elemental she felt euphoric. She didn't care that her breath smelled of decay, that her vision swam when she stood up too quickly, that she needed long afternoon naps during which she could roll up out of herself and look down at the wrinkle her body made, almost completely erased.

During this time, her vision of ideal femininity was naked of extra weight, of clothes, and of need. It stood lithe and strong as a cat, wild and free of anything offered by others.

Elsie came down with pneumonia sophomore year and had to drop out. The doctors told her parents to make her gain twenty pounds before they let her go back to school. She never came back. Slowly, Beryl found herself eating some, eating more—still not enough, but she no longer lost weight. For years after that she thought she had a hunger, a laziness, much bigger than most people's. Only slowly had she taught herself to eat normally, to believe she had the right.

For her first apartment away from home, made possible once she'd experienced some success with her photography, she'd been determined to live opulently and find the largest space possible for the money. But once she'd confronted the enormous swelling areas she'd have to learn to expand into, to fill with her taste and her emotions and herself, she'd decided to choose a smaller place close to the subway.

Beryl had always envied men, the ease of their bodies running forward, strong as animals, uncontested hunger palpable as a rock in their mouths. She'd always wanted to be strong and fast and to lean back in her chair feeling dangerously muscular, to know the world was set up for her. Men had an easier time at jobs, at home, at parties. They joked and all the women laughed obediently, startled at the beauty of the men's faces shifting with unquestioned ease.

Beryl imagined herself flipping a four-hundred-pound seal
up into the air with one hand. She had a neighbor almost that big. He must weigh at least three-fifty and was very hairy. He could never shave all the rolls on his neck; hair stuck out of the creases like the legs of bugs. She imagined herself stalking her neighbor, the breath in her chest coming as a distinct wind, her shoulders wide as a door. She lowered her head and felt the fur grow thick and warm across her back, her head become wider and flatter. She charged, her body swinging forward with an ease she'd never known. The seal, her neighbor, a single curve of muscled fat, roared up, tried to turn, to escape to the hole in the ice beside him. She shoved her paw, wide as a dinner plate, under him, flexed her arm. Her neighbor flipped once neatly through the air, forming an almost complete ring with his body. He fell stunned. She stalked leisurely forward, salivating, raising her arm again. She felt the power of her size.

Beryl had grown into a short thin woman who moved about the subjects of her photography with an easy silence that alarmed none of them, not even the wild injured animals the zoo sometimes cared for. These creatures, eyes dark with pain, faces bleeding from charging the unfamiliar metal bars, stood trembling in the darkest corners. She'd seen animals like these kill themselves with fear, deer leaping upward to slam their heads against the bars again and again, trying to get away from this strange place. Beryl made no sudden movements to start that terror, but neither did she stand rigidly still like a hunter. She relaxed and moved slowly, focused her cameras without threat. She breathed as they breathed,
stood heavy and patient as though she were also captive. She didn't use pet names or baby sounds, didn't hold out empty hands. The animals watched her calming movements, heard soft clicks, patient whirrs, the exhale of her sneakers. The animals' thin-wired ribs shook slightly with each breath.

Her parents never fought outright. They never called each other names, raised their voices, or made wide angry gestures. They fought silently, with stony faces and hardened voices that called each other “honey.” Their silences lasted entire evenings broken only as they cleared their throats over the voices on the television.

Beryl remembered one dinner when into the long silence her mother said, “Well, I had a fine day. Thank you for asking.”

Her father laughed, a harsh sound, more like a bark.

Beryl watched the floor, trying to make faces out of the yellow flecks in the linoleum. The silence unrolled again, the tension greater and greater. Beryl couldn't see any faces in the linoleum. Beneath the table she saw only her parents' feet heavy and set on the floor. Beryl didn't look up.

Years later Beryl asked her mother why they hadn't fought outright and her mother said, “We assumed fights would be bad for a child to see.” Beryl asked if they'd ever fought in private and her mother answered proudly, “Oh no, we always tried to be civilized about it.”

As a child she'd dreamt of her parents ripping each other's bellies out, popping eyeballs, tearing livers and lungs. Surprisingly, the emotion she'd felt when she awoke had been relief.

Absolute zero is minus two hundred and seventy-three degrees Celsius. Nothing can get colder or more still. Atoms slow, then stop. That is absolute death, not even the chance for life, for change or energy at the lowest level. Scientists compete to achieve that coldness in their metals, in their labs, with large machines, powerful computers. Beryl read about it in the newspaper, while she sat in the park along the river. Yet no scientist has theorized an absolute highest temperature, the upper limit for material to exist without exploding into sheer energy. The center of the sun is somewhere around fifteen million degrees. With more pressure to hold things together it could get even hotter than that.

Life on this planet thrives so much closer to the least amount of heat, of movement and energy. Closer to the absolute black stillness of space and death, far from the white of the sun. Polar bears are some of the creatures best adapted to this cold. At minus twenty degrees Celsius they lie down with
their rears to the wind; at minus forty they cover their faces. At that temperature metal becomes brittle, vodka freezes, a rose shatters.

White fur, black mouths. The bears thrive in the cold, padding slowly across the Arctic.

Beryl knew that in the future world of small things, the polar bear would probably not exist. The greenhouse effect will warm the North Pole by up to nine degrees. The ice that the bears live on during the winter won't form until later in the year and will melt earlier, depositing the bears one by one into a bay a thousand miles wide. The seals that the bears live on won't be able to survive without the firm ice. They will have nowhere to sleep at night, nowhere to birth their calves. They'll swim, exhausted in the slowly freezing water, pregnant, wiggling their weight onto stiffening ice not quite ready to take them. The ice will bend slowly beneath them until the seals are once again left swimming. They'll drown, the weight of their unborn calves spiraling them down in the dark arctic waters.

The cod that the seals eat live off the algae that grows on the ice. The algae will have no place to grow. The Arctic is a rigid world: only a few species live there year-round, can thrive in its short growing season. In the Arctic the tire slashes of a single truck stay for years; the winter ice only deepens them. The ever-increasing marks of humanity—the tracks of snowmobiles, bulldozers, pipelines—are easily seen. In a climate where the camps from the early polar explorers have
frozen into permanent museums, where their huskies still lie curled, their hair fluttering in the wind, where a human shit takes thirty years to disappear, where the smell from a seal's corpse can last for a hundred frenzied arctic summers—in a climate like that a single tossed Coke can could outlive civilization.

The ice that melts from both poles as a result of the greenhouse effect will fill the oceans, raise the waters. Beryl lived in Boston, a harbor town. When she walked along the streets, she imagined the tops of the trees swaying gently with the water, cushions floating by, a child's toy slapping against the roof of a steeple. The light flickered, blue and solid.

The water encroaches on all coasts. Weather patterns change. The Great Plains become desert. Food prices rocket up. Winter becomes more hesitant, with plants trying to grow in February. Annual migrations are confused and freak storms appear: thunder in January, blizzards in May. Some species—polar bears, moose, salmon—are wiped out. Others—cockroaches, rats, sea gulls—propagate wildly.

This was the unbalanced, wounded world Beryl expected in the future; this was the world she thought she'd been made for. A world meant only for small, patient survivors, all things wondrous left only in books, the photographs strange as fables.

That's why she wanted to photograph the polar bear. She didn't want to leave behind a picture of herself, or a gravestone, or a résumé. She didn't want to pass on her genes or write a book or climb a large mountain. She simply wanted
to have taken photographs of a creature awful and strange. A creature who even when caged would be outside of all human containers.

From where Beryl sat in her lotus position, practicing, she imagined she saw the long face of the bear through the bars of the cage. Its cage, her cage. She focused her camera on the creature. It lumbered slowly toward the warm smell of her life. She clicked the camera at every step along the way.

Beryl used to be scared of many things. Chemicals, cars, nuclear war, religion, rusty nails, the ozone layer, AIDS. She would quicken her pace when crossing the street, for she could hear the car accelerating round the corner that would leave her limp and loose as though she were finally relaxing. At the dentist's she would concentrate on her teeth and gums so much that when the first touch of the metal pick came it would puncture her consciousness like the cough of an explosion. During the day she would sometimes lie down in privacy, sobbing in anger for all the fear that filled her soul.