The Cage

by Audrey Shulman

  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 potbell
y, 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 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.

  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.

  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 breat
hed, 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.

  CHAPTER 5

  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.