The Cage

by Audrey Shulman

  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.

  CHAPTER 6

  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.

  She’d had an ulcer at the age of sixteen. Looking at a poster of one in her doctor’s office, she’d felt satisfied that her body was dissolving under the pressure as she thought it must, as she thought the world must also dissolve.

  Throughout her life she’d done all she could to hide her fear, to pretend it wasn’t so strong. Gradually she became the owner of a blank face, controlled hands, a careful voice. She took a chemistry class, drove cars, ate unwashed fruit. She led a normal life, forcing her limbs loose and the smile on her face open and constant like some strange fighting fish. But at night she clutched her belly like her mother, for the uncertainties that were her fate.

  During the day she took pictures, like her father, so she could hold her motionless colored world in her hands and no one could take it away, so no one could change the glimpses of larger moments she had caught, not even if she died tomorrow.

  At one point she’d taken over a hundred pictures of her room to create a large collage that she glued to her ceiling. Each picture, with all the restrained simplicity of a still life, hinted at things much larger. Looking up at that collage at night Beryl felt peace, for she knew that part of herself was revealed as magical, unfrightened, brave.

  Beryl was no longer terrified of death. Not since last year when she skidded a full and lazy circle across four lanes of traffic two days before Christmas.

  She’d been scared before the skid. Two inches of slush covered the interstate and more snow was falling. She hunched over the wheel, neck tense, head forward. The skid happened at the end of her first hour out of Boston. She was in the left lane and saw a glimmer of black beneath the tires of the car ahead of her.

  Ice, she thought, black ice, and then her car swayed. She felt an intense warmth fill her body and she thought briefly of unrolling the window. She turned into the skid as she’d always been told to do and the car began its slow pirouette across four lanes. She saw the flat scared faces of people looking her way from nearby cars. Her own face, she thought, must be flushed. The car spun farther and she floated backward on the interstate watching the headlights of approaching cars through the slowly falling snow. One set of headlights shone much larger than the others and she heard herself say, “Truck.” Staring into the headlights she saw the familiar image of herself dying: her body much older, her face turned away. She saw this image of her death change to herself at twenty-nine. Her body as it sat now, her hands loose on this wheel, the clothes she wore, the expression she showed. She had a feeling within her body almost of peace. The sensation of warmth was gone.

  Her car slowed, stopping in the right-hand lane. It faced directly backward, toward the oncoming truck. Her hand moved to the stick shift, threw the car into reverse. It rolled back into the breakdown lane and stopped. The car trembled slightly as the truck roared by.

  She rolled the window down, noticed with surprise she wasn’t shaking. The wet smell of pine blew into the car and she admired the snow-covered trees by the side of the road. Their silent beauty startled her. Her vision seemed much clearer. Then she opened the door and vomited onto the snow all that remained of her lunch. Nothing solid came up. The taste at the back of her throat seemed so harsh, like hawking blood. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been sick.

  Looking down at that liquid melting through the snow she understood for the first time that this was exactly how it would happen. A normal day, a normal activity and then—death. This idea was new to her. She mulled it over, the wet flakes falling onto her hair, her hand on the door handle, listening to the heavy sounds of the cars plowing by. She thought she must have survived other, less obvious brushes with death—her foot stepping over the soap in the shower, a fever breaking, a bulging can of beans thrown away. They must be happening all the time and she hadn’t noticed. Before, death had always seemed so very unnatural, so extreme and unfai
r, foreign to her life.

  She rubbed some clean snow on her forehead and then swished some around in her mouth. Once the beauty of the trees had begun to seem less severe, she closed the door, cautiously turned the car around and looked over her shoulder into traffic as she waited to merge back in.

  For several days after that she slept longer than normal, and the simplest food tasted wonderful. It was a long time before she realized that her harshest fears had slid behind her somewhere in that pirouette and had been left lying across the snow behind her like a body.

  Two weeks after the skid, Beryl decided to try to photograph a fox that she’d heard lived on one of the large estates in Brookline. She crept up the quarter-mile driveway in the predawn to lie tucked in tight against a log near the fox’s den. The many lit signs saying PRIVATE PROPERTY, SURVEILLANCE DEVICES scared her far more than the fox. For the first half hour she pictured men in black uniforms running through the woods toward her cradling guns, but then she countered it with the image of a small clot of blood heading toward her brain or heart, her motionless shock, her slackening face, the camera sliding out of her hands. That, she realized, was a much more likely threat.

  Lying on her back, she watched the light change slowly in the sky behind the bare winter treetops. A small creature, perhaps a mouse, rustled slowly through the leaves to her left, but she couldn’t see what it was, for she kept the camera pasted to her eye. Her legs went to sleep, and then her back and neck, and still she held the camera to her face, her finger on the button, pointing up to where the fox would most likely appear. She passed into a quiet musing state where she noticed many things without thinking about them. She heard many creatures without feeling panic, forgot her fear of the men.

  She heard nothing different beforehand. She saw only some red fur glistening with dew, large brown startled eyes looking down at her and a small black nose. The camera clicked and the fox leaped over her, one light hard paw pushing off her hand. The picture showed wild beauty, the color of the fur incandescent against the dark leaves, the intelligent eyes, the quiet dawn.

  Death, Beryl realized, wasn’t waiting for her especially, but it would get her no matter what she did.

  A month later, on a bulletin board at the office, she saw a flyer about the polar bear expedition in the fall. Her magazine contract would end in time. She thought if she didn’t do it right away, she never would. She applied for the job.

  Beryl knew why she’d been chosen, why size was an issue, why the cage hadn’t just been made as big as possible, big enough for a whole group of male photographers running from one side to the other, holding their cameras out in front, excited by the nearness of their quarry, the number of their prey, yelling scores to one another, a radio playing in the center of the cage.

  Natural Photography didn’t want her there. The bears didn’t want her there. Most importantly, the pictures could not show her there at all.

  A photograph of nature must always appear as if there were no humans, not even a photographer, within a hundred miles. The viewer must feel that the picture captured the animal and its world without people, urban sprawl and toxic runoff. Here, the world glimmered, pristine and natural, wild and dangerous.

  The point was to take up as little room as possible so the bears would act normally, ignoring her. She was there simply to recognize the truth, point the lens, push the button. To be silent, still and small. She felt sure the magazine would have preferred to rig up a radio-controlled camera rather than have her interfering with the polar bears, in the cage, at risk. But Natural Photography was famous for its photographs. The pictures could not be less than perfect. Instead of the radio-controlled camera, the magazine had settled for the most compact, quiet photographer it could find.

  Two nights before she left, a friend, Sara, had invited Beryl to a party during which she toasted Beryl for her “bravery.” During the toast Sara had called Beryl “the bear woman.” If it had been just one or two strangers there, Beryl wouldn’t have minded the label, but there were at least twenty people in Sara’s living room, not many she knew, and both the women and men stared at Beryl as though she were an artifact the expedition had brought back. The air in the room seemed very close, very warm. Beryl longed to get outside, to cool down. After Sara had made the toast there had been a pause and the people had continued to look at her.

  Beryl was obviously supposed to do something. In this kind of situation her father would always tell a joke, something old and hackneyed that half the audience already knew. People would laugh, bound together by embarrassment, and the party would start again. With mild horror, she heard herself start a joke about three priests in a boat in front of all these people. She didn’t often tell jokes. She wasn’t sure she even understood this one. Once started, though, she staggered on through it, trying to remember the important details. The crowd listened to her, heads tilted, waiting in its judgment.

  Just before the punch line a man interrupted her: “Anyone want another drink?” He rolled his hand out toward the kitchen. The crowd looked over at him.

  Beryl stopped talking, the momentum lost. The women lowered their eyes in embarrassment.

  Another man said, “Yes thanks.”

  Beryl waited for a moment, then tried to speak again.

  The second man added, “Any dark beer.”

  Now a tall blond man leaned down in her direction and insisted that she tell the punch line. He apologized for the rudeness of his friends.

  Beryl said, “No thanks.” She knew it wouldn’t work now. The man insisted. He put his hand on her shoulder. His eyes were earnest and determined; perhaps he thought he was being kind. She told the punch line. The humor was lost and only a few of the women laughed, out of pity.

  She tried to imagine the three men in white fur suits trekking across the frozen sea, their rudeness as some age-old ritualized sparring for power. They were too noisy for a small cold cage on the tundra. They were too noisy even for this party. She felt sure that in the world of the future they would become extinct. Only those used to living on leftovers of one kind or another would survive in the future—women, the poor. Some in India might even flourish.

  At the end of the party the blond man insisted on driving Beryl home. He said the streets and the subway were too dangerous at night for a woman alone. She accepted in the end because several people were watching them and smiling. He seemed to be friends with most of the people here, especially the women, whom he talked to easily, one hand frequently reaching out to touch their hands or hair. He had unusually wide cheekbones and green eyes. The women listened eagerly, smiling at his touch.

  When he and Beryl reached his car parked on the street, he nodded toward it with implied modesty. Its hunched graceful curves gleamed with power and money. Beryl knew that although the car looked small, it was really just compact, like a black hole. If it could be dismantled properly and spread out, it would turn itself into a house with a lawn, or a mountain of food three buildings high. She knew that in the world of the future, there wouldn’t be cars like this even in museums. There would be no private houses with lawns or pleasure vehicles. There would be only small groups of people dependent on one another for survival. There would be hard and constant work for food in a sick and plundered nature. These cars would exist only in photographs, along with the bears.

  As he put the car into drive, Beryl heard the smooth clunk of the doors automatically locking. She looked at her door uneasily.

  “Safety mechanism,” he said as he accelerated out onto the street. “So neither of us falls out on the turns.” He drove competently and too quickly as he chattered about his work in international banking. He frequently took his eyes away from the road to face Beryl as he spoke. When he did this, she found herself looking away from him and ahead to the road to watch for upcoming obstacles.

  Parking in front of her house, he leaned over her more quickly than she’d thought possible. The air in the car contracted. She pressed back against the door. The car
became a cage. He was so tall and hollow she had a momentary impression they could not be of the same species. No one watched them now and he regarded her intently with the sort of expression men wore when absorbed with fixing furniture or watching football. The kind of expression one had when alone. She thought she could try turning around to unlock the door, but she didn’t want to have her back to him at all.

  “Back off,” she said. She startled herself at the clear depth of her voice.

  He didn’t seem to hear. He touched his hand to her face and said he felt honored being this close to such an untamed woman. She pulled her head back flat against the glass of the window. His hand followed.

  She thought, An untamed woman. She said, “Get away.”

  His hand slid down her neck, his fingers slipped beneath her shirt at the collarbone. She was pressed sideways into the seat. She couldn’t get any farther away. To her own surprise, she pulled her arm back and punched her fist into the hard bridge of his nose with a strength she’d always dreamed about releasing. Beneath her hand she felt a small click, like a light switch. Beneath her hand his mouth opened in a high thin shriek.

  She unlocked the door, pulled it open and walked up the path to her home, where she paced shakily behind the locked door for an hour before she could sit down and look in disbelief at the hand that had committed such violence.

  She needed to leave this place.