The Cage Part 6

The doctor asked her what kind of clothing she had for the cage. Beryl looked down at her hospital gown and the bandages. She recited the Natural Photography list.

"Yes," he said, "yes." He nodded. "That's good. But never more than twenty minutes."

"Yes," Beryl said, "yes." She had no intention of wearing the Natural Photography suit again. She thought if she had been able to move more easily she could have kept warmer, if her vision hadn't been so restricted by the hood she might have been able to find her way back.

The day before they left, the doctor took off the bandages. Beryl's feet had been the least prepared for the cold. She hadn't worn the electric socks, just five pairs of wool. She thought maybe the circulation had partially been cut off by all the material. She examined her feet slowly, carefully. In outline they now reminded her of cartoon feet, like the Flintstones', only the big toe and three others. So much simpler, three such a magical number. She tried to imagine wearing sandals again or standing barefoot by a pool. Someone staring at her feet, knowing something was wrong, but not sure what. She imagined, in the heat of the sun, by the blue glare of the pool, trying to explain. She remembered rocking forward through the storm. She felt again the strength rising in her limbs.

Her feet were peeling; white patches of dead skin stuck out across her toes, ankles, soles. The patches peeled off easily, pink skin beneath. A scab lay where each of her little toes used to be. The smallness of the scabs surprised her a bit, the exact circ.u.mference of her old digits. She'd had many bigger sc.r.a.pes on her knees as a kid. She pressed her thumbs into the empty place where her flesh used to be. It felt as if her toes were still there, curled in, pressed tight against her feet.

She pulled her hands away. Her body had grown smaller, losing weight once again. There would be more s.p.a.ce within her shoes, a small pucker for an extra fold of socks to fill.

She eased her feet out of the bed and stood up slowly. The weight shifted more onto the outside of her arches. She'd never been conscious before of her baby toes, never really noticed them, yet now the lack of them pushed her legs out just a touch to compensate. She stepped forward, holding on to the bed, rolling slightly, cautious. Her feet didn't leave the ground all the way. She shuffled, her arms held out, her head up. As she had in the storm, as awkward as a newborn.

She looked down triumphant.

For a moment she thought she saw white patches of fur growing out from her ankles.

CHAPTER 17.

They left on Monday morning, five days behind schedule, on the morning the bus arrived. Natural Photography had had the Arctic Traveler designed for the expedition in hopes of selling a whole line of them to the companies that maintained the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The first thing that struck Beryl when she saw the bus was its vast black tires. They stood easily eight feet high, wider than she was tall and with tread deep enough to swallow her whole fist.

Butler slapped his hand against the tires as affectionately as against a horse's neck. "There's no air inside these babies. Air would contract too much at the first real chill. They're not even made of rubber. Some sort of new compound of Mylar and metal." Looking closer, Beryl saw that the tires had a light silver shimmer, like a puddle with oil in it. "They've been tested in cold down to eighty below," Butler continued. "With tires this wide the bus can hump its way up a mountain of ice."

He crouched slightly to point out a network of tubes and cylinders curving beneath the high belly of the bus. Some of the tubes looked as if they were made from the same material as the tires, but the cylinders were made of a light metal. The whole thing looked as complex as the exposed innards of an animal. The bus stood so high on its tires Beryl could have crossed beneath if she walked with her head tilted just a bit to the side. Even on four legs, the bigger bears would have to crawl to get under the bus, their front legs held out as they shuffled forward.

"There's a holding tank for waste," Butler said, pointing. "It's carried along under here so we don't dirty up where we travel. Very environmental and all. It's used as insulation for the main gas tank." Butler pointed farther back. "There's even an extra safety tank with enough fuel for fifty miles or five days of heat, whichever you prefer."

Above them the bus hunched heavy, a metallic lime green. Beryl wondered if the green was a misguided attempt to make visitors from temperate zones feel more at home. Butler swung open the doors, which hissed and sighed just like those on a Greyhound bus.

Holding them back for a moment with his arm across the doorway, Butler smiled at them and said, "You know, I don't want you thinking this is going to be roughing it in any way. I'm talking a VCR, microwave, stereo. This thing's so s.p.a.cious it's really our little arctic RV. Arctic RV, don't you like that? We've got a Kelsey generator-the size of a V-8 and twice as efficient. We can afford to be comfortable." The four of them would share four hundred square feet for the next three weeks. On weekends they would make the three-hour trip back into Churchill to take a break from each other. The project would be done whenever the ice froze and the bears stalked away across it.

The bus's engine was in the front, beneath the driver's seat. When they started it up, the vehicle heaved into motion, rumbling and groaning, making normal conversation difficult in the front room. The scenery moved by very slowly. Jean-Claude drove and Butler sat happily in the pa.s.senger seat, studying the instruction manual and yelling out every feature of the bus and the corresponding set of directions. Beryl thought Butler had probably gotten hold of his first car long before he was legally allowed to drive, simply for the pleasure of taking the engine apart, tracing the insides of each of its components, and putting it back together again. When Butler pointed out an instrument on the dashboard, his hand ran over the object as though stroking a prize pet.

For each new feature essential to the bus's operation, Jean-Claude glanced at the diagrams available, asking questions until he was sure he understood. He shook his head over the extras that Butler seemed so pleased with. Beryl looked outside. The thermometer registered eighteen below.

David and Beryl decided to explore further. Behind the front room, which served as a living/dining/driving room, lay the kitchen and bathroom. Each room hummed busily with details designed to create a plush and comfortable look: hand-spun rugs glued to the floor, imitation wood paneling, calming colors that discouraged feelings of isolation and surging helpless fear. The rooms were eight feet tall, and Beryl noticed that every inch was put to use. In the kitchen pots hung from the ceiling above the oven. Everything had its place, locked in with an audible snap. Already Beryl wanted to move things around. She remembered the science museum exhibit of the square yard of s.p.a.ce, tried to imagine this bus shrunk even further. Her imagination failed.

In the kitchen David and Beryl shuffled around each other opening cupboards and drawers, prying at the pictures glued onto the wall. In the tiny s.p.a.ce they moved almost as closely together as they had when photographing bears from the van. She reached in front of him to pull at the toaster nailed to the counter. He put a hand on the top of her head to hold it safely out of the way while he opened a cabinet door above her. As on a ship, the plates and gla.s.ses had their exact places. Velcro nets fastened around the gla.s.ses and small p.r.o.ngs held the cups. The cupboards below were packed with every type of preserved food she could imagine-artichoke hearts, jars of pesto, mandarin oranges, tamarind concentrate and hoisin sauce. Cooking and eating were two of the few pastimes possible on board; the bus's designers had planned to make them as enjoyable as possible.

Opening the cupboards at face level, Beryl noticed she was leaning most of her body against David and that his hand had slipped down to comfortably cradle the back of her neck. He was rummaging through the spices muttering something about Scotch peppers. She felt no tension at being this close, only the physical comfort of another body. She knew at some point the expedition would be over. The four of them would separate. They would make promises of reunions, future expeditions, but in the end they would leave the others and the Arctic and go back home. She would find another freelance job in the city. A few months later she would get a complimentary video of the show created from their trip. She would take it to her parents' house to show them, to explain her experience, but she would find that her story wasn't on the video. The four team members would hang back, invisible. Only the bears would be seen, stalking slowly through a world without people or arctic buses.

"Yugh," David said, pulling down a plate from the cupboard. "What is this s.h.i.t? 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. "h.e.l.l, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 gla.s.s face. Really, quite a neat-looking watch. I wish I had it now. Then, it b.u.mmed me out. I wrote a depressed letter to the manufacturer talking of my broken trust and decreased belief in the a.s.surances of adults." He picked up a gla.s.s 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. .h.i.t 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 embarra.s.sing." 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 h.e.l.l's going on here?" Butler looked down at David's b.u.t.t 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 bl.u.s.tered 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 gla.s.s 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. s.p.a.ce 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.

CHAPTER 18.

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 basketb.a.l.l.s. 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, pa.s.sing 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 att.i.tude 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 trespa.s.sers. 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.

They looked for a while out at the world. She could hear what was probably a bear chewing on the edge of a tire below.

She turned to Jean-Claude, touched his cheek with her glove and then reached forward to kiss him. Again she smelled his fresh wood smell. She tasted his lips, cold and surprised.

He pulled away, looked out at the landscape for a moment, then turned to her and kissed her back.

She pulled him closer. He tried to touch her face. His mouth felt warm. The skins between them rustled.

Someone thumped on the hatch. They jumped. Dimly they heard David yelling from below, "Dinner's ready."

She pulled back. Over Jean-Claude's shoulder she could see a huge bear yellowed with time, thirty feet away. It paced back and forth watching them, its flat head snaking about.

At dinner she caught David's speculative glance. She blushed a bit under his gaze. When no one else was looking he narrowed his eyes, then wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. His face was so mobile, it could be the very mask of lewdness. She looked away, could feel the giggles welling up inside, tried to think only about cutting up her meat. Butler looked up from his dinner in time to catch David smiling widely at her reaction. Butler looked around the table, uncertain what was happening.

"The first time I met my present love was three years ago in court," David said. He leaned a little closer to Beryl and added, "We live together even now. It's a long-term thing. It's so nice not to be considered just some cheap love slave." Beryl wouldn't look at David. She was scared she would laugh. Jean-Claude wouldn't look up at any of them. He had two high spots of color in his cheeks. Rebuffed by the others, David began to address his remarks to Butler.

"Anyway, I was in court for running a stop sign, only there was no stop sign there. I had pointed that out at the time to the police officer, but he hadn't seemed all that interested. Chris was there to lend emotional support to a friend fighting a no-left-on-red rap. When it was time for Chris's friend to defend herself, she couldn't even stand up and so Chris did, giving this impa.s.sioned speech. From the moment I first heard that voice, I was in love."

Beryl noticed that at no time did David slip and reveal a gender. Sitting beside Butler, he leaned in closer, smiling, involved in his story. Butler looked around confused, then a little nervous. He leaned away from David, closer to Beryl. His knee touched her thigh. She crossed her legs, shifting closer to Jean-Claude.

"I congratulated my true love after the speech and, well, we spent the night together. We've been living together ever since." To emphasize the point, he touched Butler on the hand. Butler jumped. David looked startled, then something else moved across his face, something harder. Beryl watched him reach out deliberately to touch Butler on the shoulder. "Feeling a little tense?" he asked.

Butler leaned away. David looked for a moment at his hand hanging in the air between them.

For the rest of the meal, David stared at Butler and occasionally slid his chair closer in order to reach food on that side of the table. He b.u.mped their shoulders together. Butler ducked his head down, turned away. His face reddened like a bashful girl. David smiled a hard lopsided smile.

She knew Butler's anger would be terrible.

When she was sure the others were asleep or at least should be, she tiptoed to Jean-Claude's bunk. She touched his bare shoulder. He awoke instantly. She could hear the slight change in his breath. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and awkwardly reached forward to touch her face. They returned to her bedroom because Butler slept above Jean-Claude's room; if David heard he wouldn't care as much. She pulled Jean-Claude's body after her into her bunk, closed the door.

She held him close. He seemed confused about what to do. She wondered if he was uncertain because of his youth or because he met few women on these expeditions. Maybe he knew no one well. He was gentle and awkward. He sighed softly in surprise.

They weren't sure how the sound might carry. They breathed as deeply as in sleep, their movements slowed to the restlessness of dreaming. His body smelled sweet as cedar. He was slight and hard, made only of bone and sinew. Beryl thought he wouldn't change much in age, no fattening or shrinking. He would change little even in death, just a slight stiffening.

Afterward he cried. Like his laugh he made no sound as he cried, just his slight rocking breath and the water on her shoulder. She pulled him closer into her side.

In the morning when she awoke, she was alone.

CHAPTER 19.

"Hey Butler," David said at breakfast. "You know, that turtleneck is just the perfect color for you." He smiled at Beryl and raised his eyebrows in antic.i.p.ation of Butler's response.

Butler wouldn't look up from his cereal. He said, "It's just a shirt."

"But it's sea bottle green. It brings out your eyes," said David. Beryl was surprised that he could undertake this baiting of Butler so lightly.

Butler stirred his cereal around and around. Some of the flakes began to break up. "Hey Jean," he said, p.r.o.nouncing it like "Gene," "why don't you tell us about the worst time you've ever had out here?" He smiled up at Jean-Claude, enthusiastic for this new topic. "Tell us about the last time you went out and everyone didn't make it back."

Jean-Claude put his toast down, looked at Butler and then around the table at the others. They were silent, watching him. Beryl realized she wasn't the only one who had wondered about the bad things that could happen on this journey.

Jean-Claude seemed confused by their interest. "Those times," he said slowly, "weren't comic books, not stories. People died. People I knew." He got up from the table. "Excuse me," he said and left.

Butler looked embarra.s.sed. "I didn't think he would ..." Beryl noticed that when he was upset his mouth hung soft and unbalanced; his face didn't look so guarded. "Look, I've got some notes to finish up." He left, carrying his dishes.