The Cage Part 4

"No," said Maggie, looking out into the snow. "I dream like that all the time."

The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then away.

CHAPTER 12.

After Beryl was followed by the bear, she often found herself sitting by the window of her hotel room, looking out. She felt differently now toward what she saw. She thought, I cannot go out there, not unless I'm in a car-even outside I have to stay in. The vast white prairie extended to the horizon beneath a solid blue sky. She still hadn't gotten used to the purity of the colors in this thin air, like scenes in a stained-gla.s.s window. Even the browns and grays of the houses in town were less muddy than down south, less dulled. She thought, All this and I can only look. As though it were already on David's film, playing on a flat screen.

She paced sometimes in her room. She thought she should be writing letters to people, making notes to herself, researching, but she couldn't think what to say about this place, or what to read. She certainly didn't want to go downstairs to the bar where David and Butler would be drinking, talking. She would be seeing more than enough of them over the next month. She couldn't go outside, so instead she paced and looked out the window.

One afternoon, she noticed the wooden beams of the ceiling in her room, the thick hand-hewn wood of old colonial houses. She was surprised to find wood that beautiful in this town well beyond the tree line. She stood on a chair to touch one. It gave slightly beneath her fingers. They were made from Styrofoam.

"When I was a child," Maggie said, "I used to dream of being Alec Ramsey. He was this kid in these adventure books I read. He went to all these faraway countries with his black stallion and raced other horses, had adventures. Even though he was always told he couldn't do things at first because he was just a kid, he got to in the end because of his horse and because of his determination. I wanted to be just like him. I thought if I tried enough, I could be him. Only I was a skinny black girl who didn't have a big horse, didn't even have that many friends. I just read a lot. I dreamed of these adventures all the time, but in that heat down there I was too tired even to run across the yard."

The car fishtailed slightly in the deep snow and Maggie slowed down further to a crawl. "When I was twenty I found this man, this good man, who said he loved me. My mom thought he was all I would ever have. I married him immediately. I mean, it wasn't like I hadn't been trying to conform all the time. We had Julie and James. A lot of fighting. I couldn't believe in this role I was playing. I couldn't believe in the apartment and our marriage and the children. No, wait, it wasn't that I couldn't believe in the children. I believed in them more than anything, I just couldn't understand they were mine." Maggie's mouth twitched a little into a smile and she looked out at the snow.

"One day I saw an ad for people needed in the Arctic. They would pay for families to resettle. Gerry didn't have a job then. A month later we were here. He thought it was for a year. Thought this would finally keep me quiet. I thought so too until I stepped out of the plane and felt that wind across all that s.p.a.ce. I'd never smelled anything like it, seen anything like it. Gerry left within the year. I really hope he's happier now."

Within a few years of college Beryl had already had a few photography shows and was making a steady living from freelancing for magazines. At her shows she'd begun to hear strangers say "Findham" a lot, as though by saying her name frequently during any discussion of her photos it would be obvious they understood her meaning. They would confidently ascribe to her name many qualities as though describing a substance like a rock with clear, easily definable veins. She still a.s.sociated her last name with her parents and each time she heard it she saw her mother c.o.c.king the camera, her father adjusting the lights. In a way it was easier for her to imagine her parents taking the pictures all these people came to see.

When she was twenty-six she attended the show of a man three years older than she and as well-established. He specialized in photographing the insides of vegetables, magnifying to huge images the hidden seedy nooks and curls inside. She marveled at his technical expertise. One of his reviews, reprinted in foot-tall letters over the wine and cheese table, said his vision of the alien hidden future was focused, involuted and withering.

Beryl completely believed in his ability, his true claim to his reputation as an artist and a man with a vision. When they'd met she'd felt the firmness of his handshake, the width of his hand. Crow's-feet appeared around his eyes when he smiled; she a.s.sumed they came from peering into a camera and thinking hard. His teeth gleamed so white and smooth she'd known immediately that he didn't smoke or even drink coffee. He said he'd been to two of her shows. She noticed the way he concentrated directly on her face whenever she talked as though she were saying something quite complex and it was critical that he follow. When she turned away to get more wine, she'd also caught the way he glanced down her body. She felt honored and nervous, finished her gla.s.s of wine too quickly. She tried to smile the way she thought he thought she should: a small confident world-weary smile. They went out to dinner.

During the relations.h.i.+p she found herself copying his speech, his mannerisms. He tended to couch his own thoughts in what she considered the impersonal style of textbooks: "It can be a.s.sumed ..." and "It need not be said ..." This style made what he said sound proven and factual. While talking philosophically he habitually brushed back his hair, ma.s.saging his scalp as though he were thinking so hard his head hurt. He twisted out his lips in grimaces while searching for the exact word. Her imitations of his speech never sounded as imposing. Her grimaces looked more like twitches than deep thought.

Gradually he took on the role of older teacher, gave her treatises by Krishnamurti, The Moosewood Cookbook and Diet for a Small Planet. He maintained that eating macrobiotic took less from the world. For her birthday he gave her a carton of recycled dioxin-free toilet paper and some perfume made without animal testing. She had been quite excited by the size of the wrapped package, then confused when she saw the first roll. He had explained the dangers of dioxins; once she saw he was serious she tried to thank him for the present as though delighted by the originality of his thought.

One day when he said she should do her laundry using only baking soda and vinegar, she'd listed all the chemicals he used in his photography. She meant only to tease him, but his face went quite stiff, the nostrils of his thin well-formed nose whitened.

"That," he said, "is Art. One cannot curtail the needs of one's expression, nor divert the means it chooses."

She had worked immediately at mollifying him. In the end he had relaxed only when she maintained that it was really the fault of scientists for not coming up with more ecologically sound chemicals. He was a pa.s.sive victim from lack of choice. He had nodded his head at her wisdom and together they had decried the scientists' greed for profit.

And from the third breakfast they shared together, he had continually told her she should give up coffee.

"It is widely understood that there are three substances dangerous to clear vision," he said the first time he enumerated the evils of coffee. He held out his hand and counted off the items on his large, neatly manicured fingers. Those fingers last night had moved so cleverly across her body she'd almost been scared of them. Afterward she'd traced the outline and texture of his nails and wrists for a long time while he slept. The blond transparent hair on the backs of his knuckles had seemed so vulnerable, so delicate.

"Nicotine," he listed, "alcohol and coffee. Mystics around the world, from early Christians to modern-day Buddhists, agree that these three dull the spirit's sight." She watched his hands, looked at his red lips forming the words. "It's fairly obvious the connection between spiritual sight and art. We must have clear truthful vision."

She was fascinated by the idea that to photograph well, one's soul had to have clarity, as though it were another lens to be fitted onto the camera. Unfortunately she liked coffee. Each morning she made it quite strong using a melior, a ritual that helped her to wake up. He said that any awakening must come from within. Something about the weight with which he uttered advice like that made her see it as a country sampler st.i.tched with little roses and hung on the wall. She knew this wasn't how he'd want her to hear his words.

When he was around in the morning she'd try to wait until he left to have her coffee, but sometimes he'd stay until lunch and then she'd pull the melior out in front of him. Once he asked how it felt to be addicted. Vocabulary about addictive behavior was quite popular at the time, from chemical dependency to dependent relations.h.i.+ps. Several of her friends had confessed to her their addictions and she had felt insensitive and slightly left out that she had no confessions to give in return. She began to wonder if coffee would be acceptable.

"It's like seeing you drink ground gla.s.s," he explained. She smiled shyly at his caring, his protection, but each time she took a sip, he'd look away. She began to enjoy her coffee less and less.

For a week she experimented by not drinking caffeine to see if her photos actually did benefit. She couldn't see much of a difference. She wondered if it took longer than a week to work the impurities out of her soul.

He started to give advice about her work each time they met at her studio. He would state the criticism with his face turned a little away from the photograph so his eyes were narrowed and looking out from the side, the crow's-feet showing, the same pose he favored in the posters advertising his shows. She never ceased to revel in the physical size of his work, blown up to ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide, grainy and hard. Sometimes he nailed wood boards onto the pictures, dusted them with dirt, glued on telephone wiring that curved in and out. The vegetables looked quite alien, like the insides of machines. The critics loved his combination of photography and sculpture. She thought he couldn't have mistakes in pictures that big.

One day over lunch, he asked if she didn't sometimes tire of photographing only animals.

She had been raising a tofu curry sandwich to her lips. She put the sandwich back down. "What?" she asked.

"You only photograph animals," he said. "You must get tired of it. If you do that well with animals, you could say so many more things with a greater subject matter, with something more than ..." He thought for a moment, puckered his lips out, and then laughed as he said, "Bambis and Thumpers."

She had tried to laugh at his joke. A drop of soyonnaise had clung to his upper lip. She'd leaned forward and wiped the drop away with her napkin, touching his lips with her other hand and then running her fingers down his chin, as though she could stop his voice, his words. She'd given up coffee almost entirely except sometimes in the afternoon if she still felt sleepy.

"Oh," she said, "I guess it would be nice if I had a larger scope, but animals are the only things that fascinate me enough to make the photos good."

"Maybe," he said, "you should try harder."

They had a long discussion on the subject. In arguments like this he was methodical and earnest, tracking each statement down to its logical conclusion. He would maintain that IF she had a limited subject matter, and IF she thought it would be better to photograph more things than animals, THEN she should try harder to increase her scope.

She wasn't as logical in her debates. For her the conversation wasn't the only thing going on. While they discussed the scope of her work, she noticed that when he made a point he held his hands cupped out toward her as though physically offering her something. She noticed that his eyes hardly ever rested on her, but tended to stare at the salt and pepper near her as though he were describing something as clear to him as the salt shaker's shape. She saw her own hands ripping up a napkin and wondered what she had in her fridge to make for dessert. After the argument he felt the issue had been settled and action would be taken. She felt they'd examined one side of it.

After he left she began to wonder. She heard his voice saying "Bambis and Thumpers" again and again.

The next time she saw him he handed her a portfolio showing his most successful work, so she could start to think about other subject matter. In the moment when her hand closed on the weight of the portfolio, she understood that he wouldn't let this issue drop. At some point she would enjoy photographing animals as little as she enjoyed drinking coffee now. The skin along her backbone began to sweat. Nothing in her life was worth more than her work.

After dinner, she kissed him one last time and then walked slowly home to change her phone number and leave on the first a.s.signment she could find that lasted over a month. Some of her best photos ever had come from that a.s.signment photographing the new exhibits at the San Diego Zoo. She'd felt so lucky just being able to stand there for hour after hour watching the animals, holding her camera. Her patience had been inexhaustible. The pictures had an almost confidential feel to them, as though the animals were bending closer to show her something secret.

Once after that, at a company she worked for occasionally, she'd stepped around a corner in the hall to see him walking toward her, examining two photos in his hands. His hair had grown longer, his face thinner. She stepped back quickly around the corner and then into the women's room, breathing as unevenly as if she'd run for blocks.

She'd had other relations.h.i.+ps since then, but they had been mostly physical with a clear line drawn by herself as to exactly how far the man could come into her life. Even with those who respected her rules, the relations.h.i.+ps usually broke up within two or three months. She didn't know if it was just bad luck or if she imposed too many limits. Other women she saw, no matter how hurt they had been in the past, still tried with each new man to be as intimate as possible. She wondered if she was wrong not to do so.

Her last relations.h.i.+p had been the best, with a friend of a friend who had a pet otter she'd wanted to photograph. The man was as humorous and fast-moving as the otter, which had perfected the art of opening doors with its paws so it could join in on any water activity, from was.h.i.+ng dishes to a shower. At the slightest slackening of her defense it would roll into the dishwater to curl up round a cup, ready to wrestle determinedly for owners.h.i.+p. Afterward, the dishes would have to be blown dry with a hair dryer to get rid of all the stray otter hair. When showering Beryl had learned not to jump at the otter's smooth fur slicking unexpectedly round her ankles.

The man and Beryl were both extremely ticklish and spent hours torturing each other, springing for the other's weak spots in unexpected moments and trying to defend their own, wriggling and laughing, begging for help. Once when they were going out to dinner, walking along a crowded city sidewalk all dressed up, he'd reached beneath her jacket as though to hug her waist closer to him and instead yanked her underwear halfway up her back. She yipped and twisted in pain and they fell to the sidewalk screaming insults and grabbing at each other's underwear. People pa.s.sing them paused, looking back, faces blank and hostile.

After six months he brought up the possibility of moving in together. She told him she would think about it. That same week she drove the otter and him to a lake near the Maine border. At the lake the otter shot out of the car and down the mud bank on its smooth belly, tucking its head at the last moment into the water as if putting on a dress. It dove and frolicked, until it lay exhausted on its back in the water, its flat feline face tilted toward the sun. The man then stripped off his clothes and dove in, chasing the otter around the lake. At one point it scrambled up his back and onto his head, pus.h.i.+ng him underwater with its weight so he surfaced sputtering. The otter swam back to nuzzle his coughing face, and the man grabbed its tail from behind to dunk it.

She watched them, feeling the sun on her back while she dabbled her toes in the cold black water. She sucked it all in with sharp bright happiness, the kind of happiness that made her skin p.r.i.c.kle. She knew she would remember this day forever. She wondered if other people had a lot of these easy simple days. She thought if she moved in with him she'd be able to have this type of day all the time, and she felt a tight and vicious greed.

After that day at the lake, she felt more needy around him. She wanted that sort of happiness more often. She wanted nothing to threaten it. She watched for changes in him or in her feelings toward him. He said she should move into his place because it was bigger. When she went over to his house now she felt lucky each time she turned the front doork.n.o.b, a large wooden smiling sun. Each breakfast she ate there, she chose her spoon with care from his mismatched set of yard-sale silver. She felt pleasure holding each utensil, feeling its well-made balance and age-smoothed surface. She thought if she moved in there each detail would become normal instead, expected. The house would narrow with her knowledge and its repet.i.tion, and at the first fight it would become a cage. She knew sooner or later he would lose interest in her, he would tell her what to do. Every other man had done so. She began to fear this more and more, to withdraw from him. She said she wasn't so sure she wanted to move in at all.

Confused at first, he'd finally begun to argue with her. Each time he yelled at her she felt joy, for she understood that this wasn't half so bad as she had imagined.

On the last day they fought with the kind of frenzied cruelty that can only pa.s.s between people who love each other. Fearful, the otter bit the base of her thumb badly. She still carried the scar, the clear imprint of sharp animal teeth across the meat of her palm.

CHAPTER 13.

Each day it got colder. At the town dump, Beryl began to have problems with her cameras. They stuck and the battery needed to be warmed against her belly before it would work. She felt stupid that she hadn't antic.i.p.ated the extent of this problem. Back in Boston she'd thought if she just kept a spare camera warming inside her parka at all times, she could switch them as needed. However, when she developed some of the film in the town newspaper's darkroom, she found the pictures had fine lines etched across them as though she'd shot them through the gla.s.s of a broken lens.

When she showed David, he said, "Oh, that's the emulsion freezing and then cracking. What a ridiculous climate. Why on earth do people live up here while Florida still has lots available? Keep the cameras warm and be real careful rewinding the film. Do it slowly, by hand. In this sort of cold, static electricity builds up. If you rewind quickly, the static'll discharge and you'll get a pretty lightning fork across your best images."

In spite of their care David and Beryl's problems increased. They stacked spare cameras near the car heater, but the b.u.t.tons still stuck, the batteries slowed. David would push at the controls again and again, swearing.

Butler phoned the magazine's headquarters in New York for some heaters for their cameras, but he said they couldn't expect anything for at least a week. David began to keep his camera plugged into the car's battery for extra electricity, the long cord snaking across the van and sometimes winding around David's feet six or seven times while he followed the circuitous movements of a bear. Beryl continued to keep two extra cameras always inside her parka, a single layer away from her skin, switching cameras every five minutes. Even with long underwear between her stomach and the cold metal, she would feel the slow chill, the numbness sneaking across her hips and up her back.

In this cold, her hands also began to slow up. She could feel the lethargy in her fingers as she tried to focus, then shoot. She fought the frustration. She wanted that picture, that one now. Her fingers moved too late. The gloves fumbled. The camera hummed sickly, trying to wind itself forward. After twenty minutes with her upper body out of the van, she could feel the cold invading her movements. When David touched her shoulder, her descent took long seconds, her knees complaining.

One day when she was rewinding some film it actually snapped clear through the center, the k.n.o.b spinning free. When she opened the camera in the darkroom the broken ends of the film were shattered as finely as gla.s.s. There'd been a picture on that roll of a bear lying on its back, arms limp across its flat chest, looking toward her with its dark eyes. The bear had looked sleepy, patient and very human. It didn't have the flat gaze of a bird or fish; it had regarded her with an expression, a presence.

In this cold she felt much older, an aging woman whose body didn't work properly. She understood why Jean-Claude walked so slowly, why he didn't smile. Once you had known the power of such cold for extended periods, every movement would seem an effort.

She knew her slowness might also be caused by lack of sleep. Each night that week she'd snuck out with Maggie for the first three hours of her watch, then Maggie would drop her back at the hotel. Each night Beryl climbed slowly up the stairs to her room, fumbled with the keys, her fingers wooden. She had to work even to pull her gloves off. She would run cold water across her hands and face, feel the water burn, the p.r.i.c.kling. She turned the temperature of the water up slowly and the skin of her face itched as it warmed. She rubbed cream into her skin, then crawled into her bed, the clean rustling of the sheets surprising her, any sounds surprising her other than the car's hum and the slow beat of the winds.h.i.+eld wipers against the snow. Beryl closed her eyes, seeing only the snowy dark houses rolling past the windows.

She'd yet to see a bear when she was with Maggie on the night patrols, very unusual for this time of year. Maggie said she was seeing five to seven of them after Beryl left in the hours before dawn. Maggie and Beryl continued to drive slowly about the town, scanning, watching. Beryl needed to see a bear striding calmly through the town, owning it, far from the dump and the mayonnaise jars. She wanted to see a bear in the depths of the night, judging the height of a window, the people inside sleeping.

As Beryl developed her early pictures, she found that she hadn't captured the arctic light at all. Those pictures undamaged by the cold looked almost like cleverly disguised zoo shots. She wanted the crystal bright light, the wide-open s.p.a.ce, the bear's swaying amble forward. She tried slower, then faster film, different filters, wide-angle lenses. After a while she got the sense of s.p.a.ce, the size of the bear, but still she hadn't captured that light within her camera, trapped it on her film. She wanted to bring that light back with her.

Friday morning Butler told the group about a man who had been stalked and killed the previous year while driving a bulldozer along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

"Bears," Butler said, then paused to take a sip of his coffee. He sucked the hot liquid in through his teeth with his lips grimacing wide. Beryl guessed he had picked up that habit while drinking coffee from thin metal cups on camping trips. He probably thought it made him look tougher. "Bears have no fear of large machinery. They are used to ice s.h.i.+fting beneath them, to cracking sounds and loud movement. The bulldozer operator couldn't hear anything over the motor. He was strapped into the seat. I mean, even if he'd heard the bear's steps behind him, what could he have done? A bulldozer won't move faster than five miles an hour. There was nowhere to hide or run. Just flat snow, rocks, gravel in all directions. Just the road he drove on leading back to base. Everything flat." Butler pushed his plate away and stretched his arms out across the back of the booth. His shoulder cracked.

Beryl was sitting beside him and she glanced up at his arm lying just above her shoulders. She had to lean forward a bit to avoid resting her head against the inside of his elbow.

Butler continued. "They think the bear started eating the guy while he was still on the moving machine." Butler looked down at Beryl beside him, searching her face for disgust. She found it difficult to look tough returning his stare when she was crouched slightly forward.

"The road," said Butler, "lay so straight, the bulldozer ran on for another mile before it got stuck in a wall of snow it had built earlier. They think the bear took the man's body away a little before that. They found what was left of the body about a mile away."

Beryl considered this type of death. It might be sudden and you wouldn't know what had happened, but just as likely it would be slow. The bear wouldn't care if you were dead or alive just so long as you were immobilized. You'd be thinking your normal thoughts on a normal day, your hearing dulled by the loud machine you sat astride, only your vision remaining. You'd see an empty flat landscape, scarred straight down the center by the road. You'd fidget in your seat in hopes of speeding this day along, of getting to the end of it to your TV and some dinner.

Abruptly a force grabs you, so powerful you don't even feel the pain. Just a wind, a crack at the back of your head. You're twisted about, blinking, looking up at a creature whose size and violence you'd never have believed, whose eyes are black and wet and small and when it leans forward to bite the flesh of your belly, you feel the rough thick hairs of its neck against your face.

"The man's body was completely mauled," Butler added, leaning in a little closer to Beryl. He did not look at Jean-Claude or David while he told the story. He was watching for her reactions. She saw his nostrils flare a little as he breathed in the smell of her skin. "Beryl, tell me if this is too gory for you, but he had no right leg." Butler watched Beryl for weakness, some trace of disgust or terror.

"He had no right leg and-you know how bears like body fat-he did not have much skin left." Butler paused to gauge her reaction to this information.

She tired to keep her face slack. His eyes narrowed slightly in irritation. She'd begun to feel uneasy around him. She didn't think she would feel this way if they spent less time around each other, but she spent most of the day within ten feet of him. If she'd met him in Boston she might've enjoyed his company for the stories he told. She might have felt attracted to him. Instead she knew she was going to be spending the next month with him in a small bus. His body weighed almost twice as much as hers. The fabric of his s.h.i.+rt stretched and wrinkled with the slow movements of his breath. He stood closer to her than she liked people to stand.

Butler continued. "They don't know how long he lived after the bear attacked him. But the doctors said that no one of his wounds was fatal. He could have lived through all of it, died slowly after the bear left, of cold and loss of blood, lying on the snow." Butler held out his heavy hand warped into claws, moved the thick paw forward slowly to touch her face, to run the nails along her cheek. He wanted to scare her, to force her to show fear. The rest of the team watched her reaction.

She moved back from his reach, not out of fear of the bear, but out of revulsion at Butler's warm moist flesh. He smiled.

She thought that being mauled by a bear was a better way to die than most. It was better than listening to the uneven rasp of your respirator.

CHAPTER 14.

Sat.u.r.day morning, someone knocked on the door of her room. When she opened the door she was surprised to see Jean-Claude. He held out a bag of wiring and batteries. "I think I can make a heater for your camera," he said. Standing face to face with him, she realized he was only two or three inches taller. She wondered if he'd been fed properly when he was a child; perhaps the expeditions he'd been on at fourteen had stunted his growth. Or maybe he had simply needed to be short, to eat less, to move fast in order to survive. His white eyebrows gave his serious face an almost comical look of shock.

He helped her rig a small battery-operated heater on the bottom of her camera. He worked methodically, explaining the steps. He spoke clearly, succinctly. He checked each connection three times. She wondered what his parents were like, his childhood. She wanted him to talk about his trips, about the Arctic, the cold and death, what he thought of walking across the snow away from a pile of clothes filled with something once alive. She watched his movements carefully. His hands were large and calloused. His right hand seemed bigger than his left. After a few minutes of staring she realized that his left hand had only three fingers; even the knuckle of the fourth finger had been removed. His fingers moved precisely, gracefully. She wondered if his mind was also moving the finger that was no longer there.

Next, as Jean-Claude watched, she constructed a heater for David. She watched her own hands and tried to move them as precisely as Jean-Claude had moved his. She imagined that her whole life depended on the success of this machine. No backup wiring or batteries. No shelter or extra food. Not even time. She rechecked the links again. Turned it on. The warmth rose, slow and comforting.

She smiled up at Jean-Claude and realized she only played with a terror he had lived.

"Hey," Beryl asked, "can you also look at my parka and clothes for the cage? I got everything the magazine recommended but I'm still worried about sitting outside in the wind. Do you mind?" In Maggie's car, even with all her gear on and the heater going full blast, Beryl's feet and fingers went numb, while her back sweated against the seat.

She opened the closet, pulled out everything and laid it across the bed. She'd brought two suits of polypropylene underwear, three flannel s.h.i.+rts, several Icelandic sweaters, Thinsulate pants, Gore-Tex overpants, the green and gleaming parka that zipped up to a small hole for breathing and vision, two pairs of gloves, three hats, six battery-powered wool socks, boots large enough for moon landings, goggles and a face mask. Each piece of clothing was emblazoned with the insignia of the Natural Photography company. She disliked wearing the electric socks the most, for they always smelled lightly of burning wool. She hadn't turned them on after the first day; the smell made her too nervous. She imagined her feet catching fire. The clothing took up an impressive amount of s.p.a.ce, much more of the bed than she did when she lay down.

Beside her, Jean-Claude started shaking. At first she thought he trembled from some sort of flashback to an expedition, to the cold and the want. She thought briefly about backing slowly out of the room. Then she looked at his face and saw that he was laughing. He held the back of his hand against his mouth and his face had changed so completely he almost looked like the boy of twenty he was.

She looked back at the pile of clothing and began to smile. When she walked to Maggie's car with all of the clothing on, she breathed as slowly and stiffly as an astronaut.

"I'm sorry," he said, turning to her. His face grinned young and happy. At that moment she could almost imagine him holding books under his arm and talking about grades. He said, "You could drown in all that. The Inuit clothing is better. Warmer. Come to my room. I have an extra suit."

Jean-Claude's suit had two separate layers. On the inside was a s.h.i.+rt and pair of pants of caribou skin. The outside was made of wolf hide, with wolverine trim about the face.

"Put the caribou layer against the skin," Jean-Claude explained. "No clothing underneath. Fur faces out." He ran his fingers over the nap of the caribou. "Wear the outside layer with the fur facing in. Don't need anything else but socks, boots and gloves. With the body warm, the face can take intense cold. Has to. Masks simply freeze with the moisture from breathing.

"Ice is a problem. Out there." Jean-Claude's eyes s.h.i.+fted to look out the window. Beryl watched them move slowly back to her. "You sweat and exhale moisture. It freezes to your clothing. This suit is made of fur, doesn't retain ice. If you fall in water or sweat really hard, take it off and shake it. The ice shatters off. It's dry again. Not like wool, where the moisture invades the cloth."

She went into the bathroom to try the suit on. His shelves were bare except for a toothbrush and toothpaste. She coughed to cover the noise of opening the medicine cabinet. Only a hairbrush. Beneath the sink was a first-aid kit big enough to be a doctor's bag.

She stripped and pulled the suit on. The caribou skin ran down over her chest and arms, supple, soft and light. She pulled on the pants and tied the thongs at the waist. She smelled smoke and leather, the sweat of sled dogs and Jean-Claude, a working smell like bitter wood. The short thick fur of the caribou stood out from her body. She could feel the st.i.tches on the inside along her belly and shoulders, but they were so small and tight she couldn't see them even when she brushed back the hair. She pulled the outer layer on. The thick fur rustled over her face. As the hood settled into place, she breathed in a musk as thick and sweet as skunk: wolverine or wolf. The smell dissipated almost immediately. She didn't know if she'd gotten used to it already or if it faded quickly in the fresh air.

She stood in the white tiled bathroom, light and flexible. With each movement she made, the fur of the two layers s.h.i.+vered and brushed up against each other. The fur made no sound; rather, it created a distinct feeling like when the hair on her neck stood up, that feeling all across her body, the interlocking and giving of bristles. It seemed she had always waited for this feeling, the soft skin of a caribou brus.h.i.+ng up between her legs. She felt strong and big. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was surprised at her new ma.s.s, the smells she encompa.s.sed. She wondered if this was how the bears felt.

She went into the bedroom to show Jean-Claude how the suit fit. He pulled the hood forward over her head as far as it would go. She could feel the wolf fur against her cheeks. He pulled at the bottom of the parka to make sure it went down far enough, then swept the front of it up and back to look at the way she'd knotted the thongs of the pants.

"No," he said, "never double-knot these." Her stomach was exposed. His hand held the material of the parka up against her ribs. If he pulled on the thongs to see how tight they were, he would see her pubic hair. "You have to untie the pants to s.h.i.+t and pee. If you take off your gloves for the knot, you could lose your fingers." He let go of the material, stepped back a bit. "It's like the moon out there. Have to think ahead." He tapped the side of her head. "Think all the time. Can't touch metal. Must protect your eyes. How deep is the snow? Your lips frozen? Hands still work? Should you run to warm up now or will you need that energy later?"

The smells and Beryl's own heat came up to her through the neck of the suit. The sensations melded together into the feeling of a single body. Always before when she had stood, clothed or unclothed, in front of a man's gaze she had felt deficient, too small. Now she stood in the smells and skins of many bodies and felt herself to be larger than she'd ever been.

He told her that if she'd worn the clothing Natural Photography recommended into the cage, she wouldn't have been able to move enough in its bulky ma.s.s to clap her hands to stay warm. Every year they sent people up here like that, and it was fine so long as they stayed inside heated cars or houses. But when they tried to go out on the snow for a while, things happened.

When Jean-Claude stood up from checking the length of the suit's legs, she found herself blus.h.i.+ng. He said he was concerned that the suit might be too tight. He pushed back the hood, reached into the back of the neck to make sure there was enough room for the extra heat to escape. His arm stretched up and over her shoulder, his body leaning forward against the outer fur. She felt the smooth imprint of each of his three fingers against the bare skin between her shoulder blades. The wolf skin rustled.

Back in the bathroom she pulled the suit off and put her own clothes on with regret. Her clothing seemed scentless, plain and light without the fur. Zippers were inordinately mechanical, b.u.t.tons foreign. Holding the suit in her arms, she returned to the other room. There was a chair in the corner, but she sat down beside Jean-Claude on the bed. He looked at her, then away. His eyes roved slowly over the blank white walls. She wondered what he looked for. She s.h.i.+fted slightly closer to him on the bed. She wanted to touch his skin, to find out if it was warmer than average. Perhaps he was a small furnace like Maggie.