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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 wantedto 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 theowner 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 thoughtbriefly 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