The Lizard Cage (32 page)

Then his brother, his almost twin, walks out the door, through the little wooden gate. Daw Sanda remains in the flat, but Teza steps into the garden compound. He closes his eyes and listens to Aung Min’s footsteps fading down the road. When a few talkative teenagers pass by, it’s hard to distinguish Aung Min’s flip-flops from theirs,
slap-slap slap-slap
. Their laughter is so dissonant, so
awful
, that Teza has to open his eyes. He looks around himself and blinks. Everything has changed. Suspended on their posts, the pale-faced orchids glow in the dark like hanged children.

W
ith a flick of gray-green tail, the lizard has disappeared over the top of the outer wall. Sitting now, rising out of the morphine deep, Teza stares at the iron bars without seeing them. He thinks of the shelf in his childhood bedroom, where he used to keep an old biscuit tin full of mementos. Old Burmese coins, long out of circulation. A photograph of his father as a serious, slender teenager. His grandfather’s nibless fountain pen. The shimmering blue-green eye of a peacock’s tailfeather. A rolled, unused piece of carbon paper.

The tin is probably still sitting on that shelf in his and Aung Min’s room. Teza knows it was still there on November 29, 1988, because he was
staring at it when the MI knocked on the door at eleven-thirty at night. The only treasure missing from its contents was the parting gift he’d given to Aung Min one month before: his old slingshot, its
Y
of wood still smooth and dark with the sweat and dirt of a boy’s hand.

The officers took Teza just as they had taken his father. After he was escorted from the house—he saw this as clearly as he felt the rough sack close over his head, the boot on his neck when they pushed him down onto the floor of the car—Daw Sanda went into the kitchen and sat down at the table. It was true, what she had told him; Teza didn’t need to be there to know exactly what she was doing. For the first time in her life, Daw Sanda wept in rage and sorrow loudly, openly, for there was no longer anyone left in the house to hear her.

T
he morphine lets him sleep through most of the afternoon, but he’s relieved to wake up when the iron-beater strikes four o’clock. Free El Salvador will appear soon with his dinner, and Teza doesn’t want another misunderstanding like the one they had this morning. He unfolds the largest piece of cloth his mother sent him in her last parcel. Then he sticks his arms through the bars and lays the worn cotton on the floor. Carefully, he places various offerings there, then pulls his arms back in and surveys the picnic. Who knows? In exchange, maybe the kid will say a word or two. Then, to insulate himself from disappointment, he thinks, But it’s fine if he says nothing at all.

Like a suitor critical of his own gift, he puts his hands back out into the corridor and rearranges things. Craving agitates his fingers, makes his gut clench painfully.
Hunger, hunger
. It’s a second heartbeat. He looks down at the bounty on the other side of the bars.
Don’t cling to what you cannot have
. He pinches an ant off the display and drops it behind him.

When Free El Salvador swings around the outer wall and nears the singer’s cell, he sees the flat body of a dried, salted fish laid out on white cloth. It stops him in his tracks. Beside the fish, a package of green-black tea leaves, a pouch of sesame seeds, three more of peanuts and deep-fried
beans and garlic. The boy frowns. The Songbird sits cross-legged, hands on his knees like a statue. His eyes are closed. The boy wonders if the prisoner is going crazy. He glances back to the food.

He takes a step forward, suspiciously. You never get something for nothing.

Teza still hasn’t opened his eyes. The boy cranes his head forward. Is the singer
dead
? Can you die sitting up?

No. He sees Teza’s skinny chest rise and fall. He’s meditating, like a monk. There have been monks in the cage before, in trouble, just like the politicals, and they do a lot of this sitting-breathing. The boy wishes the singer would open his eyes. If Teza gave him a certain kind of glance, the boy’s question (For me?) would be answered. Maybe the fish and the la-phet are for someone else. Maybe for a nat? Or Jailer Chit Naing, his friend.

He takes a step closer.

Not only the fish but Teza’s silence reels him in.

A few paces from the singer, he squats. Shoulders hunched, eyes flicking back and forth, he begins to eat the rice soup. He pauses to listen for the sound of boots. Slurping down the last spoonful, he peers up at Teza’s face.

The jolt of it makes him jump backward—the singer is staring right at him with big gleaming eyes. The startle upsets him like a bad practical joke. Teza whispers quickly, the same word he said to the boy on the first day, “Sa!” Eat.

With bony fingers pointing down, wagging inward, he waves Free El Salvador closer to the fish, the la-phet, the peanuts. He whispers the word again. “Sa! It’s for you. I can’t eat it.” Even after he soaks it in water, the salted fish is too hard. Teza still cannot chew at all, cannot grind his teeth together. When he closes his mouth with any pressure, the pain makes him nauseous.

Free El Salvador is confused. And frightened, though he doesn’t know why. The man is giving him good food; there’s nothing to fear. The skinny prisoner, jaw askew, is harmless. Even if he
were
dangerous, he’s locked in a cage.

But that’s not where the danger lies. It’s the way the man surprises him, catches him off guard, not with violence or harsh words but with kindness. The boy cautiously pulls his sling bag around, off his back, opens it like an envelope. Teza watches as he picks up each little pouch of la-phet and
squares it away in the bottom of the cloth bag. He moves slowly, thoughtfully, as if he understands that he will enter the history of the man’s life by eating his food.

On the other side of the wall, the rest of the cage unfolds, the large compound with its various buildings laid out in the shape of a warped oxcart wheel, but Teza places the beginning of the world there, almost reachable, through the iron bars, five steps away, in the boy’s eyes, inside the boy, who thanks him for the gifts in a wary voice. Teza pushes the used tray through the trap, aluminum scraping concrete like primitive words between them. Free El Salvador picks it up and leaves, walks around the dirty white wall, out into the rest of the world.

Teza closes his eyes again. Before he’s settled back into his meditation, he thinks how mysterious, how ordinary the breath is, this thin line of air cast between spirit and death, always here. Until it’s gone.

He shakes the thought away and breathes

L
ying in his rag bed, the boy stares at the plastic bag suspended above him. On the rare occasions when he has extra food, he hangs it from the roof beam to keep the bugs away. Soon he’ll kick down the piece of corrugated metal that serves as a door, but for now false night fills his shack with stars of light shining in through small holes in the walls.

The twist of fish and fishbone over him looks strange in the dark, like another creature. He closes one eye, sees fish. He closes the other eye, sees monster swimming through plastic sack. He opens both eyes and grins, deeply pleased. The pleasant stink of his dinner fills the close space.

Treasure above, treasure below. Wrapped in another plastic bag and buried half a foot deep, under the small of his small back, lies the ballpoint pen,
tsshik-tsheek
. Jailer Handsome and his ragtag team of warders are still trying to find it. Giggling to himself, the boy snuggles deeper into his bed of old longyis and Chinese felt blanket. He searches out the spot of felt that’s still furred and holds it against his cheek. With the door shut, he can nuzzle his head in the blanket like a child.

He inhales the monsoon, the smell of cloth never dry. The mildew comforts him, reminds him of sleep, the privacy of this small house, built
a little longer than his body and high enough for him to sit up, crab-walk inside. He worries about growing. If he gets big, the shack will get too small. They probably won’t let him build another one. Shhh, never mind. He closes his eyes. In the big matchbox, his carrion beetle claws against the thin cardboard. Scratch, scratch. Shhh, don’t tell a soul!

In a population of ten thousand criminals, a couple thousand politicals, hundreds of warders and guards, no one else knows where the pen is—only the beetle and the little lizard and the boy who feeds them. While Handsome searches every nook and cranny of the cage, swinging threats around like a rat stick, the boy sleeps on top of the ballpoint pen. In the evening, as he leafs through a paperback by candlelight, the pen pulsates beneath him like a glowworm.

Last night, hours after Handsome left the cage, the boy pushed his rag bed to one side and dug his treasure out. He shook the clay dirt away from the plastic bag and held the pen, poised it in his fingers like the men do, as if eating with a single chopstick. He opened one of his tattered paperbacks and willed himself to make a mark somewhere on the printed pages. But he was afraid. If Jailer Handsome somehow got hold of the book and saw ink scratches in the margins, he would be suspicious. What would the jailer do if he
found
the pen? Beat the boy to a pulp? Or throw him in a dog cell with the other politicals?

Sometimes pragmatism slaps the boy in the head like an angry warder:
You have to get rid of the fucking thing. It’s too dangerous to keep
. He could dispose of his prize this very morning, when he empties the latrine pails for a cell in Hall One, where prisoners wait to be sentenced.

As he held the pen in his fingers, he imagined letting it go, dropping it into the stink and pouring each load of crap right on top, flies rising around his hands in a noisy black net. He gripped the pen tight in his hand and clicked the nib in and out.
Tsshik-tsheek tsshik-tsheek
, it said, a sound so fine, so mysterious—like the whisper of many words hidden in the ink—that he knew he could not do it. Drowning the pen in shit would make him a … He searches for the word. A criminal!

The squeaky door of the warders’ quarters announces the departure of several men. The boy abruptly sticks his head out of his rag-bed and rises on one elbow to listen. Several men walk by the shack, but they say nothing of interest. The boy listens carefully all the time, trying to catch news
and gossip about the pen search. Mostly the warders complain about Handsome, but sometimes they talk about how angry the criminals are, because of the raids.

This morning the warders are just teasing each other and laughing and coughing. The principal cougher loosens a bunch of muck from his throat and spits loudly at the side wall of the little shack. The boy grimaces, but he doesn’t take it personally. In the cage, everybody spits a lot. Tan-see Tiger calls it the universal language. The routine of throat-cleansing starts with lights-on. The hawking, gagging, and propelling of phlegm into corners, between bars, into garden vegetables doesn’t stop until the first meal of the day.

The boy grins at his fish. He’s already planned his day’s menu. For dinner, fish with rice. For lunch, some of the Songbird’s la-phet, with rice. And very soon he will have his special breakfast, which he eats once a month (twice if he’s lucky).

He pushes down the propped-up door with his feet and sticks his head outside. Out of the thin morning light, the colors have pulled themselves together: reddish gravel, gray walls, wet brick walls and wooden buildings, another round of khaki-brown legs passing him. He glances at the door of the warders’ quarters. Cups of tea, milky sweet or bitter green, have been left behind on the tables. He used to sneak in to drain the tasty dregs, but he hasn’t done that since Handsome caught him stealing leftovers.

Never mind. He has the pen and Handsome doesn’t. He also has a fine breakfast coming. He skips to the sink behind the warders’ quarters and splashes water on his face. Then he hurries off to Tan-see Tiger’s cell.

H
alfway down the long row, three cells away from Tiger, the boy stops. Though he’s never heard the man yell, the tan-see’s voice gets very sharp when he’s angry, like he’s stabbing the one he’s talking to. The boy doesn’t like to be close to that sound, in case he accidentally gets in the way, but if he remains standing in the corridor, the other prisoners will start to tease him or ask for favors. He begins to walk again, slowly, head down. Five steps later, he pauses and carefully, needlessly, reknots his longyi.

He’s close enough to make out Tiger’s words and hear him pacing back and forth, back and forth. “I don’t care if he’s going to read your palm for
the rest of your life, you stupid twit. The guy’s an asshole, and if you want to get chummy with him, you’re out of this cell. Got that? If he wants to work for me, he has to come down here and bring me the stuff himself, not hand it to one of my men in the gardens. Never
ever
accept anything on my behalf unless I tell you to. And don’t even talk to that asshole. Can’t you see what he is? He works for Handsome. That’s reason enough to stay away from him. Understood?”

“Understood, Tan-see. I made a mistake.” The boy knows this voice too, slippery and slick, a worm. It’s skinny Hla Myat, the youngest inmate in Tiger’s cell, who has a nervous habit of running his dark, long-nailed fingers through his greasy hair. He’s a big talker too, which irritates the older men, especially Tiger, who regularly tells him to shut up. In turn, Hla Myat often teases the boy when he comes to give the tan-see a massage or fetch money for breakfast. But today Hla Myat won’t be nasty, because he’s in trouble.

“A
mistake
? A mistake like that could cost you your life. Why do you think I use Sein Yun anyway? Because he’s trustworthy? Because he reminds me of my grandpa? No, you jerk. I use him because the deliveries have become so dangerous that he’s likely to get knifed one of these days. That’s how bad the business in this place is getting. Since all that bullshit with the search, I
hope
he gets his throat cut, because he’s in on the whole thing. Helping that prick Handsome. They took all my letters! Fuck!