The Lizard Cage (50 page)

The boy watches the rice settle against the cement, a waste. He walks back and squats down beside the tray again, fixing the singer with his unwavering gaze. “Ko Teza?”

Teza looks up from his hands.

“When will
you
get out of the cage?”

Teza thinks, I have underestimated this child from the start. He shifts himself slightly to see Free El Salvador’s whole face without the obstruction
of the iron bars. “Soon, Sabado. I’m going to leave soon. That’s why I want you to leave too.”

“So we can see each other outside, in Rangoon?” When the brittle tone cracks open, a child’s voice is inside, raw with longing.

“No. We won’t see each other. But that doesn’t matter. My mother used to say that it doesn’t matter how far away you are from someone you love. The person might even disappear, but the love always stays.”

The boy skeptically explores his lower lip with his upper teeth until he finds a chapped shred to tear away. Then he replies, “That’s not the same as having them close to you.”

“That’s true, it’s not the same. But love is very strong. It’s the most powerful thing in the world.” He pauses. “Nyi Lay. Sabado. And by your birth name, whatever it is. You know I am like your brother. You know I love you as I love my own little brother, who’s very far away.”

The boy stares at him. He’s still squatting, arms wrapped around his knobby knees. He’s so thin that his opposite hands are able to reach and hang on to his elbows; he grips them hard. Teza knows the boy is waiting for something else, something more, and he feels a pang of sorrow shoot from his throat right into the mess of his cracked mouth. What more can he give?

He whispers, “Nyi Lay, we can love the people we don’t see.” The boy says nothing, but stares at him so relentlessly that Teza loses the contest and drops his eyes. He looks at the boy’s bare feet, toes splayed on the concrete. The moment the words are out of his mouth, he regrets them: “We can love the dead.”

The boy cries, “Ko Teza, you can’t die.”

The singer reaches through the bars and takes hold of Nyi Lay’s hand. But this time the boy resists the gesture and makes a fist. Teza holds on to the knot of bones and smiles at the boy, sadly but without apology. He whispers, “Just remember what I told you. And I will tell you something else. If you love the dead, they will teach you many things about being alive.”

The boy eyes him contemptuously, unable to speak. Words are useless. His chest feels hollow, empty, like the hole that has taken the place of his little house. Is loss the only thing he is allowed? If there are words for his unhappiness, he doesn’t know them. Nor does he care to learn. Stupid
paper, stupid words, the stupid pen. He’s glad he gave them back. He pulls his fist out of Teza’s grasp and barks, “Give me your tray.”

The command hits Teza like a blow. He moves away from the bars. “It’s there, at your feet, Nyi Lay. Please eat the soup.”

“I mean, give me your dirty tray, from the morning. I need to return it to the kitchen.”

Teza slowly reaches behind him and picks up the empty tray. Just as slowly he turns back, lifts the little metal trap with one hand, and begins to feed the tray through. Free El Salvador grabs it; iron bars screech against aluminum like fingernails. Cursing under his breath, the boy half rises from his squat and pulls harder. Trying to steady himself, he shifts a foot into the wrong place and suddenly the dinner tray in front of him flips over, spraying his knees and outstretched arm with sopping rice.

He looks down at the wasted food. It spreads amoeba-like over the concrete, nudging his toes, sliding into Teza’s cell. As the liquid soaks into the porous cement, bubbles form and burst. For a long appalled moment, the singer and the boy stare at the mess.

Teza says, “It’s all right, Nyi Lay. It was an accident.”

But it’s not all right to the child. Nothing feels like an accident; everything is preordained disaster. Dangerous words flare up in him again, curses he would like to yell at Handsome, that asshole Sein Yun, and anyone else who would hurt him. Before he knows it, he swears, “Fuck off! Fuck off and leave me alone.” All the warders in this end of the compound probably hear him, but he doesn’t care; why would he care about all those stupid bastards? For good measure, he throws “Stupid bastard!” into Teza’s shocked face. When he finally manages to dislodge the tray from the trap, he stands up, breathing hard. Furious, he also feels instantaneous regret, and fear. What has he done?

He stands frozen between the cell and the outer wall, wanting to run away but unable. He avoids Teza’s eyes, staring instead at his head, his hair, black bristles among bald patches.

What has he done? Why did he swear at Teza? He grips one tray in his hand but is too ashamed to pick up the other one, flipped over on the ground—that would mean stepping close to the singer again, bending down to help him clean up the mess. His face burning, he breaks out of his stillness and runs down the short corridor, takes a sharp corner, hanging
on to the white house wall with one hand. Teza calls out, “Little Brother!” but the boy doesn’t stop running until he’s past the records office and a warder coming onto his shift shouts, “Slow down, kala-lay! Now!”

The boy stops short, panting, his eyes big and glassy as he lifts his head and looks across the narrow end of the compound. The wreckage is still there, outside the warders’ quarters. In his agitation, he completely forgot. He was running home, but his shack has been replaced by a pile of old boards and sheets of rusted metal. As he walks toward them, he hears the men inside the warders’ quarters, drinking tea, talking. A woman’s voice, high and plaintive, rises out of the dusty tape recorder.

He drops the aluminum tray on the ground and lifts up the biggest slab of corrugated metal, balancing it on his knees to get a better grip before heaving it off the top of the pile. He tosses a lighter piece of siding into the hole where the shack used to stand. Wood and iron and wads of dirty cloth and broken bricks: he throws them aside methodically, a digging animal, searching for something he can’t name until he reaches the earth and sees it, covered in ants.

He has no doubt that it’s Nyi Lay, his lizard, crushed among the boards when Handsome tore them down. The boy flicks the ants away until gray-green skin shows, flayed here and there but still attached by sinew to bird-thin bones. Dozens of small scavengers rush around in great indignation. The boy reaches into the bottom corner of his sling bag and finds the big matchbox, where he used to keep his beetle. Though he’s already repaired it with a bit of paper and rice paste, it’s not sturdy enough for anything alive.

He’s turned it into a coffin. He opens the little drawer and shakes his father’s old tooth into view. Then he taps away the last of the persistent ants and lifts the finger-long skeleton off the ground. He carefully inserts the lizard into the box, closes the drawer, and buries the coffin in his bag.

Rising voices and a clatter of spoons inside the warders’ quarters rouse him. He remembers the aluminum tray on the ground, his last job of the day. Now he regrets spilling Teza’s rice for a purely pragmatic reason: his stomach is growling.

T
he boy sees Sammy the iron-beater under the watchtower, smoking a cheroot and waiting for six o’clock. The hulking Indian waves, and Nyi Lay waves back, tentative but grateful. He knows Sammy will not hurt him. Walking along the edge of the shit-stink gardens, he sees the small tea-shop stools sitting outside the kitchen. A third one, knocked upside down, rests there also, wooden legs sticking up in the air. When he’s closer, he spits at one of the upright stools, wishing that Eggplant were still sitting there. Pleased with his aim, he hawks another gob at Sein Yun’s stool. He grins for a split second, glancing into the kitchen to see if anyone’s caught him in the act.

But the kitchen is very quiet. Usually a work detail of dishwashers mills around after dinner, but the place is empty. He stands at the threshold, tapping the dirty tray against his leg as he leans in and listens, looking to the left at the big serving pots, to the right at the washing area. Then he searches deeper into the building, eyes sliding along the big chopping counters, over the pile of rice sacks. Where is Eggplant?

He turns back toward the shrine and the hospital. Hall Five is in the opposite direction. Two warders on guard duty stand there, chatting. He hears the muted voices of the inmates inside the big hall. Farther along the
ring of big buildings, Tan-see Tiger’s probably sitting on his bunk in Hall Four, all those lucky words inked into his skin, and maybe he’s picking his teeth with a nail, because he’s the tan-see and he always eats a good dinner, with chicken in his curry, even beef. This thought becomes a small vise that squeezes the boy’s stomach.

He lifts his head and double-sniffs, delicately the first time, then harder. Four sniffs tell him that leftover curry is cooling on one of the burners at the back of the kitchen, maybe with shreds of meat in it still, floating in the Chief Warden’s deep-bellied frying pan. Close by, perhaps on the neighboring burner, there’s a big pot of fresh, high-grade rice, fragrant and sweet, without a chunk of dirt or a bit of gravel in it. A bowl of mandarins sits on the rice sacks where Eggplant likes to nap. One of the mandarins has been peeled, pulled open through the middle, and half eaten. The uneaten half sends its sweet, citrusy scent to the hungry boy.

He takes one step inside, hesitantly, waiting for someone to scream,
Thief, thief!
But no one yells. He glances left, right, behind. There’s not a soul to stop him. All right, he thinks, I have to hurry. Wherever they’ve rushed off to, they’ll be rushing back soon enough. As he steps forward, his sling bag knocks against his thigh. What good fortune to have it. He’ll put a whole chunk of rice inside.

Soundlessly, he hurries down the length of the chopping counters, then cuts in at the rice sacks that form a half-wall between the rest of the kitchen and the stash of the Chief Warden’s food. The boy goes directly to the deep frying pan balanced on the gas burner and lifts off the lid. The smell of curry rises into his face, sweet dust of cumin and coriander and turmeric floating in oil, blended together like a garden for the nose. His eyes, open above the essence of garlic and chili, join his mouth in watering. He glances over his shoulder again. No one is there.

On the other burner is a big pot of fresh rice. He lifts away the aluminum top and carefully sets it on the counter. He bunches rice in his fingers, scoops it through the leftover curry, and stuffs it, dripping, into his mouth. He chews for two bites, swallows, squeezes more rice together, his mouth already open for the next mouthful, it’s so delicious that he smiles as he eats, good rice, spiced oil, such happiness. He swallows once more as his hand reaches for the rice pot again, his fingers digging gently through the soft white grains. No, he thinks, no, just put a big scoop of rice into
your bag and swallow down the oil quickly,
go
, but he can’t resist the combination, the curry and scoops of fine rice together, so once again he squeezes the rice in his fingers and dips.

He’s still chewing as he lifts the heavy pan and rests his lower lip against the metal rim. Then he tilts it up and watches the fragrant oil slide toward his mouth. It surges heavy and warm against his upper lip; he opens his mouth wider. One gulp, and a swallow of mushy cauliflower, two gulps, three. He feels oil running down his chin. He knows he needs to leave some; he can’t drink it all. Carefully again, with hardly a scrape of noise, he lowers the pan to the burner and raises his eyes.

He didn’t think, did he? No, he wasn’t thinking, he only wanted food. He didn’t check the back kitchen. How could he have made such an awful mistake?

Fifteen paces past the gas burners, Eggplant stands in the doorway, his fleshy lips slightly open. The boy turns his head, looks past the rice sacks and stacks of crated vegetables and shelves of trays, down along the counters. The double doors opening onto the twilit compound seem very far away.

With Eggplant’s voice comes the strong smell of his sweat. “Don’t even think about running. I’ve caught you stealing the Chief Warden’s food. Now you’re in big trouble, little boy.
Big
trouble.” Eggplant takes a step toward him, and the boy takes a step away from the burners.

“If you run away, you’ll get in more trouble, I promise you that.”

The boy is not convinced, but he’s lost his voice and can’t respond. He remembers what Tiger said—
Scream your fucking head off
—but how would he know how to scream? He can’t remember screaming, ever, not once in his entire life. And why would he, now? The cook is right about the stolen food. The boy’s eaten the Chief’s good curry and rice, not just leftovers off plates in the warders’ quarters. Of course he must be punished.

Eggplant walks toward him, holding the knot of his longyi against his great belly. “Get down,” he says, so quietly that the boy wonders if he’s heard right. His mind jumps to a forced task, punishment,
Get down, wash the floor
. He senses the violation but imagines the clearer forms of violence—getting thumped on the head as he’s scrubbing away, having water thrown on him …

The next whisper is louder but still quiet enough to confuse. “Come
on, kala-lay. Get down on your knees.” Eggplant sounds almost gentle, cajoling. When the boy doesn’t move, though, he gets agitated. “Hurry up!” Nyi Lay takes another step backward, comprehension dropping around and through him like a dark blanket. Eggplant doesn’t yell because he doesn’t want anyone else to hear the command, which he repeats: “Get down, cocksucker!” One sausage hand waves
down down
while the other hand gathers bunches of his red-checked longyi, which he pulls up over his big legs. He tucks the loose material over the waist knot. The boy, still standing, turns his head to the side, stunned. Understanding, not understanding, he thinks, Eggplant is going to
piss
on me!

The thought fills him with revulsion, but the reality is worse, and arranges itself quickly, relentless as a nightmare. Eggplant puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders and pushes; a weight like a load of bricks bears down on his thin skeleton. His knees buckle very easily. He’s bending, falling forward; now he has knelt and his face presses against the soft flesh of Eggplant’s inner thigh, close enough to inhale the heavy sexual scent there, sweat in the tight hair, the musk of testicles. Eggplant bends his knees, lowers himself, all the while gripping the boy’s skull tight. With his other hand, he rubs his penis over the small nose, the fine high cheekbones. The boy’s eyes follow the dark brown-purple cock, realizing what’s happening. Words crash through a wall, old words newly understood
cocksucker, eggplant
. The man’s nickname is his cock—his cock, purple and curved like an eggplant. It’s supposed to be funny but the boy gags, because of the smell, more intense now. That stink wakes him to his fear and he throws his body back, away from the cook. His torso and arms and hips jerk violently in the direction of the rice sacks behind him, but his skull does not move, only feels half torn away from his vertebrae. Eggplant’s thick fingers dig into the soft pads of the boy’s temples. One of those fleshy arms is stronger than the boy’s entire body.