The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  “That’s because he’s starving, not because he has AIDS.” Chit Naing clenches his jaw to keep from yelling. His eyes flick from Teza’s gaping mouth to the medic’s bored face. “Did you bring any morphine with you?”

  “Of course not. There isn’t any. To get morphine, we need the Chief Warden’s permission.”

  “You have his permission.”

  The medic shoots a skeptical glance at the jailer. “He’ll sleep now anyway. He won’t wake up until late tomorrow morning.”

  “If at all.”

  “With that jaw, he’ll wish he hadn’t woken up. But he will. He’s not going to die from this beating—he’ll live, the poor fucker. After the doctor checks him tomorrow, I’ll come by and shave his head. His hair is filthy. When we’re through with him, he’ll be as good as a brand-new political prisoner.” Chuckling at his own joke, he jumps up to retrieve his bag from the warder. “I’ll wash him up a bit and dress his wounds.”

  Chit Naing stands up much more slowly. “I’m going to wash my hands.”

  “Could one of you please bring me back some water?” The medic looks around. “What a bloody mess. But here, this will do.” He hands the jailer Teza’s clay water pot.

  It’s a menial task; Chit Naing should let the warder do it. As though prompted, the other man has already stepped forward, but the jailer shakes his head. “Ya-ba-deh. It’s not a problem. I’m going to the shower room anyway.” He smiles perfunctorily. “You stay here and make sure our medical man doesn’t accidentally kill the inmate, all right? The Chief is already in quite a state over his condition.”

  As he walks down the corridor, Chit Naing puts his hand out, touching the brick wall to steady himself. There is no use in hating Handsome, less use still in fearing him, but Chit Naing feels his stomach curdle with these two poisons. He gazes at the cement-block walls, the single bulb with its requisite contingent of moths. The air smells of cold water and rat shit, decay. Chit Naing knows that even his concern for Teza is tainted. The singer gives him a sense of something he desperately needs: atonement for his presence here.

  He quickly turns on the tap and rubs his hands under the hard, splashing stream. What is he going to tell Daw Sanda? How can he tell her the truth and save her from it at the same time? The stink in the shower room is like the smell of his own shame.

  PART TWO

  FREE

  EL SALVADOR

  . 24 .

  He opens and closes his eyes. Next blink, he opens only the right one; the left hurts too much. An unfamiliar breeze pours in, spilling like water over his face, his arms, puckered with sores. Something has happened to his head. He feels cool air on his skull. Shaved. All his dirty hair is finally gone.

  He thinks, Fuck, the things you have to go through to get a haircut in this place. He lifts his hand to touch his head and opens his eye to look at his hand. Beyond his hand he sees a blue wall.

  No, it’s not a wall. Sky.

  This creates a sudden vertigo in him.

  Blue through the metal bars, above a dirty white wall, a real wall, plastered and stained. Out of habit, he turns his head to look for the spider in the corner. He gasps in pain and the gasp makes it hurt more. His mouth is full of scalding water. No, not water, pieces of glass. Tears jump to his eyes. He breathes, in, out, slowly, studiously, taking stock of his body. His toes. The legs. The lower back. His breath is articulate enough to tell him about the bruising, the swelling, the dislodged toe bones. With the telling he remembers Handsome, the three warders, beating him. The young one with the beautiful face: he was named. What was his name? This is a detail he won’t be able to find for several days. Where is the pen? This is not a detail, it is a mystery. But it’s not important now; breathe, breathe. He is a sac full of thudding pain, burning pain, sharp pain, so many different voices trapped in his body, calling out, falling or rising in intensity depending on where he sends his breath. His left ear. His left eye. Just like years ago, in the interrogation center. At least this time he can see out of the slit. His whole head is a throbbing sphere. There is glass in the jaw, shattered. No, not glass: fragments of wood stuck deep in his mouth, also the lower left side—his entire face feels broken. Not wood. Bone.

  He breathes. The breath goes where it must, like the flow of ground-water. Rain. It rained while they were searching. Yesterday? Two or three days ago? He remembers the doctor coming in, leaving, coming back. And U Chit Naing was here. Arguing with the doctor? At a great distance, past the deep heart of all the pains, something else is pinching, crawling, pinching. It’s from the outside, new, almost reassuring; his skin is alive enough to feel the bites. Where did all these bedbugs come from?

  Bedbugs are a prisoner’s sons and daughters. Monk’s children.

  The pinching becomes more insistent as it works its way through to his waking mind. They have climbed the mountain of his body, migrated to the warmest places, his armpits, his groin. Bedbugs. Why are there so many of them? He crushes a few between his nails; dozens more replace them. His blood feeds them, so many hungry mouths.

  But he has lost the spider. The pen fell down and tore through the web. More carefully, he shifts the heavy anchor of his head again: sky. The realization gathers like a wave and crests over, the exhausted synapses connecting at last. I am not in the teak coffin anymore. I have graduated to a cell with sky. That’s why there are so many bugs. Before me, two or three prisoners must have been kept here.

  His face is close to the metal door, which has a swing-trap at the bottom and long bars above, all the way to the top, so he can look out. The white wall facing the cell is like a blockade, so that he cannot see into or be seen from the rest of the compound. But the air is fresh. At night he will be colder, but it doesn’t matter; the monsoon won’t last forever. Sky. The color is like food. As though in agreement, his stomach begins to growl. Eating the blue with his eyes, he retreats from his ruined flesh and goes down into memory.

  Blue and blue and blue and blue, fathoms deep, a band of it high above the cage. Sunlight during the rains is a gift for everyone. The children are playing at the curbs; boys are covered in mud on the steaming school fields, kicking the ball back and forth, yelling. Did you know, his grandfather says, that even during the day there are stars shining in the sky? The sun is a big star, closer than the other ones. Encouraged by his grandson’s surprised face, he continues in a hushed voice, leaning forward, imparting the secret: Teza, the origin of all life is starlight.

  There is no past tense. Breathing in his slice of sky, Hpo Hpo is there with him, inside that color suffused with starlight. Who knows how old he was when the old man gave him that little gem, but here it is, in an invisible pocket all this time, filling the sky over the cage. He suddenly remembers the moon. He has not seen the moon for years. Sanda, the moon. His mother’s name.

  He mustn’t cry. Not one tear. It would be a waste of salt. He may need them—salt and tears—later. To cry would sap his strength. Or, more accurately, compound his weakness. He will not even feel now; he will lie very still and think of football.

  He remembers the mud drying in ragged stripes on their backs, down their brown legs. Aung Min, unsurprisingly, is the better football player, faster, trickier. Grass and tangled weeds border a green field that slopes here and there into soggy puddles. Give it a piece of food—blue—and the spirit jumps with longing, sends him running to buy cubes of ripe papaya on Anawrahta Street. He wants the orange splendor and perfume-scent of the fruit stacked on the cart, he wants the worn wood and painted green aluminum of the cart itself, set against a powder-blue wall. Now he has something bright and sweet in his mouth, easy to swallow. From there he enters the chaotic animal brilliance of a market and glories in the fabulous, overwhelming profusion of things. He rushes to the rows of fabric—Daw Sanda will be there, shopping for a new tamin—and gazes at the bolts standing in their places against bigger bolts, so there is no wall in this universe, no brick wall, no concrete wall, no wooden wall, no bars at all, only varying
widths of rolled-up color. Black and ochre loops, the brightness of yellow birds, violet butterflies, smooth, solid expanses of cherry and pink and aquamarine from the women’s dazzling patterns. The men have deep green and rust checks, deep-ocean blues, burned reds, burgundy, washed purple.

  I will not return to songwriting. I will sell football uniforms to schoolboys. I will grow papayas. And sell longyis. My hands will unwind rainbow after rainbow of brightly dyed cotton.

  Still staring at the blue sky, envisioning his career opportunities, Teza hears slippers approaching. This sound, like a switch turned on, returns him to the throbbing in his jaw, his eye, his ear. A breath later, he knows the gait is not Sein Yun’s, that bastard. He does not move his head. Between the bars, he sees striding toward him an orange rubber flip-flop and a burgundy velvet one, the latter of the sort usually worn by women. Above the slippers rise two bony ankles, two scarred shins, two moonfaced knees eclipsed by a turquoise longyi, also a woman’s, judging by its color and sheen. The length is pulled up between its wearer’s legs, tucked in at the small of his back, transforming the longyi into a pair of pantaloon shorts. Above this garment, a lime-green T-shirt makes a proclamation in faded English. Despite the pain, Teza’s eyebrows knit together as he reads the bold black letters: FREE EL SALVADOR. If he could smile, he would. The T-shirt must have come from a plastic bag filled with white people’s old clothes. Packed in charitable good faith on the other side of the Pacific, the shirt was sold for profit on the unpredictable streets of Asia. How very far FREE EL SALVADOR has come.

  The impossibly colorful garments are in front of him now. The slapping slippers assure the singer that he is not seeing a ghost or suffering hallucinations. The colored flip-flops stop a few paces behind the swinging trap in the bottom of the door. As Free El Salvador squats, food tray in hand, Teza’s eyes rise to his face.

  Is this my new server? The singer blinks several times, looking past the shirt, focusing on the blue sky, then returning to the new face. No, he is not dreaming.

  The server is a boy.

  His face is close enough for Teza to see a dirt mark on his cheek. To see his eyelashes. And he is not just any boy.

  This is the first step his mind makes: Aung Min. Teza is simultaneously amazed and disbelieving. The boy looks like Aung Min twenty years ago. When he and his brother were small, people often confused them as twins. Only Teza’s height revealed him as the elder. If the boy resembles Aung Min, he also looks like Teza.

  His jaw in splinters, the singer cannot speak. He looks both ways, up and down the dirty white wall, but no one—no one else, no one big—is there.

  Teza’s eyes roam the boy’s face. The boy, for his part, doesn’t look at Teza. Like an animal about to be captured, he holds still while Teza looks at him. So much time has passed since the singer has seen a child; perhaps any boy would remind him of his own childhood. But there is a true similarity in the narrow, high bridge of the nose, the large eyes and generous forehead. He has a rather square face, just as Teza and his brother had; a face with a solid jaw is unusual among children beloved for their fat cheeks. Teza thinks of the tea-shop children, the orphans and poor boys sent from the country to wash dishes and run trays in the city’s sidewalk shops. Free El Salvador is nothing like them. His face, marked in places with faint scars, betrays none of their bewildered sadness, not a trace of their scrappy joy. He looks stoic and tough, wizened despite the broad cheekbones and chin. He has the large bony knees of chronic malnutrition, a feature the singer recognizes from his own body.

  Teza slowly turns on his side, carefully lifts onto his elbow, which makes him wince. The boy starts to push the food tray through the trap at the bottom of the door. Teza leans over and pushes it back. The boy turns his head away, catching Teza, for a split second, with an almost angry narrowing of the eyes. Now the singer is not so sure. From this angle, the child’s face is feral, the chin pointed, not square. The boy is a mongoose.

  Teza waves his hand and tries to say, “I don’t want to eat,” a sentence he cannot finish because of the sudden ripping of flesh inside his mouth, as though the bone fragments are newly exploded shrapnel. The words are a cry as Teza’s hand jumps forward, pushing the tray back out of the cell. The boy looks down at the food: curry soup, rice boiled to mush for the invalid. Watching Teza for a sign, he raises an imaginary dollop of rice to his mouth. Teza waves his hand, managing one word, “Sa!” Eat. Slowly, carefully, the prisoner lies down again and closes his eyes.

  Squatting in front of the tray, the boy glances left and right, picks up the metal spoon, and slurps and swallows as fast as he can. Even if the prisoner changes his mind, he will not be able to complain, because his face is so broken he won’t be able to tell anyone. There was no mistaking Sa! The boy’s nervousness does battle with his appetite down to the last mouthful, but he eats everything. Then he carefully holds open the trap and slides the empty tray through.

  Teza’s eyes are closed, but he is not sleeping. He lifts up his hand: Goodbye. The boy turns and disappears behind the white wall like a marionette whisked from the stage.

  . 25 .

  After a few days, the kitchen staff, who are also prisoners, begin to eat a mouthful of peas or a scoop of boiled rice from the prisoner’s tray. Through cage telepathy, they know Teza is not eating, so why should the little rat-killer get all the spoils? The boy picks up the tray at the kitchen, walks past the shrine and hospital at a clip, then slows down as he approaches the solitary cell. He doesn’t want anyone to see his excitement. Once he gets inside the wall that encircles the white house, he sets the tray down on the bare wet earth, hunkers over it like a dog, and eats all but the last four or five curried peas, fishing them out of the soup with dirty fingers, scooping the watery rice into his mouth as he goes. If there is a piece of potato, he eats that too. His body is going mad with growth, but cannot grow. The rats do not help.

  At night, when he tries to sleep, he feels a demon gnawing the bones inside his legs. The demon growls, Longer, and grinds its teeth into the bladed shinbones, the femurs, the way you might gnaw a piece of leather to stretch it. But the boy doesn’t want to grow. Let me be small, he thinks, lying in his shed outside the warders’ quarters. There is not enough food for big people here. Let me be small. Please.

  Let me be smaller. Let me be a cockroach. He smiles. They are so quick, so shiny.

  No. Let me be a bedbug.

  He crushes one of them—there are many living in his rag bed—and looks at the blood on his fingers before he wipes it on the corrugated metal wall of his shed. If I were a bedbug, I could live off the prisoners. I would never be hungry.

  The boy has treasures, which are not to be mocked. Certain people in the cage don’t understand his wealth—one of the corporals regularly teases him about his beetle—but the taunts don’t bother him. He is used to the ignorance of convicts and warders alike.

  Sometimes his wealth is obvious. In comparison to the prisoner, for example, who has nothing but his dirty white prison garb and a blanket and a few clothes, the boy knows he is rich.

  In addition to his bedding, which consists of a Chinese felt blanket and a few old longyis given to him by departing prisoners, the boy proudly cherishes the following items:

  the turquoise longyi

  the lime-green T-shirt

  the once-white-but-now-gray T-shirt

  the green school longyi

  the navy-blue-and-black-striped sling bag

  the box with the beetle in it (the beetle is black with red markings on its back, and very much alive, after two months of solitary confinement, on a diet of lizard shit)

  Nyi Lay the little lizard

  a man’s tooth, upper left incisor, kept inside an empty thanakha tin

  nine books of various sizes and colors, traded to him by various prisoners, usually for rats or drug deliveries

  the big pair of underwear

  many candle stubs and two lighters

  half a tin can: a small shovelr />
  the other half of the tin can: a candleholder

  a stone-sharpened nail, for killing rats

  the postcard of a golden-spired building, which he recognizes—not from memory, but from Jailer Chit Naing’s explanations—as the Shwedagon Pagoda in the heart of Rangoon

  the postcard of a Buddha from Pagan

  the photograph, on cheap newsprint, of Bogyoke Aung San, the great general. It is stuck to the corrugated wall of the shed with rice-paste glue.

  the photocopied photograph of Bogyoke Aung San’s daughter, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Her mouth is open, talking and smiling at once. She does not look at the paper in her hand but out, directly into the boy’s face. He keeps her tucked away in a book.

  the lovely but rapidly disintegrating iridescent purple butterfly he found by the stream that runs at the edge of the prison grounds. It is one of the most beautiful things he has ever seen, but the ants keep finding it. Every time he changes its hiding place another flake of wing or segment of leg drops off.

  Lastly, most extraordinarily, the boy owns a ballpoint pen. This is a recent acquisition. Its presence in his life is both miracle and disaster. The pen is still so new and so wonderful, such a lucky find, that he ignores the disaster part of the equation.

  The boy is known for hunting. He stalks plastic bags, bones, good rocks, anything useful and all things edible. One of his many jobs is rat-killing, smashing the squeakers with his stick. He’s learned to gut them and sell them too, because prisoners who don’t get food from home need to eat rats.