The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  But Handsome wants to tell. “Because once, when I was about your age, I stole some money from my stepfather, just like you were stealing food.”

  The boy thinks, It’s not the same at all. There is never leftover money.

  “He was so pissed off at me that he locked me in a rice storeroom for the night, and guess what came out and crawled all over me when it got really dark?”

  The boy, head still down, whispers, “Rats, sir.”

  This time the child’s voice wakes the man up, and his voice rears up big, very loud. “Yes, rats! It was a good punishment. It was the last time I ever stole anything. So if we catch you stealing things, money or food or anything else, we’ll do the same to you, kala-lay, do you hear me?” He shouts as he leans down, “Do you hear me?”

  The boy whispers, “Yes, sir,” but thinks, I’m not afraid of the little squeakers. He stands there waiting, knowing it will come, and it comes, a smack to the side of the head, not with the stick, very fortunately, but with the jailer’s empty hand. The boy holds his ground; he doesn’t let the blow knock him off his feet and he doesn’t let the tears squeeze out of his eyes. Blinkblinkblink, he swallows them.

  “Now get back to work, kala-lay, no more fucking around. And no more stealing.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” He bows a little, as though his throbbing temple were a gift. He sighs. Never mind, don’t cry. The leftover rice will be thrown away. He reminds himself to check the garbage bins later that afternoon. He moves away from his shack as quickly as possible and walks purposefully in the direction of the kitchen. But when he gets there, he passes by, turns the corner, and heads toward the stream. Partly fed by kitchen runoff, it’s a place of culinary possibilities: cauliflower stalks, old potatoes, bones. He rubs the lump on his aching head. When he kicks at a bit of brick chip, something moves.

  A rat. Clambering gracelessly over a bunch of discarded tires, the medium-sized rodent carries some unidentifiable orange thing in its mouth. Mandarin peel, or mango? Or a scrap of cloth? The squeaker raises one paw from the old rubber and looks over its gray shoulder at the boy. This reminds him of a prisoner in Hall Five who requested a rat this morning.

  But he doesn’t have his stick. He left it behind because the jailer was still holding on to it. As the rat steps off the hill of tires and disappears into the tall grass, the boy realizes that he’s glad. No stick, no whack. What a relief. Sometimes he gets sick and tired of being the rat-killer.

  . 29 .

  The singer meditates and sleeps. Morphine encourages both these activities. He sleeps because he cannot cry, and he cannot cry properly because he cannot open his mouth. Whenever he moves his mouth in any way, the pain takes his head and breaks it open, from jaw up into skull, a round bone under a sledgehammer. The tears amass inside him like pus.

  His meditation practice is full of halts and stumbles. Sometimes he cannot be calm. Anger flamethrows through his chest and throat for hours before burning into ash and black shadows, the stuff of mourning. Unable to pace because of his broken toes, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He can’t eat, he can’t smoke, he can’t walk. He has killed all the bedbugs in the cell. On these bad days, his rage and despair seem to be without release. They build to the point where he takes a great jungle machete in his hand, crashes through the brick wall, and emerges, slashing the air until he gets to Handsome’s throat.

  The worst is true. Despite his pacifism and dedication to human rights and dignity and democracy, he is a murderer, because he wants to kill them—Sein Yun, who must have betrayed him, and Handsome, that sadistic prick. His killer’s hand stretches out. The Chief Warden dies. Every asshole warder he’s ever had is imprisoned for three lifetimes. All the MI interrogators and torturers are executed or imprisoned for five lifetimes. The colonels and the generals are summarily executed, especially Ne Win, that superstitious old tyrant. The crooked businessmen who support the SLORC go to flooded prisons in Bangladesh, and the university administrators who abandoned the students when they were striking all go to one of the lower Buddhist hells. The soldiers who killed peaceful, unarmed people with bayonets and rifles are murdered in their turn. The Lon Htein riot police who drowned the first student protesters in Inya Lake are drowned. The soldiers who let the students suffocate to death in a police van are smothered. Every hairy, pasty-faced white businessman who uses the desperate labor of the Burmese people spends fifteen years bent over a sewing machine in a windowless, firetrap factory. In his pure, raging heart, Teza makes the old saying come true: No one goes unpunished for his crimes.

  He has no idea how many people he kills and imprisons. Hundreds. Thousands. Sometimes these long, systematic acts of revenge arise during his meditation, and he abandons his breath and charges forward like a soldier, shooting wildly into the dark wall of trees where the invisible, ever-present enemy is waiting.

  When these orgies of violence end, he wants to howl like a wounded dog, but taking up vengeful murder has not enabled him to open his broken mouth. He remains unable to weep. Spent, deeply sad, and chastised by the futility of his emotions, he returns to the humble work of meditation and inhales. Exhales. Inhales.

  Teza wouldn’t execute the prison doctor. He would just pulverize his face and then force him to spend an agonized convalescence with a quack like himself. The doctor is a nervous, cheerfully dishonest man with bad acne. Of Chinese extraction, he has round cheeks, a bulbous nose, and watery eyes. On each of his visits he takes Teza’s hands in his own, poking and prodding the fingernails. “I check for blood flow and mineral absorption, is that all right?” It’s a genuine question, as if the prisoner might refuse him. Then he slides his fingers over the still bruised and swollen skin of Teza’s jaw and cheek, clucking his tongue, occasionally shaking his head. Upon finishing the examination, he lies with a smile. “Everything is fine. Don’t worry. The fracture is clean, not much fragmentation of the bone, it’s healing well. The only problem is eating. You have to eat. Every day, without fail. They send you extra boiled rice and fish, no?”

  Teza nods.

  “You eating it?”

  He nods again. The doctor is not the only one who can lie.

  “And no talking, even when you’ve had morphine. If there’s too much motion at the fracture site, the bones won’t knit. It could get infected, because there’s lots of tearing in your left gum—that’s how the bacteria in your mouth can get into the wound. And you know the mouth is a dirty, dangerous place, don’t you?” The doctor laughs. Teza laces his fingers together tightly and looks past the doctor’s head, through the barred door to the sky, which is mercifully blue and full of scudding white clouds.

  Two weeks have passed since the beating. The doctor tells him, “The pain will lessen considerably within a month.” Teza should be able to talk, after a fashion, in the same amount of time, depending on how well he heals. Before the grizzled old warder steps up to secure the locks, the doctor always smiles. This last false grin is the worst thing about the entire checkup.

  Chit Naing visits him too. He is overseeing Teza again, so he comes by three or four times a week. But Chit Naing’s visits are not what they once were; the old ease is gone. The jailer’s anxiety infects Teza like a virus, aggravated by his pain and his inability to speak. He wants the old Chit Naing back, the serious, helpful jailer who could also crack good jokes. Eating little food, Teza craves the restorative nourishment of humor. Free El Salvador doesn’t talk, the old warder doesn’t talk, so Teza wants words from Chit Naing. His own speechlessness infuriates him. He can push out monosyllables if he’s had a shot of morphine, but that’s not enough to ask Chit Naing, “Have they found the pen? Are you bribing the doctor for the morphine? Did my mother give you the money? Have you seen her? Does she know what’s happened?” Teza can’t imagine where else the money to buy the drug could be coming from, because it’s hardly prison policy to give pain-easing opiates to politicals. He wonders too how much longer the shots will continue.

  One warm
, beautifully sunny morning, Chit Naing stands at the barred door of the cell and repeats things Teza has already heard. His eyes light upon and leave Teza’s face quickly, repeatedly. The singer knows that Chit Naing can barely stand to look at him. His words are awkward, his voice full of cracked notes. “The doctor says the jaw is not so badly broken.” Teza stares at the jailer’s mouth and tries not to let fury get the better of him. Anger is a bad fire. “He says that setting the jaw would be like breaking it all over again. All the muscles would spasm. You would be in more pain. Agony.” As if pain can be measured. As if any of them can imagine it. My face will always be crooked. “The doctor says that to do a proper job, to calm all those muscles, they would have to put you under general anaesthetic. And you know that’s impossible here.” They will not take me to a real doctor outside, in a real hospital. “And they might have to wire your jaw shut. You would lose too much weight.” Already I eat so little. “The pain, the doctor says, will eventually subside.”

  Teza looks at the bones of his knees. Having recently finished his meditation, he’s still sitting in half-lotus position in the middle of the cell. When Chit Naing begins rattling his keys, shuffling through the noises of departure, Teza turns back to him and holds an imaginary cheroot to his mouth.

  “But how can you smoke?”

  Teza shakes his head and twirls his index fingers around each other in a tiny treadmill motion. Smoking is impossible, no matter how much he would like to. He just wants to unwrap the cheroot filters. Reading material.

  “Ah, of course. I didn’t even think … I forgot … I’ll see what I can do,” Chit Naing quickly replies. He salvaged as much as he could from the teak coffin: soap, thanakha, Teza’s clothes and blanket. There were also two plastic bags of la-phet, pickled tea leaves, still sealed. Teza regrets that he did not eat everything faster, the tea leaves and roasted sesame seeds and peanuts. It’s depressing to remember the dried fish, so stupidly destroyed.

  “The boy will be coming soon, with your breakfast.”

  Teza nods.

  “Try to eat, all right?”

  He nods again. Chit Naing has the courage to hold his gaze for a long breath, but he always leaves the cell without really speaking.

  The singer has his generous moments, when he would like to tell the jailer, U Chit Naing, it’s not your fault. I know you’re trying to help and I thank you. But when his shattered jaw has woken him in the night and ravaged him, exhausted him with pain, it pleases him that the jailer feels awkward and ashamed. Someone should. Teza has that, at least, the power of the victim. But he knows it’s a tainted weapon, all righteousness one moment and the next his own long list of executions.

  He has never wanted to be the broken one. He hasn’t allowed himself to be. Even crushed physically, as he was after the interrogations, as he is now, he has always sought the power beyond the body. He grew up bathed and fed and watered with the teachings of Buddhism, learning and re-learning that the mental self and the physical body are only small, mutable parts of the world, ever changing and illusory, shifting like clouds. The soul, that spark of flame, continually moves toward rebirth and enlightenment, the great unbinding, where finally there is no separation. That’s why the great monks do not fear death. They know their deaths come to them just as their bodies did, not as ending but as movement, the next step. It’s the one thing everyone has in common.

  So when the man with power stands on the other side of the iron bars, asking to be forgiven no matter what his mouth is saying, Teza on his better days tries to reply, head nodding, hands tracing thought in the air. His eyes shine with the labor of communicating a message he barely understands himself. The daily, decades-old, entrenched battle of their country ends between them, not because Teza offers forgiveness—he is not capable of that—but simply because he sees that Chit Naing is also trapped. They are both caught and struggling.

  It is the First Noble Truth: Life is suffering. Buddha spoke these words the moment after his enlightenment. By seeing, accepting, and comprehending the truth of suffering, eyes arose, insight arose, wisdom arose, and the light arose. Such teachings have never been heard of before.

  When his meditation goes well, Teza remembers those lines from the Buddha’s First Sermon. Other times, pain sears everything from his body and memory. What light can arise from this violation? He tries to focus his meditations on letting the pain do its work without clinging to it, without identifying it as himself. This is very hard to do, especially in solitary.

  . 30 .

  Three weeks after the beating, Chit Naing carries a new food parcel to the white house, opens the cell, and gives the htaung win za over into the singer’s long-fingered hands. A painful, gargled cry escapes Teza as he stares down at the parcel, two plastic bags wrapped around and around with sticky brown tape. It’s so obviously from his mother, and full of food he cannot eat. The senior jailer had the parcel cleared the day it came in, before anyone had the chance to put his dirty hands all over it and steal whatever he wanted.

  Chit Naing leaves the cell very quickly, excusing himself with talk of other duties. Teza barely notices his departure. The htaung win za is more important; his mother is inside it. Once again Teza examines the items of a food parcel.

  There are five fish. Two bars of soap. Several small packages of tea leaves and sesame. Curry-dusted deep-fried beans. Peanuts. Ha! He cannot imagine eating a single peanut.

  No, he cannot eat, but her presence is a different kind of sustenance. Before he undoes the careful wrapping, his double-jointed fingers move over the items one by one. She likes to fold things up in small pieces of cloth, often just scraps of old material left at the laundry, but among these pieces is a small treasure, the clearest message: a threadbare white handkerchief, its edges still embroidered, very simply, with sand-colored thread. Folded inside are two cream blocks of thanakha. The very old handkerchief is a testament to the decidedly English influence his paternal grandmother experienced while growing up. It was she, who died when Teza was still a boy, who had embroidered his father’s handkerchiefs.

  Outside the cage, the parcel means very little. It would be only what it is: plastic bags filled with food and toiletries, perhaps the possession of a traveler or a student going upcountry on the train. But in the cage, nothing that comes from home is inanimate.

  Laying the items out on the floor, he thinks, What I’ve lost comes back to me now. Not the way it was before, not the way I want, but transformed. I cannot understand it. How to comprehend the threadbare square of linen in my hand that sings to me about my father? I can only hold it, lightly, and if I could speak, I would say, Yes, I accept this gift, the love that brought it here. I hear the song in this silent thing.

  An hour later, at eleven, his server arrives. The strange boy. He’s wearing the green FREE EL SALVADOR T-shirt again, with the turquoise longyi pulled up between his legs like shorts. His other outfit is an old white undershirt and a green school longyi. Where in the cage did he find a student’s school-issue sarong? This is a minor but compelling mystery, one more reason that Teza wishes he could talk—not that the boy would answer his questions. In his green T-shirt and shimmering sarong, he comes as a bearer of color and food, not words.

  Whenever Teza sees a flash, sudden as heat lighting, in those keen eyes, he expects the kid to speak. Every day he sees that spark, unveiled, and every day the small, thin body twists away from him, away from the cell. Teza wonders if it’s because of his battered face, the chin warped toward the broken jaw. The black eye and other bruises are healing very slowly. Is the boy frightened of him? Has it come to that?

  Two or three times a week, either Chit Naing or the old warder comes, opens the grille, and lets the boy take out the latrine pail. But whether or not an adult accompanies him, Teza is always impressed by the child’s politeness. It’s a matter of form, of course—the singer knows the kid eats some of the food before he appears, but he never eats it all. And when he arrives at the cell, he is a creaturely lit
tle gentleman, lifting his fingers to his mouth quickly, repeatedly, his black eyes wide with the silent query Do you want to eat? If Teza gives a short wave toward his body, fingers pointing down, Free El Salvador squats and pushes the tray through the aperture. If Teza shakes his head or waves his hand away, the boy drops down as he did the first day and eats everything save a few spoonfuls of the soupy rice. If they’ve given him boiled fish—that’s what really sick ones get—the boy leaves that too. He fears the prisoner will get hungry later and regret losing his whole meal. Knowing that the free food depends on Teza’s continued generosity, the boy doesn’t want to offend him by appearing greedy.

  While Free El Salvador deftly slurps down the boiled rice, the singer examines his face. The inflamed scratches on his cheeks and arms are from mosquito bites he has worried to bleeding—Teza has a few of those himself—and the boy has the rashes of scabies too. But where did the scar on his cheek come from? And the other gash, on his forehead?

  Why is he working in the prison? Teza hasn’t tried to ask Chit Naing—there are always other things to worry about when the jailer visits. Teza stares hard at the boy, as if the intensity of his gaze might open the child’s guarded face. Free El Salvador’s aloof expression rarely changes, not even when he’s eating, head down, concentrating. Teza is no longer sure if the child resembles Aung Min at all. Maybe all boys have the innocence of brothers until you see the scars on their faces.

  Chit Naing has told him the boy can talk, but for Teza, this new server is worse than the tongueless Sammy, who at least had a varied vocabulary of grunts and sighs. The boy is silent in both speech and body. The grating sound of the tray, pushed into and out of the cell, is the child’s only voice. And though he makes a small, grateful inclination of his head after he eats, he also shows that he’s not beholden to Teza. Occasionally, when the singer waves the food to him, he doesn’t want it. He pushes the full tray into the cell and quickly leaves. Teza understands this as Free El Salvador’s claim to independence.