The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  Handsome picks up the pot of bitter tea and fiddles with the aluminum top, but in his haste he can’t remove it. “Fucking bastard Chink!” he yells, hurling the pot as hard as he can at the accountant’s head.

  The young man ducks just in time; the teapot crashes against the wall behind him, splashing hot tea on his back. Like a martial artist in a kung-fu film, he takes a running leap for the open window. He bangs his shins hard on the frame and dives roughly into a roll on the ground, shoulder first. The flaying pain of the dislocation rips an indiscriminate, high-pitched scream out of him: “Eeeeeeeeeeeeh, aaaiiieeeeh!” Upon seeing Handsome’s face at the window, he becomes more articulate. “Help! Help me! I’m being attacked!”

  He struggles to his feet and takes a few quick steps, hanging on to his shoulder to keep it from flopping around; then he starts to run, crying, toward the administration office, where other civilized men, clerks like himself, will protect him from the madman.

  Bitter water and dark green leaves drip in abstract arcs down the wall, over the desk, dousing the open ledger again, which was already wet from the cup of sweet tea. When Handsome picks up the ledger, tea pours off its surface, smudging the figures. How could such a small vessel hold so much liquid? He clears his throat. This sound, in the empty room, is strangely menacing. If he were to speak now, he doesn’t know what he would say. Would he recognize his own voice?

  It’s better to be quiet. Better to be still for a moment.

  Holding the drenched ledger, he crosses back to his own desk and carefully picks up the white teacup. From a distance, he sniffs. Strong tea, condensed milk. He sniffs again, more closely. He can’t smell anything else, anything offensive. He lifts his head and inhales.

  The whole office is scented with sweet, milky tea.

  . 41 .

  I’m not being nosy. The junior jailer was supposed to come find me yesterday at the shrine or in the gardens, but he never showed up. That’s the only reason I’m asking.” In nervous excitement, Sein Yun works the dirt out from under his nails. He speaks as politely as possible with the warder on duty outside of Hall Four, but it’s hard to contain himself. “So. Where is he?”

  The warder responds with a smile.

  “Come on. I’m sure to find out soon enough.”

  The man turns his head in the other direction.

  The palm-reader grumbles and sticks his hand down his longyi, into the hidden pocket. “You guys would strip the skin off a mangy dog, you’re so greedy.” He fishes out a cheroot and hands it over.

  The warder pouts. Sein Yun reaches back down and drops another cheroot into the still-outstretched hand. “So?”

  “He had trouble with the junior accountant yesterday. It was a bad day. He had to deal with the Chief.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “He’ll tell you himself if he wants to.”

  “Two cheroots for that? Why don’t you tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  “I said, he’ll tell you himself. Out of pure generosity, I will let you know that a bunch of underground dissident agents from the border were brought in this morning. From an MI center. They’re in the poun-san khan right now. That’s where Handsome is, venting his frustration.”

  “That’s hardly news. Where else would he be? Listen, will you tell him I need to see him? It’s about the search.”

  The warder guffaws. “He won’t be interested. The search is over and done with. That’s the word from the Chief.”

  “Just let him know I have something to tell him, okay? It’s important. Surely he won’t be with the politicals all night—he has to eat like the rest of us. If you see him at dinner, tell him I’ll be in the gardens till lockup. After that he’ll have to send for me or come to the hall himself.”

  Curiosity piqued, the warder whispers, “Did you find the fucking thing? Do you have it?”

  Sein Yun grins. “Just tell him I need to talk to him, would you? I have some news that will make him happy.”

  Teza’s mouth is full of a steady, bloody throbbing. But he doesn’t care how much it hurts to talk. The moment Free El Salvador appears, the singer asks, “Where is your mother?”

  It’s like a brick dropped on the tray in the boy’s hands. He lurches forward, knocked off balance by the power of a word. Not motherfucker, which he hears often enough and is sometimes called.

  May May!

  Can a word be color? Light falls in yellow bands on the bamboo floor. The flowers are yellow and fuchsia; they open across the lime-bright cotton of a tamin, wrapping her hips, stretching across her thighs as she sits down on her knees. She leans over the palette of stone and the broken mirror. She sprinkles water on the stone, then grinds the soft wood against it, around and around, until the gray palette turns ivory with the wet fragrant paste of thanakha. Stretching out her first two fingers, she touches the palette, spreads the cream on her face, touches the palette again, spreads the cream on his face, around and around, the scent growing on their skin like a white flower after the first rains. With a small blue comb, she draws a swirl of lines in the circles.

  May May!

  Who remembers the voice of a dead woman?

  Zaw Gyi, chit day, chit day, muh-may-neh naw. I love you, little one, don’t forget.

  Something stings the boy’s eyes; he rubs them. Holding the tray with one hand, he steps forward so quickly that the boiled rice jumps out when he shoves the food into the cell. He seems about to stand up and bolt, which makes Teza regret speaking so bluntly.

  But then a mighty exhalation deflates him. His tight-muscled frame loosens; his weight shifts back onto his heels.

  Teza crouches down slowly, not wanting to scare him away. They each see a face framed by iron bars. The boy meets the gaze of the man and the man finds the eyes of the child. Free El Salvador is so still the singer can see him sway forward, sway back, small bent tree in a breeze. He’s felt this breeze himself, while sitting in meditation, his body pulsing almost imperceptibly with his heartbeat. But he’s never seen it in another person.

  His voice reaches through the bars like a hand. “Do you know where she is?”

  Free El Salvador opens his mouth, but nothing emerges. The answer is somewhere in him. The whole story is in him, but where is the beginning word? His gaze drops to the cement.

  “It’s a good thing, if you know. Do you know?”

  “She’s dead.” The voice is small and cool. She is an unfamiliar sound. She of colors and long hair wound up and fastened with a plain old comb, a coughing woman who hid bloody handkerchiefs under her mat. She was a woman who sang, making mohinga noodles, and hummed, washing out the aluminum bowls.

  “And your father?”

  “Also dead.”

  “Can you leave the prison?”

  “Why?”

  “Can you go away from the prison?”

  “Where?”

  “Outside. To the city.”

  The boy turns his head, blinks at the wall. He doesn’t feel very well; maybe he’s getting sick. He will say only a few more words before leaving. “My job is here.”

  “But this is a prison. A big, ugly cage, Nyi Lay. None of us want to live here. It’s not a good place to live. And you’re the luckiest one among all of us. Do you know that?”

  The boy replies by baring his teeth like an angry gibbon. This is how he feels about his tremendous luck.

  Teza tries not to laugh, because of the pain, but sharp puffs of laughing-breath blow out his nose. “But you are lucky. You are. Of course you know why.”

  What is the singer talking about? Has he gone crazy? Maybe he is just stupid. “Why am I lucky?”

  Teza puts his hand around one of the bars. “Because you are different from everyone here, warders and prisoners alike. You are free to go, Little Brother. You can leave the cage.”

  With Sein Yun gone, the warder pockets his two new cheroots and immediately makes his way to the poun-san khan cells. Halfway across the compound, he hears Handsome shouting command
s at the new politicals. A couple days in these instruction cells get fresh prisoners ready for the pecking order. Usually high-ranking criminals are dispatched to “teach” the new arrivals how to behave in front of warders and prison officials, but Handsome keeps new politicals for himself.

  The warder sends a guard in, with the news of an important message for the junior jailer. Waiting, he lights up one of his new cheroots and listens to a stuttering cry of pain, then a low sob. Handsome is too dedicated to his work.

  When the jailer finally appears, he’s red in the face from physical exertion and his eyes are buggy. The truncheon is still in his hand. Noting these details for a future storytelling session among his workmates, the warder proceeds cautiously. “Sir, I am very sorry to interrupt you, but I have a message from the inmate Sein Yun.”

  “What is it then? Can’t you see I’m working?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sorry. But Sein Yun wants to see you as soon as possible. He has some important news about the search, sir.” The warder lowers his voice conspiratorially. “He says it will make you happy.”

  “Oh, really? The prick. Where is he?”

  “In the gardens, sir. I wanted to let you know right away, sir.”

  When the man’s gone, Handsome pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes the sweat from his face. His concentration has been broken. The attending warder can finish the session tonight, but the jailer will be back tomorrow to give those bastards another lesson. There’s one guy in there he wouldn’t mind having a long talk with, alone. He didn’t come off the border but out of some satellite town near Rangoon. The report from the interrogation center says his little hut was being used as a safe house for activists and underground rebel agents from Thailand. They worked on him at the center—electric telephone, riding the motorcycle, kneeling on glass—but he isn’t broken at all, he isn’t afraid. Why didn’t the MI guys beat that self-righteous expression right off his face? If Handsome were an MI agent, he wouldn’t let such a dangerous prisoner go until he was crying under his boot. One inmate like that in the poun-san khan and the whole atmosphere of the place changes, because the other new arrivals think they have a big hero. It’s the brave ones who have to be shown up and knocked down. Like the fucking singer. Handsome regrets all the trouble that Teza’s caused him, but he doesn’t regret breaking his flapping jaw in two.

  These thoughts tick through his mind as he unrolls his shirtsleeves and heads across the compound to the gardens in front of the big prisoner halls. He sees the palm-reader in the distance, carrying a large bucket to the edge of the mud. Handsome doesn’t think for a moment that Sein Yun has found the pen. The little yellow fiend is just grasping at straws now, because he suspects that his own sentence reduction has been lost in the wake of this mess. Well, he doesn’t have to suspect anymore. Last night the Chief made it clear that Sein Yun would not be getting a cut to his sentence. He also told Handsome that he wouldn’t be offered a position with the MI anytime soon. There’s “internal restructuring,” he said, which means no more jobs for nonmilitaries. After the fiasco with the accountant, no fucking wonder. The only good news is that the Chief told him he wouldn’t record that “unfortunate incident” on his work record.

  What was he going to do, mark it down with a big black X? All Handsome did was toss some stinking tea at the guy, and the cunt had to jump out the window and wreck his shoulder! Handsome stuck to the story that there was something offensive, even poisonous, in the tea, but the Chief Warden didn’t care. “I am not interested in your excuses, Officer Nyunt Wai Oo.”

  Fuck you! It wasn’t an excuse, it was a reason. Though he knew he’d made a mistake as soon as he smelled the cup afterward. Why did he fly off the handle like that? He’s not really going crazy, he’s just pissed off. The hellish day turned into a hellish night, because he went home and had an argument with his wife. As if he’s responsible for the rising price of chicken!

  He stops walking abruptly and uses the pause to light a cheroot. It’s his knee. If he’s not going to limp, he has to rest for a couple of minutes every now and then. Sein Yun’s caught sight of him; Handsome can tell by the way the palm-reader has stuck his nose out like a hungry rat. The jailer leans down and digs his thumb into the cramped muscles of his lower thigh. His whole leg aches. His knee is obviously connected to his brain, because when he thinks too much, it starts to burn. Yesterday, after the accountant jumped out the window, just before the warders on guard duty came into the office, the swollen joint buckled under his weight, and he would have fallen down if he hadn’t caught the edge of his desk. His wife says he should go to the doctor, but god only knows how much that will cost. She says, Go to the prison doctor, it’s free, but he wouldn’t let that quack touch him with a ten-foot pole.

  The palm-reader talks to the guard now, gesturing in Handsome’s direction, getting permission. Good. It’s better if he comes over here anyway, away from the other men; no need for all of them to hear whatever he has to say. Sein Yun scurries around the outer edge of the garden. Along with the scent of shit-rich mud, the jailer smells Sein Yun’s excitement. He’s almost leaping over the brick chips, hitching his longyi tighter around his waist as if it’s a warrior’s belt. Fuck, he’s an ugly guy, grinning like a dark-lipped ghoul. Handsome pulls out his handkerchief again and wipes the last layer of work sweat from his upper lip and forehead. Then, stepping carefully into the torn brace of his knee, he walks toward the palm-reader.

  . 42 .

  Free El Salvador.” Between broken jaw and accent, the sound is fee-a-sabado.

  The boy gives him a quizzical look. “What does that mean?”

  “Those are the words on your shirt.” Teza points to the holey T-shirt, which the boy awkwardly pulls away from his body, trying to get a better look. Those straight and sticklike letters, with hardly a circle and not a single dot among them, look very unfamiliar.

  “It’s a name. El Salvador. Not in Burmese but in English. And Spanish. It’s the name of another country, a small country far away, where …” Where what? Teza knows very little about El Salvador, except that it was something like Burma. The people wanted to run their own government, but the military wouldn’t let them, and so many innocent people were killed and imprisoned and disappeared. He read about it once in an old copy of Time. “The word at the beginning is free. Lut-latyeh. Because El Salvador was a prison country, like Burma, and her people wanted to be free. Because you wear that shirt, sometimes I think of that word as your name. Sabado, for short.” The obvious question strikes Teza. “What is your real name? What is the name your family gave to you?”

  The boy rubs his nose to avoid the question. He has to go soon; he’s already been here too long, as usual. He looks up again. The singer’s still staring at him. He’s seen eyes like that before, in the skulls of addicts and inmates transferred from the northern work camps, the ones who haven’t eaten enough for months. Those men are frightening too, like Teza.

  But how can he be afraid of the Songbird? He squares his shoulders and looks at the thin, battered man. Why does Teza want to know his name, anyway?

  Tan-see Tiger knows it, and Chit Naing, but the boy asked them please not to use it. He prefers his prison names—nyi lay, rat-killer, brat, the boy, kala-lay, any of the nicknames the men use for him. They are easier. They mean what the men want them to mean and nothing more. His real name is like his father’s tooth and his mother’s thanakha tin. He wants to keep it hidden. Safe.

  How small the boy looks now, like a very young child, six or seven years old. Watching him wrestle with the question, Teza worries that he might do some shocking, normal-child thing, like burst into tears. “Never mind—Sabado’s as good a name as any, no? Sabado, don’t you want to go to school?”

  The boy raises his eyebrows. “School?” How could he go to school? He’s not even sure what school looks like. It’s the same with women. This morning some of the convicts in Hall Two were talking about women, describing their bits. The men said that women
don’t have cocks at all, but holes. Holes! Right between their legs. When the boy staunchly refused to believe this, the convicts laughed so hard they almost fell down. He looks inquisitively at Teza and lowers his voice. “Do women have cocks or holes?”

  “What?”

  “Do women have holes or cocks?” He doesn’t know why, but he’s sure the singer will tell him the truth.

  Teza’s the one rubbing his nose now, thoughtfully, buying time. That the boy extracted this question from the word school proves he is a trapped and thwarted teenager. The singer carefully answers the question. “Holes.” Sometimes the truth sounds so crude. He tries to fix it. “Special holes.”

  “Special?”

  “Like your cock is special. All those hidden things we’ve got, you have to take care of them. You protect them, they’re … special places. A woman takes care of her special place.”

  “Her hole.”

  That word again, so raw. Teza’s not prepared for this. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Why don’t women have cocks?”

  Teza breathes a sigh of relief. He knows how to get out of this. “Because the woman is different from the man. She has the babies. They come out of the hole.”

  “That’s why the woman is the mother!” This is the one thing the boy knows about women.

  Teza nods again. “And the man is the father.” With luck, that will be the end of it. What if he asks about where babies come from? But he need not worry, because the boy suddenly sits down, heavily, on his side of the bars.

  His voice is weighted with defeat. “I can’t go to school.”

  “Why not?”