The Lizard Cage (20 page)

Sitting on the floor at the back of the cell, Teza shakes his head.

The five o’clock food tray clatters down. “I can’t believe I’ve stuck my neck out like this for nothing. I’m not being paid enough!”

Teza whispers, “You said tomorrow. It will be ready when you bring the morning meal.”

Already turning to the door, Sein Yun stops and stares hard at the singer. “They are counting on you, Ko Teza.” Something very much like pleading—or is it fear?—raises the pitch of his voice.

“I said, it will be done tomorrow.” Teza stands up, steps toward his food tray. “Give my regards to Ko Myo Myo Than.”

“Of course I will.”

A
mosquito buzzes near his chin, lands on his chest. The singer remains motionless, watching the insect draw a long draft of blood. Who can tell what a single word, the right one, might do? He considers an entire letter. How far will it travel, whom will it find, what will it carry or
leave behind in its wake? Whatever he writes will mean
You have not silenced me. Despite all your power, you are not all-powerful
. Men have often reduced his voice to gasps and weeping. They have crushed the power to speak from his body, from many bodies. But words written down outlive the vulnerability of the flesh. His songs still fly through the air like swallows. Recorded words can be passed along. In one form or another, they
will
be passed along. Movement is their essential nature.

T
eza unwraps his contraband items, clears a place on the smoothest part of the cement floor. He picks up the white pen, pushes out the nib, scribbles again on his hand. Leaning over the paper, one knee folded in, the other leg stretched out, he begins his letter to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi with a pounding heart and a sweating brow. It
is
like writing a love letter.

He bites his lower lip as he begins, and cannot hold the pen without clenching it. How strange to see the words appearing, to feel the familiarity of writing come back into his hand like a surge of blood. He wipes his sweaty palms on his longyi. Twice he stands up and walks around, whispering the words to himself, not wanting to make a mistake on the paper. Just a few minutes before nine o’clock, when the lights in his cell go out, the letter is complete. Then the paper and the words and his anxious eyes are plunged into darkness.

T
he parcel is in the center of the cell. Something is wrong.

He crosses the teak coffin in agitation.

Ants have got into the box. Within the sharp anxiety of the dream, he knows they’re in there, eating his food. He has to hurry. They are dangerous ants, soldiers. They will eat everything and he will go hungry again. But he can’t get the parcel open. Someone has glued down the cardboard flaps. What kind of glue is this? He struggles, tearing at the top of the parcel with his long fingers.

Finally the cardboard slats give way. He peers into the box to see what’s happened to his food, but only ants are there, hundreds of big ants, a busy swarm crawling out of the box up onto his hands. He shakes them
away, but they keep coming because he won’t let go of the parcel. Something is still inside, hidden.

He tilts it to the side. What slides out from beneath the bottom flap? Not the white pen—something else, raw pink, flecked with ants. It’s a lizard, the skin already eaten off. Now the ants begin to devour the flesh on the skull. The two black eyes are still untouched, still alive. They peer up at his face.

He stares at the skinned body, the writhing mass of ants. Their heads swivel this way and that as their mandibles close on the flesh. The understanding comes as a slow wave of horror. He opens his mouth to cry out, to call someone, but no sound comes. It’s not a lizard at all, though the shape is the same, the tail is there, the four short limbs. But it’s not a lizard. It’s a very small human fetus.

He wakes in the dark, sluiced in sweat, shaking. He whispers, “Just a bad dream, Teza.” His voice sounds hollow.

The iron-beater strikes four.

He curls up like a child and rocks himself to sleep.

W
ith lights-on at six, he wakes and checks his parcel. Indeed, the ants have discovered it—not the big ones of his dream, but the smaller breed he knows so well from their innumerable treks on the coffin walls. He picks the creatures away one by one, then lifts the parcel and walks back and forth with it in his arms.

He paces for twenty minutes or so, to make the ants abandon the hunt for a while. Then he puts the parcel down again and rereads his letter, trying to commit what he has written to memory. There are several smudges of ink, which he regrets. Two drops of sweat blur a few words.

He spends the morning in scattered meditation. A few minutes after the iron-beater strikes eleven o’clock, his stomach begins to churn. A rising anxiety causes him to sit for a long moment listening to the empty corridor.

As soon as the palm-reader opens up, Teza whispers, “It’s ready.”

Sein Yun hands him his food, puts a finger to his lips, whispers, “I can’t take it yet. Give me your empty tray. I have to go.”

“But the letter is finished.”

“Handsome just asked some questions. Shh!” They freeze, listening. “He’s coming down the corridor. I shouldn’t have anything on me right now. I’ll take it tonight.” He holds his hand up before he leaves, like a traffic cop. Stop. Wait. And indeed, Teza stands there unmoving, quiet.

There is no sound in the corridor after Sein Yun’s slippers slap away. Teza hears the outer door of the building close too. Server and jailer are gone. The light overhead suddenly flickers, flares, flickers again, rippling over the objects in the cell. The singer unwraps the letter once again, holds the paper in his hand. There’s no need to reread it. He has it memorized.

His bare feet thump lightly across the cell. The sound reminds him of a heartbeat. Or a moth caught between his fingers. The letter sits in front of him. Evidence, he thinks. He puts it away again and paces, listening to the sounds in the corridor. In the space of an hour, he hears seven rats and as many mice pass. He can tell the difference between them by the speed of movement, the weight of small, clawed footfalls. Outside, beneath his air vent, a work detail goes by, criminal prisoners laughing and swearing; a guard coughs and spits. Occasionally there is the grumble of far-off thunder.

An hour passes. He eats another fish and drops the bones into his latrine pail. Then he paces with the food in his arms again, to confound the ants. He listens to his stomach. He waits this way all day, until the time when he begins to expect the sound of Sein Yun’s footsteps. He wonders about the warders who will be on duty. Will Handsome appear again? Many things must fit into place in order for the letters to get out safely. What if a particular guard’s shift changes unexpectedly? What if there is a random search that no one predicted?

He stops pacing, drops his head to the side like a puzzled dog.

Out loud, he whispers, “What is it?”

He doesn’t know. He goes still, trying to hear with his body. Only his eyes move back and forth, from the air vent and the spider’s web to the door, from one corner to another, crossing, going forward, sweeping back. Sudden wind howls through the tunnel between two buildings. A cry reaches him, as though across an enormous field, from another part of the prison. He listens for another cry but hears nothing.

Now and then the thunder booms in low tones, like explosions in a rock
quarry. A vision flashes into his mind from last night’s dream: living black eyes gaze up at him from inside the ant-filled box.

Teza crosses to his pile of clothes, takes the letter out, unfolds it. The fine hairs on his arms and neck stand on end.

He folds the letter over, once. Holding his breath, holding the edges of the folded papers, he slowly and carefully rips them in half. At first it is easy. The thin layers of paper offer no resistance, though the sound of tearing is like the world leaving him behind. He keeps at it, putting the torn halves back together between his thumbs and index fingers, tearing them again in half, in quarters, eighths, until the muscles in his hands and forearms cramp with effort. He tears the letter into fragments just slightly larger than the cheroot filters.

The smallest pieces escape, slip and flutter from between his fingers or lift off the neat piles he has set down in front of him. He carefully gathers them up. Salt sting in his eyes now, he blinks, blinks, squints.
What would make you cry
? He shakes his head slowly, back and forth, not knowing why he is doing this. But it does not feel like cowardice. He is not a coward.

The iron-beater begins to beat out five o’clock.

The scraps of paper go soft on his tongue, absorbing saliva easily. When he chews them, they become hard nuggets and hurt his teeth, so he tries to keep them small enough just to swallow them down.

Ladling a cup of water, he keeps balling the words up on his tongue, swallowing them down. He wonders if he will be disappointing his comrades, but feels sure he is not. He feels no guilt as the letter slowly disappears back into his body. Near the far right edge of his web, comrade spider sits patiently, waiting for his dinner. Teza stops chewing as he stretches his neck to look up at the spider, the air vent. He smells the coming rain. All the warm muscles and tendons in his neck and upper shoulders are taut. The singer feels the pounding in his throat before he hears it with his ears. It’s not the sound of thunder or heaving rain but the footsteps of men in the corridor.

Half the paper is already in his mouth as he pours the cup of water over the rest of the scraps in his hands, jumps back to the water pot, sloshes more water up to his mouth, swallows, gags, swallows. Coughing now, trying to cough quietly, fearing he will start choking and not be able to swallow, he pushes the rest of the wet paper into his mouth and holds his breath as he chews, willing the reflexive muscles in his throat to be calm. He has to chew to get the paper down more quickly, and he flinches at the stabbing pain deep in the roots of his bad teeth, but it doesn’t matter. He moves rapidly in the small space, gracefully, as though he is a dancer and has practiced it many times, the leap back to his blanket where the pen is wrapped up.

As he uncovers the pen and crosses the coffin, he is listening hard, counting. There are at least three men. Or four. Not Sein Yun, no flip-flops. They are all wearing boots. Voices now.

The men are halfway down the corridor. The keys jangle and the long chain that holds the key ring rattles and clanks. Is it Jailer Handsome? Teza
cannot tell, but he knows the meaning of the sounds. He has experienced this before, the jailer and the others coming, that chain.

The pen in his right hand is poised to the right of his right temple, pointing upward like a dart. He takes aim at the air vent, but he has never played this game with anything bigger than the bits of gravel and the uncooked peas.

The sweat gathered on his forehead trickles in rivulets onto his eyelids, into his eyes. He feels sweat on the fingers holding the pen.

They are near the door now. The singer holds his tongue between his teeth as he takes aim again.

The pen shoots from his fingers, flying upward, but too high. It falls down, narrowly missing the web. He snatches it up again and throws while he is still moving backward.

How long is a second? A minute? Ten extra years? The pen seems to float; he thinks it will go through, his shoulders have already relaxed in relief. But it hits the bottom edge of the air vent and drops into the spider’s web, tearing through the silk strands and falling to the floor. The small plastic clatter causes a cramp to twist his stomach.

What would make you cry
?

The heavy bolt cracks back hard, that smack of metal against metal, not unlike the smack of bamboo against human bone.

Teza! Teza!

It’s his brother’s voice, not his father’s, not his mother’s. Aung Min always had the better aim with a slingshot.

Stand still. Don’t back up any more. And please, stop moving. This is your last chance; they will crash through the door in four, at the most six seconds. Close your left eye and aim a little higher. You’ve always aimed too low. Stop shaking. Now!

Teza exhales a small cry as he lets the pen go. His is not the spear-throw of a warrior. It is a full surrender to the realm of absurdity where he lives in the teak coffin and men break into it, where his teeth fall out and the spider’s web tears away and his brother whispers to him from a country he’s never seen.

The key turns in the lock a moment after the pen flies from Teza’s sweating hand.

T
he small cell fills with an invasion as uncontainable as floodwater. The men crash in, brown-clothed limbs to every bare corner. Three warders and the junior jailer surround him. Each one wears boots, though he recognizes only Handsome. Teza stands, head down. There is no way to contain the flood; no matter what he says, no matter how he replies to the questions, it will not stop. The story is already written, the scene set in this cramped theater. The ending is always the same. As the voices break the air in the cell, Teza prepares himself.

We have a report of contraband now a search yes sir no sir no it’s not the case Lying will not be tolerated you singing pig I do not know sir there is nothing here Your comrades from Hall Three we know them they’re in the dog cells already we have reports they told us your name How do you like that your own friends betrayed you I don’t know what you’re talking about Where are the contraband items where are they Sir there is nothing here I swear to you sir
.