The Lizard Cage (24 page)

“Teza. Teza!” He speaks the name loudly now, asking him to return. “Teza, Nyi Lay, wake up. Wake up, Little Brother.” He presses the bloodied cotton harder against the wound. The singer groans. His legs move slightly, walking in the air. “Teza, wake up!”

The singer’s eyes don’t open, but a blur of words emerges from his broken mouth. The pain of trying to speak is the rope that pulls him forward. Chit Naing keeps pressing the gash on his head. “Pyan-ma-la-boo.” Is that what he’s saying?
I’m not coming back
.

Chit Naing’s fingers are slick with blood. “Little Brother, come back. You have to wake up now. Wake up, Nyi Lay.” The jailer can hear the need in his own voice. “Open your eyes.”

The left eye is swollen shut, but the right one opens so suddenly that Chit Naing pulls away in surprise and has to put his free hand on the floor to steady himself. He leans back over the singer, whose eye is still wide open, blinking, blinking, blinking. He’s in shock; he doesn’t know where he is. “You’re still here, Teza. I am Chit Naing, Jailer Chit Naing. Remember?”

Sound heaves out of the singer, contorted like his jaw. The enraged cry, made of a single word, reverberates in the cell, lifting the singer’s head and shoulders off the floor. The jailer can’t understand. He only knows that he’s pulled the singer back and Teza is furious. He starts to kick as he howls misshapen words. Suddenly the medic is there, on the other side of Teza’s convulsing body. Without a word to Chit Naing, he plunges a needle into the prisoner’s thigh. The appearance of another man and the visceral jab of pain, rather than the drug, subdue Teza. He stops thrashing immediately, but the eye, shining black and white, will not close for several minutes.

“There,” says the medic, “that’ll calm him down.” He drops the needle on the dirty floor.

“Was it morphine?”

“No, another sedative. But he’ll be out for a few hours.”

Chit Naing puts his hand on Teza’s shoulder. It is the only gesture of comfort he dares to make.
The needle, the needle
. “Was it clean?”

“What?”

“The needle. Was it new?” His voice is too loud, unsteady. Again he becomes conscious of the warder’s watchful presence at the door.

The medic tosses out a bitter laugh. “Where do you think we are, Rangoon General? I don’t know—we try to sterilize the needles. Sure it was clean.” He pushes his chin at Chit Naing. “You should be worried about yourself. Look at your hands—they’re covered in his blood. Do you know if
he
is clean?” The medic flicks his hair off his forehead and hops over Teza. Wearing latex gloves, he probes the gash and the inflammation around it. “It’s a superficial wound. He wouldn’t bleed to death from that. The skull’s not cracked. There are lots of blood vessels in the scalp, that’s why it bleeds so much. I don’t know about the ear. Punctured eardrum? The worst thing is the jaw. I can’t touch that.” He tilts his head sideways and down, following the contortions of bone. “It looks pretty fucked. The only one who might be able to fix that is a good surgeon.” He whispers to the unconscious man, “Good luck, buddy.” Then he looks up at Chit Naing again. “A truncheon, right? Who did it?”

“Handsome.”

“Ah, right. We’re used to cleaning up his work.”

The medic scuttles the length of Teza’s body, still in a squat, checking his rib cage, abdomen, pelvis, legs. When he gets to the feet, he lets out a little whistle. “I wonder how they broke so many of his toes. You can’t set toes. They have to heal on their own. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any internal injuries.” With a condescending grin, he asks, “Jailer Chit Naing, sir, wouldn’t you like to go wash
your
hands now? We don’t know if he’s sick or not. He’s incredibly thin, though; that’s usually a sign of it.”

“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.

H
e 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.