The Lizard Cage (25 page)

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.

A
fter 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:

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.

When there’s a storm, he’s sad, because rain drips through the roof of his shack, but he’s also happy, because he knows exactly where the rats will go.

Inside. Like giant, gray-haired cockroaches, they scuttle up the drains into the shower rooms. They prefer the smaller buildings, where there aren’t so many people. And if it rains for a long time and a building floods—like Hall Two, which is built in the lowest part of the compound—the rats come scurrying right back out again. But the other day, as the storm stirred up, the boy rushed for the closest shower room drainpipe; he knew the rats would be scurrying in. Before he reached the shrine, rain was already running down his face. He was racing the rats, but he knew they had the advantage. They’re the only ones in the cage who are permitted to run. Everyone else has to walk; it’s in the regulations. The
boy walked as fast as he could, almost skipping, hoping he wasn’t going to be too late.

When he got to the teak coffin shower room, he stood stock-still over the open drain, his trusty stick raised in the air. His eyes scurried like the rats themselves, from wall to wall to wall, but he didn’t see a single one. Rain drenched his clothes. He swore under his breath. No rats.

Just a warder walking by, who laughed at him. Shit! He was too late. The squeakers had already gone into the pipe. The men who wanted rat for dinner were going to be pissed. Still holding his stick in the air, the rat-killer started to calculate how many kyats he would lose, how much Outside food.

Blinking water out of his eyes, he growled, “Fucking rain, fucking rats,” and let the end of his stick thump against the ground. He started back toward his shack and the warders’ quarters, holding his skinny body close to the wall, under the narrow eaves, but the wind was so strong that sheets of rain snapped against his arms and legs. Angry to be wet and ratless both, he put his head down and hurried forward.

That’s when a small, blade-shaped thing hit the brick-chip gravel directly in front of him. A white dart. He was moving so quickly he stepped over it before his brain registered
treasure
. He carried on a few more steps, then stopped and energetically scratched his shin, as if he had a bad mosquito bite there, which he didn’t. He just wanted to look around before he returned to the treasure. He peered backward, past his arm. He glanced ahead. Close to the main prison office, three warders were herding a large work detail toward the big halls; warders and inmates alike rushed to get indoors. On the far side of the watchtower, he could see warders standing guard at the doors of the big halls, but the rain and the storm’s early darkness blurred them. The floodlights wouldn’t come on for another hour.

The rain he cursed became a screen to hide behind. Staring at the brick chips, water puddling around his bare feet, he shuffled back four paces. Five. Standing below the air vent and above his prize, he heard the ominous drumming of boots.

Handsome’s voice cracked like lightning into the cell.

Outside, the smallest hand in the cage reached down and picked up the glowing white pen.

Then, against the rules, he ran.

•   •   •

H
e takes out his prize and examines the fingerprinted length of it. When he presses the button at the top, the nib comes out at the bottom, with a quiet
tsshik-tsheek
. He draws a circle on his dirty hand. The appearance of the blue ink is like magic. He was brave enough to take the pen, so it belongs to him. He would like to keep it forever, but it’s worth too much. Right now it’s still too dangerous to show around, but when things calm down, he’ll exchange it. The politicals will trade anything for a pen with ink.

Dried fish, meat. To feed the demon gnawing the bones in his legs.

T
he boy can’t forget and tries not to remember his own story. Not-forgetting not-remembering is the best way to live in the cage. Any prisoner and most of the warders will tell you that.

His father, who was a low-ranking warder, never said such a thing, but then he wasn’t much of a talker. His mother talked, and she could sing too, before the time of whispering began. But that was so long ago. And who remembers the voice of a dead woman? What he remembers-forgets is the illness that killed her.

Money meant three things only: rice, rice water, medicine. She ate all the medicine and nothing came back but blood, strings of it out of her mouth, baby snakes, such a dark, clotted red they might as well have been black. She died so long ago that he doesn’t think of her anymore. Living in a world inhabited entirely by men, he forgets what a woman is, what a mother does. A very small boy, he came to the prison to help his father. He ran errands for the other warders to earn his keep. He watched his father begin to die in the same way his mother had, coughing up snakes.

They lived outside the prison grounds, across the big road, past the palm and mango grove, in a village where some houses were built of wood, but most were made of thatch and scraps of metal, random boards,
even creatively mounted lengths of old linoleum. If the wind blew the wrong way, the smell of pigs and latrines filled the air. Walking back and forth every day, the boy stayed close to his father, rarely holding his hand but often touching his leg or his hip to make sure he was still there. Already his skeleton had started to ache, protesting the rice and rice water and meager vegetables, crying out in its silent bony way
not enough not enough
.

At night he sometimes heard men fighting in the streets after long sessions of drinking. They fought with knives, broken bottles. The prison was safer, a kingdom of guards with giant dogs, where the bad men were locked up and could war only among themselves. The boy stayed close to his father, watching him, making sure he wouldn’t get away. When the sickness made him cough at night, the boy brought the medicine quickly. He gave him the pills, ran and brought him a cup of water without spilling. He cared for his father with a fierce tenderness but also with a clear motive of self-preservation. He was afraid of being taken away to an orphanage or becoming a road-builder. That’s what you might have to do, his father told him, when I die. Carry stones or cement at one of the building sites in the city. That’s where you’ll have to go.

The boy fell asleep on the floor beside his father and woke every time he coughed.

But it wasn’t the cough, the black snakes that got him. It was very early in the morning, still dark out. They were crossing the big road before the prison. Farther along, it opens out into a smaller road that leads up to the big gates. The truck wasn’t going to the cage, though; it was barreling along on its way to Rangoon. The driver had been driving all night, on his home run from Mandalay. His eyes were full of crazy medicine, pills to keep him awake.