The Lizard Cage (39 page)

I
n the midst of frantic movement, stillness comes quickly, unexpected. The boy stops fighting. His terror is no longer explosion but numbness, an ending, the end of the world. His body was never his own body. There were too many hungers and losses, too many times when it was easier to do this, to slide out of the fearful territory bounded by his skin.

It is magic. He is drowning in the stream, Handsome’s clenched hands press him down, but he is also hovering outside, invisible, like the nat. He sees everything that happens to him, but none of it matters. The thin body has gone limp, hardly different from a dead rat, its skin sliding like a velvet sac over viscera and small bones. Underwater, his eyes open to see a blurred shape outlined in light. He thinks,
Handsome is already a ghost!
Then he’s gone.

A
s quickly as the stillness came, it twists over on itself like a landed fish. Handsome hauls the boy up alive. When his narrow back arches out of the stream, his head snaps into the air, mouth spilling water. He rolls over on his side and begins to heave the food in his stomach onto the gravel. Somewhere close by and very far away he hears Handsome swearing in what sounds like normal human pain. Mid-vomit, he looks up
to see the man clutching his knee, stumbling through the nearby grass. The boy wipes his mouth and rolls over, trying to push himself to his feet. If there’s something wrong with Handsome’s leg, he will be able to outrun him. But the jailer has lifted himself upright too. He glares at the boy, who stands there dripping, bare feet ready to sprint. He’s still hacking, but he could run now, if he had to.

The jailer speaks very slowly, through clenched teeth. “Kala-lay, if you stop being so disrespectful, I won’t have to hurt you, will I? It has to be
Yes, sir
and
No, sir
, you know that. Now come here.”

Water seeps out of the boy’s sling bag. His longyi and shirt stick to him. As his coughing begins to subside, he becomes aware of the point on his cheek where Handsome punched him, a sharp ache cutting his face.

“Kala-lay, I just want to ask you some questions.”

The boy looks from the kitchen to the lit hospital windows to the first of the big halls, the place where the compound curves, following the octagonal enclosure of the walls. No one will help him. Even Tan-see Tiger’s amulets can’t help him now. He sees the floodlit figure of a warder on guard duty, the coal of a cheroot burning like a useless beacon.

The jailer is getting angry again. “Get the fuck over here. If I have to cross the stream to talk to you, you’ll regret it, I promise you that. I won’t save your sorry ass a second time, you little fucker. Just get over here.”

The boy would like to curl up, disappear. His voice quavers like his body. “Sir, please don’t drown me.”

“Just come here. Fuck! Are you deaf as well as stupid?”

Wind moves the leaves of the tree all at once, a susurrus. The boy plods back into the water. He’s shivering as he steps out onto the gravel and stands, head down, in front of the jailer, his shoulders tensed. He waits for a slap on the head, or a punch. Nyi Lay wants to put his fingers up to his cheek, to touch the swelling. But he doesn’t move.

“I only want to ask you some questions. I think you can help me, kala-lay.”

The boy cannot stop shivering. He glances up at Handsome and very quickly drops his eyes to the steady dark shimmer of the stream.

“Remember the big storm last month, when Hall Two flooded?” The man puts his hand on the child’s shoulder and kneads the narrow muscles
with his fingers. It hurts, but the boy doesn’t pull away. He knows he has to forget his fear or Handsome will smell it.

“Do you remember? It was also the day a bunch of politicals were sent to the dog cells.”

“Yes.”

“Where were you that day?”

Somebody must have seen him near the teak coffin. “In the morning I helped in the gardens, and in the afternoon I was hunting rats.”

“Where?”

“Here, by the stream. Then at the back of Hall Two. The rats all came out because of the flood.” Weeks ago, the boy made a careful plan about how to tell this lie.

“What about the solitary section at the other end of the big halls?”

“I passed by there on my way to Hall Two, and then again on my way home.” Slowly, he loosens his longyi and squeezes out some of the water. He is a fine actor: his forehead furrows with remembering. “My slipper broke. I stopped by one of the solitary houses to fix it. Under the eaves. Because of the rain.” Now it doesn’t matter that someone saw him by the teak coffin, he has an excuse. He was just on his way home. He reknots his longyi.

Handsome lets go of the boy’s shoulder and takes hold of his chin. He bends slightly and hisses in the small, water-streaked face, “You know Sammy, the big Indian? You know how he lost his tongue? Do you?”

The boy’s answer is distorted by Handsome’s grip on his jaw. “Nah.”

“He lied to me, and I cut the tongue right out of his head.”

Handsome is a liar too. The boy knows the giant didn’t have a tongue when he arrived here. He lost his tongue somewhere else, not to the jailer’s knife.

The boy slowly pulls his head back. Handsome releases his jaw. “Sir, I’m not lying. I just stopped there for a second because my slipper broke. Look, I show you—it’s tied together with string.” He starts to open the bag on his shoulder, where his flip-flops are safely stowed, but the jailer swears in disgust and pushes the boy backward.

“I don’t want to see your dirty shoes. I’m looking for something that got lost that day, during the storm. I want to find it.”

The boy has stumbled but not fallen. He stands again, head down, his eyes on the jailer’s boots. “Sir, I would be happy to help you in your search, if you like. I am very good at finding things.”

“Hey, kala-lay. Dirty little Indian, look at me.”

The child lifts up his large dark eyes.

Handsome whispers, “I won’t cut out your tongue.” He leans down and takes hold of the child’s jaw again, gently, then moves the small skull back and forth, as though testing the flexibility of the vertebrae. “If you are lying to me, I will kill you.”

The boy does not blink.

“Did you find anything in the mud that day, when you stopped by the singer’s cell? Hmm? Did you?”

“I didn’t find anything, sir.”

Handsome shoves him away again. “Go on, then. Get out of here. I’m sick of your smell.”

The boy turns and wades noisily through the stream. When he feels far away enough to be defiant, he takes his slippers out of his sling bag and shoves his feet into them, one at a time. There is no string, no broken strap. He strides on, away from the water. He doesn’t need to look back. He knows Handsome is still there, watching him.

W
hen the boy disappears between the hospital and the kitchen, the jailer leans down and touches his knee. He would like nothing more than to sit down on the ground. Instead he turns and spits at the little tree. Someone’s going to have to cut it down. There aren’t supposed to be any trees on the prison grounds. They axed the big ones years ago to stop prisoners and warders alike from thinking that nats would help them escape punishment or get promotions. Superstitious crap.

Handsome puts his back to the tree. If he could, he’d be right on the boy’s heels, but he has to rest for a few minutes. When he was showing that little bugger who’s boss, something ripped open around the kneecap—it could have been a damn bullet hitting him, that’s how much it hurt. He nearly fell on top of the kid. He’s still trembling, but he can’t tell whether it’s from the pain or the excitement.

He looks up. The boy is long gone.
But don’t think you’re getting away, you little rat-killing Indian shit
.

A couple of warders confirmed it. They saw the boy close to the teak coffin that evening. The only place in the whole prison where they haven’t searched for the white pen is the rat-killer’s shack. Handsome can’t believe he didn’t think of it himself; the kid’s always put him on edge.

After he caught the boy stealing food, he complained to the Chief Warden, but the Chief didn’t care. “What are you on about now? Don’t you have enough to deal with, Officer Nyunt Wai Oo? He’s an orphan and a good worker. He was eating leftovers off dirty plates? That’s hardly stealing. Leave the kid alone.”
Leave the kid alone
. Well, he won’t leave the little thief alone now. If he steals food right out from under their noses, there’s no telling what else he would steal, what else he has secreted away in that doghouse of his. Handsome takes a half-smoked cheroot out of his breast pocket and lights it. For a minute or two he needs this, just this, sweet heavy smoke to calm him. He will take a break and rest his fucked-up knee and then go do what needs to be done.

T
he singer goes back, before he met Thazin, years before he fought with Aung Min about the right way to win a revolution. He returns to an afternoon without cages, when he was still a boy and his father stood with a bag of oranges at the wooden threshold of the pongyi-kyaung, the monastery school. He bows to the abbot, the smiling Hsayadaw, raising his hands together to show his respect. Then he follows his father into the compound and watches him as he sets up a doctor’s office on the table of an open-air schoolroom. Stethoscope in hand, Dr. Kyaw Win Thu checks the boy with fever, the one with an eye infection, another with a lung ailment, the thin child who cannot gain weight. After his rounds, the doctor and the abbot sit under a scrawny tree and share a cheroot, laughing over things Teza cannot understand.

He wanders off. In the room where the orphans eat together on the wooden floor, he begins chatting idly with a novice who’s doing school-work, his dark orange robe half unbound. The boy complains that he isn’t very good at math. Teza finishes the novice’s page of sums while the boy rewraps his robe, then they go outside to play.

Unable to remember the boy clearly, he puts Free El Salvador in his place. Perhaps it’s all vanity and nostalgia, emotions he believes he’s relinquished.
Questions replace his memories. Why shouldn’t it be possible? The Hsayadaw takes care of so many children. If they bring thousands of men into the prison, why can’t they send out a single child? Free El Salvador hasn’t committed a crime.

Chit Naing has to help. He will help. He must. If for no other reason, then simply because he feels guilty. The jailer will have to go to the pongyi-kyaung and speak with the Hsayadaw, remind him that Dr. Kyaw Win Thu used to treat the children and the monks at the monastery school. And every year Daw Sanda used to give ahlu—a noble offering of new robes to the novices. At least in 1988 she was still doing this. Teza went with her that year. They also took food to the children. If the Hsayadaw knew where Free El Salvador was from, he would take him in, Teza is sure of it, no matter how crowded the old monastery school might be. Out of love and respect for Teza’s parents, he would extend his love to the boy.

But what if the abbot has died? The last time Teza saw him, he must have been in his late sixties, nimble enough but also fragile, parchment-skinned. Teza remembers walking up some stairs behind him. The Hsayadaw hitched up his saffron robes, careful not to trip on the worm-eaten steps. Teza watched the muscles contract in the abbot’s long, skinny calves. The parallel tendons at the back of his ankles and knees were like tension cables that held the whole delicate mechanism together. What if the mechanism has slowed to a stop?

Teza taps his fingers on the cement floor. Then he closes his eyes and tries to still his rattling mind. He sees the abbot’s face, his eyes almost disappeared in the deep creases of a smile.

Weariness settles into him. Too much thinking. And talking. Speaking with the boy has fatigued him. His jaw is throbbing, pushing pain into the rest of his head. Things get worse in the evening, when the labor of getting through the day leaves him completely wrung out. He will meditate, then sleep. He sits down in the center of the cell and genuflects three times, facing the bars and the world beyond the bars.

Metta.

Karuna.

Mudita.

Upekkha.

These are the Four Divine Abidings. Love. Compassion. Joy in the good fortune of others. Equanimity.

Upekkha. He begins and ends with this word. Equanimity in the face of what must be. The breath travels easily through his body, expanding the muscles of his back over his rib cage, beneath his shoulder blades. It used to be so hard to calm his mind and sit quietly in his body, but there’s no battle anymore. He breathes until the word
upekkha
is nothing but an empty form, a skeleton of letters with air moving through it. Then the word itself blows away with the slight wind of the heart. The lungs expand and contract until he feels as if he has no body. The pain joins this lightness, despite its great weight. He carries the burden, though the burden is not himself. He is nothing but a thread of air.

Yet he desires. Precisely this silence, this peace. He wants to stretch it, stay inside it, where he is unbound. Blood pumps bright new shards of glass into his jaw. He feels tendons, muscles in the bottom of his mouth, his tongue, all thumping with his slow pulse. To still the raging mind, to calm the body in great pain: he has found these treasures in his breath.

If desire is the root of suffering, as the Buddha said, is it wrong to crave this peace? The Buddha must have desired enlightenment. Otherwise he would have remained a spoiled prince in a grand palace.

Can it be so easy, to enter the stream? Sotapatti magga. He’s impressed with himself for remembering the Pali term. It’s been years since he studied such things. Stream-entry is the first step to becoming an enlightened one. To enter the stream is to receive the first glimpse of Nibbana, nirvana, fire unbound from its fuel, gone cold and passionless. That is the nature of the mind released.

His own name means fire. Fire and glory, Teza. How this word strengthened him, tied him to Burma’s history. He remembers the beginning, in the interrogation center, clinging so fiercely to the only thing he had:
teza
. Can he desire the end of his own name?