The Lizard Cage (30 page)

The current disappears under the first wall and the second wall. A warder told the boy that crocodiles and poisonous snakes live in the ravine between them, and the boy is sure that when the snakes and crocodiles go to bed, all the ghosts wake up. They are the restless spirits of everyone who has ever died in or near the prison, whether they went in a poke-bar fight or with a knife or after a beating or with dysentery or hepatitis or malaria or any other plague, including madness and sorrow and speeding trucks.

Outside the cage, the water filters into a great cesspool where mosquitoes breed by the millions. When they smell the blood of the prisoners, they rise up and fly over the snakes and the crocodiles and even the ghosts. Mosquitoes enter the cage of their own free will and torment everyone who lives there.

The boy absentmindedly scratches one of his mosquito bites as he walks with the current, enjoying the mud-suck at his toes. When he spots a half-rotten potato bobbing along the litter-strewn bank, he grabs it, wipes it on his longyi, and drops it into his sling bag. A few paces farther on, he finds a smooth green stone, and picks it up. Treasure.

He watches the banks, squints into the monsoon crop of grass and weeds. Soon one of the guards will scythe the plants down again—long grass can be used as a place to hide weapons—but for now he enjoys the green profusion with its show of purple morning glories. After checking for scorpions, he steps into a patch of grass and wipes the mud from his feet and legs, all the while humming low so no one can hear him. Sometimes in his little shack he sings a few lines over and over, a scrap of song he doesn’t know how he knows. Singing makes him small again. It changes his face and gives him gooseflesh, just like when Nyi Lay, his pet lizard,
comes out for a visit and eats a moth from the boy’s fingers. His eyes shine then with the luster and lust of a real child, as they do now, because he’s spotted the prize, a few steps away. The green lizard with a blue neck has come out of his hiding place.

This lizard is nothing like his pet; he will never live in a shack. He needs the long grasses and the rocks and stones. He’s wild, like a snake. And magic, because he can change color.

The boy loves to watch the lizard slowly transform from deep green to the color of dusty aluminum. If you didn’t know he was there, you would just go tramping stupidly along. The guards and the warders would never see the lizard unless he ran away from them. But the boy sees. First the blue neck fades, then the blue around his legs, then the whole bright length drains away, slowly and quickly both. The lizard can’t know how it’s happening, but it happens. Now he walks with lordly steps to a clump of greenery nearer the stream. He delicately stretches his head up to a blade of grass and licks at a drop of water until it’s gone. Then his head clicks downward on a little hinge, and he drinks another drop. His tongue is pale red. The boy watches until his mosquito bites get the better of him. After giving the lizard a polite nod, the boy rises and backs away, scratching.

The air smells of warming earth and green stuff and flowers. Two old generators, gutted of all usable bits, sit at odd angles against the first brick wall, sunk in several inches of water; they are surrounded by a few desiccated car batteries and some discarded latrine pails. Morning glories have taken over one generator, and vines grow through the rust holes in the pails. The boy steps close to the burgeoning purple flowers and carefully gathers a collection. They wilt almost immediately, but that doesn’t matter. Flowers in one hand, new stone in the other, he turns and scans the back of the kitchen and the hospital. A guard stands outside the hospital, smoking. The boy waves. The man raises his hand for a moment, then bends his head away to relight his cheroot. The boy hopes he won’t watch.

Behind the hospital, close to the first of the prison walls, there stands a small tree, rooted valiantly in a bare mound of earth. The boy doesn’t know the proper name of a single plant on earth, but he calls this one
holy
. Some of the warders have tied red and pink and orange ribbons around the narrow, sand-colored trunk. It’s not impressive, nothing like the groves of mangoes and palms across the highway, but it’s the only tree left in the
cage. The guards who believe in the spirits of trees come and leave flowers at its base or tucked between the smooth bark and the colored ribbons.

When the boy reaches the nat tree, he lowers his head, puts the stone under his arm, and self-consciously folds his hands together for a moment. One breath. Two breaths. Then he jumps forward and quickly tucks the flowers into one of the ribbons. He doesn’t bow down or say words, though he thinks of his father and his mother. He could ask for protection, but it doesn’t seem right that he should ask for anything, because he’s just a boy offering wilted flowers. Should he leave the stone as an offering? But that would be the only one, among the dried-up chains of jasmine and branches of foliage. Some of the warders, along with prisoners who work in the hospital, come and place tiny glasses of water and clumps of rice in the altar box, which is painted red and sits in the crook of the tree’s lowest limbs. The boy never touches this food. It’s for the nat.

He squats down with his father’s graceful furtiveness, but he doesn’t kneel and bow before the tree as some of the men do. If they saw a boy whose father was Muslim bowing like a Buddhist, would they forbid him to come here? Squatting, he stares at the colorful ribbons while fishing a lighter and a half-smoked cheroot from his sling bag. The cheroot is strong, stronger near the stub. Swooning, the boy puts his hand on the ground to steady himself. He waves the smoke away from his eyes like Chit Naing, who often tells the boy he must not smoke. After another heady drag, he lets the coal go out, then tucks the remainder of the cigar behind his ear.

A faint breeze stirs the leaves above him, and behind, closer to the water, something sighs through the grass. The boy smiles at the sound, and holds his breath to listen. A lizard is licking water off the long green blades.

I
nside the white house, the singer stares up at his narrow slice of bright sky, darkening cloud. He wonders if somewhere in the world grows a fruit whose flesh is the same intense blue. Heaven fruit, it’s called. From Africa. Or from the deepest jungle of Brazil. And what would it taste like?

Not that he wants to put anything solid in his mouth. The thought of chewing horrifies him. Managing his rice gruel in the morning is still excruciatingly painful. He has started to keep the Eight Precepts, which means he eats only his morning meal. This is a great relief for his jaw. There’s an old saying that it’s easy to keep the Precepts when the belly is full, but maybe it’s easier when the belly is empty. In solitary confinement. With a broken jaw. Ha-ha. He lists the Eight Precepts to himself, like a child memorizing a lesson.

A good Buddhist must try to keep the first five. People in meditation retreat keep all eight. Monks have an even longer list. Teza wishes he could say them aloud, but he doesn’t want to move his mouth. For the past few days his palate and his gums have been bleeding so much that he’s swallowed a great deal of his own blood. The doctor says he should spit it out or let it drain into his cup, but moving the spitting-out muscles is so agonizing that Teza just lets the blood slide down his throat.

As though on cue, he hears someone cheerfully greet the gray-haired warder, who has arrived to open the cell. The doctor in his dirty white coat steps around the wall, holding his black bag in front of him like a badge. Or maybe a blind man’s cane. “Né gaun la?” he asks, peering between the bars. Your health is good?

The fucking twit! How can the singer reply?

He can’t. He just stands as the warder opens the grille. The doctor trundles in, glancing around nervously. Teza doesn’t understand why the man should be so anxious; he’s not the one who’s being treated, is he? And
treatment
is a misnomer. He does little more than listen to his patient’s heart (the clammy stethoscope sticks, as though dirty, to the singer’s bone-rack chest) and look at his deeply ridged fingernails (“Mineral absorption very good!”) and lecture him about moving his jaw. This is the only honest and useful counsel he gives. “You might be able to talk a bit now. But no talking!” Though he stands so close that Teza can see the festering state of the acne on his nose, the doctor still needs to shout. The singer closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Loud sounds cut right through him these days.

The doctor yells, “No talking out loud! We have to stabilize the fracture. Your jaw is still very swollen.” When he touches the distended, discolored chin, Teza can’t feel a thing. “I’m worried about an infection. Today you get
two
needles.” His voice drops to a dramatic whisper—“Your morphine”—because the first needle is contraband. “And it’s a full dosage, more than you usually get.” Then the volume goes up again. “And some antibiotic, very good quality, from China. The Chief Warden himself makes sure you get this. The Chief Warden!” His voice deepens with
awe, as though he’s talking about some powerful nat. One after the other, the needles go into Teza’s thigh, where the veins are bigger. The ache blossoms right there, then fans out,
whoosh
. He immediately recognizes the deep flood of morphine, then feels himself falling into it.

Go, go, he thinks, watching the doctor’s mouth move. The loud voice still booms off the walls, but within minutes it no longer hurts Teza the way it did before. Wherever the morphine is coming from—his mother or Chit Naing’s private dealings or that most powerful nat, the Chief Warden—the singer is very glad to have it. Once he feels the drug sliding in and through and all around, coating him from the inside out, he can pronounce that he doesn’t need it. He can manage the pain on his own.

Twenty minutes, half an hour later—whenever, perhaps a century after the fucking doctor has gone—there it is, here it comes, the pain. It’s like this sometimes, a series of unexpected spasms. Or contractions. He is giving birth to … What?

The fracture throbs up and down like a bloody grasshopper. Trapped grasshopper. How will it get out? The doctor must be wrong—clean break, ha!
I am stoned
. Isn’t this a good time to be honest? There’s a mess inside, a grasshopper with razor legs jumping, flying inside his flesh.

But the pain is foreign, apart from him. It’s like watching a horror movie happening inside his own body, but instead of being frightened, he just stares at it, fascinated. What grasshopper? If he indulges in metaphor this way, is he breaking one of the Eight Precepts? Only if poetry counts as a sensual pleasure. Does it? He is
very
stoned. Is being stoned on morphine breaking one of the Eight Precepts?

Relax, Teza. He lies down on his mat. Just breathe. He pulls his gray blanket up over his body. There is no bloody grasshopper in your mouth.

It is very similar to meditation—you can still feel the pain, but it doesn’t really hurt. Or it hurts, very much, but you are far, far away from it, listening to some other music.

There’s a sudden flicker at the wall’s edge. Free El Salvador, his grubby little hands!

But it’s not the boy. It’s a lizard, scurrying up the wall. Hunting.

Watching the reptile, the singer feels various emotions expand and fill his chest like clouds that change with the wind, curiosity shifting to sadness billowing into grief. But not only grief, something else. He sees and hears
pieces of the strange dreams he’s had these past few weeks. His grandfather’s disembodied voice calls out through tall trees. Ants devour a fetus. Lizard claws curl around his arm. The visions of a man, he thinks, who wants to leave his cage.

His eye flits up again, following the lizard on the outer wall as it rushes forward, eats a black speck of insect. An unexpected gratitude washes through him. He’s happy to see the creature but have absolutely no interest in eating it. The days of that awful hunt are over. They will not come again.

What will come in their stead? With this question shimmering in his mind, he closes his eyes and immediately drops into a deep, blue-dream sleep. He’s floating in the sky. No, it’s water. Yet he’s not wet.

And I’m not really sleeping! he thinks craftily, like a child who has succeeded in fooling his parents. I’m just dreaming. No, it’s not a dream. I am remembering. But the memory has the measurements of a dream, the same lucidity and length and weight. He is sneaking into their neighbor’s compound. And Aung Min is just ahead of him, crouched like a warrior.

My eyes are closed, yet I see everything. He knows he’s in the cage, but the memory-dream pulls him down inexorably. Teza’s the rear guard this time. Aung Min’s the scout. His own little brother. He recognizes his longyi, the shape of his body, and feels a sharp jab of pain in his jaw. He mustn’t shout out loud. Only inside the dream. The memory, where he can say anything he wants. He could even sing.

Aung Min!

Aung Min turns and grins, then waves him forward. He creeps along, eyes on the wall. Teza glances back to the low gates of the long, narrow yard. They don’t want the wrong person to catch them at it. Though they’re allowed to enter U Toe Khaing’s compound, what they’re doing could get them into trouble. Old Uncle Toe Khaing wouldn’t care. If he were sitting outside his little flat right now (as he likes to do, in that saggy canvas chair), he might not even notice, because he’s always reading a dogeared magazine, his thick glasses perched at the very end of his wide, flat nose. Sometimes you can’t tell if he’s snoozing until the magazine falls out of his hand. Teza’s not worried about him. But if May May finds out …