The Lizard Cage

by Karen Connelly

  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.

  • • •

  He 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.

  . 26 .

  The 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.

  That’s how Jailer Chit Naing explained it later.

  The boy should have been killed too, because he was so close to his father, two fingers tucked into the waist of the thin man’s longyi. The truck came over the rise roaring, a beast without eyes. The headlights were broken. The boy thought the truck swerved—not to miss them but to hit them, for they’d almost reached the dirt and weeds beyond the pavement. They were two steps away. He felt his father’s hand hit him in the back harder than he’d ever been hit in his life—one heavy blow—and the ground shoved dirt into his mouth and pounded the air from his chest. The boy coughed as though he had the sickness; he couldn’t breathe. Tears stung his eyes as he fought for air. Then he just lay on the ground for a little while, resting, pushing small pieces of dirt out of his mouth with his tongue. He felt dirt clinging to his lips and chin.

  The stillness of the morning had returned, but the sun was up now, exhaling red light and heat. In the distance, he saw women walking from their village path onto the road, just as he and his father had done, except they were going in the opposite direction. He watched their straw hats until they disappeared into the rising sun. For a long time he stared at the places their bodies had occupied. Then he lay again on his side. Once, he lifted his head and looked along the side of the road, thinking his father would have fallen close by. Not until his eyes reached the middle of the lane did he find what he was looking for. He could see his father’s bare feet
stretching out toward him. Like hands, he thought. His eyes flitted here and there over the asphalt, searching. He felt a pang of sorrow; where were his father’s slippers? They were almost new. Hpay Hpay would be very angry to lose them. He saw his father’s legs too, also bare, his longyi torn and yanked up around his waist. But his body was twisted in such a strange way that the boy could not see his bloody head.

  When no one came—the place was a fair distance from the prison—the boy stood up and walked to the prison gates. He discovered that one of his teeth had pierced his lip when his father pushed him; he put his hand to his mouth, then looked at the blood. He did this again and again. He told the gate guards what had happened. Two men went out with a truck and took his father’s body away. The boy never knew where. No one washed the blood off the road. Afraid to go home, the boy stayed at the prison that night. He didn’t want to cross the road because of the ghost of his father. Where had they taken the body? The boy didn’t know, and he was afraid to ask. But he knew that an unburied body had no choice but to become a ghost, a wandering spirit. The boy felt guilty about this. But how could he have buried his father by himself? He didn’t own a shovel.

  He walked as far as the blood. The flies had been busy all day, licking it up. It would be gone in no time. There was a thick black mat of them making a fierce noise. Two days after the accident, he saw a bit of white sticking up out of the coagulated smears. Brushing away the flies, he squatted down. It was one of his father’s teeth. Shocked that he could recognize it, he wished he’d looked carefully at his father’s body. From the forgotten-remembered image of his mother, the boy knew his father’s image would fade too, merge into the faces of the other men, the faces from the cage. The flies covered the tips of his fingers while he picked out the tooth. Then they sank into the small hole where the tooth had been. The flies were green as peacock feathers. Some were blue-backed. Some were brown. Many were black. He was afraid of the wasps. All together, the noise they made was like an engine, like the roar of the truck that had killed his father. He wiped the blood-rust on a leaf, put the tooth in a small box, put the small box in his sling bag, and ran back to the prison.

  Only once did the boy walk across the road, through the field, and into the shantytown. He went for his other clothes and his father’s clothes. Little else was important enough to take. He took his mother’s tins of thanakha without knowing exactly why, for he’d already lost the childhood habit of smearing the fragrant paste on his skin. The landlord was waiting. As the boy walked down the road, the landlord came up behind him and asked for the rent. The boy explained that he had no money. The landlord said, “I’ll call the police and they’ll come and take you to jail.”

  The boy replied, seriously, “But that’s where I’m going.”

  The landlord slapped the boy’s head and grabbed his shoulder.

  When the boy explained he was working at the prison now and promised to bring the rent in small amounts, the landlord released his shoulder, poked the soft place in the joint with his forefinger, and warned the boy not to lie. The boy was astounded by the uncanny way grownups could read his mind. His lie to the landlord was his first real lie. He swore he was not lying, which was his second. He understood, at seven years old, that this was a skill he had to work hard to perfect. He never went back to the house made of bamboo and leaf thatch. The cage became his world.

  At first he lived in a little open storage shed near the shrine. It was a favorite place for warders to take naps and read the newspaper, and they didn’t mind him bedding down in there at night. But the shrine and the storage shed sat between the hospital and the kitchen, and both Chit Naing and Tan-see Tiger warned him away from the big cook. It was the jailer’s idea for the boy to make a little place outside the warders’ quarters. There are more men here, coming and going, and the cook never uses the warders’ latrine, because the warders hate his guts. The low-ranking warders hardly make enough money to feed their families, while the cook runs a food racket and gets fatter and richer every year. The boy made himself a shed from scraps of wood and strips of corrugated metal. The shed is low, like a doghouse, but it’s his home. His treasures are safe.

  The boy works hard. For cage work, he gets paid in rice and in cheroots, which he smokes like the small, fierce man he tries to be. As a rat-killer, he is popular with the inmates who do not have families to send them food. The rats are city rats, not paddy rats. Very tough, they have the taste and smell of garbage in them, like pigeons. He sells them to the prisoners, five kyats per rat, depending on how poor the prisoner is, occasionally ten kyats if the rat is big and the guy’s got money. When he eats rat himself, he gets a terrible stomachache. He dislikes rat meat so much that he will trade one rodent, or two, or three, for any fair amount of Outside food, but to hold his bargaining power he keeps his desperation a secret from the prisoners.

  When the men have visitors from Outside, they usually get some money. Outside is where money is made. The boy imagines that the paper kyats come from a place bigger than Hall Five, a cage full of paper and scissors. Spotting a pair of black-handled scissors in an office he was cleaning, he asked one of the other floor-scrubbers what they were. He then dared to open and close the long jaws. The cleaner took a piece of paper from the wastebasket and began to snip away. The boy watched in silent wonder as a crooked, five-pointed star fell out of the paper.

  He would love to have a pair of scissors, but he’s never seen them anywhere but in that office. He has seen razor blades inserted into pieces of wood, and the junkies’ syringes and the metal bars whose ends are sharpened into points for stabbing—these poke bars are the best murder weapons, he knows, especially if you get the heart, the lung, or the intestine. With a few pokes in the stomach, it’s hard to stanch the blood.

  But with a pair of scissors, he could cut shapes out of the paper in his books. He would cut his hair instead of getting it shaved. He would cut Bogyoke Aung San’s face out of a blue five-kyat bill and glue it to the wall beside his other picture of the famous general. The tan-see of Hall Four, the ruling convict of all the convicts in the entire hall, has given the boy many lessons about the Bogyoke. The big man even has a picture of the general hanging on the wall in his cell. Bogyoke was a hero, a great soldier. At the word soldier, Tan-see Tiger raises his arms and his voice. None of the soldiers today are as great as the great Bogyoke. And the generals, the generals of today are just a bunch of crooked pricks, nothing like the Bogyoke. He defeated all the terrible British and all the cruel Japanese who had overrun the whole country, which, the boy supposes, is Rangoon, Mandalay, and the immense field in between.

  Sometimes the boy dreams of going to visit Rangoon. Chit Naing has told him it’s less than an hour away by car, more on the bus. But the boy would never go in a car or a bus or anything else with an engine. He would walk.

  And when he got there, he would see everything: the Shwedagon Pagoda, the Sule, Chinatown, the Chinese temples. These places, he knows, are made of pure gold, with real mirrors (not pieces of shiny metal) and walls full of rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Mahabandoola Street. Scott Market. Inya Lake: the prisoners have told him it is beautiful and big and shines in the sun; there’s more water in the lake than he has ever seen in his life. But by foot, those places are a thousand lives away. And everything about the city feels dangerous. Next year, he thinks. I will save up some money and go. He doesn’t like the road with its roaring trucks and buses. He remembers the men in his neighborhood getting on a bus with a horde of people crammed inside, going off to Rangoon to work. So many people out there, so many streets. Sometimes standing at the big cage gates makes him anxious; everything about those looming metal gates means unfathomable, dangerous departure. The man who killed his father might live in Rangoon. All those buses and trucks and cars and people, they could so easily crush a boy. Chit Naing chides him, “Nonsense! You have to go to Shwedagon Pagoda, you’re Burmese. Are you just going to live out here forever and never go into the city? You have to
go to a pagoda, a temple. Have you ever been to a temple?”

  The boy stares at the ground. His father was a Zairbadi, a Burmese Muslim. He has dark-morning memories of his father kneeling and praying. He watches the Muslim prisoners bowing down during the day and murmuring their mysterious words to Allah. The Buddhists pray too, at the shrine before the Buddha. When Chit Naing told him that the Buddha is not the same as Allah, the boy felt the insult like a nasty pinch. Of course the two are not the same—what does Chit Naing take him for, a retard? Chit Naing is a kind, wise man, but sometimes he, like so many other old people, underestimates the boy’s intelligence. Allah is invisible and powerful and big as the wind—that’s why the Muslims bow down and whisper so much—while the Buddha is solid as clean gold, still and calm like his statue at the shrine. The boy knows these two holy forces, but no one has ever taught him how to pray. His mother was a Buddhist, and she kept a small altar in the house, but she was too weak for the pagodas.

  “Well?” repeats Chit Naing. “Have you ever been to a temple?”

  The boy shakes his head. The senior jailer knows many things, but how can he know the fear of getting crushed by the city? He is too big.

  “Someday you will go to the pagoda, and you will like it very much. It’s a peaceful place.”

  Yes, someday, thinks the boy, peaceful. But not now, not yet. He has too much work to do. He himself is liquid, part of the prison currency now, slipping through the corridors with messages, on missions. The boy speaks so rarely that some convicts presume he is a deaf-mute. This reluctance to talk makes him popular among the prison authorities, who sometimes choose him to do jobs on their behalf. He once overheard a senior warder say, “The little rat-killer was born with the ability to keep his mouth shut. Some of our men should take lessons from him,” which pleased the boy immensely. He doesn’t know what he was born with, but he quickly learned the importance of safeguarding a secret. It doesn’t matter whether it belongs to a warder or a jailer or a prisoner; they’re all the same. So the doctor sometimes uses him for black-market drug runs to the sick and needle runs to the junkies. Another senior warder once used him as a server to a very hairy Indian, who was on rationed meals for offending the Chief Warden. And now he has new work, serving the Songbird, which is the criminals’ name for the singer. It’s a job of some notoriety, a position that demands respect. The boy pretends he doesn’t know this; stupidity makes his life easier.