The Lizard Cage - Softcover

Karen Connelly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009950247X ISBN 13: 9780099502470

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2008

Synopsis

Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers

About this title

About the Author:

Karen Connelly is the author of seven books of poetry and non-fiction. Her first book of prose, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1993 and was a New York Times Notable Travel Book of the Year. Raised in Calgary, Connelly has lived for extended periods in different parts of Asia and Europe, and now divides her time between rural Greece, travels in Asia and her home in Toronto.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

.1.
JULY 1995
The singer is lying on the floor, a gray blanket pulled up around his chest. With slightly narrowed eyes, he stares at the ceiling. A single lizard is up there, clinging to the plaster.

What if it were the last lizard in the world? Then what would you do?

Teza opens his mouth.

It's not the last lizard. Rather, it's the first. Most of them won't appear until evening, little dinner guests neatly dressed in khaki. When the halo of insects has formed around the lightbulb, the reptiles run to and fro in their jerky, mechanical way, jaws snapping. Sometimes their mouths are so stuffed with insects that they can barely shut them. Gluttons. Showoffs. Any hungry mammal would be jealous. With all that eating, you'd think they'd get fat, but unfortunately the lizards are very skinny, like most of the human inmates. Teza closes his mouth.

In response, his stomach growls, the sound as loud as his normal speaking voice. A predatory animal has taken up residence in his gut. Never mind the parasites, a small panther is mutating in there. A feral dog. Evening with its lizard bounty seems very far away.

To confirm that sad thought, the iron-beater begins to strike eleven a.m. Teza counts each blow of a hardwood pallet against an iron bar in the compound, at the base of the watchtower. Clang, clang, clang. The timekeeper whacks the iron as hard as possible, so that the prisoners will hear him and know their time is passing. All ten thousand of them, especially the couple thousand politicals whom the singer counts as friends and comrades, are very far away. The nature of the teak coffin--of any solitary cell--is that it converts everything into distance. Time, space, food, women, his family, music, anything he mightneed or want or love: it is all far, far away.
From solitary, the whole cage is a foreign country to him. He lives on the very edge of it, straining to hear the other voices.
Tkeep! Tkeep! Tkeep!

The lizard sings. Not like a bird, though Teza remembers from first-year biology that this common cling-to-house lizard is brother to a tiny prehistoric sparrow. Then the desert wind blew and the rain fell and the scales grew into feathers. As he stares at the lizard on the ceiling, he can imagine it: the front two legs and feet stretched out, webbing, blossoming into wings. The back feet articulated into clawed toes, which curled deftly around the thin branch of a tree. And birdsong ribboned through the steamy jungle.

But before that, who knows how many millions of years ago, there was just this somewhat alarmed chirping tkeep tkeep tkeep to inspire the Neanderthals. Like Junior Jailer Handsome. Here we are again, the singer thinks, smiling. Back in the Stone Age, among cavemen, in a cave. His stomach growls.

The iron-beater is still. It's past eleven o'clock now. And Sein Yun has not shown up with breakfast. Teza watches the lizard run from the light, stop, run to the wall, stop. It runs down the wall and whisks itself out the air vent high above his head.

Teza scans the brick wall around the vent. His eyes have learned the different colors of reptile and wall, lizard skin and skin of man, brick and spider. That's what he wants to see now. The spider.

It's the color of a tiny, dirty copper pot. When the bulbous back catches the light, the copper becomes iridescent, an alchemist's metal. It glints gold, then a sheen of blue-green rises toward copper again. At dusk the creature deepens to red, then fades with the invisible sun. When Teza first came to the teak coffin, the spider was almost indistinguishable against the red bricks. But now the singer can find him in seconds.

A fine web is strung high in the corner where the two walls meet, below and to the left of the air vent. The spider often rebuilds his web in a different place. When Teza wakes each day, he checks to see if his companion has chosen to abandon the darkness of the cell and build his new home outside. The singer thinks he's the sort of spider who should have green leaves around him. But the spider stays.

The Chief Warden thinks Teza cannot see out of this narrowest of windows. In a manner of speaking, he is correct. The vent is too high. Even when Teza jumps he sees nothing save another fraction of the very high outer wall and a corrugated tin overhang. But the spider sees. He crawls the outer wall, up and up. From the top, the spider witnesses the whole city, the gold stupas, the green trees, the streets, millions of men and women, the lakes Inya and Kandawgyi, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's famous house on University Avenue, and his mother's two-story flat, surrounded by laundry and orchids. Daw Sanda loves her orchids dearly.

The spider perceives all this and more, much more: the sky with its white-backed, blue-bottomed clouds full of rain, the horizon curving like a belly. The spider sees.

And Teza watches the spider.

The fabulous copper-pot spider.

Is it male or female?

The singer has decided the spider is male: it's too depressing to imagine a woman here. He would hate to have a woman see him now.

The singer feeds his male comrade-spider secret messages, just a few words at a time, all his body can hold. Soundlessly, the spider takes in the messages and spins them out when he crawls into the world. The glimmering threads are Teza's words.

I love you. I think of you and send wishes of health.

We have dared everything; we must win.

I take strength from the knowledge that you keep fighting.

I am still alive. Teza.

Remember the meaning of my name.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 009950247X
• ISBN 13: 9780099502470
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356