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bricks. Even then the singer will make a move, and he often gets them.
    When his left hand is parallel to the top of his rib cage, he stops moving it and holds the moth lightly against the wall. His right hand is loose-fingered, ready. The lizard rushes for the head of the moth, unhinging its jaws and already gulping as the wings beat against the reptilian snout. The moth flaps furiously, pushing the tips of the singer’s fingers. It’s hard to resist the illogical impulse to release the moth, let it have a last chance at its own life. But the lizard will escape if he does this, so Teza stifles his sense of charity. Still pinching the insect as it enters the lizard’s mouth, the singer takes advantage of the small, violent flurry and slaps his palm down on his prey.
    It’s hard to kill a lizard with your bare hands. A crude method at best.
    The lizard’s head and jaws and the moth between them are crushed against the brick. These are the singer’s least favorite executions, because of the blood and moth innards and wing dust smeared on the palm of his hand. The lizard’s legs still run, escaping uselessly into the air, while the singer picks insect from crushed reptilian jaws. Other times, he manages to catch a tail or break a couple of legs; the lizard drops neatly off the walland lies writhing on the cement. Then Teza breaks its narrow neck as though he were twisting the cap off a bottle.
    He puts the twitching lizard on the floor and moves the water pot back to its corner. Then, lizard in hand again, he squats down and pours a cup of water over the small corpse, rubbing the sides of the bloody and flattened head to get rid of the moth. He doesn’t like raw insect.
    It’s absurd. What’s the difference? Raw reptile, raw moth? May May would be completely horrified either way if she could see her good son devouring his innocent cellmates.
    The singer likes to make fun, but it’s true. If his mother could see him now, squatting like an old man by the water pot, avid and shining-eyed after the hunt, she would begin to cry in her silent way. If only she had howled like the melodramatic women in the Indian movies he and Aung Min grew up on. But no, they had a mother who held herself in stoic silence.
    Despite these thoughts of his family, the singer is weirdly lighthearted. Squatting, he puts the dead lizard, its dull khaki skin still on, into his mouth. He doesn’t bother to strip them anymore.
    Yes, he is very much himself this way, teeth cutting through the meager flesh, crunching the little bones. It tastes only of what it is: lizard skin and cool blood, neither sweet nor bitter, just raw, and nothing at all like chicken, despite the evolutionary connection. He chews the lizard until he knows the bones are safe enough for his throat. At the moment of swallowing, he is without any remorse, secure in the knowledge that as long as he can do this terrible thing, he can survive the terrible things they do to him.
    That night, before the lights are switched off, he eats six lizards. Or seven. Or eight. Nine? He really doesn’t count anymore.
    But when he’s lying in the dark, a black wave of shame rolls over him. He speaks to the night in an unequivocal voice. “There is no alternative.
    “And furthermore, I am not the only one.”
    The darkness pounds on and on, moralizing.
    “Whatever happens has happened before. I am not the first. Others did this, and later, they were men again.” He raises his voice, to make sure the darkness hears him. “I am still a man. My name is Teza.”

. 3 .
    T he military intelligence agents—the MI—hated his name.
    In ancient Pali,
teza
means fire, the fire of glory, of power.
    But that wasn’t the only association that pissed off his interrogators. Teza had been the nom de guerre of the great general Bogyoke Aung San, architect of Burma’s independence from the British and still revered as a leader. When the MI agents beat Teza, the young singer, it was not only his body they