Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  —man can live only as member of nation, therefore nation transcends group interests. Strong only as cohesive unit.

  —Committee of Representatives institution that “expresses political agreement of Government and Nation.” “Documents unity of Leader and Nation.”

  —Party inseparable from Gov.

  —Party functions by finding and uniting most capable people “thru selection conditioned by day-to-day struggle.”

  He flopped it over. He’d finish it tomorrow. He sat at the kitchen table listening to the clock, unhappy, and when it reached ten he got up and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He left the lidded pot with the remainder of the bean soup and a spoon and a bowl on the table where his father would see them.

  From his bedroom he could make out a policeman talking in the glow of a telephone box. The town was dark except for an occasional window and a single bulb lighting the square in the distance. He turned his light out and stayed where he was in the darkness, waiting for his father, or the Schieles, or someone. He saw no movement except the lighter tones of passing clouds. He pulled a chair over and dozed and woke to see the dark shapes of dogs standing in people’s front gardens and peering in their windows. When he fell back asleep even his dreams had become dull and bland, absorbed with packing and unpacking large suitcases from a trunk.

  School was closed, Monday, with a curt sign posted on the chained double doors announcing it would reopen in a week. The official reason provided was unsafe stairways that demanded immediate attention. Karel’s father said the real reason was the realignment of the teaching staff. Whatever the reason, Karel lay quiet in his bed Tuesday morning, his arms at his sides, in gratitude.

  His father knocked once and said without opening the door that Albert had called from the zoo and had asked if he wanted to work extra hours in view of his free time this week. He could hear his father’s resentment at having to pass on such messages, and he regretted it. When he came downstairs he said, “Who wants coffee?” rubbing his hands together in a parody of anticipation, but the house was empty.

  He bought a small hard roll at the café and ate it on the way over to the zoo, wishing he had some juice. The zoo was on a rise along the south end of town, with a view over the square to the northern mountains. It was considered one of the attractions of the region. The new regime was enlarging its budget, and Karel hoped his apprenticeship would become a full position. The site was already bounded by an old stone wall and was being further surrounded by a moat. The moat was at that point a trench. There was to be a bigger restaurant, a concert garden, a monkey island, a new pheasantry, and expanded maintenance and administration buildings. The zoo held, besides the Reptile House, flamingos, cranes, parrots, and endless other birds, camels, llamas, tapirs, wild asses, antelope, bears, wolves, bison, ibex, wild sheep, bongos, gaurs, all sorts of deer, a mountain lion, and three monkeys. They were organized haphazardly, isolated from the looping walkways provided for visitors. In a corner of the complex a square pit represented the promised aquarium. A sign advertized its coming attractions. The centerpiece of the advertising was a lurid painting of some piranha (“the Sanitary Police of South American Rivers”). The Reptile House was next to the pit, near some neglected boojum trees. It was made of ugly yellow brick. A drab sign with an adder’s head in silhouette marked the door. As a department of the zoo it was inadequately supported. In terms of commonly shared materials it always had to make do with whatever the mammal or bird staffs had discarded or could spare. Even with that, it was a model of organization and cleanliness. It held 301 reptiles in 116 species and was roofed with louvered shutters over tessellated glass to control the daylight. There was a crocodile hall and tiers for lizards, tortoises, and snakes. The louvered shutters worked badly but were supposedly to be fixed. There were some prize exhibits: a giant tortoise, a green-and-yellow crested basilisk, an impressive poisonous snake collection, including an albino krait, and two nine-foot Komodo dragons. Karel spent most of his time helping with the feeding and cleaning cages. He had less contact with the prize exhibits but visited them before and after work and was sure a promotion would mean greater responsibilities in those areas.

  At the service entrance one of the older staff members looked at him indifferently when he arrived and dumped a sack of rotten turnips at his feet. Karel checked the menial work orders at the food kitchens and storehouses, the hospital, the quarantine station, and the masons’ workshops. In the carpenters’ workshop three men and an apprentice were standing around a box trap as if it were impossibly complex or mysterious. He could hear what he guessed to be the nearby male ibex butting heads; the sound was like great rocks being driven together.

  Albert passed him from behind, carrying a sack of fish heads. He said only “Good morning,” and nodded to indicate Karel should follow. They crossed to the Reptile House, white hairs atop the old man’s head waving lazily in the breeze. He was wearing a white lab coat that had a footprint on the back of it. They entered the building through the rear and stopped opposite the enclosure for the giant tortoise so Albert could scrutinize its carapace at length. He eyed one side especially critically, pointing out a stretch of what looked like mold. He didn’t say anything. In response to their attention the tortoise rose up on her feet, considered movement, and lowered herself down again.

  “Ever feed her something like that?” Karel asked, to break the silence. He indicated the sack of fish heads.

  She ate only vegetation, Albert said. Which was about the only type of food she could catch. He turned away from her enclosure and at a crossing hall handed the fish heads to an assistant heading toward the crocodiles.

  They stopped again on the snake tier at a glass enclosure that seemed empty. Karel was all attention, trying to be the star pupil. What am I looking at? he thought. Albert tapped the glass. A snake appeared, a hognose, unnoticed in plain view by Karel because Karel was still, as Albert always told him, inexperienced at seeing. The old man’s tapping the glass made clear that he’d seen Karel’s confusion, and Karel thumped his forehead on the pane and let it rest there, despairing of ever learning anything. The hognose, a mottled brown with an upturned nose like a shovel lip, rose and hooded its neck and hissed loudly, mimicking a cobra, and then struck at the glass. When Karel didn’t move, it rolled over and played dead, its mouth agape and tongue hanging out.

  At the lizard tier they stopped beside the desert iguanas. A small gecko looked on from across the aisle, waving its tail like a prowling cat. Albert gathered the long metal tube and a bag of olives left for him against the wall and prepared to enter the enclosure at the end of the row while Karel watched a brilliant yellow iguana, entranced at its way of growing torpid in intricate attitudes. Albert cleared his throat, and Karel came to himself and followed him around the back of the tier.

  The old man smoothed his hair and straightened his coat, as if preparing to meet royalty, and then tapped the door loudly to clear away dim-witted individuals who hadn’t registered the vibrations of his footsteps. He opened it, gestured Karel through, and followed. They watched carefully where they stepped. Iguanas scattered in various directions and then froze as if playing a children’s game. Some froze on branches, others head downward on rock faces. A few squeezed into clefts in the piled shale. Albert was making tiny squeaking noises with his pursed lips. He had his sights set on a small brown lizard with a large head, clinging to a rock not much bigger than itself. He identified it as a crested anole. Not feeling good, he said, but she wouldn’t hold still for the noose.

  The noose was the usual way of gathering specimens, a thin bamboo pole a few feet long with a string running its length and a tiny lasso dangling from the end. Few lizards seemed to mind having the pole waved cautiously over their heads, and most were gathered this way without harm, after some admittedly exasperating maneuvering of the miniature noose. When the noose tightened they always spread their legs stiffly, as if refusing to believe they were being lifted from the earth.

 
“So,” Albert said, “we resort to drastic measures.” He held up an end of the metal tube and fitted an olive into it. He put his mouth to it like a bugle, aimed the other end at the anole, and blew hard. The olive ricocheted off two walls and the anole bounced off the rock and rolled over limp.

  A larger lizard scurried to the olive and clasped it, stopping in that position.

  “It doesn’t hurt them?” Karel asked, amazed.

  Albert shook his head, gathering the anole gently into a mesh specimen net. Its small mouth gaped, and Karel could see grain-sized teeth. “Ripe olives,” Albert said. “The nomads, when they want to kill them for food, use pebbles or nails.” He held the little drooping animal up for Karel’s inspection. An assistant passed by and stared at them through the glass. “How would you describe her on a field report?” he asked.

  Karel coughed, immediately nervous.

  “You’d start with size,” Albert said.

  “Size,” Karel said quickly, and trailed off.

  “Extensible throat fan,” Albert said. He pointed out the throat sac. He asked Karel if there were other distinguishing characteristics.

  Karel nodded, appreciating his tone. He pointed out to Albert the coloration, the crossbands, the compressed tail with a crest supported, Albert demonstrated, by bony rays.

  “She loves the sun,” Albert said fondly, and prepared to leave.

  Karel asked what was wrong with her.

  “That we’ll find out,” Albert said, and he smiled, and patted the anole with his forefinger as he might pat a soap bubble.

  Outside the enclosure he went on for Karel’s benefit, though he’d been ready to leave. His voice was patient. He offered the information whatever Karel’s capacities. She was a member of the Iguanidae family, fourteen genera, with forty-four species native to their range. She was small for the group. Did he notice the five clawed toes? Did he notice the teeth attached to the bony ledge inside the jaw? She’d only lay one egg every couple of weeks. Her mate would defend his territorial range by elaborate behavioral signals that resembled energetic pushups. When they found a mate, Karel would see.

  He left Karel to the feeding, and Karel, once he’d returned from the food kitchens, sat among the iguanas and anoles in their enclosure, watching them eat their mealworms and grapes, gazing at his reflection beyond them in the glass, and smiling at passing assistants, who smiled indulgently back.

  He stopped by Leda’s on the way home. He was so inured to not finding her there that he was already backing away from the hedge, angry with himself for being so pathetic, when he realized he’d seen her. She was sitting in a lounge chair, holding a letter and envelope out in front of her like mismatched socks. He hesitated and then passed through the gap in the hedge to their garden. She said hi and smiled at him as if not wanting to forget something else. While he fumbled and made hand motions of hello, she slipped the letter into a flimsy overseas envelope with a dreamy precision. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped blouse with a gory ketchup stain that had not washed out, and her brown hair fanned across her cheeks. There was a faint vaccination mark on the tan of her arm. Her forehead looked damp. She said, “Well. I haven’t seen you in a while,” sounding like a much older girl.

  “So hi,” he said. His hands described a half-wave and caught themselves.

  She looked at him steadily, as if she’d forgotten something about him, and set the letter aside with an odd delicacy that stirred him. He felt again reduced in her presence, and to compensate stepped forward for no reason and tipped a planter holding some pale trumpets, flopping them dismally onto the ground and spilling dirt.

  “Eep,” she said, bending close. She helped him gather the dirt back into the terra-cotta planter. She said her mother would die. She sounded pleased. Her eyelashes were longer at the outer corners, giving her eyes a special slant.

  She settled back into the lounge chair while he tried to get the trumpets to remain upright. They tipped and drooped and packing the soil seemed not to help, and finally he left one hand cradled around the stems and tried to settle himself into a comfortable crouch beside them. She produced a bundled blue sweater and attached ball of yarn from somewhere and arranged them on her lap. Her shoulders and the back of her neck were red, and he worried tenderly about sunburn. She was focused on the sweater. There were shortages, and apparently it was being sacrificed for another project. She began winding, her hand a rapid satellite around the ball of wool, and in thin rumples and lines the sweater began to disappear. He was disheartened by her ability to shift in his presence to an abrupt and neutral lack of interest, the way dogs might in the middle of play.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll tell her I knocked it over. Sit in the chair.” She pointed to an undersized folding thing that always seemed to be waiting for him. It looked too small even for David, her little brother. He wondered at his most pessimistic if she intended it as a sly humiliation. He sat in it, and it flexed and tottered as it always did. The trumpets slid slowly over. He drummed a finger on his knee like a simpleton.

  “How’s Nicholas?” he asked. Her older brother was institutionalized locally. She thought it was unnecessary. She battled with her mother about it. She said he had a learning disorder, that was all. Karel hadn’t heard her mother’s side of the story. He had tried to visit Nicholas once, unsuccessfully, and remembered small groups of patients standing at the gates, staring mournfully at passing children in shorts.

  Leda thanked him and said Nicholas was fine. She was pleased he’d asked.

  David came out of the house carrying a comic book and sat on the sandy ground between them, puzzled at the richer color of the spilled soil. He looked over at the trumpets with interest but didn’t say anything. He was seven years old and had round eyes and a thin face. Karel liked him. He had a way when nervous of hesitating with his eyes averted. He had no interest in the comic book and gave it to Karel.

  The comic book was titled The Party Comes to Power, and featured the Praetor on the cover in armor, swinging an ax against a horde of cringing demons. Some of the demons had the exaggerated features of the nomads. They’d made the Praetor overly muscular, and he looked silly in armor. The inside had nothing to do with the cover and looked like a pretty boring account of the National Unity Party’s rise to power: the two referendums, the national vote, the Praetor’s appointment as Guardian of the Republic, and the announcement of the Emergency Revolutionary Defense of the Country. That had been the night Karel’s father had been taken away. Karel flipped through it for anything of interest until Leda took it from him and tore it in half. She dropped both halves between them.

  David looked at the mess and pinched his earlobe with his forefinger and thumb. He and Karel watched Leda work.

  Her hair swayed over the yarn. She was absorbed. He watched the soft motions of her head and the quiet dance of insects behind her, and he felt a fragrant stillness, filling him with expectations of what he didn’t know. He watched her expression. The yarn was speeding back and forth, the sweater vanishing from the earth.

  Mrs. Schiele came outside carrying a dark brown radio shaped like an egg halved lengthwise. She said hello. She said she’d brought Leda her radio. She was a gentle and standoffish woman, full of warnings for her children about getting entangled in other people’s potentially dangerous business. She liked Karel and seemed to feel he was no troublemaker, docile and intelligent enough. He wondered if his relationship with Leda could ever survive such a blow.

  She complimented his haircut, and he nodded, embarrassed, running his hand over the crown of his head. His father insisted his hair be trimmed close on the sides in the current military style. It left the hair on top in a haylike mat when he washed it.

  “It looks nice,” she said.

  Leda snorted. David picked something from the spilled dirt and held it to the light like a prospector. The trumpets by now hung horizontally over the lip of the planter. Karel willed Mrs. Schiele not to notice.

  “
Beautiful day,” she finally sighed, and went into the house.

  Leda watched her go. Then she tilted her head and peered at Karel. He was growing, she said. Was he bigger?

  He said he was. He was growing fast now that they couldn’t afford food. His father called him the Stork, always with some of the sadness of a poor provider. Karel thought of her questions as opportunities to talk more, and he was squandering each of them, one by one.

  She asked if he wanted to hear the radio. She turned it on.

  They listened to a show called The Party Has the Floor! The surrounding countries, the nation’s enemies, the whole world could go down in flames, the speaker said. Why should the nation be concerned with that? The nation’s concern was the nation, that it should live and be free.

  There were bulletins from the northern border. The announcer spoke of the difficulties, the courage, and the enthusiasm of the special border patrols. They could hear singing. Some men he identified as wounded shuffled up audibly to the microphone and repeated the information that they were wounded, specifying where. One man in a preternaturally calm voice said, “I have lost my feet.”

  Leda shut it off. Her smile had disappeared. She said, “I visited the borderlands once, with my father.” Her father had died the night of the Bloody Parade. He’d been crossing the street. She talked about him only as a quiet man who’d been an accountant for a gravel yard, who drank beer and read at night. She loved him very much, she said. She left that in unspoken contrast with her mother.