Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  How did she know about it? Karel asked. She said David had taken her.

  The sky was red and violet in streaks. He walked along thinking of the endless number of things in this town he knew nothing about. Leda stopped opposite a shallow-looking niche in an exposed rock formation. She said, “It’s late. But we won’t go far.” She sat on the ground and then lay back and edged sideways into the niche. She disappeared.

  “Come on,” she called, her voice muffled. There was some scraping. Karel sank to his hands and knees and saw a much darker slot deep in the niche, through which the top of her head bobbed. He crawled in, trying to stay low, and banged his shoulder on the rock. His exclamation of pain echoed around him. At the slot he slid over sideways and his legs tumbled down onto Leda shoulders, and he apologized until she said it was okay, already.

  They settled themselves in a black oblique space as big as a car backseat. He was excited at being this close to her. She was moving stones. He spread both hands on the dark rock around him and said something inadequate to express his enthusiasm. This was amazing. She was a girl. She said, “This part’s narrow,” and started in feet first on her back, using her elbows on the sloping sandy floor of the tunnel. With everything but her head and shoulders in, she hesitated, and twisted around to look back at him. “You sure you want to do this?” she asked. “You won’t be scared? The bats if you see them are pretty ugly.”

  Karel made a dismissive spitting sound. He asked her if she wanted him to go first. She shook her head and slipped into the darkness, making a light scraping noise. It reminded him of a shovel being drawn over sandy soil.

  He eased himself into the hole feet first when he judged her far enough ahead. It was cold on his back, and he took a last look through the entrance up at the sky, already deep blue in the twilight, and then began edging downward.

  He could just make out the rock face, three or four inches over his. He could raise his head only a little, and couldn’t see over his feet down into the darkness anyway. He thought of scorpions and heavy bird spiders, and the back of his neck prickled. How was it she wasn’t scared? “Hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “Hey.” He stopped.

  There was a rustling ahead and then silence. “What?” Leda said.

  “How are we going to see anything?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a candle,” Leda said. Karel could hear her crawling again.

  He scrabbled downward for minutes, trying to estimate the distance they were traveling, his rear and elbows thumping along. He wondered what sort of reptiles they might come across. Some skinks, some blind lizards, the sort of translucent, helpless-looking things he saw in books. It was stupid, he supposed, to just climb into places like this, but then he told himself that if Leda knew about it, it must be pretty well traveled. He kept crawling, not very reassured. He thought about finding and bringing back a new species of something, docile and unique. He thought he should have brought his hoop snare and specimen bag. He passed a part of the wall that was dripping, and he felt colder. He could smell guano. He hoped that that wasn’t what he was feeling along the walls and floor. “Yick,” Leda said, ahead of him.

  He bumped his tailbone painfully on a ridgelike rise. He stopped, easing down off his elbows and lying flat on his back.

  “Hey,” he said again. He could feel cold air sweeping up from below, over him.

  “What?” Leda said, a little exasperated. She was much farther ahead.

  “How much farther is this?” he asked.

  “We can go back if you want,” Leda said. The guano smell was much stronger. Then she said, “You hear that?” Her voice came up the shaft like a whisper.

  He stopped and rubbed his lower back, chilled. He craned his head up as far as he could and looked over his feet down into the darkness. He listened.

  “What is that?” Leda asked. Karel couldn’t hear anything. He strained, frightened. He began to pick up the faintest puffs, bursts of air, chuffings, like someone in a distant room displacing air with sheets of paper. There was a scratching, and Leda lit her candle and the yellow glow radiated up the circular tunnel. Karel could see his feet and Leda’s head, and her hand cradling the flame. The walls around him were covered with long sheetlike stretches of guano. He groaned.

  “It’s the bats,” Leda said, and one spiraled up the tunnel with supernatural finesse, planing over her head and looping and undulating right over Karel with a whispery sound, its tiny black eyes glittering.

  He was going to remark on that, delighted, when down the tunnel a huge wind seemed to be building, and Leda gave a cry. Another bat fluttered by, faster, like some black, wrinkled fruit, and he looked down and the roaring grew louder and the bat shapes exploded out from below the darkness, extinguishing Leda’s candle and filling the tunnel top to bottom and roaring all around them. He jerked back and crossed his hands over his face. They were a torrent, unbearably thick and furious in the darkness, colliding with the walls, the ceiling, his head, rocketing and pinballing by and landing on him everywhere, piling up in confusion below his feet, climbing him awkwardly, stumbling as others buffeted them from behind. He felt them squirming into his pants legs and he shrieked and thrashed. The crawlers were reaching his head and arms, fighting for position and leaping into flight, tensing their little claws on his forehead and ears, propelled by his violent twisting. His cheeks were brushed and swept with fur and leathery flapping, and he revolted, turning left and right, slapping and clawing at his face. He could hear even through the din Leda’s sobbing. He tried to get to her and couldn’t. He turned his face to the rock and tried to submit, but they didn’t let up, and he was suffocated by the smell and the sound and the overwhelming feeling of being crawled on everywhere, and he cried out for her and for help and wanted to bang his head against the rock wall until it stopped, and he stamped and kicked the walls and scraped his hands until finally, suddenly, they began to subside. He could hear again, the volume dropping steadily, and then there were only a few stragglers flitting by, or laboring up his shirt front. He beat them off, hurting himself with his violence. They made tiny squeals.

  Leda was still sobbing. He shivered and shook and furiously scratched and rubbed himself. He crawled down to her and tapped her with his foot, to reassure her, and she shrieked and started crying again. He rested a foot on her shoulder, unable to reach her with his hands. Together, after a wait, they climbed back up the tunnel. The darkness beyond the cave was complete enough now that they had to negotiate their way out slowly, sniffing and choking, by touch. Outside the cave they held on to each other, sobbing, and then Leda pulled away from him and ran home.

  His father helped him clean up. He was covered with scratches and dirt and guano and acrid bat urine. He explained he’d been in a cave, and there’d been bats, but couldn’t bring himself to say any more, and he started crying, waving his arms fruitlessly and ashamed to be so childish.

  His father patted his shoulder and sat back on the edge of the bathtub, looking at him glumly. “What a mess, huh?” he finally said. He got up and opened the bathroom door softly, as if out of consideration. “What a mess your mother left me with,” he said.

  He dreamed that night he was swimming under a featureless white sky in a dead-calm ocean, in complete silence. The horizon was flat and smoothed in all directions, and he had little trouble staying afloat. He could faintly hear his own splashing. It echoed claustrophobically like splashing in a bath. Brightly colored ceramic balls floated by every so often, the reds, oranges, and deep blues striking. The water was completely glassy, ripples from his exertions flattening immediately. The light seemed artificial. He gradually became aware that he was swimming near the clifflike black hull of a huge ship—a theatrical prop of some sort? he wondered—and in the far distance, while he watched, a silent and giant wave swept across the horizon, hundreds and hundreds of feet high.

  He stayed in bed the next day until late afternoon. He thought about the way as a child he’d collected geckos by slidin
g them headfirst into empty beer bottles. He thought about the speckled lizard that came every morning onto his stone table to share his breakfast on their old patio in the city. The lizard had been fond of brown sugar, and when it drank the water he set out in a shallow dish it rested its throat on the lip.

  When he got up and went downstairs his father was preparing drinks for himself and a man named Holter, whom Karel had met once before. Holter had met Karel’s father while they still lived in the city and had told him about the opportunities out in the desert. Karel knew that his father hated to keep pushing Holter about it, but also resented the fact that Holter hadn’t come up with anything yet, and had more or less ignored them. Holter nodded at Karel as if he lived there. It turned out he was talking about a possible job. Karel’s father wouldn’t say what sort of job. When Karel asked Holter, the man put his finger to his lips and mimed a shushing noise.

  His father was making the horrible mint-and-grain-alcohol thing he called the Roeder Specialty. Karel stood in the kitchen doorway. The sensation of the bats’ claws on his neck and arms refused to go away. He closed his eyes tightly and opened them again. His father asked if he’d seen the pestle. Karel doubted they’d ever had one. His father told Holter they needed a pestle to do the job right and then ground the fresh mint leaves into the bottoms of their glasses with a fork. The fork made an unpleasant noise on the glass.

  His father held one of the drinks up to the light. The mint leaves swirled helically around the glass, creating the impression of swamp water.

  Karel sat down at the table, overcome with unexpected affection and sadness. His father only wanted some purpose to his life, to be happy, to be unashamed of himself and his accomplishments. What did he lack? Some sort of energy? Will? Luck? He’d once told Karel in a café during one of his lowest periods that all he was doing was prolonging himself.

  His father continued scuttling his fork around as if with enough work the drink would become appetizing. He smiled at Holter, and Holter looked at him curiously.

  What sort of job was being offered Karel didn’t know. He didn’t like Holter. Though he knew it was wrong he hoped things wouldn’t work out.

  Holter extended his feet and flexed them at the ankles, looking at them with satisfaction. “I work so hard that afterward I’m too tired to enjoy myself,” he said.

  His father cleared his throat and asked Karel about school. He looked ready to give up on the drinks.

  Karel told him flatly that he didn’t think he’d like the new subjects. The same reptile study sheet was still on the kitchen table. For some reason it depressed him.

  His father said he’d study the subjects he was given and like it, but Karel recognized in his voice the tone he assumed when talking tough as a way of compensating in advance for giving in.

  There was trouble in the schools, Holter told them. The schools were still a problem area. These things didn’t happen overnight. The Party was governing on an ongoing emergency basis, with the Praetor holding the government in trust until the new constitution could be worked out. It was unclear to Karel, toying with his study sheet, who was working on that problem. Holter added that anyway it was hard for anyone to imagine a constitution that would be preferable to the Praetor.

  “People forget,” Holter said, “how much had to be overcome simply to unify us. We’d been at each other’s throats for years, a conglomeration of selfish interest groups, the plaything of other nations.”

  Karel’s father lifted Holter’s glass and the bottom fell out. He stood with the empty cylinder raised as if in a toast.

  Karel was set to work mopping up. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Holter eyed the mess.

  His father lifted the other glass, and again with a faintly musical rush the bottom and contents stayed behind, inundating Karel below with a fresh wave. The grinding had been too much for the glassware.

  Holter was only with difficulty persuaded to stay.

  They sat in silence, Karel squeezing out great patters of mopped-up liquid into the sink. Holter started in again: everyone had taken advantage of their good nature and internal division; for too long this country had been satisfied with too little. Did they know twenty-one percent of their country received less than eight inches of rain per year?

  That was the kind of thing it was good to know, Karel’s father said, and they hadn’t known it.

  No navigable rivers, Holter said. Few forests. And meanwhile, to the north, he asked Karel, what were their nomad neighbors doing?

  Karel waited, flapping the wet dishrag. “I’m not completely clear on that,” he ventured.

  Holter sat back impatiently. Karel’s father said, “We need more, I’ll go along with that.”

  Holter got up, shaking his head, and announced he’d overextended his visit as it was. He shrugged off protests. He thanked them and left, waving from the street.

  They watched him go, and then Karel’s father sat down disconsolately, looking at the glass cylinders.

  “I don’t like the Party,” Karel said, after a while. He thought about what Holter had called the preventive police measures: people around town had already disappeared magically, like the objects in the flashing reflection of a rotated mirror.

  “What do I care?” his father said. “What does that have to do with this?” He indicated the wet floor. “Why am I always talking with you about this? What am I even doing here?”

  Karel put his head in his hands. He was going to take another bath. He could still smell the guano.

  “I don’t need lectures from you,” his father said. “You can’t be any help, keep to yourself.” He got up and turned off the light and left the room. Karel sat where he was for a few minutes and then carried the glass cylinders and bottoms to the garbage pail and threw them out. He went to his room. He lay spread-eagled on his bed, feeling the house get darker as his father switched off the lights one by one.

  When he finally got back to the zoo, a lot was changed. There were new black-and-white signs in the shape of the National Unity eagle proclaiming new rules, the zoo’s history, or pertinent facts (occasionally wrong) concerning an animal group. Odd, arbitrary areas where no one would want to go such as the trash heap behind the food kitchens were now marked PROHIBITED, and walkways and benches were marked ACCESS ALLOWED. Two corners of the administration building had been appropriated for Party advisers. A huge willow older than the zoo that shaded the east end of the Reptile House had been cut down, sawn into segments, and left in a heap.

  The new main sign greeting visitors was as tall as Karel and obscured the long view of the antelope and wild sheep enclosures. It read:

  DEAR VISITOR: WELCOME to our National Zoo, West. We hope very much to give you an experience both pleasant and edifying during your sojourn with us. We ask of you the following:

  1. PLEASE, DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS! Many of them do not know when to stop. They spend the day begging, eat too much, lose health, and die. We desire to preserve their health and encourage breeding.

  2. DO NOT TEASE THE ANIMALS. They need resting hours not only at night. Do not expect them to be active when each individual citizen passes by. Do not throw stones or verbally abuse them.

  3. DO NOT DISTURB THE ANIMALS’ TRAINING. If not trained, they become bored and aggressive. They are kept chained from the evening on, since a chained animal cannot steal his neighbor’s food.

  4. WE HAVE PUT UP BARRIERS FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY. If you do not respect them, you will be hurt and lose personal belongings. We will not be responsible.

  5. OUR ZOO: A GREEN ISLE IN THE HEART OF THE DESERT AND AN OASIS OF REST FOR THE PEOPLE OF OUR COUNTRY. Nomads and peddlers not allowed.

  A wooden sign on a humped and desolate area near the masons’ workshops marked the future site of a huge Carnivore House that would be part of the new regime’s expansion of the original “small and primitive” zoo. It would hold “exotic animals sent from all over the world, especially by diplomats serving in new colonies.”

&n
bsp; He found Albert in his office. He was very mysterious about where he’d been for the last week—Karel had seen nothing of him, despite stopping by the zoo every so often—and finally became short-tempered when Karel persisted. Did he have to report to Karel, too? he wanted to know. He indicated the papers on his desk as a measure of the work facing him. Karel shook his head, hurt, remembering another comment Albert had once made to him: “Don’t keep after me. I’m not your father.” He considered telling Albert about the bats, but didn’t.

  As if aware of his mood, Albert announced that today they’d be feeding the Komodos, and so would Karel, if Karel had any interest. It was what Karel had been waiting for, and he was disappointed the opportunity finally came this way, as a consolation prize.

  The Komodos were surrounded by a new laminated-glass shield “160mm Thick to Withstand the Enormous Strength of the Animals.” Albert was unhappy about it. Previously they’d been in the open, surrounded by a deep moat and wall. He was unhappy too about a new sign that said DO NOT BE AFRAID! THE PANES ARE STRONG ENOUGH! and underneath related stories about tourists on the lizards’ home islands being killed and eaten, including one involving the discovery of an arm and shoulder blade with the hand still pathetically holding out a half-eaten roll. Albert felt the old precautions had been more than adequate. The two Komodos, Seelie and Herman, now looked out through the reinforced glass with an untroubled disdain for the excessive safety measures.

  It was clear even to Karel that the two had distinctly different personalities. He looked at Seelie and Seelie looked back, with her lizard’s oddly neutral, self-satisfied smile. After an inspection she ignored him and wandered from side to side in the enclosure, examining things she’d tramped past countless times. Like all monitors she walked well off the ground, her skin in that light like fine beadwork. Her dull yellow tongue undulated out at points of particular interest. Herman lounged against a slab of rock near the door, as always, as if too bored or stunned to move. Karel stayed where he was, his nose touching the glass: Herman had once in his presence lopped a huge shank of goat meat from a tray Albert had been setting down, the ferocity and force of the lunge all the more shocking because it had come out of such stasis.