Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  Seelie returned to the glass and regarded him. She was surrealistically large, as though he had his eye to a giant magnifying glass. In her dark eye he could read her intelligence and her reptile’s blank acceptance of torpor and violence.

  Albert was preparing their meal: more goat meat, with eggs. They loved eggs. Their habitat, a reproduction of savannah grasses and brush, looked worn. It had to be maintained at a hundred degrees the year round and roofed with a special glass to allow in the enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation the reptiles required. For all that the grass was dead in one corner.

  Seelie lowered her head and scratched behind an ear opening with her foot. Her claw made a coarse scraping sound through the glass. She froze, forgetting her leg in midair. Herman lapped at nothing and tamped a patch of grass repeatedly. Seelie began to doze. Neither took any notice when Albert entered the enclosure with the tray of meat. The eggs he carried in a long-handled basket.

  Karel was allowed to wait for the feeding before going back to work. It was not a small concession: it took twenty-five minutes for Seelie to work up an interest. She crawled completely over the meat and then backed up and tipped the egg basket. When Karel left she had smashed the basket and covered her face with eggshells. Herman was looking on from his sprawl.

  He spent the rest of the morning cleaning the tortoise and turtle enclosures while the occupants hunkered down like sullen stones in the corners and waited with mineral patience for him to leave. He was grateful for the time with the Komodos but surprised by how little it had cheered him. While he worked he considered his last glimpse of them, their skins like polished gravel in the hazy and filtered daylight, and their clear dark eyes gazing at him sleepily and expectantly.

  The next morning was Monday, and he sat staring at the corresponding date on the calendar in his kitchen, where he’d written: School again. He had coffee alone with some desolate lemons set in an earthen bowl before him. At school he kept to himself. On the playground there was a smallish audience for two boys who were setting mice on fire with machine oil. One mouse scampered free, trailing brown oil. As the students formed their lines it crouched in a corner of the courtyard under some discarded broken desks, licking its forepaws furiously. It watched Karel troop into the building.

  Attention in class was focused on a kid named Sprute, who was wearing the black-and-white uniform of the Kestrels, the cub organization of the Young People’s NUP. Karel instantly knew from his face that he’d been forced to wear the uniform by a parent who didn’t know or didn’t care what it meant to be the only kid dressed that way in the entire sixth and seventh standard.

  Miss Hagen, while she approved of the NUP, disapproved of the violation of the dress code and the disruption it was causing. It was not clear, given the state of things, in just what ways the old rules would be relaxed, and Miss Hagen clearly resented the confusion. The class responded independent of the politics to a difference so extreme it seemed a challenge.

  While his teacher confiscated paper clips and other missiles, Sprute was mocked and thumped and prodded. His papers were knocked to the floor. He sat like a soldier throughout it all. Leda, who sat in front of him, did not turn around. The kid behind him drew, when Miss Hagen returned to the front of the room, a long, slow line down Sprute’s back with a pencil.

  She finally suggested he go home and change. The class cheered, enjoying the uproar for its own sake.

  Sprute’s eyes filled with tears and he stayed where he was, sitting up straight. He looked at Karel, and Karel was moved so violently by pity for this quiet kid—where was he going to go? Home to change in front of parents who had made him dress like that in the first place?—that he said, aloud, “Let him stay.”

  It was suddenly quieter. He realized what he’d said and took another horrible second to realize he’d succeeded Sprute as the object of attention. He looked down in an agony of self-consciousness and stammered that it was school; who cared what people wore?

  The class digested the surprise slowly. It seemed to be considering whether Karel’s outburst represented common sense or an attempt to ally himself with Sprute against them. The kid behind Sprute was caught slingshotting a rubber band and was told that as punishment after school he’d have to pick the nettles out of the small rectangular lawn around the flagpole.

  Karel felt bad for him but preferred their system of punishment to the one for the lower standards, where children caught misbehaving were made to wear a sign which read I AM A BAD INFLUENCE until someone else was caught and the sign passed on to that person. Whoever wore the sign Friday afternoon at the end of school was beaten. The arrangement created from Wednesday on a sense of unbearable suspense, complete with last-minute rescues and catastrophes.

  They got on with the lesson. There were snorts and sneezelike sounds and badly stifled laughter.

  “I’d better not see misbehavior when I turn around,” Miss Hagen remarked.

  “You won’t,” someone promised. There were more giggles.

  They watched her make vigorous and glossy arches across the blackboard with a wet sponge. She outlined new subjects: The Nation as a Community of Fate and Struggle. The Soldier as a Moral Force. Heroism. Women in War. The Community and the Struggle for Unification. Hygiene.

  Leda made a disparaging, hissing sound. No one reacted to it.

  They would study the Great Trek, the march across the desert plateau to Karel’s home city. It had been undertaken by the leadership of the Party in its infancy to dramatize its struggle for recognition. They would study also the example of Bruno Stitt, the fourteen-year-old who had decided to die beside his father rather than abandon him to the foreign marauders overrunning the family farm. Leda sighed audibly. There was no mention of the take-home assignment, which Karel had obviously done for nothing.

  He took some listless notes, wondering what the sixthstandarders were making of this. Answer not in material Egoism, but in joyous Readiness to Renounce and Sacrifice. Do not Stand Apart!

  Her inconsistency with capital letters struck him as evidence of sloppy thinking, though he couldn’t say why. He wrote without comprehension, as usual, he thought grimly. He glanced over at Leda. She wasn’t writing, and she eyed the board with a critical tilt to her head. He considered her intelligence with envy and frustration. Was she going to fall in love with someone who didn’t understand what was going on half the time? Was she going to fall in love with someone who couldn’t keep up? Even if he at times made the effort he learned almost nothing, and waited for the moment when a simple question or quiz would expose his ignorance in all its vastness for everyone to look upon, stupefied, as if having opened a kitchen cabinet to reveal a limitless and trackless desert.

  In literature they studied Mystical Forebears, whose chantings were transcribed from rock fragments dragged from various archaeological sites. They were so stupid that everyone changed words here and there in the workbooks to mock them: “The skin of our race is roseate-bright, our complexion like milk and blood” became, in Karel’s workbook, “The skin of our race will nauseate, right, our soup will be milk and blood.”

  They were instructed to clip and remove foreign writers from their anthologies—the new anthologies had yet to arrive from the printers—with the explanation that they as a people were the only ones capable of profound and original thought. The foreign spirit, Miss Hagen explained, was like the bee, which worked efficiently and had its place, while their spirit was like the eagle, which with its strong wings pushed down the air to lift itself nearer the sun.

  Karel, irritated and lost, wrote on his paper Bee—Eagle.

  Miss Hagen read from the booklet Do Not Stand Apart! There were those, she read, who found it comfortable and soothing to withdraw in a sulk to their own little chamber, to nurse their holy wounded feelings and say, “You needn’t count on me anymore; I don’t give a hoot about the whole thing.” Because their tender sensitivities had been offended by one thing or another they spoiled the joy of achievement for the
whole group. Who were these people who refused their obligations? Who were these people?

  When she saw their faces she apologized for getting too complicated and promised to talk more about all of this later.

  He received a note from Leda which read: I’m glad you like the Kestrels so much, and when he tried to catch her eye she wouldn’t look.

  They watched a filmstrip involving polite members of the Civil Guard teaching methods of terrace farming to grateful and simpleminded nomads. The nomads provided comic relief by doing things like attempting to eat the fertilizers. The day ended with Miss Hagen telling the story of a young boy from a school much like theirs who’d had the courage to turn in his parents, both of whom were working for outside interests. The class reaction was muted. They went home without even the enthusiasm that came from their release at the end of the day or the new opportunity to torment Sprute.

  He changed and went over Leda’s. When he peeked through her hedge she was sunning herself in a faded canvas deck chair. Her skirt was raised in a lazy S across her thighs. Her elbows were lifted to the sun. She seemed not to recognize him immediately. She did not move her skirt, and he imagined he saw underpants, of a dreamy pale blue.

  On the ground nearby were discarded oil paints, tumbled across a palette like undersized and squeezed toothpaste tubes. David sat near the mess reading with his back to the sun while the breeze turned the pages of his book every so often, in anticipation of his progress.

  She asked how things were at the zoo, and Karel told her. She said her skin temperature was about a thousand degrees. She asked if he wanted any mint tea with shaved ice. She said she had started a painting for him, and had given up. She held up as evidence a forearm crisscrossed with blue and yellow paint.

  He was thrilled, and sat near the palette and examined the paint tubes for traces of his unrealized painting. The names on the tubes pleased him. Where some of the paint had bubbled out it was still moist, and the skins were resilient and yielding like the skin on boiled milk.

  Leda said she hadn’t gotten over the bats, and wanted to know if he had. He shook his head. She hadn’t told her mother, and asked if his father had helped. Karel said he hadn’t, much. She shivered, thinking about it.

  She turned the radio on. It was hidden below her in the shade of the deck chair. After some staticky popping there was a howling wind, and then the overheated music of Adventure Hour.

  “This thing,” Leda said.

  Karel followed along, dandling a paint tube. The story was about mountain climbers, one of whom announced hanging over a crevasse that he was doing all of this for the people. He went on to describe the mountain he was mastering, which he called the Ice Giant. An arctic blizzard whistled behind his voice. The Ice Giant was supremely beautiful and supremely dangerous, a majestic force which invited the ultimate affirmation of, and escape from, the self.

  “This is a mountain climber?” Leda said. Her eyes were closed to the heat.

  “I don’t understand any of these shows,” David said.

  A fanfare indicated the climber’s triumph, which he confirmed by shouting, “Thus I plant our nation’s flag in this wild place.” There was a sound effect of the flag going in, sounding macabre, like something being stuck with a knife. Leda changed the station. She waved away an inquisitive fly.

  Karel was moved by the notion of the almost-painting and felt a rush of feeling for her, a surge of excitement and longing that could have been audible as he watched her drowse. He shaded his eyes from the sun. She turned on the canvas chair and smiled. She had at that moment the face of a placid, intelligent child, someone younger than David. He was so filled with tenderness that it was only with difficulty that he restrained himself from announcing it whatever the consequences. She sighed and said she couldn’t have mint tea alone.

  More and more he connected unrelated elements of his life in unexpected ways to her; more and more she would appear, magically, inside a disconnected thought, slipping by without turning her head. They’d been friends since childhood, but she had had many friends, and he felt as though he’d had just her. Around her as he was now he felt the same unreasonable contentment he felt in the presence of old dogs comfortably asleep.

  Most of all he wanted to talk to her about it, and couldn’t. He spent so many nights burrowing through the whole thing that he was bewildered by the sight of it. Once he’d almost had the courage, walking with her in the shade of an anonymous whitewashed house, but when he’d said, “Leda,” and she’d turned to face him, the directness of the clear look that returned his stare had seemed to him so adult and sensual that all he could think to say at that point was “You have nice hands.” She had looked at him strangely.

  Leda said, “You’re quiet today.” He focused on David, attempting to induce him telepathically to leave. Mrs. Schiele came out of the house in a sundress and bonnet of a matching peculiar green, carrying a glass of ice water and filling him with impatience.

  “I guess I am, too,” Leda said.

  Her mother greeted them and settled herself into the other chair beside Leda, remarking to David that if he continued reading like that he’d grow up a hunchback. She asked rhetorically if her daughter the princess was speaking to her today, and then said to Karel, “What a battle you missed.”

  “That’s some outfit, Mother,” Leda said.

  “Such a battle,” her mother said.

  Leda sighed and said, “We had an argument.”

  “Arguments like that I hope to have once in a lifetime, thank you,” her mother said. The two of them were positioned identically, arms and legs straight out, eyes closed.

  “What about?” Karel ventured. He nursed a crazy hope he was the cause.

  “The Population Registration Act,” Mrs. Schiele said, as if talking about it once again was inevitable, and talking about it the first time had been a terrible mistake.

  “Oh,” Karel said, and then realized in an awful and dim way that he sounded like a simpleton.

  “Karel gets worked up about these things,” Leda said.

  “No, I know about it,” he protested, but only weakly: he knew some details. The act required registering at the post office. It assigned everyone to a racial group and said that everyone who was one quarter or more nomad had to register that way. What had they been fighting about?

  Leda looked over at him. Mrs. Schiele said, “My daughter can argue about the Population Registration Act.”

  He was curious, but mostly he wanted her mother and brother to go away and for Leda to say “Karel,” the way he’d said her name, near that whitewashed wall.

  “You young people never see nomads anymore. There are a few who live outside of town,” Mrs. Schiele said. “That’s a shame, Leda’s right. When I was her age we lived closer together. Now you have to make an effort to get to know them.”

  “Mother,” Leda warned.

  “Leda doesn’t like the idea of renegotiated borders and their getting their own areas,” Mrs. Schiele said.

  “Now who’s twisting words?” Leda asked. “I said they’ll get the horrible places no one else wants.”

  “You’re an expert, of course,” her mother said. She sipped from her ice water and rolled the glass on her cheeks. “Considering all the troubles, especially after the elections, I’m sure they’re happier with their own kind.”

  Leda made a scoffing noise. A coasting bicycle passed by beyond their hedge, whirring. Her mother was quiet.

  Karel cleared his throat. “I don’t see anything wrong with giving them some land of their own that they could work,” he said. It was something his father once said.

  They both were looking at him. “Then you’re an idiot, too,” Leda said, with extra heat.

  “Leda,” her mother said sharply, and the blood rushed to Karel’s face. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “Why?” Leda said. “If he talks like an idiot?”

  Mrs. Schiele sighed theatrically and looked over at him with a what-can-you-do? express
ion. Leda lay back, flushed and fidgety. Karel raged inwardly at himself, at that familiar granite feeling of stupidity.

  “When I get old,” Mrs. Schiele said, as though changing the subject, “I want to be taken care of by a nomad. I wouldn’t want somebody else to see me that way.”

  Leda said nothing.

  “Leda had a woman who was half nomad as a nanny,” Mrs. Schiele said. “Did she ever tell you that?”

  Leda made a bitter, hissing noise.

  Karel shook his head, unwilling to anger her further.

  “She did,” Mrs. Schiele said. “She was wild about her nanny. Told her secrets she wouldn’t tell me.”

  “You can see why,” Leda said.

  He experienced an odd, powerfully erotic image of interracial contact in a darkened theater, with Leda as nomad. You’re depraved, he thought. You really are.

  David stood and arched his back painfully, for his mother’s benefit. He remained where he was. Mrs. Schiele gave no indication of intending to leave, either. It seemed to Karel that in terms of all he cared about he was moving backward.

  “In the early days of my marriage we had to concentrate just on survival,” Mrs. Schiele began, and Karel thought in frustration, Now why’s she talking about this? “My father didn’t approve of Leda’s father, and didn’t give us a bean. Still, it was exciting, we were determined to have a house, determined to have children,” she said.

  Leda sat up, rubbing her arms. “Mother, you must have made sense once,” she said. “But it was so long ago—”

  “Oh, hush,” her mother said. “Karel’s interested, even if you’re not.”

  Go in the house, Karel thought fiercely.

  “When I grew up, love and marriage were big things,” Mrs. Schiele said. “You were told what you were doing by your parents. And it was your parents’ privilege and duty to do that.”