Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  According to both versions he achieved his first serious political notice when he was twenty-three and the press picked up his proclamation that the streets of his country were “fields of crime” and that the Republic was to blame. It was said that he disciplined traitors to his new movement by asking them to sing the national anthem at the top of their lungs and then shooting into their open mouths. He had killed, Albert said, more people than the typhus, and in towns that had been particularly hard hit the standard curse—when someone was alone, or felt completely safe, which was less and less often—was “May his lungs collapse.”

  It turned out the Praetor was not visiting, though one of his closest friends—one of the old OAS (Secret Army) fanatics from his original entourage—was. The visitor’s name was Subsecretary Wissinger, and he had as far as anyone could tell no real role in the government. He was on a tour visiting all the towns of the frontier, The People’s Voice mentioned with a noticeably deflated lack of interest. His work was to discover the truth about morale and the spiritual ethers of the people. He would be giving an oration, presiding over a spontaneous celebration, and dedicating a new sculpture of two men on a bench whispering while a third in uniform overhears. Karel had not seen it yet.

  He asked Kehr if that was one of the reasons Kehr was in town, and Kehr said no. The rival Security Service was handling the visit. He would not be attending the festivities and did not recommend Karel did so, either. Karel was surprised and a little impressed at his independence. Leda would have told him they all thought the same way and acted completely predictably.

  Kehr told him that this was not an element of the Party of which he was particularly proud. In the old days they were signing people up wherever they found them. Still, the lowest agents fostered an anarchy that the higher ones were then pledged to eradicate, the way a doctor might give you a disease so he could cure it.

  Karel went anyway. Soldiers formed a cordon around the square, and Security Service men, dressed in a way they hoped was unobtrusive, drifted through crowds that pretended not to notice them. They were immediately noticeable as the only people acting casual. One kept a close eye on a string of four-year-olds brought out to hear the speech. The four-year-olds hung on to a rope tied between two adult leaders and shuffled along like a miniature chain gang.

  There were only a few booths, near the entrance to the square, with canvas flaps that could be tied shut once Wissinger began to speak. One advertising a butcher’s consortium said UNITED MEAT FOR ALL and featured a line of pale calves’ heads holding lemons and carnations in their teeth. One booth was called SUPPORT FOR THE MASSES and displayed a pyramid of hernia trusses tied with little flags and colored ribbons.

  He recognized a lot of classmates. Besides the local NUP most of the people in the crowd were children and teenage boys. The smallest children milled around a fenced-off area entitled ORIGINAL VILLAGE OF THE RACE in which two men in blond wigs and winged helmets banged on an anvil and a woman scratched at a washboard. All of this was over-looked by a painted backdrop depicting a sunset with nomad hordes on the horizon.

  Nearer the stage there were tables set up with pamphlets and Party publications that were free. Karel paged through them, keeping an eye out for someone he knew (who was he expecting to see go by? he wondered. Leda? Albert?). He kept three: a comic book called Secret Service with a naked girl in a waterfall on the cover and two pamphlets called Investigations into Science: The Nomad Race and Torture: Why Not?

  Wissinger arrived in a car hooded in black cloth with its headlights painted over with blue calcimine. He saluted some children before he mounted the stage. He introduced a huge man by the car as Freddy the Crusher, his bodyguard. The crowd applauded.

  He announced this would become an annual event of the Party. He added as if it followed that the Praetor was angry at the disturbances in the cities, the results of delinquents. He promised that those involved or thinking of becoming involved would feel the nation’s anger when the war was settled. The crowd applauded again. Karel started threading his way out, thinking he’d go by Leda’s on the way home. Somebody bumped him, and he felt protectively for the pamphlets in his back pocket. The Praetor, Wissinger said, like his nation, knew the emotion of anger, of being insulted. The teenage boys closest to the stage roared. Karel took a lemon from one of the calves’ mouths on the way out of the square, and had it checked carefully by a young soldier taking no chances when he passed through the cordon.

  When Karel left for the zoo that morning Kehr asked him where he was going. He looked at Karel soberly over his coffee like an attentive father. He was wearing his full uniform. Karel tried to indicate by his tone that where he went was his decision. Kehr said, “The zoo is a good idea.” Stasik opened the door and held it.

  Albert hadn’t left any instructions, and it took a while to track him down. When Karel found him in Maintenance, Albert handed him a flat rock and continued rinsing out a rag in a pail. Karel hefted the rock and told Albert he had news for him.

  Albert nodded. It wasn’t clear he heard or cared. He had by his feet in a deep dish covered with a warped piece of screen a pair of flat-bodied lizards. He was cleaning and rearranging the emptied cage. In the dish one of the lizards placed a leg on the back of the other, gently indenting the pliable skin.

  “These are granite night lizards,” Albert said.

  Karel knew that. Albert had apparently given up testing him.

  He was aligning the granite slabs so that the spaces between them made corridors facing the front of the cage. They liked to hide in some pretty tight crevices, he told Karel, which was fine, except then nobody saw them. Which was a bad situation for a zoo. The trick, he said, was to expose them without making them feel exposed.

  Karel was interested despite himself, and got angry. He had big news. He needed advice. He could wait until he dropped for Albert to ask how he was doing.

  “I still haven’t been paid for my last weeks,” he finally said irritably. Albert looked at him. “I mean, you know, the stuff I did a while ago,” he said.

  Albert said, “I don’t think your heart is in this work anymore. I think you’ve got other interests.”

  Sure, you do this, too, Karel thought. He was surprised at his bitterness.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Albert asked.

  “How would you know?” Karel said. “You ever asked me?”

  Albert looked at him again and continued to shift the rocks. He leaned more into the cage. Good-sized pieces of flat rock, preferably granite, he said. Slanted and supported so the spaces were a half inch with the openings facing the front, and gravel as ground media. When you had decent gravel. The lizards stirred in the dish as if in appreciative interest.

  “It’s like I’m not even talking,” Karel said. “I might as well not be here.”

  Albert stopped what he was doing. “I’m trying to teach you something,” he said. “I’ve been trying since you came to me.” They were looking at each other, and Karel had the uncomfortable feeling that Albert suspected him of something. After a minute Albert went on about the lizards.

  Karel shrugged. It’s my life, he thought. Why should you care about it?

  “I’ve got the Civil Guard at my house,” he said. “A man named Special Assistant Kehr. They moved in.”

  Albert set the granite down and continued to gaze at it. “What do you mean, ‘moved in’?” he asked. He sounded as if it had been Karel’s idea.

  Karel gave him another shrug but Albert was looking into the cage. Did Karel mean they were searching his house?

  “I don’t think so,” Karel said.

  They were billeted there?

  “That’s it,” Karel said. “Kehr took my father’s room.”

  Albert was quiet, and disturbed, he could see. It gave him some satisfaction. What had they talked about? Albert wanted to know. Had they asked a lot of questions?

  Not really, Karel said. They hadn’t done much of anything, as far as he could tell. He didn�
��t know whether to tell about his father. He was going to get some version of I-told-you-so if he opened his mouth, he knew.

  “My father joined the Civil Guard,” he said.

  Albert put the heel of his hand on his forehead and rubbed it as if erasing something. “Who told you that?” he asked. “Kehr?”

  The question shocked Karel. “You mean you think he might not have?” he said.

  “What bureau?” the old man said. “Did he say?”

  “The Fifth, I think. I got a letter from him.”

  “A jailer,” Albert said. “Perfect.”

  “You think it’s not true? You think somebody made him write the letter?” Karel asked. “What? Nobody ever talks to me.”

  “I don’t know,” Albert said. “I don’t know your father. I don’t know what Kehr’s up to.”

  “Up to?” Karel said. “What’s he care about us?”

  Albert lifted the bowl to the open enclosure and tipped the two lizards onto the gravel. They fell on their bellies together with a quiet plop. “He probably did,” he said. “Your father, I mean. Why wouldn’t he?”

  “If he did it’s not my fault,” Karel said.

  Albert finished up with the cage.

  “I don’t like staying there right now,” Karel said. Albert nodded and turned and led him down the hall through one of the outbuildings to the quarantine station. Karel was uncomfortable the whole time, his hint hanging unacknowledged, and he wished there were a way to take it back. At the quarantine station Perren was working alone, humming to something slightly syncopated on the radio. He was guiding a dead mouse into a bushmaster’s mouth with a pair of forceps. On the table opposite there was a metal basin the size of a bathtub.

  Albert peered over into it and made whispery clicking noises with his tongue. A black-and-red Gila was asleep inside. It was on its back with its legs in the air in the relaxed and oblivious manner of a puppy. Some egg yolk was drying in an anchored dish near its head. Albert remarked sadly that no one was eating lately, and Karel understood he was being asked to leave.

  Albert mentioned Seelie, who was refusing even eggs. His bringing up the Komodos at this point hurt Karel in ways he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t quit. “Do you think I should stay somewhere else?” he finally said.

  Sure, stay with me, Albert could say. You can’t live with those people. It’s not like you don’t have anywhere else to go.

  Albert seemed to be aware of Perren at the other table. “I don’t see why,” he said. “It’s your house, too.”

  Karel fought the humiliation and disappointment the way he’d fought surf at the beach. His face burned with it.

  It wasn’t like it was a real problem, anyway, he told Albert. They got along. Kehr wasn’t like the others. And he was starting to show him things.

  “I’ll bet he is,” Albert said. Perren turned off the radio. Albert said, “Maybe you’d better not come back here for a while.”

  Karel closed his eyes. He felt pitiful and hated it.

  “There’s no work now, anyway,” Albert said. “And you have all this to deal with. We haven’t paid you for your old work.”

  “You’re not letting me back here,” Karel said. “Because of all this.”

  Perren made a clacking noise with the forceps, and Karel had the impression he was being made fun of. Albert reached in and lifted the sleeping Gila like a red-and-black baby and didn’t say anything else, and Karel turned and ran out of the room and out of the zoo.

  At home he found Stasik in his T-shirt and uniform pants playing with a ringtail while Kehr watched. The ringtail was on the floor in the kitchen and they were flanking it with chairs. Kehr was on the field telephone, listening, for the most part. Whoever had installed it had punched a hole through the kitchen wall.

  The ringtail was curled in a crouch and jittery. They had the doorways to the other rooms blocked off with empty cartons, and it was giving each carton the once-over. It was a few feet long and had the weird amalgamated look of all ringtails, as if assembled by committee: a cat’s body, a fox’s head with huge, pale eyes, a raccoon’s fat bushy tail banded in black and white. While he watched it lifted a pink paw to him as if in greeting.

  He’d always heard from his father that they could give a nasty bite, but Kehr and Stasik seemed unfazed, and Stasik was feeding it crickets. He had the crickets in a paper bag. He set them down one by one, and the ringtail would back off, its fat tail curling and undulating warily. It ignored the crickets’ first tentative hop and pounced after the second, coming down on them with both paws and stuffing them in its cheek.

  Kehr cupped his hand over the receiver and introduced it to Karel as their new friend. Stasik had found it in the shed with the chickens. The ringtail backed coolly under the kitchen table at Karel’s approach and refused to come out. It cheeped when he passed through heading for his bedroom, and when he stepped over the boxes it negotiated its way along the wall in the opposite direction. Near the sink it defecated.

  In his room he shut the door and lay on his bed. Why was he worrying about the house like he was caretaker? Who else cared about it? What was he looking out for? Boxes of family things he didn’t recognize? You don’t have a family, he thought. Get that through your head. What did he care about this town, this zoo, Albert, his father? Why hadn’t he run away already?

  He heard someone come up the stairs and stop outside the door.

  “I know somebody’s there,” he said.

  There was a cough and a knock. “What?” he said. “What? What do you want from me?”

  Kehr opened the door. He had a folder in his hands. He sat on the bed, and Karel moved his legs to make room.

  “Our ringtail was having an energetic discussion with the chickens when Stasik found him,” he said.

  “What’re you doing here?” Karel said. “All you do is hang around the house. They pay you to hang around the house?”

  Kehr smiled. His skin was completely smooth, and he seemed at ease. If I looked like that Leda would love me, Karel found himself thinking. He shook it off. Kehr said, “I haven’t started working yet. I’m engaged in what we call the preliminary stages.”

  Karel wasn’t even going to ask, and give him the satisfaction. He reached over and switched on the radio. Kehr opened the folder and looked inside it as if waiting for something. The radio went on about sectors in the rear being scoured of trouble, and Karel reached over and shut it off.

  Kehr said, “I have something for you.” He held out the folder.

  Inside was a photograph of a woman’s face. She had large eyes and dark hair under a big hat. She was looking at him with a serious expression. Her mouth was slightly pursed.

  He blinked. He could feel pressure in his throat, like the impulse to swallow. “Is this my mother?” he asked.

  Kehr nodded. He had had it sent, he said. It had been in one of the old files.

  Karel held it before him, trying to overlay the image on his blurred and incomplete memory. Kehr put a hand on Karel’s shin and then took it away. The face was so concrete and open to study that it was disorienting and made him suspicious, even as he recognized how moved he was by its revelatory power: this is her, this is what she looked like.

  “This is my mother,” he said, to himself, and while he continued to look Kehr stood up and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  He stood the photo against the wall and turned off the light. The face gazed down at him whitely from the darkness. It was as if he had somebody else now to think about, his father, Albert, Leda, his mother from the tiled floor, and now this woman. When he slept that night they all mixed together in ways his dreams didn’t make clear.

  The next morning he heard a banging in the kitchen and went downstairs. Kehr was on his back under the sink with a huge range of tools. The others were out. The ringtail was cowering under the kitchen table from the noise.

  “Good morning,” Kehr said. “Time to fix the plumbing. I made some coffee.”

  K
arel poured himself a cup and sat down. The ringtail scrabbled away at his approach.

  Kehr clanked and banged away unseen. Karel sipped his coffee. This was better than the stuff he made. Someone had cleaned the pot. “Time to put a little work into this house,” Kehr said.

  Karel rubbed his eyes, disoriented by the attempted domesticity. “Don’t you have people who could do that?” he asked.

  “Give me a hand,” Kehr said. “Hand me the wrench.” His hand waved and flopped around outside the cabinet to indicate its search.

  Karel took another sip and then got up and brought the mug with him. He knelt on the floor by Kehr’s legs. He could smell urine from the ringtail somewhere when he got this low. He surveyed the tools in front of him and picked up something plausible. “Is this it?” he asked.

  Kehr leaned his chin on his chest from inside the cabinet to look. “That’s it,” he said. “You know your tools.” He took it and went back to clanging. Why specific tools were important if he was just going to bang away, Karel didn’t know.

  Nobody’d done anything about this plumbing for a while, Kehr remarked.

  “My father always said he was going to,” Karel said.