Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  “What?” Karel said.

  Kehr held his hands up, as if to say he wasn’t enjoying this either. “We found ink, we found blank paper, we found boxes for the paper. And the younger brother told us strange men drop packages at the house.”

  Karel’s mouth dropped open. “None of that’s true,” he said.

  “She’s confused,” Kehr said, as if that were the end of the subject. “The state isn’t in the business of trying to fill its prisons. I’m not in that business. You help me, I’ll help her.”

  “What? What do you want me to do?” Karel asked.

  Someone in this town was running the partisan cell for the area, Kehr said. He thought Karel knew who it was.

  “Is that what you’re doing here?” Karel said.

  Kehr didn’t answer. Then he said, “All I want from you is a confirmation of what I already believe.”

  “I told you I don’t know any partisans,” Karel said. “I don’t know any.”

  Kehr shrugged, as if he had all the time in the world.

  “What’ll happen to her?” Karel asked.

  “There are people in our prison system who are absolutely reprehensible,” Kehr said. “I could tell you stories.”

  Karel was breathing through his mouth. Sweat appeared on his back and forehead like magic.

  The sort of people who believed any scruple could be overcome by a good beating, Kehr said.

  “Oh, God,” Karel said. “Oh God.”

  “We use the law as far as it serves us,” Kehr said. “Then we move to other methods.”

  Karel stood and paced. He pulled at his hair. “I don’t know anybody who’s a partisan,” he said.

  Kehr grabbed him by the shirt collar, so quickly it terrified him. They were face to face. Karel could smell mint. “Listen,” Kehr said. “Leave your hair alone and try to concentrate. You’ve been getting by without decisions. With inertia decorated with sentiment. That’s over.” He let go, calmer. Now, he said. Mistakes became errors only when persisted in. He smoothed the front of his jacket with his spread palm. He needed Karel’s decision.

  Karel sat, blinking back tears of frustration and fear.

  “You just want to be left alone, with this girl and your reptiles,” Kehr said. Karel nodded, after a moment. “Well, even the little man with no ambitions needs help just to be left alone. Like men joining hands in the surf against the waves.” He leaned forward when Karel didn’t respond. “Am I clear?” he shouted. “Am I coming through to you?”

  Karel nodded, swallowing. He was looking straight ahead, at the glass. There was no one in the other room.

  “I need your answer now,” Kehr said. He straightened up and went to the door. He put his hand on the handle.

  “Albert Delp,” Karel said. As he said it he felt the earth open and himself fall into it.

  Kehr sat back down. Karel felt hyperaware, as if his fingertips had gone to sleep. His head tingled. He blinked often and tried to focus. Kehr quizzed him on details. Karel told him as if he’d gotten on a slide and it was now much too steep to stop about the tea cozy, the mysterious visitor, the secret space under the false bottom of the kitchen cabinet. Kehr, after rechecking, looked him over from head to toe and then stood and congratulated him quietly. He shook his hand. He left the room.

  Karel sat where he was left, not moving.

  At some point Stasik came back in and helped him up and led him down the hall and into the room where the Schieles had been. They were waiting there.

  Mrs. Schiele hugged him immediately, and Leda looked grateful but wary. He still felt numb. Mrs. Schiele talked about repaying him and having known Karel would help, and Nicholas told him they had train tickets to go to the capital that night. They were all hugging him goodbye. Leda hugged him and he could feel her relief and happiness and smell her damp hair and he believed as he hugged her back that everything else in his life was some sort of vanity except his love for her.

  Stasik led them all outside to a car that was to take them two towns over to the train station. Karel wasn’t going. Kehr was nowhere to be seen. While they loaded the car’s trunk, David was the only one who was able to stay calm, which was only right, he said, since he was a future Kestrel. He asked if he could sit near the window on the train as he got into the car.

  Stasik took the portable radio out of Nicholas’s hands as he climbed in and dropped it on the pavement and stamped on it. “No radios,” he explained.

  Leda was the last one in. She turned to Karel.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were making pamphlets?” he blurted.

  She looked at him in surprise and shot a look at Stasik, who was obliviously jamming the trunk shut.

  “What did you tell them? What did you do for them?” she demanded. “Why are they letting us go?”

  “Get in the car,” he said. Stasik had come around and stood behind them. He was suddenly terrified that it all might collapse. “Get in the car.”

  “What’d you do? What’d you tell them?” she said.

  “Ask them,” he said.

  “You are not them. They are not you,” Leda said.

  “All right, lovebirds,” Stasik said. He loaded Leda into the car like a particularly awkward plant and shut the door. He banged on the hood and the driver put the car in gear and drove away.

  Karel stood where he was, watching her disappear. Stasik chuckled and went into the station, energetically cleaning an ear with his little finger. When he came back out he asked if Karel wanted a ride home. Karel didn’t. He went home instead by a shortcut he knew. He moved as if asleep and appreciated with an aesthetic detachment a far-off yellow streetlamp over the black twist of a path. Farther on he caught at a deserted intersection his own reflection sliding along the darkened glass of a passing staff car.

  At home he dreamed about an old teacher taken from his house and dragged down steps covered with fruit and vegetable rinds, thrown into a snake pit (the snakes Karel couldn’t identify, and they limited themselves to disinterested coiling and the first stages of courtship). The sequence ended with a strange hybrid of anole and skink sitting on the teacher’s head and applauding with its fore-paws.

  When he didn’t get out of bed in the morning Kehr came up to his room and pushed open the door and sat heavily on the patched coverlet like a dad whose patience was pretty much exhausted. He tossed Karel a nectarine and said, “I suppose we’re in official mourning now over our loss of innocence.”

  Karel said, “I don’t feel good.” He set the nectarine on the mattress beside him, and it wobbled when he shifted his weight. He kept the top of his sheet where it was, below his eyes.

  “This is a tragedy,” Kehr said. “It really is. Here’s a man who’s doing everything he can to bury this country and poor you had to help turn him in.”

  “What happened to him?” Karel asked. “Where is he?”

  Kehr looked at his watch. “I imagine he’s at the zoo,” he said. “Most people have been out of bed and busy for hours.”

  “You mean you haven’t done anything to him? He wasn’t arrested?” Karel asked.

  “You sound disappointed,” Kehr said. “Did you think we would hurt him?”

  Karel blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

  Kehr shook his head briefly at the fancies of children and stood up. “We’d like lunch, at some point, at your convenience,” he said. “And our friend the ringtail’s been leaving exploratory turds in various places. I can smell them.”

  “You’re not going to do anything to him?” Karel asked.

  Kehr paused at the door. “As I told you, he is the head of the partisan cell in the area,” he said. “Who he meets, who he has contact with, is of some interest to us.”

  “Aren’t you afraid he’ll get away?” Karel said.

  “The only people who leave are people we want to leave,” Kehr said tiredly, going down the stairs. “How many times do you have to be told that?”

  He checked. He got dressed and said he was goi
ng to the market and went to the zoo instead. He slipped in the back gate and found Albert making his rounds. He stayed out of sight. Everything seemed fine. At the gate on the way out, Perren appeared behind him. He was not surprised at seeing Karel. He said, “This area’s closed to visitors,” and demonstrated by shutting the gate and giving it a rattle.

  So why did he feel the way he did? They’d known about Albert before him and everything was the same. And maybe Albert was doing something he shouldn’t’ve been. But he couldn’t sustain the righteousness because the image of himself terrified and selfish and saying the old man’s name rose up in front of his eyes while he walked, to renew his self-disgust.

  He felt sorry for himself and moped and felt disgusted about that and so moped some more. He wished he’d never gone to the station, blamed Leda, blamed Nicholas, blamed Albert, blamed Kehr, blamed himself. None of it helped. He passed mirrors and scowled, as if no one should have to face what he’d seen.

  Days he spent alone. Kehr and his assistants almost always now worked late. At night he lay in bed and Kehr talked. He felt lost and hopeless and didn’t protest. Kehr wore his full uniform and explained the stripes and bars and pins signifying the honors and theaters of service and the distinction displayed in training. He left a replica of the antipartisan badge he wore on the lamp table beneath the photo of Karel’s mother. He gave Karel a replica of the small ceremonial dagger he wore, with the antipartisan symbol flanking the Party letters on the hilt. He talked with patience and attentiveness while Karel toyed with the dagger or tossed and turned or lay on his stomach with his chin on the pillow and his eyes on the wall.

  He talked about some of the unfortunate lapses of discipline Karel had witnessed and suggested that soldiers in such cases were unsuited to their roles, and who after all could blame wolves set to guard sheep?

  Karel at one point interrupted to wonder aloud if the Party had done all it wanted to do and was ready to stop.

  There was no answer in the darkness. Then Kehr said in a low voice that all they’d done so far was impose the illusion of order, as though they’d laid a slab of glass over a whirlpool.

  The people, he went on after a short silence, were always more malleable than expected. They were now habituated to government by surprise, to believing the situation too complicated for the average citizen to comprehend and too dangerous to talk about. They worked hard to live by the rules, and the Party changed the rules, slightly but enough to continue to make obedience compelling work. The appropriate image, he suggested, might be the blind man who continually had to negotiate his way past rearranged furniture.

  Of course, some complained, Kehr told him. Most remained where they were: removed from politics.

  What about the partisans? Karel asked. He knew who Kehr was talking about: his neighbors, his father, himself, before his naming of Albert. The partisans, Kehr said, believed, as did the Civil Guard, that there was more latent opposition to the Party out there than anyone might think, ready to be agitated into motion.

  The partisans understood violence, Kehr said. They understood a central point: that violence was the only way to create a hearing for moderation. And, of course, they didn’t accept the consequences of their actions unless they were caught: they didn’t stay around to take the punishment.

  Within everyone there was a little man claiming Common Sense and Common Decency, Kehr said, but there came a point when people became used to even the unnecessary brutalities. Did Karel ever wonder at what point people would say, of the steps the Party felt compelled to take toward national solidarity, “No, not that”? Did Karel know that all around him people demonstrated that there was nothing they would not stand for? Karel pulled the pillow over his head. Did Karel know that feeling Kehr remembered from long ago, the feeling he’d never forgotten, when he first understood that all sorts of things that had been supposedly forbidden, impossible, and criminal seemed more and more natural, more and more possible, to this new version of himself?

  Karel was standing at the stove preparing some simple pastries Kehr had shown him how to make called Prisoners’ Fingers while Kehr worked at the kitchen table, every so often taking a break to continue what he called “our discussions.” Karel rolled the dough with dirty hands and didn’t retain much of what was being said. He thought about Leda and how much she suspected. He’d asked if he could write to her, and Kehr had said that right then the mail in their area wasn’t moving in any direction.

  Kehr talked about violence and aesthetic standards, and when Karel’s interest was flagging completely he asked what Karel thought should be done with Leda’s journals.

  Karel turned so quickly one of the pastries made a cricketlike hop and stuck to the wall before rolling off. Kehr was incompletely successful in hiding his pleasure. He repeated the question.

  “You have her journals?” Karel asked stupidly.

  “We do,” Kehr said. “A search of the house turned them up. We’ll save them for her, naturally. I just thought you’d be interested.”

  In the other room the ringtail was tapping on something with his claws as if working on a typewriter. “I am,” Karel said.

  They were going to be going over there this afternoon, Kehr said. Karel was welcome to come.

  All the way there Karel felt guilty and nervous. The house was double-padlocked BY ORDER OF THE NATION AND THE CIVIL GUARD and Kehr had the keys. While he got to work with them Karel waited on the front steps. Neighbors peeked from behind blinds and curtains.

  Kehr opened the door and went in. He moved some packing boxes from the hall and led Karel to Leda’s room and hefted a shallow box off the desk and put it in Karel’s arms. Then he left the room.

  This was wrong. Karel knew it. The dresser had been dragged over and the floor molding behind it pulled out. He could see the hole where she’d kept the journals. These were things she had a right to keep to herself, things she could have shared with him if she’d wanted to. But he was excited at having secret access: Leda herself answering all his questions. How did she feel about him? How much did she think about him? Was there anybody else?

  And suppose this was his only chance? She was gone. Suppose this was the only Leda he’d ever get again?

  Kehr seemed to be bumping around innocuously downstairs. It wasn’t clear to Karel what he was doing.

  There was still time. He could leave it all, let Kehr know he knew he had no right to do this. But what if she’d gotten herself into trouble with what she’d written here? If Kehr or somebody had read it? He’d need to warn her then, or plead her case. He hefted the box higher and said, “That’s true,” as if saying it would make it so, and left the room and headed downstairs.

  He spread everything in front of him on his desk and then with suppressed excitement limited himself to the first of the three spiral-bound notebooks. It was filled with pencil drawings. She had titled some of them: Nicholas, Nicholas and David, Nicholas Asleep, Sad Crow and Rabbit, Dog, and then, filling him with hope and joy, K’s Hands. That one featured three sets of hands orbiting a lizard’s foreleg and claw: one with the right hand curled inside the left (washing?), another hefting a rock, and the third operating a nooser. The design puzzled and bothered him. Was she comparing his hands to the lizard’s? Did she think of him in terms of the Reptile House? She’d done the foreleg from life: the toes ending in the sharp curve of claw, the keeled scales. He tried to push ahead but found himself flipping back to that page, unable to stop looking.

  He left a piece of paper there as a bookmark and paged quickly along looking for other parts of his body. He came across an old man with Albert’s hair and tired expression, dressed in a zoo smock. He was holding a bird in one hand and a gun in the other. His legs ended at the ankles. Whether he was supposed to be standing in something or Leda couldn’t draw feet Karel couldn’t tell. It looked like Albert, and the connection disturbed him. More and more he was having the queasy feeling that his whole world was interconnected behind his back. The bird had a lea
fed branch in its beak. There were lines radiating out from the man’s head. Holiness? A thought? A headache? A vulture or other huge bird sat in space above him. She’d drawn NUP on its breast, the letters curved to fit.

  He shut the notebook. He’d look at the drawings more later. He wanted more of her voice and thoughts.

  On the first page of the second notebook it said, This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me.—Leda Schiele. A sheaf of pages following that had been torn out. The first entry remaining had no date but was numbered 17, at the top of the page.

  Elsie was right: I hurt her feelings, and where did I get the right to do that? I’m never happy with anyone else but where do I get the idea I’m so great? From the bottom up I need to work on myself. I say I want to be an artist but what do I do to prove it? I hardly draw anymore and I have zero patience for my books. We learned to draw pretty well in school even though our art mistress was mediocre and very young, and what’ve I done with what I learned? At least I’ve stopped turning out complete trash like I did with Mr. G. Sometimes the other thing that cheers me up is that I think I’m learning, and that’s the main thing. The rest should come by itself.

  It’s not a game anymore. My ambition should be to perceive things clearly and calmly. I’m surrounded by false information and false people. For my sake and my family’s I have to figure out the truth and act on it. And how is the truth discernible? The truth is discernible first by means of logic and second by the precise investigation of things. Nicholas’s treatment an ex.

  She sounds like Kehr, Karel thought. What wasn’t a game anymore?

  Why do I let what other kids think about me affect me? Don’t listen or care so much about what others say. You retain your independence when you don’t rely on what other people can take away.

  Do not do yourself what you dislike in others.