Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  “This is Karel Roeder,” Kehr said.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Karel said. He was still against the wall. The man in the apron smiled sympathetically and crouched near the bedframe to examine wires that ran to the field telephone. The unshaven man crossed the room stiffly to the lattice screen and sat behind it at one of the desks. The shadows made patterns across his face and clothes. The desk was too small for him and it looked as if he were being made the object of a joke.

  “Mr. Birthday is one of our up-and-coming experts in public safety training and civic action,” Kehr said. The man in the apron gave the wires an expert tug and nodded modestly.

  The unshaven man behind the latticework had taken out a small writing pad and a pencil.

  “What you’re interested in is over here,” Kehr said, inclining his head toward the bedframe. “Not behind the screen.”

  The unshaven man hadn’t looked up and was concentrating fiercely on his writing pad. Kehr remarked that the prisoners here did their part to run the system; that way the customers served themselves, as they liked to say.

  “It teaches them responsibility,” he added.

  “I think we’re about ready here,” the man in the apron said. He was bending over the toy box with his hands on his thighs. He reached in and extracted a silver rod a foot long and a narrow length of cheesecloth. The cheesecloth he folded and refolded and then wrapped around the tip of the rod and lashed it with string from his pocket. Karel recognized the knot from camp. The bedframe made a creaking and shifting sound.

  “Sit down,” Kehr said to Karel. Karel was looking at the rod. “I would suggest it,” he warned. The man in the apron indicated the chair with the rod, as if offering an open seat on a bus. Karel sat down.

  “What happens is this,” Kehr said, and he took hold of the crank handle on the field telephone. “The field telephone is battery-operated and generates a current when the handle is turned. The voltage produced depends on the speed at which it’s turned.”

  He turned the crank at an easy pace, the way he might grind coffee. The man in the apron reached over and flipped the switch beside the crank and the young man howled and shot from the metal frame all at once, a rigid board, a magic act. He came back down and bounced and screamed and then twisted and thrashed. Kehr stopped.

  Karel pressed against the back of his chair as if he wanted to push through it. Kehr reached over and took his hand and put it on the crank over his, and Karel tore it away, trembling. Kehr turned the crank and flipped the switch as if introducing Karel to an uncomplicated but soothing craft. The young man shrieked and tore upward at his manacles, and the bedframe jumped an inch across the floor.

  Kehr relinquished the crank to the man in the apron.

  The man in the apron cranked at various speeds and thumbed the switch intermittently. The young man shrieked and cried and jabbered in between the shrieks. The manacles were making raw red lines on his wrists and ankles and he’d bitten his tongue.

  “What’re you doing?” Karel asked. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” He was trying to turn his head away, but he was too close and Kehr was restraining him from getting out of his chair. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” He looked wildly at Kehr, and Kehr put his finger to his lips.

  The man in the apron unhooked the wires from the bedframe and wound them through an eye at the base of the rod. He cranked the field telephone again and touched the cheesecloth tip of the rod lightly to various parts of the young man’s back. The young man screamed even louder than before. The rod made coin-sized burn marks. Karel could smell it. The man in the apron shut off the switch and adjusted the cheesecloth.

  Karel had his hands over his ears and was trying to keep his eyes shut. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” he asked. His voice rebounded around the cement walls.

  Kehr gave his arm a pat and then pulled it down, freeing an ear. He said, “Is it so hard to figure this out? What we do is administer fear in small doses, which we then gradually increase. Education. We’re teaching him a story with two themes: ultimate brutality and absolute caprice.”

  “I can’t watch this,” Karel said. He was starting to sob.

  “In fact you can,” Kehr said. “You’re not up pounding on the door. You’re not retching. You’re not doing anything to stop us.”

  “No no no no,” Karel shouted. The man in the apron walked the rod tip down the bumps of the young man’s vertebrae and the young man started screaming the same thing. He drowned them all out.

  Kehr said it was like Karel’s herpetology and that Karel should’ve recognized that already. The man in the apron described a grid pattern with his prod across the young man’s back and legs. The young man screamed as if someone were pulling his throat out. That sort of study created an identity for the object being studied, provided an essence. He was talking about a kind of power over the natural world. This was about power, the power to see clearly what one was designed for. What he was talking about, he said, was the audacity he had, the audacity Karel had—he shook Karel, hard, to focus his attention, and the man in the apron poured a small bottle of mineral water onto the young man’s back and touched the rod to it—the audacity they had, to circle, as it were, like birds of prey over inarticulate suffering.

  Karel was crying. Kehr was unbothered by it. After waiting for Karel to stop he got up and led him to the door and opened it for him. He said something in a low voice to the man in the apron. Out in the hall he shut the door with a clang on the young man’s shrieks and smoothed his hair and reminded Karel that he had gotten up to leave, not Karel. This was nothing, he said. This was not torture. This was a long way from what it could be. This was exercise.

  Karel,

  Mother says the light here will ruin my eyes and here I am writing to you anyway. I’m in bed already, and I’ve even been to sleep and had a dream. Now I can’t sleep, so I’m writing you, though I’m not sure you’ll ever write back or that you got my other letter or that you’ll even get this.

  In my dream we were hiking. (I almost always dream I’m going somewhere.) We came to a big lake. It was night and there was a moon. You wanted me to swim the lake and I told you I wanted to eat first. That’s all I remember, though later you kissed me. They say dreams depend on the noises you hear in your sleep. Maybe it’s true. I always feel the same in dreams: like I live in this peculiar world where I’ll never be entirely happy, but still … It’s strange. It always makes me melancholy. Am I getting really sentimental?

  I’ve been thinking of you more often than usual. Maybe because I’m always tired with work and everything. I tell myself: you’re looking for a crutch. You know you can depend on him, how he feels about you. (Leda being presumptuous.) But then I find myself thinking about you anyway. I think, What do you know about him? And I find myself going over all the good things and remembering things like our walks. Karel! If I ever get completely sappy, promise to shoot me, like a horse.

  After all my talk about self-sufficiency. I do really believe what I’m saying, but how many times am I able to act that way?

  Well, if you didn’t answer me before you’ll never answer me now.

  Work at the center is endless and all I do is complain about it. David and Mother try to stay away from me at night, and even Nicholas starts to yawn and blink after a while. I work with ten other girls and we’re responsible for sixty-six children. (!) We waste a lot of time standing around waiting for our supervisor, etc. Even that’s tiring. The worst times are the lunch breaks when we either monitor the children (who throw everything and trade food and fight about it nonstop until the period runs out) or eat with the other girls on the staff. The children wear me out so quickly: it’s tiring having to think myself into their world and stay detached from it at the same time. And the girls on the staff are worse: I have to close my ears to their chatter. Sometimes I actually start humming to myself while they talk. Every time I join in it seems like a big concession and I immediately regret it.
They come in every morning thrilled with the NUP and the war and go home just as blinkered. I usually manage to stay in the background, because of my shyness. I wish I could keep it up, but I catch myself showing off in little ways, trying to teach them. It’s awful, this craving I have to be noticed. And look: even as I write that I’m wondering how it looks on paper. Where do I get ideas like that? Who am I to think I’m too good for these people? What arrogance! Where did I get it from?

  They fired off some live ammunition near the center this afternoon. My ears are still buzzing.…

  Will you write? You never tell me about yourself, though I suppose I don’t ask as much as I could. I often wonder who you’re with at some point in the day, and who you’re friendly with in general. You never talked about that. Who you like best, for instance. Have you met anyone new? Are you mostly alone? Are all those questions stupid at this point?

  Leda

  The image of the young man would not go away from Karel. He saw the young man’s face on the window glass during the whole trip back to the Assessment Center. He didn’t speak to Kehr until they’d arrived and gone inside. The heat had let up a little and they sat in the patio off the dining room. The patio was littered with broken red and white ceramic tiles that crunched and skittered when they moved their feet.

  “Thanks for the letter,” Karel said.

  “It came while we were gone,” Kehr said. He looked at his watch.

  “Lucky the people you know going back and forth are willing to carry those letters,” Karel said.

  “Yes it is,” Kehr said. “Luck follows me around.”

  Gnats had settled into Karel’s drink. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said. “Thinking about that guy.”

  “Weakness is kicked in the teeth in this world,” Kehr said. “Which is a shame.”

  Two men at the next table were explaining a long-handled metal instrument to a third man, who had trouble catching on.

  “What’d he do?” Karel asked. “Did he do anything? Aren’t things like the bedframe against the law?”

  The laws were iron, Kehr said. And some people were outside the law’s protection.

  In the far corner of the courtyard two children were sitting on a square of cloth on the pavement and playing with rubber balls and a toy lizard. A haggard man in a prisoner’s shirt was watching them.

  “Some of our officers occasionally have to bring their children,” Kehr explained. “I’ve seen days when it was like a school around here.”

  “There are no rules?” Karel asked faintly. “Anybody can do anything? Downstairs?”

  Not at all, Kehr said. In fact, they were cleaning up the system. That had been a big source of tension. He looked over at the children. The prisoner was pointing out to one a ball that had rolled away. Karel should have seen the conditions and methods at the Ministry of Social Welfare: Kehr had thought he could not watch such things. Much different from the sort of things Karel had seen. Another order of intensity altogether.

  He saw Karel’s expression and tried to explain. By “excesses” he meant for the most part acts carried out individually, for personal goals. There’d been for example what they’d considered too much individual initiative on the part of operatives at night in the prisoners’ cells. Especially the women’s cells. This for the most part had had to stop. This was why: no one really minded what was being done as long as it was continually clear that it was being done at the instructions of the state. Because once people were clear on that, it was just a matter of finding out the rules and playing by them.

  Karel looked shocked.

  Please, Kehr said. This wasn’t news. Everybody knew. He surveyed his glass, which was also dotted with gnats. He said there was an argument that those who restrained their cruelty did so only because theirs was weak enough to be restrained, but that, he thought, oversimplified the situation. The political man at arms had to be a model of correctness in dress, deportment, and behavior. Otherwise where was his authority in ideological reorientation? Those who understood that had nothing but distaste for the rabid types who behaved as if they were dressed in horns and pelts. The good torturer lacked the capacity for hatred. Pain was administered the way power was to be exercised: dispassionately, from on high.

  They left the patio and headed to the prisoner assessment room again. Kehr said that one could get to the point where what he did made extraordinary wine or fragrances possible, made contemplation possible, made sleep possible.

  The young man was carried onto the bedframe. The man in the apron returned and did not seem to be in as pleasant a mood this time. Two prisoners set up bright lights on tripods and a third took photographs. The man in the apron introduced innovations: a horseshoe-shaped electric prod applied simultaneously to the ears and teeth that they called “the telephone,” and a small electrified metal rectangle with legs that sparked and hopped erratically around the young man’s back and that they called “the spider.” While they worked the lights created a double image behind them of their shadows gigantified on the walls.

  Afterward the young man passed out and nothing could be done with him. He was carried to the infirmary.

  Kehr sat Karel down behind the lattice screen and told him it was time they examined what had been going on here. He asked if Karel had any questions. Karel asked again despite himself why they hadn’t asked the young man any.

  He was not ready to speak, Kehr said. With experience you understood that. Softening up was required before it was even worth the bother.

  Karel wanted to know how they knew someone was telling the truth. Kehr explained that a specific tone appeared in the voice in that situation, and that again, training and experience allowed one to recognize that tone. Subjects under that sort of stress invented the most farfetched things. One woman he’d been associated with had sent over fifty people to prison, and none of them as far as he knew had provided anything yet, or seemed likely to.

  The special methods were indispensable to the cause of truth; with each application another layer of deceit was stripped away, until the last truth was told, finally, in the last extremity.

  Why was he here? Karel wanted to know. What did they want from him?

  It was becoming clearer and clearer to the Civil Guard, Kehr said, that to do its job with maximum efficiency it would need to recruit more heavily among nonmembers of the Party, to systematically build a core of people who were not Party members or known supporters. They’d allow for greater flexibility in operations. That would do two things: it would create a more omniscient intelligence service, and it would create the impression of a more omniscient intelligence service.

  And they wanted to Karel to do that?

  Among other things, Kehr said. An example: there was a certain protest organization, of families that had had family members disappear. It had been particularly hard to penetrate. Kehr had proposed months ago that one of their female operatives be accompanied to the meetings by a young boy posing as her son to give her greater credibility. It could even be arranged to have the son save the day during a faked police intervention and thereby cement his position within the group.

  There’d also be paperwork around the centers, more routine activities—release orders, transfer orders, final disposal orders—all such things that needed to be done and that there was always so little time for.

  Karel sat upright. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I couldn’t do that.”

  Kehr nodded. He seemed undisturbed. “That I think is a common reaction,” he said. “But it’s a little more complicated in your case. Take for example the prisoner who was sitting here yesterday recording the session. What he intuited some time ago was that there was nothing a man wouldn’t do to save himself, and having saved himself, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for increasingly trivial reasons, and that eventually he finds himself doing these things out of duty, out of habit, out of pleasure, or for no reason at all.”

  Karel shuddered.

  “Strange but true,
” Kehr said.

  “Are you going to torture me to make me do it?” Karel asked.

  “I suppose I should be more frank with you,” Kehr said. “There is in my business what we call Involuntary Recruitment. This is carried out through private consultations between the operative and the subject, during which the subject is introduced to compromising actions and situations. At some point the recruit is asked to join the struggle. Should the recruit refuse, which is likely considering the reasons for which the recruit was chosen in the first place, it is then pointed out to the recruit that he or she is already inside the movement, and that he or she will be exposed to his or her friends—as well as the partisans, who unfailingly act very badly in such situations—if he or she does not co-operate.”

  Karel was thunderstruck.

  “But of course you have time to think about it,” Kehr said. “We should be going. I think someone will soon be using the room.”

  Karel followed him on his rounds, in shock and feeling he had nowhere else to go. They dropped in on a woman who was being released as soon as she recovered fully, and Kehr asked if she’d write down for him her full name and address. “I like to keep in touch with my girls,” he said. He told Karel after they left the cell that he’d drop her a card every so often to see how she was doing. In the courtyard they passed a file of prisoners with sticks tied to their legs who were being taught to march. The partisans would not go away and this contrary political activity would not go away, Kehr remarked as they left the center. But we’re not here to adjust to this world, he said. We’re here to adjust it.

  THE REPTILE HOUSE

  The next night, while kehr and stasik were out, he heard a noise downstairs. He was in bed. The noise was weight somewhere on the floorboards; it was too large and too heavy for the ringtail. He went down the stairs expecting nearly anything. He passed the bathroom and could smell the ringtail’s droppings on the tile. The house was still dark. Something moved over the bathroom sink, and he looked closer. There was a cough and a face bloomed in the dark mirror as he fumbled and scrabbled for the light switch. He got it and flipped it on and his father was behind him, reflected in the mirror, wearing the uniform of the Civil Guard.