Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  The smell was still bad, worse than anything he’d smelled. He’d entertained ideas of hunting for food but couldn’t bring himself to and thought now he couldn’t even sleep here, either. He left the terrace to continue his circuit and kicked the body of a woman covered with flies. They rose up in a small agitated cloud. She was lying on her back and her arm was resting on the stone of the terrace as if she’d made herself comfortable. Her hair was over her face in a black sticky wing. There was another body behind her in the darkness with its legs folded and neck back at a severe angle. He ran blindly away from the house back toward the trail, sending the goat clattering in panic out of his way. The smell and the image stayed with him all the way back to where he’d turned off and longer, and he cried and swung his arms and cursed and felt revolted and horrified, and sorry for himself for ever having seen such a thing.

  The bus driver waved him on without even looking at his pass card. He didn’t see any soldiers or Civil Guardsmen among the passengers. They looked at him strangely as he came down the aisle. When he settled into his seat a cricket sprang from his pocket.

  His head throbbed and he was thirsty and wanted to empty the sand from his shoes. As they crested the hill in long winding turns he kept his face to the window, looking back at the dark green patterns like underwater vegetation on the desert floor below.

  At Naklo the bus let him off across the street from the train station. He stood in line to buy his ticket behind a woman who held her baby up against her chest and continually apologized to it. When it was his turn he pushed his money under the slot and held his card up to the glass and again there was no trouble. He bought a pineapple drink from a sidewalk vendor while he waited for the train and drank it slowly, the cup cool in his hand.

  Nothing was on schedule, but the noon train ran in the afternoon and the afternoon train at night, so that every so often a train came in right on time because it was the previous train six hours late.

  The train came as the sun was setting. They passed a small factory in a narrow valley just outside of town and some small farms before he stopped looking out the window and tried to sleep. A fat man opposite him caused an epic amount of trouble endlessly getting in and out of his seat and finally disappeared before the ticket taker arrived. The ticket taker checked Karel’s ticket and pass card and left with them and returned a few minutes later with another official while Karel pretended to doze, his heart thumping. The ticket taker prodded him and returned the card and ticket and passed on.

  He slept. There were creakings, snores, conversations, jolts. He woke every now and then at the water stops, hearing the trainmen murmuring. When he woke again they were stopped at a quiet station and nothing seemed to be happening. He saw moths around the light illuminating the station sign. A discarded timetable stirred and fluttered on the platform. Somebody coughed. He could make out part of a loopy painted slogan on the side wall:——STAYS. Another train passed with a noisy rush and reflected his window and he saw himself spying out of a fluctuating plane of lights and then he was gone. Their train started again, giving all the passengers’ heads a lazy shake, and he watched the station and its water tower diminish around a curve with the rails crossing ties and spinning into the darkness and then he was dozing again, more exhausted than he’d realized, thinking about Leda and relaxing himself as much as he could with the steady clicking and rocking that were taking him away.

  He felt the humidity and salt air in the closed compartment before he saw the sea. They came in along the high ridge of the cove, and he gazed down on the warehouses and storage tanks around the docks and the harbor glittering beyond them. There were boats, more than he remembered. The train let him out at the top of the city, and he swung his beltpack around so it rested on his hips and began his way down a road so steep the houses along it could only be entered from the top floors. He kept his eyes on the harbor.

  He had Leda’s address, but it was too early, and he was hungry besides. As he got lower, shops appeared on both sides of the street. He passed garages, a butcher’s shop, a fabric store, a dealer in military antiques. At a welder’s three men were beating on a metal object with hammers and cursing. The noise stayed with him for blocks. He could smell the salt in the air and the humidity after the desert was wonderful. He passed a bakery and then a café and stepped inside.

  He ate back near the kitchen and it was narrow and cluttered. A black iron stovepipe went up to the slanted ceiling and while they made his breakfast he gazed blankly out of a triangular skylight. Above the stove on racks were spices he could smell in small wooden boxes, and a dirty dishtowel hung on a peg over his table. Flies wove past him and disappeared.

  For breakfast he had coffee and shredded nut pastries and then asked if it was too early to make some cuttlefish with spinach and lemon. He’d been away a long time, he explained. While he ate he watched a beautiful blond woman in a Women’s Auxiliary uniform who waved her spread hands like a fan over her tea, letting the cherry polish on her fingernails dry.

  Back on the street he passed blocks he’d never seen before, and odd sights—a dwarf stopping to give some coins to a blind couple jointly playing the accordion, a pigeon perched just above a sleeping cat—but it seemed that every street, every simple corner of a house, retained a shiver of something from his past, some old tremor of feeling. He was here, he thought as he walked. He was here.

  He showed a passerby Leda’s address and asked directions. He passed small trees growing out of square open areas in the sidewalks and tightly fenced gardens. Dogs occasionally raced or clawed along the fences, eager to get at him.

  The Schieles turned out to live in yet another part of the city that was unfamiliar to him, and he was beginning to feel discomfited at the continued undermining of his nostalgia.

  He found himself in front of a shabby and narrow house facing a courtyard where buses were apparently stored. There was a fish store on the ground floor. Their apartment, a helpful neighbor said, was the small dark place on the third floor. The house was very old and had in its keystone arch a fierce mythical lizard of some sort with a fish in its mouth. The second-floor landing was dark and filled with junk: a bicycle wheel, some sodden cardboard boxes, stacked metal pails, a tangle of rusted and broken knives.

  He smoothed his hair and knocked and thought belatedly about cleaning himself up.

  Leda opened the door and surprised him completely by not being surprised.

  “You’re here,” she said, and her expression was so beautiful he knew he loved her completely. Her hair was lighter and finer and pinned up on the sides. She hugged him, and stood back from him, smiling. She tilted her head and smoothed her hair on one side by bringing her opposite hand all the way over the top of her head. “Come in,” she said.

  Their apartment was just as she had described it. Everyone was gone.

  Mother had taken Nicholas and David to the beach, she explained. Aunt was working. She’d waited here for him.

  “You knew I was coming?” Karel said.

  Leda looked puzzled. “Didn’t you send me this?” she asked. She showed him a printed note: Coming soon should arrive Thurs or Fri. Love, Karel.

  Karel stared at it, dumbfounded. Something told him he should lie, that if he told the truth Leda would be less happy to see him.

  “I forgot,” he said. She looked at him strangely.

  “So how did you get here? What happened?” she said. “Are you hungry? Are you okay?”

  She got him iced tea with mint while he told her about his father’s return and the destruction of the zoo. He told her about the desert and the bodies in the abandoned farmhouse. He did not tell her about the prisoner assessment room. She put her hand over her mouth. He regretted having upset her, though he appreciated her concern for what he’d been through, and he sipped his tea, aware all at once of how filthy he was.

  She shouldn’t grill him like this, she said. She put a hand on his cheek. She’d been going to suggest they go to the beach and find every
body, but she didn’t think that was such a good idea anymore.

  He shook his head.

  He was probably tired, she said. And he probably wanted to wash up. She took the glass from his hands and set it down and tenderly helped him up, leading him to the bathroom door. She took off his beltpack and he raised his arms dumbly but she didn’t take off anything else. She disappeared and came back with a towel and a scrub brush that looked as if it was used for pots and pans. She told him to let her know when he was finished. She gave him some of Nicholas’s shorts to sleep in.

  He washed himself in a small claw-footed tub. Was she in danger? Why had Kehr send the note? It had to have been Kehr. What was happening? What was Karel doing to her and her family by lying to them?

  The water when he got out was gray. It left a ring, and he knelt and tried to wash it away with his hands. When he came out she looked pleased and the air in the living room was cool.

  Now a nap, she said, and he was thrilled at the idea of her lying next to him, her family gone, his having braved great dangers to be at her side.

  But she kissed him once on the mouth and pulled herself away from his hands, and told him it was wonderful to see him, and hugged him again. She shut the door behind her as she left.

  He was disappointed but the plainness of the bedsheets in the sheer white morning light seemed paradisical. He sat on the mattress with his hands on his knees, gazing unsurprised at the extent of his own exhaustion. He lay back and thought it was possible to have kinds of homecomings without home, and fell asleep.

  He woke to voices through the walls, the next apartment, and listened for a while before deciphering that the people were refugees and they were arguing over whose situation was worse. He heard other voices, too, and realized the rest of the Schieles were home.

  They were all happy to see him. Nicholas pointed out that Karel was wearing his shorts and that Leda was much happier now, and the insight made him radiant. He sat across the room still wearing his bathing suit and smiled as if he knew each of Karel’s secrets.

  David stood with both hands on the arm of Karel’s chair and asked about the desert and did Karel see any nomads or scorpions and said he had plenty of things to show Karel in the city. His mother hushed him and made Karel relate everything he’d already told Leda, stopping him to shake her head and then nod every so often. He knew she’d retell some of what he told her as part of her store of catastrophe tales, all of which featured her in a prophetic role, unheeded by the foolish (“I had a feeling something was going on at that zoo …”).

  There was news for him. The war was as usual but there were reports of troubles inside the army and there’d been in the city alone in the last month nine explosions, set by God knew who. There had been two bombs left at municipal offices in bookbags, and in one of the markets a donkey had exploded; down by the waterfront a blond boy had walked into a hotel foyer and had blown up. They were now in a special state of emergency, which Leda’s mother confessed she thought they’d been in, though officially the explanation was still that these were not partisans but delinquents.

  The hotel explosion had destroyed the front of the building housing the nursery center, so now Leda was out of a job.

  When he looked at her she arched her eyebrows and shrugged.

  Which didn’t help financially, but still, her mother said.

  Did he have a place to stay? she added.

  “Can’t he stay with us?” Leda asked. “After all he’s done for us?”

  Karel looked away in genuine embarrassment. “Of course,” Leda’s mother said. “I was just curious. I’ll fix it somehow.”

  “I can get a place,” Karel said. “I’ve got money.”

  “Plenty of time for that,” her mother said. “For now you’re our guest.”

  They were all awkward and silent and then Karel said that what he wanted most was to have some real seafood again, and would they let him take them out for dinner? Leda’s mother graciously vetoed the idea, to his relief, over the protests of David and Nicholas. She suggested slyly that the two of them go. Leda colored when he asked and said she’d love to.

  In the street she took his hand. She was wearing the red linen dress and he considered it a good sign. She’d glossed her lips with something even though he’d heard her complaining to her mother when getting ready in the bedroom that there was no lipstick or anything else she could use anywhere.

  She said she knew a restaurant and led the way. She asked if he was sure he could afford it, if maybe this was irresponsible of them, considering. Then she squeezed his arm and said she thought celebrating his being here was not going to hurt anything, really.

  They passed cinnamon and cypress trees that made the air fresh and fragrant. Down a side street people were being made to scour slogans off a wall with wire brushes while soldiers looked on. Leda didn’t notice them and Karel didn’t point them out. They passed wide yards of washing, and ahead of them on the street from the backseat of a car a woman’s hand stretched to caress a man on the sidewalk who leaned toward her. Karel began to recognize where he was. Leda crouched and spread a finger and thumb around a cricket, but it shot ahead and disappeared into a hedge. Everything seemed suddenly touching to him, his return, the city, Leda, the shadows of the leaves on the streets, and he felt the need to stop and put his hand on his heart and look around. As they turned a corner he imagined himself imprisoned or stranded on a far-off island and remembering the ordinariness of this walk with her as the perfect walk and the perfect happiness.

  The restaurant was the Sea’s Trade.

  They sat in the open-air section, furnished now with new wire café-style chairs and smaller tables. They could see down into the harbor and the sun flashed off the water around the boats. The gulls he remembered still circled and settled endlessly.

  “This is so nice,” Leda said.

  They ordered wine and melon. Karel told her he loved her letters and quoted passages from them, and she was pleased. She apologized for always being so mopey and pessimistic in them and he said not at all, they were wonderful, and she was even more pleased. She asked him if he was getting taller and he sat up straight and said he thought he was. She asked if he was okay considering everything, and he looked away, guilty, and said he was, though he was worried he wouldn’t see her enough even here in the city.

  Was that a major worry? She wished she had his problems, she said, but she smiled to indicate she was flattered.

  How about her? he wanted to know. Was she okay?

  Much better now, she said. The menu was on a chalkboard, and the waiter brought it by. She ordered ocean catfish with dates and turmeric and he got fried brislings or sprats, tiny and plump fish he hadn’t seen since he was six or seven.

  It was hard, though, she said when the waiter went away. He could see she was delighted at the sophistication of eating out, of the two of them here alone. Today he had perked everyone up, but it wasn’t always like that. It seemed as if everyone had lost his enthusiasm for everything, which was understandable. She put her hands down and touched her silverware and plate with appreciation. It had been hard on her mother especially. Not all the girls where Leda had worked had been let go, and her mother was convinced Leda’s attitude had had something to do with it. She smiled at him. She said, “Nicholas meanwhile has gotten completely quiet, and David I really worry about—he’s getting like the dog from across the street, Eski, full of all these terrors that just come and go. He’s always waking us up, and he sits there during the day saying these little wild things to himself. But maybe the scariest thing is that I can feel it wearing me down. I’m getting slower mentally. I can feel it. Sometimes when I’m reading I have to go back and read the words aloud, and still they just lie there and it’s like I don’t absorb them or something.”

  Karel stroked the top of her hand sympathetically.

  “It’s scary,” she said.

  They were quiet, though they smiled at each other occasionally to show they were hal
f sorry the conversation had gone in that direction.

  She asked if it had been harder than he thought seeing his father, and he was surprised by how sad it made him even now. He told her that over and over again he thought he understood how little he meant to his father, and over and over again he found out he meant even less.

  “He just doesn’t like me,” Karel said. He shrugged helplessly.

  He told her how much his father had always mistrusted him—him! What was he going to do? Who was he going to betray his father to?—and the way he’d always been amazed that all that suspicion had never seemed a burden for his father to carry. He gave her examples, and the food arrived. She said quietly that in the case of her and her mother she was beginning to realize how much alike they were. “My aunt says I’m turning into her,” she said.

  The notion bothered him and he thought she was leading him to something, that she thought it was true in his case. Maybe she was right: if things were bad between him and his father, did he really think it was all his father’s fault? He remembered the way even as a small child when he watched his father doing something wrong he would think, I’ll always be able to use this against him. He had collected and exaggerated his father’s faults. They were always reacting to each other, and that had something to do, he realized, with their helplessness together.

  Leda saw his sadness and leaned forward and whispered something he didn’t hear. He was grateful and reminded of an early memory of one of his mother’s quiet counter-demonstrations of sympathy on his behalf.

  Over dessert she didn’t seem bothered by his suggestion that his father had changed. Her mother said if you lay down with dogs you got up with fleas, she said. The comment stung him. He imagined her discovering where he’d been with Kehr.

  They walked home in step behind a drunk who seemed perpetually ready to topple over. They balked for a while at the riskiness of passing him and finally slipped by when he collapsed against a fence rail. When they looked back again he’d slid to a sitting position.