Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  It was quiet and the lights were out when they got home, and Leda took off Karel’s shoes and settled him into some blankets on the floor. He realized he had drunk too much and he felt vague and slightly paralyzed. She kissed him goodnight and disappeared, and he lay back while the ceiling wavered above him in the dark. He listened to David’s breathing and Nicholas’s slight snore. He felt with some sadness that even loving Leda as he did he hadn’t succeeded in adjusting himself here, to these people, either, and that even in this city that he’d dreamed of coming back to he was still an outsider.

  The next morning they went to the beach. He still hadn’t met Leda’s aunt and was nervous about that. She was out when he got up. They took Nicholas and David, and Mrs. Schiele left with them to look for work. Leda would have to as well in a few days, she warned before they split up. She told Karel in an aside that he should keep an eye on David’s cough. Leda told him as they waved goodbye that her mother was becoming obsessed with everybody’s health. She speculated that it was her way of dealing with her powerlessness in everything else.

  It was a hot day. The breeze off the water made him wonder just what his favorite smell was, if it wasn’t this. Leda seemed very happy, and he wondered if in some situations thoughtlessness was justified.

  The beach was a startling bone color, and in the shallows offshore the water was an electric blue. Both were crowded. They crossed a paved area to the sand and spread their blanket in the shadow of an upside-down white dory with a shattered keel. Leda warned David about splinters and he and Nicholas whooped-hooped their way across the hot sand to the water’s edge.

  Leda lay on her back facing the sun. Karel lay beside her, propped up on his elbows. She took his hand. She was wearing a pale gray bathing suit, and he looked down at the water and told her she looked beautiful. Her toes waved in his line of sight, acknowledging the compliment.

  The sand was powdery and made him think of hot ash. He dug around with his heels and unearthed a green wine bottle choked with sand. Adults on other blankets were bobbing their forefingers, counting children crouched over tide pools. He closed his eyes. Leda murmured something beside him. They could live here with every day the same as the day before. He’d provide for them all and they’d make him happy and drive Kehr and the image of himself in the cellars of the Civil Guard out of his mind.

  They went down to the water to swim. Sandpipers milled around nervously in the glaze of the wave’s retreat, and he thought he could hear the suction of their feet on the wet sand. On the reef he could see the shadow of a sea bass lunging at nothing, and at their feet a jellyfish had washed up onto the sand. It trembled in the wind and David poked at it and dropped rocks on it. Karel dove in, and when he surfaced and looked back Leda had her arms out but instead of emulating his dive sat down suddenly at the water’s edge and began to splash herself. Her brothers surprised her from behind and threw her in.

  He opened his eyes in the underwater silence while she swam to him. Below them in the hazy green light they could see scraps of a fishing net rotting over tin cans and a whelk gripping a holster. Above them the surface rippled like the ceiling of a luminous tent, and they held hands and floated with the dreaming motion of clouds leaving the world behind.

  Back on the blankets they watched her brothers and other boys splashing around a tide pool to collect crabs for a crab war. They toweled off and stared at gulls perched on the dory and the gulls looked back at them as if they knew that when these people were gone others would show up and stare at them, too. Leda lay back and settled herself comfortably with her face to the sun again. Beyond her someone was swinging a baby so that its toes skimmed the sand and the baby was screaming in terror and glee. Karel lay with his hand on his cheek and looked at the wet dark hair combed back from her forehead and the grains of sand that glittered in her ears and imagined with a kind of onrushing contentment that his life was starting now, that what he could do now, finally, was figure out the ways to be happy.

  When he met Leda’s aunt she told him it was nice to meet him and that he had to leave. She made him repeat the story of how he got there alone, and it was clear she thought something was suspicious about all of this and that there might be trouble in it. Leda and her mother protested and argued and claimed they couldn’t believe she was acting this way, but in the end it didn’t matter and Leda’s mother explained to him that this was her husband’s sister, and he found himself out on the street with his beltpack and a bag of food, saying goodbye to Leda while the aunt looked down at them from the upstairs window. He still didn’t know her name. He was a little frightened but he had money and he told Leda he was going to stay at the Golden Angel, at least until he could find a cheaper place, and that she should look for him there.

  It took him longer than he expected to find it. The same manager, the tubby man with the sunburned head, was sitting on a wooden chair in the cool shade of the entrance. He didn’t remember Karel. He led him inside.

  Karel stood taking deep breaths while the manager fussed with the register. The lobby was the way he recalled it, musty and fragrant with the scent of wood. He went into the common room and visited the painting of the cavalry charge. He had tears in his eyes. For what? he thought. Those days? The situation now? He turned to the manager, who was waiting. He realized he wanted to bring Leda back here and couple an old happiness with the present one, though he wasn’t sure why.

  It turned out that all the rooms were much too expensive. The manager repeated the price. Karel stood at the desk feeling that whatever sense he’d had that he could get along in the city alone was gone. The manager added that there was one room, very small and no view, it was nice enough but no luxury suite, and next to one of the service rooms besides. He could let Karel have it for less than half the standard rate.

  It was fine. It looked out on a narrow street. It had an iron bedstead, a desk, a wooden armchair, and a warped chest decorated with phlox and pale trumpets in a clay pot. The bathroom was in the hall. He set his beltpack on the desk and opened it in a parody of someone settling in with his luggage, and the manager handed him his key and left.

  He sat on the bed and tried to determine what to do with himself. It occurred to him that he needed long pants, that he stood out and that it would get colder here. He decided instead to see his old house.

  He found it after a few minutes’ walk. The new owners had put an addition over his porch, and there were flower boxes on the balcony. When he tried to get a better look a woman poked her head through the kitchen window and told him to get away from the house or he’d be explaining his sightseeing to the Security Service. He spent the rest of the day down by the waterfront, watching the loading and unloading of cargo.

  He returned to the Golden Angel after dark and went up to his room and lay on the bed with his hands behind his head. The room had a small round clock on the desk and he watched its hands move. When it was past ten someone knocked. Leda came in and shut the door behind her as if there were wolves in the hallway. She was furious, she said, and ashamed and sorry, and she felt terrible for him. He got off the bed and went to her with no clear idea of what he was doing and put his arms around her and kissed her. She kissed him back, her hands on his head and arms and then his head again, and they reeled around the room, bumping things, putting a hand out every so often to steady themselves, and she was crying and he kissed her more passionately for that. He eased her onto the bed and she looked up at him, intent on his expression, whatever it was. The moment was frozen and detached from itself and from what seemed to have gone before. Their kisses were intent and noisy and her lips were glazed under his. He pulled at her clothing and she pulled at his. Her skin when he touched it was so delicate that he left pink spots that resisted fading. He had his clothes off, all but a shoe, and hers were in a tangle near them. She had her hands on the back of his neck and was still looking at him intently. She scratched herself so that the bed shook. That sense of a revelatory something about to happen returned, and
she laughed, looking at him, at his expression, laughed at the suddenness of his own transition from not seeing to seeing the extent of her love for him.

  Somebody came to the door and knocked a few minutes later. Leda pulled her legs up and covered herself with the bedspread in terror, and Karel rose to all fours on the bed and waited. There was some muttering and a voice outside the door said, “Whoops whoops whoops,” and then they heard rapid steps heading down the corridor the opposite way.

  “Oh, God,” Leda said. He settled beside her and hugged her, and she shifted and got up and turned off the overhead light and switched on the little desk lamp. Then she pulled the covers back and got under them, and he followed.

  She huddled against him. He was still excited but thought maybe he should just hold her. Just before, she’d been worried and careful even through her passion and had frustrated his attempts to enter her. He kissed her again, and she made a pleased sound. They were quiet for a long time and he realized she was beginning to doze. He heard the light uneven sound of rain beginning on the window, and then it accelerated, the droplets on the glass catching light against the darkness and slipping individually down the pane. He hadn’t heard or felt rain for months. The window was open a crack and he could feel the dampness in the air outside the blankets. He imagined the wet terrace of a nearby café, the waiter wiping slabs of tables. He turned to Leda, determined to watch her all night, to remember everything.

  It was still raining. The window curtains bellied in the wind. He brushed a damp hair from her ear and drifted a thumb across her temple. Her hair was still slightly pungent from the sun and the ocean. He ran the tip of his tongue lightly along her bottom lip and kissed the place at the outside of her eye where he imagined her tear duct to be. She murmured something in her sleep or half-sleep about his being so nice, and he had the impression that even her hidden thoughts were innocent, that she had no secrets or only virtuous ones, and he was overwhelmed with his good fortune at being here with her. He found himself considering and reconsidering her sleeping profile with the tenderness that someone going blind would have for what he still sees.

  Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up, with a quiet start. She took his face in her hands and kissed him, and when he moved up against her small noises flowed out of her with a kind of thrilling ease. He understood her reticence with certain things and so wished he knew better what he was doing in terms of pleasing her, wanted his touching to be not only tender but intelligent. She pulled him closer and he wanted to be everywhere she was, imagined himself dissolving like sugar in her mouth. She stopped him again after a while and said she was sorry, and he said no, don’t be sorry. She lay still after that with her mouth to his ear and then she said, “Listen. I was going to wait, but listen.”

  He moved back on his pillow and waited. Somewhere in the distance the rain was hitting the metal roof of a shed like far-off pebbles in a pan.

  She sighed. She stroked his arm and then sighed again, with more resolve. “We keep saying we don’t know what to do,” she said. “And everything we hear is a little worse than the last thing we heard. Only a little worse. That’s how it works; you wait for the next thing, and then the next thing, and then you’ll do something.”

  Karel took a deep breath and blinked with shame.

  “My mother sees how bad it is and still she says I’m an alarmist. I am an alarmist. Now she says it’s too late and we didn’t stop it, so now what?

  “We have to do something,” she said, when he didn’t respond. “The people I talk to can’t imagine changing anything. There’s this—reverence, for what they assume must’ve existed at some point.” He felt the intensity of her desire to understand, and her frustration. He took her hand and squeezed it.

  “I want you to help me,” she said.

  He didn’t want to hear this. “What?” he asked.

  “There’s no point in trying to put him in jail, or get people to overthrow him,” she whispered. “Everybody’s sworn allegiance to him personally.”

  “What are you thinking? What are you trying to do?” Karel said.

  “We have to kill him,” Leda said. “I don’t know how yet. I don’t even know if it’s possible. But I think somebody’s got to kill him.”

  Karel was staring at her. The roof was going to fall in, spilling Kehr on the bed. Holter was going to break in the door and take them away.

  She turned to him and took his face in her hands again, holding it the way he held newborn rabbits. “If it isn’t possible it isn’t,” she said. “But we should be finding out. We’re not infants anymore. Maybe now that we’re together there really is here somewhere a way to act, maybe all we have to do is look a little for it. I’m ashamed of myself sometimes. It’s like I think I’m just here to sit and wait. I’d like to find out if I am all just talk.”

  “They’ll kill us,” Karel whispered. “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s dangerous right now,” Leda said. “You think all those people who disappeared did something?”

  He thought of the young man in the prisoner assessment room and put his hands over his eyes.

  “They’d kill everybody,” he said. “They’d go crazy.”

  “We’d only do it if we could do it,” she said. She came closer and kissed him, and then held him, his chin on her shoulder.

  It was as if she held his fears a little bit, and settled them. He began to recognize a war inside him between the responsibility she was talking about and his old self, and he tried to settle back to observe it, like a spectator. He imagined himself learning to cherish what she cherished instead of just his own happiness and hers, imagined himself opening up to her, confessing his silence, his cowardice, his complicity, and being forgiven and purified. His mind wandered to the beach in the darkness and the rain, and he felt that he was unable to anticipate what was going to happen, that the future stood with its back to him.

  “All the good I’ve tried to do I didn’t just do for its own sake,” Leda whispered. “I did it to look good. I did it for myself.”

  He told her no and held her and decided he’d help, he’d do it even though nothing about him was heroic, because she was precious to him and it meant everything to her. She said, I won’t let anything happen to you, and it was her mothering voice, the moved, fearful one she used with her brothers, and he said, no, no, nothing’ll happen to us, and held her and prayed that whatever would come would at least spare her.

  He wasn’t sure if he woke up slowly or just never slept. It was extra cold outside the blankets and the solid things in the room were darkening as the space around them paled and took on light. It was still raining and the darkness outside was blue.

  He heard keys in locks and the squeak of a metal cart and imagined an old woman in black making the bed next door, smoothing wrinkled white sheets with her palm. He lay still, pondering a mysterious reflection in the mirror over the washbasin: a stripe and the corner of something wooden he couldn’t identify when he looked around the room. A swallow scissored past the window.

  Leda sat up, abruptly, and wrapped herself in the outer blanket against the chill and then padded barefoot to the door and went into the hall to the bathroom. He got up and put his two shirts on and wished again he had long pants. His shirts smelled. He crossed to the window and gazed down to the street. People were up already, walking quickly with light short steps because of the rain. In a men’s shop through the streaked display window he could see little hats on pegs, only now becoming visible.

  Leda came back in and crossed the room and hugged him, and then tried to get dressed while keeping the blanket on her shoulders. She spread her elbows and shivered, and the blanket tented out and flapped with her movements. Karel stayed by the window and thought of the kind of peace she brought for him to particular objects like the blanket or moments like this morning. Outside dew had frosted the hood of a parked car, and he registered two soldiers standing beside it, their arms folded. There was something else wrong and his mi
nd was about to remark on it when the old metal washbasin near Leda rang softly and she said their first words of the morning: There, I’m finished, and the door banged and crashed open with such force that she seemed to be thrown backward not so much from the shock as the concussion of air.

  Four men swept into the room wearing army shirts and civilian pants and two of them pulled the blanket up and over Leda’s head and wrapped it tightly around her and one produced some rope. Karel rushed to her and the fourth man hit him across the face with what felt like a small flat plank and a thousand stars sprayed the room, and while he rolled on the floor arms grabbed and pinned him and they put a small paper bag over his head and locked his hands behind his back with a series of sliding bars that squeezed his wrists. He felt and heard loose grains around his head in the bag and realized it was an empty sugar bag. Leda was screaming for help, muffled under the blanket, and they told her to stop or they’d kill her. He heard the grunts as they lifted her and then they pulled him up and shoved him from behind, and led him into the hall and down the stairs and out of the building at a great rush, orienting him with twists or pulls of his neck and shoulders. They were piled into a car. Leda kept calling his name and he would say, I’m here, his voice harsh and trapped in the sugar bag, and then she cried out when they hit her to quiet her down. There was something wrong with the car, it wouldn’t start, and eventually he had to get out and they unlocked his hands and told him to leave the bag on his head and he had to push with two other men at the back of the car until it started. They were quiet the rest of the way until Leda said, her voice still muffled, Why are you doing this? This is a mistake, and then the man beside Karel who was still breathing heavily from the pushing asked her angrily if she had any idea what was involved in an operation like this. Arms, civilian coordination, training centers, transports, intelligence gathering, paperwork: did she think all that operated in the service of mistakes? And the man in the front seat told him to shut up.