Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  “They’re all right,” Karel said. As they got higher the rocks increased in size.

  “Are there scorpions here?” Leda asked, holding a foot in midair.

  “I guess,” Karel said. “I haven’t seen one during the day.”

  She completed her step. “I don’t like scorpions,” she said.

  They climbed, leaning forward and making huffing noises, until they reached another steeper slope abutting theirs.

  “Here,” he said, and in a minute or two, flipping over flat stones, he found a lesser earless lizard, gray with pale blue along its spine. It skittered a foot or so away and froze with a quizzical expression.

  Leda was facing the panorama of the town below them. She said, “It’s pretty up here.”

  “I thought you wanted to watch,” he said, and lowered the noose slowly over the lizard until it looked condemned by a tiny lynching party. He yanked the noose and his hand must have jerked: the lizard was magically gone.

  “Huh,” Leda said.

  “It usually always works,” he said. His armpits were sweating and the sun was hot on his back.

  “Well, keep trying,” Leda said. “It looks hard.”

  “It isn’t, really,” he said, irritated with himself. “It’s not supposed to be.” He crouched beside some chia blooming in indigo clusters above the slope. There was something there, too, maybe a horned lizard, but as he maneuvered the bamboo rod through the tangles it disappeared.

  “Huh,” Leda said again.

  When they’d disappeared they were right nearby, often downslope, Albert had taught him. While he searched the area in a crablike crouch she gazed back at the town again, shading her eyes with her hand.

  “Did you hear about Mr. Fetscher?” she said.

  “I was there,” he said. He overturned a rock slab to confront a Jerusalem cricket, tomato red and enormous, grotesquely humpbacked.

  “You were?” Leda said. She turned, shadowed by the sun. “Oh, God. Look at that thing.”

  He shooed it away, and it left unhurriedly, dragging itself audibly over the shale.

  She watched it clamber over a rock with distaste. “So?” she said. “What happened?”

  Karel shrugged. He piled some rocks. “They took him away.”

  She made a face.

  “Did you hear what happened after that?” he asked.

  “I heard what they said.” She watched him ease a fan-shaped rock up. Nothing underneath. “What do you think happened?” she asked warily.

  “Right here,” he said. “Look.”

  She crouched immediately beside him. Her face was more tanned with shade and he could see the tips of her teeth as her mouth opened slightly in anticipation. He held the noose over a head-sized stone concealing a tiny horned lizard smaller than the first. He could hear her breathing through her mouth while she watched him maneuver the rod.

  She said, “You never answered.”

  He lowered the loop and the horned lizard’s head turned, as if listening for far-off music. “I think they killed him,” he said.

  “So do I,” Leda said. She was looking at him intently, and her eyes had the directness of the eyes of figures he’d seen in old mosaics. He could pick up the sun smell of the hairs on the back of her neck. It was as if as a child she hadn’t been spared anything, as if her mother had never changed the subject when she’d entered the room.

  “I may want to run away,” she said.

  “Where?” he said. Not: With me?

  “The city,” she said.

  He closed his eyes at a horrible thought. He said finally, “Are you with me only because you want me to help?”

  She told him no as if that were a peculiar notion, and the simplicity of her answer flooded him with relief. He waited for her to go on, unsure what to say. “You can’t get on the train without a seat reservation and a permit to leave our area,” she said. “I need three.”

  “Three?” he asked.

  “David and Nicholas and me,” she explained.

  “What about your mother?” He sat on the scree, but she maintained her crouch.

  “If my mother would go I wouldn’t need to run away,” she said.

  “Do you think it’s going to get worse?” he asked. He still didn’t know where his father was, and now all this was happening. His unhappiness had crystallized into that one thought, run away with Leda, and he worked on the courage to ask her if he could go.

  “My mother was talking with my aunt,” Leda said. “Near Naklo they found eighty people, women and children. The Special Sections are killing everybody after the army passes.” Naklo was on their side of the border.

  “Maybe they were …” Karel said. He trailed off.

  “They’re just killing people,” Leda said. “And we say, ‘Oh, that’s awful. What do you think happened?’ And we don’t do anything.”

  Karel dangled the noose, squeezing and relaxing it. Leda put her finger through it and started a gentle tug-of-war. “Everybody thinks they don’t have to do anything and this’ll pass, like the weather,” she said. “Stay quiet and let everything happen and it’ll turn out okay in the end just because the days are going by.” She slipped her finger from the noose and examined it. “Well, every time the days go by I hear something worse.”

  She looked up at him for confirmation, and he nodded.

  “You want to keep walking?” she said. “My knees hurt.”

  She stood and stretched. They walked carefully back down the slope.

  What would she do after she ran away? he wondered. What do you do after you run away? How would she live?

  She couldn’t talk to Elsie or Senta about it, she said. Kids in their class just sat there, like little birds with their mouths open, waiting for worms. Elsie memorized even what she didn’t understand.

  They did believe a lot in memorization, Karel said, meaning the school. It was a principle or something.

  “Habit’s our principle,” Leda said. She cupped her hand over a stalked puffball as she passed it. “Our first habit is not asking questions.”

  He trailed his nooser as though trolling and thought, What good is asking questions? but then remembered the number of questions he’d wanted to ask his father, and Leda.

  “We have to fight them,” she said. “To do that, we have to fight ourselves.”

  He nodded, openmouthed. He said, “Where’d you get that?”

  “I read it,” she said. “In a newspaper you get in certain places that the NUP hates.”

  He was impressed. This was another of those times he felt four years younger.

  They were on a road skirting the town and leading through dry scrub. A black-and-red bird darted and swooped over their heads—they were probably near a nest—and a family of jackrabbits still far away were spooked into flight, leaping as they ran.

  “I get scared,” Leda said. “People are doing what they’re doing because they’re scared, so they’re not doing the right thing. It’s like they didn’t pay enough attention and then they weren’t brave enough, and now they don’t know what to do.”

  We could go back, Karel was thinking. We could go back to the beach and the Golden Angel.

  “Does your mother think the same thing?” he asked.

  “My mother’s waiting,” Leda said. “Sitting there like a lump waiting for someone to change everything or tell her what to do.”

  Karel was quiet.

  “It’s like she’s caught in this—box, of just being pleasant about everything and hoping for the best. I said to her at Elsie’s birthday party, ‘Just say what you think. Go ahead.’ You know what she said? She said, ‘Leda, that’s impossible.’ She said, ‘I don’t even think I’d know what to say.’

  “So,” Leda added, and then stopped. They sat under a gnarled and peculiar tree he couldn’t identify. She found a clump of long-leaved phlox and took the pale, star-shaped flowers between her fingers.

  “Tell me about your father,” she said.

  He didn’t know
where to start. He tented his sweaty shirt away from his chest to cool off. He found himself in the shade of the strange tree telling her of the times they’d gone to the beach. He’d been five or six. He remembered the bathing huts with their damp pine smell and changing and not liking being barefoot on the splintery and unsteady boards, and the sound at the end of the day of the wet sandy suit dropping onto the wood. He remembered his inability to copy the swimming strokes that his father demonstrated for him in front of the whole beach. It occurred to him while he talked that his father’s power came just from being his father, not from anything he’d earned. He told another story, of his father buying him wafer candies, as many as he wanted.

  Leda had her chin on her knees and the hem of her skirt stretched between the two. She said that it didn’t seem so bad, just sad. He was taken aback by the mixture of compassion and perspective.

  She said as she got up and they kept walking that she thought starting a family, taking care of kids and showing them what was right, was the biggest accomplishment that anybody could do, and that most people didn’t really do it as much as it just happened to them with their being around at the time.

  He agreed. He was happy with how much better he felt, and moved to tenderness by the patience with which she tossed her hair back with a turn of her head. On the outskirts of town they knelt in a stranger’s open back garden like saboteurs, hidden by a screen of shrubs and grunting along the furrows of a strawberry patch. They edged along keeping an eye on the neighboring houses, gobbling the berries and smelling the plants and earth under the hot sun while an irrigation hose trickled uselessly into a culvert.

  They came into town on an unfamiliar street. A dog foamed and snarled at them along the length of a ram-shackle corral. Nothing seemed to be keeping it where it was except its own sense of where it could or couldn’t be. Leda gave it as wide a detour as possible.

  The street led to the Retention Hospital, where Nicholas was kept. Leda was pleased with and Karel skeptical about the coincidence. She suggested they visit.

  “Can you visit on Saturday?” he said. “Just like that?”

  That’s when you visit, she told him. She was going to go later anyhow.

  The hospital was walled the way the zoo was. There was an iron gate. The ironwork read WORK AND USEFUL THOUGHTS ARE THE HOMES OF FREEDOM AND HAPPINESS.

  They rang the bell. A boy with his leg in a complicated harness of wood and leather, all straps and slings, watched them carefully. Two other girls who looked to be twins stood by and seemed to be exchanging information about the boy. He knew it was unfair that he expected exotic horrors here, pinheads who would say “Why aren’t you like this?” or frightening people who would feel better only if they knocked him down and sat on his chest. He was ashamed.

  “Come on,” Leda said, and rang again.

  A nurse crossed the yard to the outer gate as if demonstrating how to walk erect. Leda mentioned in a low voice that this woman, Mrs. Beghé, was a jerk.

  They smiled like conspirators. Mrs. Beghé was almost beautiful, with dark blue eyes and straight blond hair. Her chin was too small. Above her breast a plastic pin said Beghé, with the accent drawn on.

  “Call her Mrs. Begg,” Leda whispered, while the woman opened the gate with an impossible key the size of a spatula. “She loves it.”

  But as they passed by the woman rested her eyes on him and he had a fleeting sexual fantasy: an abandoned room white with bedsheets or towels, Mrs. Beghé arching her back, reaching with her hand spread behind her to scratch herself.

  He followed them to the reception area. While you’re visiting the sick brother of the girl you love, he thought dismally. His mind was a sinkhole, the mesh trap in the filthy steel tub in the back of the butcher’s.

  Mrs. Beghé asked them to sit, and left. Leda said, “She hates me. I’m always giving her problems.”

  The right half of the reception area was roped off under the slogan from David’s Kestrels pennant: WE ARE A UNIVERSAL PEOPLE, etc. On a freestanding placard there was an architect’s drawing of a proposed new National Museum, to be erected on this site.

  “Hey,” Leda said. “Maybe they are going to shut this down.” She got up and walked over to the sign and peered closer.

  In the drawing over the front of the building he could read the words IN OUR CREATION THE WORLD SOARS.

  “What’s that mean?” he asked.

  Leda had already moved to the next exhibit. “Some of these things people think make sense just because they’ve heard them a thousand times,” she said.

  He followed her a little way, hoping they weren’t going to get in trouble.

  More drawings showed what the museum would look like. Until a solution was found for the inmates, the National Museum of Folk and Art would share the building with the hospital, occupying the east wing.

  “That makes more sense than they think,” Leda said.

  Along the corridor there were sample exhibits: the various Armed Forces in Ceaseless Motion and a marble family group with the family kneeling around the sitting father, who spread his hands over them, palms downward. “Must’ve been just passing through,” Leda said bitterly.

  Mrs. Beghé was waiting for them with Nicholas. He had a long face, like David’s, but otherwise didn’t appear to be Leda’s brother.

  “How are we, Nicholas?” Mrs. Beghé said, in the encouraging way people address invalids. “Are we happy to see Leda? And so early?”

  “Hi, Leda,” Nicholas said.

  Leda hugged him. Karel felt stupid standing around the reception area. Leda introduced them. Mrs. Beghé explained that because of the work for the museum they’d have to have their visit in the dining room, which was quiet this time of day. Leda agreed. Nicholas was clearly disappointed at the lost opportunity to get outside.

  “We could come back,” Leda said. She stopped and looked at him closely. “Nicholas? Do you want us to come back, later, and we can all go outside?”

  Nicholas rubbed the back of his neck and gazed at Karel helplessly. He thought about the question while they all waited and finally said no. Mrs. Beghé led the way through the inner doors. Karel scanned Nicholas furtively for differences.

  A harassed orderly in the corridor was mopping at a large stain and rinsing his mop with water dirtier than the floor. Writing on the walls extended all the way down the hall. It looked to be one long story or message. The corridor smelled of urine. A young man in olive pajamas followed them and pressed his hands to his head and asked for sweets.

  The NUP might be doing a lot of good things for the country, Mrs. Beghé said, but not for this hospital. Leda and Karel didn’t respond.

  They were led into a dining room filled with long rows of splintery pine tables covered with clear plastic. Mrs. Beghé said she’d return when they’d had a nice visit and left them alone, shutting the door with annoying care in an effort to be silent.

  Color photographs of food were hung around the room: roast lamb with pineapple rings, mounds of cherries, white asparagus in butter, pastries, lingonberry tarts, kiwis and cream. Some of the pictures had old thrown-food spatters on them. Leda gave Nicholas some chocolate biscuits she’d brought, and he thanked her.

  He offered one to Karel, who said no. He considered them conclusive proof that their stop at the hospital had been no coincidence.

  A small group entered and sat on the opposite side of the room: a girl riding a tricycle with orthopedic attachments on the pedals, and two older boys. The tricycle squeaked and creaked until she got off. One of the boys was blind and being steered by the other. He didn’t have glasses on his eyes. Karel closed his and practiced being blind, touching the plastic sheeting in front of him. Another nurse brought the three children a tray of food.

  Leda was talking to Nicholas about the museum. She said she hoped now he’d be able to come home. “Mom wants you back, she does,” she said. “She just doesn’t know it.”

  Nicholas thought that was fine. He leaned forward and w
hispered into his sister’s ear. She smiled.

  “He tells me secrets,” she said. “I tell him secrets, he tells me secrets.”

  Karel tried to smile. “Like your nanny,” he said.

  She nodded, pleased at the connection.

  She asked her brother what else was new, and he told her he’d been allowed as a special treat Thursday to flush all the toilets at once with a master lever.

  The blind boy across the way was eating in big bites. It bothered Karel that the boy was so used to his situation, that he’d grown into it and was no longer conscious of it.

  “They should give more money here,” he said finally. “Somebody should complain.”

  Leda looked at him and made a face.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “As long as you say ‘somebody’ it’s easy, right?” she said.

  He made a helpless fuming noise. “All you do is tell me what I should be doing,” he said sullenly.

  She ignored him and talked with her brother. It was as if they’d moved four seats down. Karel played miserably with the sheeting and pulled some of the tacks. A tiny boy with a shaved head passed the doorway lugging dark liquid in a pail. The weight made him walk in a hurried and stiff-legged way and the liquid slopped out metronomically.

  Leda showed her brother a trick you could do by inverting your interlocked fingers. They were having fun, and Karel sat there. Mrs. Beghé at some point showed up and explained they’d had a nice visit, and that their brother would certainly look forward to the next Saturday.

  Leda hugged her brother at the inner door while Karel and Mrs. Beghé looked away in opposite directions. When they passed into the reception area Nicholas waved through the glass. Leda waved until he turned and shuffled down the corridor, backlit by a window at the end of the hall in a dispiriting image of incarceration.

  Karel led the way for once, into the courtyard. He mused that Leda had her answer for why she’d been born—for Nicholas, for David—and she went day to day living for the moment when they’d be happy, when the hidden justice would be found and released. They passed the deserted play area and a flopped-over bicycle. A little girl with one side of her head shaved and stitched watched them leave. Mrs. Beghé let them out. They waited, for no reason. The little girl pressed her fingertips to her mouth and signaled to them something lost and intricate with the complex movements of all ten fingers, sketching an unreadable alphabet on the air.