Lights Out in the Reptile House

by Jim Shepard

  “There’s no room,” Karel said. “I live here with my father.”

  One of the subordinate officers from the Fetschers’ and the café stopped into the kitchen to listen. The other came into the house and remained in the background in the living room. He lit a cigarette on the window seat. The smoke hung around him in a gauzy and unpleasant way.

  “Your father’s not going to be using his room,” Kehr said. When he saw Karel’s face he raised a hand against foolish assumptions. “Right away,” he clarified.

  “What’s happened to him?” Karel said. “Is he in trouble?”

  “None whatsoever,” Kehr said. “At some point we can talk about him. Of course, I asked his permission to make these arrangements, and he granted it.”

  “You talked to him? Where is he?” Karel asked. “Where is he? How do I know he said that?” He realized that that was stupid question.

  Kehr looked at him. The officer in the kitchen leaned against the lintel of the doorway and guffawed quietly. “You don’t,” Kehr said.

  The rabbits rummaged and tumbled around in their cages, the sound like someone’s drumming fingers. “What are you going to be doing here?” Karel asked.

  “That’s the nation’s business,” Kehr said. “Unfortunately, not yours. We’ll expect you to do the cleaning you normally do.” He looked around the kitchen. It was a mess. “And help a little with the dinner. That’s at seven.”

  Through the window Karel could see neighbors outside, standing around and speculating. “Why are you letting me stay?” he asked. “Why don’t you just kick me out?”

  “If you’d like, we will,” Kehr said mildly. He was becoming more interested in some papers on the table. “Do you have a place you’d go?”

  Karel thought of presenting himself to Leda, and her mother: The NUP threw me out. He didn’t think he had the courage.

  “Of course, I assured your father you wouldn’t be displaced,” Kehr said. “In these troubled times.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Karel said.

  Kehr leaned back and brushed his palm down his chest like a man sweeping away crumbs. His tunic was lighter than his trousers, and there was a golden pin of a winged hammer on his collar and another of a winged anvil on his breast pocket. The embroidered oval beneath with the sword penetrating the nest of snakes into the skull Karel had seen.

  “You have nothing to do but not interfere,” Kehr said. “Which in these times is not easy.”

  The interview seemed to be over. Karel hesitated in the doorway. The officer leaning on the lintel regarded him levelly.

  “It’s a particularly bad time to be a vagrant,” Kehr said. “With the turmoil in the streets and the various bureaus and Special Sections in such competition with each other, and no clear lines of jurisdiction.… I should introduce you to my assistants,” he said. “They’ll be staying as well. Assistants Stasik, here, and Schay at the window.”

  Neither made any gesture. This seemed to be a joke to them. Karel maneuvered through the boxes and went up to his room.

  It looked unchanged. His reptile study sheets and the long-abandoned scraps of a letter to Leda were the first things he checked. They hadn’t been moved. From two canteens he kept near the bed since his father had left he drank a cup of water, a cup of warm pineapple juice, and another cup of water. He thought he should get one of those sweating metal pitchers with removable caps. He lay on his bed and listened to boxes and furniture being moved below, the noises punctuated by the occasional chicken in distress sounding like one of the laugh boxes from the amusement shops of his old city.

  He went back downstairs after a half hour or so wait. “I need to know about my father,” he said.

  “Why are you bothering me already?” Kehr said. “Do you want our relationship to get off on the wrong foot?”

  Karel sat down. Everything was going wrong. “It’s just that I haven’t heard anything from him at all,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on.” He realized with some horror that he was close to tears.

  “You didn’t get a letter from him?” Kehr asked.

  Karel looked up guiltily. “No,” he said.

  Kehr raised his hands as if standing figurines on his palm. “You feel you’ve been badly treated,” he said. “And maybe you have.”

  Karel felt the self-pity well up in him and had to look away. Most of the boxes and both assistants were in the spare room off the living room and the door was shut.

  “It’s now one-thirty,” Kehr said. He laid two papers carefully over one another as if matching the edges of puzzle pieces while Karel watched. “The animals have been stacked in the back near your storage shed, which you will clear out for them. At three we’ll talk.”

  So Karel spent an hour and a half piling the junk from the shed into a heap behind it and arranging the rabbit and chicken cages so they’d get the most of the light and breeze from the doorway. The rabbits hunkered down and watched him with a blank alertness. He caught Mrs. Witz peeking over at him from across the street, but when he stood up to talk to her she went inside.

  At three he came back to the kitchen. Kehr was still sitting at the table. They were alone in the house. There was a large olive field telephone dangling a bundled and corded tangle of wires on the kitchen counter. Beside it there was a stack of thin blue books tied with string. They were titled Psychological Operations in Partisan War. On the cover of the top one the words were placed one under the other with rows of heads between each. The heads had holes in the foreheads.

  Kehr was finishing up with some papers held down with a paperweight that looked like a small hipbone. While Karel got a drink of water and then sat opposite him he rearranged other objects on the table (a set of files, the notepad from the Fetschers’, a small cup) as if they were required for what was to follow.

  So, he said. Karel put his glass down. Kehr picked it up and took a sip himself. What were Karel’s politics?

  Karel said he didn’t have any.

  “Tell me the story of your mother,” Kehr said.

  Karel stared. His temples and cheeks felt cold. He felt a vista had opened to afford him a view of just how little he understood what was going on.

  “What do you know about her?” he said. “Did you talk to my father about her?”

  “She left you when you were very young,” Kehr said. “She had artistic ambitions. She died young.”

  My father talks to him about her and won’t talk to me, Karel thought.

  “She was, I’m to understand, a very intelligent woman,” Kehr said. “Strong-willed.”

  “How do you know all this?” Karel asked.

  “I know a good deal,” Kehr said. “You talk. Then I’ll talk.”

  So Karel talked about his mother, to this Special Assistant from the Sixth Bureau. He told him what he could remember. He withheld his most specific memory, of his mother embracing him on the tile floor. He was surprised how much it distressed him to talk about this.

  Kehr sighed, looking at him. He seemed sympathetic. “Your mother was associated with one of the groups opposed to the NUP in the early days,” he said. “Artists’ political collective. Not very astute, not very dangerous.” There were other details, he added, they could talk about some other time.

  “That’s it?” Karel said. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “Some other time,” Kehr said. “As I said.”

  They sat in silence, looking at each other.

  “What are you doing here?” Karel asked. “What do you want from me?”

  Kehr explained he was organizing Armed Propaganda Teams for the area. He had other duties as well. The patch Karel was staring at with the sword and the snakes was an antipartisan badge.

  Karel looked back at his eyes. “Where’d my father go?” he said. “Did you take him away?”

  “Your father has not disappeared,” Kehr said. “As far as we’re concerned, no one disappears. We maintain a comprehensive criminal registry. All citizens are
recorded there. No one loses himself.”

  “The radio’s always talking about somebody you’re looking for,” Karel said.

  “They’re like beans in a coffee grinder,” Kehr said affably. “They get stirred around, and sometimes the big ones displace the little ones, but they all move into the grinder.”

  Karel pondered the image.

  “Your father,” Kehr said, “happily for everyone, chose another route. Your father chose to serve his country and joined the Party. He joined, in fact, the Civil Guard.”

  Karel’s mouth was dry. “Why would he do that?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

  “You’re asking me to speculate,” Kehr said. “As for the first question, I imagine he wanted to be part of a movement in which somebody like him—a failure in the eyes of his social class, in the eyes of his family, in his own eyes—can start from scratch. As for the second, I have no idea. But maybe he explains.” He produced a letter from the pile and held it out to Karel.

  While he read it Karel felt the same shame he’d felt when Albert had criticized his father. His father’s letter was hand-written, and the penmanship if anything was worse than he remembered:

  Karel,

  I know I didn’t handle this in the best way possible but it had to be done this way for reasons you will soon see. Special Assistant Kehr has been good to me and you should cooperate with him. I’ve discovered two things I can do well: organize and facilitate. Right now I spend a lot of time outside town. I’ll try to visit soon. I’ve given Special Assistant Kehr some money to buy a quarter of a ham or better. Make sure you eat right or you’ll get sick. See you soon—

  Your father S. Roeder

  “The ham we already bought,” Kehr said.

  “This letter was sealed,” Karel said.

  “Magic,” Kehr said. He shrugged.

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Karel said. “He didn’t tell me why he did it.”

  “He did it for the reason people like him do it,” Kehr said. Karel could hear the impatience and contempt in his voice. “To get a job, to keep a job, to get a better job.”

  “He didn’t have to,” Karel said.

  “No, he didn’t,” Kehr said. “No one has to display intelligence or ambition. He certainly hadn’t before that.”

  Karel stood up. “I don’t want to talk anymore,” he said. Stasik and Schay came out of the spare room and looked in on them both. Kehr nodded at them and they left the house.

  Karel was fingering the edge of the table. “He just left,” he said. “He made all sorts of promises, that he wouldn’t do what my mother did, that he’d get a good job. Then he just left.”

  Kehr was looking at him silently, as if he’d expected something like this. “Broken promises helped make this country what it is,” he said.

  They remained where they were. Karel occasionally sniffled.

  “Sometimes I think it’s my fault,” he said. Why was he telling Kehr this?

  Kehr looked unimpressed with his generosity.

  “Why’d you hire him?” Karel said. “If you think he’s so dumb?”

  “He doesn’t work for me,” Kehr said. “And I certainly didn’t ‘hire’ him. He works for the Party. He’s in a different bureau. Your father I assume impressed people with his mediocrity the way others do with their talent. You know him as well as I do.” He sat forward. “It’s important we see these things with clarity. Your father when we found him was working for a brick manufacturer and had just dropped a load of bricks four stories. He was available.

  “Since then he’s been working for the Fifth Bureau,” he said. He shrugged. “I’m told he’s had surprising success. The details of which I won’t burden you with.”

  He went on about himself. The information did nothing to lift Karel’s spirits or clarify his sense of what was going on. Kehr described himself as an idealist, which he defined as a man who lives for an idea, and not a businessman. This set him apart from many of his rivals in the Party, including his chief rival in the Security Service, a man he didn’t name but characterized as a hedonist and a shopkeeper. When Karel contributed that he thought the war was against the nomads, Kehr agreed that that was in fact the problem. Karel was very astute, he said: what had been conceived of as a healthy competition that would foster competitive spirit and loyalty to one’s outfit had in fact gotten out of hand. But power in these matters had not been strictly delegated yet, or set, Kehr said, and it remained to be seen over the next few months and years just who would control what in terms of the security of the nation. But that was neither here nor there. He asked Karel why it was, he thought, that he was not involved in any way with the Party.

  Karel was taken aback. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

  Kehr opened his mouth and poked around his molars with his tongue.

  “You know, on the radio they talk about the program and everything, but I don’t follow it,” Karel said. Why was Kehr bothering with him? What did he want?

  “Mmm-hmm,” Kehr said. He seemed to be in no hurry. Karel rubbed his hand over his face as if he wanted the skin to come off. Here he couldn’t get ten minutes of talk out of his father and this complete stranger who looked busy and important enough to Karel seemed to have all the time in the world.

  Kehr suggested that Karel in the future ignore the Party program, since it was conceived largely as a public relations gesture to those outside the Party. This was a movement, not a Party; it wasn’t bound to any program. Karel nodded blankly. Kehr sighed and indicated that the interview was over and that they’d talk again soon.

  It was hot and sticky that night and flies crisscrossed the kitchen under the light. He stood over the stove and made a dinner of broiled chicken and fried broad beans. He’d gotten the instructions and ingredients from them. Schay stood around beside him the whole time. He spoke once, to warn him that Kehr didn’t like that much oil.

  Karel didn’t eat with them. When they were finished he said he was going out, and Kehr let him go. He headed to Leda’s to tell her what was going on and keep her from walking in on everything. He ran into her on her way over.

  She announced she’d had no luck pursuing the missing inmates. He was a little insulted she’d tried without him. While they walked she said she didn’t understand people anymore, that whenever she heard the celebrating on the radio she felt like going out into a deserted field and lying down by herself.

  Karel told her about Kehr and left out the part about his father. She was shocked, and then angry for him, and then sympathetic. She put her hand on his waist. They sat on the Oertzens’ stone wall. Behind them dishes clattered in dim windows. Leda seemed to be thrashing this out for herself. She asked if he thought Kehr’s being there was connected to the missing inmates. He said he didn’t know. She thought even if it wasn’t, considering who he was he’d know something. She said she thought that Karel had to be careful but this was a great opportunity: Kehr had access to all sorts of information. This was a really rare opportunity. Karel sat on the wall feeling as utilitarian as a rake or a hoe. They talked about her mother, and Nicholas, and then before leaving she kissed him for the second time ever, on the corner of his mouth. The pressure was moist and warm. The kissed spot was cooler when she drew away. He walked her back to her yard and then continued home alone, musing on the quiet fervor and unfailing warmth that she always displayed toward the Karel she thought he could be.

  He didn’t see her for the next few days. He didn’t see Albert either, or tell him what was going on. He worked around the house and followed orders—what Schay mockingly called “household tips”—and had no more talks with Kehr. He registered impressions: of showing them a bad section of plumbing and being surprised at his anxiety at their lack of approval; of coming downstairs early one morning and finding Stasik in sandals and a frayed robe in the back garden, oiling his forearms and face; of passing his father’s room, now Kehr’s, and the way Kehr left the door open as he dressed, pleased to be se
en at it. Kehr did the same thing at night, catching Karel catching a glimpse of him folding the edges and sleeves of his tunic away into Karel’s father’s cupboard. At one point Karel came upon Schay going through the accumulated laundry, his hands buried in a pile of socks and shorts. Kehr at meals sat and chewed for minutes, and regarded Karel, smiling, as if remembering something mischievous from long ago.

  Two units of the army were garrisoned in town and just outside of town as well. They brought with them a medium-sized camp following, and the square was impassable at busy hours. An avenue of poplars where Karel and Leda walked was leveled, bulldozed, and metaled over and then surrounded by fences for reasons no one could guess. Around town Karel saw vans full of goats, wagonloads of pigs packed shoulder to shoulder, trucks with covered load beds that gave off moos. He could see cows’ eyes through the slats. Everywhere, day and night, there were sleeping soldiers, dozing against the wall, in the shade, in cafés, on piles of equipment. At night he thought he could hear them from all parts of the town and from within his house, stirring and sighing in their sleep, dreaming whatever they dreamed.

  The rumors were that all of this was in preparation for a visit by the Praetor himself. Kehr refused to confirm or deny anything and only looked amused at Karel’s curiosity. The People’s Voice ran a retrospective article on the Praetor’s early years which mentioned the possibility, though it stressed that because of security considerations and the many claims on his time nothing was certain. The article was headed with a picture of him dozing under a grape arbor. Inside they ran a more official portrait: shirt open, jaw set, staring off past danger and personal concern to a distant goal. He had thin hair and dark, blank eyes. The biography provided nothing new. He’d worked laying telegraph lines as a boy and developed a passion for things mechanical. In school he’d been the leader, organizing his peers in political discussion groups. With the Republic came disorder and hunger, and he’d been unemployed at a time when “death and mess had become the natural order of things.” He never drank but had been a solitary presence, great with books. Karel hadn’t studied his life and even he knew the details by heart. He also knew through Albert and Leda the other versions everybody knew: that as a child he’d been renowned for hating everybody; that he gambled on everything and refused to pay when he lost; that he once knifed a schoolmate; that he discovered out of school that he didn’t like hard work and so went around with a gang of friends harassing shopkeepers and dressing so eccentrically, with a white yachting cap, winged collar, green army breeches, and a blue workshirt, that he was known in his hometown as the Circus Performer. He’d had a beanlike growth trimmed from his forehead. (That, Leda told Karel, was a particularly delicate secret: he was so vain that before assuming power he’d responded to charges that he dyed his hair by holding a series of public baths so the people could confirm he was a natural blond.)