Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

Albert outlined some of the characteristics of the anguid family of lizards. Karel wondered if he thought it therapeutic. He talked about individuals who were willing to give up part of their tail to an attack, or would smear the attacker with excrement. He moved to the differences between the snake families Elpidae (fixed fangs) and Viperidae (retractable fangs). He gave the Helodermatidae one last try. Did Karel know that they tracked prey by tasting the ground with their tongues?

Karel sighed so Albert could hear him. Albert gave up, his arm still over his eyes. He sighed as well and lay still.

“I’m going to go,” Karel finally said.

Albert made an approving noise.

“You think the government needed him for some special secret job?” Karel asked. He thought there was a better chance his father was on Mars.

Albert cleared his throat and made an unhurried chewing sound. He said, “There are a lot of people you meet who can get a penknife and some string and rewire a house. Fix your watch. Build a birdcage. Your father is not one of them.”

Karel felt the heat on his cheeks from the harshness and truth of the comment. He was ashamed of feeling shamed. He said, “You shouldn’t say that. You don’t know. How do you know?”

Albert shrugged, as much as he could lying on his back. He apologized. Outside a small translucent gecko pressed itself against the glass of the living-room window. He could see light through it, and its pale palms and belly somehow suggested to him both vulnerability and mercy.

Albert explained that he was under a lot of pressure recently and was upset because he’d been notified that the zoo as a newly designated Educational Institution would be under the jurisdiction of the Committee for Popular Enlightenment, which was under the jurisdiction of the Civil Guard.

Karel rubbed the back of his neck. He thought now that Albert had never really been considering his problem. It occurred to him that possibly no one was going to help.

Albert said, “I’m getting too tired to be careful. I’m sitting here in my house with a tea cozy over my telephone. I’m sitting here worried about what I can say to a boy who works for me.”

Karel blinked. He had the impression the house was settling, easing apart. “Do you think I’d get you in trouble?” he asked.

Albert said, “They’re taking so much away I’m wondering what I’m trying to save.”

“You mean the zoo?” Karel said.

Albert finally took his arm off his face and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. It made a faint and unpleasant sound. “Whatever I’m doing now won’t undo all the time I was doing nothing,” he said. “How long ago was it I knew there was a hundred percent turnover at the centers? What did I do then? How sure did I have to be?”

“What’s that mean, hundred percent turnover?” Karel asked, frightened.

“It means bad things have been going on,” Albert said. Karel resented his tone. “And your boss here took a long time to figure it out.”

In the kitchen there was a clinking, as though the dishes were taking care of themselves.

“I have mice,” Albert said.

“You didn’t know then,” Karel said. “About what was going on.”

“It’s sad, is what it is,” Albert said.

“I’m going home,” Karel said. He made show of moving his feet on the rug. “I have to find my father.”

“We should have a new motto, on the flag,” Albert said. “‘ We Are Mute. We Are Shameful. We Are Miserable .’ That’s how it should go.”

Karel let himself out. Albert told him to take some olives with him. At the blockade, the two soldiers laughed at him and told him his shirt was on inside out, a comment he did not understand.

His father was not home. The radio announced the nomad capital had fallen. There were few casualties and fewer prisoners. The nomad armies had melted away before their forces like snow beneath the sun, and now were broken and scattered through the mountains. A passing officer was apprehended and asked about the nomad situation.

“They’re broken,” he said. “And scattered through the mountains.”

The radio announced the anniversary of the Bloody Parade, and Karel winced, for Leda’s sake. The festivities planned for their town included a parade, band concerts, and orations. These would be expanded to celebrate the victory. The Bloody Parade had been the first coup attempt by the Party. It had been a measure of the Republican government’s unpopularity, Albert had told Karel, that an abortive coup was seen for years as the NUP’s greatest achievement.

He spent two useless days banging on doors in the neighborhood and rechecking with the police. On the evening of the second day he sat in his kitchen with the lights out listening to the groans of the plumbing and the parade cranking up in the distance.

There was not going to be any question of avoiding the thing. He got up and banged his chair against the table and went out, unable to sit still any longer and hoping to come across his father maybe having simply and miraculously lost track of the time.

The Schieles’ house was dark. Poor Leda, he thought. He walked to the square. They’d put up a lot of new flags of thin cloth that flailed around in the wind. He hit the crowds and started working his way through them. Booths created standstills every few feet where hawkers told fortunes with dolls of little girls that rose or sank in jars of water, or white mice that dragged string through various chutes marked “Yes” or “No” or “It Needs More Thought” or “He/She Loves You.” He was taken by the crush past a booth involving a blind violinist and a bald baby in a smock and was unable to figure out what they were doing — selling? begging? entertaining? — even after hearing suggestions from other puzzled passersby. Along the parade route people began holding their positions on the side of the road whether or not they blocked access to the booths. He stopped for a while at a table rooted like a breakwater and looked at a large multicolored parrot whose entertainment value seemed to be based only on his ability to shift his weight from foot to foot. Behind the parrot a vendor was selling plaster busts of the Praetor and auto parts.

Farther on, cheeses carved into likenesses of the Praetor were displayed in delicatessen windows. Sausages were arranged around them. He watched the crowd for his father but still felt he was wandering around stupidly, like a puppy who’d been smacked on the ear. He passed Holter, and Holter said that that was some news about his father. They were separated in the crowd and Karel said “ What? ” and Holter nodded and smiled and said he thought so, too, before disappearing. Karel fought his way after him in a frenzy of anxiety and frustration. He’d been wearing a light bluejacket. At an intersection of two alleys a lieutenant in the Civil Guard blocked the way, stooping over to examine the arm of a little boy who seemed lost. The lieutenant asked the boy if he knew what happened to little boys who stole things, and the boy said no.

The alley emptied back into the square, where stages had been erected around the central well. A band on one struck up the old drinking song the Party had adopted as its anthem. It sounded to Karel like a horn section falling down the stairs.

The people behind him started shouting and air horns sounded on the side streets: something else was going on. He fought his way to a streetlamp, pulled a younger boy down, and shimmied up. He scanned the crowd in all directions. There were three people above him higher on the pole, and it swayed and lurched. His palms were skinned. He could not find Holter.

The parade had started. It took a few minutes to reach him. While he waited he sucked on one palm and then the other. Both were burning. A cart passed, carrying a bust of the Praetor covered with flowers. It was followed by ten of the town fathers portraying the Old Guard and one the Praetor. They marched along reenacting the Bloody Parade every thirty yards or so by walking into a hail of tossed flowers. When the flowers hit, the Old Guard staggered and lay down, while the Praetor marched on. He paused every so often to allow the group to re-form. Behind them young men with glasses and uncertain expressions carried a banner that said JUNIOR SCHOLARS OF THE HOMELAND. Behind the banner two men rolled a large silver-and-glass thing on wheels shaped like soup tureen and said to contain the Praetor’s legacy to the future, a short autobiography in verse. It was topped by a silver baby kicking up its heels. A small band followed, identified as the Flutes of the Political Orphans, and then jugglers, and more local officials, and at the end rowdy unofficial marchers. Karel checked everybody. At the very end two members of the Young People’s NUP called to each side over and over: We are a universal people —