Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

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.

The local policeman handling the six-block grid where Karel lived was an elderly sergeant named Grebing. Karel knew him from hanging around the café. He was a harmless old man. He did his best to avoid trouble and cultivated a hearing problem partially for that reason. He liked to cadge fruit from the market stands.

Grebing was doing his best with what The People’s Voice called spontaneous outbursts of patriotism. The outbursts took the form of late-night vandalism. The victims were those who had been or might have been supporters of the Republic, those in the town records who had voted against the party in the very first referendums. Grebing usually arrived in time to assist in the clean-up. The newspaper openly lamented such lawlessness, however well-intentioned, and listed in its sympathetic account of the damage done to each home the home’s address, usually with the comment that it had not been entirely destroyed. Following such announcements it usually was.

The radio announced the local police were being directed by the Security Service to assist in the firmer measures soon to be instituted. Grebing, apparently, was handling Karel’s grid.

He pedaled past while Karel watched from his window. His cap sat high on his head; it looked as if he’d forgotten his and borrowed someone else’s. He coasted to a stop at the Fetschers’ front hedge. The chain rattled. He got off the bike and it fell over with a crash. He stopped and then decided against lifting it, and tore his sleeve on the handbrake straightening up. Karel could hear the sound where he was.

A light went on in Mrs. Fetscher’s house. Grebing struggled with the latch of the low gate and closed it behind him.

Karel left the window and went outside. A bat swooped and fluttered above his head in the dark. A truck engine coughed.

At her front door Mrs. Fetscher was looking at Grebing. Her eyes were flat and her expression suggested there was nothing more to say.

“Karel, come here,” she called.

Karel came around into her yard, stepping over the gate. There was a rustling in the cactus bed near his feet.

“Sergeant Grebing is arresting me,” she said. Her voice was neutral.

Grebing protested. He was trying to tuck the torn part up his jacket sleeve. It was protective custody, to keep her safe from the hoodlums.

“I thought he had news of the investigation about my husband,” Mrs. Fetscher said. She ran the palm of her hand across her forehead. “He informs me otherwise.”

Grebing, embarrassed, held out the sheet of paper for Karel to see. “I think it’s a small thing,” he said. “These people are supposed to gather at the Town Hall. It’s a small thing.”

“I’m going to call my sister,” Mrs. Fetscher said. She seemed to be looking at Karel. “I assume you’ll wait.”

“Might I wait inside?” Grebing asked.

“No,” Mrs. Fetscher said. She left the doorway.

Grebing lowered his head and stepped back and forth in place while he waited. He glanced at his bike and then at Karel. He looked as if he thought there was a chance he had something to worry about in that regard. It was colder now, and he shivered, maybe to demonstrate his unsuitability for this kind of work. He had no weapon.

Mrs. Fetscher returned. She was holding Eski up by her chest and carrying the other piece of the matched suitcases her husband had taken. Eski’s ears bobbed.

“I don’t know if Eski can come, Mrs. Fetscher,” Grebing said.

“Eski can come,” she said.

Grebing knitted his eyebrows with sadness, thinking probably of the upcoming reprimand. “Is that all you’ll need?” he asked. “You may be—”

“That’s all,” she said. To Karel she added, “My sister will be coming in a week or so. You’ll help her if there’s anything she needs?”

Karel told her he would.

“By then you’ll be back, I think,” Grebing said.

She led them to the gate. She stooped and set Eski down. While the dog urinated she cleared away with her free hand some peppergrass from the walkway. She said, “Karel, you’ll give these flowers some water?” She said goodbye. Grebing offered her his bike and she said, “You ride it.” He did, weaving slowly and erratically along in an effort to maintain a slow enough pace for her, circling her like an suitor while Karel watched. She kept walking, back straight, with Eski’s ears bobbing over her shoulder, all the way down and into the square, and out of sight.

The next morning Karel was in his kitchen early, making coffee even though there was no sugar. He washed the brown ring out of his cup and thought about things he could have done for Mrs. Fetscher. He imagined a protest that stopped everybody or his hand on Grebing’s arm, and thought these were things Leda might do, not him.

With the coffee ready he didn’t want any. There was nothing he felt like having for breakfast anymore.

Someone banged at the back door. When he opened it, Leda looked at him critically. “You just get up?” she asked.

“Yes. I just got up,” he said. He wiped his eye. “It’s early.”

“We have to go back and see Nicholas,” she told him.

“You want some coffee?” he asked. He didn’t remember if there was another cleanable cup or not.

“We have to go now,” she said.

He looked at her, conscious of horrible early-morning breath. It dawned on him that he was still in tattered shorts and a T-shirt that had egg on it. His hair, too, probably looked like a rat’s nest. What she was saying at that point formed in his mind, like letters becoming visible through disturbed water.

“You want to go where?” he said. “We were just there yesterday.”

“We have to go back,” Leda said. “My aunt called. She wasn’t going to, she told me, but she was worried. Something’s going on.”

He looked at her blankly. They stood facing each other in the doorway.

“My aunt?” she prodded. “With the son in the Civil Guard? My cousin?

“Yeah,” he said. “What’s going on?”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know . She said her son told her that one of their units had gone to Nicholas’s hospital, the whole thing was supposed to be very secret, last night.”

“What would they go there for?” he asked. He tried to tuck in his shirt.

“ Kar el,” she said.

She waited for him to dress right where she was, in the doorway, and called out, “Can’t you find your clothes?” when he didn’t reappear immediately. He barely had time to lock the door, and he followed her in silence for a while, feeling taken for granted and peevish. He told her finally about Grebing and Mrs. Fetscher.

She nodded, ahead of him. Had she already known? She walked faster.

At the iron gate they were told by a new nurse with no nametag that Mrs. Beghé had had an accident and was recuperating. The news increased Leda’s agitation geometrically.