Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“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.