Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

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 seen 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.)

According to both versions he achieved his first serious political notice when he was twenty-three and the press picked up his proclamation that the streets of his country were “fields of crime” and that the Republic was to blame. It was said that he disciplined traitors to his new movement by asking them to sing the national anthem at the top of their lungs and then shooting into their open mouths. He had killed, Albert said, more people than the typhus, and in towns that had been particularly hard hit the standard curse — when someone was alone, or felt completely safe, which was less and less often — was “May his lungs collapse.”

It turned out the Praetor was not visiting, though one of his closest friends — one of the old OAS (Secret Army) fanatics from his original entourage — was. The visitor’s name was Subsecretary Wissinger, and he had as far as anyone could tell no real role in the government. He was on a tour visiting all the towns of the frontier, The People’s Voice mentioned with a noticeably deflated lack of interest. His work was to discover the truth about morale and the spiritual ethers of the people. He would be giving an oration, presiding over a spontaneous celebration, and dedicating a new sculpture of two men on a bench whispering while a third in uniform overhears. Karel had not seen it yet.