Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

Karel stood and paced. He pulled at his hair. “I don’t know anybody who’s a partisan,” he said.

Kehr grabbed him by the shirt collar, so quickly it terrified him. They were face to face. Karel could smell mint. “Listen,” Kehr said. “Leave your hair alone and try to concentrate. You’ve been getting by without decisions. With inertia decorated with sentiment. That’s over .” He let go, calmer. Now, he said. Mistakes became errors only when persisted in. He smoothed the front of his jacket with his spread palm. He needed Karel’s decision.

Karel sat, blinking back tears of frustration and fear.

“You just want to be left alone, with this girl and your reptiles,” Kehr said. Karel nodded, after a moment. “Well, even the little man with no ambitions needs help just to be left alone. Like men joining hands in the surf against the waves.” He leaned forward when Karel didn’t respond. “Am I clear? ” he shouted. “Am I coming through to you?”

Karel nodded, swallowing. He was looking straight ahead, at the glass. There was no one in the other room.

“I need your answer now,” Kehr said. He straightened up and went to the door. He put his hand on the handle.

“Albert Delp,” Karel said. As he said it he felt the earth open and himself fall into it.

Kehr sat back down. Karel felt hyperaware, as if his fingertips had gone to sleep. His head tingled. He blinked often and tried to focus. Kehr quizzed him on details. Karel told him as if he’d gotten on a slide and it was now much too steep to stop about the tea cozy, the mysterious visitor, the secret space under the false bottom of the kitchen cabinet. Kehr, after rechecking, looked him over from head to toe and then stood and congratulated him quietly. He shook his hand. He left the room.

Karel sat where he was left, not moving.

At some point Stasik came back in and helped him up and led him down the hall and into the room where the Schieles had been. They were waiting there.

Mrs. Schiele hugged him immediately, and Leda looked grateful but wary. He still felt numb. Mrs. Schiele talked about repaying him and having known Karel would help, and Nicholas told him they had train tickets to go to the capital that night. They were all hugging him goodbye. Leda hugged him and he could feel her relief and happiness and smell her damp hair and he believed as he hugged her back that everything else in his life was some sort of vanity except his love for her.

Stasik led them all outside to a car that was to take them two towns over to the train station. Karel wasn’t going. Kehr was nowhere to be seen. While they loaded the car’s trunk, David was the only one who was able to stay calm, which was only right, he said, since he was a future Kestrel. He asked if he could sit near the window on the train as he got into the car.

Stasik took the portable radio out of Nicholas’s hands as he climbed in and dropped it on the pavement and stamped on it. “No radios,” he explained.

Leda was the last one in. She turned to Karel.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were making pamphlets?” he blurted.

She looked at him in surprise and shot a look at Stasik, who was obliviously jamming the trunk shut.

“What did you tell them? What did you do for them?” she demanded. “Why are they letting us go?”

“Get in the car,” he said. Stasik had come around and stood behind them. He was suddenly terrified that it all might collapse. “Get in the car.”

“What’d you do? What’d you tell them?” she said.

“Ask them,” he said.

“ You are not them. They are not you ,” Leda said.

“All right, lovebirds,” Stasik said. He loaded Leda into the car like a particularly awkward plant and shut the door. He banged on the hood and the driver put the car in gear and drove away.

Karel stood where he was, watching her disappear. Stasik chuckled and went into the station, energetically cleaning an ear with his little finger. When he came back out he asked if Karel wanted a ride home. Karel didn’t. He went home instead by a shortcut he knew. He moved as if asleep and appreciated with an aesthetic detachment a far-off yellow streetlamp over the black twist of a path. Farther on he caught at a deserted intersection his own reflection sliding along the darkened glass of a passing staff car.

At home he dreamed about an old teacher taken from his house and dragged down steps covered with fruit and vegetable rinds, thrown into a snake pit (the snakes Karel couldn’t identify, and they limited themselves to disinterested coiling and the first stages of courtship). The sequence ended with a strange hybrid of anole and skink sitting on the teacher’s head and applauding with its fore-paws.

When he didn’t get out of bed in the morning Kehr came up to his room and pushed open the door and sat heavily on the patched coverlet like a dad whose patience was pretty much exhausted. He tossed Karel a nectarine and said, “I suppose we’re in official mourning now over our loss of innocence.”

Karel said, “I don’t feel good.” He set the nectarine on the mattress beside him, and it wobbled when he shifted his weight. He kept the top of his sheet where it was, below his eyes.

“This is a tragedy,” Kehr said. “It really is. Here’s a man who’s doing everything he can to bury this country and poor you had to help turn him in.”

“What happened to him?” Karel asked. “Where is he?”

Kehr looked at his watch. “I imagine he’s at the zoo,” he said. “Most people have been out of bed and busy for hours.”

“You mean you haven’t done anything to him? He wasn’t arrested?” Karel asked.

“You sound disappointed,” Kehr said. “Did you think we would hurt him?”

Karel blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

Kehr shook his head briefly at the fancies of children and stood up. “We’d like lunch, at some point, at your convenience,” he said. “And our friend the ringtail’s been leaving exploratory turds in various places. I can smell them.”

“You’re not going to do anything to him?” Karel asked.

Kehr paused at the door. “As I told you, he is the head of the partisan cell in the area,” he said. “Who he meets, who he has contact with, is of some interest to us.”

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll get away?” Karel said.

“The only people who leave are people we want to leave,” Kehr said tiredly, going down the stairs. “How many times do you have to be told that?”

He checked. He got dressed and said he was going to the market and went to the zoo instead. He slipped in the back gate and found Albert making his rounds. He stayed out of sight. Everything seemed fine. At the gate on the way out, Perren appeared behind him. He was not surprised at seeing Karel. He said, “This area’s closed to visitors,” and demonstrated by shutting the gate and giving it a rattle.

So why did he feel the way he did? They’d known about Albert before him and everything was the same. And maybe Albert was doing something he shouldn’t’ve been. But he couldn’t sustain the righteousness because the image of himself terrified and selfish and saying the old man’s name rose up in front of his eyes while he walked, to renew his self-disgust.

He felt sorry for himself and moped and felt disgusted about that and so moped some more. He wished he’d never gone to the station, blamed Leda, blamed Nicholas, blamed Albert, blamed Kehr, blamed himself. None of it helped. He passed mirrors and scowled, as if no one should have to face what he’d seen.

Days he spent alone. Kehr and his assistants almost always now worked late. At night he lay in bed and Kehr talked. He felt lost and hopeless and didn’t protest. Kehr wore his full uniform and explained the stripes and bars and pins signifying the honors and theaters of service and the distinction displayed in training. He left a replica of the antipartisan badge he wore on the lamp table beneath the photo of Karel’s mother. He gave Karel a replica of the small ceremonial dagger he wore, with the antipartisan symbol flanking the Party letters on the hilt. He talked with patience and attentiveness while Karel toyed with the dagger or tossed and turned or lay on his stomach with his chin on the pillow and his eyes on the wall.