Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

It’s not a game anymore. My ambition should be to perceive things clearly and calmly. I’m surrounded by false information and false people. For my sake and my family’s I have to figure out the truth and act on it. And how is the truth discernible? The truth is discernible first by means of logic and second by the precise investigation of things. Nicholas’s treatment an ex.

She sounds like Kehr, Karel thought. What wasn’t a game anymore?

Why do I let what other kids think about me affect me? Don’t listen or care so much about what others say. You retain your independence when you don’t rely on what other people can take away.

Do not do yourself what you dislike in others.

Develop yourself. Develop yourself.

I have to find friends I can trust. I never feel completely happy or relaxed around people. It’s like every word I have to examine from every angle, and I always have to watch myself. I hate it. I should not close myself off. I should develop for what’s coming a hard head and a soft heart. Too many people around here have the opposite!

Every day someone I thought was half all right turns out to be an idiot. The little idiots support the big idiots. Today the radio was going on as usual about things I can’t even talk about, they make me so angry. Nearly everyone’s lost their minds. Everything runs on lies, everything generates lies, everything is so tangled and mixed up it’s getting so I can’t imagine it any other way.

My pessimism is getting worse. I feel like skepticism and cynicism are poisoning my soul. I want to save it by running away, but where to? Instead, I create a wall around me and keep adding to it. Who will climb it? Why do I want anyone to?

God, listen to me.

I have to see clearly and be stronger. For all my big talk about self-improvement I’m still working at the same old pace. I get childishly pleased with every bit of progress I make, but every day I see how far I have to go.

There was a poem entitled “Anxiety.” Most of it had been furiously crossed out. He could decipher only perhaps I will learn/perhaps I will draw them, and in the final long stanza, two phrases: never-ending, and leaves me tethered .

A mimeographed note was folded into the next page: I hereby permit my daughter Leda Schiele to use the outdoor and indoor swimming pools. __________: Father’s Signature . Someone had drawn a line through Father’s and had written Mother’s .

There was an short entry in a code, nonsense words repeating themselves in various patterns, followed by:

can’t remember

possibly

not sure

oh

There was another.

Man was CREATED to have these doubts and terrors and miseries of self-examination. I believe that. So he can’t just vegetate, like a plant or a lizard, because his mind won’t leave him alone. What the mind tells the soul we say to the state: WE WILL NOT BE SILENT. WE ARE YOUR BAD CONSCIENCE. (save)

He shut the journal and put it down. He stacked the other two on it and put all three in his bottom drawer. Then he went downstairs and outside, past Kehr, who kept an eye on him as he went by. Out away from the house he cleaned the shed in the company of the rabbits for the rest of the afternoon.

He managed to stay away from the journals for another day. He sat and watched one hundred and forty-one trucks roll through the square at noon heading for the front. The cloud of dust they raised stayed level and thick. The trucks were coated with it. His eyes watered. The canvas flaps on the trucks were tied down on the sides and back. When they were gone the dust took its time settling. It moved unhurriedly past the buildings like wandering cumuli. He thumped his clothes to produce his own clouds and tried to loiter in the square afterward, but his dread of running into Albert finally drove him home.

He thought about going over to Leda’s and worried: suppose the neighbors saw him. Suppose the police or Civil Guard were watching the house. He was passing through the kitchen in distraction when Kehr asked if he’d been listening to the radio recently.

Stasik was leaning on the stove, looking at nothing. Kehr had a file open on the table, and Karel wondered if that was all he ever did, sit at the kitchen table and look at papers. The top page was divided into three columns: names, addresses, and something he couldn’t decipher in the third column.

Here was a hypothetical for Karel, Kehr said. A partisan near the capital had thrown a bomb into the backseat of a Security Service car carrying a Special Investigator. A group of kids Karel’s age had deliberately gotten in the way of the Civil Guardsmen in pursuit. The partisan had escaped. The question was this: what would Karel have done with the kids?

Karel got a glass from the cupboard and poured himself a drink from the faucet. The plumbing still made noise. Was the Security Service man killed? he wanted to know.

“Blinded in one eye,” Kehr said. “Otherwise fine. Laid up for a while.”

Karel guessed he would have given them some sort of work detail, or something. Stasik snorted and told him they’d been flogged and given prison terms. Of course, before this they’d been good boys, he said bitterly. That was supposed to make a difference.

“My junior officer has an endearing faith in corporal punishment,” Kehr said. Karel imagined Stasik years earlier, in a place like this, standing where Karel was standing, an actor wearing Karel’s clothes.

Karel said he had other things to worry about.

Kehr smiled. “Your father,” he said. “How he’s doing, no doubt.”

Karel shook his head, a tight little shake.

Kehr continued to smile, and drew a straight, easy line through two of the names on the list. “Seems to me our friend Leda was happy to leave,” he said.

It wasn’t that, Karel said.

“It’s interesting,” Kehr said after a pause. “I had business at the station the night she left. Her train was delayed. I stopped to visit and she wanted to know, out of nowhere, if you’d assisted us in any way. I assured her you’d been as unhelpful as you’d ever been. In fact, I told her that even though we were letting you go we were not at all pleased with your performance.” He cast down the list, touching the pencil point to each name, and made rapid question marks beside a few of them. “I don’t believe in not telling the truth,” he said. “But every so often a little fit overcomes me.

Karel thought, My head’s made of glass. I might as well just walk around with signs. “What’d you say when she asked why you were letting her leave?” he said. He tried not to look as though the news had affected him.

Kehr stood the file on its edge and straightened the pages with short thumps on the tabletop. He set it down and clasped his hands over it. “Her friend Albert arranged it. Travel passes. At your request.

“She was, if I’m any judge of emotion, quite moved,” he added.

“You lied to her,” Karel said. But he was relieved. He felt better. He realized he’d now be doing things to keep people from finding out about things he’d already done. He imagined her on the train thinking of him, and his face heated with guilt at his excitement and pleasure. He had saved her, hadn’t he? He had a flashing sexual fantasy of her gratitude.

Kehr and Stasik returned their attention to what they’d been doing, in Stasik’s case, apparently, brooding. Karel got up to go, anticipating the illicit feeling of being alone with her journals again, but Kehr reminded him about dinner and pointed out the recipe on the counter for Flat Lamb Pie.

“I want you to do me a favor,” Kehr said later while they ate. The ringtail sat on its haunches by his chair and begged with its forepaws up like a dog. “After dinner I want you to pick up some packages for me. At Albert Delp’s.”