Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“Well,” Holter said. “Finally, we hit on it. Bang: the electric bills of the businesses above! Get it? All those sites would be siphoning off electricity. Right away we found a central cell, maybe forty people. We’ve identified most of the bodies.”

Albert paled. He ran his hand up the back of his neck and let it drop.

“Kuding’s actually alive,” Holter said. “Though he won’t be a problem. As our Justice Minister says, show me a man and I’ll show you a case.”

Albert put his hands over his eyes. He was trembling.

Karel stood up, abruptly, and had no explanation when Holter looked at him in surprise. The young men returned from the crawl space dirty and empty-handed and saved him. One had cobwebs hanging from his hair.

“I’m supposed to be back,” Karel said. He couldn’t take any more of this.

Holter lifted two boxes from the hall and brought them to Karel. “Children need two things, don’t you think?” he said, addressing Albert. Karel put his arms out and he loaded the boxes on them, tilting the weight back against Karel’s chest. “If they don’t get them, the result is unhappy children. Routine and discipline: the child who doesn’t get them will have all kinds of trouble.”

Karel said goodbye to Albert over the boxes and left. He had to wait at the door for one of the young men to open it. Holter called after him as he went down the steps that what he recommended was that children be given plenty of little tasks, and then be made to do them regularly.

Today we tried to read the future by dropping melted wax and lead into bowls of water. E asked, Will Leda marry Karel? and everybody thought that was funny. Sometimes I feel so excluded from their company! and I just want to sit outside under the sky and feel sorry for myself, like mother says.

Poor K! Always around, so sure he’s in love. I’m amazed how my feelings for him have grown. Because of what? He’s very maddening and almost always strange. That time with N an example. Mom and David like him a lot. Only Nicholas seems skittish around him. I kissed him, but would he ever kiss me? I think about him often, but what does that mean? Sometimes I think it’s like I don’t love him but the world in him.

K: 1 Political?

2 Kind, thoughtful

3 Attractive

4 Good?

5 Emotions not good or bad — just up and down

6 So self-consc. — never just does something. I think that bothers him.

The People’s Voice announced that the conversion of the Retention Hospital to museum space was now fully under way. A large number of patients had been moved to unspecified centers around the region, and others had been unfortunately lost in an outbreak of typhus the hospital had surpressed to prevent panic. Those families involved in the loss of loved ones had each received an urn, a certificate, and a bill. In rare cases there had been inevitable bureaucratic errors involving notifications, and these were deeply regretted.

Karel took long walks, wanting to get out of the house. It was hot. He passed an old man walking a dog on a lead. The dog stopped endlessly, and the old man conceded the dog that right, as if any kind of delay he experienced because of it made no difference in a world like this.

He sat in the shade and read the posters on a kiosk: nomads had formed teams of stranglers that roamed the countryside at night. Victims had been found with their ankles broken and eyes put out, according, it was thought, to a secret nomad tradition: the eyes so the dead wouldn’t recognize their murderers, and the ankles so they couldn’t follow them and indicate to everyone their guilt.

In the square a band was playing, sweating in the heat. The music was nervous and worn out and the band members played number after number with their eyes on the ground, their fingers working the stops. The heat staggered drifting mongrels and cats. In a cleared field he saw hawks and sparrows panting and standing beside each other in the shadows of fenceposts, on a truce because of the heat. Their wings slanted downward and trembled in the dirt. Beyond them through a window in the cool shade of a whitewashed room a woman with Leda’s hair and eyes served something from a shallow bowl with the smooth silence of a painting come to life.

He worried that he’d gotten no letters from her and asked about the mail situation at the post office. The clerk informed him in a harassed voice that he wouldn’t predict that anything got anywhere in any amount of time. He asked Kehr if he’d heard anything and Kehr said no and added that he was not holding his breath waiting for a note of thanks from the Schieles.

He tried to ration his time with the journals. He discovered with a shock that he had a rival:

Where is your smoothness? Why have you left? Now, when others pass their hands through my hair I resent it. Dark boy, I’m hypnotized by your black eyes. So much is happening all at once! You’re four years older, four years smarter, four years better, four years worse, four years more experienced. Am I aiming too high? Oh, I want you to be happy.

The next three passages said nothing more on the subject, as if he’d hallucinated it. He was flipping frantically ahead when Kehr appeared in his room and announced that they needed the journals right away for a while, he’d get them back, there was no need to get all excited, he was going to have to call Stasik if Karel continued to make a fuss, and no, it couldn’t wait.

Karel came downstairs early the next morning and moped around the kitchen inefficiently gathering what he needed to start breakfast. Kehr eyed him from his chair. Karel asked if he was finished with the journals yet and Kehr said as if he hadn’t heard, “Do you think you’d like to do what I do someday?”

“I don’t even know what you do,” Karel said. He scooped the coffee with extra vehemence and it slopped onto the floor.

Kehr shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said. “Today you come with me.”

Kehr drove. Stasik stayed at the house. They went out of town by the southern route. Karel saw where he and Leda had walked, where she’d leaned close to see the horned lizard. The morning was already hot. He rode with his hands on his thighs, watching the sun pinwheel off the metal on the dashboard. He was rarely in cars and enjoyed the speed, though he thought this one’s ride was bumpy.

They drove through stands of creosote and shadscale that seemed like brittle clouds of thin branches lining the road. He tried not to think about the dark boy in Leda’s journal and got angrier and more frustrated as he did.

They were going to a Prisoner Assessment Center. In the Guard you called them PACs. This one was a converted animal hospital.

It was a low white building with corrugated tin roofing and a central metal gate leading to a courtyard. The front had been a circular drive with a rock garden, and all that was left was a single exhausted desert sage and a small salt-bush. Cars and trucks were parked everywhere.

They were checked through the gate by a slovenly guard in an army uniform who gave all his attention to a cat leashed to a ring on the wall. The inner courtyard was being hosed down.

Kehr gave a little tour. On the first floor there were offices, a dining room, staff lounge, kitchen, and bathrooms. On the lower floors, prisoner assessment rooms, the infirmary, and holding cells. These centers were new and were all a little makeshift but were being modernized. They’d been mandated and funded by the Statute for the Process of National Reorganization. The statute turned over responsibility in the cases of actual and potential enemies of the state to the intelligence-gathering services. Both the Civil Guard and the Security Service operated within these centers, and not always harmoniously.