Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“Thanks for the letter,” Karel said.

“It came while we were gone,” Kehr said. He looked at his watch.

“Lucky the people you know going back and forth are willing to carry those letters,” Karel said.

“Yes it is,” Kehr said. “Luck follows me around.”

Gnats had settled into Karel’s drink. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said. “Thinking about that guy.”

“Weakness is kicked in the teeth in this world,” Kehr said. “Which is a shame.”

Two men at the next table were explaining a long-handled metal instrument to a third man, who had trouble catching on.

“What’d he do?” Karel asked. “Did he do anything? Aren’t things like the bedframe against the law?”

The laws were iron, Kehr said. And some people were outside the law’s protection.

In the far corner of the courtyard two children were sitting on a square of cloth on the pavement and playing with rubber balls and a toy lizard. A haggard man in a prisoner’s shirt was watching them.

“Some of our officers occasionally have to bring their children,” Kehr explained. “I’ve seen days when it was like a school around here.”

“There are no rules?” Karel asked faintly. “Anybody can do anything? Downstairs?”

Not at all, Kehr said. In fact, they were cleaning up the system. That had been a big source of tension. He looked over at the children. The prisoner was pointing out to one a ball that had rolled away. Karel should have seen the conditions and methods at the Ministry of Social Welfare: Kehr had thought he could not watch such things. Much different from the sort of things Karel had seen. Another order of intensity altogether.

He saw Karel’s expression and tried to explain. By “excesses” he meant for the most part acts carried out individually, for personal goals. There’d been for example what they’d considered too much individual initiative on the part of operatives at night in the prisoners’ cells. Especially the women’s cells. This for the most part had had to stop. This was why: no one really minded what was being done as long as it was continually clear that it was being done at the instructions of the state. Because once people were clear on that, it was just a matter of finding out the rules and playing by them.

Karel looked shocked.

Please, Kehr said. This wasn’t news. Everybody knew. He surveyed his glass, which was also dotted with gnats. He said there was an argument that those who restrained their cruelty did so only because theirs was weak enough to be restrained, but that, he thought, oversimplified the situation. The political man at arms had to be a model of correctness in dress, deportment, and behavior. Otherwise where was his authority in ideological reorientation? Those who understood that had nothing but distaste for the rabid types who behaved as if they were dressed in horns and pelts. The good torturer lacked the capacity for hatred. Pain was administered the way power was to be exercised: dispassionately, from on high.

They left the patio and headed to the prisoner assessment room again. Kehr said that one could get to the point where what he did made extraordinary wine or fragrances possible, made contemplation possible, made sleep possible.

The young man was carried onto the bedframe. The man in the apron returned and did not seem to be in as pleasant a mood this time. Two prisoners set up bright lights on tripods and a third took photographs. The man in the apron introduced innovations: a horseshoe-shaped electric prod applied simultaneously to the ears and teeth that they called “the telephone,” and a small electrified metal rectangle with legs that sparked and hopped erratically around the young man’s back and that they called “the spider.” While they worked the lights created a double image behind them of their shadows gigantified on the walls.

Afterward the young man passed out and nothing could be done with him. He was carried to the infirmary.

Kehr sat Karel down behind the lattice screen and told him it was time they examined what had been going on here. He asked if Karel had any questions. Karel asked again despite himself why they hadn’t asked the young man any.

He was not ready to speak, Kehr said. With experience you understood that. Softening up was required before it was even worth the bother.

Karel wanted to know how they knew someone was telling the truth. Kehr explained that a specific tone appeared in the voice in that situation, and that again, training and experience allowed one to recognize that tone. Subjects under that sort of stress invented the most farfetched things. One woman he’d been associated with had sent over fifty people to prison, and none of them as far as he knew had provided anything yet, or seemed likely to.

The special methods were indispensable to the cause of truth; with each application another layer of deceit was stripped away, until the last truth was told, finally, in the last extremity.

Why was he here? Karel wanted to know. What did they want from him?

It was becoming clearer and clearer to the Civil Guard, Kehr said, that to do its job with maximum efficiency it would need to recruit more heavily among nonmembers of the Party, to systematically build a core of people who were not Party members or known supporters. They’d allow for greater flexibility in operations. That would do two things: it would create a more omniscient intelligence service, and it would create the impression of a more omniscient intelligence service.

And they wanted to Karel to do that?

Among other things, Kehr said. An example: there was a certain protest organization, of families that had had family members disappear. It had been particularly hard to penetrate. Kehr had proposed months ago that one of their female operatives be accompanied to the meetings by a young boy posing as her son to give her greater credibility. It could even be arranged to have the son save the day during a faked police intervention and thereby cement his position within the group.

There’d also be paperwork around the centers, more routine activities — release orders, transfer orders, final disposal orders — all such things that needed to be done and that there was always so little time for.

Karel sat upright. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I couldn’t do that.”

Kehr nodded. He seemed undisturbed. “That I think is a common reaction,” he said. “But it’s a little more complicated in your case. Take for example the prisoner who was sitting here yesterday recording the session. What he intuited some time ago was that there was nothing a man wouldn’t do to save himself, and having saved himself, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for increasingly trivial reasons, and that eventually he finds himself doing these things out of duty, out of habit, out of pleasure, or for no reason at all.”

Karel shuddered.

“Strange but true,” Kehr said.

“Are you going to torture me to make me do it?” Karel asked.

“I suppose I should be more frank with you,” Kehr said. “There is in my business what we call Involuntary Recruitment. This is carried out through private consultations between the operative and the subject, during which the subject is introduced to compromising actions and situations. At some point the recruit is asked to join the struggle. Should the recruit refuse, which is likely considering the reasons for which the recruit was chosen in the first place, it is then pointed out to the recruit that he or she is already inside the movement, and that he or she will be exposed to his or her friends — as well as the partisans, who unfailingly act very badly in such situations — if he or she does not co-operate.”

Karel was thunderstruck.

“But of course you have time to think about it,” Kehr said. “We should be going. I think someone will soon be using the room.”