Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

The bus driver waved him on without even looking at his pass card. He didn’t see any soldiers or Civil Guardsmen among the passengers. They looked at him strangely as he came down the aisle. When he settled into his seat a cricket sprang from his pocket.

His head throbbed and he was thirsty and wanted to empty the sand from his shoes. As they crested the hill in long winding turns he kept his face to the window, looking back at the dark green patterns like underwater vegetation on the desert floor below.

At Naklo the bus let him off across the street from the train station. He stood in line to buy his ticket behind a woman who held her baby up against her chest and continually apologized to it. When it was his turn he pushed his money under the slot and held his card up to the glass and again there was no trouble. He bought a pineapple drink from a sidewalk vendor while he waited for the train and drank it slowly, the cup cool in his hand.

Nothing was on schedule, but the noon train ran in the afternoon and the afternoon train at night, so that every so often a train came in right on time because it was the previous train six hours late.

The train came as the sun was setting. They passed a small factory in a narrow valley just outside of town and some small farms before he stopped looking out the window and tried to sleep. A fat man opposite him caused an epic amount of trouble endlessly getting in and out of his seat and finally disappeared before the ticket taker arrived. The ticket taker checked Karel’s ticket and pass card and left with them and returned a few minutes later with another official while Karel pretended to doze, his heart thumping. The ticket taker prodded him and returned the card and ticket and passed on.

He slept. There were creakings, snores, conversations, jolts. He woke every now and then at the water stops, hearing the trainmen murmuring. When he woke again they were stopped at a quiet station and nothing seemed to be happening. He saw moths around the light illuminating the station sign. A discarded timetable stirred and fluttered on the platform. Somebody coughed. He could make out part of a loopy painted slogan on the side wall — STAYS. Another train passed with a noisy rush and reflected his window and he saw himself spying out of a fluctuating plane of lights and then he was gone. Their train started again, giving all the passengers’ heads a lazy shake, and he watched the station and its water tower diminish around a curve with the rails crossing ties and spinning into the darkness and then he was dozing again, more exhausted than he’d realized, thinking about Leda and relaxing himself as much as he could with the steady clicking and rocking that were taking him away.

He felt the humidity and salt air in the closed compartment before he saw the sea. They came in along the high ridge of the cove, and he gazed down on the warehouses and storage tanks around the docks and the harbor glittering beyond them. There were boats, more than he remembered. The train let him out at the top of the city, and he swung his beltpack around so it rested on his hips and began his way down a road so steep the houses along it could only be entered from the top floors. He kept his eyes on the harbor.

He had Leda’s address, but it was too early, and he was hungry besides. As he got lower, shops appeared on both sides of the street. He passed garages, a butcher’s shop, a fabric store, a dealer in military antiques. At a welder’s three men were beating on a metal object with hammers and cursing. The noise stayed with him for blocks. He could smell the salt in the air and the humidity after the desert was wonderful. He passed a bakery and then a café and stepped inside.

He ate back near the kitchen and it was narrow and cluttered. A black iron stovepipe went up to the slanted ceiling and while they made his breakfast he gazed blankly out of a triangular skylight. Above the stove on racks were spices he could smell in small wooden boxes, and a dirty dishtowel hung on a peg over his table. Flies wove past him and disappeared.

For breakfast he had coffee and shredded nut pastries and then asked if it was too early to make some cuttlefish with spinach and lemon. He’d been away a long time, he explained. While he ate he watched a beautiful blond woman in a Women’s Auxiliary uniform who waved her spread hands like a fan over her tea, letting the cherry polish on her fingernails dry.

Back on the street he passed blocks he’d never seen before, and odd sights — a dwarf stopping to give some coins to a blind couple jointly playing the accordion, a pigeon perched just above a sleeping cat — but it seemed that every street, every simple corner of a house, retained a shiver of something from his past, some old tremor of feeling. He was here, he thought as he walked. He was here.

He showed a passerby Leda’s address and asked directions. He passed small trees growing out of square open areas in the sidewalks and tightly fenced gardens. Dogs occasionally raced or clawed along the fences, eager to get at him.

The Schieles turned out to live in yet another part of the city that was unfamiliar to him, and he was beginning to feel discomfited at the continued undermining of his nostalgia.

He found himself in front of a shabby and narrow house facing a courtyard where buses were apparently stored. There was a fish store on the ground floor. Their apartment, a helpful neighbor said, was the small dark place on the third floor. The house was very old and had in its keystone arch a fierce mythical lizard of some sort with a fish in its mouth. The second-floor landing was dark and filled with junk: a bicycle wheel, some sodden cardboard boxes, stacked metal pails, a tangle of rusted and broken knives.

He smoothed his hair and knocked and thought belatedly about cleaning himself up.

Leda opened the door and surprised him completely by not being surprised.

“You’re here,” she said, and her expression was so beautiful he knew he loved her completely. Her hair was lighter and finer and pinned up on the sides. She hugged him, and stood back from him, smiling. She tilted her head and smoothed her hair on one side by bringing her opposite hand all the way over the top of her head. “Come in,” she said.

Their apartment was just as she had described it. Everyone was gone.

Mother had taken Nicholas and David to the beach, she explained. Aunt was working. She’d waited here for him.

“You knew I was coming?” Karel said.

Leda looked puzzled. “Didn’t you send me this?” she asked. She showed him a printed note: Coming soon should arrive Thurs or Fri. Love, Karel .

Karel stared at it, dumbfounded. Something told him he should lie, that if he told the truth Leda would be less happy to see him.

“I forgot,” he said. She looked at him strangely.

“So how did you get here? What happened?” she said. “Are you hungry? Are you okay?”

She got him iced tea with mint while he told her about his father’s return and the destruction of the zoo. He told her about the desert and the bodies in the abandoned farmhouse. He did not tell her about the prisoner assessment room. She put her hand over her mouth. He regretted having upset her, though he appreciated her concern for what he’d been through, and he sipped his tea, aware all at once of how filthy he was.

She shouldn’t grill him like this, she said. She put a hand on his cheek. She’d been going to suggest they go to the beach and find everybody, but she didn’t think that was such a good idea anymore.

He shook his head.

He was probably tired, she said. And he probably wanted to wash up. She took the glass from his hands and set it down and tenderly helped him up, leading him to the bathroom door. She took off his beltpack and he raised his arms dumbly but she didn’t take off anything else. She disappeared and came back with a towel and a scrub brush that looked as if it was used for pots and pans. She told him to let her know when he was finished. She gave him some of Nicholas’s shorts to sleep in.