Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

It turned out that all the rooms were much too expensive. The manager repeated the price. Karel stood at the desk feeling that whatever sense he’d had that he could get along in the city alone was gone. The manager added that there was one room, very small and no view, it was nice enough but no luxury suite, and next to one of the service rooms besides. He could let Karel have it for less than half the standard rate.

It was fine. It looked out on a narrow street. It had an iron bedstead, a desk, a wooden armchair, and a warped chest decorated with phlox and pale trumpets in a clay pot. The bathroom was in the hall. He set his beltpack on the desk and opened it in a parody of someone settling in with his luggage, and the manager handed him his key and left.

He sat on the bed and tried to determine what to do with himself. It occurred to him that he needed long pants, that he stood out and that it would get colder here. He decided instead to see his old house.

He found it after a few minutes’ walk. The new owners had put an addition over his porch, and there were flower boxes on the balcony. When he tried to get a better look a woman poked her head through the kitchen window and told him to get away from the house or he’d be explaining his sightseeing to the Security Service. He spent the rest of the day down by the waterfront, watching the loading and unloading of cargo.

He returned to the Golden Angel after dark and went up to his room and lay on the bed with his hands behind his head. The room had a small round clock on the desk and he watched its hands move. When it was past ten someone knocked. Leda came in and shut the door behind her as if there were wolves in the hallway. She was furious, she said, and ashamed and sorry, and she felt terrible for him. He got off the bed and went to her with no clear idea of what he was doing and put his arms around her and kissed her. She kissed him back, her hands on his head and arms and then his head again, and they reeled around the room, bumping things, putting a hand out every so often to steady themselves, and she was crying and he kissed her more passionately for that. He eased her onto the bed and she looked up at him, intent on his expression, whatever it was. The moment was frozen and detached from itself and from what seemed to have gone before. Their kisses were intent and noisy and her lips were glazed under his. He pulled at her clothing and she pulled at his. Her skin when he touched it was so delicate that he left pink spots that resisted fading. He had his clothes off, all but a shoe, and hers were in a tangle near them. She had her hands on the back of his neck and was still looking at him intently. She scratched herself so that the bed shook. That sense of a revelatory something about to happen returned, and she laughed, looking at him, at his expression, laughed at the suddenness of his own transition from not seeing to seeing the extent of her love for him.

Somebody came to the door and knocked a few minutes later. Leda pulled her legs up and covered herself with the bedspread in terror, and Karel rose to all fours on the bed and waited. There was some muttering and a voice outside the door said, “Whoops whoops whoops,” and then they heard rapid steps heading down the corridor the opposite way.

“Oh, God,” Leda said. He settled beside her and hugged her, and she shifted and got up and turned off the overhead light and switched on the little desk lamp. Then she pulled the covers back and got under them, and he followed.

She huddled against him. He was still excited but thought maybe he should just hold her. Just before, she’d been worried and careful even through her passion and had frustrated his attempts to enter her. He kissed her again, and she made a pleased sound. They were quiet for a long time and he realized she was beginning to doze. He heard the light uneven sound of rain beginning on the window, and then it accelerated, the droplets on the glass catching light against the darkness and slipping individually down the pane. He hadn’t heard or felt rain for months. The window was open a crack and he could feel the dampness in the air outside the blankets. He imagined the wet terrace of a nearby café, the waiter wiping slabs of tables. He turned to Leda, determined to watch her all night, to remember everything.

It was still raining. The window curtains bellied in the wind. He brushed a damp hair from her ear and drifted a thumb across her temple. Her hair was still slightly pungent from the sun and the ocean. He ran the tip of his tongue lightly along her bottom lip and kissed the place at the outside of her eye where he imagined her tear duct to be. She murmured something in her sleep or half-sleep about his being so nice, and he had the impression that even her hidden thoughts were innocent, that she had no secrets or only virtuous ones, and he was overwhelmed with his good fortune at being here with her. He found himself considering and reconsidering her sleeping profile with the tenderness that someone going blind would have for what he still sees.

Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up, with a quiet start. She took his face in her hands and kissed him, and when he moved up against her small noises flowed out of her with a kind of thrilling ease. He understood her reticence with certain things and so wished he knew better what he was doing in terms of pleasing her, wanted his touching to be not only tender but intelligent. She pulled him closer and he wanted to be everywhere she was, imagined himself dissolving like sugar in her mouth. She stopped him again after a while and said she was sorry, and he said no, don’t be sorry. She lay still after that with her mouth to his ear and then she said, “Listen. I was going to wait, but listen.”

He moved back on his pillow and waited. Somewhere in the distance the rain was hitting the metal roof of a shed like far-off pebbles in a pan.

She sighed. She stroked his arm and then sighed again, with more resolve. “We keep saying we don’t know what to do,” she said. “And everything we hear is a little worse than the last thing we heard. Only a little worse. That’s how it works; you wait for the next thing, and then the next thing, and then you’ll do something.”

Karel took a deep breath and blinked with shame.

“My mother sees how bad it is and still she says I’m an alarmist. I am an alarmist. Now she says it’s too late and we didn’t stop it, so now what?

“We have to do something,” she said, when he didn’t respond. “The people I talk to can’t imagine changing anything. There’s this — reverence, for what they assume must’ve existed at some point.” He felt the intensity of her desire to understand, and her frustration. He took her hand and squeezed it.

“I want you to help me,” she said.

He didn’t want to hear this. “What?” he asked.

“There’s no point in trying to put him in jail, or get people to overthrow him,” she whispered. “Everybody’s sworn allegiance to him personally.”

“What are you thinking? What are you trying to do?” Karel said.

“We have to kill him,” Leda said. “I don’t know how yet. I don’t even know if it’s possible. But I think somebody’s got to kill him.”

Karel was staring at her. The roof was going to fall in, spilling Kehr on the bed. Holter was going to break in the door and take them away.

She turned to him and took his face in her hands again, holding it the way he held newborn rabbits. “If it isn’t possible it isn’t,” she said. “But we should be finding out. We’re not infants anymore. Maybe now that we’re together there really is here somewhere a way to act, maybe all we have to do is look a little for it. I’m ashamed of myself sometimes. It’s like I think I’m just here to sit and wait. I’d like to find out if I am all just talk.”