Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“They’ll kill us,” Karel whispered. “Are you crazy?”

“It’s dangerous right now, ” Leda said. “You think all those people who disappeared did something?”

He thought of the young man in the prisoner assessment room and put his hands over his eyes.

“They’d kill everybody,” he said. “They’d go crazy.”

“We’d only do it if we could do it,” she said. She came closer and kissed him, and then held him, his chin on her shoulder.

It was as if she held his fears a little bit, and settled them. He began to recognize a war inside him between the responsibility she was talking about and his old self, and he tried to settle back to observe it, like a spectator. He imagined himself learning to cherish what she cherished instead of just his own happiness and hers, imagined himself opening up to her, confessing his silence, his cowardice, his complicity, and being forgiven and purified. His mind wandered to the beach in the darkness and the rain, and he felt that he was unable to anticipate what was going to happen, that the future stood with its back to him.

“All the good I’ve tried to do I didn’t just do for its own sake,” Leda whispered. “I did it to look good. I did it for myself.”

He told her no and held her and decided he’d help, he’d do it even though nothing about him was heroic, because she was precious to him and it meant everything to her. She said, I won’t let anything happen to you, and it was her mothering voice, the moved, fearful one she used with her brothers, and he said, no, no, nothing’ll happen to us, and held her and prayed that whatever would come would at least spare her.

He wasn’t sure if he woke up slowly or just never slept. It was extra cold outside the blankets and the solid things in the room were darkening as the space around them paled and took on light. It was still raining and the darkness outside was blue.

He heard keys in locks and the squeak of a metal cart and imagined an old woman in black making the bed next door, smoothing wrinkled white sheets with her palm. He lay still, pondering a mysterious reflection in the mirror over the washbasin: a stripe and the corner of something wooden he couldn’t identify when he looked around the room. A swallow scissored past the window.

Leda sat up, abruptly, and wrapped herself in the outer blanket against the chill and then padded barefoot to the door and went into the hall to the bathroom. He got up and put his two shirts on and wished again he had long pants. His shirts smelled. He crossed to the window and gazed down to the street. People were up already, walking quickly with light short steps because of the rain. In a men’s shop through the streaked display window he could see little hats on pegs, only now becoming visible.

Leda came back in and crossed the room and hugged him, and then tried to get dressed while keeping the blanket on her shoulders. She spread her elbows and shivered, and the blanket tented out and flapped with her movements. Karel stayed by the window and thought of the kind of peace she brought for him to particular objects like the blanket or moments like this morning. Outside dew had frosted the hood of a parked car, and he registered two soldiers standing beside it, their arms folded. There was something else wrong and his mind was about to remark on it when the old metal washbasin near Leda rang softly and she said their first words of the morning: There, I’m finished, and the door banged and crashed open with such force that she seemed to be thrown backward not so much from the shock as the concussion of air.

Four men swept into the room wearing army shirts and civilian pants and two of them pulled the blanket up and over Leda’s head and wrapped it tightly around her and one produced some rope. Karel rushed to her and the fourth man hit him across the face with what felt like a small flat plank and a thousand stars sprayed the room, and while he rolled on the floor arms grabbed and pinned him and they put a small paper bag over his head and locked his hands behind his back with a series of sliding bars that squeezed his wrists. He felt and heard loose grains around his head in the bag and realized it was an empty sugar bag. Leda was screaming for help, muffled under the blanket, and they told her to stop or they’d kill her. He heard the grunts as they lifted her and then they pulled him up and shoved him from behind, and led him into the hall and down the stairs and out of the building at a great rush, orienting him with twists or pulls of his neck and shoulders. They were piled into a car. Leda kept calling his name and he would say, I’m here, his voice harsh and trapped in the sugar bag, and then she cried out when they hit her to quiet her down. There was something wrong with the car, it wouldn’t start, and eventually he had to get out and they unlocked his hands and told him to leave the bag on his head and he had to push with two other men at the back of the car until it started. They were quiet the rest of the way until Leda said, her voice still muffled, Why are you doing this? This is a mistake, and then the man beside Karel who was still breathing heavily from the pushing asked her angrily if she had any idea what was involved in an operation like this. Arms, civilian coordination, training centers, transports, intelligence gathering, paperwork: did she think all that operated in the service of mistakes? And the man in the front seat told him to shut up.

Then they were rushing along a corridor, with spaces he could feel opening out and closing suddenly behind him, as in a dream, and he felt a chill at his back from not knowing what was around him. Someone said Here, and he heard a heavy metal door swing open, and he touched his palm and fingertips to the rough wall beside him as a last gesture before they shoved him through the doorway.

He heard voices and had the impression of a large room and was pushed down to a sitting position against a stone wall, scraping his back. The sugar bag was removed and his handcuffs taken off.

Leda was beside him. She hugged him. They were in a huge dark cell with a low ceiling. The walls were lined with sitting or squatting people. Some had bundles and small overnight bags. The floor was cold with seepage and he felt it through his shorts, so he got up into a crouch. Leda was on her knees.

An officer of the Civil Guard sat at the table near the door, flanked by two soldiers. The officer said, “You new arrivals should turn your valuables in here, voluntarily. At the depot there’s a lot of stealing goes on.” He was addressing the group around Karel and Leda. Karel looked at the man beside him, and the man looked away timorously, like someone too shy to acknowledge an invitation. A few people got up and crossed to the table.

He could hear sobbing from around the room and realized there were a lot of women and children here. “Thank God they haven’t got my family,” Leda whispered, and he understood she’d noticed, too. She seemed both more frightened and more despairing, and he wondered if that meant he was courageous or ignorant.

He could smell moldy clothing. An older man on the other side of the room stared at him hopelessly. He tried another direction and a woman asked him sharply what he was looking at. He moved closer to Leda.

They stayed there for hours. New people were brought in occasionally. Karel and Leda shoved over to make room along the wall. A boy David’s age was thrown to his knees so hard he skidded on them. The soldier who did it gave him an apple afterward. They boy sat whimpering against his mother, holding the apple.

They heard rumors. What this was all about, who was about to be released. The officer at the table said No talking. There was the metallic sound across the room of someone urinating into a tin. On one wall there was an adjoining cell connected by a door, and someone from the other side was poking straw through the keyhole. Another officer came in and the first stood up and saluted him. The one who’d come in announced they were all prisoners of the Second Army Group in action. He crossed the room to Karel and regarded him with his hands on his hips. He didn’t say anything. Finally he turned away. All of Karel’s previous courage left him and he crouched sweating and shaking afterward. The new officer on the way out bent over a sleeping or unconscious woman near the door and asked how Madame was tonight. He saluted the officer at the table and left without waiting for an answer.