Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

Later there was a genteel ringing the officer at the table identified as the dinner bell. Some young men in gray uniforms came in lugging pails with ladles and stacks of wooden bowls. The adults got porridge with a kind of gravy and the children something the officer called milk soup. The eating cheered up the woman who’d snapped at Karel and she said out of nowhere that they couldn’t torture her. She’d confess to being a leader of the nomads if they tortured her.

He couldn’t eat and neither could Leda. Other people took their food. While the young men in gray were collecting the bowls the officer who’d stared at Karel returned and said something to the officer at the table. Then he turned and gestured to Karel, whose stomach jumped and heaved. Karel pointed to his chest and the officer nodded and indicated with two spread fingers the both of them.

He took them out of the room and down a corridor, walking ahead of them. Leda held Karel’s hand and said this was some kind of mistake, but the officer didn’t respond.

He led them through one hallway after another and then across an enclosed courtyard that haggard men were sweeping with switch brooms. They passed through more hallways and then another courtyard, this one muddy and strewn with empty suitcases and a rotting mattress. Karel thought this prison went on forever and remembered what Albert had once told him: now we have prisons for people who’ve done things, prisons for people who haven’t, prisons for people who might, prisons for people who might not, prisons for everybody because everybody is somebody who could go to prison.

The officer turned them over to a sad man in civilian clothes at the end of another long corridor. There was one yellow light over the man’s table, and the corridor was very dark. Two cell doors on either side of him stood open. The sad man watched the officer leave and then turned to them. He had a patchy gray stubble on his cheeks and bleary eyes, and he appraised them as if they were an acquisition for the zoo while Leda asked him questions he didn’t answer. When she was finished he dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a sugar lump for each of them. Then he put them in separate cells.

On the floor of his cell Karel remembered sharply the look of tenderness Leda had given him as they’d trooped along behind the officer, as if she’d already figured out (and he hadn’t, being an idiot) that this could be their last private moment together. He made a small noise of surprise and pain and then howled with the thought, the room echoing the sound, and then was silent.

There was one small window very high up, and the peephole on the door was shut. He called and called to Leda but he didn’t hear any answer. He strained to listen and thought he heard hammering, and distant singing. He sat there and sat there while the sky turned dark outside his window and the terror of his position poured in on him like black water: all of what had felt to him at first like a frightening misunderstanding now gaped before him like a canyon. He fought the realization that he was abandoned and lost to the world: what would happen to him now? And if something bad happened, who would know?

In the middle of the night there was a clatter of keys at the door and it opened, throwing yellow light across the wall. Two men entered in silhouette carrying a small folding table and chair and set them up and then left. Then Kehr came in, with a lantern, and set the lantern on the floor.

“Why am I here? What are you doing with us?” Karel shouted, and when he got off the floor and tried to get to Kehr, Kehr hit him in the face first with his open palm and then with his closed fist, and Karel experienced a black-redness behind his eyes and a bloom of something that turned into fiery pain. He swallowed blood. He thought: I’ve been dealt with. I’ve been guilty and now I’ve been dealt with. He’d fallen on his arm. He got off the stone floor and rose from his knees as if on a trampoline, and swayed a little in front of Kehr’s table. Kehr sat down.

“This is a turn of events,” he said. “In the future when you address me pay particular attention to your tone.” He laid out a pad of paper and a pencil and brought the lantern up from the floor. He sharpened the pencil with a clasp knife. Karel sat down, holding his nose and mouth. Both were swelling, and he swallowed the blood intermittently in small amounts.

“We didn’t do anything,” he finally said. He sounded defiant and whiny.

Kehr shrugged. “We not only punish action,” he said. “We also prevent it. If we looked only to the politically active to fill these prisons, who knows where we’d be.”

“What are we doing here?” Karel said.

“Why should you understand this?” Kehr asked. “How intelligent are you? How intelligent have you been?”

Karel snuffled and held his nose and mouth with his hand. Pain branched out from his nostrils and he wondered if his nose was broken.

What they were doing here were things that imaginations had outlined but never realized, Kehr said. He cleaned his ear with his little finger and ran a palm along his jawline. One could say no category covered their activities; that they were beyond categories, conducting an experimental inquiry into what was possible. And learning centers like these were their laboratories.

“I don’t want to know,” Karel said. “I don’t care about that.”

Kehr smiled. “See what I mean?”

He lifted the pencil with a slightly mocking anticipation. “Now,” he said. “I have some questions for you.”

“I have questions for you,” Karel said.

“I would limit myself to comments that don’t endanger your life if I were you,” Kehr said.

Karel was quiet, his attention focused on avoiding another blow.

“I need names,” Kehr said. “Albert’s associates. You were close to him; you know who I mean. It’s the fault of those people the zoo was destroyed.”

“The Civil Guard destroyed the zoo,” Karel said. “I saw it.”

“After a while one’s patience runs out,” Kehr said. “I understand the men’s feelings. If Albert’s friends had turned themselves in, the zoo would be standing today.”

Karel sat lower against the wall and looked at the blood on his hands.

“The names,” Kehr said.

“I don’t know any names,” Karel said.

“What did I tell you about tone?” Kehr said with a softness in his voice, and Karel was frozen with fear. They were quiet for several minutes. Karel could feel his heart. Kehr breathed out exaggeratedly and said, “What have these people ever done for you? Have you asked yourself that?”

“At least they left me alone,” Karel said, despite himself, and he waited in terror for Kehr’s reaction.

Kehr sat back in his chair and put his chin in his hand and gazed at Karel. “Let me give you an idea,” he said, “of what you’re playing with here, playing the hero: your friend next door. And her family.”

“You have her family?” Karel asked.

“My subordinate when interviewing the older brother asked him his rank in the organization,” Kehr said, shaking his head at the memory. “I said, ‘Organization? Mr. Stasik, he was in an institution, a home.’ On the other hand, it had been considered by many to be a possible staging ground, and that was never disproved. So on the whole the entire family would be safer outside of Mr. Stasik’s custody.”

“I don’t know anything,” Karel said. “If I knew I’d tell you. But I don’t know anything.”

“Your friend wouldn’t even have to know her family’d been taken,” Kehr said. “They could be back on the street that fast. As could she. As could you.”

“I don’t know ,” Karel cried miserably.