Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“What are you talking about?” Karel said frantically.

“That leaves you,” Albert said. “I’m supposed to be here to show you what can happen, or urge you to avoid it. I forget which. But I do want to tell you: after me he’ll come for you.” He looked at his hand, the way he used to look at a lizard’s mite infestation. “He always believed you were closer to me than you were, he wanted to recruit you, sure, but he also wanted to get at me, at the organization. After me he’s got nobody. After me he’s got to get it from you.”

Karel felt his forehead and back chilled, and he shook Albert’s pallet. “Can’t you tell him I don’t know anything?” he asked.

“I don’t think he believes me,” Albert said. He smiled, his eyes closed. “I am in amazing pain,” he said.

He opened his eyes and looked up at Karel. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Karel nodded, though he wasn’t sure the old man could see him.

“I am sorry,” Albert said. “For everything.”

Karel was crying again. “Listen,” he said. “I need to tell you something.”

The old man waited, his breath wheezing a little.

“I need to tell you,” Karel said, in agony. “When Kehr wasn’t going to let the Schieles go, when Kehr—” The old man was looking intently at him while he fumbled for the words, as if he didn’t want to forget anything of what Karel was about to say. “I identified you,” Karel finally said. “I gave them your name.”

Albert lay there on the pallet and just looked at him. The moment expanded into an awful vacuum. “I thought you did,” he said finally. He just looked, and nothing in his expression suggested absolution.

“Please,” Karel said.

“They already knew about me,” Albert said. He lifted an arm toward Karel and gave a small wave. “I’m going to try to help the girl.”

“Have you seen her?” Karel asked wildly. The door opened and two soldiers came in and lifted Albert’s pallet. “Have you seen her?” Karel repeated, and Albert said no and gripped Karel’s hand and then they were gone.

Only a few hours later there was a noise at the door again. “I don’t even know why I bother to lock this,” he heard his guard grumble. More soldiers came in and grabbed him and dragged him into the hall. Kehr and Leda were waiting there, next to the open door of Leda’s cell. The soldiers released Karel and she hesitated and then ran to him and they embraced in the dark stone hallway, with Kehr, three soldiers, and the sad man who guarded the table all looking on.

“Oh God,” Leda whispered in his ear. He wanted to tell her about her family, tell her what he’d done, but there was no time. He covered her head with his hands. “I wish I could be more for you,” she whispered, and he hugged her more closely and gave an involuntary cry. “He wants something he thinks you have,” she whispered in his ear. “Listen to me: when he does what he does most people do what he wants. But some don’t .” She had her cheek to his and her lips to his ear and he could feel her tears. “Maybe that’s what we have now,” she added, and tightened her hug so that he would feel the urgency in what she said. “ Maybe this is our life’s work .”

“I hope you’re telling him the compelling reasons he should cooperate,” Kehr said. “I hope you’re telling him where you’re going.”

Karel held her arms and separated himself from her. “Where are you going?” he asked wildly. “What’s happening?”

She hugged him again despite his resistance. “ I love you, ” she whispered, and holding her then was like what he felt when his eyes were closed and still he knew the sun had come out from behind clouds, a suffusion of warmth, of tenderness, and when they pulled her away before the sad man pinioned his arms he realized as she gazed back at him that he had no words or gestures for this, nothing to convey to her the extremity of his feelings but those words and gestures he used every day for everyday things.

They held him in the hall and made him listen. She was only two or three doors down, with Kehr and one of the soldiers. She shouted she loved Karel and then something else about the regime he couldn’t make out and then she screamed. He fought and tore at the arms holding him but the sad man had him around the throat and one soldier hit the side of his knee with something that made him cry out and unable to put weight on it anymore. Leda screamed again, and he could tell from her voice that she stood on the edge of something she couldn’t master, and he registered that he was breathing in and out and had to continue to do so or else he would suffocate, and the screaming went on and on until there was one more that rose above the others and seemed not to come from a human being but from some sort of terrified instrument. The stone rang with it. In the silence that followed Karel was shrieking and shrieking her name, and they hauled him back into his cell and threw him across it with such force that he hit the opposite wall and bounced back toward them.

It was warmer. He found himself gazing on an astonished cloud through the high square of his window. There was blue sky behind it. He’d been up all night and he was chilly and spent. When he closed his eyes his head reeled and he tumbled through empty space. He thought with some simplicity of the things he would never have: time, happiness, Leda. He would have told them anything at that point; he would have told them anything earlier, but no one asked.

He touched the edge of his mattress. His knee was in intense pain and swollen to twice its size. He seemed surprised by the resiliency of objects.

He sat where he was for he didn’t know how long, gazing up at his window. Transparent knots swam across his eye. He wanted Leda to know: he would have helped her, together they would have acted the way she’d wanted to.

He heard the door unlocked and someone pacing behind it, back and forth, as if that someone were the prisoner. Then his father came in and shut the door behind him. He looked terrible, but Karel felt his sensibilities had coagulated or stiffened inside of him and so just sat there, watching his father enter.

He knelt beside Karel and Karel looked at his face and saw his pain, saw the pain of someone who now could do nothing to protect his child, who couldn’t fulfill even that responsibility, and couldn’t be forgiven because of it. His father was talking to him. His father was asking for something. His father was telling him that Leda had died feeling nothing bad was happening to her, after that first part. His father was saying he had to let him help. Karel said, “I don’t want anything. I don’t want you. I don’t want help.” It occurred to him that his father had in a profound way never realized what he’d been doing; that there was an interdependence, in his father’s and his own case, between thoughtlessness and evil.

His father was asking him for something, pleading, and he had nothing to give. He was helpless in the face of this suffering. There were no words left to exchange whose value he trusted. His father said, Please, Karel, and he said again that his father had to go, and Kehr came into the cell, and looked at them both, and said the same thing.

“There is, I think, in every one of us something mineral and unteachable,” Kehr said. “You see it when all evidence — all the dictates of logic — suggest one course of action, and the individual persists in doing something else. It interests me,” he said.

They were in the room Leda had been taken to. It was different and darker than the room in the other Prisoner Assessment Center. On the wall there was tin shelving that held instruments with silhouetted long and narrow attachments. They reminded him of the mandibles and antennae of insects. The floor was concrete and had been washed and was puddled with water. In one corner a sump pump labored on and off. There was a sign embroidered like a sampler over the door: If You Know Something, Sing for Us. If You Don’t, Suffer . It brought back to him the calendar from his home.