Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“Let me tell you what you’re hoping for,” he said gently. “The good that saves the day, that turnaround moment when the point of light expands and drives away the darkness. If Karel was like Kehr, then why couldn’t Kehr be like Karel?

“Let me tell you what will happen,” he said. His eyes were close to Karel’s and Karel closed his own and tried to raise an arm, like a blind man groping to ward off a blow. “We’re taking everything. No one is left for you. No one will be sorry. We’re taking your life and your death. You’re resisting, but I’ve taken away the world you’re resisting for. Your martyrdom is impossible. With no witnesses there’s no testimony. Who’s going to record your gesture? Who’s going to record hers?”

“I am,” Karel whispered. He was crying and wanted only to be put out of his agony. “I do.”

You should have been born in another time, Kehr was telling him, after it had been quiet. This was a chosen time and a chosen place. What chance did you have? Kehr stood and signaled to someone, and he felt himself being lifted up. So many never fully understood, Kehr was saying from somewhere behind him, the way that in places and times like this it was just a matter of history being let off the leash.

In his cell he lay across his mattress, too weak to move, shivering violently. He thought he could hear the faint scraping and tapping of mortar and trowels and imagined his cell expanding in all directions. His thigh and knee swayed and throbbed in steady waves and he could feel his blood purling out of him. He wrote his name and Leda’s name with his finger on the floor. At times he thought to himself, Now it’s time to get ready, now’s the time they’ll come for me, or I’m not ready, I’m ashamed, I’m alone, I’m guilty, but at other times he could let feelings and sensations from his time with Leda enter him as he might enter shade, and he tried to hold on to parts of her, small memories that faded and wavered unreliably as he tried to keep them still. Maybe they won’t come, he thought, and heard them at the door, and he could feel his heart within his chest and the fear of facing this alone like a single transparent hand against his back. They cleaned his cell while he lay there, and when they lifted him to his feet his mattress was dragged away, and even supported as he was by two men he was trembling and unsteady and desired to press his heel against the stone floor to steady himself. He told himself he should be calm and controlled and lucid for this and closed his eyes to shake off the numbness and he felt he wanted to say a measured goodbye to even this world but his breathing would not allow it, and the sensation he felt as they brought him across the cell and laid him on their pallet was that of sliding slowly across warm sheet ice. They settled him into it and tied him down and he registered from the feel of the air and the paleness outside his window that it was sometime before dawn, and he began an incantation of names: Leda, his mother, his father, Albert, Eski, Seelie, David, Nicholas, Herman, Mrs. Fetscher, and Leda, the loop allowing him the sense that his past was there with him still breathing in the darkness, and as they lifted him and rocked him along he felt he was being allowed a dream, David and him at the ocean, David gone, himself on a sandbar surrounded by fog and everything silent except the lapping of waves. There was a nonvisual sense of Leda, a certainty she was there because of the weight of her arms and the warmth of her body, and because he thought Kehr was wrong and the mercy he would be granted had no conditions.

And from that sandbar they could see the offshore Seprides, the Roof of Hell, and as his body tilted on its axis and hands steadied him against the cold iron on his back and other hands fumbled with the shackles around his wrists, some part of him wanted to generate an image of retribution, a smiting and a scouring of the earth: the sea at night in front of the island churning as if stirred from beneath, an explosion, and then the wave of Albert’s father’s memory: at first a thin phosphorescent line rising higher and higher in the distant darkness, and then the clear silvery-white crest showing the wall of black water beneath it, the air pressure a rising roar before it, the whole sea piling up behind it, and when it hit the hills themselves would seem to capsize, and the ground roll like choppy waves in a rough sea, the cove itself falling away in concentric ranks to expose the bodies of all the tortured and the dead, all forgotten, all buried sitting up and facing the sea, but as Kehr came closer and the world came back to that room, in the end it was Leda, Leda, always and only Leda.

SPECIAL THANKS TO GERRY HOWARD,

RON HANSEN, K. K. ROEDER, AND EDWARD HIRSCH

Jim Shepard (b. 1956) is the author of four short story collections and seven novels, most recently The Book of Aron , which has been shortlisted for both the Kirkus Prize and the American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal. Originally from Connecticut, Shepard now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches creative writing and film. He won the Story Prize for his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway , which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Shepard’s stories have appeared in the New Yorker , the Paris Review , the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine , and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern , among other publications; five have been selected for the Best American Short Stories , two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories , and one for a Pushcart Prize.