Lights Out in the Reptile House Read online

  “Were you scared?” Karel asked. The northern mountains were supposed to be dangerous. They rose like walls on the horizon even from this distance. Every year hikers were lost. They died of cold and falls and snakebite before being discovered. The nomads, cause of the border troubles, were also beginning to be blamed.

  She shook her head. It was too beautiful, she said. They didn’t go way up. They saw a few people, but everyone was so poor.

  She talked to him about what it was like. There were rounded, blunt, burned hills, between which were plains of intolerable sun glare and narrow valleys up high in the haze. There were hard dry places completely empty that they called dry lakes, and ugly and bitter pools, never dry on the hottest days, dark and ashy and rimmed with crystals. There were broad wastes open to the wind where the sand drifted in thick waves. There was this terrible pure blue of the sky. Karel could see it all and had to restrain himself from touching her. He thought: She’s my age. How is it she’s not amazed at herself?

  He got home uncertain of what had happened and shining with the experience regardless. The house was quiet and dark. His father was sitting in the kitchen, clearing his throat in the repeated way he did when he was upset. Karel knew immediately that something involving his job hunt had disintegrated. He said a cautious hello and turned on the light. His father winced.

  “You’re sitting in the dark,” Karel said.

  His father looked at him to indicate he knew that.

  He went about the busy fiction of beginning preparations for supper, with no clear idea what he was making or looking for in the various cabinets. He ended up with an unlikely array on the counter before him: a cheese grater, a large spoon, a shallow pot, a can of yams. His father gazed on the assortment impassively.

  “Hungry?” Karel asked. It was dangerous to ask what was wrong, and dangerous not to.

  “Look at him,” his father said. The suppressed anger in the voice shook him. “Comes in like there’s nothing wrong, like the world’s a—” He gave up, unable to think of the word. He returned his attention to the table, as though it were the least repellent object in the room.

  “What’s wrong?” Karel asked.

  “What’s wrong,” his father said.

  Karel was peeved, tired of this. He rubbed his face. “Did you get turned down for something?” he asked.

  “I got turned down for something, all right,” his father said. He was very close to violence. “You’re an imbecile, you know that? How did I get such an imbecile for a son?” He rode the word with such stress his head bobbed.

  Karel looked at the counter, not seeing clearly.

  “Your mother was right about you,” his father said in distaste, as if that settled the matter.

  The emotional swing from Leda to this was too abrupt, and Karel could not help tears. “What did she say?” he challenged. “She never said anything.”

  His father didn’t respond. He seemed to have the ability to say anything he wanted and then forget he’d said it. He seemed as well not to realize Karel remembered. Karel knew when he hurt his father, he couldn’t control himself and was sorry even as he did it, but his father wasn’t sorry for anyone, either when they fought or afterward.

  They remained where they were, wishing they had someone other than each other. “We don’t have anything to eat,” Karel said. “For supper.” He intended it as an indictment.

  His father ignored him. He folded a paper napkin into a little boat and set it on the table. “I don’t want to have meals with you,” he said. “For the next few days, you eat before I come home.”

  “Fine,” Karel said. He shoved the cheese grater into the pot with a crash and left the room.

  Once upstairs he heard the pop and crackle of a radio and he shouted, his anguish making him reckless, “Where’d we get money for a radio? Who has money for a radio?”

  His father walked softly to the bottom of the stairs, dangerously close to coming up. “I bought it,” he said. “I thought we were coming into some good luck.”

  Karel lay on his bed without moving, terrified. After a moment his father returned to the kitchen.

  A voice furry with static spoke for the Committee for Popular Enlightenment.

  “You couldn’t even buy a good one,” Karel said, as loud as he dared.

  There was more popping and snorting of the radio being tuned. We call on our people, the voice said, for simple enthusiasm and simple pride in their national destiny, not for melancholy and sophistication.

  The voice reported, as if its limitless patience were about to be overtaxed, even more provocations to the north, and added that listeners could rest assured that the government in their name intended to brook no more nonsense and to defend the country offensively along those borders.

  The radio was off. There was a muffled squeaking sound, and a dull clank. Was his father eating the yams?

  “Do you want help?” he called, despite himself. “Do you want something warmed up?” His voice rang on the bare walls.

  There was no answer. There was a small crash. His father rarely got cans opened without incident, never uncorked wine bottles without picking to bits half of the cork, never built things, never took things apart. Karel remembered him gazing at the flybag while Karel built it. He imagined his father downstairs, standing with dull lassitude before the yams, unable to understand the unfairness of things, unable to understand his own inertia, unable to understand at this point how his life could have gotten away from him. Years ago he’d watched his father go through the first stretch of unemployment. For whole afternoons he’d lain in bed looking at his hands or something ordinary like a chair. Karel had poked around the house, frightened and depressed, and had thought even then that if it happened again he’d leave. He hadn’t gone anywhere yet. Oh, Leda, he thought melodramatically, and didn’t finish, feeling selfish and childish.

  He went up to the storage space above the house. The heat was stifling and close, and the single covered window seemed darker than the rest of the room. In a box for machine parts he found a woman’s sun hat he didn’t recognize, and a pair of shoes. His father kept his mother’s things packed away. That was another reason they had moved: his father had told him once that the city had been his mother’s place, their house had been his mother’s house, and his father had gotten tired of trying to stick it out, and for what? The Schieles had moved after Mr. Schiele’s death, and Karel, who’d been resisting his father’s periodic threats to leave the city, had performed a complete about-face. He’d spoken, with some guilt at his own deceitfulness, about the possible opportunities and the lower cost of living in the desert. He had not mentioned the Schieles.

  He had very few memories of his mother. One of his earliest, possibly spurious, was of a woman in warm gray and pale blue huddled near him on a tiled floor. There were snatches remaining from her funeral—an unpleasant-smelling man leaning close and telling him not to worry, another woman saying there was no doubt where his mother had gone, but not mentioning where, and a decision on his part, staring at the coffin, that she would be back by Saturday—but most of the rest was lost. He pulled a photo from a box of train and ferry tickets—why had his father saved train and ferry tickets?—and the photo, curled at the edges like a proclamation, was of the seashore, with a grainy woman by a café table in the middle distance gazing out at some boats. Her face was hidden by a hat. She was in a perfect circle of shade. The hat was not this hat, but something about it, the brim or the spray of flowers near the band, was familiar. There was nothing else in with the tickets.

  He set the smaller box aside and rummaged a little more. He thought of Leda and her mother, Leda remarking distantly once while walking with him that they were happy enough in their own separate ways. He found a postcard of the desert—his mother had visited here!—sent back to the city and his father.

  He knelt beside the box and turned the card over once or twice in his hands. The handwriting was careless and very adult. It was dated with the year
, and he calculated he’d been two at the time. Had she left him with his father? The card read: Simon: It’s hot and glorious here, as we expected. I find blue lizards in my overnight bag. There are mineral springs and ruins to visit and travel is arduous but very inexpensive. This drawing is of a great gate from the early Empire, not nearly so impressive in person. Hope all is well—

  He sat with his back to the box for a long time, the sadness of not having been mentioned at all in a card from his lost mother growing in him like a bubble. When his father called him, he went downstairs, trailing his hand on the wall, acknowledging the truce.

  Hiring was announced for a Public Works project in the area and Karel was sent to Naklo, a little town near the border, to pick up an application for his father. The zoo was not open, and he found when reporting there in the morning only a note to the staff on the outer gate: Lights out in the Reptile House. The Civil Guard has decided to carry on a political inspection. We must, they suggest, be patient. —Albert. So he had no convincing reason for avoiding the trip.

  The noon bus dropped him at his stop an hour late. His father had gotten instructions by telephone on how to proceed from there, and Karel stood in an unfamiliar square peering at his father’s scrawl. He took a numbered trolley to another part of town. He found himself growing anxious as less and less of what they passed seemed to coincide with the instructions. To double-check the number he asked a man across the aisle. The man shrugged before he finished the question.

  The trolley stopped with a sway and a jolt at a narrow side street to allow a small convoy of Civil Guard buses to pass. A young man scrabbled half out of the open window of the last one, hanging upside down and waving his arms to try to get his balance. Someone had him by the belt loops. He dropped lower suddenly with a jerk and then tumbled onto the road. The woman next to Karel gave an exclamation as if she’d seen something acrobatic at the circus. The young man pulled himself onto the trolley and clambered inside. He was bleeding from the top of his head. The buses on the side street were stopped and guards were trying to get off. The trolley pulled away into traffic.

  They were all quiet at the conductor’s courage. He was looking at the man with his rearview mirror. The woman next to Karel took out a handkerchief and gestured toward the blood. She said, to break the silence, that it was terrible what these people thought they could get away with.

  Halfway up a hill the conductor stopped the trolley. They could hear sirens and honking behind them. The young man scrambled out and disappeared between two houses.

  So Karel never got to the application office. All the passengers were loaded onto another bus and driven to the local police station, where they waited to be interviewed. The trolley conductor disappeared. The woman who’d been next to Karel said, “This is terrible. This is an outrage,” while they waited. Karel was interviewed next to last—naturally, he thought—by a beefy sergeant tired of the whole business whose interrogation lasted all of four or five minutes. The sergeant asked Karel what he saw, and Karel told him. The sergeant asked if the man had any confederates, and Karel said no. The sergeant asked if he could describe the man, and Karel said truthfully he hadn’t seen him too clearly. The sergeant frowned, his pencil making edgy little anticipatory lines on a pad, and told him he could go.

  By the time he reached the application office it was closed and he’d missed the last bus besides. He got a long and meandering ride home on the front of a manure truck, holding his breath futilely and swatting at flies even after it was too dark to see.

  The next morning he went over Leda’s to tell her the story. Mrs. Schiele told him that Leda was busy. He could wait in the living room. She sat opposite him with a great exhalation, as though she believed it was her unhappy job to entertain him until he drifted away from boredom. She gazed at the piano, a small black upright polished and shiny with disuse. “Do you play?” she asked, though the question seemed ridiculous. She said she once had, and left the rest to his imagination. She indicated her hands—arthritis? he wondered—and rubbed her knuckles as if to remind herself of the pain.

  “What an artist the world lost,” Leda said impatiently, coming into the room to flounce herself down on the fat green chair opposite him.

  Her mother sniffed. “I tried to get my daughter to carry on, to have a little—”

  “Oh, stop,” Leda said. “So what’s the news?”

  Karel told her about the trolley. Mrs. Schiele was looking at him, and he realized he had a dirty arm on a lace doily that looked to be a hundred-year-old family heirloom or something.

  Leda was appalled. She said that this was the kind of thing that everyone was supposed to be patient about. The NUP was always asking for patience while it consolidated its position and ferreted out those working against the unity of the country.

  Her mother tsked.

  “I don’t know what I would have done,” Leda said. “These people are such pigs!”

  “Leda!” her mother said.

  Leda put her hand to her forehead. She said, “What they get away with is so outrageous it makes me want to scream.”

  Karel winced. She was too loud. He felt cowardly, ready to agree with anything to win her over.

  Her mother got up and looked ready to leave the room. “Miss Politics,” she said. “Fifteen years old and she knows better than everybody else.”

  “I do,” Leda said with some vehemence.

  “So when you’re old enough you be Praetor,” her mother said.

  “When I’m old enough I’ll help throw all them out,” Leda muttered.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” her mother said vaguely. She rubbed her eyes with both hands and sighed.

  “You’re scared of everything,” Leda said. “Daddy’s ghost, this place, everyone around us.”

  They were quiet. Karel felt intensely uncomfortable, and politically too ignorant to know what he should be arguing.

  “You listen to rumors,” Leda’s mother said. “This party’s like the rest. You don’t remember things before.”

  “I know,” Leda said with that sarcastic look she had. “I’m too young for things.”

  “Why do you always twist my words?” her mother demanded.

  Leda was silent.

  Her mother rubbed her knuckles and the back of her hand. She was still standing in the middle of the room. She said, “You talk about border troubles and things you hear about. I’m talking about things I see, things like more jobs and less fighting and not a new government every ten minutes, things like that.”

  “I can’t talk to you,” Leda said, as if announcing the weather.

  They sat quietly, Karel surrendering his hope of an invitation to lunch.

  “They say in their own Party program, which they even published, what they’re going to do,” Leda said, sadly. “Twenty-five points.”

  “Who reads programs? Do you read programs?” Mrs. Schiele asked Karel. He shook his head. “The National Unity Party is something new,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

  “Well,” Karel said, standing.

  “What about all the troubles, all the beatings, the people who are missing?” Leda said. “You think it’s just foreigners it happens to?”

  “I think troublemakers who won’t mind their own business are getting into trouble,” her mother said sharply. “You leave trouble to the police.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Leda said.

  “Leda,” her mother said.

  “I’m sorry,” Leda said, frustrated. “You’re awfully quiet,” she told Karel.

  “Oh, leave the poor boy alone,” her mother said, working into an anger. “You have to badger him as well?”

  “Do I badger you?” Leda asked.

  Karel shook his head, his mouth half-closed.

  “There,” Leda said, without triumph. “See?”

  “There’s no sense arguing with you when you’re being impossible,” her mother said stiffly. She left the room.

  “So don’t,” Leda called
after her.

  “You’ll just disagree with whatever I say,” her mother said from the kitchen.

  “So test me,” Leda said. “Tell me the NUP are idiots.”

  “I don’t like you using that word!” her mother yelled. She was standing in the doorway, brandishing a large stirring spoon.

  Leda quieted, frightened. Her mother left the doorway.

  Karel cleared his throat. He put his palms together in front of his mouth.

  Leda swung her legs around and hauled herself from the chair and suggested a walk. “We’re going to go get into trouble, Mom,” she called from the front step, and then shut the door behind her when her mother didn’t answer.

  On the walk Karel asked about Nicholas, to change the subject.

  “That’s one good thing,” Leda said. “The NUP says too much aid goes to places like mental institutions. Naturally. They probably all escaped from one. I’m hoping they’ll just abolish the whole thing and send him home.”

  “Where do you read all this stuff?” Karel asked. Leda shot him a look, and he didn’t pursue it. “You don’t like Nicholas’s … place, huh?” he said instead. “I thought they teach them skills and things.”

  “I’ll tell you what the kids learn,” Leda said. “They learn to clean filthy things. They learn to sweep. Sometimes to count. I asked Nicholas once what he was learning and he said he was learning to be quiet.”

  Karel nodded sympathetically, chagrined that this topic too had exploded. He hadn’t had any idea things were that bad there.

  “I don’t know whether to cry or hit people when I go there,” she said. “It’s so terrible.”

  “I’ll go with you next time,” he offered. Another, shadow part of him said, Are you out of your mind?

  “You want to?” Leda asked, and stopped, and looked at him closely. “Thanks,” she said, and squeezed his arm. “That’s nice.”

  He was pleased with the squeeze and nursed the feeling for a while.

  They continued walking, and he asked where they were going. Leda said the cave with the bats. Did he know about it? She’d show him.