Lights Out in the Reptile House (23 page)

Everyone seems meek and willing to go about their business. Nicholas and I have a game on streetcars where I try to make men blush by staring at them, because he said once that girls blush if men look at them long enough. I used to play a game like that with Elsie.

People here follow the war news more closely than they do at home. You see little crowds around the kiosks all the time after announcements are posted. Even though there's nothing new there, either.

What else? All the big shots show off like idiots driving around in their requisitioned cars and occasionally bang into each other in the process. I think there are as many casualties here as on the front. Mostly we stand in line for everything (yesterday for a piece of cheese the size of your finger). Two days in a row the same married couple stood behind us and asked us where our Party pins were. We couldn't stand them. When the wife got sick on the second day and started throwing up right there in line we started pinching each other so we wouldn't burst out laughing.

You'll have to forgive me if this rambles. I've lost my journals so you're in some ways standing in for them.

Have you seen the new language rules for writing letters? You get them handed to you when you go to buy stamps. Euphemisms, and launderings of less pleasant and more precise words. All correspondence is supposed to be subject to them. Have you noticed there are no unpleasant words in this letter? Mother insisted, and I suppose she makes sense. Still, I worry daily that I'm becoming too sensible.…

Do you miss me? I miss you. Though sometimes I think it's good we're apart, because I couldn't take one person's company for too long. Don't misunderstand, but I think sometimes if you spend a lot of time with one person he or she might exert too great an influence on you. Have you ever felt like cutting adrift from everyone? I think I get very touchy when someone makes a lot of demands on me. As you must know yourself, there are hours of solitude that make up for the days you spend pining for someone.

Anyway sometimes I think if we keep in touch it could be nice this way, with two people keeping each other company w/o promising to meet up at such and such a place or stay together forever. They travel the way they're going together for a while, and then if their routes diverge they understand. But I suppose that's mostly wishful thinking on my part. A lot of times everything takes a less pleasant and rational course, and there's a lot of sadness and tiredness and inertia and hurt.…

This whole letter will probably strike you as odd in the extreme. Maybe you're sitting there thinking, Who is this person? Do you think about me? If you do, don't just think about me as I am—think about me as I'd like to be. We don't know each other well enough, I think, and I'm a lot to blame. Do you know what I'm thinking? Do you know what I'm thinking about? Will you write?

Leda

The next day they went through another set of double doors past the holding cells and interrogation room. They were going to what Kehr called a prisoner assessment room. On the way he showed Karel the punishment cells they called “the tubes.” He showed him the infirmary. He showed him some of the converted kennels. They passed a grating covering a small set of stairs leading to a subbasement. Somebody had taped a paper handwritten sign next to it that read
Juvenile
.

The prisoner assessment room was a white room like the interrogation room, with cement floors and walls and a wooden lattice screen with small desks behind it. The overhead lights flickered and buzzed. The desk and chairs were undersized, as if they'd been taken from a grammar school. There was a long unpainted metal table with two chairs. There was a metal bedframe with shackles on its four corners, hooked up improbably to a field telephone. There was a mop and pail in the corner. There was a big wooden box like a toy chest beside it filled with instruments. There were no windows.

“This is a torture room,” Karel said. He felt the way he had when giving Albert's name, hyperaware, and he could feel his insides racing.

“Torture is what we do here, yes,” Kehr said.

Karel backed up a step. This was like a blank wall. He'd imagined when he'd imagined anything at all dungeons and chains, fire and darkness. This was dirty, it was empty, it was ordinary. “I don't want to be here,” he said. “I don't want to see this. What are you going to do?”

“It's the next step for our young man from yesterday,” Kehr said. “It's the next step for you.”

“What're you going to do?” Karel asked.

Kehr sat in one of the chairs. His jacket bunched and creased, and he sat forward and straightened it. Karel put his hands behind his back and leaned his shoulders against the wall and did not look around, his stomach feeling emptied and urgent. He looked at the far wall near the ceiling, at a short row of iron grappling hooks. Below them there were fanlike patterns of scratchmarks on the concrete.

The door opened. The young man from the day before came in escorted by two others. The young man was naked except for his underwear, which bagged in an oversized way like a diaper. He looked rapidly around the room and didn't recognize Karel, but then, Karel remembered, he'd been blindfolded. Each of the other men had one of his arms.

They brought him to the bedframe and made him lie on his stomach. The springs in the frame creaked and jangled. No one said anything, and Karel had the surreal sense that he was watching the reenactment of a horrible crime.

The two men manacled the young man and shook the manacles to test them, and left. Kehr was still in his chair. He rubbed his eye with a fingertip and blinked. The young man lay spread-eagled where he was, gazing at a spot on the wall. The weight of his head was all on his chin, and he ground his molars. His jaw was still swollen. His toes curled and uncurled against the frame.

Two other men came in. One was short with heavy glasses and wore a white apron. The apron had
OP
printed on its upper left corner.

“This is someone we call Mr. Birthday,” Kehr said. The man in the apron smiled in acknowledgment. The other man was filthy and unshaven and looked like a prisoner himself and apparently didn't rate an introduction.

“This is Karel Roeder,” Kehr said.

“I don't want to be here,” Karel said. He was still against the wall. The man in the apron smiled sympathetically and crouched near the bedframe to examine wires that ran to the field telephone. The unshaven man crossed the room stiffly to the lattice screen and sat behind it at one of the desks. The shadows made patterns across his face and clothes. The desk was too small for him and it looked as if he were being made the object of a joke.

“Mr. Birthday is one of our up-and-coming experts in public safety training and civic action,” Kehr said. The man in the apron gave the wires an expert tug and nodded modestly.

The unshaven man behind the latticework had taken out a small writing pad and a pencil.

“What you're interested in is over here,” Kehr said, inclining his head toward the bedframe. “Not behind the screen.”

The unshaven man hadn't looked up and was concentrating fiercely on his writing pad. Kehr remarked that the prisoners here did their part to run the system; that way the customers served themselves, as they liked to say.

“It teaches them responsibility,” he added.

“I think we're about ready here,” the man in the apron said. He was bending over the toy box with his hands on his thighs. He reached in and extracted a silver rod a foot long and a narrow length of cheesecloth. The cheesecloth he folded and refolded and then wrapped around the tip of the rod and lashed it with string from his pocket. Karel recognized the knot from camp. The bedframe made a creaking and shifting sound.

“Sit down,” Kehr said to Karel. Karel was looking at the rod. “I would suggest it,” he warned. The man in the apron indicated the chair with the rod, as if offering an open seat on a bus. Karel sat down.

“What happens is this,” Kehr said, and he took hold of the crank handle on the field telephone. “The field telephone is battery-operated and generates a current when the handle is turned. The voltage produced depends on the speed at which it's turned.”

He turned the crank at an easy pace, the way he might grind coffee. The man in the apron reached over and flipped the switch beside the crank and the young man howled and shot from the metal frame all at once, a rigid board, a magic act. He came back down and bounced and screamed and then twisted and thrashed. Kehr stopped.

Karel pressed against the back of his chair as if he wanted to push through it. Kehr reached over and took his hand and put it on the crank over his, and Karel tore it away, trembling. Kehr turned the crank and flipped the switch as if introducing Karel to an uncomplicated but soothing craft. The young man shrieked and tore upward at his manacles, and the bedframe jumped an inch across the floor.

Kehr relinquished the crank to the man in the apron.

The man in the apron cranked at various speeds and thumbed the switch intermittently. The young man shrieked and cried and jabbered in between the shrieks. The manacles were making raw red lines on his wrists and ankles and he'd bitten his tongue.

“What're you doing?” Karel asked. “Why aren't you asking him questions?” He was trying to turn his head away, but he was too close and Kehr was restraining him from getting out of his chair. “
Why aren't you asking him questions?
” He looked wildly at Kehr, and Kehr put his finger to his lips.

The man in the apron unhooked the wires from the bedframe and wound them through an eye at the base of the rod. He cranked the field telephone again and touched the cheesecloth tip of the rod lightly to various parts of the young man's back. The young man screamed even louder than before. The rod made coin-sized burn marks. Karel could smell it. The man in the apron shut off the switch and adjusted the cheesecloth.

Karel had his hands over his ears and was trying to keep his eyes shut. “Why aren't you asking him
questions?
” he asked. His voice rebounded around the cement walls.

Kehr gave his arm a pat and then pulled it down, freeing an ear. He said, “Is it so hard to figure this out? What we do is administer fear in small doses, which we then gradually increase. Education. We're teaching him a story with two themes: ultimate brutality and absolute caprice.”

“I can't watch this,” Karel said. He was starting to sob.

“In fact you can,” Kehr said. “You're not up pounding on the door. You're not retching. You're not doing anything to stop us.”

“No no no no,” Karel shouted. The man in the apron walked the rod tip down the bumps of the young man's vertebrae and the young man started screaming the same thing. He drowned them all out.

Kehr said it was like Karel's herpetology and that Karel should've recognized that already. The man in the apron described a grid pattern with his prod across the young man's back and legs. The young man screamed as if someone were pulling his throat out. That sort of study created an identity for the object being studied, provided an essence. He was talking about a kind of power over the natural world. This was about power, the power to see clearly what one was designed for. What he was talking about, he said, was the
audacity
he had, the audacity Karel had—he shook Karel, hard, to focus his attention, and the man in the apron poured a small bottle of mineral water onto the young man's back and touched the rod to it—the audacity they had, to circle, as it were, like birds of prey over inarticulate suffering.

Karel was crying. Kehr was unbothered by it. After waiting for Karel to stop he got up and led him to the door and opened it for him. He said something in a low voice to the man in the apron. Out in the hall he shut the door with a clang on the young man's shrieks and smoothed his hair and reminded Karel that
he
had gotten up to leave, not Karel. This was nothing, he said. This was not torture. This was a long way from what it could be. This was exercise.

Karel,

Mother says the light here will ruin my eyes and here I am writing to you anyway. I'm in bed already, and I've even been to sleep and had a dream. Now I can't sleep, so I'm writing you, though I'm not sure you'll ever write back or that you got my other letter or that you'll even get this.

In my dream we were hiking. (I almost always dream I'm going somewhere.) We came to a big lake. It was night and there was a moon. You wanted me to swim the lake and I told you I wanted to eat first. That's all I remember, though later you kissed me. They say dreams depend on the noises you hear in your sleep. Maybe it's true. I always feel the same in dreams: like I live in this peculiar world where I'll never be entirely happy, but still … It's strange. It always makes me melancholy. Am I getting really sentimental?

I've been thinking of you more often than usual. Maybe because I'm always tired with work and everything. I tell myself: you're looking for a crutch. You know you can depend on him, how he feels about you. (Leda being presumptuous.) But then I find myself thinking about you anyway. I think, What do you know about him? And I find myself going over all the good things and remembering things like our walks. Karel! If I ever get completely sappy, promise to shoot me, like a horse.

After all my talk about self-sufficiency. I do really believe what I'm saying, but how many times am I able to act that way?

Well, if you didn't answer me before you'll never answer me now.

Work at the center is endless and all I do is complain about it. David and Mother try to stay away from me at night, and even Nicholas starts to yawn and blink after a while. I work with ten other girls and we're responsible for sixty-six children. (!) We waste a lot of time standing around waiting for our supervisor, etc. Even that's tiring. The worst times are the lunch breaks when we either monitor the children (who throw everything and trade food and fight about it nonstop until the period runs out) or eat with the other girls on the staff. The children wear me out so quickly: it's tiring having to think myself into their world and stay detached from it at the same time. And the girls on the staff are worse: I have to close my ears to their chatter. Sometimes I actually start humming to myself while they talk. Every time I join in it seems like a big concession and I immediately regret it. They come in every morning thrilled with the NUP and the war and go home just as blinkered. I usually manage to stay in the background, because of my shyness. I wish I could keep it up, but I catch myself showing off in little ways, trying to teach them. It's awful, this craving I have to be noticed. And look: even as I write that I'm wondering how it looks on paper. Where do I get ideas like that? Who am I to think I'm too good for these people? What arrogance! Where did I get it from?