Lights Out in the Reptile House (3 page)

She ate only vegetation, Albert said. Which was about the only type of food she could catch. He turned away from her enclosure and at a crossing hall handed the fish heads to an assistant heading toward the crocodiles.

They stopped again on the snake tier at a glass enclosure that seemed empty. Karel was all attention, trying to be the star pupil. What am I looking at? he thought. Albert tapped the glass. A snake appeared, a hognose, unnoticed in plain view by Karel because Karel was still, as Albert always told him, inexperienced at seeing. The old man's tapping the glass made clear that he'd seen Karel's confusion, and Karel thumped his forehead on the pane and let it rest there, despairing of ever learning anything. The hognose, a mottled brown with an upturned nose like a shovel lip, rose and hooded its neck and hissed loudly, mimicking a cobra, and then struck at the glass. When Karel didn't move, it rolled over and played dead, its mouth agape and tongue hanging out.

At the lizard tier they stopped beside the desert iguanas. A small gecko looked on from across the aisle, waving its tail like a prowling cat. Albert gathered the long metal tube and a bag of olives left for him against the wall and prepared to enter the enclosure at the end of the row while Karel watched a brilliant yellow iguana, entranced at its way of growing torpid in intricate attitudes. Albert cleared his throat, and Karel came to himself and followed him around the back of the tier.

The old man smoothed his hair and straightened his coat, as if preparing to meet royalty, and then tapped the door loudly to clear away dim-witted individuals who hadn't registered the vibrations of his footsteps. He opened it, gestured Karel through, and followed. They watched carefully where they stepped. Iguanas scattered in various directions and then froze as if playing a children's game. Some froze on branches, others head downward on rock faces. A few squeezed into clefts in the piled shale. Albert was making tiny squeaking noises with his pursed lips. He had his sights set on a small brown lizard with a large head, clinging to a rock not much bigger than itself. He identified it as a crested anole. Not feeling good, he said, but she wouldn't hold still for the noose.

The noose was the usual way of gathering specimens, a thin bamboo pole a few feet long with a string running its length and a tiny lasso dangling from the end. Few lizards seemed to mind having the pole waved cautiously over their heads, and most were gathered this way without harm, after some admittedly exasperating maneuvering of the miniature noose. When the noose tightened they always spread their legs stiffly, as if refusing to believe they were being lifted from the earth.

“So,” Albert said, “we resort to drastic measures.” He held up an end of the metal tube and fitted an olive into it. He put his mouth to it like a bugle, aimed the other end at the anole, and blew hard. The olive ricocheted off two walls and the anole bounced off the rock and rolled over limp.

A larger lizard scurried to the olive and clasped it, stopping in that position.

“It doesn't hurt them?” Karel asked, amazed.

Albert shook his head, gathering the anole gently into a mesh specimen net. Its small mouth gaped, and Karel could see grain-sized teeth. “Ripe olives,” Albert said. “The nomads, when they want to kill them for food, use pebbles or nails.” He held the little drooping animal up for Karel's inspection. An assistant passed by and stared at them through the glass. “How would you describe her on a field report?” he asked.

Karel coughed, immediately nervous.

“You'd start with size,” Albert said.

“Size,” Karel said quickly, and trailed off.

“Extensible throat fan,” Albert said. He pointed out the throat sac. He asked Karel if there were other distinguishing characteristics.

Karel nodded, appreciating his tone. He pointed out to Albert the coloration, the crossbands, the compressed tail with a crest supported, Albert demonstrated, by bony rays.

“She loves the sun,” Albert said fondly, and prepared to leave.

Karel asked what was wrong with her.

“That we'll find out,” Albert said, and he smiled, and patted the anole with his forefinger as he might pat a soap bubble.

Outside the enclosure he went on for Karel's benefit, though he'd been ready to leave. His voice was patient. He offered the information whatever Karel's capacities. She was a member of the Iguanidae family, fourteen genera, with forty-four species native to their range. She was small for the group. Did he notice the five clawed toes? Did he notice the teeth attached to the bony ledge inside the jaw? She'd only lay one egg every couple of weeks. Her mate would defend his territorial range by elaborate behavioral signals that resembled energetic pushups. When they found a mate, Karel would see.

He left Karel to the feeding, and Karel, once he'd returned from the food kitchens, sat among the iguanas and anoles in their enclosure, watching them eat their mealworms and grapes, gazing at his reflection beyond them in the glass, and smiling at passing assistants, who smiled indulgently back.

He stopped by Leda's on the way home. He was so inured to not finding her there that he was already backing away from the hedge, angry with himself for being so pathetic, when he realized he'd seen her. She was sitting in a lounge chair, holding a letter and envelope out in front of her like mismatched socks. He hesitated and then passed through the gap in the hedge to their garden. She said hi and smiled at him as if not wanting to forget something else. While he fumbled and made hand motions of hello, she slipped the letter into a flimsy overseas envelope with a dreamy precision. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped blouse with a gory ketchup stain that had not washed out, and her brown hair fanned across her cheeks. There was a faint vaccination mark on the tan of her arm. Her forehead looked damp. She said, “Well. I haven't seen you in a while,” sounding like a much older girl.

“So hi,” he said. His hands described a half-wave and caught themselves.

She looked at him steadily, as if she'd forgotten something about him, and set the letter aside with an odd delicacy that stirred him. He felt again reduced in her presence, and to compensate stepped forward for no reason and tipped a planter holding some pale trumpets, flopping them dismally onto the ground and spilling dirt.

“Eep,” she said, bending close. She helped him gather the dirt back into the terra-cotta planter. She said her mother would die. She sounded pleased. Her eyelashes were longer at the outer corners, giving her eyes a special slant.

She settled back into the lounge chair while he tried to get the trumpets to remain upright. They tipped and drooped and packing the soil seemed not to help, and finally he left one hand cradled around the stems and tried to settle himself into a comfortable crouch beside them. She produced a bundled blue sweater and attached ball of yarn from somewhere and arranged them on her lap. Her shoulders and the back of her neck were red, and he worried tenderly about sunburn. She was focused on the sweater. There were shortages, and apparently it was being sacrificed for another project. She began winding, her hand a rapid satellite around the ball of wool, and in thin rumples and lines the sweater began to disappear. He was disheartened by her ability to shift in his presence to an abrupt and neutral lack of interest, the way dogs might in the middle of play.

“Don't worry about it,” she said. “I'll tell her I knocked it over. Sit in the chair.” She pointed to an undersized folding thing that always seemed to be waiting for him. It looked too small even for David, her little brother. He wondered at his most pessimistic if she intended it as a sly humiliation. He sat in it, and it flexed and tottered as it always did. The trumpets slid slowly over. He drummed a finger on his knee like a simpleton.

“How's Nicholas?” he asked. Her older brother was institutionalized locally. She thought it was unnecessary. She battled with her mother about it. She said he had a learning disorder, that was all. Karel hadn't heard her mother's side of the story. He had tried to visit Nicholas once, unsuccessfully, and remembered small groups of patients standing at the gates, staring mournfully at passing children in shorts.

Leda thanked him and said Nicholas was fine. She was pleased he'd asked.

David came out of the house carrying a comic book and sat on the sandy ground between them, puzzled at the richer color of the spilled soil. He looked over at the trumpets with interest but didn't say anything. He was seven years old and had round eyes and a thin face. Karel liked him. He had a way when nervous of hesitating with his eyes averted. He had no interest in the comic book and gave it to Karel.

The comic book was titled
The Party Comes to Power,
and featured the Praetor on the cover in armor, swinging an ax against a horde of cringing demons. Some of the demons had the exaggerated features of the nomads. They'd made the Praetor overly muscular, and he looked silly in armor. The inside had nothing to do with the cover and looked like a pretty boring account of the National Unity Party's rise to power: the two referendums, the national vote, the Praetor's appointment as Guardian of the Republic, and the announcement of the Emergency Revolutionary Defense of the Country. That had been the night Karel's father had been taken away. Karel flipped through it for anything of interest until Leda took it from him and tore it in half. She dropped both halves between them.

David looked at the mess and pinched his earlobe with his forefinger and thumb. He and Karel watched Leda work.

Her hair swayed over the yarn. She was absorbed. He watched the soft motions of her head and the quiet dance of insects behind her, and he felt a fragrant stillness, filling him with expectations of what he didn't know. He watched her expression. The yarn was speeding back and forth, the sweater vanishing from the earth.

Mrs. Schiele came outside carrying a dark brown radio shaped like an egg halved lengthwise. She said hello. She said she'd brought Leda her radio. She was a gentle and standoffish woman, full of warnings for her children about getting entangled in other people's potentially dangerous business. She liked Karel and seemed to feel he was no troublemaker, docile and intelligent enough. He wondered if his relationship with Leda could ever survive such a blow.

She complimented his haircut, and he nodded, embarrassed, running his hand over the crown of his head. His father insisted his hair be trimmed close on the sides in the current military style. It left the hair on top in a haylike mat when he washed it.

“It looks nice,” she said.

Leda snorted. David picked something from the spilled dirt and held it to the light like a prospector. The trumpets by now hung horizontally over the lip of the planter. Karel willed Mrs. Schiele not to notice.

“Beautiful day,” she finally sighed, and went into the house.

Leda watched her go. Then she tilted her head and peered at Karel. He was growing, she said. Was he bigger?

He said he was. He was growing fast now that they couldn't afford food. His father called him the Stork, always with some of the sadness of a poor provider. Karel thought of her questions as opportunities to talk more, and he was squandering each of them, one by one.

She asked if he wanted to hear the radio. She turned it on.

They listened to a show called
The Party Has the Floor!
The surrounding countries, the nation's enemies, the whole world could go down in flames, the speaker said. Why should the nation be concerned with that? The nation's concern was the nation, that it should live and be free.

There were bulletins from the northern border. The announcer spoke of the difficulties, the courage, and the enthusiasm of the special border patrols. They could hear singing. Some men he identified as wounded shuffled up audibly to the microphone and repeated the information that they were wounded, specifying where. One man in a preternaturally calm voice said, “I have lost my feet.”

Leda shut it off. Her smile had disappeared. She said, “I visited the borderlands once, with my father.” Her father had died the night of the Bloody Parade. He'd been crossing the street. She talked about him only as a quiet man who'd been an accountant for a gravel yard, who drank beer and read at night. She loved him very much, she said. She left that in unspoken contrast with her mother.

“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.