Lights Out in the Reptile House (7 page)

In literature they studied Mystical Forebears, whose chantings were transcribed from rock fragments dragged from various archaeological sites. They were so stupid that everyone changed words here and there in the workbooks to mock them: “The skin of our race is roseate-bright, our complexion like milk and blood” became, in Karel's workbook, “The skin of our race will nauseate, right, our soup will be milk and blood.”

They were instructed to clip and remove foreign writers from their anthologies—the new anthologies had yet to arrive from the printers—with the explanation that they as a people were the only ones capable of profound and original thought. The foreign spirit, Miss Hagen explained, was like the bee, which worked efficiently and had its place, while their spirit was like the eagle, which with its strong wings pushed down the air to lift itself nearer the sun.

Karel, irritated and lost, wrote on his paper
Bee
—
Eagle
.

Miss Hagen read from the booklet
Do Not Stand Apart!
There were those, she read, who found it comfortable and soothing to withdraw in a sulk to their own little chamber, to nurse their holy wounded feelings and say, “You needn't count on me anymore; I don't give a hoot about the whole thing.” Because their tender sensitivities had been offended by one thing or another they spoiled the joy of achievement for the whole group. Who were these people who refused their obligations? Who were these people?

When she saw their faces she apologized for getting too complicated and promised to talk more about all of this later.

He received a note from Leda which read:
I'm glad you like the Kestrels so much,
and when he tried to catch her eye she wouldn't look.

They watched a filmstrip involving polite members of the Civil Guard teaching methods of terrace farming to grateful and simpleminded nomads. The nomads provided comic relief by doing things like attempting to eat the fertilizers. The day ended with Miss Hagen telling the story of a young boy from a school much like theirs who'd had the courage to turn in his parents, both of whom were working for outside interests. The class reaction was muted. They went home without even the enthusiasm that came from their release at the end of the day or the new opportunity to torment Sprute.

He changed and went over Leda's. When he peeked through her hedge she was sunning herself in a faded canvas deck chair. Her skirt was raised in a lazy S across her thighs. Her elbows were lifted to the sun. She seemed not to recognize him immediately. She did not move her skirt, and he imagined he saw underpants, of a dreamy pale blue.

On the ground nearby were discarded oil paints, tumbled across a palette like undersized and squeezed toothpaste tubes. David sat near the mess reading with his back to the sun while the breeze turned the pages of his book every so often, in anticipation of his progress.

She asked how things were at the zoo, and Karel told her. She said her skin temperature was about a thousand degrees. She asked if he wanted any mint tea with shaved ice. She said she had started a painting for him, and had given up. She held up as evidence a forearm crisscrossed with blue and yellow paint.

He was thrilled, and sat near the palette and examined the paint tubes for traces of his unrealized painting. The names on the tubes pleased him. Where some of the paint had bubbled out it was still moist, and the skins were resilient and yielding like the skin on boiled milk.

Leda said she hadn't gotten over the bats, and wanted to know if he had. He shook his head. She hadn't told her mother, and asked if his father had helped. Karel said he hadn't, much. She shivered, thinking about it.

She turned the radio on. It was hidden below her in the shade of the deck chair. After some staticky popping there was a howling wind, and then the overheated music of Adventure Hour.

“
This
thing,” Leda said.

Karel followed along, dandling a paint tube. The story was about mountain climbers, one of whom announced hanging over a crevasse that he was doing all of this for the people. He went on to describe the mountain he was mastering, which he called the Ice Giant. An arctic blizzard whistled behind his voice. The Ice Giant was supremely beautiful and supremely dangerous, a majestic force which invited the ultimate affirmation of, and escape from, the self.

“This is a
mountain
climber?” Leda said. Her eyes were closed to the heat.

“I don't understand any of these shows,” David said.

A fanfare indicated the climber's triumph, which he confirmed by shouting, “Thus I plant our nation's flag in this wild place.” There was a sound effect of the flag going in, sounding macabre, like something being stuck with a knife. Leda changed the station. She waved away an inquisitive fly.

Karel was moved by the notion of the almost-painting and felt a rush of feeling for her, a surge of excitement and longing that could have been audible as he watched her drowse. He shaded his eyes from the sun. She turned on the canvas chair and smiled. She had at that moment the face of a placid, intelligent child, someone younger than David. He was so filled with tenderness that it was only with difficulty that he restrained himself from announcing it whatever the consequences. She sighed and said she couldn't have mint tea alone.

More and more he connected unrelated elements of his life in unexpected ways to her; more and more she would appear, magically, inside a disconnected thought, slipping by without turning her head. They'd been friends since childhood, but she had had many friends, and he felt as though he'd had just her. Around her as he was now he felt the same unreasonable contentment he felt in the presence of old dogs comfortably asleep.

Most of all he wanted to talk to her about it, and couldn't. He spent so many nights burrowing through the whole thing that he was bewildered by the sight of it. Once he'd almost had the courage, walking with her in the shade of an anonymous whitewashed house, but when he'd said, “Leda,” and she'd turned to face him, the directness of the clear look that returned his stare had seemed to him so adult and sensual that all he could think to say at that point was “You have nice hands.” She had looked at him strangely.

Leda said, “You're quiet today.” He focused on David, attempting to induce him telepathically to leave. Mrs. Schiele came out of the house in a sundress and bonnet of a matching peculiar green, carrying a glass of ice water and filling him with impatience.

“I guess I am, too,” Leda said.

Her mother greeted them and settled herself into the other chair beside Leda, remarking to David that if he continued reading like that he'd grow up a hunchback. She asked rhetorically if her daughter the princess was speaking to her today, and then said to Karel, “What a battle you missed.”

“That's some outfit, Mother,” Leda said.

“Such a battle,” her mother said.

Leda sighed and said, “We had an argument.”

“Arguments like that I hope to have once in a lifetime, thank you,” her mother said. The two of them were positioned identically, arms and legs straight out, eyes closed.

“What about?” Karel ventured. He nursed a crazy hope he was the cause.

“The Population Registration Act,” Mrs. Schiele said, as if talking about it once again was inevitable, and talking about it the first time had been a terrible mistake.

“Oh,” Karel said, and then realized in an awful and dim way that he sounded like a simpleton.

“Karel gets worked up about these things,” Leda said.

“No, I know about it,” he protested, but only weakly: he knew some details. The act required registering at the post office. It assigned everyone to a racial group and said that everyone who was one quarter or more nomad had to register that way. What had they been fighting about?

Leda looked over at him. Mrs. Schiele said, “My daughter can argue about the Population Registration Act.”

He was curious, but mostly he wanted her mother and brother to go away and for Leda to say “Karel,” the way he'd said her name, near that whitewashed wall.

“You young people never see nomads anymore. There are a few who live outside of town,” Mrs. Schiele said. “That's a shame, Leda's right. When I was her age we lived closer together. Now you have to make an effort to get to know them.”

“Mother,” Leda warned.

“Leda doesn't like the idea of renegotiated borders and their getting their own areas,” Mrs. Schiele said.

“Now who's twisting words?” Leda asked. “I said they'll get the horrible places no one else wants.”

“You're an expert, of course,” her mother said. She sipped from her ice water and rolled the glass on her cheeks. “Considering all the troubles, especially after the elections, I'm sure they're happier with their own kind.”

Leda made a scoffing noise. A coasting bicycle passed by beyond their hedge, whirring. Her mother was quiet.

Karel cleared his throat. “I don't see anything wrong with giving them some land of their own that they could work,” he said. It was something his father once said.

They both were looking at him. “Then you're an idiot, too,” Leda said, with extra heat.

“Leda,” her mother said sharply, and the blood rushed to Karel's face. “Say you're sorry.”

“Why?” Leda said. “If he talks like an idiot?”

Mrs. Schiele sighed theatrically and looked over at him with a what-can-you-do? expression. Leda lay back, flushed and fidgety. Karel raged inwardly at himself, at that familiar granite feeling of stupidity.

“When I get old,” Mrs. Schiele said, as though changing the subject, “I want to be taken care of by a nomad. I wouldn't want somebody else to see me that way.”

Leda said nothing.

“Leda had a woman who was half nomad as a nanny,” Mrs. Schiele said. “Did she ever tell you that?”

Leda made a bitter, hissing noise.

Karel shook his head, unwilling to anger her further.

“She did,” Mrs. Schiele said. “She was wild about her nanny. Told her secrets she wouldn't tell me.”

“You can see why,” Leda said.

He experienced an odd, powerfully erotic image of interracial contact in a darkened theater, with Leda as nomad. You're depraved, he thought. You really are.

David stood and arched his back painfully, for his mother's benefit. He remained where he was. Mrs. Schiele gave no indication of intending to leave, either. It seemed to Karel that in terms of all he cared about he was moving backward.

“In the early days of my marriage we had to concentrate just on survival,” Mrs. Schiele began, and Karel thought in frustration, Now why's she talking about
this?
“My father didn't approve of Leda's father, and didn't give us a bean. Still, it was exciting, we were determined to have a house, determined to have children,” she said.

Leda sat up, rubbing her arms. “Mother, you must have made sense once,” she said. “But it was so long ago—”

“Oh, hush,” her mother said. “Karel's interested, even if you're not.”

Go in the house,
Karel thought fiercely.

“When I grew up, love and marriage were big things,” Mrs. Schiele said. “You were told what you were doing by your parents. And it was your parents' privilege and duty to do that.”

Leda announced she couldn't stand another minute of this and they were going for a walk. Her tone made it clear that Karel's comment had not been forgotten and that he was at this point the lesser of two evils. He followed her through the gap in the hedge, waving goodbye. “Have a nice time,” Leda's mother called after them.

Her walk had a fluidity and purpose that suggested she knew where she was going. He found it hard to fall into her rhythm and imagined someone seeing the two of them: her glide and his uneven, constant adjustments.

“God,” Leda said, “look at that,” without indicating what.

“I'm sorry about what I said,” Karel told her. “It was stupid.”

Leda looked at him and made a lump under her cheek with her tongue. “You're so fake sometimes I don't know what to do,” she said.

The comment was more crushing than the one in the backyard, and he knew what she meant: his losing efforts to keep track of her nuances and formulate strategies to win her over.

“I just like you,” he finally said. At least it was honest.

“I like you, too,” she said. They passed an enclosed courtyard where a black-and-white cat with an eye stitched shut stealthily climbed a ladder to the second story. He had a feeling she was waiting for him to go on. So why didn't he? Did he have any idea what he was talking about?

They passed a stone bench overhung with carpenter bees, and a terrier puppy sleeping in the sun with its mouth ajar, exhausted from a day's hysterics. “I don't know if we'll ever be really good friends, Karel,” Leda finally said, looking at the dog, and he felt as though he'd watched a door close on him, locking him out of happiness.

Along the road two women sat unloading baskets of gourds and chatting. On one of the gourds an anole perched, turning his head to examine the vibrations. Leda talked about a friend from school, Elsie, and the night her mother had dozed on the couch and the two of them had drunk sweet fermented wine that Elsie had smuggled in. Elsie kept threatening to throw up and that would make them start laughing all over again, though they had to be quiet. And Elsie's boyfriend came over and tried to get in, but Elsie didn't like him anymore, though he didn't know it. He just stood at the window saying, “Let me in, let me in,” in a voice muffled by the glass. Of course, her mother had missed the whole thing.

“Who was her boyfriend?” Karel asked quietly. “What happened to him?”

“I don't think you knew him,” Leda said. “We shut the sunshades at one point, and when we remembered them he was gone.”

They walked to the very edge of town. The dry brush in front of them extended to the hills in the distance. They turned and headed back. Leda told him more about Elsie, who was always talking about marriage and supported the regime because she liked the colors and because she'd gotten picked as a flower-bearer for the local celebrations of the Great Trek.