Lights Out in the Reptile House (9 page)

Karel had never seen Albert's house. He'd barely spent time in his office. The house was on the other side of town. A block or two before it they came to a roadblock, staffed by two soldiers. What the roadblock was supposed to be guarding was anybody's guess. Albert misunderstood at first and thought the road closed. He led Karel a few streets over to an alternate route, which was also closed. Puzzled, he returned to the first roadblock. He stood looking at it as if to verify its existence while Karel waited in a misery of impatience. The soldiers at the barrier looked at them suspiciously now that they were back. When they finally crossed to the striped sawhorses, one of the soldiers, a thin teenager with a swollen eye, leveled his weapon at Albert's chest and left it there.

“What is this?” Albert asked pleasantly.

“Do you have identification?” the older soldier said. He was a corporal and had his breast pocket lined with candy bars.

“To go home?” Albert said. He began halfheartedly to fumble through his pockets.

“You live here?” the corporal said.

“You saw me go by this morning, when you were unloading these things,” Albert said. “I wondered what you were doing. The gun is unnecessary.”

From his wallet he extracted a card, his membership in the Herpetological Association.

“What is this?” the corporal said, after a pause. He held the card as if it were an attempt to humiliate him.

“It's the Herpetological Association,” Albert said. “I'm an officer. We study animals, reptiles. Lizards?”

“Why are you loafing near here?” the younger soldier said. Karel speculated on his swollen eye.

“Everything can be explained,” Albert said. “I work at the zoo—”

“If you move rapidly like that my friend'll kill you,” the corporal said. Karel felt a chill at the back of his head. The corporal handed the card back. “And who's this? This is your son?”

“I was looking for more identification,” Albert said. “No.”

“This is not your son?” the corporal said. This seemed to open whole new vistas of problems.

“He works for me,” Albert said, near despair. “He was coming over for lunch. I'm very tired.”

“Is that a hobby of yours?” the corporal said. “Inviting young boys over for lunch?”

The younger soldier guffawed.

Albert was silent. He peered down his block. The corporal looked over another identification card and speculated to the younger soldier what Albert would do or had already done with Karel. The younger soldier turned his head to use the good eye to listen. He said to Karel, “What are
you
looking at?” The corporal laughed.

The younger soldier hawked and spat and then moved aside and let Karel and Albert pass.

“Happy hunting,” the corporal called. Albert turned back to look, and then led Karel to his house.

In the entryway Karel cleared his throat and commented, to change the mood, on a fat, flowered tea cozy half covering the telephone. The flowers had smiling faces.

Albert turned on the radio and sat at the kitchen table. He rubbed his eyes with his palms. He said, “You want to know about the tea cozy. So. There's a man named Kehr. From the Civil Guard. He knows many surprising things about me, it turns out.” He got up and went through the cabinets and pulled out a box of crackers and a jar of olives, which Karel hoped wasn't his idea of lunch.

“People have been here to look at my phone,” he said. He pointed to his ear, and Karel gaped at the tea cozy, amazed.

“Or it could've been a neighbor,” he said, sighing. “I was supposed to have been listening to foreign broadcasts, and the idiot next store could've said something. We go at it every so often. She beats her rugs over the fence while I try to nap.”

“You listen to foreign broadcasts?” Karel said.

Albert made a disgusted noise and refused to answer.

Karel considered the tea cozy. Suppose his father had said something stupid or wrong somewhere? The more he thought about it, the more miraculous it seemed his father had stayed out of trouble this long.

“What would they do to you?” he asked. “If they thought something like that?”

Albert dumped the olives into a dish and brought out bread and cheese. When he lifted the bread from the cabinet the shelving lifted with it and Karel saw that it had a false bottom, a secret space. Albert glanced at him, and Karel had looked away in time. “Turn me over to somebody like our friends at the roadblock,” he said. “Or one of the centers.”

“To be reeducated?” Karel asked.

Albert looked at him sharply. “That's one way of putting it,” he said.

“Suppose that happened to my father?” Karel said.

Albert sliced the bread and then the cheese, and arranged the slices with a hurried sense of the right way to do things. “Your father didn't seem particularly opposed to this regime,” he said finally.

That was true, Karel reflected. He felt better.

Albert indicated the food and took a piece of cheese to demonstrate.

Karel laid some of the thicker cheese slices on a piece of bread and ate standing up. The cheese was very sharp and the bread was dry, a day or two old. He was thirsty. He asked what Albert thought about the war, and Albert said only that the war was obviously what the majority wanted.

“You think?” Karel said.

“By the majority I mean the Praetor,” Albert said.

When Karel asked him after a pause what he thought the nomads wanted, he said, “To be left alone.”

One of the olives tasted horrible, and he wasn't sure if he should spit it out. It made him more thirsty. He sat down without being asked, chewing endlessly and eyeing the water faucet. Albert poured himself a glass of water while Karel watched and drank the entire thing and put the glass in the sink.

After lunch they went into the shaded and gloomy living room, and Albert surveyed his sofa. It looked like he was getting ready to nap. He suggested Karel try his neighbor, who was working for the new transportation board and might have issued Karel's father a travel pass. She'd be home now, for lunch.

So Karel went next door and followed her around like a dog waiting for an answer to his question. She was directing workmen laying in plaster sculptures in her rock garden. When she finally put her attention to Karel she announced she had no idea what he was talking about, and that no Roeder had been through her office, and how had he found out where she worked in the first place?

On the way back he could see from the street Albert talking intently with a young man in the living room, the two of them sitting forward on the sofa and nodding. Albert had his two index fingers together and moved them apart to demonstrate something. When Karel knocked and came in the young man stood up and looked at him and then thanked Albert for the directions. Albert wished him luck, and the man left.

Trying to find the square, Albert said. He asked how things had gone. He said again not to worry, the thing to do was to check at home and give it a little time before getting excited. He'd written a number on his palm, and when he saw Karel notice it he made a casual fist.

The house smelled of mildew. Albert settled back on the sofa and closed his eyes and draped an arm over his face. Karel could see his nose in the crook of his elbow. He said things were a mess everywhere and transportation was impossible. Karel's father was probably sitting in a café somewhere worrying about
him
. He brought up the Komodos, which were refusing to reproduce in captivity. He asked Karel if he had any ideas. When Karel didn't answer he guessed that all of this clumsy coming and going by the Civil Guard wasn't helping. He talked about Seelie as now so aggressive that the prospects of artificially impregnating her were fading fast. He frowned, finally, and abandoned the subject.

He lay silent for a while, perhaps hoping Karel would leave. He seemed relaxed, but his foot jiggled impatiently. Karel felt he had nowhere to go after this, and looked around the room hopelessly. There was a plaque above the sofa framing a silhouette of a rattlesnake's head. There was a mounted photo on the lamp table of Albert kneeling beside a netted tortoise. Some skeletons were jumbled together across the room in a breakfront. He'd imagined endless interesting things in Albert's house, and none of these gave him any pleasure. He stood uncertainly beside the sofa, unhappy where he was and with no idea where he could go.

Albert outlined some of the characteristics of the anguid family of lizards. Karel wondered if he thought it therapeutic. He talked about individuals who were willing to give up part of their tail to an attack, or would smear the attacker with excrement. He moved to the differences between the snake families Elpidae (fixed fangs) and Viperidae (retractable fangs). He gave the Helodermatidae one last try. Did Karel know that they tracked prey by tasting the ground with their tongues?

Karel sighed so Albert could hear him. Albert gave up, his arm still over his eyes. He sighed as well and lay still.

“I'm going to go,” Karel finally said.

Albert made an approving noise.

“You think the government needed him for some special secret job?” Karel asked. He thought there was a better chance his father was on Mars.

Albert cleared his throat and made an unhurried chewing sound. He said, “There are a lot of people you meet who can get a penknife and some string and rewire a house. Fix your watch. Build a birdcage. Your father is not one of them.”

Karel felt the heat on his cheeks from the harshness and truth of the comment. He was ashamed of feeling shamed. He said, “You shouldn't say that. You don't know. How do you know?”

Albert shrugged, as much as he could lying on his back. He apologized. Outside a small translucent gecko pressed itself against the glass of the living-room window. He could see light through it, and its pale palms and belly somehow suggested to him both vulnerability and mercy.

Albert explained that he was under a lot of pressure recently and was upset because he'd been notified that the zoo as a newly designated Educational Institution would be under the jurisdiction of the Committee for Popular Enlightenment, which was under the jurisdiction of the Civil Guard.

Karel rubbed the back of his neck. He thought now that Albert had never really been considering his problem. It occurred to him that possibly no one was going to help.

Albert said, “I'm getting too tired to be careful. I'm sitting here in my house with a tea cozy over my telephone. I'm sitting here worried about what I can say to a boy who works for me.”

Karel blinked. He had the impression the house was settling, easing apart. “Do you think I'd get you in trouble?” he asked.

Albert said, “They're taking so much away I'm wondering what I'm trying to save.”

“You mean the zoo?” Karel said.

Albert finally took his arm off his face and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. It made a faint and unpleasant sound. “Whatever I'm doing now won't undo all the time I was doing nothing,” he said. “How long ago was it I knew there was a hundred percent turnover at the centers? What did I do then? How sure did I have to be?”

“What's that mean, hundred percent turnover?” Karel asked, frightened.

“It means bad things have been going on,” Albert said. Karel resented his tone. “And your boss here took a long time to figure it out.”

In the kitchen there was a clinking, as though the dishes were taking care of themselves.

“I have mice,” Albert said.

“You didn't know then,” Karel said. “About what was going on.”

“It's sad, is what it is,” Albert said.

“I'm going home,” Karel said. He made show of moving his feet on the rug. “I have to find my father.”

“We should have a new motto, on the flag,” Albert said. “‘
We Are Mute. We Are Shameful. We Are Miserable
.' That's how it should go.”

Karel let himself out. Albert told him to take some olives with him. At the blockade, the two soldiers laughed at him and told him his shirt was on inside out, a comment he did not understand.

His father was not home. The radio announced the nomad capital had fallen. There were few casualties and fewer prisoners. The nomad armies had melted away before their forces like snow beneath the sun, and now were broken and scattered through the mountains. A passing officer was apprehended and asked about the nomad situation.

“They're broken,” he said. “And scattered through the mountains.”

The radio announced the anniversary of the Bloody Parade, and Karel winced, for Leda's sake. The festivities planned for their town included a parade, band concerts, and orations. These would be expanded to celebrate the victory. The Bloody Parade had been the first coup attempt by the Party. It had been a measure of the Republican government's unpopularity, Albert had told Karel, that an abortive coup was seen for years as the NUP's greatest achievement.

He spent two useless days banging on doors in the neighborhood and rechecking with the police. On the evening of the second day he sat in his kitchen with the lights out listening to the groans of the plumbing and the parade cranking up in the distance.

There was not going to be any question of avoiding the thing. He got up and banged his chair against the table and went out, unable to sit still any longer and hoping to come across his father maybe having simply and miraculously lost track of the time.

The Schieles' house was dark. Poor Leda, he thought. He walked to the square. They'd put up a lot of new flags of thin cloth that flailed around in the wind. He hit the crowds and started working his way through them. Booths created standstills every few feet where hawkers told fortunes with dolls of little girls that rose or sank in jars of water, or white mice that dragged string through various chutes marked “Yes” or “No” or “It Needs More Thought” or “He/She Loves You.” He was taken by the crush past a booth involving a blind violinist and a bald baby in a smock and was unable to figure out what they were doing—selling? begging? entertaining?—even after hearing suggestions from other puzzled passersby. Along the parade route people began holding their positions on the side of the road whether or not they blocked access to the booths. He stopped for a while at a table rooted like a breakwater and looked at a large multicolored parrot whose entertainment value seemed to be based only on his ability to shift his weight from foot to foot. Behind the parrot a vendor was selling plaster busts of the Praetor and auto parts.