The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

  Howard: Here’s what I mean. Mick, hold off. Here. Listen.

  Mick stopped scraping. Howard took hold of Danny’s shoulders. The grip of his hands was almost painful, but what amazed Danny was the heat pouring out of them. No wonder the guy wore shorts.

  Howard: You hear those sounds? Insects, birds, but not even that. Something behind them, you hear it? It’s—what? A hum, almost. But not quite.

  The heat from Howard’s hands had soaked through Danny’s jacket and shirt and was filling up his arms. He hadn’t realized he was cold, but it turned out he was—had been ever since they’d gone into the broken-down part of the castle. Danny listened and heard nothing, but it was a different kind of nothing than he was used to. Most quiet was like a pause, a blank spot in the usual noise, but this was thick, like you only heard in New York right after a snowstorm. Even quieter than that.

  Howard: I don’t want to lose that. I want this place to be about that. Not just some resort. He let go of Danny’s shoulders. The veins stood out in Howard’s arms and neck. Danny knew he’d better understand this or look like he did.

  Danny: You want the hotel to be about silence?

  In a way, yes. No TVs—that’s a given. And more and more I’m thinking no phones.

  Ever?

  If I can make it work.

  So it’ll be like a…retreat? Where people come and do yoga or whatever?

  Not really. No.

  Mick: Can I?

  Howard: Yeah, go ahead.

  Mick started brushing again. He liked to be constantly occupied, that was clear. A perfect number two.

  Howard: Think about medieval times, Danny, like when this castle was built. People were constantly seeing ghosts, having visions—they thought Christ was sitting with them at the dinner table, they thought angels and devils were flying around. We don’t see those things anymore. Why? Was all that stuff happening before and then it stopped? Unlikely. Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird.

  (There was no pause in Howard’s talking, but I’m taking a pause here to tell you that Danny wasn’t listening. The mention of phones, or lack of phones, reminded him that he’d been out of touch too long for maybe an hour by now, and having that much time pass made it easy to imagine how more time could pass, and then more time, and Danny knew from experience that when someone dropped out of the mix it was only a matter of days before it seemed like they’d never been there. Everything shifted and moved and rearranged, no one’s place got saved. To Danny, the thought of disappearing like that was worse than dying. If you were dead, fine. But being alive but invisible, unreachable, unfindable—it would be like those nightmares he used to have where he couldn’t move, where he seemed to be dead and everyone thought he was dead but he could still feel and hear everything that went on. And right in the middle of thinking this stuff, Danny realized Howard was saying something important. He could tell by the way it rushed out of his cousin like it was breaking free. So Danny started listening.)

  Howard: Imagination! It saved my life. I was a fat kid, adopted, I didn’t have many friends. But I made things up. I had a life in my head that had nothing to do with my life. And what about people in medieval times? They saw one shitty little town their whole lives, their kids caught a cold and dropped dead, they had three teeth left in their heads by the time they hit thirty. People had to do something to shake things up or they would’ve keeled over from misery and boredom. So Christ came to dinner. Witches and goblins were hiding in corners. People looked at the sky and saw angels. And my idea—my, my…plan, my—

  Mick: Mission. He didn’t pause in his sanding.

  My mission is to bring some of that back. Let people be tourists of their own imaginations. And please don’t say like Disneyland, because that’s the exact opposite of what I’m talking about.

  Danny: I wasn’t going to say that.

  Howard: People are bored. They’re dead! Go to a shopping mall and check out the faces. I did this for years—I’d drive out to the malls on weekends and just sit there watching people, trying to figure it out. What’s missing? What do they need? What’s the next step? And then I got it: imagination. We’ve lost the ability to make things up. We’ve farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.

  Howard was pacing, turning, waving his arms. Mick’s soft brushing filled up the background.

  Danny: And you think this is something people will pay for?

  It came out rude, but Howard seemed to love it. Excellent question! The only question, from a business standpoint. The answer is always the same, Danny: Depends how good a job we do.

  Did that we include Danny? He wasn’t sure. Howard and Mick seemed like brothers.

  There you are!

  It was Ann, coming through the cypress into the sun. She’d changed into a long green skirt that caught on the branches so she had to stop and unhook it. She wore a sleeveless black top that made her shoulders look very white.

  Ann: Husband dear. I thought we were taking Benjy into town.

  Howard: Jesus, what time is it? I got caught up in showing Danny—

  Mick pulled on his shirt and stood up. I’m gonna head back. Should I tell Benjy you’re coming?

  Howard: Couple of minutes. Thanks.

  Mick picked up his tool bag and headed toward the cypress. Since that first hostile look he hadn’t even glanced at Danny. When Mick was gone, Ann shut her eyes and stretched.

  Ann: Sun feels nice. Hard to find a place where you can actually feel it on your skin. So Danny. What do you think of our little kingdom? Or duchy. Or fiefdom, whatever it is.

  Howard: Barony. He gave an empty laugh.

  Ann: Of course.

  Danny: It’s great. But I—I’m still not clear on the hotel part. I mean, someone books a room and they come. And what, like, happens?

  No one seemed to have an immediate answer.

  Ann: I’ll tell you how I picture it, can I?

  Howard: Please.

  Ann: A woman travels here by herself. She’s unhappy, she’s—shut down. Maybe her marriage is in trouble; maybe she’s alone. Whatever it is, she’s become numb, dead to herself. So she checks in and leaves her stuff in her room and then she comes through the garden to this pool—I don’t know why, but I always picture this happening at night (Ann was taking steps toward the edge of the pool while she talked, her dark hair shining purple in the sun)—and the pool’s all lit up and the water’s clean, obviously, and it’s warm, it has to be warm because it’s always cold here at night, even in summer, and she dives in (Ann lifted her arms in a white V over her head and pulled her body long and straight, shutting her eyes), and it—it does something to her. Being in that water does something: it wakes her up. And when she gets back out of the pool, she feels strong again. Like she’s ready to start her life over.

  Ann let her arms fall back to her sides and smiled at Danny, embarrassed. He thought: That’s a lot to ask of a swimming pool, but he didn’t say it. Didn’t really feel it. While Ann was talking he’d been weirdly caught up.

  Howard: You know how I think of this? The Imagination Pool. You dive in and—bang—your imagination is released: it’s yours again, not Hollywood’s, not the networks or Lifetime TV or Vanity Fair or whatever crap video game you’re addicted to. You make it up, you tell the story, and then you’re free. You can do anything you want. He turned to Danny. The Imagination Pool. What do you think?

  Danny was thinking a few things:

  1. That Howard was starting to sound a little nuts. Lots of powerful people were nuts, Danny wasn’t sure why. But was Ann nuts? And what about Mick? Not to mention all those graduate students. Could they all be nuts?

  2. That this hotel sounded like the closest thing to hell Danny could imagine.

  3. That he needed to set up his satellite dish.

  Danny: I guess I’m wondering—

  Howa
rd: Tell me.

  —what you want me to do. I mean, it’s such a…grand scheme, and you’ve got so many people already working on it. Nothing really seems to be missing.

  Howard glanced at his watch. Ann, you want to take Benjy into town and I’ll meet you down there?

  Ann: Are you asking me what I want or telling me what’s going to happen?

  Danny: Howard, go, please. My schedule’s…I mean, obviously I don’t have a schedule.

  No, I’d rather—I’m sorry, honey.

  Ann: Okay. We’ll see you when we see you.

  She left quickly, quietly, her green skirt disappearing through the cypress. The silence settled like glue in Danny’s ears. Howard rubbed his foot over the brushed marble. When he looked back at Danny he was serious.

  Howard: I’ve given you the wrong impression. There is something missing.

  Danny: What?

  Howard: I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out. Here, let’s walk. Let’s—you feel like climbing a wall? There’s an awesome view from the top.

  Danny absolutely felt like climbing it—for the satellite dish. He followed Howard through another cut in the cypress. Maybe thirty feet beyond the trees, there was a broken section of wall like the one Danny climbed last night. Howard ran straight up, scaling it like a billy goat in his shorts and hiking shoes, while Danny huffed behind in his velvet coat and slippery boots, trying not to look too ridiculous. It didn’t matter—Howard wasn’t watching him. He was taking in his view.

  The wall was built like a sandwich, two layers of stone with a lot of concrete rubble in between, but unlike the part where Danny had walked last night, this rubble was collapsing, so you had to grip an outside layer of wall to keep from falling into the gap and twisting an ankle. So: no satellite dish. Still, the view was something. At Danny’s back was the cliff he’d looked over into the valley last night, inside the walls to the left was the block of castle buildings, straight ahead was the keep. Below, the black pool looked like a crater, a hole punched into the earth.

  Howard: I see all this, Danny, and I’m awed by it, but I’m still on the outside. There’s some way in I can’t find. And I don’t know where the fuck to look.

  How do you know it exists?

  Howard turned to him. I feel it. Right here. He socked a fist into his own gut with a force that would’ve made Danny gag. It’s—I don’t know what. A map. A clue. A key. It might not even be a thing. It could be an idea.

  Danny: Do…other people feel this?

  Howard: They feel something. They’re restless. They want me to lead them in some clear direction, and I can’t do it. I’m stuck. He was staring out as he talked, and Danny followed his eyes to the keep.

  Danny: Does it have to do with that old lady in there?

  It could. Sometimes I think it’s the keep itself. That was the heart of the castle back in the day, and I can’t get my hands on it. Or it could be something totally different. But I need an answer—this thing has to work. I’ve put my marriage on the line, dragged all these people over here. Everything I’ve got is wrapped up in this castle. So it has to work. It has to work.

  He turned to Danny with a look that was short of desperate but not by much. A hungry look. Howard needed something.

  Danny: This morning, when I was looking through the telescope, I saw someone in there. Inside the keep. But she was young.

  Howard: There’s no one young in there.

  I saw her. Blond, pretty—she was young, Howard. Right in that window.

  He pointed at the keep, but Howard didn’t look. He was looking at Danny. And for the first time in a while, he was smiling.

  Howard: I’m amazed it’s happening so soon.

  What’re you talking about?

  Howard’s face was flushed. It happens to everyone who comes here. I felt it the very first time, with Ann—less than an hour in, I noticed my perceptions starting to sway and shift, almost like I was dreaming.

  Danny felt himself get cold and still. You’re saying I’m hallucinating?

  I’m saying the baroness is an ancient hag who looks more dead than alive. I’m saying there’s no one else in that keep. And I’m saying that this—what happened to you with the telescope—is the whole fucking point of our hotel. That’s it, bang! You’ve got it.

  Danny: Okay.

  The worm stretched open in him. All it took was the itch of one ugly idea—Howard was fucking with his head—to shake it out of its dormant state. Danny was generally pretty worm-resistant, and he had a knack for slowing down the worm in other people by reminding them that just because you saw four orange cars in an hour didn’t mean undercover cops were staking out your apartment for a raid, or that hearing a guy laugh in the window of Starbucks right as you walked past wasn’t proof that he’d spent the previous night fucking your girlfriend. But even Danny wasn’t completely immune to the worm, no one was.

  Howard: I can see you don’t believe me, Danny. I don’t blame you. Just—stay with me. Keep an open mind.

  Okay.

  Howard’s eyes moved over his property, the high chunky outer walls with their round towers every fifty yards, the wild green inside them, the cluster of castle buildings. So much of it was broken, collapsed or about to collapse, you could almost feel gravity leaning on it, forcing it back into the earth. The whole thing seemed insane to Danny, a doomed venture.

  Howard: I spoke to my folks a few weeks ago, Danny, and they mentioned you’d gotten into some kind of trouble in New York.

  So now the family was gossiping about him. But Danny already knew it.

  I had a gut reaction: bring him over. Pure instinct. Danny needs something, I need something—maybe there’s a fit. But I’ll tell you this: I make all my decisions that way. And you don’t make the kind of money I’ve made unless your instincts are pretty fucking astounding.

  Danny: Well, my instincts tend to fuck me up. So we’ve got your instinct to bring me over here versus my instinct to come.

  Howard laughed. It was a big joyful laugh, the kind that makes you glad to be the one who brought it on. Danny felt the worm start to relax.

  Howard: So where’s the conflict? If I win, you win, too.

  What I want to know, Tom-Tom says, after I read out my stuff in class, is which one of these clowns is you?

  Clowns? I squint up my eyes at him. Clowns are a touchy subject with Tom-Tom. I’m surprised he brought it up.

  Okay, he says. Assholes.

  Easy there, Holly says. Not because of assholes—that’s almost polite—but because he’s saying it about something I wrote. And on Holly’s list of rules, Respect one another’s work is ahead of No physical contact—one more way you can tell she’s never taught in a prison before.

  Tom-Tom’s a guy nobody likes, but that doesn’t tell you anything. Tom-Tom’s a guy who likes the fact that nobody likes him, because it means he must be right about the world being one enormous piece of shit. I guess you could say Tom-Tom likes being right more than he likes being liked.

  I already knew who he was because of the geckos. We have a reptile program where inmates keep eggs under lights and then raise the baby lizards or what have you until they’re big enough to be sold in a pet store. Tom-Tom’s our gecko man. They’re medium-sized, the brightest green you ever saw. He takes them outside on leashes made out of string and lets them run around in the dirt. He rubs their shiny little heads and kisses their lizardy lips.

  Maybe a year ago, a horror show named Quince walked up to where Tom-Tom’s geckos were playing in the yard and put his boot through one of their heads, just crushed it cold. That was back in the days when all I did was sit—depression, laziness, despondency, being a goddam snitch spy, why I did all that sitting depended on who you asked. That day I was on a bench maybe twenty yards away from Tom-Tom, across a chain-link fence. He should’ve been on his knees thanking God it was only a gecko Quince decided to smash that day, but as soon as Quince was gone Tom-Tom’s face did something I’ve never exactly seen befo
re, it crumpled and collapsed like there was a boot on his head crushing it, and his lips drew back so his mouth was a black open hole, but no sound came out. At first I thought he was having a stroke or a heart attack, but then I realized I was seeing pure misery, the kind people only show when they think they’re by themselves.

  Then Tom-Tom saw me through the fence. For a split second I thought, I’m dead. And I would be dead, no questions asked, if he was a real con. But Tom-Tom’s not a con, he’s a meth freak who loves reptiles and hates everything else.

  Who says any of these assholes is me? I ask Tom-Tom now.

  Well, you sure as shit didn’t make it all up.

  I did make it up, I say, because I want Holly to think that. Otherwise it’s all just stuff a guy told me, so why not be impressed with that guy instead of me?

  No one could make this shit up, Tom-Tom says. It’s too ridiculous.

  More ridiculous than walking into a bank in a clown suit and shooting three people? Hamsam says, and the room gets snickery. It’s funny with Hamsam and me: we’re friends, but we almost never speak. Maybe that’s why we’re friends.

  Fuck you, shitbag, Tom-Tom says, but his ears get pink.

  I write down shitbag.

  Hey, Holly warns Hamsam in a sharp voice, our crimes stay out, remember that? But she’s looking at Tom-Tom and you can tell she’s thinking, Clown suit?

  Alleged crimes, says Allan Beard, our resident brain.

  Our crimes? Tom-Tom’s smiling up at Holly and his smile is like a lizard’s smile. Is that what you said? Our crimes?

  Only to be nice, Holly says. I have to admit she’s learning fast.

  I’ve tried everything to get her to look at me: clamming up, asking questions, laughing, stretching, knuckle cracking. Every week I bring in something to read, and after I read it out she glances my way because she has to, but her eyes don’t connect—they’re looking next to me or behind me or even through me. I guess the stuff I wrote about the guy fucking his writing teacher made her nervous. And I feel like telling her, Babe, it wasn’t you, okay? That writing teacher was an actual blonde, not to mention she was under thirty, no wrinkles around her eyes, and had curves on her like you wouldn’t have if you ate Snickers bars around the clock, plus she wore dresses—ever heard of those? And she smelled like strawberries. Or mangoes. Or licorice. Hell, I don’t know. But being inside changes everything. Stuff you’d call common or even flat-out invisible in the outside world turns precious in here, with magical uses you never thought of. A broken pen is a tattoo gun. A plastic comb is a shank, meaning a knife. A couple of plums and a piece of bread are next week’s hooch. A packet of Kool-Aid is dye, an airshaft is a telephone. Two paper clips in a light socket plus a piece of pencil lead will light up your cigarette. And a gal like Holly, who maybe you wouldn’t raise your head to look at out in the world—in here she’s a princess.