The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

  When Danny turned to go back in the room he saw his boots lined up neatly outside the door. He must have taken them off last night after coming down from the roof (don’t think about it). Danny’s eyes filled up, seeing the boots; that’s how strung out he was. He actually pushed them against his face for a second. Then he pulled them on his feet and headed downstairs.

  One floor down there was another window. Danny couldn’t see the town anymore, but the voices—it was voices he was hearing—were louder. So the sounds weren’t coming from the town after all, there were people outside the keep. Which meant Danny couldn’t leave, because there was no way in hell he’d risk having somebody see him. He’d face the baroness again before he’d take a chance of Howard finding out he’d fucked her.

  He followed the stairs another level down but didn’t stop because it was the point where he’d first come in, which meant the baroness was probably in the next room where they’d drunk the wine (don’t think about it). A level below there was one last window, and after that the stairs twisted into blackness. Danny flicked on his flashlight and pointed it down, but the dark swallowed up his beam. He had an urge to keep going into that dark, a push from inside as deep and strong as wanting to reach the town, but different. Opposite.

  There were foot-sized indentations in the steps. Danny set his feet in the grooves and started down. The air smelled like clay and his chest felt heavy and cool, like the clay was inside him, pressing him deeper into the keep. He was right at the turn in the stairs when he heard the voices again, clearer now, floating in through the window above him. They broke Danny’s concentration, and he climbed back up to see who it was.

  The window was maybe fifteen feet above the tops of the trees, close enough that Danny could see between the branches in some places. Mick and two graduate students were down there, dust masks hanging around their necks. Bits of talk floated up to Danny.

  Mick:…could start over here…

  Girl Student:…blocking the…

  Boy Student:…not that there’s much…

  They all laughed. Mick kept looking at the keep, not up where Danny was but the part below him, under the trees. Someone else must be there: Howard? Danny yanked his head back inside. But then the person moved into the light and he saw it was Ann. With the baby girl in some kind of pouch on her chest.

  They were all laughing again.

  Ann: Why not just put up an awning?

  She had one of those voices you could hear, high and clear and a little sharp, like kids’ voices are. Danny leaned back out the window.

  Mick:…hire a sharpshooter.

  More laughter. Mick was turning into some kind of comedian. Even in the warm weather he wore long sleeves. His dark hair was pulled back in a thong, and there was sweat on his face. On the ground lay a pile of planks. The graduate students seemed to be leaving.

  Girl:…until lunch?

  Ann: Forty-five minutes.

  Boy: So we’ll…

  Mick: Don’t let…

  More laughing. Now Danny knew the time: 12:15. No wonder the sun was drilling a hole through his head. He wished they would get the hell out so he could get the hell out in time for lunch. He was light-headed for a lot of reasons, but starvation was definitely on the list.

  Mick: Wait.

  That came up clear. He was talking to Ann, who’d started to walk away, following the graduate students. The baby was asleep, head lolling to the side. Ann turned around. She had on a yellow short-sleeved blouse. Her cheeks looked sunburned, or maybe just hot. Her dark hair must soak up that sun.

  Ann: What?

  Mick:…talk to you…

  They stood there. No one seemed to be talking.

  Mick:…never get to…

  Ann laughed. Whose fault is that? You disappear every time I show up.

  Mick said something Danny couldn’t hear. His smile was gone. Ann was serious, too.

  Ann: You seem so unhappy.

  Mick:…keep having…

  Ann: Yeah, I guess I knew that.

  Mick:…wondering…driving me…

  Ann took a small step back. Mick, you’ve got to get this under control. You know that, right?

  Something in Danny locked in for the first time. He’d been half listening, waiting for Mick and Ann to go away, expecting any minute to hear the baroness staggering down the stairwell behind him. Now he thought: Wait, what am I hearing? It wasn’t even the words so much as what he saw: How close together they were standing. How Ann didn’t walk away. The misery in Mick’s face.

  Ann: I mean it. You’ve got to get past this. Or we’re headed for trouble.

  Mick:…still think about it?

  Ann: I don’t! I make a conscious effort not to!

  Mick: (inaudible).

  Ann: Okay, but it wasn’t yesterday. Six years is a long time out here in the real world. I didn’t even have a kid yet!

  Mick:…exactly…every single…

  Ann: I don’t want to hear this.

  Mick put his hands in his pockets and looked down. Danny thought Ann would walk away, but she didn’t. She cupped her baby’s skull and shut her eyes. Danny knew what was in her head like he was intercepting her thoughts: she wanted to bolt but she couldn’t bolt, she had to fix this thing, get it under control, because if she didn’t it was going to explode. And then Howard would know—well, he’d know that Mick and Ann had fucked each other six years ago, was how it was starting to look.

  Ann moved close to Mick. She looked up into his face over the head of her sleeping kid and said: Let’s just tell him.

  It took Mick a second to react. Then he said: What are you talking about? It was the first full sentence Danny had been able to hear from the guy. Mick’s lips were white.

  Ann: He’s strong, he can take it. It’ll be rough for a while but in the end I think it’ll be okay.

  Mick: No. No. No. No. No. Do you hear me?

  Okay!

  Mick was pacing, frantic:…Cut my own throat…think I’m kidding…?

  Ann: All right, relax. It was just an idea.

  Mick: Never…the last thing I…can’t believe you’d…

  Oh, fuck you, Mick.

  Mick went quiet and looked at her.

  Ann: You tell me what to do. What do you want me to do? If you keep acting like you’re acting and making scenes, he’s going to figure it out. And I promise you, that’ll be worse.

  Mick: Don’t tell him.

  You think I want to tell him? Come on! It’s the last thing I want to do. Look, I’ve got a baby asleep on my chest and I’m having this conversation with you. Jesus Christ!

  Mick:…your voice down.

  Ann started to cry. Danny watched in a state of shock. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing and hearing—couldn’t believe he was able to see and hear it. It kicked up a mess of reactions in Danny that he couldn’t separate out. He felt:

  1. Sorry for Howard, who had no idea he’d been fucked over by his wife and best friend.

  2. Glad Howard’s perfect life wasn’t quite as perfect as he’d thought.

  3. Even sorrier for Howard, because it’s easier to feel sorry for someone when their life isn’t perfect.

  4. Excited to be the one who was seeing and hearing and knowing all this stuff.

  And this last feeling—this thrill of being in the know—kicked something back to life in Danny that had been on ice since he’d gotten to the castle: the thinking, active part of him that spent its time figuring out what was going on around him so he’d know where he fit. The part that had kept Danny alive all these years. The world moved and rearranged itself around him and Danny was himself again, which meant not just knowing things but knowing more things than other people, seeing all the links when everyone else could see only a few. Information. This had worked for Danny, it had! For years and years it had worked. Not because he used the information—that would be dangerous, more likely to blow up in the face of the person who tried it than anyone else’s. But there was power in just
having it, in knowing where everyone stood. And Danny had a word that could say all that. One word: alto.

  Mick took hold of Ann’s hand. Here we go, Danny thought.

  Mick: (inaudible).

  Ann (sobbing): It’s just…I looked forward to coming here for such a long time and now it’s…I can hardly sleep.

  She stood there crying, Mick holding her hand, and then Ann stopped crying and wiped her face. She kissed her baby’s head and checked her watch.

  Mick:…easier if I…

  Ann: Yeah, but you can’t leave, so there’s no point talking about it.

  Whoa, Danny thought. You can’t leave?

  Mick: (inaudible).

  Ann: I agree. Given what’s going on now, it was a horrible idea. But you’re here and there’s no going back.

  Danny’s mind was churning. Why couldn’t Mick leave? What possible reason could there be?

  Mick: (inaudible).

  Ann: Forget the apologies. I’m a big girl, I got myself into this. I just—I can’t find a way out.

  She’d let go of Mick’s hand.

  The sun moved, and Danny lost their faces. Mick was trying to explain something to Ann, but he’d lowered his voice to a mumble. Danny couldn’t hear a thing. Ann was quiet, listening. Danny slid a little farther out the window, at which point he caught inside and time to think and patterns but he couldn’t make sense out of it. The meaning was one step beyond him. Danny’s feet were off the ground and he was balancing on his abdomen, arms and legs floating ahead of him and behind. He shoved himself out a few more inches. And that was too far.

  Danny knew it instantly: he’d ignored that grandmaster of the physical world, gravity, and tipped the bulk of his weight outside the window. Now gravity was pushing him down, so only the friction of his pants against the stone window frame held him in place. Danny almost screamed, but he managed to choke it back. He dug and scrabbled his hands around that window looking for a fingerhold, and wiggled and shimmied his ass, trying to jostle enough of himself back over that stone frame that gravity would be on his side again. For a second or two it seemed like this might work, he was starting to ease himself back, but the friction messed him up—the stone resisted his pants and then sweat started running down his legs and soaking into the fabric, which made it slippery. Or maybe it was him getting slippery inside the pants. Anyway, Danny dropped—boom, it was out of his hands—he was sliding, falling, bellowing, because who the hell wouldn’t bellow when they fell head first out a window?

  He caught himself with his feet, flexed them hard so his toes hooked over the window frame and stopped his fall—and held him there, at least for now. Mick and Ann were yelling.

  Mick: Who the hell is that?

  Ann: I don’t know. I think—is it Howard’s cousin? Danny, is that you?

  Danny tried to answer, but tensing the muscles of his gut to say even one word would siphon vital energy away from his feet.

  Mick: Jesus, he’s—wow. Okay, I’m going up. Hold on, Danny, I’ll be there in just a…His voice faded around the side of the keep.

  Ann: Hold on, Danny! He’ll be there in a second. Just hang in there.

  Every bit of Danny’s energy was pouring into his feet. His whole body shook from the effort of flexing them, but he could keep it up, no question, he could flex his feet with this intensity for an hour if he had to. The problem was his boots, which couldn’t seem to hold his feet. In agonizing little slips his feet were coming out, meaning the boots were too big. Maybe they’d stretched in all the years he’d been wearing them, or maybe Danny had shrunk, or maybe his socks were too thin, or maybe the boots had always been this big and he’d never noticed until now. But Danny didn’t think so. When he’d bought the boots they fit perfectly. That was one of the reasons he’d bought them, because it felt like fate: he would meet his future in these boots, which seemed like they were made especially for him. Now Danny’s head was a dead weight pulling the rest of him down and his feet were coming out, first in sweaty jerks and then in one last awful slide that separated him from his boots for good.

  PART II

  Nora: So. Is it a death wish, or are you just really, really accident-prone?

  She was sitting near Danny, who opened his eyes to find he was flat on his back in a place he didn’t recognize. It was getting to be a habit.

  Danny: Where the hell am I?

  Nora: Your room.

  That threw him. His room? Danny’s cloudy eyes made it hard to look around, but after a couple of seconds he recognized the wood canopy on the antique bed where he’d slept when he first got to the castle. And the high stone walls and the fireplace, an orange blur beyond his feet. And the window—black, so it must be night. Unless his eyes weren’t working.

  But it wasn’t his eyes, it was his brain. The melting, liquidy way things looked reminded Danny of painkillers he’d popped over the years. But why would he be on one now? And right when he asked that question, Danny noticed a thing that had been there ever since he’d opened his eyes but muffled, so it took a while to push through into his thoughts: pain. Not headache pain—headache pain was a hand job compared to this. This was head injury pain. When Danny touched his head, where the pain started out from, he found a mess of bandages.

  And then it all came back, a mudslide of remembering that felt a lot like slipping out of his boots had felt in the first place. Fuck, he was high.

  Danny: What kind of shit have they got me on?

  Nora shrugged. Some kind of injections.

  Each little thing she said had to travel down a long curled-up tube before it got to Danny’s brain. And then his answer had to travel down another long tube out of his brain before it could get to his mouth. When the word injections finally got all the way down the tube, Danny jumped. He said (after another long gap): What injections?

  Nora: Not sure. The doctor speaks that bizarro language they all speak around here.

  Danny: Does Howard understand him?

  Nope. No one can.

  Somehow, Danny managed to heave himself onto his elbows. You’re telling me some dude no one understands is giving me injections?

  Relax. That old lady who lives in the tower, the baroness. She’s translating.

  Here? In this room? The idea made him frantic.

  No, no, she won’t leave that tower—won’t even open the door. So Howard and the doctor stand outside, and the doctor yells stuff up at the window, and then the baroness yells the meaning back down to Howard.

  Danny lay back and shut his eyes. It was too much to figure out. Suddenly Nora was hopping around, plucking at his blanket.

  Nora: Nodon’tgotosleep! Don’tgotosleep! Are you going back to sleep? Don’tgotosleep!

  Danny opened his eyes. What the hell is wrong with you?

  Nora looked at her watch. Her hands were shaking again. She unhooked something from her belt and Danny heard a staticky noise.

  Nora (into the machine): He’s awake. Over.

  Crackly voice: How long? Over.

  Nora: Ten minutes. Over.

  Crackly voice:…on my way.

  Nora smiled. It was the smile Danny had been waiting for, the smile that cut through her attitude and dreadlocks and bad eye contact and hating of facts and turned her straight back into the pretty suburban girl she’d started out as. But Danny didn’t see the smile. His eyes were—I want to say glued, but it was more than glued: his eyes were laminated onto that walkie-talkie in Nora’s hands. How can I explain what Danny felt, seeing it? Like a guy on a hunger strike who sees a roast beef go by on a tray. Like a con doing life without, watching a Hustler centerfold hump a pole. But those examples aren’t enough, so instead I’ll tell you what happened inside Danny: his mouth watered, his gut rumbled, his throat got a lump, his nose prickled, his eyes filled with tears, and he let out a long groan.

  Nora: What? What? Her dreads shook as she fluttered over him.

  Is that a…what is that? His head was starting to pound.

  It’s a walkie
-talkie. Should I—I think Howard’s already on his…

  Inside Danny’s head a maniac had started clubbing at a door that wasn’t strong enough to hold him back.

  Danny: How did you get it? He was having a memory or maybe a dream: holding that machine, talking into it, having a voice answer back. His whole gut went watery at the thought.

  And then the force of how much Danny wanted the machine ground against the fact that he didn’t have it.

  Nora: We’ve all got them. It’s the only way we can find each other in this…

  The maniac pounded harder, drowning her out. Nora: I’m surprised Howard didn’t give you—Wham, wham, wham. The door popped, and Danny passed out.

  Can you hear me? Danny. Danny?

  Danny opened his eyes. First he saw the ceiling: very high, with black beams running across it. Then he saw Howard by the bed.

  Howard: Great, fantastic, you’re awake. He checked his watch. Okay, nine forty-eight. And how long was the last one? He was talking to someone who turned out to be Nora. She was standing behind him.

  Nora: Thirteen minutes.

  You still with me, buddy?

  Danny: I’m here.

  Howard looked different, but whatever the difference was made him seem more familiar to Danny, more like he’d been before. Or maybe Danny was finally getting used to this new face.

  Howard (to Nora): You tried to engage him?

  Nora: Yes. I mean, we talked.

  Howard: But you didn’t stress him.

  Nora: I don’t think so. She gave these answers absolutely straight—no irony, no sarcasm, no doubletalk. It was like watching a color picture go to black-and-white.

  Danny: What the fuck is going on?