The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

  The baroness hoisted herself back inside, veins pulsing in her neck. A lady never yells. I spoke clearly and calmly.

  Danny: Did it work?

  Pah. They began their stupid renovation and hoped I would die before they were done. But I outlasted them. That wet laugh trickled up again from so deep in the baroness that it seemed like it wasn’t coming from inside her but below her, from the actual keep. She made her way back to the fireplace and sat. All the shouting had left her shaky. Danny stood by her chair.

  Danny: It’s amazing they didn’t just come in here and remove you.

  Remove me? The baroness’s face contorted with shock and rage to the point where Danny wondered if she was having a stroke. She tottered back onto her feet. Her throat was raw from all that shouting out the window, so she rasped at him: The keep is the tallest, strongest part of the castle, where everyone fled if the walls were breached. This keep hasn’t surrendered in nine hundred years, and you’re asking why they didn’t remove me?

  Danny: Okay. Okay.

  If they’d been stupid enough to try such a thing, I would have poured boiling oil over their heads as they came up the stairs. I keep a tub of oil on hand for exactly that purpose. And I have the ingredients for Greek fire, too, which burns and maims whomever it touches. Historians are still squabbling about what Greek fire was made of, but I have a recipe left to me by my father, who got it from my great-great-great grandfather, whose great uncle left it to him. And so on.

  I get the picture.

  I have weapons, too. That goes without saying: swords, a longbow, a crossbow, even a cat, which in layman’s terms is a battering ram. And revolvers, naturally. You may tell your cousin that.

  My cousin? Danny was thrown—he’d completely forgotten Howard. Then he played dumb. Does he want you out of here too?

  He must, mustn’t he? She gave a crafty smile. But your cousin is smarter than those Germans. He knows I can be useful. She lowered herself back onto her chair.

  Danny: Useful how?

  Well, the castle’s original dungeon is under this keep. There’s a whole room filled with instruments of torture—imagine if he could show his tourists that! But he has no idea of how to find it. And there are a thousand things like that: tunnels, passages—a whole city underneath this castle and around it, things your cousin couldn’t find if he spent a hundred years looking. If I go, he loses all that—generations of knowledge, secrets, gone. There’s no getting it back.

  Her voice had changed. It was reaching, calling out to someone else. She was talking to Howard, not Danny. It made Danny feel like his cousin was in the room, leaning against the shadowy wall by the old paintings and the furniture covered up with cloths.

  Danny: It sounds like you and Howard need to have a negotiation.

  Isn’t that why you came?

  Me? No. I—I was just walking past and you were…

  But already Danny wasn’t sure. Why had he come to the keep?

  The baroness leaned forward so her face was only inches away from his. She was swaying in her heels. He dreaded the smell of her breath, but it turned out to be dry and a little sweet.

  She said: Your cousin and I have nothing to negotiate. The cards are entirely mine. You may tell him that.

  She smiled at Danny, this ancient crone, alone and weak, nuts if she thought she could operate a battering ram on her own. She was powerless any way you sliced it, but she thought she was strong and that made it true in a way. This astounded Danny. He’d never seen it before.

  Danny: You must want something. Everyone does.

  Nothing your cousin can give me. Or I would demand it, you can be certain of that. Now, shall we put our work to the side and have a glass of wine?

  Absolutely. Danny was enjoying himself. It felt like the first time in a while.

  He offered to help the baroness get the wine, but she flapped him away. Danny heard her pointed heels clicking on the stone steps. He added a log to the fire and waited. An idea about Howard and the baroness was taking shape in his head, but it took him awhile to know what it was. And then he got it: Was his job, the reason Howard had brought him all this way, to get the baroness out? As soon as he’d asked, Danny was sure the answer was yes.

  The bell for dinner must have rung, but he hadn’t heard it. Outside the sky had gone black. The baroness was taking forever. It crossed Danny’s mind that she might not ever come back and even this wouldn’t seem especially strange.

  Restless, he got out of his chair and started peeking under furniture cloths around the edges of the room. An old harpsichord. A bulky thing with about a hundred ivory drawers in it. A mirror with a gold outline. A painting he couldn’t really see. Danny snapped on his pocket flashlight and aimed its beam at the canvas: a boy and a girl, pale skin, brown eyes, faces so identical they came off as one kid in two different outfits. Dark hair curled around their earlobes. The boy was leaning against the trunk of the tree in short pants and a purple velvet coat, and the girl stood near him in a dress made out of the same purple velvet. Her arm hung around the boy’s neck. The baroness came and stood next to Danny, breathing hard.

  Baroness: We thought they’d run away at first. But eventually the pool was drained and they were lying at the bottom. Holding each other, was how the story went.

  All this was familiar, but from where? Then Danny remembered: the twins who’d drowned in that pool. We, she’d said. He turned to the baroness and saw that her mouth was like the twins’ mouths: long full lips that looked as unexpected on their small faces as they did on her ancient one. Their sister, she had to be.

  Danny: Were they older than you?

  Baroness: By four years. She seemed tired. She was a fighter, Danny thought, but when there was nothing to fight against she went limp.

  Danny watched the picture. The kids’ exact positions were hard to pin down, like they were moving slowly—too slowly to see, but enough so when he aimed his beam away from them and then back, they’d shifted.

  Baroness: Come. I’ve poured the wine. There it was, on the enameled table in front of the fireplace, a bottle that looked like it had been dug up from a grave. From Papa’s wine cellar, the baroness said. The cellar is still intact, exactly as it was, and only I know where it is.

  I’ll pass that on.

  Do, she said, and laughed.

  Danny laughed, too—at the bottle. A Burgundy from 1898! He was no wine expert, but he’d been around enough of them to know that a Burgundy from 1898 was like a steak that had been sitting around since 1960. Putrid would be a distant memory. Nonexistent was more like it.

  But there was something in his glass that looked like wine. Danny picked it up and smelled: mold, wet wood. The glass was thin and hand-blown, colored bubbles around its base. Danny sipped. The taste was outright freakish: a reek of decay mixed with some sweet, fresh thing the decay hadn’t touched. He drank fast, racing to get that freshness in him before the decay wiped it out. A minute later he was pouring more, for the baroness too. He drank again, thinking the goodness might be gone, but it was still there. Danny had to force himself not to chug.

  Danny: So did anyone ever attack this keep, like with weapons?

  Baroness: Certainly they did, many times. The most spectacular were the Tartars—historians say they never crossed the Vistula, but that’s a fantasy. A band of Tartars surrounded our castle on their white horses, their sappers brought down the east wall with an underground fire, and as the Tartars poured through the walls we locked ourselves inside this keep with enough provisions to last eight months. My ancestor, Batiste von Hagedorn, brought knights from a secret garrison through an underground tunnel that led inside the castle walls, and he cut off the Tartars’ supply lines and trapped them inside. They were finished in twenty-four days.

  She looked at Danny with glittering eyes. The wine was gone—they’d drunk it all. The baroness leaned back into her soft chair, her gold-white hair spreading out on the velvet upholstery. That’s why I feel so very safe inside my ke
ep. Do you see?

  I see. And he did see: the baroness was like a magnetic field bending his thoughts her way.

  It was only when Danny stood up that the wine walloped him. He felt weird. And see, I have a problem here, because I keep saying, Danny felt weird. And Danny felt weird. So how is this weird any different from all the other weird ways he’s felt? Well, here’s how: Those other weirds were the opposite of calm and fine, but this weird was calm and fine. Danny felt calm and fine, but also like he was asleep. Or at least not awake. His brain was cut off from his body, which had gotten out of its chair and was following the baroness to the door.

  Danny: Where are we going? He heard his voice, but didn’t know he’d said the words.

  Baroness: You asked to see the roof, did you not?

  Danny had wanted to go on that roof ever since he’d spotted it at night from the castle walls. Had he told the baroness that? He trailed her back out the heavy door. She started climbing the narrow flight of stairs he’d seen when he first came into the keep, and Danny followed. They passed door after door, to the point where it seemed they’d gone higher than the keep could possibly be. The higher they went, the narrower the stairs got, until Danny’s shoulders were touching the walls on either side. Eventually he had to turn sideways just to get through. It was like squeezing between muscle and skin. The baroness kept stopping to breathe, and Danny heard air rattling through the wet caves in her chest.

  Finally they climbed through a trapdoor onto the keep’s roof: a stone platform the same size and shape as the room they’d been sitting in. Around its edges were those square indentations Danny had seen on top of the castle walls. Everywhere else there was sky, a giant sky crammed with more stars than he’d ever seen—a splattery mess of them, a garbage dump. It was almost obscene.

  Danny stared at the sky. He felt something in one of his pockets and pulled it out. His phone. He’d forgotten it. He stared at the thing, amazed to think he’d ever pushed those buttons and talked to people in countries thousands of miles away. It seemed like a miracle, like calling out to one of those trillions of stars and having a voice answer back.

  Danny held the phone and knew it was over, all that. He was somewhere else.

  He threw the phone hard, so his shoulder and elbow snapped. It shot straight out into the dark. He didn’t hear it land.

  Baroness: Did you make a wish?

  She was standing across the keep, watching him. Her voice was the same raspy man’s voice, but when Danny turned to look at her she’d dropped thirty years, maybe more, her tits tight inside her dress, those pale arms visible again. Danny realized he’d been waiting for this, to see her this way again. Knowing it would come.

  She got younger every step he took, until her hair was heavy and gold around her long white neck. Danny took hold of her hands, feeling the sharp bones inside that soft, soft skin. He pushed himself against her, easing her backward onto the stones, which were smooth and flat from hundreds of years of people stepping over them. When they kissed, the taste of her mouth was like that wine. It made him drink wildly, chasing after that sweet last thing.

  I have a dream I’m stuck inside a burning tower. When I open up my eyes, there’s a flashlight so close to my face I can feel the heat from its puny bulb. It’s got me too blind to see who’s behind it, but when I hear the voice I remember where I am. It’s Davis.

  I’ve got your number, pal, he tells me. Oh yeah, I’ve got it now.

  He’s used that one before, I’ve got your number. I already wrote it down.

  You’ve had my number since day one, I tell him.

  Davis moves the flashlight back a little, but it’s still in my eyes. He’s looking at me like there’s something hidden behind my skin that he wants to see.

  Nope, I didn’t have it on day one, he says. Didn’t have it yesterday. But now that I do, this camouflage act of pretending you’re brain dead is officially out-of-date.

  I’ve got no idea what Davis is talking about, but I’m used to that. I say, What happened since yesterday?

  He ducks, and the light is finally off me. It leaves a big green patch in front of my eyes. I look over the edge of my tray and see Davis hunched over, rummaging under the tablecloth that covers whatever’s underneath his bed. When he stands back up he’s got a bunch of typed pages in his hand. They start sliding and drifting down to the floor and I jerk on one elbow and shoot a hand under my mattress to see if my manuscript is still where I put it. A mistake. Davis drops his flashlight and grabs me in a headlock.

  Are those mine? I manage to croak out.

  They’ve got your name on them, he says. Already he’s easing up. The headlocks are a reflex with Davis, it’s nothing personal. As soon as I can move I push my hand under my mattress right below my head. No pages. I get a gnawing feeling, but I don’t let it show.

  You read it all? I ask him.

  Don’t act so surprised. I read up whole books on my bunk while you snooze away the night. I use my time. And I’m amazed—I’m in a state of shock, brother, that’s God’s truth—to find you’ve been using yours, too.

  Brother?

  He lets me go and I yank in some breath. Davis’s sweating hands have wetted up my hair.

  That shit isn’t mine, I tell him, for two reasons: one because I don’t want Davis to know I give a damn about the pages, two because I want him to take that look he’s pointing my way and move it someplace else.

  Don’t try to back off now, Davis says. Take responsibility for your actions! But Davis can’t say responsibility in a normal voice: he has to shout it.

  Shut the fuck up! Luis yells from next door.

  I’m saying I didn’t make it up, I tell him softly.

  Davis snorts. Obviously you didn’t make it up.

  My pages are all over the floor, and my computer time’s shot until next week. If anything is missing from the new stuff I’ve typed, I can’t give it to Holly tomorrow. This started the week after the fight: Allan Beard ate up a whole class reading a long thing about climate change, and when class was done and Holly was leaving, she stopped by my desk and said, Ray. She wasn’t looking at me—she still won’t even since the fight, but it’s different now. Now it’s like we’ve agreed not to look, because our eyes meeting up seems too private. I only want that to happen if we’re alone in a room, which in this place is pretty much impossible. In the break, when the other guys swarm around Holly all wanting their little piece, I go out to the hall.

  Holly looked at my pages and said, Give me that.

  I handed them up. She slipped them in her bag, and the next week she gave them back to me (still not looking) with these beautiful green marks on the edges of every single page, Nice! and Cut? and More of this? and Careful and Heavy-handed? and Strange and Good tension and More? and More? and More of this? and Yes and Wow! and Yes and Very nice! and this is as close to sex talk as it gets for me in here, so you bet I enjoy it. I never look at my part, the stuff she’s talking about—who cares? What I want is more, and the only way to get more is to write more, and every week I try harder so I can rake in all those yeses and nices and wows. Not just blabbing stuff down but really trying to make something out of it.

  What I want—I actually have dreams about this—is to hold her hand. I remember how it felt on my forehead right after the fight, those dry cool fingers, and when I think hard enough I can still feel them there, like they left a mark. When Holly gives back my pages I try taking them from her in a way that my fingers will slide against her fingers or even just brush them for a second and I’ll feel her body there the way I did when she touched my head. No luck. I think holding her hand in here would be equal to fucking her on the outside.

  I get off my bunk slowly, trying to avoid another headlock from Davis. I crouch down and start picking my pages up from the floor. Our leaky head has gotten one of them wet, smearing up Holly’s green ink. I blot it with toilet paper. All this while I’m down by Davis’s bunk, which he usually guards like a dog because of what
ever the hell he’s got under there. But he watches me now like I’m a magician setting up a trick.

  Look at you, he says. And here you’ve been acting all these months like you don’t give a shit about anything.

  When I’ve got all the pages I can find, I put them in order and count. My heart kicks up, because if the numbers aren’t right I know I’ll have to fix it, I’ll have to solve it, or I can’t do anything else.

  I’m missing forty-five, I tell him.

  Davis acts like he doesn’t hear me, so I get in his face. Four-five, Davis. Page forty-five. I need it.

  Look at you, he says. It’s like he’s fallen in love. His wild face looks soft as a puppy dog’s, and he keeps tilting his head and shining his eyes my way.

  Stop looking at me, I tell him, because Davis in love is not a sight you want to see.

  Relax, he says. We’ll put your ghost story back together just like it was.

  Ghost story? I say. The fuck are you talking about?

  Don’t play possum with me, he says, and I hear it, play possum, but the missing page has me too rattled to care.

  I leave what pages I’ve got on my tray and crouch on the floor and start looking for forty-five. There aren’t a lot of places a piece of paper can go in a room this size, but I feel around behind the head and under the sink and over near the window. There are no ghosts in this story, I say to Davis.

  Oh yeah? Then show me where the people are.

  I look up at him. What people?

  Davis waves the pages I’ve left on my tray so they flap in the air. These people, he says. I can see them, I can hear them, I know them, but they’re not in this room. They’re not on this block. They’re not in this prison or this town or this country or even this same world as you and me. They’re in some other place.

  I think: If one more page falls out of that bunch I’ll squeeze Davis’s head between my hands until it pops. But all I say is, C’mon, man. It’s just words.

  Davis holds the flashlight under his face: angles, sweat, eyes, and the sight of him lit that way gives me a shake from my ass to my neck. They’re ghosts, brother, he says. Not alive, not dead. An in-between thing.