The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

  Danny tried to push against Howard’s hand, but being even halfway vertical made his head start to spin. It was almost a relief when Howard took one of Danny’s shoulders in each of his hands and eased him gently back.

  Howard: You can’t stand up, buddy, no, no. You’re not ready for that. And I—I went too far. I’m sorry, Danny. I was trying to engage you, but I went too far.

  Danny thought he might be sick. He took long, shaky breaths. The room was dead quiet.

  Howard: You okay? You hanging in there? He held two fingers to Danny’s wrist like he was checking his pulse.

  Howard? Benjy?

  It was Ann. She stood in the doorway in a blue bathrobe, looking confused. Her voice was sleepy. I looked in Benjy’s room and he wasn’t there and I sort of freaked out.

  Howard went over, carrying Benjy in one arm. The kid attached himself to his mother like a monkey glomming onto a tree trunk. Danny was glad to be rid of him.

  Howard: He’s been keeping me company. Haven’t you, Big Guy?

  Ann: It’s—isn’t it the middle of the night?

  Yeah, we’re trying to keep Danny awake. Then he spoke softly to Ann so Danny couldn’t hear.

  Ann’s eyes refocused. She gave the kid back to Howard and came to where Danny lay. She looked the same straight out of bed as she did in bright sunlight, telling how a dip in a swimming pool was going to turn around some washed-up lady’s life.

  Ann: Oh, Danny. How’re you doing?

  Danny: Fending off the coma. So far.

  Howard: Not coma, please don’t say that word. Gripping sleep or—or grabbing sleep.

  Danny and Ann looked at each other. She was scared too, but not the way Howard was. Ann wasn’t scared Danny would die, she was scared he would tell.

  And then it all came back: the whole reason he’d fallen out the window in the first place. Danny hadn’t exactly forgotten it, but he’d been thinking backward, crooked, maybe because of the drugs. This whole time he’d had a fact inside his head that would blow a hole straight through the middle of Howard’s life. And having that fact put Danny in charge.

  His anger at Howard dried up instantly, like his sadness. He floated in a weird state of relief.

  Howard: Nora, what’s the time?

  Nora: One fifty-four.

  Howard: Wait—what? He turned to look at her.

  Nora: More than two hours. Almost two and a half.

  Howard let out a shout: Yes, yes! Danny, you did it! You did it, buddy!

  He half fell on top of Danny and embraced him—the warmest envelope of a hug Danny could remember in his life. Howard’s torso covered all of his, and the heat from it sank between Danny’s ribs and pulled in around his heart. Confused, he reached up and clung to his cousin.

  When Howard stood up again, his eyes were wet. He wiped them on his arm. Fuck, I was worried. I can say that now, Danny. I was so fucking worried about you.

  Benjy: You said fuck! Fuck!

  Ann: Benjy! Howard!

  But she was laughing. All of them were, even a few graduate students who must’ve come in from the hall. There was crowing, hi-fiving, all that stuff. Only Ann was still afraid. Danny saw it in her eyes: a kind of squinting, like the sun was out.

  Danny was tired, so tired. The old exhaustion rushed back in to fill up the place where his anger had been. He felt it wrapping around his eyeballs, rolling them back in his head. He shut his eyes and passed out.

  My crew and I are digging up a plumbing line maybe twenty feet inside the perimeter fence when I notice a little tan Subaru coming up the road. This road connects the interstate to the prison. It runs parallel with the outer fence but at a distance, and what with the two layers of chain link in between plus all that razor wire, you’ve got no idea who’s driving. I don’t even know what makes me look. But that’s bullshit. We always look.

  There’s no visiting on Thursdays, so the parking lot is empty except for staff. The Subaru pulls in and takes a spot. I’ve got no reason to be thinking about Holly—Thursday isn’t her day. And I’m not thinking about her, but for some reason by the time the door opens on that Subaru I’m waiting for her to get out. And then she does.

  She’s smoking, that’s the first shock I get. Usually I can smell it on a woman when she smokes, her hands and hair and breath, but with Holly I had no hint. It’s a nasty habit, especially in a woman—too bad if that’s sexist. But watching Holly take a long drag outside her car, shielding her eyes from the sun, I’m not disgusted. More impressed. That she was smoking all that time and I didn’t even know.

  Shock two is her outfit. Instead of the loose stuff she usually wears, she’s got on a long dark skirt with some kind of pattern on it and a pale green blouse like you wear to an office. Her shoes have a little heel on them, enough to tip her forward onto her toes. And her hair is down, blowing around in the hot breeze. She takes one last drag and squashes the butt under her shoe.

  By now my eyes hurt from the brightness of all that wire I’ve got to look through to see her, not to mention the white stone rubble they use to fill in the dead space between the inner and outer fences. It’s white to set off any foreign object that happens to land there, for example any one of us who somehow manages to clear the first fence, which is thirty feet high, without nicking an artery on all the razor wire they’ve got spiraling along the top. The outer fence has a wall underneath it that reaches twenty feet into the ground. Nothing gets through but the pipes.

  Someone you know, Ray? the CO says.

  Someone he wants to know, Angel says.

  She’s my cousin, I say, and for a minute they all look at me like maybe it’s true and then they all laugh, except for the CO.

  Move or I’ll start writing tickets, he says, and he means it. Jenkins writes more tickets than any other CO in this place, that’s pure fact. We call him the Meter Maid.

  We’re digging out a rotten plumbing main, exposing a leaky, crusty system that smells like a corpse. Later on in the week we’ll replace it all. I’ve got an eye on the admissions building, because with visiting closed I know Holly will get through there fast. Then she’ll come out the other side and walk maybe thirty feet to the prison building, at which point I’ll see her again with no fences in between us.

  Sure enough, she’s back out two minutes later. The path from admissions to the prison lobby has flower beds on one side from the horticultural program, and they’re blooming like crazy. Maybe that’s why Holly slows down, to look at those flowers. But that can’t be right—there must be flowers everywhere on the outside. More likely she slows down because she doesn’t want to breathe in the smell that gags you when you first walk into the prison building. If I knew how to give you that smell in words I wouldn’t need a writing class. All I can do is name some stuff that’s in it—cigarettes, germ killer, sweat, chow, piss—but the mix is so much worse than those smells combined could ever be that at first you think you’d rather stop breathing than have it in you. And after an hour you can’t even smell it anymore, which I guess is worse. So Holly goes slow past those flower beds and for a minute or two I’m just in awe of my good luck, happening to be in this spot right at the second when she walks through on an off day. What are the chances? It’s like being high, like I’m somewhere else, like whatever thing it was that started up in me all those weeks ago in Holly’s class was leading me to this: watching her walk up that path on a sunny day. I don’t know how to say it.

  The guys are muttering tasty and sweet and wouldn’t mind a little of that stuck to my face, but so softly it’s like rustling more than words. Not even Jenkins can hear it. Red and Pablo, the rapists, don’t say anything, just follow her with their eyes. Holly glances our way and as soon as she does she speeds up and then boom—she’s gone, into the lobby. And when I try to replay it in my head, to watch her walk through those flowers all over again, what I see is just us: seven prisoners in green khakis and vendor-approved work boots digging out a reeking hole. Guys without faces, except Red, maybe, who’
s a foot taller than the rest of us. And the good feeling drains out of me so fast I get woozy, like I nicked an artery. I sit on the edge of the hole we just dug.

  On your feet, Meter Maid says. Fuck’s the matter with you?

  I stand up.

  Take that shovel and dig. That’s a direct order. He says it like that so if I don’t move he can write me up. There’s no way I’ll give him the satisfaction.

  My shovel goes in and comes back out. I need to think. If I think, I can make this feeling stop. But I can’t think.

  You sick? Jenkins says, and I read his mind: He’s remembering Corvis, last month. Corvis conked out on his laminating machine after the CO wouldn’t let him break. Died on the spot from a heart attack.

  Yeah, CO, I say. I’m sick.

  Me too, Red says.

  We’re all sick, CO, Angel says. Too sick to dig.

  But we keep on digging.

  You’re a bunch of sickos is what you are, Jenkins says, and he laughs like mad at that one.

  At the next class, Holly looks like she always looked before: loose clothes, hair pulled back. At break there’s the usual crowd of guys trying to get her attention. Normally I go straight into the hall, but today I hang around. I wait.

  Eventually it’s just Hamsam and me waiting, and when Hamsam sees I’m behind him he gives up his spot and walks out. Hamsam and I were brothers in a past life.

  Holly smiles at me. It’s the first time we’ve really looked at each other since Mel threw me on the ground those weeks ago. It feels strange, naked.

  What’s on your mind, Ray? she asks.

  Now that I’m here with her looking right at me, I don’t know what the hell to say. Finally I tell her: I saw you. On Thursday. Coming in.

  I saw you too, she says.

  Liar, I tell her.

  You were digging something.

  That amazes me, floors me. And even though I’m standing right in front of Holly, close enough that if I put out my hand I could touch her, I still don’t smell the smoke. Not a trace of it.

  I say, How did you know it was me?

  Your face, she says, and we both start to laugh, and the more we laugh the funnier it gets.

  There’s noise in the hall, someone raising his voice, and it makes this room with just us in it seem even more quiet. Every minute that door doesn’t crash wide open is one more miracle.

  I want to talk to you, I say.

  Aren’t we talking?

  I mean get to know you. I want to hear your story.

  For a second, the pain I saw one other time swims right up under Holly’s face. No you don’t, she says.

  Why’s that?

  She thinks about it. Because it’s complicated without being interesting.

  I want to complicate it more.

  I get that feeling, she says. You want to get me fired.

  You’ve got another job. And that one you dress for.

  No comment, she says, but the smile is back.

  Are you married? I ask, and when she doesn’t answer right away I say, Divorced. Or separated. And “complicated” means kids—two at least, but I’m guessing three.

  Something peels off her face and for a second she looks raw, almost scared.

  You’re a con man, right? she says. That’s what you’re in here for, conning people?

  Con men don’t end up in here, I say. They go to nicer places.

  And you?

  I’m in for murder.

  Liar.

  I’m serious.

  Holly gets quiet. When she finally answers, her smile is long gone. If you thought that was going to impress me, you were way off.

  Just answering the question, I say. But my chest goes very tight. Did I think it would impress her? I don’t even know.

  She opens up a folder and looks inside. Holly, I say, but she keeps her face turned down. And then the door bangs open like it should’ve done all those seconds we were talking. Break is done.

  I go to my desk and sit. My chest is tight.

  For the first time ever, Tom-Tom’s brought in something to read. It’s handwritten and looks about eighty pages long. Holly tells him right off that there’s no way he can read all that and Tom-Tom looks kind of deflated. Then he starts up in a nasal, whiny voice that sounds like it’s making one long excuse for something. The voice is so bad, and the way he reads is so nervous and wired, and he has to stop so many times because he can’t read his own writing, which is gigantic to the point where every couple of sentences he has to turn a page, that at first I can’t even listen. None of us can. But finally some stuff starts to come through. Summer in the deep South. Poor family. Too many kids. A mom drops a pot of boiling water on her three-year-old boy and his arm stops growing. Sick as I am from the conversation with Holly, how wrong it went, I lose track of where I am. The boy grows up and starts doing crystal meth. The ending is right after his first robbery, when he twists an old man’s arm and breaks it in three places.

  Tom-Tom stops. Turns out he read us the whole thing. No one says a word, and finally Tom-Tom laughs in a nervous way and says, Guess you were too bored to stop me, huh?

  Holly checks the clock, then her watch. Her eyes are funny, like she’s been sleeping. Okay, she says. Let’s talk about it.

  Allan Beard starts off with the same comment he always makes: he wants more context. Beard’s a context freak, can’t get enough of it. Or maybe he just wants Holly to know he knows what context means.

  Cherry says, It’s sad, Tom-Tom. Made me real, real sad.

  Mel says, You got to get some humor in there, T-T. It’s urgent, man, just maybe a joke or two, but something’s gotta be funny.

  And on it goes, Holly nudging them with questions like: Context for what? and Is “getting you down” necessarily a bad thing? and This really speaks to the question of why we read. And watching her, I know that Tom-Tom has managed to do the thing I meant to do, should’ve done, needed to do in that long, beautiful break I was given with Holly: he reached her.

  Finally Holly says, I give up, and we all look at her. She comes right up to the first row of desks.

  If I haven’t taught you enough to know that what we just heard is good—powerful, honest, moving, all the things we hope for when we sit down to write—I must be the worst teacher out there. Seriously, I don’t know what we’re doing in here if you can’t see that.

  She stands there waiting. No one says a thing. And you might think one person at least would be happy, hearing all that, meaning Tom-Tom, but then you wouldn’t understand him. When Holly’s done talking he turns and looks at me. Why so quiet, Ray?

  I don’t know, I say. Do I need a reason?

  I just poured out my frigging heart and soul on that paper. You’d think I could expect one frigging comment out of you.

  I feel Holly’s eyes on me. And I know that if I go ahead and say what no one else seems to get, that Tom-Tom is a fucking genius and he wrote something great—great—then the bad thing that happened between Holly and me will disappear. And I have the words, the exact words, right in my throat. But they’re too far down.

  Tom-Tom’s watching me, too. He’s around thirty, I’d guess, but like all meth freaks he’s missing half his teeth, so his face caves in. Still, right now he looks about eight years old, his eyes jumpy, full of hope. Any little thing from me will make him melt, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I have that power over Tom-Tom. I don’t even want it. But I can’t give it up.

  The seconds pass. I know what’s going on because it’s the same thing that always happens: give me something nice, something I love or want or need, and I’ll find a way to grind it into dust.

  Tom-Tom’s eyes go flat. Fuck you, Ray, he says, and he turns back around. I see his bent spine through his shirt. Holly looks down.

  And I’m fucked. I know that.

  That night I lie on my tray and try to write. Holly left class without taking my pages, but I’m hoping next week she’ll start up again. And maybe that way I can fix i
t. Maybe I can reach her like Tom-Tom did.

  What I mostly do is lie there.

  Davis is on the tray below, rustling and chuckling like he’s watching TV. Except there’s no TV, just the “radio.”

  Once in a while he pokes out his head and says, What’s wrong with you?

  Nothing’s wrong, I say.

  Then why are you lying there like a volcano belched you up?

  No reason.

  There has to be a reason. There’s always a reason.

  The words I didn’t say to Tom-Tom are still in me, caught in my neck like a hook. I feel like I’ll die if I don’t get them out.

  Davis stands up and looks at my face. You sick? Is that it? he asks, and I get the feeling he’s trying to be nice. But any sign of weakness pisses Davis off.

  That’s it, I say. I’m sick.

  Yeah, well. Let’s hope you do some getting better fast.

  At six the next morning, we walk to chow. Normally Davis won’t go near it—he survives on seafood ramen noodles he stockpiles from the commissary. But even Davis will haul ass over to chow hall on pancake days. I mean, who doesn’t like pancakes?

  Chow hall is like a huge factory floor, with long windows on the top facing the sky where it’s red from the sun coming up. The place has its own foul smell: steam from the steam trays mixed up with boiled vegetables and ammonia from the floor and today there’s also the sweet of phony maple syrup.

  Every table seats four, I guess the idea being that smaller groups are less likely to get in fights. Davis and I sit alone. The hall is full of men, but what you mostly hear is echoey scraping sounds of eating. Davis and I eat without talking. We’re done in under five minutes.

  I’m in line to dump my tray when I see Tom-Tom waiting for pancakes. He’s got a gecko on each shoulder and another one climbing between the buttons of his shirt. Those little bright faces next to Tom-Tom’s dried-out toothless head give me a pain in my chest. I wonder if I should go over and say it right now, tell him I liked what he wrote. Even if it’s too late. Even if Holly won’t ever know.