I call his name until my voice gets weak. I go back inside the keep and lie down on the brocade couch. I’m overwhelmed by the purest sadness I can remember in my life—not like Corey, where the sadness was mixed up with guilt, responsibility—this is just loss. Pure loss. I know Ray is gone, and I’ll never see him again.
I start to cry. I lie there, sobbing into the cushions. A couple of times I hear the door open, but I don’t look up. I know it’s not Ray. It’s other people in cashmere sweatsuits who leave as soon as they see me.
Eventually I stop. I lie there while darkness fills up the room. The only light is from the fireplace. And then I hear a bell. It ripples in through the windows, a clear beautiful sound. It rings five times, each one like a silver wave rolling onto a dark beach.
After the bell stops ringing I hear movement, as though the keep has suddenly come to life. I even feel it: a rustling behind the walls, doors pushing open, the whispery sound of feet as people move down from the top of the keep through all those internal stairwells and begin passing outside through the doors on the floor where I am.
Dinnertime.
I lie there, empty from crying, and listen to the movements of people walking. And even though I don’t want to eat or listen to live medieval music, I find myself getting up off my couch and leaving the room. I join the stream of people in beige cashmere sweats and move with them back down the outdoor staircase.
At the base of the keep, the group follows a white shell path toward the castle. I go a different way. The air is sharply cold on my hands and face, but the cashmere keeps the rest of me warm. The sunset is an orange tear at the bottom of a solid gray sky.
Hotel employees are lighting candles along the paths, each one inside a glass globe. Alto. I know where I’m going as if I remember it.
The wall of cypress. An opening lit by a lantern. I squeeze through, and the beauty of the pool rocks through me like the bell did—it’s huge and round, lit from under the surface. The water is pale green. The white marble around it turns the whole area bright, as though it’s earlier in the day. A few people sit along the edge of the pool in thick beige bathrobes. Some are in the water. I’ve stopped looking at faces, so I don’t know how old they are, if they’re male or female. Off to one side is a cloth tent.
The air hurts my fingers, and I pull my hands inside the sleeves of my sweater. Cold skims steam off the top of the pool, and it whirls and dissolves like dozens of mini-twisters. It’s getting darker by the second, but that globe of light around the pool lasts and lasts, like a bubble you know will break, can’t believe hasn’t already broken, but there it is, intact.
The last time I saw Ray, it was a formal prison visit. I wasn’t teaching anymore, which made it easier to drive up, park, go in, and give my name. The guard knew me.
Because I wasn’t on Ray’s list of preapproved visitors, I’d had to arrange things ahead of time through Calgary, getting an earful every step of the way: “Look, Holly, I don’t know and I don’t want to know, know what I’m saying?” and “It’s got nothing to do with me, but people are talking, okay?”
I told him, “He almost died. I want to see him again.”
“Like I said, it’s your life, know what I’m saying?”
And so on.
I sat in a yellow chair and waited in the noisy visiting room, which was full of tired dolled-up little kids and the smell of vending-machine nachos heating in the microwave. Twenty minutes later, Ray came in. His hair was longer and he looked tan, but maybe that was just compared to how pale he’d been in the hospital. I saw him and it was all still there between us, without a word being spoken. He sat down on a chair across from me and said, “You look beautiful.”
“I can’t believe you’re alive,” I said.
“Me either,” he said, and laughed. “Wasn’t my turn, I guess.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “I’m so glad.”
We were quiet. It wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly. It felt like we were in the real world, on the outside or as close to it as we’d ever been. I could imagine us getting up and walking out of there together.
Ray moved and sat next to me. “You took a risk,” he said, “coming here like this.”
“I had to.”
It went on like that, little comments with a lot of silence in between, and the silence seemed more powerful than all the rest.
A half hour, I’d told myself. I let it drag to forty-five minutes. “I should go,” I said.
“One thing.”
I leaned back in my chair.
“That stuff I wrote,” Ray said. “I know it was shit.”
And when I tried to protest that it wasn’t shit, it was just rough, it needed work like everything does, it was a beginning, blah blah blah, he pushed a finger to my lips. It was the first time he’d touched me.
“I want to give it to you,” he said. “Not that it’s good, we’ve covered that. But maybe you can make something out of it.”
In his eyes and face I saw that hope, that belief in me that had filled up my life all those months. But class was over now.
He was watching my face. “Or not. It doesn’t matter. But I wrote it for you.”
“Keep it,” I said.
He looked startled. “Why?”
“I can’t write,” I said. “You’re better off holding on to it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because the need to confess was welling up in me, I couldn’t stop it. “I was your teacher under false pretenses. I’m not even qualified.”
“Crap.” He sounded angry.
“I’m telling you this so you don’t do anything stupid,” I said. “I’m not a writer. Or a teacher.”
“I know who you are,” Ray said.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking, and the nails were bitten. I should have given myself a manicure. There was a long pause, and then Ray took my bitten-up hands in his hands. It was hard to believe they were the same hands I’d held in the hospital—those had been hot and damp and swollen. Now his hands were strong, cool. Healthy hands. He got well, I thought.
“Holly,” he said, and when I looked up he was smiling again. He’s happy, I thought. I’ve never seen him happy before. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “You’re free.”
We watched each other. I thought, It sounds like he’s saying goodbye. Why, when I’m the one leaving?
In the cabana, an older lady gives me a black one-piece swimming suit and a thick terry-cloth robe. There are private changing cubicles with canvas walls and full-length mirrors. I watch myself change into the swimsuit. Thirty-three years of wear and tear, but there I am.
When I come back out, it’s dark except for the big green circle of swimming pool. The cold bites at my fingers and calves and feet. I stand there listening, because a new sound has started up, like thousands of tiny glass pieces breaking above and below and all around me. I turn my face to the sky and then I feel it, bits of cold on my face: snow. In the total quiet of this place, I can hear snow falling through the air and landing on the marble. A trillion invisible clicks.
The steam on the pool is thicker now, like spinning bales of white hay. I can barely see the people underneath it.
And I don’t know if it’s the snow, or the night, or that pale green water, or something else that’s separate from all that, but as I walk to the edge of the pool I’m filled with an old, childish excitement. I wait, letting the snow fall and melt on my hair and face and feet. I let the excitement build until it floods my chest.
I close my eyes and dive in.
Acknowledgments
My massive thanks to those who have listened, read, calmed, housed, inspired, informed, and otherwise aided me while I worked on The Keep: David Herskovits, Amanda Urban, Jennifer Smith, Jordan Pavlin, Lisa Fugurd, Kay Kimpton, Don Lee, Monica Adler, David Rosenstock, Genevieve Field, Ruth Danon, Elizabeth Tippens, Peggy Reed, Julie Mars, David Hogan, Alexander Busansky, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cul
lman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
JENNIFER EGAN
THE KEEP
Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
ALSO BY JENNIFER EGAN
Look at Me
Emerald City and Other Stories
The Invisible Circus
PRAISE FOR JENNIFER EGAN’S
THE KEEP
“Jennifer Egan is one of the most gifted writers of her generation…. The risk-taking writer has created an original, post-modern take on the Gothic thriller.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Egan’s third novel…is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“Visionary…. At once hyperrealistic and darkly dreamed…. With Egan’s powers of invention running at full tilt, The Keep reads like a twenty-first-century mash-up of Kafka, Calvino, and Poe, in which the absurd meets the surreal meets the unspeakable—to edgy, entertaining effect.”
—Elle
“Remarkable…. Egan effectively echoes the works of Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), fusing a seemingly moribund genre with elements borrowed from the metafictions of John Barth, Italo Calvino and others. It’s tricky; but it’s a trick only a terrifically talented writer could pull off.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“It’s precisely Egan’s talent for tapping into the American subconscious—with deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture—that has established the author and journalist as a prescient literary voice.”
—Vogue
“Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous—imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests—and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins–style atmospherics.”
—The New Yorker
“If Kafka’s Joseph K. and Lewis Carroll’s Alice had a son, he would have to be Jennifer Egan’s Danny…. No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles…the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting.”
—The Boston Globe
“Egan is an exceptionally intelligent writer whose joy at appropriating and subverting genres and clichés—from prison memoir to Gothic ghost story—is evident on every dizzyingly inventive page.”
—The Washington Post
“Intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive.”
—The New York Observer
“Egan spins a haunting tale…. [Her] brilliance is in balancing the deliciously creepy elements of Gothic-castle novels with the dead-on realism of a prisoner’s life, to create a book worth keeping.”
—Vanity Fair
“Egan gets everything right—from the convolutions of the strung-out male mind to the self-deceptions of a drug addict—and her skill will keep you marveling at the pages that you can’t help turning.”
—People
“Arresting…. Insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives…. Strange and beautifully drawn, a place well worth visiting.”
—USA Today
“Dazzling…. A metafictional tour de force…. It draws us in with its compelling realism as surely as anything by Dickens or Balzac—not to mention Henry James, who understood better than anyone how to turn the screw.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Egan breaks the mold from page one…. [The Keep] maintains a frightening, vertiginous velocity…. The immersion in these high-stakes psychological tightrope acts gives The Keep a page-turning horror…. Outstanding.”
—The Onion
“A hypnotic tale of unexpected connections between isolated people, each concealing secrets that ultimately upend how we see them…. Though dark with betrayal and violence (both psychological and literal), The Keep ultimately reveals itself to be a love letter to the creative impulse.”
—Newsday
“Egan is a contemporary American storyteller in the vein of Stephen King or The Sopranos scriptwriters. Her latest novel, a slightly Gothic tale of love and the (possibly) supernatural, is a pleasure to read.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A dark and fascinating journey…. Egan skillfully builds the tension to a tipping point, culminating in an explosion…. The complicated plot comes together seamlessly, marvelously.”
—Rocky Mountain News
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2007
Copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Egan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Egan, Jennifer.
The keep / by Jennifer Egan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Cousins—Fiction. 2. Prisoners—Fiction. 3. Europe, Eastern—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.G292K44 2006
813'.54—dc22
2006011573
www.anchorbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-38661-8
v3.0
Jennifer Egan, The Keep
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