[...] all of which was fine but none of which was the thing. Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny’s whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he’d forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he’d never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was.

He loved her. She had a sly, proud face and a fuzz of invisible hair over every part of her. She made the girls he’d slept with before—models or might-as-well-be models (would be, could be, wished they were, mistaken for, proud they weren’t, etc.), girls with elastic faces who ate a lot of popcorn and green peppers and nodded respectfully whenever he went on about his moneymaking schemes, whereas Martha said once, You can find out it’s bullshit by wasting a chunk of your life or just admit it’s bullshit right now and drop it—made them seem interchangeable. And some miracle had led Danny through that clutter of identical girls to Martha.

She flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the pool. It floated for a second, then sank. She said, I don’t like facts.

Danny: I don’t like nouns. Or verbs. And adjectives are the worst.

Nora: No, adverbs are the worst. He said brightly. She thought hopefully.

Danny: She moaned helplessly.

Nora: He ran stiffly.

Danny: Is that why you’re here? To get away from all the adverbs back in New York?

Who says I’m from New York?

Aren’t you?

Nora cocked her head. Short-term memory problems?

Oh, yeah. Facts.

Nora: Anyway, there’s no getting away from adverbs. They’re rampant.

Danny: She confessed anxiously.

Nora: They’re in our heads.

She cried desperately.

Nora: I hope you don’t actually write like that.

Danny: I write for shit.

Nora: I’m an excellent writer.

She said smugly.

Nora: Not smugly. Factually.

Danny: Ah. So you’ll make an exception to brag.

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.

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.

He smiles at me, and damned if his teeth aren’t the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen in a human head. We. We: it’s an offer, an invitation to believe in his nonsense. I watch Davis put his ear against his “radio” and nod with his eyes closed, and all of a sudden I think: How do I know it’s not real? Okay, it’s a shoebox full of dust with knobs pushed through the cardboard, but what if it works? What if it actually does what Davis says? And in that split second I go from pretending straight into believing—it’s like all the pretending made me believe, except that doesn’t make sense, because pretending and believing are opposites. I don’t know what happens. Maybe it’s this place. Maybe if old fruit can be next week’s wine and a toothbrush can slit a throat and holding a girl’s hand is the same as fucking her, maybe a box of hair is a radio. Maybe in here it’s true.

Now wait a minute, someone’s got to be saying. Three pages ago Danny had been awake almost ten minutes, and now you’re telling us it’s forty-five? Are you kidding me? I could repeat everything they said on those three pages in five minutes tops, which means Danny should be awake seventeen minutes maximum. But hold on, bud, you’re forgetting two things: (1) Everything anyone said had to travel down a long tube to Danny’s brain, and so did his answers before they got to his mouth and (2) there were other things going on in the room that I didn’t write down because I would’ve needed pages and pages, which I don’t have, not to mention it would be boring as hell. Such as: Howard got up and poked at the fire. Nora shut the window. Howard scratched his head and blew his nose in a white handkerchief. Nora went into the hall to talk to someone and then came back. Howard’s walkie-talkie made a staticky noise so he had to fiddle with it to shut it up. Every one of those things adds time, to the point where if I’d told you an hour instead of forty-five minutes, even that would be realistic.

Benjy leaned closer. In his face Danny saw sympathy mixed in with a kind of cold curiosity you never saw in adults. They’d learned how to hide it.

Benjy: Are you sad to have nothing?

No, I’m not sad.

But he was. The sadness came on Danny suddenly and buried him. He saw himself: flat on his back in the middle of nowhere, with a smashed-up head. A guy who had nothing.

Benjy: Are you crying?

Danny: You’ve got to be kidding.

I see tears.

That’s just from the…my head hurts. You’re making it hurt.

Grown-ups cry sometimes. I saw my mommy cry.

I need to sleep.

Benjy peered at him. Danny shut his eyes. He heard the kid breathing next to his ear.

Benjy: Are you a grown-up?

[...] Danny had a creepy feeling of watching himself: a gimping, head-injured guy with a right foot full of big white toes anyone could reach out and grab, stumbling through a rotten garden outside a castle full of strangers in a country he didn’t know the name of. A guy at the end of the line is what Danny saw, with no options left. A guy with nothing, or why would he be here?

Another squirt of cold. Danny talked to himself: Get it together. Get. It. Together.

This was how the worm got in. You opened yourself to that kind of thinking and the worm crawled inside you and started to eat and didn’t stop until nothing was left. You saw yourself as a weak powerless guy and it was only a matter of time before everyone agreed you were that guy. Danny had seen it happen. The worm ate people up the way years had eaten away this castle: caving in ceilings, chewing through walls, tunneling under floorboards until even a perfectly renovated hallway with varnished doors and fake candles on the walls had a thousand bugs crawling around a few floors underneath it.

The slowing of his blood made Danny dizzy, the relief of not being afraid and even more than that, knowing he’d been afraid of nothing. Not that Danny was safe—the worm was trying to get inside him, that was clear. He knew the signs. When you were vulnerable to the worm you had to take precautions, put a few key facts in a strong place where the worm couldn’t touch them if it somehow did get in. Danny used to think of his heart as that strong place, but now he had a better word: the keep. His own keep, inside him, where his treasures would be hidden in case the castle was invaded. What should go in Danny’s keep? A lot of stuff went through his head, a whole storm of stuff from eighteen years of friendships, girlfriends, triumphant moments, powerful people whose number two he’d been, but when it came down to what he couldn’t live without, there was only one thing: Martha Mueller. That she loved him. Danny pictured himself holding that fact in his hands like it was alive, putting it in a box inside his ribs and sealing up the box. And then the fear left him. He felt safe. Weak, wiped out, but safe. As long as Martha was in the keep, the worm couldn’t win.