I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  “You’d think they’d want a good shot,” he said, reaching for a wineglass. “You think they’d, like, just want me to be honest.”

  “I thought you threw something.”

  “It was a lens. It was just a lens.”

  He poured himself a glass of wine; he had a habit of reaching blindly for a bottle in the cheap section of the grocery store and finding whatever he’d purchased disappointing.

  “Good wine,” he said, acknowledging the glass. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not into red.” But actually, I didn’t mind it. I had chained myself to this new detail I had to follow to its dead end, no matter the cost. The me here, and the me out in the riptide. I had taken to lying not just about Finn, but the minutiae of my life, things that would never return to either of us, that would just drift away unseen, unnoted.

  Which was, I knew even then, a warning sign.

  * * *

  —

  “Well, Ian here wants me to go to chemo,” Finn said, smiling. He clapped my thigh and forced a short, loud laugh. The man was probably the worst actor in a ten-mile radius. Which was, in New York, saying something.

  “So he’s told me,” Luke said. “Sorry to hear, by the way.” He pushed away the torn scraps of straw wrapper.

  “Oh, it’s fine,” the man said.

  I wanted to take this man aside, to lecture him on proper use of the word “fine,” and how—the way I’d described it—he was not, in fact, fine. He was four or five years, tops. Maybe next week if I could kill him off and save Luke from ever uncovering the truth: that there is no Finn. Just this “actor,” “acting.”

  As if by some unreal cue, a stage direction written right into the story itself, I heard Diane spill her coffee. The sudden screech of moving chairs as she reached for napkins. The perfect time, I thought, to clean a filthy floor. To look up and notice me.

  * * *

  —

  Luke met me after he’d had—in his words—the best croissant since he lived in Paris, back when he thought he could make it big, debuting in one of those foreign glossies. He bought the pastry earlier in the day, before work, and I’d remembered his token indecision, his tan skin, serious hazel eyes, camera case in hand. I’d tried to flirt with him by asking if he wanted samples of a new truffle, but he didn’t hear me. Which was probably for the best. (As it turned out, they dried out your mouth; a few customers in this way choked, quietly gagging, out of the store.)

  He came back in while I was closing, turning up chairs onto the tables and sweeping. I usually brushed the dirt to the corners and blamed the cashier for it, but when I saw him again, I grabbed the dustbin.

  “Are you closed?” he asked, having ignored the unmissable sign I’d turned on the door that read in blocky red letters: CLOSED. “Sorry to intrude.”

  “Closing,” I said. “And it’s fine.”

  “Just wanted to ask—are your croissants made from scratch?”

  “Yeah, every morning.”

  “You make them?”

  I stopped for a moment, leaning down to collect a small pyramid of dirt. I was trying not to give in to my impulse to tell him yes, it was me, but I felt it tickle out of me, a reflex I couldn’t control. “Yeah.”

  A lie, of course. He introduced himself, and we got to talking about how croissants are properly made. I invented something idiotic about the importance of using fresh eggs. His smile charmed me, and I asked if he wanted to see the back. I still don’t know what prompted me to do this. We toured the industrial kitchen, and I pretended to know how things worked. This oven for the baguettes, that one for the bagels. When he was about to leave, I gave him the day-old pastries, frosting making a messy snow globe of the bag, and he looked at me, stared right through me as if he were really seeing me. Outside, it was starting to pour, water curtaining off the store’s awning in thin sheets. He leaned against the counter—a move I would later recognize as one of his favorite shoot poses. The light was golden, dimming with the sun through the rain. He left his business card: Lucas Hayes, Photographer, Weddings & Headshots.

  I had seen something like this happen on a reality television show I’d watched the night before, in which beautiful women flirt with ugly men, and the reactions are recorded. They all believe they have a shot.

  I waited twenty minutes after he left to lock the door.

  * * *

  —

  “How have you been? It’s been, God, twelve years?”

  How Diane recognized me was itself unbelievable—it must have been something about the cowlicks in my hair, maybe, or my profile. The fact I still hadn’t grown any taller. I regretted having taken her to prom, where she must have learned enough about my features in the sheer glare of gym light to recognize me now. The coffee shop began to blur: a mosaic of browns and tans. I felt suddenly unmoored from my ability to contain my lies, to seal them from touching one another. Luke and the man continued talking at the table, and I expected at any moment for Luke to rise from his seat, take a good look at me—staring through, really seeing me—before walking into the cold, bustling streets of New York.

  “I’ve been good, thanks,” I said. I hugged her quickly. Her coat smelled strongly of dust. I turned to Luke, moved by the idea that so long as I could lump everyone into one conversation, I could manage what was said, broker the facts. Like a Vegas dealer, aware of all the aces.

  “Still up in Vermont. Visiting a friend here,” I said, nodding once toward the man. “What brings you to the city?”

  “Oh, I’m a talent scout,” she said, with a kind of I’m a successful New Yorker pride I could never buy. I could sense Finn perk up.

  I spoke to move things along, make the unavoidable introductions. “Luke, Diane. Diane, this is my boyfriend Luke.”

  “Boyfriend!”

  Luke, the man, and I gave her a moment to make some apology. But, being Diane—one of only three girls who auditioned for cheer squad every year and never made the team—she didn’t. She had some social deficits. If I weren’t the smallest alternate wrestler, and so bent on seeming straight (and pretty sure, at the time, she’d go with me), I probably wouldn’t have asked her to prom.

  “And who’s this?” she asked, looking to the man.

  “This is Finn,” I said, annoyingly aware the actor forgot his own character’s name. It occurred to me Luke didn’t yet know exactly who Diane was, and that if I could keep it that way, I wouldn’t have to guard the boundaries of my lies. I offered to help her clean the mess, and Luke and the man got back to talking—slow, mundane material about how he had recently started using conditioner (a dubious claim, but passable) and still for the life of him couldn’t figure out the subway system (how embarrassing, I thought). We didn’t speak while piling napkins on the floor, the liquid soaking up in dark spots, like blots in a Rorschach test.

  Diane seemed as eager to end this odd episode as I was, jarred or perhaps hurt by what she must have considered my nascent homosexuality. Or maybe she really did have somewhere else to be, someone of her own to scout on the spot. Her presence was a brief blip in Finn’s story, a tense, awkward hiccup. She waved on her way out the door, and Luke said, “Seems like a sweet girl.”

  * * *

  —

  “It’s not even about trust,” Luke had said. “Or just about trust. But it’s, I guess—I need to know that I know who you really are.”

  This was when we’d gone back to his apartment after getting ice cream—that sort of test, I’d learned, to see if I was faking my lactose intolerance, which I was. The small hairs on his forearm were raised. On the television, a woman slapped a man and said something slow and deliberate, meaningful—one of those obvious, important moments, but I’d muted the sound. I felt an urgent pull toward the remote on the table; pressing the “back channel” button would reveal I had been watching Comeback Cove, a show in which
starved-for-attention B-list celebrities compete for paltry sums by constantly throwing one another under the bus at a luxury seaside resort. Luke learning that this was my chosen entertainment would not help my case, so I changed the channel. Erasing my tracks.

  “You do this thing,” he told me. “You speed up, time gets fast, you overdo the detail. You jump ahead, really suddenly. And you always tell me when it’s the end.” He hesitated. “You know, when you lie.”

  “I know.” I felt myself become apologetic in a way that heartened me, lending an authentic flavor of remorse to my performance. “Look,” I said. “I know. You know who I am.” I said this without really thinking about it. Because it’s what he needed to hear, and what I wished were true. I would have given up so much for the chance to rewind to that moment in the bakery, to have said No when he asked if I’d baked those croissants that morning, pretending to have sore hands from kneading dough, to have been honest and forthcoming—unfailingly and gratingly myself—from the start.

  “You really think that?” Luke asked.

  “I know it,” I said, and turned up the sound. I leaned against him on the couch, seeking that reassuring touch, but felt only his chest, the muscle of which was beginning to slide, to atrophy from whatever post-firing depression he’d lapsed into, but I didn’t mind. On-screen, two actors walked dramatically away from each other without a sound.

  “You feel hot,” I said, putting the back of my hand to his forehead. “You should get some sleep.”

  Which is one way of ending an inconvenient conversation.

  * * *

  —

  Luke had his answers. There was Finn in front of him. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was really him, too, that maybe this whole time I’d just come to know someone from the other side of things, imagining a man into being. But of course it wasn’t true. Any more time with Finn, and Luke would had discovered the truth, left me in New York, a place I haven’t been able to stand since I visited years ago. Too much gray, too much noise.

  “Well,” Luke said, relaxing in his seat. “Great meeting you.”

  “No problem,” the man said, picking up the newspaper again. It was a subtle move, but it was effective. It was the work of an actor, improvising, and I thought for a moment maybe he did have what it took to make it in New York. Maybe everyone does.

  “Take care of yourself,” Luke added. He leaned into me and said he needed to make a call and asked if it was okay if he stepped outside for a minute. I watched him walk out the door and considered all the ways I could close Finn’s story in the weeks or months to come, lock it for good like a door behind me: overdose, suicide. Car accident. His cancer. I sat down across from Finn, my left shoe sticky with the residue of Diane’s coffee.

  “That was kind of fun,” the man said. “Thanks.”

  I took out a fifty-dollar bill. I’d actually gone to the ATM and withdrawn the money earlier in the week, in preparation for bribing someone into doing this. But the lifting feeling, the sense I’d emerged from something and not sunk deeper into it, was so strong I didn’t care that I couldn’t afford to lose the money.

  “Put it under your roles: Finn,” I told him. I turned away and picked lint off my coat. The crowd was clearing, and I imagined Luke outside the shop waiting for me, walking away with him, driving until the skyscrapers shrunk into a thin smog in the rearview and mountains rose on the horizon, snow falling over the hills. I imagined falling asleep next to him, my chin against the back of his neck, his pulse on my jaw.

  I looked back for a moment and adjusted my collar. “But don’t make it seem like some big part,” I said, smiling. “Like Romeo.”

  Finn was right there, almost—just for a moment. He looked at me as if I had a generous bone in my body, like I wasn’t just trying to save my own skin.

  “Maybe more of an Iago,” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said, pretending I knew who that was.

  I walked out of the store, heard the sharp clang of the bell. Luke hugged me from behind and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  I said, “Don’t worry about it. He liked meeting you.”

  What I’d learn in the next few weeks was that there are a lot of ways to break something. Luke started seeing someone else. That was one thing I couldn’t control. He told me to say hi to Finn sometime for him when he left, the screen door snapping shut behind him. I followed him out onto that small wood deck, where he apologized for doubting me. He said sorry a lot. I said, “It’s fine,” a lot. He walked down the stairs, his luggage thumping against each step. Like my heart, I thought melodramatically of those sounds at the time. Spring peepers chirped outside, the same noise I remembered from all those nights falling asleep alone, my bedroom window open next to me. And then he drove off, and that was the end.

  * * *

  —

  I would replay that moment of finding Finn, watch it for the sad fun it gave me, like an episode of Comeback Cove, when I thought about Luke and why he left. The imagined heat and taste of the scene would wash over me like a strong mountain breeze, and there I was again: manic in a coffee shop, hundreds of miles from home, trying desperately to save the thing that mattered most by first saving myself. One day when the image of Luke was finally starting to blur—what his nose looked like, or what his favorite flavor of gum was—I went on a date with Levi, the owner of a shoe company. He was intolerably boring. He asked me some questions and we got to talking about our friends.

  “Mine are all back in San Francisco,” he said, biting into his burger. The red juice of the meat leaked onto his plate. He told me his friends were all nurses or cooks, which I found dreadful. Rain began to fall outside, but it was tame, a pitiful drizzle—nothing at all like that day in the bakery, patting my palms on a floury counter to suggest, when I went to shake Luke’s hand, that every last thing I had said was true.

  Levi watched raindrops strike the window and mentioned some obvious fact, something about an umbrella he had in his car, pop music in the background cheapening every moment. I looked around for a photo, something to draw attention, but there was nothing interesting on the walls.

  “San Fran and Boston,” he added, trying to jolt the conversation alive. “And I have a few in Cambridge.”

  “I had some in New York,” I said. I tore a straw wrapper and arranged the pieces on the table as we were that day in the city. Diane, Finn. Luke and me. “But, you know how it goes.”

  He looked up from his meal long enough to say, “Yeah, I do.”

  PUNCTURE

  Blue? Blue looks sort of like a healing black,” I say, filling two glasses with water in the sink.

  Clark is color blind, or so he’s telling me. It is Sunday, three forty-five in the morning, two weeks to the day since my mother passed, and he’s bleeding on my floor, brown dots on the hardwood—which only now caught my attention.

  “It’s just those two: blue and red,” he says, rewrapping the towel around his hand. “I can see everything else.”

  Clark and I met a few hours ago on the dance floor at a gay bar during Indianapolis Pride. I dropped my vodka tonic and he picked up the broken glass, then someone bumped into him—that’s his embarrassing version of it. As the bartender waved everyone outside, I heard somebody say, “It’s like a fucking murder scene.” That was before I noticed the blood on my shorts, and before Clark refused a drive to the ER, or any medical attention. But the worst of it: How do you leave someone like that? How do you say, Sorry, I’m partially responsible for your injury and not interested?

  “So, LA?” I say, giving his uninjured hand the water.

  “It’s not good,” he says. “The students are so dumb.”

  I look at his hand. The blood has turned the tan cloth almost black.

  “You’re studying rocks, right?”

  “Geology PhD,” he corrects, as if to remind me I should be impressed by the credenti
al. “Yeah.”

  Someone in the street outside my apartment yells, “Don’t jump the fence. Dude, you’re gonna kill yourself!” I move the trash can from my bathroom next to the couch.

  “But sure, rocks,” he says. “Essentially.”

  I remember my mother taking my siblings and me to a cavern when I was fifteen, sifting bagged dirt through a sieve, looking for gems. In her bag she found a rare ruby. The staff couldn’t understand how it had even got in there, but it was worth thousands, polished to an expensive shine. I want to transfer the excitement, how a moment like that cracked open our endless petty fights and made us see each other again, so I try to explain it to Clark—the entire scene—but he interrupts when I get to the part about the rocks my mother found us in the gift shop.

  “Geodes,” he says, swallowing the water fast to get it out. “They’re really gorgeous,” he adds. I stop the story. I’m more present in that memory now than I am even here: the hot wind tapping tree branches against the window, his shoes near the door, the red print of his hand on his jeans that I don’t think he’s noticed yet. I rip a paper towel and lay it over a spot of blood. It expands rapidly, like a dilating pupil.

  “They’re really beautiful,” he says.

  I can tell he wants me to agree, to pin this down as the point, those beautiful rocks we found that I only care about because he’s here in front of me. I’m not going to get to the part about how my sister, now backpacking alone in Brazil, tried to open hers with a hammer, or how my mother—buried hundreds of miles northeast—kept one, uncracked, in her sock drawer. A rock that might still rest there. I suddenly want to hit the conversation with a hammer, for all this talk to just shatter. “They are beautiful,” I say. “Do you work with them?”