I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  The words seemed to come out of nowhere—prompted, Ty thought, by nothing.

  Ty lifted himself off the pier, flexing his shoulders back, and almost pushed Max into the water. It would have been so easy. Max was weak, and if he was a real lifeguard, Ty thought, he could at least save himself. In fact, maybe he shouldn’t have lifted him from the water when he’d had the chance. As he walked off the pier and onto the searing pavement of the lot, up the hill, he tried to wash himself of what he’d just thought. He didn’t hate Max. He felt the apology almost in his pulse, and remembered praying that rosary with his mother, seeking that untenable forgiveness, and began to speak a prayer aloud, just to himself, as he walked up onto the main road, toward his home, and only realized minutes later when he stepped onto the prickly welcome mat at his front door that he was walking barefoot.

  * * *

  —

  At his desk, Ty took the algebra textbook from his drawer and tilted back as he often did in class, leaning at a dangerous angle. But here in his bedroom there was no one to stop him. He closed his eyes and let the fan’s breeze raise the small hairs on his neck, then curl up the collar on his shirt. He tilted farther back, until he knew he was unstable, and let go of the desk.

  For almost an entire minute, which he counted in slow seconds, he stayed balanced. After, he closed the book, stood, and walked to the widow. Seeing a car had parked beneath the tree, he felt a surge of fear that it might be xXZachXx, returning to try to meet again. But it was just a neighbor slamming the door, bags of groceries at his side. A graduation party in their backyard—yellow and pink balloons tied to a fence.

  * * *

  —

  The days sped into weeks, and the weeks into months. The summer blurred like blood in the water, and Ty couldn’t find the skull. He searched for it while scraping barnacles from pier posts and siphoning water out of dinghies that had sprouted leaks, but there was no evidence of its existence. Max still didn’t believe the skull had ever been there. He had just felt sick that day, he told Ty one afternoon. It had been something about the air. Ty wondered if he brought the skull up as a kind of apology, a way of saying maybe it was real.

  Ty started talking to other men online. Tom stopped messaging him. Occasionally, he would see Tom’s face, the lie of that photo in a small box to the right of the screen, and he would wonder what Tom had done after leaving, whether he realized the truth—that Ty had seen him and wasn’t interested anymore. And then, one night as he fell asleep, it occurred to Ty that maybe this happened all the time with people like Tom—putting one image forward, forgetting the truth. Ty thought of himself, casting out years and becoming a man like that. How he might someday wish to swim back to this exact moment. A green dot next to his face on the chat bar, his hair receded to a patchy fuzz, typing out that same opening line he used now: Hey mister, what’s up?:)

  * * *

  —

  One night in mid-July, Ty heard keys turning in the lock, his mom walk in the front door of the house. He closed his computer, turned off the fan, and listened to her voice, her side of the conversation, which was high with stress. Ty inched his bedroom door open, careful not to make noise, quieted his breathing, and turned off his light. He wasn’t supposed to be home yet, but he’d left the pier early, and he waited, listening.

  “He’s out helping that boy in that club, the one for people who need friends.”

  “It is a good idea. He doesn’t have any. And he could learn a lot from that kid, Max. The AP one.”

  “No, no.”

  After a long pause in the conversation, Ty stopped listening. He imagined Max alone on the small lip of the beach, drawing in the sand with an oar. It clicked painfully into place that he was a kind of prop friend for Max. Ty felt cheated, living a lie someone else had created for him. He thought maybe his mother had hung up the phone, before he started listening again and she added, “Right, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “I only donate every other week. You know that.”

  “Don’t hang up on me. Don’t you do that again.”

  “Honest to God, Don. We both know. At best? He’s going to a state school.”

  “We don’t know if it’s a habit. It might’ve just been the one time.”

  * * *

  —

  By early August, Ty had become consumed with finding the skull. He spent as much of his time in the water as possible, the skin on his legs softly rippled after hours out under the pier, as if transforming him into an amphibious creature that lived there. He wanted to tell someone about it—but who would believe him? He started leaving men fake numbers to call. He started pretending to be interested in serious dating—in marriage, even—and then stopped talking to them altogether. He gave them the address a few doors down from his home but said he was moving far away, to San Francisco or Quebec, to Stanford. A full ride, he wrote to one man, Carl, trying to keep his spelling perfect. He imagined himself as Max then. I got lucky, he typed. Very lucky.

  Then it was the night before his last day of lifeguarding duties for the summer. He hadn’t saved anyone. No one swam in that water anymore. He hadn’t really done anything, he realized. He was in bed watching the sun set, the film of his life skipping like a broken record over that one scene: craning his neck to see Sam’s paper, the sweat of his palm on the pencil, the glare of that fluorescent gym light on his unused calculator.

  Ty took a large yellow flashlight from his closet. He walked out of his room and down the stairs, out the door, barefoot into the wind, leaves blowing across the house’s cobblestone path and falling in the streets. He walked under the willow tree, birds scattering down in a pulse and collecting into formation before flying away. He continued until he saw the water, then out onto the pier, where Max was hunched, reining in the rope of a lobster trap someone had set illegally.

  Max turned slightly and nodded toward Ty.

  “What’s your problem?” Ty said.

  It took Max a second to respond. “I only get to pick one?”

  “You really don’t get it, do you?” Ty said, undoing the top button on his shirt. What he meant by this he didn’t know. It seemed like the sort of thing that established a tone, that said, Don’t ask me that again. A breeze turned up his collar. He fixed his gaze near the far buoy and tensed his calves, which he hoped had thickened with muscle since the summer before, when he’d jumped into this same spot so carelessly. He looked down between the planks of the pier and saw a thin line of his reflection. There were dark lines under his eyes. It frustrated him that he looked tired, a thought he knew he would lose sleep over, and envisioned the calm black ocean as an endless chat room before him, that blank space unfurled like an empty scroll out to the horizon.

  “What’re you doing?” Max asked.

  For a moment they both paused, and the soft blast of a foghorn sounded. The clouds were low and gray with rain. Ty felt the moment become heavy, baited with dumb significance, an empty mark waiting to be filled in.

  “What’re you doing?” Max said again, the question directed more at himself this time, dropping the line. He looked to Ty’s hand, the flashlight. Ty released a breath. He imagined running his palms over the skull, its bone glowing white like an answer in the darkness, feeling that sand-tumbled smoothness, and rising in the water with it under an arm. He could almost feel that pressure against his ears as the water grew light, struck with a sudden ray of sun, bubbles shooting up around him, the full beam of light that had helped him find it.

  Ty wanted to start over. There was the mess he’d made around him, cluttering him in, and he needed to prove something, make someone believe him. The thought washed against him like a wave, pulling in and then out—impossible, and then clear, suddenly simple.

  Ty would not find the skull. He would dive into his reflection, far and deep, toward the ocean floor, that place where the water was cold with possibility. He would kick
down until all was black around him, the disturbed silt tickling his skin. He would swim until he couldn’t tell where he was except by how his body lifted when he paused, his limbs invisible and shrouded in darkness, that futile light of a single beam shooting through the water as he tried, finally, to see.

  HUMAN RESOURCES

  Anthony has this white pin on his right lapel that reads MY INTERESTS ARE: ANIMALS & POSITIVITY. Every employee has one of these pins, and everyone is required, I guess, to list two of their prominent interests. My interest, if I worked at a place like ElectronicZone, would be in how, exactly, a guy like Anthony goes from running over the neighbor’s chickens with a golf cart in the sixth grade to wind up, twelve years later, with those top two favorite things, ANIMALS & POSITIVITY. That would not fit on the pin, of course, so I’d settle for something equally true, like VERY SMALL, CATLIKE DOGS. EXPENSIVE WINES. Or, if I’m being honest (a least favorite thing), CHEATING ON MY HUSBAND. Of course it’s Anthony, who I messed around with in that broken mall photo booth, because who better to see two days before Christmas, when everyone is wearing two jackets, and the lines are backed up to the burner phones—the cheapest variety of which is in my left hand. I had no way of knowing the checkout I chose, one of the availably lit dozen, would lead me right into his view. But I’m back in my hometown of Laconia, New Hampshire, for the mercifully short window of seventy-six hours, a period I calculated during my ascent from Phoenix. Before I’d boarded the plane, my partner, Lex, had told me that “God knows this will be a good break from human resources.” And now I’m looking for a reason to release my pity on Anthony. Anthony who failed home economics for starting a grease fire. I’m looking right at him, the dumb tattoo of a rose on his neck curling up from under his red and white company-issue polo. Through the distant beeping of every item past the register, some happy holiday jingle between us, I realize he isn’t even going to look up at me. He won’t even have the chance to see how I look now, how I got every wish I wanted. He looks in my direction, but it’s like he doesn’t remember. Like he knows it’s me and doesn’t need to say anything. Like we were never just down the street, pausing midkiss when he turned to the lens and said to no one in particular, “Does that thing even work?”

  AIM FOR THE HEART

  for Poppy

  When Troy thought of what it might be like, falling asleep the night before, to kill that animal, he imagined a version of himself physically transformed, more solid—a strong cut of jaw, brows thick lines of concern, all his features suggesting the power it would take to stop a heart.

  The next day, Troy was trailing that buck through the snow, the blood from its punctured chest now only faintly visible in the slush. Neil walked alongside the animal—examining the watery film of its eye, pulling back to observe the twitching tail. This, Troy knew, is what happened when you lied in passing about being an avid hunter. After you made a promise to show your boyfriend how hunting works. You opened that box containing your father’s old gun and drove your pickup with the only man you have ever loved down a mud-rutted road into untraveled backwoods. You walked slowly around the pines, listening with an air of practice for the sound of an animal you knew you’d never find. And then a young buck wandered lazily into your path. You knelt slowly, acting the part, and tried to miss, prayed to miss. And despite what Troy had read about how easily deer scare, how scarce the chance of even a sighting in Maine mid-February, the lone buck had turned its head as if in invitation, its ears pivoting toward the noise of his boot crunching the snow. He aimed slightly to the left and pulled the trigger. The sound startled the deer directly into the bullet’s path, and it fell onto its side, tossing up a celebratory white plume of powder.

  And now, here he was: rattled by a deep cold, followed by a man who couldn’t kill an ant without squirming, dragging a deer by the antlers a quarter mile back to his pickup, where he’d swaddle the body in a blue tarp normally reserved for summer mulching.

  It didn’t occur to Troy until after they’d reached the road that he could have found some reason not to take the buck. Not regulation or Could be diseased—see this? And then he’d point to some questionable feature: a dirtied coat, perhaps something as easily missed (that could only be caught by an expert hunter) as the color of its eye. Something Neil would believe. But even that would have been difficult, he realized, as he struggled to lift the body into the bed of the pickup. Bullet wound aside, the creature was all perfect cream coat and short, sleek hair. Troy hoped that at any moment the deer might kick free of his grasp and dart off, back into the wilderness, so that they could both continue on living.

  * * *

  —

  When Troy was in middle school, he’d been pulled from homeroom and questioned by the vice principal; his close friend Iffer had shot himself that morning with his grandfather’s handgun, barely missing his heart—miraculously, the surgeon claimed—causing significant damage only to his left lung. The school and his family were looking for reasons. Iffer was found when his mother, who’d forgotten her library card, returned to see him bleeding out into the shower—a detail Troy learned through a rumor that had traveled around the school faster than a virus. The way she told it, there wasn’t blood—just heaving and painful wheezing. A pipe had burst when the bullet met the wall, she had made a point to mention. As if to relocate the damage in the story. He wondered whether Iffer’s mother actually thought that anyone believed this—that thank God they had survived this violent hiccup in their otherwise calm, normal lives. Or if maybe she believed it herself: that something had broken and mended swiftly, the way a lizard can regrow a severed tail in days. He suspected the damage that water had done gave her a way out of Iffer’s story, and that she was grateful for it.

  “Has Iffer ever done anything that’s made you uncomfortable?” the vice principal asked. He folded his hands on his lap and waited.

  Once, several weeks prior, Iffer had reached for Troy’s hand at the middle school dance. Troy didn’t pull away when Iffer had wrapped his fingers around his palm, and the two stood silent in the darkest corner of the gym, an industrial fan washing them with aggressive cold. The next day, he’d said to Iffer, Sorry, whatever that was.

  Yeah, Iffer had agreed.

  “No,” Troy said, but the man was already writing on his pad like he knew better.

  * * *

  —

  Troy drove off that road rutted by frozen mud, and turned onto the interstate en route to Neil’s for the night. As he made the turn, he noticed in the rearview that antlers shining with frost poked out of the bed of the pickup, clinking against the cold metal with each lurch of the truck. He remembered something about needing a license to hunt as the police siren sounded behind him.

  Troy pulled carefully over, and the officer approached the car. Troy could see in his rearview the man’s narrow face, the inflamed red bulb of his nose, his eyes poring over the animal. It was not an especially big deer—a young buck, Troy suspected. He decided that, if prompted, he would call it such to avoid appearing unsure.

  The man asked to see Troy’s license and registration. He hadn’t turned from examining the deer. Neil handed Troy the papers.

  “Troublemaker,” Neil said, smiling.

  “Always,” Troy said. Troy did have plans for the buck, though they were shapeless plans—a vague idea of having it stuffed or preserved, a trophy. Something about having killed the buck made him feel like he hadn’t lied to begin with, that he’d just had some premonition, some prescient sense. Neil had believed Troy so easily when he’d mentioned his hunting habit months ago. He sometimes thought he looked the part himself: slight gut, thick neck, a strong frame that held the attention of football and hockey coaches through high school. Troy decided to avoid hunting duck with Neil due to the sheer number of birds he imagined in the area—surely deer would be harder to come by, he’d thought.

  But now, as the officer approached his window, Troy felt the quie
tly exhilarating rush of having trapped himself in a lie from which it was likely he could not emerge without his own scar.

  * * *

  —

  On only a few occasions had Troy ever been found out. Once, during college, drunk at midnight on the roof of the Deaf Studies building, he divulged what he’d claimed was his life story to a group of other flannel-wearing, guitar-playing students he’d met just hours before. In it, he had a sister, Lauren, who was in law school and had an enormous mole on her nose. There were his parents, a doctor and nurse as they were, but in this version they were both under lawsuit for malpractice. And the people seemed to believe him. They seemed eager to accept whatever he put forth. So he kept talking, kept offering these gifts of fabricated strangeness. It was almost generous, he remembered thinking. He was giving these people stories they could tell for the rest of their lives.

  At one point, under the clear black sky, a breeze moving over the building, Troy considered mentioning Iffer. But he felt Iffer’s place among the lies would be inappropriate, as if the story in its truth couldn’t touch the serrated, fragile edges of Lauren and the time he’d gone “cow-tipping” and his family in all their false ruin. Eventually, Troy told a story about how Lauren once tried to remove a friend’s mole with his father’s practice scalpel, not realizing that very same friend had arrived on the roof while he was speaking, and he found himself deflating with the weight of the truth, uncovered if only to one person. He walked back to his dorm room and wrote on a notepad the words Stop lying over and over, before resting his head on his forearm, and falling asleep. When he woke, the ink from those words was smeared on his forearm.