I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  Eventually, it always became too much effort to chart the paths of his lies, and Troy would move from person to person, let his imagined selves peel away like shed skin. He was a terrible student and spent only a handful of his evenings in the library (where he imagined Iffer did the same with much more discipline), reading on business and economics, fascinated by the futility of it all, how he could sense the knowledge practically expiring as he read. Those facts slipping away, turning into something else. He often found himself looking up in study carrels, bored by the material, and tending to his ever-evolving image, the mirage of himself growing fainter and fainter before disappearing entirely. Who knew what of him? How many hims existed out there, in others’ minds? In his?

  * * *

  —

  The lies had unfurled quickly, but, Troy knew, such was their nature: Each one had loose strings. It was just a matter of cutting those frayed bits short to keep others from taking note and pulling on one, unraveling it like a handmade sweater. The officer asked to see Troy’s hunting registration. He claimed he forgot it, and when asked how long he’d been hunting, Troy said ten years. He immediately regretted saying “ten”; the cleanness of a decade felt too fake to be believable.

  “Have an expired copy?”

  “Should, let me check.” Neil flipped through the glove box. There was, of course, no expired license.

  “Guess not.” The officer handed Troy a ticket and said something as the window slid up. What? Troy mouthed.

  “A beauty,” the man said. He knocked on the side of the pickup and nodded toward the animal, which, Troy noticed, was now completely visible, the officer having peeled away the folds of the tarp. Troy pulled back onto the road. One tire fell into a deep frozen gouge, jerking the truck along its path where those before him had driven.

  “I thought you’d only been hunting for six years,” Neil said. “Since the promotion.”

  “Oh,” Troy said.

  Troy waited for Neil to continue, but he said nothing. “Well,” Troy explained, “I’ve heard about the new guys getting harsher fines.”

  Coloring the past was the most important thing in lying, Troy had learned. Tell someone you’ve killed a deer and they’ll wonder why, how. Tell someone you’ve hunted on and off since getting a job managing accountants, and they’ll think they know who you are.

  Neil appeared to accept the response. Troy turned up the incline to Neil’s home, a cabin outfitted to seem a house. Troy could always sense that Neil was nervous about having him over—he didn’t come from a wealthy family and didn’t make much as a baker. Troy knew this and always made a point of complimenting some feature of the space. Today it was the birch trees, white and stiff in the breeze, ghostly pillars in the night.

  “Thanks,” Neil said. He turned his head down, sensing pity. But Troy always meant it, whatever he complimented. He really did.

  * * *

  —

  Iffer sat in the back of the classroom in the weeks following his hospitalization, and Troy was assigned as his sort of helper. During lunch, Troy sat with Iffer and, later, helped wheel him between classes. The doctors and parents emphasized the importance of rest, the power of the body to heal itself. Troy was told not to encourage Iffer to get out of his wheelchair even though he technically could walk, could probably run, if he wanted to, and only occasionally had trouble breathing. It was, he remembered thinking, as if Iffer were a deflated version of himself. Not just physically—his body slumped in an effortless curve—but in another way; some distinct sadness had settled on him. The two began to fall away from each other: Troy to a junior varsity lacrosse team and Iffer to the chess club, his thick curls of hair draped over the board, thinking or perhaps avoiding thought, moving a king into its corner for the checkmate.

  By June, Iffer’s lung had become deeply infected, and a complex series of procedures saved his life but not without the cost of great damage to the organ. In freshman year of high school, he wheeled through the halls, unable to attend classes on the third floor, and remade himself as a bookish, tired boy.

  When Troy would pass Iffer on his way to calculus, he’d occasionally remember that hand in his, that night in the gym, the groups of kids too busy to notice the two of them, paralyzed by a friendship they couldn’t understand. But Troy would always turn away or look past, not sure what he was expecting.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Troy and Neil watched breaking footage of an airplane that had crashed while attempting to land in San Francisco. A wing of the plane was severed, strewn along the runway in splintered piles, and its exterior held a dark char. Outside, the deer remained slumped in the bed of the pickup—which was fine, Troy told Neil, due to the cold. Was it fine? he wondered, just to himself. He did not want to know. The television screen cast a faint fluorescent hue through the window onto the truck, shading the animal in soft white tones in the dark.

  “Ever been to San Fran?” Neil asked.

  “No,” Troy said. He’d avoided that city, actually: too many gay people, he thought. How could one have a lasting relationship with so many options, so much temptation? He knew this was an inappropriate thought, or somehow testament to his own insecurity.

  “Those runways are scary,” Neil said. “Drop right off into the water.”

  On the screen, medics unfolded orange gurneys, and the shot zoomed out to show the black dot of the wreck flanked by endless ocean.

  “I feel like people there are, I don’t know. I feel like everyone there is really gay.”

  Neil cocked his head. “Sorry?”

  “Sorry, that was rude.”

  “I mean, there are a lot of gay people there.”

  “Right.”

  “But I don’t think that’s a fair thing to say. That they’re really gay.” Neil was quick to get upset and quick to show it. Troy appreciated that about Neil: his inability to hide what he felt, to withhold. Still, his defensive reply seemed, ironically Troy thought given the context, a little much.

  “You’re right,” Troy said, wanting to end the moment. “Sorry.” Just to himself, he thought: Everyone there is really gay.

  The running scroll on the bottom of the screen read: THREE DEAD, THIRTY-FOUR IN CRITICAL CONDITION. Flights to and from the airport had stopped. Above the wreck, the sky was a bright candy blue, and hot-air balloons rose from the ground in small, slow groups. Troy tried to imagine himself there with Neil, but, unable to, envisioned instead the moment of the crash: the first trembling of the cabin, the short glissando screams, the sudden weightlessness and dive, yellow plastic masks tipped down from their compartments.

  Troy reached to hold Neil’s hand, but the timing felt wrong. He folded his hands in his lap and watched.

  * * *

  —

  Somewhere, Troy knew, Iffer was still alive. The news of Iffer’s death or returned illness surely would’ve reached him. There was no way to know, but then, no—perhaps he did know. Troy’s last memory of Iffer was at prom, where he saw Iffer as if those painful years had never happened, a healthy skin seemed to have grown over them; Iffer had turned into a tall, slender, meticulously dressed guy after outgrowing the wheelchair sophomore year, giving the seamless illusion that he knew who he was. He carried an inhaler and held himself in a slight, constant slouch—but he was becoming well again. Iffer danced with his hands in fists, neon lights pulsating in the air behind him. Easily mistaken, from across the room, as someone, anyone else.

  As the evening drew to a close, most parents arrived to pick up their kids, and Troy and Iffer remained on the inn’s patio afterward, waiting. Several juniors mingled around a table lit by large red candles, and the air smelled romantically of summer in Maine, purple lilac and the rising tide. Troy wandered toward Iffer, who leaned against a small fence.

  He looked tired. His corsage had lost most of its pink petals, but his tuxedo seemed
freshly pressed, as if he’d only just arrived.

  “Hey,” Iffer said, noticing Troy. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going.” Troy leaned back on a table, taking in the scene. He wanted to feel attractive to Iffer, but then, he’d never felt he had to try until now. It was one of those rare moments when it was permitted to speak in terms of lives and goals and dreams, and Troy was coming down from the high of discussing his plans to run a small business and move far away. The two briefly talked about college, their insufferable parents, pets that had passed away since Troy and Iffer had lost touch. The others on the patio left. They were finally alone, again.

  “That was a weird thing,” Iffer said, presumably talking about the incident. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I used to be so angsty.” He smiled, coughing one syllable of a laugh. He was avoiding eye contact, or Troy wasn’t inviting it.

  “It happens,” Troy said. He regretted those words even as he spoke them. Shooting yourself in the lung doesn’t just happen, he thought.

  But this was all Troy would receive from Iffer, the closest thing to an explanation he’d ever get. Troy’s father pulled up, wheels grinding gravel and turning into the lot. Troy hugged Iffer before walking away. “Take care,” he said as he reached to shake Iffer’s large, warm hand. His father honked the horn once, and then Troy was driving home, taking extra care himself for his permit test days later, adjusting the air-conditioning toward his blushing face, wondering if he would ever see Iffer again and deciding that, no, he likely wouldn’t.

  * * *

  —

  When Troy woke on the couch, the television was still on. Sixteen fatalities, eleven in critical care. The plane had been bombed; suspects were in custody. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it the night before. There had been obvious signs, the exposed cabin, the charred perimeter of a gaping hole in its hull.

  Troy looked at Neil and felt a shiver of delusional dread, as he often did before he left and had with many men—that this might be the last time he ever saw him. He playfully slapped Neil’s thigh, and Neil twitched reflexively at the touch, then moaned and turned away.

  “Hey,” Troy said softly. “I’ve gotta run.” Neil moaned again. “I’ll see you later.” Another moan.

  Troy walked outside, taking care to close the door gently to avoid waking Neil. The deer was stuck in place, a frozen thing paralyzed in the act of dying, a body released from struggle. He looked it in the eye, that big, mournful pupil. The bullet wound was smaller than he’d expected, almost unassuming. How had it died so fast? He jerked open the frozen door and started the car, drove to a small building where local hunters had their animals stuffed—this he knew from a shameful one-night stand years earlier with a man whose brother worked at the shop.

  When he arrived, he led the man to his pickup. The man whistled at the sight. “Haven’t seen antlers like these in a while,” he said.

  Troy sensed the man’s need to discuss the process—the kind of gun he’d chosen to take out on that fresh field of snow, where his boot prints left that romantic, intertwining trail with Neil’s, and the things he’d hide from his story, like the feminine little “um” that escaped his lips when the deer lifted one front leg at the hit, then fell over. There was the feeling that escaped Troy, like a bullet exiting his heart, that for the first time he had proven his masculinity, and that there was no possible way that feeling could last. That what he had really shot was his only chance with Neil. He wanted to tell the man, unprompted, that it wasn’t him! That of course he had not done this.

  “Pose preference?” the man asked. He laughed a bit at his alliteration; Troy imagined he thought himself clever. He led Troy inside and pointed to model deer in a small showroom: a doe lying curled on the ground, young deer in imitation of their first awkward steps, a buck with its head fiercely turned. He asked to have the deer standing with a front leg lifted, its head down. A strange request, he knew, but he wanted a pose that seemed characteristically him, and he figured something that couldn’t see but thought it knew where it was going would be fitting. He told the man he’d come back for the deer in several nights and left. A thin coat of frozen fur remained in the bed of the car after the animal was peeled off—a reminder.

  When he went to pick up the deer days later, the man greeted him with a toothy smile. Troy noticed he held something in his hand, and behind him stood the deer with its slack neck, its closed eyes. It looked as if it were grazing, in repose, nothing at all like what Troy had imagined. The man opened his palm. “Perfect aim,” he said. The silver shell of the bullet in his hand flashed gold with sunlight. “Right for the heart.”

  * * *

  —

  The rest of the week, Troy avoided Neil’s calls. He turned off even the far lights down his driveway at night as if anticipating Neil’s arrival, his pleading to understand. What Troy had come to realize took shape in the memory of being handed that shining bullet: He was getting too good. The skill had not only become habit, it had become an intractable part of him. The boldest lies were these attempts to convince himself that this wasn’t true; they seemed to reflect indefinitely like an image in opposing mirrors—artifice of artifice.

  * * *

  —

  Troy woke next to the man who had come to fill Neil’s spot in his bed. He had come over hours earlier, tracking snow around his kitchen floor, and remarked on Troy’s rugged appearance, the squareness of Troy’s jaw, which Troy had always doubted whenever he couldn’t see it. The compliment had endeared Troy into asking him to stay the night.

  After a few moments of listening to the man’s calming breaths as he fell deeper and deeper into his sleep, Troy heard one gunshot outside, followed by another. He rose quickly enough to hear the rustle and snap of disturbed brush as several deer sprinted across his lawn, jumping gracefully off into the woods around his home. The next night, anticipating another pop of shells, he thought of that trespassing hunter, someone like him—cold and waiting, with everything to prove. How he might describe it, if that stranger were still next to him, or maybe to Neil, or even to Iffer, were his chest rising and falling as he’d memorized it from all those years ago: one young doe shot through the shoulder, an awkward gait to its manic run. And as Troy closed his eyes to sleep, no matter how he tried to chase it, the deer would always just barely get away.

  AUDITION

  Joe or Joel, whatever his name is, takes me to the roof of his LA apartment, where a small pool sends bright waves of light onto the walls and perfumes the hot August night with a chloric bite. This is date one and drink six—pretty sure about the six—of a kind of strawberry concoction that should have been drink one (the first was the cheap vodka at Simon’s place before I ditched him). The city shines holographic right before us, and I feel his hand on my thigh as I throw my head back to see the stars. Every time I view the city like this, from above, it saddens me—it is everything before me I cannot have because I am not yet a good enough actor. Looking up at the stars, clear and bright like ornaments, I think, I can’t appreciate these.

  “What can’t you appreciate?” Joe or Joel says, and I realize that instead of thinking the words, I had said them.

  “The stars,” I say in a tone that I hope communicates my desire to end that discussion. I shift my leg and his hand slides off.

  “They’re just dying light,” he says, and I sense him lurch his head back in the same way I had just done. Everyone knows this fact about stars; I’m offended he thinks I don’t. I feel a rush of the word I want to say: “whatever.” Joe or Joel is willing to agree with anything I say and do anything I tell him—he’s that grateful to be around me. That’s another thing I should appreciate. Instead it makes me feel sorry for him.

  This on the heels of a two-year relationship with a bodybuilder named Chad who co-owned an organic grocery store back in Phoenix, managed the produce section with the tight-ship discipline of someone whose
moods depended upon his ability to deadlift twice his weight, and frequently hit me during sex. I can call that abuse now, almost two months out. It feels heavy, the memory of it. I remind myself—that’s because it is.

  “The stars look the same as the city,” I say flatly.

  “And the pool,” he says.

  “Not really.” The alcohol emboldens me to say whatever I feel, but my feelings change immediately, and so I regret almost the entire wake of what I do.

  Back in May, I had asked Chad if he thought I had celebrity potential. He had been re-sorting the pomegranates into a pyramid, and I had stopped in to visit him late one night after ditching my friends.

  “Not really,” was his response.

  In the next scene I arrive at my friend’s apartment in LA. Five a.m.

  “It’s such a beautiful night,” Joe or Joel says. He looks at me with all he’s got, infusing the air with romance, but it’s just another view to me.

  When I first met Chad, we walked the produce section as he taught me the difference between kales. What is this one called? I might have said, holding up a thorny orange melon. There is nothing sexy about the way he would look at me. It would be the same stare of blunt desire, one-way want, and when it comes at you, you have to dodge it.

  These days I hold kindness up like a strange fruit.

  “I see what you’re saying,” I tell Joe or Joel. “About the pool.”

  I take a sip of the drink. Strawberry pulp races up the straw and clogs it. I can feel that he wants to kiss me right now, and when I look over at him I realize I’m right. I think, What the hell am I going to do? And then I hope—I just hope—that I didn’t say that too.