I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  HOW TO LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE

  The wind that night was stung cold with luck, that envelope damp with sweat in Kyle’s hand again. Here he was outside after midnight, threatening himself to mail it. He had every reason not to—a thought easily displaced by the shine of every reason he had to. The streets were dangerous this time of night. Days ago a nearby building had gone up in a planned flame, that faint smell of smoke drifting in through the crack beneath his front door. People were finally getting angry. Kyle was among them. He placed the envelope in the box and lifted its red flag.

  He tilted his head toward the sky and tried to make out constellations, but he couldn’t pair the stars together, couldn’t imagine them into a shape. He waited there for minutes, taking in the night, until a light flicked on in the apartment, a single room in which Jerry and Chloe—his partner and daughter—slept on separate couches. It was probably another one of Chloe’s nightmares. They had become more frequent. She needed medication for them, but it didn’t help, and then it wasn’t affordable, and now Kyle held her until she fell asleep. It actually worked, and often he didn’t rest, just sat and thought, her head on his thigh, blond hair spread like the blossom of a great flower.

  He didn’t realize how cold the night was until he shut the door behind him.

  * * *

  —

  Months before, Kyle and Jerry sat down together, finally.

  “Jerry,” Kyle said, “the thing is, we can’t even afford two more months’ rent.”

  Jerry folded his hands beneath his chin, elbows resting on the table. It would have been one of his drag poses, a vogue moment, if he weren’t so concerned.

  “I’m not doing more shows.”

  “Okay.” Kyle lowered his voice, worried he might wake Chloe, who had been asleep for hours.

  “We could lease,” Kyle added.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “The Smiths were an isolated case.”

  “No one knows that.” There was a pause. Kyle got the sense Jerry felt like he was in a movie, and managed his anxiety in the moment by indulging these feelings, whenever they arose. “Tell me people aren’t looking for handouts, Kyle. Tell me people in this town don’t want something for nothing.”

  An almost admirable level of drama. It was true, though, Kyle knew. The city of X had a way of keeping people where they were. It was, after all, where the nation’s homeless, the hugely indebted, the failing masses had been brought.

  “We could sell some stuff, clear out.”

  Jerry’s expression, a disgusted squint, read, No.

  “Okay, then. Not that.”

  Neither one spoke for minutes, and Kyle could hear several stray dogs take up their coarse howling in the dusk. Kyle noticed their cries seemed to come from multiple directions at once, and he wondered how they managed it, or whether their overlapping noise was coincidence. “I’m going to bed,” Jerry finally said, obviously just to himself.

  * * *

  —

  That night, as Kyle lay in bed, he considered what he’d done to keep Jerry happy, the things he’d stolen now taking up residence on walls and tables throughout the house. The time that had been freed up to do this was the benefit of being unemployed, if there was one. Kyle ducked into other houses and returned with candles, mats, expensive plates and vases. The first time he’d brought himself to steal, he’d chosen a candelabra holding two unused sticks of yellow wax. He placed it on the kitchen table, unsure how he’d justify it to Jerry when he returned home. And when Jerry saw it, he smiled. “This is cute,” he said, lifting it off the table. To Kyle’s relief, no explanation was asked for, and none was ever given. Chloe must have assumed Jerry could afford these things; she never mentioned them either.

  Kyle turned on his pillow, folding over him the recent steal of a knitted red blanket, and fell asleep.

  The next morning, he woke to a note under his door. He knew the handwriting, the pink ink, was Chloe’s as he bent to pick up the scrap of paper. The cursive read: Sorry. Nightmares again.

  Kyle walked down the stairs and noticed her asleep on the couch. He wanted to sit next to her, to thank her, to let her know what he knew to be a lie. It would be okay. It was kind of her to write the note, and he was sorry she had lost sleep—sorrier that she’d heard them fighting at all. Instead, he adjusted the blanket where it had fallen to the ground so that it covered her.

  Through the window, snow was falling—lightly, barely. And when he opened the door, there it was, a paper hex on his front step: the silver-rimmed envelope, sealed with a thick dot of brilliant gold wax.

  * * *

  —

  The letter must have arrived early that Saturday morning. Kyle didn’t know as he leaned down that the silver notes were being picked up all around town, off porch steps and inside snow-dusted mailboxes throughout X. He didn’t know what exactly the letter was for, even after breaking the seal and sitting down to his morning coffee, closing the door gently to avoid waking Jerry and Chloe, who were still asleep. How to Live Your Best Life, the paper read in gold type. From one angle the message appeared welcoming, warm, and from the other, distant and cold like the bills he’d been paying and expecting and tried not to think about. There was a date given, a time he didn’t pay attention to. How to Live Your Best Life. Kyle released a breath. It sounded like a scam.

  But then, in the weeks that followed, he learned it wasn’t a scam. It was a game. People started playing, and between seven and eight on Saturday nights, the whole town—the whole nation, really—began to stay indoors, watching people learn how much families in X knew about what one another truly wanted, if they knew how they’d choose to live their best lives. The payoff was a new life somewhere else, a quarter-million-dollar sum for each participant, a way to erase the debt and dirt, the cheap memory of living in X.

  And the drawback, written in typical black type near the bottom of the page: the potential to be put to death on live television.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s disgusting is what it is,” Jerry said, looking at the letter. “A joke. Is this a joke?”

  Jerry waved the paper like a cheap fan. He was on his way to perform that Saturday night, and his makeup, the slick brown wave of his wig, gave him a fierce confidence.

  “Looks real,” Kyle said.

  “Lots of things look real.” Jerry squinted to see the print. “These lashes, for instance.”

  “The neighbors got one too. They came over to check.”

  “Well, I won’t be watching.”

  Kyle handed Jerry his heels.

  “No,” Jerry said, setting the paper on the table. “The green ones.”

  * * *

  —

  Kyle stole only during the day. He would ring doorbells and wait for minutes. If someone answered, he pretended to have the wrong address. There were so many homes in X, but none of them were homes—not really. They were apartments, fractured living spaces, often cluttered with items about to be pawned.

  This was a solution, Kyle thought. Jerry noticed the things he stole, even complimented them. Regarding a throw rug Kyle had placed in front of the bathroom door, he once said, “Did you get this? It’s nice,” and Kyle had said, “Yeah,” and that was it.

  Another time, walking back from a steal, he heard Chloe’s voice calling after him. He’d lifted several bright towels and carried them on a side road, putting space between himself and the small apartment from which he’d taken them. He wasn’t sure why Chloe was out, but he flung the towels over the fence just before she saw him, ran into his arms, the sunlight hot on his face like a spotlight.

  Today, Jerry had finally noticed a pair of small glass doves Kyle had taken from a couple several units away. The birds rested, singing, on a small wooden mantel near the bed. Jerry lifted them and put them back down, inspecting for the signature of a brand. He didn’
t say a word.

  * * *

  —

  The homeless were the first to go on air.

  It had happened fast: Only weeks after the invitations were received, the production was going, held in a studio miles away in downtown X. It was hard for Kyle to tell if the people had volunteered or if they were somehow forced onto the show. He refused to watch at first, and Jerry was typically busy doing drag shows at the time, which were already losing money to people opting to stay in and watch the new show.

  Instead, Kyle looked at the thin envelope on the table, trying to consider it as an invitation, not a death sentence. It felt impossible. He folded and unfolded the paper, checking and rechecking the words, which, though he hadn’t realized it, he’d already memorized.

  With Chloe asleep and Jerry gone, he decided to watch just the opening credits of the show. He felt a sense of sudden duty, as if these people, whoever they were, might need him. But then, on the set—a great marquee of flashing yellow lights and slick black glass—he saw the face of a man he thought he’d passed on the street while walking to the bank, one of those times he’d needed another loan. The man’s wispy gray beard and hefty figure were backlit with strong white light, and two others stood in glass cases far behind him. The written words crossed the screen, appearing letter by letter: How to Live Your Best Life.

  Kyle had to force his body to take in air. The springs in the couch seemed to press against him the entire hour. Between him and the monitor were only paralyzed motes of dust in the air, weakly illuminated by the evening light. When the final question was asked, the man was shivering—the camera didn’t stray from close-up, and his whole body shook.

  By the time the confetti had fallen, the quarter-million-dollar amount announced and announced, the man had fainted, and his siblings, released from their glass boxes, kneeled beside him, brushing the green, yellow, red paper from his beard, his eyes, remembering all the while to smile.

  * * *

  —

  “Help me,” were Chloe’s words. When she woke at night, plagued by nightmares, that was what she screamed. There was something too pointed, too clear about it, Kyle thought. Years ago, when she first started having the dreams, it was those words that had made Kyle and Jerry recognize that Chloe was special. She knew how to communicate, how to help and how to ask for help, in the manner of an adult. Sometimes Kyle had to remind himself that she was a child.

  The routine went like this. Kyle would pour Chloe a glass of milk and knock on her door before walking in to keep from frightening her. She would sit up, her eyes shut, breathing hard. He would stay at the edge of the bed and wait for her to move next to him, where she would lean against his arm and fall asleep. Sometimes she explained her dreams, what she’d seen. One night, she had grown painful wings but hadn’t been able to fly. Or she was trapped in a stone maze with no exit.

  “I was drowning,” she said tonight. “Way out in the ocean.”

  Without thinking, Kyle whispered, “Remember? I taught you how to swim.”

  * * *

  —

  “It’s a gym membership,” Jerry said. “The manager got it for me. I have to go.”

  “You don’t,” Kyle said. He could sense Jerry wanting to stand from the table, to walk away, and added, “And it could be okay. No one’s even died yet.”

  “Yet.” Jerry paused. “And I have to go. It was free and it’ll help me lose this.” Jerry pinched the imagined weight in his midsection. He was thin, thinner than Kyle, and had made the recent habit of pretending things weren’t what they were.

  “Think about it—the death thing is just a ploy. Three months—no one’s lost.” Kyle paused.

  “I could probably use a new comb,” Jerry said before walking away.

  Kyle had met Jerry at one of his performances. There was the dimming of lights and the sonic beat of a new number and then there he was: fierce, aloof, taking and throwing everyone’s money on the floor. Kyle had stood and walked up to him, offered a dollar between two fingers. And later in the night, as Kyle waited at the coat check, back when he could afford the coat check, Jerry had found him. “Oh thank God,” he’d told Kyle, short of breath. “You’re still here.” He handed Kyle the bill, which still held its crease from earlier in the night. On its edge, Jerry had written his number and the words We should probably get coffee. A lipstick kiss covered Washington’s face. A little much, Kyle had thought, but as he later learned, that was Jerry.

  And then they did get coffee, which is when Kyle learned that Jerry got his drag start after having to use his sister’s makeup to cover the large scar where his ex had once thrown a plate, puckering the skin just under his eye. Jerry liked the way he felt no one knew this about him when he performed. “Just a little extra concealer” he’d said. A week later, Kyle had helped him gently remove the foundation after a show and had seen it, the scars where those sutures had been. The tenderness of the moment brought up in him a care that felt like love. One day, Jerry brought over a hand mirror and left it on the table. And the next he was walking upstairs saying, “Look, I’m going. Let Chloe stay up a bit.”

  * * *

  —

  Kyle walked out of his apartment at midnight, holding the envelope. He had stopped on the cement steps leading to his door, smiling, letting his white exhalations rise hopefully in the cool night. The moon seemed brighter than usual, he noticed, like a winking eye. This was a solution.

  Kyle checked to make sure the envelope still rested in the mailbox and walked back inside. He didn’t realize how cold it was until he’d shut the door behind him.

  * * *

  —

  There were things Kyle hadn’t known. He was, for example, under the impression no one would actually die on the show.

  Usually, he watched alone. But tonight he watched with Jerry, who hadn’t been called in—the show was losing the club money. Jerry had prepared, though—his purple eyeshadow was smeared, his short brown hair hot and flat against his head from the lace front, which he hung on the coat hook behind the front door.

  The show started as it always did. A young couple from somewhere in downtown X were trying their hand. There was only the young man in the glass box, which was attached to the set itself, a thick gray tube connecting from somewhere above the stage to the glass. He stood with his hands on his hips, determined.

  Kyle would return to the memory of what happened next, float it in his mind each night—an awful, unreal blur. The man answered each question incorrectly. He was prompt with every response, as if worried his partner would take offense to a slow answer. The red X appeared above him with each reply. The audience grew silent. Kyle’s hands moved from his hips to his hair, worrying through it. He couldn’t recall what happened before the moment the golden mist was released into the box, filling it in a rich plastic light. And then the television went black and the skull appeared slowly, softened from gray to stark white, into an image. The crossbones appeared in a perfect X below it.

  “Fuck,” Kyle said. He stood and walked to the kitchen. “Fuck,” he yelled again. Chloe could hear him, he knew, but then, she probably wasn’t asleep.

  “Wow,” Jerry whispered in the other room. His silence meant he was talking about the show.

  Kyle leaned against the sink, both hands steadied on the cold counter. His saliva began to sour, and he sensed the feeling of both sinking and rising in his stomach. The room didn’t spin, and nothing moved. Everything was terribly still.

  Jerry stayed in the other room, but his voice carried clearly, cut through the mist of Kyle’s panic.

  “What, Kyle?”

  Outside, the stray dogs barked again. Their cries sounded like firing guns. Kyle’s hand touched the edge of a plate. He wanted to throw it.

  * * *

  —

  The letter showed up early on a warm Thursday. Punishment.

  Kyl
e opened the note at the mailbox. Weeds had started to take the small lawn, and in the corner, near his neighbor’s yard, a profuse cluster of daffodils had started to raise their green fingers from the ground. His attention turned to the paper. He unfolded it, snapped it open. The first word he saw beneath the logo was “Congratulations!”

  One of his neighbors walked out to her mailbox—someone he hadn’t yet stolen from—and he wished to trade places with her, to pawn the note off somehow. But what if they won? What then would be done with the knowledge Kyle was willing to risk Jerry and Chloe for a better life? They’d always know that he had sold them out, or at least been willing to. How did he ever tip the scales back, or think he someday could?

  His best life. Not his best life, he thought. There was no living that now.

  Kyle waved to her and closed the mailbox. He spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between trying to figure out how to explain to Jerry that in a few weeks they would all be packing up for their new life somewhere else, and the thought that perhaps he could steal something enormous in apology. He planned how he would deliver the news to Jerry: He could leave his job, stop performing for people living their comfortable lives, watch Chloe become the brilliant girl she truly was, away from the smog, the soot, the bloodred sunsets of X.

  * * *

  —

  Jerry walked out of the house, halfway through putting on foundation, and returned hours later, walking back in like a storm. He told Chloe, and she cried quietly, living the nightmare of reality. Noise faded. Kyle sat in the kitchen, his thumb tracing the glimmering edge of the letter, trying to believe, to make sense of it all.

  * * *

  —

  Kyle’s neighbors, a couple new to X from outside the city, invited them over for dinner a month after selection. There was the mutual benefit: The neighbors could hear about the process, the anxiety, and Kyle’s family could get a free meal. He’d stolen from the same apartment before the two had moved in and couldn’t shake the memory of ducking in, the cold glass of the snow globe in his hand, and rushing out, tossing it in one hand on his walk back.