I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  After that pause, I walk back up, trying to forget the actual sting of the bite. I regret having broken the skin. In the wind, my blood feels cool. It’s almost evening, the time Andy actually died, but Sal calls out to say I’ve done a good take, and that they don’t need any more. The crew briefly cheers, announcing that the filming for the series is over. This was it.

  But as I shake the stinging numbness from my thumb, I consider that none of this is technically the problem. The problem, technically, I can’t forget. Even as I let my neck grow slack, that thin orange glow on the horizon in my peripheral vision and the small lens shooting my smaller reflection back at me in the sudden cold, I think about it. My boyfriend Cole is lying on an operating table struck with sterile white light, and a man with a green mask over his nose and mouth is holding out his hand and saying, “Scalpel.”

  * * *

  —

  I did know what moving in with Cole would look like. Sort of.

  And Cole had always been defensive about his work, something I felt I couldn’t, as another aspiring artist, ever invalidate. So I didn’t press the point. But I did not know, not at all when I opened the screen door with that faded duffel at my side, backpack a lead weight on my shoulders, not at all before climbing those wood steps to the porch, what his life looked like—really. After three years spending nights in each other’s dorm room, it was all perfect—or as close to perfect as I could see the word: him with his paint-splattered overalls, his wide-lens camera and rolls of tan film, and me with my scripts, the rehearsals and auditions, replaying single scenes for hours. That was the expectation.

  So when he saw me trying to get the door that day, fumbling with the strap on my bag, he turned the handle. I bumped awkwardly in. He kissed me—that unchanged tongue-first kiss. I hit my head against the low doorframe as he pushed me and we both fell down. The tile floor was hot with sunlight as we smiled into each other. And then there he was on top of me when I saw the first warning sign.

  It was not hard to discern, at the time, what it was hanging on the wall, or why I didn’t ask about it. The photograph. But I didn’t get a good look at it. In fact, at first, I wondered if I saw it at all.

  But that didn’t matter to me then. Because in an instant I was back again—to those years before I knew what it felt like to be adrift in the world, to intimately know the phrase “cattle call,” before those few months when I didn’t have Cole, trying to make it alone, so I could run back to him with proof of my worth. See! I wanted to say, months later. Before the backup plan was to move to New York, take up with some small theater, and hope for someone to stop me, to beg me into a job. And that place was so warm, so what I wanted, even the room disappeared around us. He pushed off my backpack, and I closed my eyes. I felt ridiculous to be that romantic. The tile lifted beneath me like a cloud.

  * * *

  —

  The hill seems steeper, at least the way I’m going down, stopping every few moments to pause at the reflective eyes of chipmunks. The dark settles in like a gray mist around me. I’m surprised I’m not being walked down by the crew, who decided to stay put to get some cold open footage of the sunset. Lethal Instinct. I can almost see it already flash, tacky, across a screen.

  My phone rings—I didn’t think I had service. I lose my footing on a slick boulder trying to fish it out of a loose pocket. For some reason, I thought Andy Campbell would wear baggy clothes, clothes he could drown in—my own misprojection. As it turns out, Sal showed me a photo of Andy—young Andy, back when he was social and full of promise, and he was handsome, something the description of him hadn’t mentioned and something I hadn’t actually considered a possibility—wearing a denim jacket, his brown hair parted and slicked back. Sal let me wear what I had brought, and it felt like a betrayal of character, but I didn’t want to argue the point and risk seeming high maintenance.

  “Hey, buddy.” I have to pause to hear Sal. “We were talking, me and the crew, we were talking,” he says. I detect he needs something more from me. A drop of rain hits my nose, and I look up, move nearer to the trunk of a tree. “We were wondering if you wanna shoot that scene again. Right now, soon as you can. Joey looked over it and it just looks, well, you know.”

  I can hear rain falling over trees. I consider what I did wrong. People tell you it’s the light or some bullshit about angles. No. If you have to redo a take, you did something wrong.

  “It’s something about the light,” Sal says.

  “It is pretty dark out,” I say, sure he’s seeing the same night I am. My mind runs back to the question: How I had messed up. I went through Andy’s thinking as best I could beforehand, scribbled in black ink in my notebook back at Cole’s: If I were Andy, I wrote, I’d have gone searching for that snake. I’d have overturned every leaf, looked behind every rock, and just when I thought it futile, called off my search, there it would be: coiling like a garden hose in dense weeds. I’d see it and then the snake would get me. Like that. No explanation. The notes weren’t helpful, but suggested I was serious about my roles, so I had cultivated the habit early in my career.

  But then I realize: Was Andy being impatient? Maybe that’s it. That’s the reason he couldn’t save that snake from the Vermont forest, the winter, when it would surely die. Maybe he was so happy he finally found it, he couldn’t think clearly. It was, after all, the moment of rescue. And what else did Andy have?

  I tell Sal I’m walking back up, to expect me. With every step, I consider that acting would be a gift, if I could do it either much better or much worse. If someone had told me in middle school, as I acted out Macbeth to an audience of ten, that I wasn’t cut out for this, gotten me on another path, an office job that would have let me take care of myself. Or if I could have signed with an agent during school, fast-tracked past the shit gigs. Just before I see the outline of the dark clearing ahead, a calm wind slanting its tall grass, I notice a voicemail, delivered to my phone sometime these past few minutes when I wasn’t paying attention. The voice is low, and I have to pause again to make it out. I catch—“this does not look good. Please give us a call back when you can. I’m sorry to concern you, but this is truly urgent.”

  The word “truly” feels hard and wrong, too formal.

  “Hey!” Sal spots me from the field. He’s waving both his arms, like that’s the only way I’ll notice him, like I don’t get subtlety. I raise a hand as if to say, Wait a minute, as if I’m on the phone with someone, but then there is the sharp beep against my ear and I am frozen in place. I move my foot forward but I feel sick. I am sick. I am on the ground, and my eyes are watering, my palms against the fallen wet leaves, a sick metal taste behind my molars. “You ready?” he yells down to me. My lungs seize. The air is so clean it hurts to breathe. The inky night pitches in and out of focus, and I feel a drop of rain strike the back of my neck, faster. “Just one more,” he adds. And then, louder, “We promise!”

  * * *

  —

  Cole lived in an enormous cabin in the middle of New Hampshire. It was beautiful, a sort of vacation home, wrapped in porch, with more window than wall. It seemed to have been designed around how much sunlight would enter, and from which angles, and at what times. When I woke up the next morning, and Cole was still asleep, it felt as if I had been startled awake. It was the hard light shooting in through his blinds—more expensive blinds, I noticed, than I had expected. And the red sheets were so soft. I made a note to ask about thread count over breakfast, whenever he woke.

  But a half hour later—like in college, when I came back from the dining hall to find him still asleep in my bed—he wasn’t awake. I stayed near him, watched him turn over, but even at noon he was asleep. I got up and took a shower, only using his soap; the shampoo was foreign and looked expensive. Cole always had this sort of taste, ever since I met him in Introduction to Acting: no dining hall food, packages of imported things from his parents, a cultivated fondness for
something that looked like caviar but was in fact both rarer and more expensive. After the shower, I dressed and, noticing Cole still asleep, walked to the kitchen.

  And there it was.

  It was not a photo of just any man, but a beautiful man—blond with those darker highlights, those chiseled abs I could never get no matter how I starved myself, the sort of brooding face that suggested real thought. The worst part: Cole’s florid signature beneath it, like he had some claim to the man. The photo hung above Cole’s kitchen sink, and I immediately imagined him seeing it, enjoying it, every day, every time he saw it. I looked closer, and the whole thing came into sharp, revolting relief.

  None of this would have been a problem, I reminded myself, my stomach burning with anxiety—not if it hadn’t been for the day senior year I walked in on Cole while I skipped a lecture on Lessac theory, my copy of his key turning in that lock, and those loud and hurried whispers, and the black sheets over his pale chest. I had heard Cole once discussing a photo he had taken of this same man as his best to date. “Not because he’s attractive,” Cole had said, but because the man had been on the verge of tears after his own breakup, which made for excellent photography, “real emotion.” The wind struck me as I walked back to my room, shaking. None of this would have been a problem. The photo would not have been a problem.

  I heard footsteps and turned around. “Morning,” Cole said, rubbing his eye with a palm. I pointed at the photograph without looking at it again, that stupid body backlit with white light. I mustered in a quick rage some of the best acting advice I had ever received, years before during an audition: If you want to sound serious, speak a question as if it’s a fact.

  “Oh,” he said, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

  Outside, a cicada held its shriek.

  “What is this,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  “You look awful.”

  This, of course, is Sal, who has everything set up for another shot. But he’s taken the light away. The problem, he says, was it looked artificial. It looked made. I wanted to steal away, only for a minute, to call the doctor and learn what was happening with Cole, what they’d found. The red rash that had spread suddenly like a map across his back days ago, the blood that had come to the corner of his lip in a clot after breakfast. A fang through us both.

  But Sal had asked, “Can it wait?” And I had said yes—something that, unlike projecting confidence, I’m trying not to do. To say yes to everything. I hold my thumb and make a point not to bite it again. I can feel it still, the glow and pulse of pain.

  So everything gets reset. Sal stops telling the crew to “find the wind” and to move the snake just so. I have no lines. I just redo the part where I die.

  But after Sal calls, “Action!” something clicks on like a lamp, and I start walking with a different step. It feels almost as if I’m possessed, like my body knows all the right things to do. My eyes are mad with fear. I make a false pass at a log, looking for the snake, which I’ve suddenly given a name—Emily—that name is just spinning in my mind, and I’ve lost her, why had I left the lid of her tank open last night, and where could she be, really, and then I see her. And I move my hand down, something I’ve never had to do before—her tank is on the top shelf, above the scorpions—and I don’t have time to kneel. I feel how Andy does: as if the world has dealt me an unfair hand, I think, but not in the way people reference it—like even the cards themselves are meant for another game. I’m on the ground, my forehead slick with sweat, but before I can keep on with the scene, Sal has jumped off his chair. “Holy shit!” he says.

  Behind him, one of the crew members tosses up his hands and says, “Sal, come on. You just fucked up the shot.”

  My shirt is weighed down in the humidity, the flannel choice seeming smarter every minute, my personal spin on a role so unlike me. I’m overcome by a sense of pride, the feeling I’ve reached some new height, adrenaline tripping my heartbeat.

  “Turn on the lights!” Sal says. He hops back on his chair, pleased with himself. “For fuck’s sake. Give him some light. That was”—he pauses, unaccustomed to thinking before speaking—“excellent.”

  There is a cut-open quality to the moment, a vulnerability that feels violent. I sit up and brush the burrs from my knees. Above, the moon glows yellow, but it instantly disappears when a flash of stark, hot light floods my vision. I can see the rain fall, barely, through the harsh glow. I cover my eyes with my hand, the scabbed red dot on my thumb uglier than I expected. From this angle it actually looks like a snakebite. The crew flicks on another light behind me.

  “Now that?” Sal adds. “That was acting.”

  * * *

  —

  It didn’t take long to rehash the basics: Cole had been doing this since senior year, when he’d photograph models in an unused room in the Engineering building, which was never locked and near his studio, since he realized how well it paid; he was still trying to sell his nature photographs to major magazines; he preferred other art; this was temporary, probably; he loved me—he really did—so, what was the problem?

  “The problem,” I said, “is, like, five problems.”

  “Start with one.” Cole had the awful habit of getting me to talk by making the discussion seem doable, the problems solvable, even easy.

  “Where do you even do this now?”

  “Here,” he said, and tried to take my hand. “I’ll show you.”

  He brought me to the top of the cellar staircase, his hand shaking. I wondered how he thought I’d react once I did find out he was still doing this, because I was going to find out—he had the photo above his sink, for God’s sake, and then it occurred to me maybe this was a sign of how desperate he perceived me to be, that he knew I would love him despite it.

  “Shit,” he said. He held the silver door handle and looked at me, his eyes shot with red. The sunlight grew across the living room, reached us and faded. “You’re going to freak out.”

  Another one of Cole’s habits: He tended to be right.

  The view of basement registered in the same way as a scene I once played in college for an original horror-drama entitled Please Hold. All of my lines (and the play itself) were bad. I had taken the part, given out of some ridiculous pity from a professor who considered me a department underdog, which was embarrassing. In the film, I was a secretary entering middle age, and every other scene had me answering the phone at my work, several times, and saying those words: “Please hold.” In the final scene, though, I realized my daughter had left her bedroom after curfew, taken off with a handsome, volatile football player with a drug problem and a collection of samurai swords on his bedroom wall. “You have to seriously imagine the trouble,” the director said. His words held weight, and I imagine he could feel them reflected in his own life.

  And so I did. I imagined, seriously, the scene’s “emotional turning,” a phrase used to describe the advancing of emotion through a split-second moment. It was one of our college’s things, a proud central lesson of the curriculum. The idea was there are moments inside of moments that we can never know but have to try to replicate. My emotional turning for the scene, my hand on my head, jaw gone slack, eyes scanning that room, registered like this: 1. Fear for my daughter → 2. Anger at her having broken her promise to me → 3. Concern over how I would be perceived by those close to me → 4. Disbelief that it had ever happened, that I had ever lost her, at all → 5. The lockdown of definite loss.

  So when I saw the photos, gold framed and winking on the wall, I was furious. I turned to Cole, expecting my body to will forward a punch. But when I saw the bed in the center of the room, made cleanly with those same red sheets I had slept in the night before, I collapsed into disbelief. I sighed and sat down on the cold cement stairs.

  “Cole,” I said.

  “I can explain,” he said.

  “Haven’t you alread
y.” I felt myself press the period into that sentence.

  At the end of that play, I returned to that bedroom, and my daughter was still gone, and that was when the lights for the act went down. Cole was in the audience, watching me, though I couldn’t see him. He later told me I had looked directly at him, but I don’t remember that. And before the hot light shut down, it grew intensely, furiously bright, so that when I was left standing near her bookcase, my hand on the small of my back, I appeared as a ghost in the sudden dark.

  * * *

  —

  It is night now. I run through the scene again, one last time, and my heart is wild, like I released something I didn’t know was in me to begin with, something that kept the other parts of me lodged in their correct places. I’m on the ground, again, my hair coated with dew, the rain shower now a pervasive mist, like I’m filming in a dream. We just finished three more takes of the same scene, with variations on where I first thought I’d seen the snake: under a log, near my foot, and once—“So exciting!” Sal had said—behind the lens, from the snake’s point of view.

  A flock of small birds trembles up from tall trees, like thrown ash across the deep blue sky. I wait for Sal to finish talking to his assistant, a sad man wearing an awful old earpiece whose main job is to strike the time code clapper.

  “So we were thinking,” Sal says again. He walks toward me, a silhouette. “We were just talking and, wow—something changed in you.” He stops just short of stepping into where he’d be in the shot, halfway illuminated. I can see his squinted eyes, sense good news.