I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Stinger,” he said, unwrapping a new bottle, pouring into a red cup. “Like this wine—so bitter. Think they have any mixers?”

  “The rays don’t have stingers. Lia de-barbs them,” I said. I expected this to start conversation, but Nick was moving something in a lower cabinet.

  “That guy, the second one,” Nick said, “has such an interesting face. I think I might just love him.”

  Nick always made this joke about people he didn’t like. He “just loved” them.

  I could see myself blushing, even in the dark glass of the window. I didn’t know what time it was, or even what we were going to do. The real problem was what I had actually until now hoped for, how we might have driven there together just to make something, anything, happen to us. But that was just one way of hiding the truth in a stranger’s home, in dark Largo, on an October night stung with heat. I would follow Nick anywhere.

  * * *

  —

  “And you’re still doing those paintings, right?” Lia asks me.

  She’s cleaning out old tanks behind me, an assignment given to her by Sam, who probably has no use for them anymore and won’t mind if they break. Several kids run up to the touch pool and lean against the faux rock. The rays glide along, black diamonds in the warm water, moving faster with excitement, waiting for someone to offer a hand across their backs.

  I could try to play dumb with Lia, but it would feel insulting, so I say, “Yeah.”

  “Of the eyes?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Eyes.”

  A boy slaps the water as a ray turns away. I walk over to him, not just because one of the adults noticed, but because this annoys me. Even when people touch the rays, I want to tell them to stop—or when they pick favorites, when they try to name them. My job is a practice in not saying, Leave them alone, except for right now, when it gets to be.

  “Leave that guy alone,” I say. That’s how it comes out—a kind of no harm done tone I can’t seem to fix.

  The boy looks up at me, wipes his hand on his jeans, and gazes back into the pool in a contemplative way that makes me think he’s a liar and will grow up to be someone like Nick.

  When I walk back to Lia, she’s standing next to the tank, which is half-coated in a sheath of pink algae. This has happened a few times before, often at work. I wave a hand gently in front of her face, to no response. Her eyes are petrified straight ahead, but they’re lifeless. Her shoulders are slouched forward, her body gone slack, the soft smoke of a recent cigarette around her. I take the yellow cloth from her loose hand and call for Betsy, who used to be an EMT. She runs over from the gift shop and sets a folding chair. I press my hand against Lia’s lower back, in case she falls. I can feel her wavering in the air, a part of her detached and floating, like it might escape her. Betsy looks at the cloth in my hand and says, “Is that clean?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Matt, I need a clean one. Now.”

  “Back room,” I say. There’s panic in my voice.

  From behind me I hear a woman calmly say, “The man told you not to.”

  I look over my shoulder. The boy is clapping the water again, a flurry of rays near him. His shirt is stained with water. “For fuck’s sake,” I loudly say, “leave them alone.”

  It’s only after I say it I notice the crowd is thickening, people are curious, they’re noticing Lia—and Sam is behind them. He’s looking me right in the eye, a Who do you think you are? look on his face. Someone holds the boy’s hands, and he starts crying. Lia’s weight is more on my hand, she feels cold, her face paler, and Betsy returns with a wet cloth. The ambulance is fast.

  Betsy says Lia will be okay, that it was just another episode, and tells me she needs to work sitting down. She says it like I’m not eighteen, like I’m old enough to care for someone else like this. Sam tells me he’ll talk to me when things have settled. When I feel better, I put a damp cloth on my forehead too.

  * * *

  —

  The climbing speed of the ambulance down the interstate. The flash of blue and red light against the emergency room entrance. The sliding doors closing like a drawn curtain.

  * * *

  —

  The porch was colder than I remembered walking in, but my skin was numb, warming from the wine. Nick moved back among the men, needling his way through them with his shoulder, cup lifted overhead, but he wasn’t leading me now. He wasn’t urging me on, and I sensed that at any moment I could break away from him and it would take him a few minutes to even notice. It made me want to try.

  But then his hand was on my wrist again, and at first I felt grateful, relieved, before I noticed his palm was sweaty, and we were standing in a circle, and he was introducing me to people. I realized I didn’t know what had happened at a certain point, that I had lost track of time. Micah was nowhere, and maybe hadn’t even come at all. We were talking at the far edge of the porch to several men, who held each other around the waist and occasionally made meaningful eye contact. One of them said his great-great-grandfather invented dark chocolate.

  Another claimed to pilot 747s, to have a discreet boyfriend whose “name you’d know.”

  “The water’s still pretty hot,” one of them said, looking off. “Freezing out here.”

  “I’m game,” said Nick. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while, I realized, and he was drunk, gratingly eager to impress. He crossed his arms at his waist and took off his shirt, exposing a ripple of abs. He leaned against me, put his arm around my shoulders. I wondered if he was doing it to draw a comparison.

  And then we were walking down those steps toward the water. Nick left his shirt on the ground, some kind of statement. His body was briefly illuminated as he passed by the light of a tiki torch. He was so thin I could see his ribs, even mistake them for muscle. He was ahead of everyone, and the group was laughing, and it seemed for a moment as if they were making fun of him.

  The men spent several minutes wading in, getting comfortable, and I said I’d rest on the shore. I expected Nick to insist I go in, but he didn’t—in fact, it was hard to tell where he was at all, the light hitting the water and confusing it, glimmering on its surface like a mirror. Sitting on the damp sand, next to a long snake of dried seaweed, I could sometimes make out a familiar face. The bald man with the sharp nose surfacing, Nick moving back into the group, which convened in a new circle every few minutes. Eventually, I heard voices coming closer behind me. Dozens of men were heading for the water. It embarrassed me that I was alone, so I stood and walked farther down the beach, my arms crossed. I felt suddenly angry at Nick for having left me, for having abandoned me so easily. I wondered if it had been his plan all along.

  And as I was about to turn and walk away, back toward the house, to sit on that stool and drink whatever was left of that wine, I saw Nick’s dark, thin body running out of the water, running at me. He was charging, and as he stumbled, I felt my stomach pitch. I realized instantly: The men were giving him shots out there—that was why they were circled, their heads arching quickly back. He was drunk.

  “Matt!” he said. I could see the men looking in our direction, their attention focused on him. I moved back, and he stopped. “A shark!”

  He was breathing hard, and what was attractive in him suddenly coagulated to a kind of pitiable, childish enthusiasm. I wanted to tell him to calm down, but that had never worked in the past, whenever he got a role he didn’t want—passed up for a secondary part in favor of the lead—or when he didn’t make the highest diving marks at meets. Those words—“Calm down”—only upset him. It occurred to me, standing there feeling the eyes of all those men on us, that Nick was actually dangerously competitive, that he would win or die trying—which was something I knew but that had never concerned me until then, where death seemed to lurk in the water.

  “Okay,” I said, a
nd held out my arm. I kept my voice low and calm, hoping it might transfer to him. “Show me.”

  He took my hand with thoughtless force and led me up the beach, over driftwood and mats of dried weed, our feet pinched by broken shells, where he had apparently at one point been, though I hadn’t thought to look for him there. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I could see vague movement in the water—shadows of bodies moving and pulsing with life. About a half mile up the beach, Nick squeezed my hand and stopped, as if waiting to hear something. My sweat made a small black heart on my shirt. He pointed out and whispered loudly, “There.”

  I didn’t see it at first, but then there it was, moving, barely, on the sandbar. It was enormous, bigger than both of us. It didn’t make sense why it wasn’t able to move. The sandbar was shallow, but the creature was still partially submerged, though it was hard to tell from so far away. Nick started to walk out in the water a bit, and I felt myself caught in the net of decision: to pull him back and risk something between us, or to let him go and risk having something awful happen to us.

  “It’s a spear,” Nick said. “Something hurt it.” He started running out, in the water, the depth slowing him, pushing with his arms.

  “Stop,” I said. I didn’t realize I had started after him until the warm water was at my knees, and then I had said, without my own permission, “Nick, you’re drunk.”

  He didn’t hear me at first. He had dived under the water and come back up for air in a stupid show of rescue. I could read him too easily, tell too obviously how he wanted to say later he had saved something. But the closer I got, the easier it was to see the animal was already dying, that there was nothing either of us could do.

  “Nick,” I said again. “Stop. You’re drunk.”

  He turned, the water rippling away around him. Without the sound of his splashing, I could hear loud laughter down the beach. It felt directed toward us both. The shark cracked its tail once against the water, a hard whip, closer than I expected.

  “And I’m supposed to let it die?” Nick asked.

  “It’ll hurt you, Nick.” I instantly regretted saying his name. I could hear it echo between us, condescending.

  “Oh, so you’re the expert.”

  “I’ve worked with sharks.”

  “You work,” Nick said, “with stingrays.” His voice was licked with contempt. “That don’t even have stingers.”

  I had heard in school about how alcohol changed people, something I couldn’t quite believe until now, witnessing that transformation firsthand. And like that, he was out of the water, past me. I couldn’t tell what his plan was even as I tried to formulate my own, but I moved slowly toward the beach out of some instinct, trying to make my movement appear calculated, and reminded myself Nick would get back to the party without me eventually. Before Nick started to run up the dune, stumbling on the cooling and uneven sand, I could have sworn I saw a ray pass before me in the water, somehow darker than the water in the night. How could I tell if the drink had changed me too? I didn’t feel changed.

  * * *

  —

  Sam calls me in after my shift, and I sit down in the only chair in his office, an old thing with wicker legs, upholstered, bursting seams.

  “You don’t need to sit,” Sam says, looking through papers. I know Sam well enough to know he doesn’t actually have that much work to do, and that he’s trying to look busy. I stand, and he says, “But you can, if you want.” So I sit back down.

  Sam is a bad leader for these and other reasons, made powerful by his position managing this quarter of the park, the exhibits and keepers. He doesn’t have much, but he has this, something I could sense from his micromanaging my interview a few years ago.

  “What you said, to that kid earlier. Swearing? Inappropriate.” He adjusts his glasses, small square frames. He looks tired, sad even, and it occurs to me he might be disappointed in me.

  “I understand,” I say, in case he is disappointed in me, not that I care.

  “What do you want to do with your life?” he asks. The question feels too big for the conversation we’re having. He pushes away the papers, trying to settle into a seriousness he can rarely summon without the help of some asshole comment.

  “I want to paint.”

  “What do you want to paint?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My eyes lock on a porcelain shark near his computer, breaking with its triangular teeth a wooden sign that reads: SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK, some kind of joke I don’t get. He waits for a response, folding his hands. “I don’t know,” I say again. “Paintings.”

  I can tell he thinks I’m trying to make him seem dumb for asking the question at all, so I recover by confessing, “Eyes.”

  “Matt,” he says. “Look. Why I called you in: We’re closing the touch pool.”

  I feel a thump in my heart, then a lifting, but I don’t pay attention to it. “Why?”

  “It’s just a liability, these things regrowing their barbs, you know—the major aquariums are doing it. Look.” He slides a paper in front of me. It reads: Permission for Release.

  “You’re letting them go?”

  “We’re not putting them down.”

  “No, that’s exactly what you’re doing,” I say. I can feel my face turning red. Someone knocks on Sam’s door and he says, “Just a minute!”

  “We just wanted you to know.”

  Lia opens the door, her brown hair unwashed. She’s holding some of the promotional pamphlets we have for the new otter exhibit coming in. I want to ask her how things are, really, and whether she is okay, how Lisa was doing, if they had patched things up. I want to tell her to do something, to make some move, to go after what she wants. Instead, I look at my hands. I hear the screams from the Octocoaster outside, that excitement amplified like shot electricity in the air. I want to tell Lia I’m sorry. Even though I know I am only trying to tell myself.

  * * *

  —

  The time in the seventh grade Nick pushed Aaron Sommers into the industrial fan at the winter dance for calling me a fag. The time Nick made me cut the tip of his finger with a scalpel to get him out of a bio midterm. The time we sat on a bench “sick” during baseball tryouts, and when the whole team was huddled on that field, the trees fluttering with hot wind upstage of that orange sunset, Nick asked me, “Should we kiss?” and I said, “That’s okay.” The time I shouldn’t have said anything and closed my eyes and said yes.

  * * *

  —

  “I was thinking about your thing, that thing you said,” Nick yelled, walking up a dune. The sound of the party receded to a light static, and in its place was the gentle lapping of waves against the sand. In the distance I saw the men had lost interest in us—silhouetted dots moving in twos and threes back to the porch. “About people getting hands in our lives, how we need to tell them to stop—”

  His inflection lifted, that’s how I knew he wasn’t done talking. He cocked his head up at the night sky, moonlight falling over the reeds bending in the wind, the tall grass, everything washed faintly gray. I put a hand on my hip and tried to look annoyed.

  “I realized,” he continued, “that’s not the problem. That’s not the problem at all.” Screamed on the windy beach, from that far bump of sand, I realized how dumb my metaphor actually sounded. I had been feeling smarter, more together than him, and hated that he was right—it was just a dumb thing I said. “The problem,” he said, his voice lowering with thought, “is how do we tell people to get their hands in our lives, right? That’s the real thing.”

  I rolled my eyes and laughed. There was something absurd about extending the metaphor that far, I thought, spreading it that thin. They were rays in a tank. I didn’t even know what I was talking about.

  “It’s just a thing I said,” I said. “I didn’t even mean it.”

  It occurred to me, even as I spoke the words,
that I had meant them. I was trying to make him see reason, to get him involved, but I was doing it wrong—I knew I was doing it wrong—and it wasn’t working.

  “You know, Matt,” he said. He raised his hands like he was caught in some act, taking a deep breath as if he were coming up for air. “I just love you.”

  Something in me frayed, then snapped. For just a moment, I wanted the upper hand back. I didn’t know whether I meant it, but right then, I wanted to let him go.

  “Keep it dramatic,” I said, loud enough for him to hear.

  I knew exactly how to hurt him. He turned and faced me, but he was too far away, backlit by the weak light from the party—I couldn’t see what he meant by it. He nodded, finally understanding something, then turned and picked up toward the house, first at a jog, then running clear on the sand, arms pumping at his sides, until he was gone, his profile lost behind the thick brush, dark as the sky. And I was standing there alone. The breeze moved like a great thumb through the high grass. There was a distant clap of thunder, and the moonlight dimmed nearer to black. I felt proud and lost.

  * * *

  —

  “Two kinds of places in this world,” Lia says. She stands near the edge of the touch pool, looking out at the city, which is brought to a greasy black haze on the dimming horizon. A gray folding chair leans against the back of the touch pool. She got off her shift an hour ago but hasn’t taken off her smock, and I wonder if she’s trying to make a point. “Places you like and places you’d like to set on fire. And then there’s this.”

  She laughs a little as she says it, gesturing out with a cigarette in one hand, the other resting over her stomach.

  I know she’s telling me something she’s heard before, or maybe saying something she talked about with Lisa. And I sense I’m not old enough for the conversation she wants to have, and that she knows it. Behind me, the rays move over shrimp I just emptied into the touch pool, their wings splashing the water. A siren sounds down the freeway, coming toward us. Lia checks her watch. We live together in this moment, separate from each other. She exhales, the smoke curling up like a wish around her. I close my eyes and breathe it in.