I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  * * *

  —

  “You deserve it. I’ve always known it’d be you,” I told Eric outside, waiting for him to finish his cigarette. Steam pummeled angrily up from a vent down the street. Eric had just gotten tapped to be Charmed that morning, and I was caging in my fury. His boss had walked over to him with a cake heavy with vanilla frosting that read in florid red cursive: You’re a Charmer! The whole spectacle of the promotion felt too rich, condescending in a way that made me question whether I really even wanted this anymore. I had thought the crowning would be a little quieter. For the first time I wondered if I might be too good for the job; the idea I had given up too much for it upset me.

  He made a face, like he was about to cry. “That means a lot. Thanks. I honestly thought it might be you.” He laughed.

  “Oh please!” I smiled knowingly, performing for him how ridiculous that must sound to me. “No, not my time.”

  But it was my time, and I knew it. A taxi pulled over in front of us, two young women stepping out, bright yellow high heels.

  “Fuck, my three o’clock,” he said.

  “Them?”

  He didn’t answer. He stabbed out his cigarette and walked quickly back into the lobby with a new kind of confidence I seethed at. His refusal to finish the conversation felt like a personal attack. That’s my three o’clock, I thought, just to myself. You just sat your ass down and never got up.

  * * *

  —

  Dave could tell I was pissed when I walked in the door. He turned off the game right away, and I saw his face in the blank screen ahead of him, tired. I almost asked him if he’d even gotten any sleep.

  “What’s got you grumpy?” he asked.

  “I’m no Charmer, not today.” He seemed not to remember I had told him about this, about work, or maybe I had never told him. Either way, I felt myself blame him.

  “Still wearing that cross though! I like it!”

  He smiled his big, fake grin, and I wanted to tell him to take a shower.

  * * *

  —

  We arrived at the church five minutes before the Mass started. The air outside was thick with the syrupy scent of frankincense or something like it. Whatever it was exactly, the smell was just left of Christmas at my rich aunt’s. Simon’s dirty blond hair, parted, slicked down, started to get me hard, so I bit my tongue. The crucifix felt invisible, the temperature of my chest, as if it had melted right into me.

  Outside the large stone entrance, people were folding their hands, bowing their heads. Small groups formed, the ominous groan of an organ warming up its hundred throats. When we walked inside, Simon dipped his fingers in a bowl of water and made a cross. I could see him touch, left-right, across his chest, and did the same. A small drop of water lingered at the corner of my brow, and I sensed that at any moment it might bore a hole right into my head, announce me as the impostor I was. We sat on the end of the hard pew in the back. What kind of choreography did one do in the church? Whose lead did I follow? Suddenly, I felt more at risk of being exposed than ever before. What was the padded green bar under the pew ahead of us for? How long did this even last? Growing up, I’d heard friends talk about how Mass dragged on. Were we talking hours?

  We rose at the sight of the pope. The pope? Was that a priest? It was not a shaman. The pope was the one in charge. Ah, I thought. Vatican.

  He greeted us warmly; we stood, then we took our seats. I thought, Game time. One eye always on Simon. I stood behind him, sat after his lead, a power play unknown to him that registered in me as sexy. At several points we sang, “Hosanna in the highest!” And I found the tune kind of catchy. After what seemed like an hour (it had been an hour), there was a scene playing out about the Body and Blood of Christ, and I realized I was going to have to commit. To eat the Body of Christ.

  Simon’s shoe lifted the bar we’d been kneeling on, and he gave me a look. Like pride. Guilt surged through me. We attached ourselves to the back of a long line of everyone. (Nothing I could have sat out.) We moved forward with a kind of overly mindful step-touch. It made everyone look pretty gay.

  A few people ahead of me eyed what looked like crackers as the priest lifted them, mumbled a thing, and then placed them in the palms of hands.

  I heard Maggie’s voice, singsong, almost funny: Eternal damnation.

  I saw people bypassing the goblet so (unlike me) skipped on the wine. When we got to the back, Simon took my hand. I almost gasped. He led me to the foyer, where a few hymnals were scattered on the floor, that water I dabbed myself with on the way in—and he kissed me. I could still taste the grape juice. The Blood of Christ, I almost said aloud, just to correct myself.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, Amy stopped by my desk, looking around suspiciously. It was the kind of care I didn’t expect from her, and both this and the attention she’d paid to her red-brown hair, which waterfalled down onto her shoulder, gave me a jump of sit-up respect I normally didn’t experience with her.

  “So, about Eric,” she said. “What do you think?”

  Amy was a famous gossip, so I never got to know her. (“Smart,” a photo assistant Lexi had said during drinks one day, revealing some experience she didn’t want to share. “Very smart.”)

  “I don’t know,” I said, tired of being in a dishonest mode. “I’m happy for him.”

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning against my desk. “He’s been here four years.”

  “Four years?” I said. “That’s insane.”

  “Yeah, it is. He tells all the new hires he’s coming up on two.” She ate some peanuts I didn’t know she had in her hand. “Kind of embarrassing.”

  I felt a reminder not to disclose anything about myself. “Good for him,” I said again, trying to pump the words full of meaning, trying to mean them.

  She sighed. “They told you you were up for it, didn’t they?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, feeling a heavy thud in my heart.

  “Oh, they do that with everyone. Makes you work hard like crazy,” she said.

  “They told you?”

  “They still tell me.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I said.

  “Honestly? So you can take yourself out of the game,” she said. “Four years? Four years,” she said, making a face like she’d just witnessed a grimace-worthy football play.

  “Have you really been here for just two years?” I asked her. I hoped my ability to see through her shit would override my anxiety at having bought into all this crap. Crap on crap on crap.

  “Three,” she said. “And a half.” She paused for a moment. “So I’m next. By the way, I like the chain on you,” she said. “It’s a good look. You need the edge.”

  I took it out from under my shirt, feeling the bumps of the little Jesus in my fingers. “It feels bad,” I said. “To be honest. To wear this and not mean it.”

  “You really can’t have that much of a conscience,” she said. “Obviously he likes you.”

  “Anyway, I don’t care about getting Charmed,” I said, trying to end the conversation. Just after I said it my eyes darted around, making sure no one that mattered had heard. The lie felt strong, bulletproof, but my eyes were starting to water, so I didn’t look at her. Amy laughed. She clapped her hands free of the peanut residue and placed one on my desk, staring into me. “Yeah. I said that too.”

  * * *

  —

  My key didn’t open the lock. The knob felt stuck. I fumbled with it, then knocked on the door. “Dave?” I eyed the keyhole. “Dave? Can you open this up, please?”

  I knew he was home. I heard gunshots on the television screen. “Dave, can you open this?” I yelled louder. Sometimes the headpiece was hard for him to hear through.

  Finally, the lock gave. On the screen, Dave was out—no lives left. Blood punched at
the monitor, paintballs of it. I put my bullshit keys on the bar cart and felt a lifting in me for some reason, like finally I wanted to just talk to him. It looked like they’d beaten the armory and were on to someplace else. It almost looked like a church.

  I froze when I turned the corner into the hallway, my body shivering up, standing reflexively on tiptoe, like a ghost at the sight: blood traveling in a thin chain, slow, down a divot in the hardwood, from the bathroom. It looked like grape juice.

  I stopped in my tracks and called Maggie instantly. My hand shook, and my voice erupted with panic, everything I couldn’t keep in bursting out. She was in a good mood when she answered.

  “What’s got you grumpy?” she said.

  “I think my roommate killed himself.”

  “You know,” she said, laughing a little, “you don’t always need to be dramatic.”

  “He’s in the bathtub, I think.” The silence between us fell, hard, to the floor.

  “I’m going to call someone.”

  “Can you just stay on, for just a second? Dave!” I called again. I didn’t want to face it. I had nothing to feel sorry about, not a thing in the world. Maybe no one else did either. Behind me, gunshots. A tiny, triumphant voice through his headset: “Got him!”

  * * *

  —

  Since I was a child, watching my older brother play video games, I had the idea that when we die we are taken to something like an end screen to give away our goodness and our badness, the sum accumulation of all we’ve done, before our game really ends. I want to give Dave everything. All of it. Not because I care, but because I can’t keep it for myself. I looked at what the truth was doing to me, disgusted, and wondered if he’s giving it all to me right now, before that red light on his console turns off.

  Date four was Simon’s plan to help me heal. He said that certain views can mend a heart, God calling out clear over the hills, after I phoned him crying. Through the insanity of that moment, my tears slicking that glass, I recalled feeling perversely happy that an awful thing was bringing us closer together, and it made me wish for the suffering I had.

  So it’s right now, right now. Simon and I have made it to the top of that abandoned fire tower upstate where God had visited him two years ago in a breath, something he told me on the drive there. God told him he could be gay, but he had to be careful. Date the right guy. We drove through piles of fall leaves kicking up past us, like the deciduous shoot that had actually turned out well. Not that I was there to see it with my paid leave.

  On the walk up, I admired the way he moved, sometimes taking two of those rickety metal steps at a time, an eagerness for the view that seemed too pure for me. Looking out now over the trees, the sunset, all that glimmering beauty, an apology rises in me. I don’t even know who it’s for, but I don’t want it for myself. For the first time, I know Simon wants to kiss me. He thinks I’m finally safe to love. I’ve passed all the tests. A hot breeze hits us, and I watch its path through the trees, fluttering their orange-brown leaves like a spirit. Will he still love me when I tell him the truth? Will he still love me if I tell him the truth? The faith is in me, I want to say. I promise it is. I just don’t think it’s where you want it to be.

  Picture perfect, I’m wearing almost everything I’ve borrowed from Charm’s closet, throwing around orange patterned shorts and spiky overthought shoes with Eric that day when we knew this is where we’d be, back when I thought I could have a clear conscience about all of this, like it wasn’t just going to hurt me in the end. The brown belt that risks, but fashionably. My white sleeves cut up higher than a short sleeve, highlighting the place my bicep starts. Suddenly, I wonder if I just look ridiculous, someone trying so hard for something they don’t need, or can’t sustain. That anxiety gives birth to a fact I know I wear well: I just look stupid.

  Simon turns to me and says, “Let’s pray.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  He has one of his serious moments, looking up with those gorgeous eyes, like a Charm cover model. “I’m so glad we met,” he says.

  “Me too,” I say. I fold my hands on the cold metal bar. When I close my eyes, I wonder if maybe he’s in a tower taller than this one, looking down on me. But I don’t believe it, not for a second. I love you, Dave, I think, and try to make myself feel it. That cool metal cross just over my heart, the one I won’t ever take off. Entering this prayer I can’t leave. A breeze coming now from the other direction, moving my hair back into place—picture perfect. Simon with his proud smile. No clue of those words but the first two. Dear God,

  DOUBLE EDGE

  The cold blade lodged in my throat like it always did, the glare of the spotlight hot on my face. What I had to do was hold the sword for a few moments, my tongue pressed against the base of my mouth, and exhale as I lifted it out, its edge sliding against my throat, between my front teeth. Afterward, I was meant to quickly bow and move ringside so the stallions could rear wildly, followed by the standing elephants, then our impatient ringmaster, whose whip cracked the air in yellow sparks. It wasn’t hard to know what went wrong. I tasted my saliva souring, and as the drums crescendoed into a rush and a piercing stillness took the tent, the blade turned, catching on my molar and digging into my gum. In the version of the story I planned to tell Miles, I would blame my sweating palm, the widening of my throat with a gagging cough. I wouldn’t tell Miles it happened just as I decided to look for him in the stands—the shock of his graying hair, a bright polo pulled tight with muscle—and realized he hadn’t come.

  The neighing of the horses as they were held back. My careful lean onto the padded orange gurney, the doctor whose job it was to gently hold the metal hilt, which winked with light as I passed beneath the entrance marquee. My eyes glazing with warm tears. The sudden cold of the night, the reminders to breathe. The distant chirring of crickets. The vibration of the metal in my throat with the revving ambulance, nurses with hands over their mouths in the ER.

  I didn’t know until a few days later, after I was discharged, that Miles had given me no reason. When I called him, he didn’t pick up. I drove to his house late one night, half a bottle of merlot swirling in my gut, and saw his shadow in the window, but when he noticed my car outside he turned his lights out. I opened the car door and listened to the hot wind move through the willow trees but couldn’t bring myself to do anything else. I swallowed so hard it felt as if that blade were back in my throat, pitching it open.

  * * *

  —

  Before Miles there had been Chuck, and before Chuck, Charlie, a venture capitalist with blackout curtains drawn on every window in his apartment. “For insomnia,” he’d told me.

  I had met him outside of a show and days later at a bar and been transfixed by his desire to bring up, at almost every chance, the fact his wife would classify our date as cheating. I did not find it sexy exactly, but I could not understand his obsession with me until hours later when, drunk and alone with him in his apartment, he gestured to PVC pipe leaning against the wall near the shoes. He explained that, seeing me, he’d been “impressed.” Then it made sense that he had watched my throat as I drank that martini, his interested pupils moving slightly with the lift of my Adam’s apple as I swallowed. I closed my eyes and kneeled at his feet. As he sunk the plastic into me, I sensed a danger that felt like desire until his fingers touched my lips and he gently pushed my head back, the pipe moving past where the metal had ever gone.

  When I met Miles he looked me in the eye. He noticed the way I got upset. It was strange to love someone first for their ambivalence, but it was how the love had started, and I assumed later, waiting for him in my car parked outside his dark home, how it had ended.

  * * *

  —

  It would take me a few years to return to performing, though I’d practice raising the sword in my kitchen and bedroom during nights when I couldn’t sleep, its blade catching moonlight through the
windows. Things would be different. I would be more careful, hold the sword every time as if it really could kill me if only I blinked the wrong way. And when the spot rose again from the worn dirt of the ring and onto my face, its heat on the bridge of my nose, I wouldn’t be looking for Miles. I would try to feel the applause when I bowed. I would stand outside the tent after shows talking to families, promising that the sword is real. I would wait a few years and throw the old sword away, but before I would I’d look for any indication of the accident—a scratch, a film of dried mucus. But there would be nothing; I would be able to see my whole face in that blade.

  At some point during my time away, the show added another act. I see it each night now, from under the stands, between the legs of families. It’s called the Vanishing, placed just before the bows. Two clowns, some new hires, stand against a white wall that’s rolled to the center of the ring. They each strike a pose against it, as if blown back by a great wind, and hold hands. There is a piercing flash of light—the whole tent briefly consumed with a golden mist. The orchestra gets loud and brassy. And when sight returns, applause takes the tent in a fever. Both have become silhouettes, shadows.

  Tonight, I ask the ringmaster if I can sit in the audience to see it. It’s one of our last runs of the season. He says okay, that I owe him. I nod and walk around to the back. Several rows are empty, and I sit near the exit. The air smells of cotton candy and rust. I wonder what I look like in the ring from this distance. I wonder if there’s ever a way to see myself like that—really.

  When the time comes for the Vanishing, I make a point to watch for what happens to the clowns, but the light is too bright. I blink, and I miss it.