I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  “They’re actually not that interesting,” he says.

  “You’re bleeding a ton.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Can you see what color this is?” I say. I lift a soaked paper towel. The light from my bedroom backlights the spot, a horror-movie red.

  “It’s red,” he says.

  “Can you see it, though?”

  “I know it’s my blood.”

  “So you can’t see it. Jesus, you need stitches.” Another drop falls from his pinky finger. “You really do.”

  “I’ll be okay,” he says. He laughs a little, trying to convince me. I bend to spray the floor with cleaner, and I briefly wonder if “okay” is different than “fine.”

  “It’s just a temporary puncture,” he says. There is a pause. “Hey,” he adds. I can hear him smiling. “Do you want my number?”

  Down the street, an ambulance screams.

  “Do you want more water?” I ask.

  “Are you okay?” He furrows his brows.

  “Of course,” I say. The blood smears on the wood. It doesn’t lift as easily as I think it will. As I clean, I imagine myself in his classroom in California late at night, all the doors locked and windows closed, the rows of rocks and formalin-injected reptiles behind thick glass. A giant geode cracked open, a layer of dust dulling its sparkling core.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he says.

  “Of course,” I say again. I toss the paper towel in the trash, where it lands with a wet thud, and tear a new sheet. “But look at you.”

  RIVER IS TO OCEAN AS ___ IS TO HEART

  Ty drew a breath and dove off the far end of the pier, sliding under the skin of the cool waves. It was late May, and the water on the Cape still held a chill. This was the first time he’d taken out the buoys to cordon off the swimming area, the first time he’d done so as Assistant to the Lifeguard, a bogus community-service job he was wasting his final high school summer for. But then, as his mother had said, it was his own fault he’d had to do community service in the first place. It was his own fault he had cheated, and then lied about cheating, on a standardized exam.

  “Here?” Ty yelled. His arms kneaded the dark water in wide circles. His left, wound with blue and white rope, looked ghostly beneath the surface.

  On the pier, Max waved his hand forward.

  A rush of wind blew Ty’s hair back. If he hadn’t been eager to see how he looked and felt swimming after spending the winter lifting weights in his parents’ basement, he would have asked Max to set the buoys—Lifeguard Max with his protruding stomach and absent biceps. It occurred to Ty often that Max wouldn’t actually be able to save anyone. It didn’t matter that they were the same age. If there was an emergency, Ty’d be the one to race into the water, to lift and console and check for a pulse, to place both hands over the heart and push.

  “Here?” he yelled. Max gave a thumbs-up.

  The water around Ty was a pocket of eerie warmth. Growing up, he’d imagined all sorts of things beneath him while swimming—sharks and stingrays had been his worst fears until he’d thought up the idea that maybe there was no ocean floor, only a bottomless pit of water on which he was a floating mote of dust. He released a breath and looked up at the sun, a bright dot on the horizon. He let go of the buoy and dropped its lead anchor, his muscles relaxing with the release. On the pier, Max was walking toward the parking lot, the crack of his ass visible over a slouching bathing suit.

  Ty would lift himself out of the water and up the wooden ladder, a breeze whipping him from the side. He would walk the few miles back to his house, neglect biology homework, and fall asleep listening to the town clock strike a new hour, like he always did. He would have done these things if he hadn’t decided instead to swim the fifty yards to the shore, for the added exercise. Then as his foot met the sooty detritus, it kicked something smooth and round. Waiting for the brown cloud of sand to settle, Ty saw it in a flash, as if dreaming: the two dark hollows of sockets looking past him, the barely gray bone of a skull resting like a shell on the ocean floor.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks before, Ty had been sitting at a desk in the school gymnasium, completing the first in a series of timed sections, finding the values of Xs and Ys he’d deemed totally useless since the seventh grade.

  Looking back, Ty thought it must have been something about the silence, the stillness of the hot air that had given him the confidence to look up from his desk and over at Sam’s paper. He had to crane his neck, faking a stretch, to see her answers. And then Ty’s precalculus teacher, one of those men who only knew numbers and jokes about numbers, lifted his calculator and dropped it on the desk, snapping him back into the moment. When Ty was asked to gather his things, he hesitated. He tried to summon tears but, unable to, complained instead about his neck, and how he’d been told to stretch it, and how he knew what it looked like, and that he was sorry.

  After Ty had handed in his exam, the paper was checked against Sam’s, and he’d forgotten—in the rush of having gotten away with it—that he’d kept too strictly to her answers. And then he was sitting in a high-backed chair in the principal’s office, with his mother on the phone, crying, her high voice audible from across the room. And then there he was, sighing on the far edge of the pier, meeting Lifeguard Max, asking him if he’d ever cheated on anything.

  “There was one time, when I was in track and field,” Max had said. “And I cut into the woods. I just stopped running.”

  “That’s not cheating,” Ty had said, slicking back his wet hair in the water’s reflection. It almost disgusted him. “That’s just giving up.”

  * * *

  —

  Ty didn’t call out for Max right away. He stood, the water at his waist, and blinked at the bone. At first, he thought it might be plastic, a toy or a conch shell broken by the rolling surf, beaten into the shape of a skull. But it was too big—an adult’s head, Ty thought. He could make out the fine lines, the faint gray cracks mottling its surface, the ridged nasal cavity, and the long row of teeth, which appeared sharper, smaller than he’d expected.

  “Max! Jesus, check this out.”

  Ty walked slowly out of the water, careful not to disturb the silt, and through a small bed of saw grass needling his feet, onto the shore. Max turned and walked back toward him. His large orange shirt was partly tucked into his swimsuit, and only now did Ty see that he had a slight limp to his right leg, more apparent when he walked on the sand.

  “This is fucked up,” Ty said. He laughed as he said it, still in shock.

  “What is?”

  “Just walk out. Right over there.” Ty pointed out at the water. “Like near that buoy. Like thirty feet.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “If it’s something dead, just tell me. I already washed my feet off.”

  “It’s not something dead.”

  The lie had come so easily, and with such conviction, that Ty almost believed it himself.

  “Well, I’m going,” Ty said, walking back in the water. Gulls helixed over the pier, landing on the tips of posts and docked boats. The day was quiet this late and at low tide, and the stillness lent the afternoon a hollow, gutted feel. “Come on. You have to see this.”

  * * *

  —

  It was either the soup kitchen, highway litter removal, or assisting the lifeguard. Those were the options, his father had said. After a pause, he’d added, “And I can’t believe we’re even giving you options.”

  The consequences were light: a two-week suspension from school, time Ty spent doing push-ups in his bedroom and showing his mother practice problems he’d done months back as proof of his improved attitude and ethic. And the part-time position assisting the lifeguard through the summer. His free time—and it really was free time, with his father working long hours
at the bank and his mother often visiting priests or off at Bible study—afforded Ty other opportunities. For instance, he’d started talking to men online.

  He’d found xXZachXx one night a few days into his suspension, and it was hard for Ty to chart how exactly it happened, but hours after talking in the DISCRETE chat room, his laptop heating up on his thigh in bed, he’d begun making plans to meet the man, who lived a half-hour drive away in Provincetown. The man’s photo showed him leaning against a No Trespassing sign, wearing a puka shell necklace and sunglasses, cropped to show just him—from the waist up, his vaguely defined abs and thick neck—though someone else’s tan hand rested on his shoulder.

  When his mother came home that night, after visiting the church for one of her frequent devotion Masses, she walked into Ty’s room. As he shut his laptop, she lifted a string of red rosary beads from her purse. She sat on the edge of his bed and asked him to pray with her. And he wasn’t sure why, but he said yes.

  * * *

  —

  Max didn’t see the skull at first. He saw something else, or he must have, because he just stood there, hands on his hips, squinting down into the water. Or maybe he was looking at it the wrong way, like those mosaics Ty had seen in waiting rooms, the images snapping into place when you focused hard enough.

  “It’s a skull,” Ty said. “Like a guy’s.”

  Though the sky was beginning to darken and the water with it, Ty could still make it out—that white oval on the ocean floor, shifting with the waves like a mirage. He leaned over it, inching closer, and considered reaching his arm down toward that smooth, slick arch of the bone, when he heard a sudden, heavy splash behind him. The weak evening light hit the water like glass as he turned. The water rippled around him in strong rings. Max had fainted.

  * * *

  —

  In the days after chatting with xXZachXx, Ty learned that his real name was Tom, that he had family near where Ty lived. He was thirty-seven. He “traditionally dated younger.” He was serious and worked at a law firm. He used formal language, said “content” instead of “happy.” He hadn’t worked out in a year but was getting back into it, slowly. He offered to pick Ty up and take him out to dinner the next night, and Ty agreed.

  There was a nervous weight in Ty’s stomach in the hours leading up to meeting Tom, a feeling Ty had associated with his regular lying, that sensation of getting away with something—but what? He paced around his parents’ house alone, opening windows and closing them, doing dishes, taking out the ingredients of recipes to cookies and cakes, spreading them on the marble countertop, and deciding that no, he wasn’t hungry.

  He sat at the dinner table, where on weekend nights he ate with his parents, looking out the window, and imagined the car slowing to park across the street, beneath the shade of the willow tree. He watched then as sparrows disappeared into the waving gray tendrils. And then, as if he’d called for it, a small silver car parked beneath it, and the crows shuddered out the top and away at once, scattering in the bleak sky.

  * * *

  —

  Ty picked Max up out of the water as he’d been taught to during training—lifting with his legs, his forearms carrying the weight. If this were a rescue operation, in water off the continental shelf, Ty would have panicked, having to dive to kick and ration his breath. But the water was shallow, and Max seemed to regain some composure after being lifted to his feet. He curled Max’s arm behind his neck, the cold weight of it on his shoulders. Ahead, wind bent tall grass in hard diagonals and small crabs hurried into their holes in the sand. The air was chalked with salt, touched with panic.

  He brought Max to the shore, setting him down on his side. What Ty hadn’t realized—and maybe it was because he never really looked at Max straight on—were his eyes, a striking pale blue, like the water Ty had seen in postcards of white sand beaches, though he didn’t want to admit this even to himself as he checked for a pulse and felt it: a strong beat Ty could match with the rhythm of his own.

  * * *

  —

  Tom hadn’t called that evening as Ty had expected. He just arrived. The way Ty had imagined this moment the night before, restless in bed, Tom called before he parked on the side of the street—not in front of the house, as Ty was sure to tell him—to pick him up. Each hour of that afternoon waiting had passed as if a painful memory he was paying for in advance, slow and difficult to endure. He almost wished he had school, something to occupy him.

  Tom parked on the side of the street under the tree, four minutes early. The man got out of the car and tilted his neck as if in a yawn. Ty could see his pale, jowled face, a round stomach that the photo had somehow hidden. He suddenly wanted to put a world of distance between himself and this man, to have avoided talking to him, even. Ty walked up the stairs to his bedroom to get a better view, but the height only offered up other flaws, like that Tom was balding, a thin circle of brown hair on his head.

  Ty knew his mother wouldn’t be home for several hours and that his father was gone for the night, away on business. So he lay on his bed, one ear against the pillow, and listened to the sound of his breathing as he heard the first soft knocks on the front door.

  * * *

  —

  Before he kissed Max, before he’d closed his eyes and considered, really, what it would feel like—the soft cut of Max’s lips on his—Ty hesitated. He knew Max had fainted. He knew there was protocol, the details of which he’d forgotten in the manic disorder, the confusion of his thoughts. Max looked dead, and his skin seemed to Ty almost blueing, turning slightly with color. Ty placed two hands on Max’s chest and pressed, stopping every few seconds to check for a pulse under the jaw. A strong wind stirred the branches and the sand swirled around him. The moment felt like an unreal blur, the kind of thing he would bat away—an intrusion into a daydream. He leaned toward Max’s face, waiting to feel the breath on his cheek—but nothing.

  Ty let his lips align with Max’s, which were dry and cold. He didn’t remember how to breathe air into someone else. He didn’t even know what he was doing at first. And then Max woke, or came to, coughing, and Ty pulled away from him, the sand hard in his palm. And they both stared ahead, past each other, at the thin stripe of warmth on the horizon, the wind rushing through the cattails like whispers behind them.

  * * *

  —

  Ty turned over in his bed, listening for any sound of Tom outside. The knocks subsided after a few minutes, and Ty could only hear the faint clicking of the humidifier, the steady wash of a fan in the corner of his room. He sat up in his bed and walked to his desk, where the pages of an open book of practice problems whipped back and forth in the breeze.

  He closed his eyes and slapped one hand against the book, stopping it on a random page. He opened them and saw analogies, those awful, useless comparisons, and picked up his pencil. Outside, there was the sound of a sputtering engine, and then its fading noise as the car drove away.

  Before now, whenever he chose to sit and pretend, Ty had made a point to copy the answers from the back of his book. Normally, he did this when his mother was nearby, cleaning rooms down the hall or while letting stew sit before dinner. But tonight it was just him, and he wanted to answer just one question correctly himself. He couldn’t. Instead, he recalled one of the analogies he’d taken from Sam’s exam the week prior, his shivering pencil against the paper, neck tilted (or strained?). RIVER is to OCEAN, the paper read, as ______ is to HEART.

  Ty remembered shading the corresponding circle, copying the answer: VEIN. He remembered the fleeting thought too: He didn’t need to cheat for that question. He already knew the answer.

  * * *

  —

  Ty tried not to remember whatever had happened in the weeks after he asked Max, quietly, if he needed help getting up off the sand, the sky clotting to a gorgeous sherbet orange behind, his bottom lip quivering. He dreamed of it so
me nights, though—the slippery arch of the bone against his toe, the shimmering white oval of it out on the water. The moments over Max, almost wondering if he was looking at someone dead, or dying.

  After he went home that night, unable to sleep, Ty imagined himself walking silently down the stairs, out the front door, through the night thick with mosquitoes and those warm winds, beneath the glow of lampposts and toward that water. He would stand on the shore and watch for a sign of that skull, imagined seeing it lit like a lantern beneath the calm waves, but he would find nothing. He imagined himself sitting on the splintering edge of the pier, waiting for the proof to wash up near the water’s edge. But there would be only the soft tapping of docked boats against the wood with the rising tide.

  * * *

  —

  Max wouldn’t ever look for the skull. He still didn’t believe it was real, and cited his low blood pressure, mumbled something about a condition, as they spoke the next day.

  “I know what I saw,” Ty said. “I even felt it.”

  “Fingerprints,” Max said. “Well, footprints,” he corrected. “What would you even do, if you found them? Tell someone?”

  The two sat at the edge of the pier, and Ty felt as if he’d given something away, let something slip from between his hands and back into the water. He knew with upsetting certainty that Max would not ever take him seriously again; it felt unfair in a way that confused him.

  Lifeguards weren’t needed here. They were needed on the main beaches, those long stretches of hot tan sand, but not near the pier, and not as boats sidled boringly up next to their posts.

  “You know,” Max said, breaking the silence. He turned to Ty, his eyes full of confident wisdom. “You don’t have to go around pretending.” Ty thought he was talking about the skull, until he added, “And it’s okay.”