I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  “We’d never go to one of the viewings,” Leila said, passing a bowl of steamed broccoli. “Exciting, sure, but—”

  Kyle cut into the chicken. The knife made a short yelp against the plate.

  “I think it’s about the possibility more than the thing itself,” Leila’s husband said. Everyone perked at his voice—no one expected him to speak about the show, or even at all. He worked as a newscaster. His business had been devastated by the popularity of the show. It was what Kyle imagined drove them into X in the first place.

  “I think that’s right,” Jerry said. He paused, chewing. “Like with stripteases. People don’t want to see everything, just enough.”

  “Some people want to see everything,” Chloe said. Attention shifted to her as she reached for a roll. “Can someone pass me one?” she asked. “I can’t get it from here.”

  * * *

  —

  The games always started like this: The running scroll of a warning filed across the bottom of the screen. They’d given the show an advisory rating, warning people that there was a real chance of death.

  Kyle sat down with Jerry and Chloe on the couch, on its fraying armrest. They had made a point to watch one episode together as a family a week, and tonight the flashing neon of the monitor read, Do You Want To Live Your Best Life? Sometimes, out the window, Kyle could see his neighbors settling in for a viewing, the shifting shadows of their bodies through the curtains. Recently, he’d tried not to look. Their movement through the windows made them look like contestants inside a television.

  On the screen, the host summoned the family members in their glass boxes. There were three tonight: two brothers and a sister. Kyle couldn’t imagine what had brought them to X, but it must have been something awful. In makeup, in close-up, they looked so young.

  When all was settled, the sister began to cry. This happened occasionally. The cameras avoided her until she regained composure.

  Jerry and Kyle hadn’t spoken about whether to include Chloe in these weekly viewings, but it was already decided that she’d likely find another way of seeing the show, and that this was a necessary part of preparation.

  “First question,” the host said. “What time does Erin like to eat dinner?”

  The first brother offered his answer: seven. It was correct.

  “I wonder if there’s a way to quit,” Chloe said.

  “There isn’t,” Jerry said. Kyle gave him a look, and he shot one back. “I mean, not that I know of, but maybe.”

  There wasn’t a way to quit. Kyle had considered this nightly as he fell asleep next to Jerry, the slight smear of purple makeup on his pillow—the residue of whatever show Jerry had done the night before. People outside X paid a lot to see the drag shows but tipped little. Jerry’s job doing drag was actually a strong one, even for the little it brought in.

  “I think they’re going to win,” Chloe said. “I just know it.”

  “You know,” Kyle said, retying a small bow in her hair, “I think you’re right.”

  “I’ll look up how to quit,” Chloe said. She sat up and combed her fingers through her hair.

  The fact was, he knew, there was one way out now. The confetti fell like colorful snow inside a globe on the monitor, and Chloe clapped with relief. It was to win.

  * * *

  —

  About a week before Kyle and his family were slated to appear on the show, there had been a riot downtown: buildings sprayed with the show’s signature golden mist in wide Xs and profane slurs: Take your fucking $ and shove it and This is not human and We won’t play much longer. Kyle had to walk Chloe to school a long way to keep from seeing the mess, which still hadn’t been cleaned up, even now.

  These were the thoughts Kyle found himself orbiting, returning to again and again. There almost wasn’t room for wanting anything at all but to be somewhere else. Maybe that was part of the game, he thought. Maybe that was the whole point.

  * * *

  —

  He sat in his kitchen looking out the window, frost climbing slow on the glass from the radiator, snow falling outside. He couldn’t sleep. The sun was beginning to rise, a thin line of warmth. He had been practicing the answers to possible questions, closed his eyes and considered them each:

  Where would your father most like to travel? (Hawaii.)

  What is your husband’s greatest wish? (To win this show.)

  Who does your father love more: his husband or you? (______)

  Kyle hated the last question the most. He didn’t yet have an answer for it.

  If there was an upside to How to Live Your Best Life, Kyle thought, it was that the show allowed for a few weeks of preparation, but this preparation was true code for torture. Sometimes Chloe would wake him up in the middle of the night, crying with a simple question she needed the answer to, something like, “Do you want to have another kid?” Or Jerry would turn on the pillow, eyes closed, and quietly ask, “Do you ever want me to stop doing drag?”

  The last few weeks had been full of answers. He was telling Jerry and Chloe what he wanted, which was important because contestants had to answer two such questions consecutively and correctly, with three chances for error.

  Kyle knew he should be asleep. He considered walking to the living room and rewatching an old episode, looking for clues, hints of repeated questions, common errors. The snow outside was almost imperceptible with the intensifying morning light. Jerry would be awake any moment, probably with another question, like, What time would you wake up if you didn’t have a job? Something small, delivered with a slight sneer. The last few weeks had been full of answers, and Kyle didn’t want most of them.

  Kyle saw Jerry’s shadow rise on the far wall and put the envelope back on the table. The radiator began to hiss, and he imagined its sound would wake Chloe, as it normally did.

  “Any new wants?” Jerry asked him, per routine.

  “I don’t want to do this,” Kyle said, standing up.

  “You knew,” Jerry said, “that’s not how this works.”

  * * *

  —

  Jerry was fixing the braid in Chloe’s hair when the black van pulled up in front of their apartment. It had been a long time since any of them had been in a car—weeks, Kyle knew, but how long exactly, he wasn’t sure. Inside it, the air smelled like dust and smoke. The three buckled their seat belts.

  “You look beautiful,” Jerry told Chloe, adjusting the braid over her ear.

  Kyle sat back in his seat, shifted his weight, and pulled on his shirt, which had begun to wrinkle. When he looked over, he saw Jerry, offering a look as if to say, Here we go. Kyle opened his palm to Chloe, and she took his hand. Then he opened his other hand to Jerry, closed his eyes, and waited. He felt warmth racing to his cheeks, and he nearly said, Take my hand, but kept himself from appearing too desperate. The car moved forward, their apartment shrinking in the rearview, the city growing on the horizon.

  * * *

  —

  From backstage, the set seemed like a room made of light and sound. Kyle briefly saw it as he passed, the vacant seats like headstones before the stage. There were more than he’d imagined, a small stadium of them.

  Feedback hit the stage.

  “You’d think with all this money they could hire professionals,” Jerry said, rolling his eyes.

  Kyle wasn’t sure why he had assumed they’d have a few minutes together, but just as soon as they had been escorted into the studio, its high ceilings and cement walls, two guards appeared. They led Jerry off to have his makeup done. “I can do it myself,” he told them, fixing his hair in the dark glass of a sign that read, KEEP CALM. SMILE. YOU’RE ON NATIONAL TV.

  “Dad!” Chloe called out after him.

  Jerry turned his head and said, “Love you!” He strutted like he did on the bar runway. Kyle smiled at it and opened his mouth to say so
mething but couldn’t think of what, and by then Jerry had turned a corner and disappeared.

  “Listen to me,” Kyle said, turning back to Chloe. He knelt to her. “Do you know how many people have done this?”

  “Hundreds,” Chloe said without hesitation.

  He didn’t expect her to have the right answer, but then, he thought, when didn’t she have the right answer?

  “Right.” He exhaled.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m excited to live somewhere else.”

  He hugged her then—a slow, warm embrace. The heat of the show’s lights lingered around them in a haze.

  “And if they ask,” Kyle said, “about which of you I’d save, if I had to only save one of you?”

  He paused. He didn’t know why he paused. He looked down, pinching the bridge of his nose. Was he performing the difficulty of the answer, or was it really this difficult? Two other guards arrived from behind him, one hand from each reaching for Chloe’s shoulder.

  “You,” Kyle said. “I want you.”

  * * *

  —

  A man with a large headset handed Kyle a clipboard with the questions. He had a half hour to answer all of them. He made a point to keep his responses to one or two words. There were some that Jerry and Chloe would certainly get. And there were others he just didn’t know. And a few summoned the image of that flashing X.

  * * *

  —

  Kyle’s face burned with the violent white spotlight, which he remembered seeing from the opening of so many episodes, the faces of contestants lit in a dangerous glow, their terror made obvious by the visibility of any scars, any sleeplessness from the night before. He couldn’t see Jerry or Chloe, and his throat tensed with anticipation, the fever of nausea. What he tried to focus on was how he would forget this memory he was currently living inside, this moment with his trapped family set to arrive in their glass boxes, the distant movement of bodies shifting in their seats, the sick gleam of the host’s teeth as he welcomed the audience to consider whether they wanted to live their best lives, and how.

  Kyle noticed after everyone else, following energy directed upward, the little gasps of excitement: Jerry and Chloe inside of their boxes which hung in the air, held by glossy black chains. He almost swore. He’d seen the glass boxes in a variety of arrangements, stacked, placed on the ground, even dug beneath the stage. Once, their edges were licked by blue flames. Another time, on one of the anniversary episodes, the boxes sat within a great tank of water, which reddened with each incorrect answer in actual blood.

  “So,” the host said, turning to Kyle, his eyes drawn to Jerry and Chloe. “Do they know how you’d live your best life?”

  The man turned away, his greasy hair catching the light like a mirror. Kyle looked up at Chloe, then at Jerry, who faced forward. Jerry was tapping his right heel nervously—a habit Kyle had thought he’d grown out of years ago. It was hard to listen to the host, who spoke with thick enthusiasm, something Kyle knew better than to trust. Noise had faded, blurred into a static, almost, then turned to a piercing hum in his ears. It took Kyle a moment to recognize the noise as his microphone turning on.

  “Let’s find out,” the man said, and then a great light appeared from behind Kyle—the game screen—making him look and feel like a shadow.

  * * *

  —

  The red X appeared above Jerry. Time passed, rushing forward. Sound faded in and out, and at several moments Kyle felt delirious. There was that familiar sensation of getting away with something—but with what? He almost felt the wind racing past him as he tripped, routinely, running home with those things he’d stolen.

  The red X flashed above Chloe without warning, and a weak trail of clear liquid began to file into her box. It pooled on the bottom in a translucent film. Kyle was relieved it wasn’t blood, then wondered when the trail would stop, and what, exactly, it was. He heard a light thudding—Jerry pounding on his glass. It was against the rules. The show seemed to stop for a moment as the host received word from someone backstage. There was another question—one more before Chloe could lose, which she wouldn’t.

  And Kyle heard Jerry’s dulled scream, like the fog of a whisper. Let her go, Kyle thought he was saying, but it was hard for anyone to tell for certain, and the show went to commercial as the water continued to flow slowly in.

  * * *

  —

  The host unfolded the paper.

  What crime would your father most want to commit?

  The words seemed to sting the air. Kyle had answered, Fraud, something he’d joked with Jerry about—though how much of the joke Jerry understood, Kyle was unsure. He hadn’t expected Chloe to receive the question when he’d written it—his pen shivering against the paper, the word spilling out of him like a secret—trying to remember what he’d told them he’d wanted, all those times.

  The pause before Chloe’s response was long, heavy with fear. Light saturated the stage, and that dust drifted in the air again. Kyle could hear people shifting in their seats. The host stretched the pause before Chloe was prompted to speak, and he wondered if they had cut to commercial. There was no great noise but a howling Kyle wished came from outside X, those sad dogs begging—but to what, and what for?

  Her voice was small and polite, and it rang out amplified over the audience like a sentence.

  “Robbery.”

  Kyle didn’t believe he heard it at first. He was suddenly sure his life had dovetailed somewhere in the past months, frayed, that he’d slipped into a dream he felt vividly, awfully, and into the harsh light of his life. He hadn’t sent that envelope; he hadn’t signed on that line. He wasn’t onstage. He couldn’t be watching the scene on that great big screen behind him: Chloe turning like a trapped animal fifty feet in the air, water floating her white dress to her waist, the slight fogging inside, her hands pressed against the glass.

  He looked up at his daughter, her blond hair shocked out in the bright water. The light came from behind and made her seem a silhouette. Like him, he thought. Monitors reflected off the dark glass of the set, showing her in close-up: cheeks inflated with air, face reddening slightly. Her eyes were closed in expectation of a correct answer. She was holding her breath as he’d taught her to. He wanted to run up to the glass and shatter it right there—water flooding the stage, shards glistening like confetti on the floor, a sudden, mortified gasp from the audience. He wanted to rewind the whole night, to sink into his old life. There had to be a way, he thought. People managed to erase all sorts of things every day: failures in marriages, in jobs. And just as he planned to turn to the main camera and punch it out, to shout, Help me, the buzzer sounded, and a thin golden mist was swiftly released into the tank.

  Part II

  YOU KNOW

  PLEASE HOLD

  The photo hangs crooked, like this—

  * * *

  —

  I can barely hear Sal call, “Action!” over the wind, brown leaves turning up and scattering downhill. It is the final shot of the day, and standing in this mountain field—my back hit with the last rays of sun, red flannel shirt itching my arms—I think: Why was I cast as Andy? What about my online CastCall profile says, Maybe a little out of his mind. Prefers being alone. Willing to risk his life for a snake.

  It is dusk, a line of gold light tipped over the Vermont mountains. We have to stop filming for Lethal Instinct every few minutes because Sal needs to “check the big game.” The snake, which rests on a bed of dead oak leaves, from a certain angle—in silhouette, I’m told—looks real. Everything from the crew, who fight over a fast-food dinner, to the cameraman’s broken chair suggests what I told myself I’d never do again: low budget. But this afternoon, and tonight, I’m Andy Campbell, a man bitten by one of the exotic snakes he kept as a pet before meeting his untimely death in the Catskills, having inappropriately p
rojected human emotion onto a wild-caught king cobra. I am Andy Campbell, and my eyes are glazing evocatively over with tears. My legs are the first to go paralyzed, then my hands, and I fall to my knees to avoid facing the lens. I am Andy Campbell, alone in my field. I was cast out by society for my love of reptiles and made my home in a cabin flanked by old pines. I own several forgotten vials of antivenom, and I don’t have time to call my brother before the pain seizes my arms, fills them with dead weight. I’m not clear on what motivates me to handle the snake improperly, and Sal says he can’t tell me. “No one really knows,” he says. I am a dead mystery, and I did not have a history of bad decisions. I twitch just once before dying.

  “We’re gonna run three takes, just in a row,” Sal yells.

  “Sure,” I say. It sounds just how I want it to—so over it, done before. I’ve been trying to project confidence. Four years ago when I started doing these films, I thought it was a way out of something, and now I realize it’s only a way in—to doing more of these films, which could more aptly be called “stints,” a term my mother has taken to using in place of my preferred “jobs.”

  “Action!” Sal yells.

  I walk a few steps down the hill, kneel to the snake, upstaging it so the camera can’t see. I try to move with the kind of nonchalant gait I’d expect from someone like Andy, a sort of whatever in every movement. I pause for a few beats, preparing for the imagined bite. When it strikes, I bring my thumb to my teeth and snip the skin hard—snap back my arm, shake my hand, and bring the bite wound to my lips, a small circle of dark red pooling near the base of my thumb. Andy Campbell would have learned to suck out the venom.