I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  * * *

  —

  “It doesn’t look like anything,” I told my friend Noah. “Like, a bug. A swatted fly.”

  The Rorschach test was the last in a series of attempts at divining what, exactly, was wrong with me—or, that’s what I assumed. The final vestige of a friend group I had when I moved to the city, Noah was the sort of guy who felt his undergrad psychology degree entitled him to judge strangers from across crowded bars with an accuracy that was really just stubbornness, a kind of no-second-look sensibility that once seemed wise and now just felt pitiable. We’d practiced with less formal methods of healing, everything from crystals I kept in a plastic bag to powder I was supposed to mix into water and then leave on my bedside table. (“But do not drink that,” he’d cautioned sternly, without explanation.) My night terrors were growing more vivid, cripplingly real; I wasn’t sleeping more than a few hours each night, and even then, the sleep was irregular. I would have seen a real therapist, but this was one way of trying to get Noah to fall back in love with me—if he ever even had been to begin with—and it made him feel useful, which gave the profoundly misguided impression for both of us that this face time was working.

  “Look again,” Noah said.

  I looked again. In the dream I’d been having for the last two weeks, I sit with my mother watching a magician pull calico cats from his sleeve, levitate chairs, whistle into being a string of Christmas lights over the audience. At one point, two women wheel a coffin to the center of the stage, and the magician asks for a volunteer—this is the moment I become terrified—and my mother walks to the stage and steps into the box, which is then closed and sawed through its center. When the time comes for the reveal, it hasn’t worked. She’s been halved. But the audience still applauds.

  “It seriously looks like someone shit on a piece of paper,” I told Noah.

  We moved through the inkblots quickly, and I nearly saw things in each: the almost-head of a man, a near-crab with its pincers defensively raised. (“You really don’t need to be that specific,” he’d said of that detail.) When we finished, Noah placed the papers on his desk, then turned back to me. From his puzzled expression, I knew that, like me, he hadn’t figured anything out.

  “These don’t seem to be helping?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not really sick.” There was a fine line to walk between needing his guidance and seeming well enough to be datable. But I had no way of knowing that I wasn’t sick, no way of knowing what then might have been my worst fear, if I’d been paying attention: that my conscience would rise up in me months later after agreeing to cast the Crucifixion, after watching a man die months afterward upstage left, feet from where Hansel and Gretel had become trapped only days prior, next to a cauldron filled with dry ice.

  “How does that make you feel?” Noah asked. “That you don’t feel sick.”

  I gave him an old look—what a stupid question. A little mean, but I excused it. I hoped my intelligence hurt him. I was the one who got into graduate school and moved out of his parents’ basement, even if studying late into the night had cost me things nothing would ever cost him. Walking down the library steps at midnight a few months into dating, I could feel his loss of interest in just the way he had held my hand. Intuition I tried to shake but prophesized that disaster, when days later he broke the news to me in that same library. He said that he had “lost the feeling.” I missed hearing this at first and had to ask, knowing from the apology in his eyes what was happening, for him to repeat himself. Staying there, next to those books, felt like a way never to leave the moment, a space that would grant me the chance to turn back to the start if only I figured out how. My demeanor changed and never changed back. I became the kind of person I had until then hated, who dealt out bullshit pushback, my resentment like an outfit I selected and wore every day, until the clothes were my skin, and I was my job, my current starring role as a producer. I had wished it all up, even the heartbreak. The curse of my intuition, I sometimes joke to myself, though of course it is no joke.

  Not even two months of dating Noah, and over a decade later his was the spell I couldn’t shake. He lit candles on the table between us at the start of each session, and I was back in his apartment, the berry smell of his hair, those old posters on his old apartment walls showing off an interest in vintage horror movies I always knew would never last.

  “So you know, reliably, the dream won’t end well,” he said. “Have you ever tried stopping it?”

  “Is there science behind this stuff? To be honest, that sounds really dumb,” I told him, which was true. He laughed and it made my heart jump, voiding my irritation at his seeming not to have listened when I said, several meetings ago, that I can’t move in it.

  “I can’t move in it,” I said again, as if for the first time.

  Noah had flipped to a new page of his yellow notebook, scribbling. Once, when he excused himself to the bathroom where he indulged a long fart, I glimpsed an open page; it read: M 7–7, TR full, F 12–8. His nursing shifts. Information I did not want to have. I imagined him helpful instead, reducing my life to bones and what those might be: antidepressants, weight gain, anxiety, mother’s death.

  “I’m going to ask,” he said, “that you try to stop your dream. Just tonight. And that you note how that goes.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. The homework was a promise of another weird half hour with Noah. When I went to put it on my calendar, not that I was at risk of forgetting it, I saw that word: date!

  * * *

  —

  Something’s wrong with the cross, or at least that’s what Tuck—in full makeup—is telling me an hour before the curtain rises, like someone who doesn’t want to keep his job.

  “It’s just wobbling,” he says. “A bit. Like, only a little.”

  “Crosses don’t wobble,” I say.

  I can hear the protesters’ chant through my office window: “Respect Christ! Respect our Lord!” That it doesn’t rhyme assuages my fear these people might be under good leadership. Thankfully, there aren’t nearly as many as on New York’s opening night just over a year ago: riots in the streets outside the off-Broadway theater, cars tipped and set ablaze, tall white candles lit in vigil, the whole scene mournful and angry.

  The idea for the production had come from two brothers, a pastor and a prison guard with a passion for community theater, the latter of whom got it in his mind, walking past death row inmates one day, what a live-action crucifixion might look like. Next thing you know, the guys have an article in the local paper that goes viral with controversy, and CNN brings it to air: these two brothers talking about whether this could happen. How? The ratings climb, and everyone gets interested. “We just don’t live in those times anymore,” one anchor had said, laughing uncomfortably. Which is how my colleague Ethan took notice, hungover, watching a monitor at his airport terminal while waiting for a flight home, then sending off a stray interested e-mail. His Chicago theater had just secured Jesus Christ Superstar for fall. By the time the plane had landed, he had an enthusiastic voicemail from both the siblings. “The rest,” Ethan told me over scotch a few months ago, looking a tired, uneasy mess, the regret apparent through his put-on confidence, “is history.”

  People are getting used to the Crucifixions; the churches that haven’t closed down are the only ones funding this sort of protest, but I’m not sure why they bother. It’s all legal and has been for a few years. After the shows, a lot of families go out to dinner. Dates take each other for drinks.

  * * *

  —

  Tuck tries everything he can think of to fix the cross—glues it, then nails it. Finally, the boards stay.

  In a dressing room, he props the cross against a wall. Now that it’s finally ready, a guard brings Alix into the room. I was instructed to do this by Ethan, the producer who started the first Crucifixions in Chicago. Apparently, without instruction,
one of their Jesuses had the spikes driven through his hands, which didn’t hold his body up—he slid off the wood like peeling wallpaper. “Goddamn understudies,” Ethan told me.

  The first thing I notice is: Alix is fatter than his mug shot. By a good fifty pounds. He has a prominent hooked nose and deep bags under his eyes; a tattoo of a thick chain that will be hidden with foundation curls around his bicep. If I saw him anywhere else, I’d think he was a criminal. He doesn’t quite have that Prince of Peace look I was hoping for, the kind advertised on some of our flyers.

  “They’ll go through the wrists,” Tuck says. He holds his arms out on the cross, demonstrating. “The lashing won’t hurt—not real whips. We’ll be quick.” Even in death, in the theater, everyone has to be on the same page.

  Alix backs up so his body is aligned on the cross. It reminds me of how doctors measure height during checkups. Tuck explains that Alix needs to cross his ankles once lifted onto it.

  “And this. This is important.” He holds up a small bottle of blue liquid, taps it with his nail. It looks like food coloring. “You know what this is, I know. Drink it right before the scene. When Mary starts crying up-left, just throw it back. Like a shot.” The small bottle, shaped like a vial, is poison. It’s a variety that shuts down nerve sensation, then organ function—one by one turning off the light switches of the body. I remember signing the papers for it weeks ago. The forms were stamped with special seals, coupled with confidentiality agreements and safety hazard notices. Ethan had told me it was optional, that technically I could decide whether I wanted a more realistic scene. But he said the wailing on his opening night, that fierce echo of dying noise in the wide atrium of the house, haunted him. He said the theater is a place for a lot of things, but when you get down to it, you always have to work to make it real but not too real. Under “purpose” on the supply request form, I wrote: To aid in the realistic depiction of the final scene. What I think I meant was: To kill a man as painlessly as possible.

  “It’s going to make you weak,” Tuck adds, holding the bottle up to the light. “So be aware.”

  Alix nods. I haven’t heard him speak, and I guess it doesn’t matter—none of the Jesuses have any lines. Some critics have called this “a powerful choice to transcend literal narrative,” but really it’s just because we don’t have much time to fill them in.

  “The set is a huge crown,” Tuck tells Alix on his way out. “It’s thin, just supposed to cast a silhouette, so don’t touch it. It could fall.”

  “What would be great,” I say to Tuck, “is having everything not almost fall, or break.”

  “What would be great,” Tuck says, “is getting through tonight.”

  It’s not his place to talk to me like this, but he knows I need him too much to call him on it right now. He tightens his gold belt and gives me a look. “Here we go,” he says, and Alix follows him, head bowed, out of the room.

  I walk to the back of the house, which is filled to capacity. People are sitting in the aisles on the balcony. A mother and her two sons hurry toward their seats, excusing themselves as they bump against others. The lights flash, then dim. The curtain flinches and begins to rise.

  * * *

  —

  “May I have a volunteer?”

  The magician was tall and thin, skeletal, with long arms and slick black hair. When the light caught his face, I noticed he had the just-left-of-handsome look of someone I’d briefly dated a few months ago and also still not gotten over, who broke up with me on a date by gently noting an apparently obvious lack of chemistry—a guy I since had tried to forget by way of just hoping I would forget him eventually.

  My mother and I were sitting at one of dozens of small, round tables at the back of an old theater. The night’s first act had been astonishing—leaf petals summoned from the stage’s wings, hovering midair like birds frozen in flight, before vanishing without sound. I was starting to feel anxious. We were sitting in the back, the old proscenium illuminated softly, as if with only peripheral light. The room smelled like cigar smoke, though no one was smoking.

  “You!” the magician said, beckoning with his hand. “In the back.” He was calling my mother.

  Suddenly, I came to; I remembered Noah and what he’d said, and how the goal was to stop this, to put an end to it. As I realized this, I became anchored in place by some familiar force—fear? Anxiety? Whatever the thing was, it only stilled my body. I watched as my mother shook the magician’s hand and climbed into the box. As he began to saw, I thought to myself: I can will this not to happen. I can change the ending.

  When the box separated—the two women carefully opening each half to face out—I realized I had, in fact, revised the dream. The audience applauded and the magician bowed slowly. She was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes in, and I make a tentative note to fire the entire sound crew. Feedback is ruining beats. King Herod’s lines are dropped, and he feigns fury at the thought of not being heard; he’s a real pro and gets a lot of laughs. If no one knew what was coming, if no one considered this merely an opening act, I’d guess some people would walk out.

  Miguel, the technical director, races down the stairs. I can tell he’s been looking for me.

  “The cross,” he says, short of breath. “Will Alix stay?”

  He’s a small Mexican man with a thick Australian accent and bad acne scarring, the kind of person with a history I wouldn’t believe if I heard it. I hired him a few months ago because he had designed for an off-Broadway production of Les Mis and seemed agreeable—a trait I’ve grown to loathe. I now recognize he’s just feckless.

  “Isn’t that your job, to know that?”

  “I didn’t order the crosses.”

  I can hear Herod make his exit: loud and dramatic. The audience reels with laughter, but it’s muted through the walls.

  “Figure it out,” I say. “You need to make it happen.”

  I imagine Alix sliding off the cross, not fully dead. I imagine refunds and complaints, bad reviews. Miguel rushes back up the stairs, his tiny legs scissoring up the steps in annoying bursts. I put my hands in my pockets and focus on my breathing. I fix my hair, looking at my reflection in the dark glass of the door, and wait for intermission.

  * * *

  —

  “So you stopped it,” Noah said, uncrossing his legs. He lit a small white candle and placed it carefully on the table between us. Romance, suddenly, like I’d fallen into a trick room. “That’s good.”

  “I didn’t stop it. I think I just changed it.”

  We couldn’t agree on what I’d done to “fix” the dream. And that question haunted me, a second ghost: How could I even know if I’d been the one to manage it? Were there ever really answers, or did we just decide on our version of the truth, cling to it until we found another?

  Noah had his yellow notebook not on his desk but on his lap, which I took as some kind of sign he felt the meeting was especially crucial or telling. I wanted to read what he was writing, to learn if he was, in fact, making new, essential judgments. If he was just writing his work schedule. Or if he was merely learning what I consider obvious: that I will run back to a memory to make sure I haven’t just dreamed it all up myself. If I was pathetic to him, I agreed with the assessment, the diagnosis, whatever it was. I was.

  Noah put the pen in the crease of the notebook, then closed it and placed it on his desk. He leaned back in his chair, taking something in. It seemed like a move he would have done in college, just before making a stupid point with impressive confidence. I wanted to hand him a paper with a grade for this mock job he was doing—C+.

  “So, what are we talking about today?” I asked.

  “I want to talk about whatever you do,” he said.

  This was his way of admitting he couldn’t care less what I had to say, and we both knew it. Each time Noah deferr
ed to me, I experienced it as an admission of his stupidity. He wanted gossip. Like everyone, he wanted to know what really happened on that car ride home from Christmas Eve Mass, his ears perking up as if it were the only car crash to ever occur in Boston, the only car to hit another car on an interstate off-ramp. The full scene I couldn’t cast, even to myself. After Noah had read the obituary, he’d shown back up in my life, a rescue operation—I’m still here! his presence seemed to say. At first only part of me wondered if he was in it for the gossip, and I became convinced this was true because I wanted it to be.

  One night, alone in my apartment, I wrote about what had happened in great detail: the sudden glare of two headlights turning to face me seconds before the uncanny crack of something (her neck?), which sounded like a beer being opened, something I learned the next day when I tried to do exactly that and dropped the bottle, from the instinctual memory of the noise, onto the kitchen tile. The white mist of smoke rising like a last breath from the hood of the car, and the way I had for only a moment looked up from the wheel to see the frost sparkling across the entire windshield, like a static channel, waiting for it to change. After I finished writing, I read the first paragraph and felt ill. I deleted everything and began to cry. I learned I didn’t really know what happened, except she died on impact and I sat there like an idiot rubbing my sore wrist, whining, swearing at this drunk fuck in the obscene night for a good three minutes.

  “The inkblots,” I told him. “I want to try them again.”

  “Okay,” he said, and lifted them off the table.