I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

I took each slowly, considered the careful, ugly symmetry. The shapes began, almost magically, to snap into place: a jaw, two women’s faces, a lion’s mane. I turned to look at Noah, to see how well I was doing. He flipped the blot and squinted, looking for the mane.

  “I can’t quite see it,” he said. The candle flickered between us, as if to announce a ghost. “But as you know, there’s no wrong answer. They all kind of look like manes, huh?”

  * * *

  —

  There’s a moment of silence that the great shows and bombing ones share, a kind of piercing stillness that briefly eclipses even the show itself, when no lines are being said—a beat that washes over the audience and actors. At first, standing outside the theater, hearing nothing, I think something’s gone wrong. But as I open the door—carefully, to avoid drawing attention—I see Alix walking across the stage, apostles in tow. A soft red hue is cast on the scrim, the director’s not-so-subtle touch at foreshadowing that I reminded her on several occasions didn’t need to happen; people know how the story ends.

  Alix is wearing a loincloth, his soft belly noticeable even from where I stand. The group is just walking, stage left to stage right, wing to wing. I can faintly hear their steps on the ground.

  An older woman a few rows from the back is choking up, and a man shushes her from behind.

  The next scene arrives—Judas’s monologue on the thrust—but the theater has taken on a chill, the whole audience sharing one brutal, fascinated awareness: The man they just saw walk across the stage will be put to death before them. I realize what I’d have known if I’d seen the full production before, why the Crucifixions have been tanking the new blockbuster-hopeful musicals and putting whole playhouses out of business, why Los Angeles and Atlanta and Seattle are hurrying the paperwork with their prisons. It’s breathtaking.

  * * *

  —

  I had decided to stop seeing Noah, a choice that I told myself was an act of self-respect but was really just a dramatic move to get him to acknowledge something, anything, so that I might find in that acknowledgment the truth about the depth of his feeling toward me. Desperation upon desperation, a story I knew well.

  Nothing was helping the anxiety, and the dreams were persistent—it turned out I had changed the ending, but I could never stop it entirely. The women would turn to open the halved coffin, the hinges swinging open with a woody thud to reveal an empty space. But because Noah had brought in more inkblots, I felt obligated to indulge him, just one last time. I planned to ask about the yellow book, about his notes, to learn how he saw me, if he ever even had, but I wasn’t sure how to, and so I never did.

  “Mermaid,” I said, noting the vague silhouetted outline of a flipper. He held up a new page. “Willow tree.”

  I had stopped trying to see exactly the things in the ink and looked instead for semblances, shapes. When you lowered your expectations, there were a lot more options for what something might be. I found myself, when I closed my eyes between blots, back at that table in the library, the blue light from the windows on my hand, waiting with moronic hope to hear his footsteps back up that marble staircase. For him to say that he’d had the kind of epiphany I wouldn’t have believed even then. That he was wrong.

  * * *

  —

  During intermission, women wept in the bathroom, moved. Men formed small groups in the lobby, discussing a blizzard in the forecast, their work, how they expected Alix would be crucified exactly, down to the kind of nail, the technique of the swinging arm. Miguel informed me, unconvincingly, that he’d fixed the cross, and I told him I’d believe him when I saw it.

  Now, everyone is back in their seats. It’s the scene before the crucifixion. Lepers are hobbling down the aisles, shaking, holding their wounds, asking for a pittance. People are leaning away from them. I remember talking to Ethan about this scene, and why it preceded the crucifixion, because it confused me: Why have a dozen actors in full hair and makeup and costume wasted on these few minutes? And his response was something like, “To freak them out, and then freak them out more. To unsettle them, physically, then mentally. It’s what they’re paying for, really.” And I guess I agree. They’re getting what they paid for.

  I walk back to the lobby. Outside, several protesters drink coffee from paper cups, sit on the curb. Their few signs are propped against a trash can. I turn around, because I don’t want them to see me, not that they’d know who I am if they did.

  I sit on the steps and listen to my heartbeat, which has started to pick up. Pontius Pilate’s voice is all I can hear, his side of the conversation, and through the intensity of the moment, I consider how I’ll deal with the sound crew. The words firing out from the stage: “Are you? Well, are you?”

  There’s a beat coming I’ve seen before, heard before, when Herod is the first to shout: “Crucify him!” And then it really starts. The whole thing picks up, gets manic. Even the rehearsals got heated. I try to imagine how it’s going to work, whether Alix will struggle at all, whether he’s really prepared to die—something I hadn’t actually considered before.

  Herod kills the line, and I jump at it, even though I expect it. There’s a cry in the audience, someone is having a fit, and an usher escorts the woman to the lobby. Her sweater is tight against her, and her skin has begun to sag slightly with age. Her stomach pulses with each shallow breath. Her purse is wrapped around her shoulder, and a loose tissue falls to the floor as she blows her nose. She looks up at me and then back down. I think I hear her say, “I’m sorry,” through the choke of a sob, but I’m not sure, and she leaves the building.

  The scene onstage unfolds rapidly, hysterically, and though I can only hear it, my heart seems to keep time to it.

  For minutes, I sit. When the frenzy calms, after Alix has been nailed to the cross, after Miguel gives me the thumbs-up from the top of the stairs—a gesture I take to mean Alix is secure—I open the door to the theater. All is silent. I press the oak carefully, mindful of its hinges, until I see the stage, the backs of countless heads before it, the marley thinly glossed with blood, the enormous silhouette of the thorny crown behind the scrim, which is backlit with strong red light. But even when I look closely, I can’t see the crown—not exactly. I concentrate on the shape, the perfect mirror of its form. I wait for it to snap into being, to know the ending I’ve made. Someone says, “My God,” and I realize I’ve forgotten if this is how the show ends. Or if there are more lines. If someone missed their cue. If someone isn’t listening.

  GOLDFISH BOWL

  Two hours before I tell him it’s over, a man I’m dating holds the holy water above the goldfish bowl. He says, “What happens—ha-ha—if I pour this in?”

  I say, “Shut up.”

  It’s a game we play. He says anything and I’m rude to him.

  In its bowl, the goldfish already looks dead, its fins losing their color. The goldfish is sick with something called dropsy. I got it a few weeks ago after moving six states west to start a new life in a town where no one knows that it is possible to test positive in your mother’s bathroom two months after a night you don’t remember. I moved to tell the world I am happy now—I am happy now!—but the problem is I don’t think the world believes it yet.

  The idea was the goldfish would make me less lonely. Then its abdomen swelled like an egg and weighed it down, where it now rests on the gravel.

  “Something’s wrong with it,” he says. He does one of his ha-has again. “Maybe this will cure it.”

  He tips the bottle, smiling, and asks me again what would happen. I detect he comes from the sort of family that easily forgives bad behavior like this. What I want to say is I don’t know. The water is my mother’s. She’s hundreds of miles northeast watching our dog sleep. A little respect, please.

  Instead, I say, “Put it down. Don’t waste it on a fish.”

  DIVING, DRIFTING

  Emma watched from her hotel
balcony each morning as the local kids spearfished: stingrays, snappers, the occasional hogfish, each one split through with one immense stick, then hollowed out, and thrown to boil on the colorless sand. The children scattered the length of the beach and into its narrower lagoons, surfacing only to showcase their prized kills. Emma first pretended not to notice, but the animals’ blood lit up in loose pockets along the coast, followed by throngs of seabirds flying above them. She noted those areas most heavily harvested, where the water settled to a pink, translucent mist, and resolved not to wade near them, aware she’d want one evening swim. She was taken by the sight, and the movement gave her something to think about.

  Emma’s father had passed, and the hotel was all she could afford in the coastal South Carolina suburb, a series of cul-de-sacs knotted into one neighborhood. Her mother had told her she was to stay for the wake and nothing else. And how would they feel? A dyke at a funeral. Just come, then leave. It had all happened quickly and over the phone, which wasn’t to say Emma hadn’t been hurt by it. She’d heard it before—the slurs, the dog jokes, the word “butch” a rare, kind offering—and for as long as she could remember her family’s words had defined her. Her father was no different, but he loved the ocean as she did, and that was all that kept the relationship tolerable—frequent visits to the pier, where their moods seemed to jointly lift with the tide.

  Sometimes Emma had dreams in which her mother was a shark and she was a dolphin. She never slept through them. There was something about how each of the sharks had smiles that made them different. The difference was in their eyes too. When she was near the ocean, the dreams intensified. And on the morning of the wake, one boy caught a sand shark and slid it ashore, pitched through the mouth, thick stems of blood trailing through the bright water. Emma leaned on the balcony’s precarious fencing, listening for the noise she came to expect.

  The only girl on the beach bold enough to mingle with the cluster of ten-year-old boys was a tomboy. She bent down and poked the fish a little, her hair matted and thick beneath an embroidered black baseball cap. It was Emma, at fourteen, with curlier hair and a tighter, sweeter voice.

  The boy had plans for the shark—it was clear from the way he hauled it back to shore—but Emma could see his disappointment at its size, its pathetic lank, shriveled to just another fish. The young girl wrapped fists around the spear, twisted, popped it from its hold on the shark. Scooping it into her arms, she shifted it toward the ocean. She nudged its fins, let it go. Its carcass tugged against the waves, rolled with their corkscrewed funnels, turned pallid and a bit sideways. The band of kids watched as it clotted the water in one massive stain.

  A few of the boys turned to the girl, her awkward, shifting weight, and appeared to laugh. Emma couldn’t hear them—complimentary breakfast was about to be served in the hotel’s enormous atrium, the noisiest morning she’d seen since college—but there was no mistaking the boys’ amusement. The girl ripped off her baseball cap and ran back to her parents, who were positioned somewhere on the main beach, but Emma’s eyes grew tired as she tried to follow the girl through the puzzling mess of umbrellas and beach balls and other children. She reclined on the couch, taking in the forecasted weather. “One sunny day ahead,” chimed the weatherman. Emma slouched, then corrected her posture. She hadn’t mapped her way to the funeral home yet, and she began to wonder if seeing her father—his jaw square and stiff, though without its signature twitch—would be worth it at all. The prospect of an open casket kept her where she was.

  * * *

  —

  The wake formally began a half hour after Emma started showering. She opted to miss the ceremony completely, as if it were a menu option. The rest of the day seemed to pull away from her—first slowly, then rapidly, as if reined taut by some colossal sea monster. As night settled around the hotel, Emma gathered her belongings and made her way down the fourteen flights of stairs. As she walked the length of the beach, void of any locals in the night, she noted one purse, inlaid with delicate patchwork, partially hidden by sand.

  Emma examined it from a few feet, then a few inches, and tipped its mouth open. Every few moments she paused and looked about her surroundings, ready to recognize anything other than the ocean or the occasional scuttle of hermit crabs at her feet. She began to leaf through its contents—the dim parking lot light spilling with velvet serenity toward the beach—noting: lipstick, a few tarnished bracelets, blank postcards, a ripped photo of some unrecognizable statue in Europe. As Emma became more fascinated by a new tropical-peach flavor of sugarless gum, a woman’s voice peeped from behind her.

  “Excuse me? Miss?”

  “Sorry!” Emma started. “I’m sorry.”

  She began shoveling what she had laid out on the sand around her back into the woman’s purse. The woman’s features were delicate, her hair sleek and conditioned beneath a fancy hat, one Emma would never wear because it looked like an oversize doily, but which suited the woman just fine.

  “Oh no. It’s my fault, leaving it on this beach.” The woman’s embarrassment seemed to radiate from her.

  “Are you kidding? This is totally my fault. I’m so nosy. I’m so sorry.”

  Emma handed the woman her bag.

  “There you go. And, sorry.”

  Emma paced back toward her hotel room, up the flights of stairs, fumbling on herself, filled with nauseating self-pity. Reaching her door, she realized she had left her green and white towel next to the woman’s precious purse. Exploring the panoramic view from her balcony, she couldn’t chart its location on the beach. The air had staled to a breezy pulp. Lights flashed from the lot, ebbing with the darkness before pulling out and veering onto the interstate.

  Three voicemails had been left by her mother. She deleted each one separately, indulging in their gradual departure from her phone. The waves outside seemed louder than Emma remembered them moments ago. Something in the water leapt, then fell back in—tasting the air for a short moment, and wishing again for water.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Emma woke from her most vivid nightmare: she, a dolphin, her mother, a shark, and her father, an enormous spear. She couldn’t understand how she knew these things were so. She and her mother were caught in a gigantic, rectangular aquarium, taking bites from each other, while a spear pitched from the water’s surface at desultory angles, holing them through the torso and dorsal fins, marking them in ruby, graphed lines, as if both were nothing more than pincushions. Emma vowed to attempt this retelling at her next week’s therapy session.

  Beach activity slowed as winds from the north grew stronger. Still, the girl and only two other boys played on the temperate beach. Emma watched as the girl and boy buried the shortest child in a pit and filled it with sand, leaving only his head peeking above the surface. The two continued to play for a time, then grew restless, exhausting all their options for fun in the feigned disembodiment. Both began to trek through clouds of seaweed in search of small shells and stones to skip. The boy struggled to free himself from the sand, and before long the eldest was throwing sand at the girl, while the girl hurled handfuls of pebbles back at him, and an adult came to dig up the smallest. The girl escaped to the jetty, balancing on a rock the shape of an arrowhead, testing how far she could slip without falling.

  Emma returned to her television. Her phone had accumulated two new voicemails: one from her mother, and one from the first woman to break her heart, who had done so during a five-hour call, which had occurred through the same phone. Both were deleted simultaneously. There was nothing acceptable about either the phone calls or messages.

  The weatherman announced, “Hurricane Lisa confirmed to be headed for Northern Florida.” He paused a bit, receiving further word from his lagging prompt. “Its trajectory up until now has been unknown. Keep an eye out for updates.”

  Breakfast was served in the atrium per usual, and Emma decided to attend, since
she had nothing better to do. She avoided the dairy and bacon but indulged in extravagant portions of bread and fresh fruit. Her therapist had told her that eating healthier food could erase the cells that stimulated her strange nightmares. And though Emma didn’t like pineapple, the possibility of a restful night had her clearing her plate.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Emma headed to the beach, hoping the water might cool her skin, which had begun to burn up through the afternoon. And it did assuage it. But eventually, the ocean began to roll too quickly, the waves piled on top of one another—choppy and growing in the roiling surf. Emma walked from the water and, soaked, returned to her room, footprinting pockets of sand into the gaudily ornate carpet. Silently, she cursed herself for not purchasing another towel.

  After showering, she curled into bed, her conscience spinning about the room, blaring in and out of focus with the weather report, the television monitor.

  Two hours later, she woke. Not from dreams or nightmares, but the storm. Outside, the ocean churned restlessly, a few beachside homes nearly ripped from their thin foundations, wooden planks visible beneath. The hotel’s generator had kicked in, a groan emanating throughout the building. Trees knocked against the hotel’s crenellated roof, wind uprooted shrubs and flew them downtown in broad strokes. Emma reached for her phone, which held in it one voicemail. She flipped it open and pressed it against her ear, which was red from the sickness, the stress, the storm.

  “And one more thing, Emma,” the familiarly shrill voice spat. “They say it’s a category four. It’s getting stronger. Just leave.”

  Emma looked out onto the balcony, past the beach, toward Hilton Head, which earlier reports had said would receive tremendous impact, despite its distance from the eye of the storm. Something about the Gulf Stream. After a few hours, Emma found rhythm in the tumultuousness of the weather—the melodic snapping of twigs, the itching of sand in the air—and fell asleep.