I Know You Know Who I Am by Peter Kispert

Author:Peter Kispert [Kispert, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

BE ALIVE

We’re on our way to the city, finally, when Glen tells me that the chainsaw got him this time. He was out of ammo and extra lives, so he hid under the bed. “Who knew,” he says, looking out the car window at the bright night skyline, “zombies could crawl?”

Early December. The roads are still without ice, but the air is bit through with cold. My boyfriend Glen and I are driving to a dinner with his parents in Chicago, a city I loathe for its constant bleakness, the way you can turn a street corner and be jarred into another gray atmosphere. Glen once used the phrase “melting pot” to describe the city, the place he’s from—a reminder he’s seventeen years younger than me and still not clear that almost everywhere is a melting pot. Some places just wear the title better than others.

“Which is crazy, right?” Glen says. “Thinking zombies. With chainsaws.”

“That is crazy,” I say. “Aren’t zombies not conscious?” I try my best to make it sound rhetorical, to erase the top of the question mark. I can hear myself using lawyer-voice, sounding leave-me-alone bored, like I do at work.

“Exactly,” he says. “It’s crazy. Be dead or be alive—I mean, come on.”

This is what upsets you? I almost say. But I sense the awkward shine it would give the conversation. So I say nothing.

Here is what I’m not saying: Three hours ago, I learned that my brother has been committed, finally, to the psych wing of Mass General for swallowing the bleach our mother keeps hidden behind the washer. It is like the universe is saying, Deal with this. Look at this. Acknowledge this. Which is to say, I no longer care that Glen’s parents will learn I am not, in fact, twenty-six. Or that I am likely to pay for another dinner I cannot comfortably afford. This is to say my brother has now absolutely missed the part where he transitions to being self-sufficient. My mother’s words through the phone: Mark, he is never going to get there.

“I shouldn’t have lied,” I say. I rest a hand on Glen’s knee. “About my age.”

“You look thirty,” he says. And then, more sincerely, “Really.”

This is another problem: I’m in love with Glen, a love misunderstood by even many of my gay friends. Sometimes I think it hurts too much, to feel in my blood the interrogating thought of others when I’m around him. And then I imagine my life without him.

I slow for our exit, signal the turn. There is a chain of cars ahead of us, their lights blinking red. Glen starts again about a zombie that came after him with a syringe. He was running up these cement stairs, so many stairs, and the zombie was gaining on him. But it was a new release of the game. They let it out too soon, he says, with this glitch—those stairs didn’t end. He just kept running, but it didn’t matter how far, and then there

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