Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  I was jealous of her ability to believe in Vera, and knew it was a failure in myself that I believed this doctor I had just met over my own daughter. But I couldn’t help listening to the doctor—it was some kind of reflexive respect for authority, as involuntary as an eye twitch. However, he could sense this and it caused him to begin addressing all his statements to me, ignoring Katya and infuriating her even further.

  “This is a phase,” she kept insisting. “I know it is. In my heart. As a mother. It’s a phase.”

  But what kind of phase was it to strip naked and try to baptize cheerleaders with liquor? Who cuts up their arm with a kitchen knife at a party for kicks?

  And yet Katya was just trying to protect her daughter. Even Dr. Sneed seemed to understand this and he spent more than an hour with us in that tiny office, gently arguing with Kat until finally Vera asked if she really had to sit through this, got up, and walked down the hall.

  —

  After her psychotic break, Vera was only held at the mental hospital for three days. She stabilized remarkably quickly, though I didn’t know enough to appreciate that at the time, had zero context for understanding what was happening. But in retrospect, we were lucky. She responded well to the drugs. For a little while, it seemed like maybe we were out of the woods. Vera seemed pissed off, distant, but not insane. We would get through this. She would take the pills. Maybe eventually she could taper down. Everything would go back to normal.

  After her release from the psych ward, we said goodbye to Dr. Sneed, and Vera was appointed a psychologist by the state named Dr. Carmichael, who spoke in a high, breathy voice like Winnie-the-Pooh. It was difficult to keep a straight face when he was talking. It didn’t seem possible that it was his real voice. It must have been caused by some kind of medical condition, so it shouldn’t have been funny, but it was. After our first session, Vera, Katya, and I all stood in the parking lot for a while, awkwardly making small talk, before Katya suggested we get frozen yogurt. It was right next door to Dr. Carmichael’s office in the same strip mall, one of those places where you are allowed to serve yourself and the smallest size available is basically a cardboard bucket. The three of us ate sitting at the counter, staring out the window at the parking lot. “Can we please,” Katya said finally, “just acknowledge the voice? What was going on?”

  “What do you mean?” Vera asked. The medication she was on made her slow and literal, or else it was an affectation she was trying out, a way of punishing us by refusing to be her usual loquacious self. She blinked slowly, like a cow.

  Katya did an impression of Dr. Carmichael’s high, ridiculous voice, and Vera’s face lit up, almost in slow motion. She burst out laughing. “I guess it was kind of weird,” she said.

  Katya went on and on as Dr. Carmichael, “And how does that make you feel, Vera? Can you think of a better way you could have solved that problem? Let’s revisit that a little later. Was that uncomfortable for you?”

  I watched, amazed, as Katya goaded her until Vera was in hysterics, the two of them happily laughing, waving their plastic spoons like batons as they conducted, sentence by sentence, the crushing idiocy of the kindly and ridiculous Dr. Carmichael. How did Katya know how to do it? How could she perform such alchemy, turning tragedy into comedy, like straw into gold? Even as I was jealous, I was grateful for the reprieve, however momentary. Grateful to be included, eating yogurt and watching the two of them laugh.

  Ever after that, we all used the Dr. Carmichael voice, especially when we were talking about something boring or something we didn’t want to do: asking Vera if she had done her homework, explaining we had to take the car in for an oil change. Probably it was cruel of us, but it was a necessary cruelty, a way of surviving a situation that was actually terrifying.

  The absurdity and the banality of the mental health system were almost unreal: the paperwork, the weird scripts of questions used in therapy sessions, not to mention the problems with insurance and billing. And in the midst of it, Vera, beautiful even when zitty and dull-eyed, wearing cutoffs and stained, revolting, sweaty Ugg boots, telling truths that horrified everybody.

  About the medical establishment: “You want to police my thoughts, and if I have thoughts you don’t like then you say I am mentally ill and you drug me against my will. This is criminal. Show me a brain scan, show me a blood test that proves any of this!”

  About Katya: “Mama, you are enjoying this too much, you should try to hide it better. You are not in a movie. This is real life. Nobody cares how you feel. Pull it together.”

  About me: “Papa, you are so awkward at comforting me it makes me tired just looking at you.”

  When she wasn’t saying these cutting things, she was generally morose and silent. She slept twelve and thirteen hours a night. She was in a support group for people living with mental illness that she absolutely hated going to. There was a schizophrenic there who did nothing but describe various salads he had eaten. It bothered her, the salads, and she complained about them. “How is that supposed to help me?” she would ask.

  None of us knew. None of us knew the answers to any of the questions she was asking. We just told her to keep going to the support group anyway and that “things would get better.” But she knew we were lying to her.

  —

  It wasn’t just the bipolar diagnosis. Her psychotic episode had been in October, and by November she was back in school but being bullied. Some shitty kid had taken video of her episode with his phone and posted it on the Internet. I was clueless about it until Vera’s boyfriend, Fang, showed it to me.

  Fang, having evidently procured my schedule from Vera, simply appeared one Friday at Orange Coast College where I taught English. He found me sitting in the courtyard, avoiding grading papers by means of drinking bad coffee. He sat down at the picnic table with me, though when he did, he eschewed sitting opposite and instead sat down close beside me, making the whole picnic table groan and creak. I thought for a moment that we were going to tip over.

  Fang was a confusing and intriguing mixture of things: Mormon, but born on the island of Tonga in Polynesia, huge and hulking, a defensive tackle for Rancho Cucamonga High’s Cougars, and yet strangely dreamy and easily bossed around. Vera was constantly making him do small errands and chores for her. In Rancho Cucamonga, there was a surprisingly large Polynesian population, and Tongans were notorious defensive linemen. “Tongan tough, Tongan lazy,” the football coaches liked to say, and Vera hated it. “Racist blowhards,” she called them, all the while stroking Fang’s hair, as if he were an oversize pet, a trained bear or tame lion lounging in her lap on the couch.

  But there was no denying the Tongans were a wild bunch. Once Vera went to a barbecue at which a live pig was slaughtered and then roasted. She reported that the boys not only killed the pig with spears but kicked it, punched it, literally fought the pig to death, all in the parking lot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Such things went on in Rancho Cucamonga, though I never would have guessed. From the outside, the town was culture-less, bland, a collection of middle-class families with a propensity for big trucks and eyeliner. Katya worked at the nearby elementary school in special ed—that was the reason they had moved there, so that she could be the director of a new program in the district. Their condo was only about an hour inland, depending on the traffic, from my apartment in Irvine.

  For her part, Katya objected not to Fang himself but to his Mormon-ness. “So you have to date a Christian, I get it, it’s Rancho Cucamonga, but did you have to pick a Mormon boy?” she would ask. It wasn’t the special underwear, or the idea of getting your own planet, or even the Christianity that really upset her, though she did openly mock all of these things. It was that the Mormons had set about baptizing the dead in an effort to save them retroactively, and in particular, they had been baptizing the victims of the Holocaust. They had even baptized Anne Frank. It was offensive beyond all belief, though the Mormons seemed to have done it in genuine good faith.

&n
bsp; Although initially against Fang, Katya finally caved because she liked the boy himself so much, but she still needled him about it, asking him how his grandma Anne was, and saying, “You better distance yourself from those crazies, Fang. You better not go on a mission!” But Fang showed no inclination to go on a mission. He didn’t seem overly mindful of the prohibitions in the Words of Wisdom, either, and a Starbucks was almost perpetually in his hand. If he wore special underwear, Vera said nothing about it. And though he went to church semi-regularly, this discrepancy between word and deed appeared not to bother him at all. As to whether he actually believed in God or in the Mormon faith, I had no idea. He was fairly unreadable in that regard.

  “Look,” Fang said, and pulled out his phone. He opened an app, was loading a video. “There’s this kid and he videoed Vera that night. He keeps posting it. Everybody at school has seen it. I didn’t know who to come to. You better look at it,” he said.

  Then he pressed Play with his giant thumb, and together we watched the tiny, grainy, badly lit video in between his cupped palms. It was Vera. She was naked and there was something wrong-looking about her eyes—they were too dark. Her pupils were huge. She was in front of a laughing crowd, catcalling her, as she told them she was God’s daughter. No knife could cut her. “I am the immortal light,” she said, before reaching up with a long serrated knife and slashing at her extended arm. Laughter, and then, as the blood spurted from her, leaping like little red frogs at the drunk kids watching her, the laughter turned to shouts and yelling, and the kid who was videoing ran out of the house to the dark front yard where you could hear him panting and laughing uneasily, saying, “Jesus Christ, let’s leave before the cops get here.”

  We sat in silence together when the video stopped playing. It was so bright out. I could hear young girls laughing a table away, silly, hysterical, the way only teenagers can be.

  “I could beat him up, but I thought I should come to you first,” Fang said finally, his eyes worried above the planes of his cheeks.

  “That’s good you did,” I said, though I wondered why he had come to me and not Katya, why he had driven the hour west to seek me out. Perhaps because Katya was still insisting that Vera wasn’t mentally ill, that this was all the result of some obscure vitamin deficiency. Or maybe it was an intuitive delicacy that made him prefer not to show such a disturbing video to Vera’s mother. Maybe he understood that Katya should be kept from seeing such things at all costs. “Don’t beat him up,” I said. “I’ll go to the school and have him expelled or something.”

  Fang nodded, as though this was what he had been hoping for.

  “All right,” he said, standing suddenly, his business clearly concluded. “You’re a good man, Mr. Lucas,” he said, before lumbering away.

  But I wasn’t able to get the boy, Johnson, expelled, only suspended for three days, which was fine, except that the video kept being posted and reposted under a variety of names. Vera appeared not to mind the fact that she was openly taunted at school and often came home with spitballs in her hair that she was too out of it to remove. “Why are you so surprised by the potential for cruelty in teenagers?” she said in a sit-down with me and Katya one night. We were all eating grilled chicken breasts and tomato-and-cucumber salad that Katya’s boyfriend, Misha, had prepared so slowly and carefully that I had gotten panicky watching him do it. Did he not know how to slice a tomato? Why was he looking at the tomato for so long, turning it this way and that before making a cut?

  I did not understand Misha, who was also Russian and exceedingly good-natured and possibly very Zen or else just mentally slow. They had been together three or four years now, but as far as I knew there was no talk of getting married. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Kat wound up with another Russian émigré. Her Russianness could not be eradicated no matter how long she spent here. She was the only person our age I knew who brewed coffee in a percolator. But then, it wasn’t really about Russia, it was about Russianness. It was about ways of making tea, raising children, the importance of piano lessons, the incompleteness of a home without nice rugs. I wondered if Misha minded the way she kept the original plastic on the seats of the dining-room chairs. It made a small hissing noise whenever you sat down. But maybe his mother had done the same, maybe he found it comforting, maybe together they both recoiled at the sight of naked upholstery in other people’s homes.

  “Did you not read Lord of the Flies?” Vera said. “This is just how humans are. This is it, guys, so just get over it.”

  But we couldn’t get over it. After almost a month of this, Fang and his cousins cornered the boy who was with his two doofus friends and beat the living shit out of them. Katya was appalled, but I was glad. I would have loved to punch the kid myself. After that, people mostly stopped making fun of Vera openly, but perhaps they had simply moved on to someone else.

  Even if Rancho Cucamonga High was comfortable forgetting, I knew I wouldn’t be able to. I would forever remember that shaky, grainy video clip, my naked daughter, her large, mannish hands making her arms look too thin as she held out her wrist, “I am the immortal light.” She was God’s daughter, she had insisted. I couldn’t help but feel it was my absence in her childhood that she was trying to fill, that really this was all my fault, that God had rushed in where I was supposed to be standing.

  And as the months passed, that video was the only proof I had that Vera actually was mentally ill. Otherwise, I sometimes felt the doctors were simply trying to medicate the Russianness out of her. Sometimes I wanted to reassure them: “No, no, a perverse interest in nothingness is actually perfectly normal.”

  That winter, Vera turned seventeen at the most depressing birthday party ever thrown for a seventeen-year-old girl. Katya made her wear a purple tissue-paper crown, and Misha had unexpectedly baked: yellow cake from a mix, chocolate frosting from a can, but he had iced it too soon and the layers were melty and slouching. Vera ate two slices. The medication made her crave sweets like crazy. She had gotten into the habit of eating Fruity Pebbles soaked in half-and-half in the middle of the night. I knew because I found her doing it in my apartment one night on one of her rarer and rarer weekend stays. Katya griped about Vera’s new Reddi-wip habit. The girl would just stand at the open fridge, shooting whipped cream into her mouth at intervals. It wasn’t that we worried Vera was getting fat. The weight she had gained since starting the medication hadn’t quite pushed her into chubby. It wasn’t even that we were worried about her health. It was that we could all tell that it wasn’t her. That she hadn’t always been like this. That it was the drugs doing this to her.

  After cake and presents (Katya had bought her the newest iPhone, in which Vera was weirdly disinterested—she didn’t even open the box), we watched a movie together on the big corduroy sectional couch. Vera had picked the movie, Dangerous Liaisons with John Malkovich and Glenn Close, because it was Fang’s favorite film of all time and she had never seen it. I had never seen it either. And after watching it, I was even more puzzled as to who Fang might possibly be. And who was my daughter that she loved him? They held hands at the end, and in the final scene, where Glenn Close wipes at her face so savagely and all the makeup comes away to reveal the pink, almost burned-looking skin underneath, Vera gasped. This movie, about rich, bored, rococo French aristocrats, spoke to her and Fang deeply. Perhaps that was what Southern California had become: a world of artifice, as constricting as a corset. A layer of makeup over their burned skin.

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know my daughter well enough to ask these things. Only to wonder as I drove the long freeways back to my empty apartment, the radio tuned to turned-down static, the window cracked, letting in the buffeting wind and the slithering nothingness of pavement flashing by.

  —

  Maybe I should never have taken Vera to Vilnius. It was an absurd idea, after all, whisking her off to a strange Eastern European vacation in the midst of a mental health crisis, though by that spring she was entirely stable. What
worried me most was that she no longer seemed to be trying to find a way out of the maze of her depression. She had simply lain down and gone to sleep inside one of anxiety’s winding tentacle arms. I expected resistance to my Vilnius plan from Katya, from Dr. Carmichael, but everyone agreed, a little too quickly, that it might be just the thing.

  I had never been there. It hadn’t even exactly occurred to me to go, not that I had ever had the opportunity to travel, really. And yet Vilnius in particular, and Lithuania in general, took up a sizable amount of mental real estate in my imagination. It was an almost mythic place to me, a kind of secret garden locked away in the heart of the world, the city they called the Jerusalem of Lithuania, the seat of a massive prewar Jewish cultural flowering.

  The idea of the trip came to me in the form of a leaflet placed in my faculty mailbox. “Experience History Firsthand” it suggested in curly white script over an image of a yellow baroque cathedral. It was the kind of thing I would normally have thrown away. These days no one seemed to have even heard of Vilnius, and I liked it that way. It made me irritated to think that this leaflet had been slipped into everyone’s faculty mailbox, that just anybody who wanted to could get the idea to go there, buy a plane ticket, and “experience history firsthand.” As though that were a thing it was even possible to do.

  My grandmother had been born in Vilnius, though her family was Polish. If other kids were raised on Wheaties, I was raised on stories of Grandma Sylvia. Grandma Sylvia had been sent to the Stutthof concentration camp, not because she was Jewish—we were Catholic, though by the time I was born nobody went to mass anymore—but because her father was a journalist who had openly criticized the Reich. Stutthof itself was mostly a camp for imprisonment of the Polish intelligentsia, though by 1943 it had been included in the Final Solution and a gas chamber and crematorium were added. But Grandma Sylvia managed to escape, and in an attempt to flee Germany for her native Lithuania, wound up in Poland and lived for a time with a group of rebels loosely affiliated with the Home Army in the forests outside of Warsaw. Ultimately, she never did return to Vilnius but immigrated to America after the war, where she met and married my grandfather. Together they had a family: my mother, Rose, and her brother, Toby, who died in Vietnam.