Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  It isn’t about that. It is about the fact that even love is not enough.

  From Vilnius,

  V

  ON MONDAY, DARIUS STARTED IN the lecture hall. I had caught Vera and Judith smoking pot together that morning, and I wasn’t pleased. I barked at them incoherently, I was so mad. It wasn’t that I was scandalized by a teenager smoking pot, that was probably part of their mission directive from God, after all, but it seemed weird and inappropriate for Judith to be the one toking her up. Something a little incestuous about smoking pot with Grandma. Maybe it was all in my head. Mainly, I had no idea how marijuana would interact with Vera’s medications. Surely it couldn’t be good, though her doctors had never discussed it specifically. Vera had put on too much perfume in an effort to hide the pot-smoke smell on her clothes and now my sinuses were beginning to swell in an allergic reaction as we sat there, listening to Darius.

  “Today,” Darius told us, “we are going to visit two sacred places: the Great Synagogue of Vilna, which was the center for Jewish life in Vilnius, and the Cathedral of Vilnius, the heart of Catholic life in Vilnius. Two sacred places in one city, though the visitors of one are not the visitors of the other, so that for each group, there appears to be only one holy site. But of course, one of these places does not exist. And so we must visit it with our minds.” The room went dark and Darius flipped on the projector. For a moment it was just a blue screen and then a black-and-white lithograph of the interior of a large and beautiful building came up.

  “This is the Great Synagogue,” Darius said. “Which stood at one end of Žydų gatvė, or Jewish Street.”

  “That’s our street,” Vera hissed.

  “I know,” I whispered back, and Vera reached over and clutched my hand as though we were about to go on a roller coaster.

  “It was first built in 1573,” Darius told us, clicking through various images of the building, all of them interiors, some drawings, some blurry black-and-white photographs. “But the interior was remodeled in the eighteenth century. It was built upon the site of a Jewish house of prayer that had been there since the 1440s. The Great Synagogue was built below ground, because no synagogue was allowed to be taller than a church, so from the exterior, the building was unremarkable, but inside it was five stories high, so magnificent that Napoleon himself is said to have stood on the threshold, wonderstruck, frozen with awe. It could hold five thousand worshippers. The interior was done in the Italian Renaissance style.” He clicked through images of the massive columns and ornate decorations, though all the pictures were so dark and blurry that I began to feel like I was going blind.

  “Well!” Darius said. “Are you ready to visit the Great Synagogue of Vilna?”

  Everyone was excited and there was murmuring as we stood to go. Darius led us out onto the street where it was lightly raining, a relief from the heat. Umbrellas were popped open and Vera and I wound up borrowing one from the Owl People who had brought two and were generous enough to share. Our group was small that day. Judith hadn’t come because she was exhausted, she said, and didn’t want to be dragged through the rain, though probably it was just because she was high. Who wouldn’t want to stay inside, cozy, smoking pot and eating apples and farmer’s cheese? But I didn’t see Susan or Daniel in the group, either.

  Darius himself marched through the streets without an umbrella, unstoppable, like an automaton who did not feel the rain. Vera and I followed, not talking to each other. It wasn’t that I was still mad about her smoking pot, I was over it, but she had something else going on, some kind of internal drama that I wasn’t invited to participate in. She carried herself like a dishonored queen. Even the way she held her head at an angle as she considered the buildings around us seemed watched and pretentious, and I thought about my mother saying there was something toxic about being very beautiful. It must be terrible to be a woman. I honestly thought that, looking at my daughter in the rain. I thought her life would have been better or easier if she had been born just a little bit uglier. When had she gotten so beautiful anyway? The weight she’d gained this past year seemed to have melted off again. There was no more bald spot at the back of her head, or else she had figured out a way to hide it by wearing her hair in a bun.

  Darius stopped us in front of a playground. There was a building on the back half of the lot that appeared to be some kind of kindergarten: There were children’s paintings hung up in the windows.

  “Here we are,” Darius said. “This is the Great Synagogue.”

  We all looked at him, confused.

  “It was partially destroyed by the Germans during World War II, but the entire complex was torn down by the Soviet authorities. They replaced it with this park and kindergarten so that no memorial could be erected.”

  We all stood there, looking at the rain-soaked park with its swing set and mud puddles. Perhaps it would not have seemed so sad if there had been children playing, but there were none. It was impossible to imagine the Great Synagogue, though we had just spent forty minutes watching a slide show of images of it. It was impossible to imagine anything other than the playground in front of us, its puddles glimmering as the rain continued to fall. Vera whimpered, and when I looked over, I saw she was crying.

  “Whoa,” I said softly and put an arm around her. I had experienced this temple-turned-kindergarten revelation as surreal and sad, but it was clearly hitting Vera much harder.

  “Three pieces survived the destruction,” Darius went on. “And we will visit them at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum tomorrow.” He described the pieces, but I was distracted. Vera could not seem to stop crying. It was no longer just tears silently slipping down cheeks, but audible, hiccupy sobbing.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, which caused her to duck her face into her hands. She started hyperventilating.

  “When they destroyed the Great Synagogue,” Darius was saying, “there was a rabbi who tried to save it, refusing to leave, so they took him out front and put a garden hose down his throat and turned it on until his stomach exploded inside him and he died.”

  Vera was now crouched on the ground, her face completely hidden in her hands. I squatted beside her.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I was trying to understand if we should attempt to continue with the group or just depart and give up on the rest of the tour.

  Vera was struggling to breathe. “There’s so much violence,” she said, gasping. “It was a house of God. How could you look at it and tear it down?” She slapped her hands down in a puddle then cupped the rainwater in her hands and splashed her face so that her cheeks were wet and streaked with mud.

  Vera poured more of the muddy rainwater over her head, wetting her hair. It came to me very quietly, the knowledge: that it was happening, that Vera was having another episode. It was like a whisper inside my mind, but I knew. I had never even truly thought it could happen while she was on so many meds. But now I knew it, and I was filled with the cold calm of emergency. Continuing on with the tour was no longer an option.

  “Are you okay?” the Owl Woman mouthed to me.

  I nodded. “We’re fine, just go on ahead,” I said, and motioned for her to rejoin the group that was slowly making its way down the street.

  “Vera,” I said. “We’re going to go back to the house, all right?”

  She nodded, biting her lip, holding her wet hands out in front of her, but she sat down on the curb. I crouched in front of her.

  “God must be so disappointed in us,” Vera said, wiping her eyes. I didn’t know what to say to this. I didn’t entirely believe in God, not in that way. I didn’t believe in a being who had personal feelings like disappointment. On the other hand, I could empathize completely with the devastating emotional realization that this is what human beings were: the kinds of animals that built Great Synagogues, and the kinds of animals that shoved garden hoses down the throats of holy men and then watched as they died. I
rubbed her shoulder in a way I hoped was soothing.

  Maybe I was wrong about this being part of an episode. Maybe her reaction to the destruction of the Great Synagogue was because she was a Jew and I was not, or maybe because she was stoned, or else because she was seventeen and understanding the full cruelty of human history for the first time. But God, she had never looked more like Katya than at that moment.

  “Your mother would get upset like this when she was your age,” I told her. “Only for her it was about American slavery.”

  Vera looked up. “She did?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember she had a breakdown in the middle of American history class. They were watching Roots and she had to leave the room and go throw up in the bathroom. She said it was like it was happening to her, watching it. She said it was okay to experience the suffering of the slaves, because at least that was pure, but what made her throw up was feeling inside herself the cruelty of the masters.”

  “That poor rabbi,” Vera said, starting to cry again.

  I nodded, though I did not want to think about the rabbi, had built up ramparts in my mind against that kind of information long ago.

  “I’m really hungry,” Vera said.

  I took her wet, gritty hands in mine. “Then let’s get something to eat.”

  —

  We wound up in the Belgian restaurant that was the ground floor of our building, again. This time we both ordered the borscht. “I’m sorry I got so freaked out,” Vera said, tearing into one of the rolls in the basket and dipping it in the rich pink broth of her soup. She had gone into the bathroom of the restaurant when we first got there to clean the mud from her face, and her hair was still wet and slicked back from her forehead. It made her look vulnerable. “But then why should I be sorry—who can hear something like that and just stand there? You know, it’s sort of disgusting, all of us here on vacation.”

  I nodded. It was swelteringly hot out, but it continued to rain. Our table was right by the window and I watched the drops coming down and hitting the steaming cobblestone street. “But it’s also about memory,” I said, thinking of Darius, of his peculiar unbending rigidity. “Remembering. There’s nothing gross about that—trying to hold on to the memories of your people. That’s important.”

  “I have to tell you something,” Vera said.

  My fatherly ears pricked. No one announced they were going to tell you something before telling you unless it was something big. Or something bad.

  “One time,” Vera said, setting down her roll, leaning back in her chair, “Fang and I were lying in this field, and it was fall, before the episode, but it was really sunny, a really pretty, pretty day, and the grass was green, and we were lying there, just watching the clouds, and I was thinking that we would never be that young again. That every moment that passed, we were moving closer to death, and I felt like I could feel myself rotting. I kept thinking I could smell us rotting, just underneath the regular smells of sweat and skin and perfume or whatever. I remember thinking that it was my job to keep Fang from ever noticing that we were dying. I started doing this thing, of kissing him between his eyes, and in my mind, I thought I was keeping his third eye shut so that he wouldn’t see, so that he wouldn’t know that we were dying. And maybe you think that’s crazy, but at the same time it was true, you know, every day you live, you get closer to dying. That’s a fact.”

  She eyed me uneasily, as though she were waiting to see if I would agree. “Death and taxes,” I said. “They’re inevitable.”

  She nodded, seemingly reassured. “And then,” she went on, “when I had the episode. Part of it was that I thought, well, that there is so much more to life than what’s cool or uncool in a high school in Rancho Cucamonga. I was watching these cheerleaders getting drunk and I started to see the muscles under their skin, and their skulls, and all their veins, and I realized they were rotting too. They were dying and they had no idea. They were like corpses in party dresses, worried only about who had the cutest shoes. It was revolting. Revolting the same way it is revolting to watch everyone just listen, nodding, as Darius talks about murder, about that poor rabbi, about all of it—the mass graves, the torn-down buildings, people’s whole lives erased. How can the world go on? How can you just go out to lunch like we’re doing right now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, wanting so badly to steer her, to force her to think about it differently, less melodramatically, even though on some level I thought she was right. “What else is there to do, though?”

  “Papa,” she said. “Do I sound insane to you? Are the thoughts I’m thinking really insane? That’s what I want to know.”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to contribute to some kind of delusion that she wasn’t mentally ill. That was one of the recurrent themes in all the narratives of mental illness I had read in books, on message boards, in forums: The desire to believe that they weren’t actually crazy was one of the chief dangers for the mentally ill. The suspicion would build in them until eventually they stopped taking their medication and then they would have another episode and their lives would unravel further. But at the same time I worried I would lose Vera—that this tenuous intimacy would slip through my fingers. And I didn’t think what she was saying was truly crazy. Kat and I had said far, far crazier things to each other when we were her age. “No,” I said. “You don’t sound crazy to me.”

  She nodded, leaned toward me over the table. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Now I need to tell you the big thing. And you are going to be really, really mad at me, okay?”

  I nodded, unsure what she was going to say and praying, just praying that she was not going to tell me she was pregnant. I don’t know why, it was the only thing that occurred to me: that she was pregnant with Fang’s baby and she was going to try to convince me she would be sane enough to mother it.

  “The night of the episode,” she said, “that night at the party? Fang and I had taken acid. I was on acid that night.”

  This new fact was like something injected into my bloodstream and for a time I was unable to say or even think anything as it traveled through me causing a series of chemical reactions, complex recalculations that I couldn’t compute fast enough. My mental state was really more like a strobe light than an opinion.

  “I didn’t want to tell the cops I was on drugs!” Vera rushed on. “It was one of those decisions you make at the time that then you can’t take back, and also, well—it was complicated. Papa, are you listening?”

  “I’m listening,” I said. I had never done acid myself—it had been one of those drugs that scared me a little. But it was starting to click together—Vera’s story, her own sureness that she wasn’t mentally ill, her scorn for the doctors and for all of us, her worry that the self was not a solid thing but instead a swarm of chemicals, a collection of the little men inside of her. Dear God. If she wasn’t mentally ill, had we been drugging her, poisoning her, all this time for no reason? It was terrible to think about, but also building in me was a wild, irrepressible hope that it was true—that she was not mentally ill, that it had just been a big mistake.

  “So what you are saying is that you don’t think you have bipolar?” I asked.

  “Well,” Vera said, “I don’t really know. I mean, Fang was on acid and he didn’t take off all his clothes and start telling the cheerleaders they were sinners. So I really did think I had an episode, and I just didn’t want to tell the drugs part, but then over the past few months me and Fang have been thinking, well, what if I’m sane? What if it was just the acid?”

  I took a sip of my beer. “I’m not going to lie,” I said. “I’m so relieved that I don’t even know what to say. I should be furious with you, but right now I am just—fuck it—I’m overjoyed.”

  “You are?”

  “Jesus,” I said, “I’m sorry—I’m reeling. There’s a lot to consider. We need to tell your mother. We need to get you off the medication. We’ve gotta call your shrink.”

  Vera made a face
. “Fuck,” she said.

  “What? I know it’s scary, but we’ve got to.” My mind was already a scrolling marquee of to-do lists. I was thinking that I would turn my phone on and to hell with the charges and we would start calling people that very afternoon. Everything could be handled. Everything could be sorted.

  “No,” she said. “There’s something else. That I have to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I went off my meds three weeks ago.”

  There was a heavy pause. She was holding her linen napkin in her lap, twisting it in her hands until it was a thick little rope. Of course she had. I thought of the way her skin had cleared up. Of the way she had seemed to come out of herself and get excited about the trip to Vilnius. I had thought it was Grandma Sylvia luring her, tempting her back into the land of the living, but of course it wasn’t.

  “Vera,” I said. “That’s really serious. You need to taper off medications like that, and you really shouldn’t have done that without getting your shrink involved.”

  “We did taper off!” she said. “We did—Fang looked it up online, and we figured out how to do it, and we just did it over a couple of weeks.”

  “Christ,” I said, feeling grim but also giddy. She had gotten off her medication and she was fine. She was going to be fine.

  “It was making my hair fall out,” she said apologetically. “I thought maybe if I could just see—because then I would know for sure whether I was or whether I wasn’t before I told people.”

  I almost laughed—it was so much a teenager’s line of reasoning. It was so stupid: thinking about being in trouble for taking acid when her mental health was on the line. Worrying about her hair falling out. And Fang—Fang I wanted to just strangle. Giving her acid. Playacting at doctor.