Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  A circle of paramedics and two police watched us. “Labas,” I said, which was the only word in Lithuanian that I knew. I imagined this was some kind of weird Greek tragedy and these men were the chorus. I was embarrassed for us. Embarrassed of Vera’s nightgown and madness and my own awkward delivery of her into the room. No one should see such things. It was like they had caught us shitting together.

  I held up one finger in what I hoped was a universal gesture that meant “wait.” I grabbed a pair of her jeans from the floor and held them open for her. She stepped into them, one leg at a time, as though she were a child. I had never dressed her before. I had missed all of that stuff. The diaper changes, the putting on of pajamas, the bath times, the cuddling. I had never been a father to her in that way, and it struck me now, as I pulled the jeans up over her legs, which were goosefleshed and shaking, that I had missed everything. I had missed the whole thing and never known it. I handed her a sweatshirt even though it was hot.

  “Can you help me?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. I knew the police and paramedics in their professionalism, their sudden official-ness, scared her. They were just watching me dress her. She was too flustered to be able to figure out how the sweatshirt worked. I held it open and pulled it over her head, holding open the neck hole so she could find it, pulling it down when it got stuck on her ears. She was able to find the armholes herself, but I fussed with the cuffs anyway, making sure her hands got free. There she stood, in jeans and a nightgown and a giant sweatshirt surrounded by police and paramedics in that dark, slant-roofed room, her eyes black, black as the eyes of a deer.

  I didn’t know what would be next. We would go with these men to where they took us. Eventually we would find someone who spoke English. There was nothing to do but what they told us to do. I took her hand and nodded at them that we were ready to go.

  —

  The emergency room they took us to was adjoined to a mental hospital, a combo I had never heard of before, and as emergency rooms go it was pretty tiny, more like a triage unit. There was no hustle and bustle, no other patients, just a waiting nurse, who looked as plump and peaceful as a chicken sitting at her desk when we came in. She wrote out the forms with a pen that had a big orange plastic flower on the end, as the paramedics filled her in on the situation in a stream of Lithuanian that flowed over both Vera and me. I signed everything she gave to me, even though I couldn’t read any of the forms.

  Then she led Vera and me into a little cubicle behind a curtain with a hospital bed where Vera perched. She had to get one of her arms free of the sweatshirt so they could take her blood pressure, but she didn’t want to take the sweatshirt off, so she just snaked her arm up through the neck hole. Everything was absurd. I noticed Vera had mascara under her eyes, and I wondered when she had been crying. Had she been crying when she held Daniel at knife point? Had I failed to register that? Or had she been crying before that? Or only later in the ambulance? I couldn’t remember her crying in the ambulance. The nurse told us something in Lithuanian, and we just stared at her. She tried Russian, and Vera nodded, sniffling like her nose was getting clogged up, snaking her arm back in her sweatshirt. The nurse left.

  “The doctor will be in here in a minute,” Vera said, sniffling again and sighing. I noticed that she wasn’t trying to explain her vision to the nurse. That plan seemed to have faded or receded in her mind.

  I nodded.

  “I hope they give me a lot of drugs,” Vera whispered.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I’m scared.”

  A lot of things were only now occurring to me. That at some point, I would be asked to leave and she would be alone here. That she would be with other mental patients who didn’t speak English. That I would be essentially abandoning her in this strange place. The building was large and clearly very old. I wondered who had built it. If only Darius were here to explain things to us. It felt like the kind of building that would have ghosts, if there were such things as ghosts. I had been more in the mind-set of a trip to a hospital where, since she was a minor, and I was her father, I would be allowed to follow her, to spend the night at her bedside. But mental illness wasn’t treated like physical illness for reasons that seemed newly unfathomable to me. I squeezed her knee because her hands were unreachable, tucked up inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt. I had lost Vera so many times. I had lost her when she was a baby, I had lost her when she was four, I had said goodbye to her at the end of every weekend we spent together, sending her back to her real life, to her mother and school and friends, and none of it had felt like this. I was panicked to let go of her.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. “Seriously, don’t.”

  “I can’t leave you here,” I said.

  “Well, you’re going to have to.”

  The doctor, when he came a few minutes later, spoke English and so I was able to relieve Vera of the burden of talking, and I explained her past mental history, the current episode, at least what I had seen of it. Luckily, the police had suggested I bring Vera’s medication with us when we were still at the apartment, so I was able to give the ER doctor the prescription bottles that included Vera’s doctor’s name and phone number. Vera sat through all this patiently, her eyes far away. The questions were unending, and then suddenly they weren’t.

  “Probably because of the use of the knife,” the doctor said, “she will be asked to stay for at least forty-eight hours, but this will be decided by the administrators tomorrow. Because she is a danger to herself and others, it is a policy. But they will decide tomorrow.”

  Vera and I both nodded. I looked at her to see if this was okay, and she shrugged. It was what I had been expecting, since pretty much the exact same thing had happened when she was hospitalized in the States, and I guess she had been expecting it, too.

  “We don’t have insurance here,” I said, “so how will we pay?”

  “I don’t know the exact details of that,” the doctor said, “but some of the nurses can help you when you come and visit her tomorrow and the administrators have had a chance to review her file.”

  It all seemed very humane. In America, the first thing you did at an emergency room was figure out how you would pay or give them an insurance card. The idea that such matters could be left until tomorrow was an unexpected, almost lavish kindness.

  “Visiting hours are ten to noon,” the doctor said. “You can wear your clothes in the ward, but if you want we have some pajamas you can wear for tonight. If you don’t wish to sleep in your clothes.”

  Vera nodded. She was still wearing her nightgown over her jeans and under her sweatshirt, but it was thin and had lace in the front. I could understand why she wouldn’t want to wear it.

  “I will have the nurse bring you some,” the doctor said.

  “Can I go and see her room?” I asked. “Can I at least see where she’ll be?”

  “I’m afraid no one is allowed in the ward except during visiting hours,” he said, and gave me a polite smile. He was tall and balding. “Because it is the junior ward, the adolescents—the rules are more strict. But a clean transition is better. We will take very good care of her.” He stood there, nodding and smiling.

  “It’s fine,” Vera whispered.

  But I didn’t feel like it was fine. I felt like I was abandoning her here.

  “The nurse will be right in with some pajamas and can show Vera to her room, but I’ll give you two a chance to say goodbye.”

  Once he was gone, I hugged Vera where she sat. She didn’t wrap her arms around me back, just let herself be hugged, her arms at her sides. They had given her a strong sedative and I could tell it was kicking in. Her face looked thick and frozen. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m pretending it isn’t happening.”

  We swayed back and forth, me standing, her sitting on the creaking hospital bed, not talking.

  “I love you,” I said. I had said that to her before. I had said it a mi
llion times. I said it as she was getting out of my car at her mother’s, as we said goodbye on the phone. I had said it a million times, but this time it seemed to be shredding my vocal cords.

  She didn’t say anything back. When the nurse came, she was holding a pair of gray pajamas that had been washed so many times they were almost white. Vera climbed off the bed and accepted the small bundle, and together the three of us left the little curtained room. The nurse said something in Russian and gestured me back the way I had come, as she steered Vera down the hall in the opposite direction. I just stood there, watching as the woman guided Vera by the shoulder. Before they rounded the corner, Vera turned back to me and mouthed, “Dragon. Go find the dragon.”

  Chapter 13

  “Revelations”

  Word doc

  Created by User on 7/18

  It is unclear to me yet whether Dragon is merely the name of the project, or if it is a metaphor (for that which is on fire, that which is molten and chaotic, yet housed within a scaly exterior, just as murder/genocide/etc. is, i.e., an irrational principle cloaked in the disguise of reasonable behavior), or if there is an actual literal dragon. Not sure about the line between literal and metaphorical in general. Could be a trick, way the government is duping us, possibly convincing all populace that reality has only one layer, whereas clearly it is multilayered as evidenced by metaphysical activities like falling in love, etc. And about dragons, I am unclear what kind of creature is indicated. The Hebrew word for dragon is tannin, which is also the word for serpent, but I need to look up which word is used in Genesis, because if Eve was tempted by the dragon, then that would be a very interesting thing to know.

  Pits are another interesting feature. The huge, unfillable pit left by the Great Synagogue. The pit full of bodies in Ponary. If there is a hole, something will rush in to take its place. A vacuum. This is how Tesla comes into things, maybe. But curious as to the relationship between pit in the ground and pit in a fruit. Connection? Coincidence? Even if they are not etymologically related, aren’t they still phonically linked? Possibly there is no such thing as coincidence?

  And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority. One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast. And they worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast and who can fight against it?” And the beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months.—Revelation 18:1–18

  Hitler ==> Modern Germany ==> European Union ==> Internet ==> Tesla ==> Daniel

  “Ways to Keep Papa from Noticing”

  Word doc

  Created by User on 7/15

  1. Remain calm and collected at all times

  2. Do not let him notice the way strangers have begun to respond to you

  3. Feed his ego by letting him feel close to you

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  I READ THROUGH these documents and more on Vera’s laptop as I sat on her bed, in her little slant-roofed room that was so similar to my own but which felt entirely different. It had taken me only three tries to guess the password to her computer log-in, and then her laptop was completely open to me. The password was “FangBoy76,” which was easy to guess because it was also her Pandora password that she had given me so she could play music on my stereo at home.

  Her room had a little chair by the door and her dresser was wider and lower than mine was. These two tiny differences seemed enormous, maybe because I kept assuming I was in my own room as I read and then getting startled that I was not. I read her e-mail first, skipping around in time, then finally deciding to go all the way back to the beginning of our trip and read linearly forward. Then, once I had a better idea of the narrative, I started to go through her Word documents, of which there were literally hundreds. Some of them went on for pages, some were only a few lines. Lots were from before our trip, but a shocking number of them were from just the last few days. Yesterday she had created twenty-three new Word documents.

  It was like watching an instant replay of a bad fall. There was an almost physical revulsion to reading bad logic, like looking at pictures of people badly wounded or deformed, and I realized, reading, that I had always been afraid my own thinking was like this. Writing anything was to stare this kind of madness in the face. All you could do was move through the links between one idea and the next, testing each one out, hoping they held. You were all alone with the words and the page, going further and further away from anything social, civil, conventional, or agreed-upon. At times, I came away from reading my thesis thinking it was like this. I would close the document, horrified, revolted. And that had been a well-formatted academic paper.

  Her ideas were something like this:

  The persecution of the Jews was not a historical accident. (How could it be? How weird was it to hate Jews? Why hate, they were like everyone else?) Instead, the Jews, in their worship of God, had created a positive polarity, which, by virtue of some physical law (enter Tesla), had engendered the dragon as a corresponding negative polarity. There were incomprehensible math equations trying to explain all this. Nazi Germany had harnessed the power of the dragon, but after Hitler’s fall, those dark powers had only been shattered, not slain. The ghosts of those slain in Ponary had tried to bind the dragon to their bodies and sink him in the pits, but had failed precisely because the Soviets had destroyed the Great Synagogue. Again there were references to Tesla, trying to argue that spiritual energy operated by similar principles to electric energy and that Tesla’s work had been repressed because it was too dangerous. She suggested that the Soviets had found a baby dragon somewhere in the region (there was some supposition in the text that the dragon had actually been Grandma Sylvia’s lost child, and that Agata was a fake planted later by the EU) and had built a secret laboratory in the ruins of the Great Synagogue where they could keep the dragon and study it. For some reason I could not understand, she had decided that in the global power vacuum created by the crumbling of the USSR, the EU had become a kind of dream team of power-hungry scientists and Freemasons, who were also secretly trying to suppress Tesla. They had taken over the care of the dragon, but eventually the dragon would grow too powerful for them to contain.

  The poor girl didn’t know a thing about alternating or direct currents and she kept trying to guess what the “War of the Currents” was about. Clearly she had been reading the book Daniel had given her, but her brain had been too exhausted from the mania to take much in. In the end, she decided that Daniel was acting as some kind of agent for the EU (because of the pirate shirts, or at least the pirate shirts figured prominently on a list of reasons Daniel might not be a “real” person) and that he had been planted in the history tour to discover how much she, Vera, “knew” so that the government could decide whether or not to kill her.

  “I wouldn’t mind if they killed me,” she wrote, “but it would make Fang so sad. For his sake, I must somehow untangle all of this.” It was a herculean task she had set for herself, impossible if it were real, but even sadder and more impossible because it was not. In addition to this, there was a lot of speculation about whether or not human beings were animals or if there was such a thing as a higher self, a soul. The more manic she got, the more able she was to believe in the soul, in God, in beauty. This struck me as profoundly tragic. I did not want madness to be her only way in to believing in those things. I did not want her choices to be between No Meaning, a desert landscape presided over by bland Dr. Carmichael and his vials of pills, and Too Much Meaning, a lightning storm of connections that amplified
and built upon one another until everything was connected to everything else and the government was hiding a dragon in a kindergarten.

  I had been so busy. I had been so busy with Susan and with history and even with Judith and the stupid cat, with blini and beers and glasses of wine and shots of vodka, with thinking I was such a great father and I was going to vanquish the absurd foe Dr. Carmichael, that I had failed to notice any of this.

  Then again, what kind of father snoops in his daughter’s laptop? What kind of asshole would I have been if that was how I treated our new intimacy? Hacking her password that was her boyfriend’s name and jersey number?

  I had let her drink. I had let her go off her medication. I had let her go out unsupervised with Judith. She and Judith had smoked pot! I had almost forgotten about that. Why hadn’t I asked her how she was doing? But maybe I had. We had been spending every day together. We had been talking. She had seemed fine. Maybe it was because she had always been so insightful that it had been possible to overlook her madness. Vera had always been able to see through people. Like at that birthday party when she was just a child: “If you wanted a birthday party so badly, maybe you should have thrown one for yourself.” I was so confident in her assessments of reality, in her ability to penetrate and see the truth, that it took a delusion as ridiculous as a conspiracy involving a dragon to make me actually believe, really and truly believe, that she was sick.

  It was a bitter, burned-tasting irony that clear-sightedness and insight, her greatest gifts, were the very things that had been taken from her.

  I set down the laptop next to me on her bed and rubbed my eyes. I had not slept at all. I had come straight from the mental hospital and begun reading at around one in the morning. Go find the dragon, she had said. And I had.

  Now it was bright out and about 4 a.m. So it would be 6 p.m. in California. Dinnertime.