Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  I looked at her. “What you did,” I said, “was reckless and stupid and worrisome.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Let me finish,” I said, leaning over my untouched bowl of borscht. “It is most worrisome because it indicates a complete lack of faith in the adult world. You found yourself in a scary fucking situation and the only person you took into your confidence was Fang.”

  She nodded.

  “And that just breaks my heart,” I said. Really, it did more than break my heart. But that hackneyed phrase was all I had to describe the disorienting way it shifted my mental landscape, the way it splintered all the assumptions I had made, had let my reality rest upon. It recast the entire past year from her point of view. I had been so unable to overcome my own awkwardness, concerned with whether or not she liked me, injured by my own inability to be her father, but I was not the one who was injured. I was not the one who paid the price. I had let her pay the price in full.

  “Papa,” she said, “I don’t have a way of describing exactly what it is like being on that many drugs, but I was trapped in a fog bank. I was literally tranquilized out of even being able to talk or make decisions. So please don’t take it personally. I was so passive, I don’t think I could have even formulated a plan to get off of them myself. But Fang was crazy worried about me. He could see that I was just gone. The lights were out, you know?”

  I nodded. I had known too. I had been worried about her. I had seen that the lights were out, that she was gone, and I had done nothing. I had left my problems to be solved by a teenage football player.

  “Most days, by three in the afternoon,” she went on, “I literally could not keep my eyes open. And that was always sixth period, which was Algebra II, and I would put my head down and go to sleep. And the teacher would yell at me, but I can’t even describe—I just didn’t care. I could barely understand what he was saying to me. Like, I literally couldn’t understand the words. One day we got into this fight, and he asked me if I was on drugs. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m on a lot of drugs.’ And he says, ‘What drugs?,’ and so I start listing all my medications, and he got so angry that he threw his dry erase marker on the ground, and said, ‘I meant real drugs!’ And I was so confused, really, Papa, I didn’t know what he meant, and so I said, ‘I’m pretty sure they’re real.’ Which made the class bust up laughing and made him even madder, but honestly I wasn’t trying to be funny. Anyway, after that, he just let me sleep and failed me, and all the other students felt so bad for me, they would put their sweatshirts on me to keep me warm while I slept, so I would wake up and there would be a pile of sweatshirts on top of me.”

  The waitress came over to see if everything was okay. Neither of us had eaten our soup but we had her take our bowls away. I wanted to murder people. I wanted to murder her math teacher and her shrink and her social worker. I wanted to murder the cops who had arrested her for not noticing or not even considering that she might just be fucking high.

  “So did they not test you for drugs?” I asked. “When you were arrested?”

  “I have very little memory of that part of the night. I know I took a pee test. I’ve always kind of wondered about it, but Fang’s cousin said that they don’t test for acid with a pee test. I have no idea.”

  “I want to kill your math teacher,” I said.

  Vera laughed. “It’s not his fault,” she said. “Although how he didn’t get the memo that I was diagnosed I really don’t know. Public school.”

  “It must have been so weird for you,” I said, finally starting to catch up with her, to what her version of reality must have been like. “Having all of us so convinced you were insane.”

  “I was convinced I was insane!” she said, laughing again. There was a lightness to her now, an almost physical relief to having her secret out that showed in her face and in her eyes. “I kept having thoughts, like, not hallucinations, but sudden thoughts that I thought were part of it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I thought the glistening in Mom’s eyes were demons telling her that I was crazy when I wasn’t. That she wouldn’t believe me because there were these things, these beings, inside her eyes occluding her vision.”

  “Occluding,” I echoed, surprised and pleased that she knew the word.

  “I used it right,” Vera said defensively.

  “No, you did. You absolutely did.”

  “And I thought I was getting the strength to keep going from touching Fang’s skin. It was a blue light, coming off his skin. I thought he was loaning me his life force, but I felt really guilty about it because I knew it would mean he died sooner. I actually think about that a lot.”

  “Fang dying?” The demons in Kat’s eyes and the blue light coming off Fang’s skin concerned me, but I wondered if they could have been acid flashbacks or something.

  Vera nodded. “Do you think that’s crazy?” she asked.

  I sighed. “People think a lot of things,” I said. “People think all sorts of weird things and that’s not what makes them crazy. Crazy is…” I trailed off. But I didn’t know what crazy was, where the line was. I could remember thinking bizarre and wondrous things when I was a teenager, long winter afternoons at Exeter, thinking that birds were music made into animals, thinking that Katya’s body was a bell and God was the tongue inside making her ring with beauty, thinking Grandma Sylvia was watching me, disappointed, as I ate Oreo after Oreo alone in my dorm room. But that was different than seeing blue light on Fang’s skin.

  Yet who was anyone to police someone else’s thoughts and decide which were sane and which insane? Who were doctors to inspect my daughter’s brain, determine that her ideas were delusions, her mind unfit? That was the thing about bipolar—there was no blood test, no brain scan, nothing that went into the diagnosis except one person deciding another person was insane.

  “I’m just so angry,” I said finally. “I’m so angry that we left you alone with all of this. I’m so angry that even when we thought you were ill, when you needed our help most, all we did was try to alter you, medicate you, control you. I mean—I never even asked you any questions! I never even asked what it was like inside your head!”

  Vera laughed. She wiped a tear away with the back of her hand. “It was weird inside my head!” she said.

  “I’ll bet it was!”

  Chapter 6

  Date: 7/14/2014 9:16 PM

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: What’s done is done

  Dear Fang,

  I don’t forgive you. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what to believe, I don’t know how to behave, but the truth is that I need you so much that I simply don’t care. Fuck Stephanie Garrison for all I care, fuck her silly, just please, please don’t leave me alone in this world. I need you. I need you so desperately.

  I told my father. I told him about the acid, but also about getting off my medication. HE BELIEVES ME. Fang, he believes me! I don’t know why I didn’t understand before, but now it seems so clear. My father was the only person who would ever have believed me because he is the only one of them that is really and genuinely simple. I don’t mean he is stupid, I mean he is impractical. He is lacking in cynicism. He thinks he is world-weary, but he is not, he is more like a child than a man. My father believed me, Fang, because I was telling the truth. That is how simple it is with him. And it is simple with him because he is simple. Why did I not understand this? I always thought: Oh, he is so simple, what an idiot! But there are also advantages to simplicity, and one of them is purity. He is like clean water. He is like a piece of quartz. TELL ME I AM CLEVER! STROKE MY HAIR AND CALL ME BABY! I DID IT!!!

  My mother does not believe me. We waited until it was seven in the morning California time and called her and she told him that acid can trigger bipolar and blah blah blah. He got really mad at her! I’ve never seen my dad mad before, and it is true that it does make him look kind of impotent because he holds it in
too much, and he turns all pink, but at the same time it was really kind of impressive. He threw his cell phone against the wall after she hung up, and it broke into two pieces, but then we had to quick-fix it so he could call my doctor and see what my doctor had to say, but it was easy to fix. It was just that the plastic casing had popped apart. Thank God the screen didn’t shatter because I left my phone in Cali.

  Dr. Carmichael said I had to get back on my medication. Which, I mean, what else is he gonna say, he doesn’t want to get sued, right? And I’m all the way over here, he can’t evaluate me. And you know what my dad says? He says NO!!! Fang, he said no! And he called Dr. Carmichael a joke! He actually said that, he said, “You’re not a doctor, you’re a joke.” All sorts of insane things began spewing out of him: “My daughter’s life is on the line here,” “I am serious, sir, I’m deadly serious,” and, my favorite, “What exactly would she have to do to make you reconsider your diagnosis? Walk on water? Swallow a sword? I mean, really, once you’ve diagnosed someone is there anything they could ever do that would make you reconsider, or are you infallible?”

  I mean, Fang, he lost control. He totally did. Not that Dr. Carmichael didn’t deserve it, he is a joke, but still, my dad is supposed to be a grown-up, he should never have said any of that stuff, but you know why he did?! Because he is simple!!! Wonderfully, lovably, adorably, perfectly pure and simple!!!

  After the phone call to Dr. Carmichael, which ended a little anticlimactically with scheduling an appointment for as soon as we get home, it was like he was transported by what had just happened into the locker-room scene of a football movie, and he sat down at the table with me and he said, “Listen, Vera. I need you to listen to me. This is not going to be easy to undo. It is not going to be easy to get people to believe you. But we will fight. And we will win. We will win, Vera.”

  I legitimately got the shivers!!! Oh, it was amazing, Fang. I wish you could have been here.

  With Love,

  From Vilnius,

  Your triumphant,

  V

  PS: I totally got caught smoking pot with Judith Winter this morning. But just GUESS who she got the pot from?! That little tenor shaped like a teapot from that crazy concert the first night! She says he is a total sweetheart. Judith is absolutely the best. Also there is a ton of Vilnius stuff I need to tell you about, but I am too happy and too excited to talk about it now. I am going to go just sprawl on my bed thinking about how perfect the world can sometimes be.

  THE MOST DISTURBING THING ABOUT Vera’s confession was that it didn’t “change everything,” so much as it revealed everything as having been other than it had seemed to be. Nothing had changed, in fact, it was just that I now knew more about what had happened and so it all looked different to me. I had heard a story once of an Amazon tribesman who had lived his whole life in the jungle where line of sight was limited to thirty paces or so. The first time he was taken on a road and driven through fields where you could see long distances, he saw a building far away and asked what the miniature house was for. Having never had to calculate perspective, his brain simply didn’t know how to do it. That was how I felt in the days after Vera’s confession: like a man baffled by miniature houses that got mysteriously bigger as you approached them.

  It wasn’t just seeing Vera as suddenly sane that was a mind trip, it was also the literal trip we were on: It was Vilnius. It was seeing Grandma Sylvia differently, and by extension seeing my mother differently. It was seeing European history differently by getting to know this peculiar and really rather small city, which didn’t seem to be a city so much as a concatenation of different cities happening on top of one another, both simultaneously and consecutively. War, genocide, and even the weather had conspired to make Vilnius a place people were constantly fleeing. Darius mentioned quite casually Vilnius had lost ninety percent of its prewar population. With such an unstable population, Vilnius was literally a different city than it had been. For this reason, it was a city without memory. A city of strangers, Darius called it.

  The day after Vera’s confession, our history walk was through the district of Užupis, technically the Republic of Užupis, a small area that, either in earnest or in prolonged jest, had proclaimed itself independent of all of Lithuania, Europe, and the world, though its statehood was recognized by no government. It was difficult to know how seriously Užupis took itself, Darius explained, since they declared their independence on April 1. I hadn’t known April Fools’ Day was a thing in Lithuania, but when I asked, Darius looked at me with his ice-blue eyes, unamused. “You think America made up April Fools’ Day?”

  I had already framed Vilnius in my mind as a liminal place, a portal between East and West, but also, as Darius had mentioned, a portal between the living and the dead, and I didn’t like the idea of crossing the river into Užupis. It made me think of the River Styx. But the River Vilnia was narrow and picturesque, not haunting or misty, and the bridge railings were bristling with love locks. It was a custom around there, Darius told us, for young couples to have their initials engraved on a lock, which they attached to the bridge, and then together they would throw the key into the river. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of locks on the bridge, covering every bar of the railing. “They do this now in many cities,” Darius explained, “but it has been a custom in Eastern Europe for at least a hundred years.” Vera was clearly delighted by them, and ran her hands over the clumps of padlocks as we passed by.

  On the other side, there was a sign letting us know we had entered Užupis. Darius translated: “Smile, drive slowly, create masterpieces, and be careful of the river.” The Republic of Užupis was small, only a little over half a square kilometer with seven thousand residents. Užupis even had its own army, Darius said, though it was comprised of only eleven men. “This is the artists’ country,” he said. “The president himself is a poet, musician, and filmmaker. Everyone here is either involved with the arts in some way or wishes they were.”

  I wondered what Dr. Carmichael would think about such a place. Would he become furious and begin impotently writing prescriptions for every passerby, or would he melt with repressed desire and throw himself at the foot of some tangle-haired poetess and beg to be remade? I thought it was rather more likely to be the latter, honestly. Dr. Carmichael, as hateful as he was, didn’t ever seem to enjoy being himself.

  It was a big group that day. I noticed that both Daniel and Susan were with us. Even Judith had come and was walking along steadied by Vera’s arm. I forced myself not to turn around and catch Susan’s eye, but I couldn’t help being aware of where she was in the group, closer or floating farther away, as Darius led us around.

  He took us to a square with a statue of the angel Gabriel blowing his horn to rouse the artists, or else to announce the end of the world. Previously this square had housed a statue of an egg, but the egg had now been moved to another part of town. “There were a lot of empty plinths,” Darius said and stared at us, pausing, almost as though he were uncertain if he would go on. Was it worth it to explain the history of his country to these people, most of them idiots? I was aware of my own beer gut, of the Owl People in their bright clogs, of the general distracted, ragtag appearance of our group and I felt embarrassed, but also thought that what Darius was doing in taking us on these history tours was possibly heroic. “When Lithuania became independent of the Soviet Union and all the statues of Lenin were torn down, there were many empty plinths. Užupis actually began as an idea two years before the republic was founded when a group of artists decided to erect a statue of Frank Zappa. It is not in Užupis, however, it is over by the children’s hospital. If anyone wishes to go looking for it.”

  I was unsure if I was hearing Darius correctly. No one else in the group guffawed—they were all listening patiently. No one seemed amazed that in Lithuania, in order to deal with the end of communism, local artists had made a statue of Frank Zappa. It didn’t seem to strike anyone but me as odd or wonderful or funny. Vera whispered,
“Who is Frank Zappa?”

  “And now Frank Zappa has become sort of a patron saint, if you will,” Darius said, “of Užupis, but also of Vilnius and even Lithuania as a whole.” He paused again, squinting in the bright sun. “This area,” he gestured around us, “was really just a slum. These warehouses were filled with homeless, with prostitutes. The artists who founded Užupis were mostly squatters living in these buildings. There had been no life for them under communism. They just, well, mainly they drank all the time. They used to call alcohol ‘ink.’ They would say, ‘I have to go to the store and get more ink,’ because they really believed that drunkenness and the artistic process were one and the same. A lot of those guys are dead now. They all died very early from liver failure. It was very sad, but, I guess—well! I guess they did it to themselves, you could say.”

  As we continued along, I could feel Vera buzzing with excitement. She loved it here. She kept exclaiming in wonder over murals, pointing out hidden statues to Judith. This was exactly the sort of place she always dreamed existed, the sort of place that could never come into being in safe, ordinary Rancho Cucamonga.

  On one of the pockmarked walls on a narrow cobblestone street the constitution of Užupis had been translated into twenty languages and then engraved on great slabs of shining mirrored metal so that as you read them, you had to face yourself in the mirror. The items ranged from the profound to the whimsical.

  Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnia, while the River Vilnia has the right to flow by everyone.

  Everyone has the right to be idle.

  Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat.

  Everyone has the right to look after a dog till one or the other dies.