Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  A dog has the right to be a dog.

  A cat is not obliged to love its master, but it must help him in difficult times.

  Everyone has the right to sometimes be unaware of his duties.

  Everyone has the right to be happy.

  Everyone has the right to be unhappy.

  Everyone has the right to be silent.

  Everyone has the right to have faith.

  No one has the right to violence.

  Everyone has the right to encroach upon eternity.

  It ended with these simple instructions:

  Do not fight.

  Do not win.

  Do not surrender.

  “Hi,” Susan said, coming up beside me. Vera was a few paces away, reading the constitution printed in Russian with Daniel, and maybe that was why Susan had decided to approach me.

  “Hi,” I said. We stared at the constitution, which also meant staring at ourselves in the mirror. I was uncommonly sexually attracted to her. It was uncanny. It was frankly uncomfortable because at the same time she did strongly remind me of my mother. The silence stretched between us so long that it became surreal and suddenly anything could have been on the table. I could have reached over and kissed her. She could have reached over and honked my nose. Or punched me in the face. Or grabbed my crotch.

  “How are you?” she asked. It was such a female question. The other famous female question being: What are you thinking? “How are you?” was the easier of the two to answer.

  “Disoriented,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Dizzy,” she said. We stared at each other some more. It was hot out. I wanted a beer. I wanted to be alone with her at a picnic table in the shade by the river drinking a beer. “I couldn’t sleep all last night,” she said.

  I nodded. “The long days have been throwing me off. I keep waking up at four in the morning.”

  “But isn’t that why we travel? To get disoriented. To be changed.”

  “What do you think about this?” I said, gesturing at the constitution in front of us, but then more loosely to the buildings around us, to the project of Užupis.

  “I think it’s kind of wonderful,” she said.

  “See, I think I’m just being a stick in the mud.”

  “How are you being a stick in the mud?” she asked, nudging my shoulder with hers.

  “I’m suspicious of it. I’m suspicious of the whole thing: alcohol as ink and this faux free society where everything is a joke at the same time as it is for real and everyone is a drunk or a whore but with a heart of gold. I mean, was the poetry they wrote any good? Were their paintings really good? I don’t know.” I didn’t like the world of Dr. Carmichael, the world sucked dry of anything that might be magic—but I wasn’t willing to live in this world, either.

  “Oh, I think that’s a fair question,” she said. “I don’t think that’s you being a stick in the mud.”

  “Hmm…” I said. But I knew that what bothered me about Užupis was that it reminded me of the farm.

  “You disappeared the other night,” Susan said. “I hope I wasn’t too forward in asking you to dinner.”

  “No, not at all,” I said. But I didn’t say anything else and she didn’t either. We just continued to linger, standing next to each other, waiting for the group to be led wherever we were going next. I looked over at Vera. She was laughing up into Daniel’s face with his arm around her. I wondered what it meant, what it meant about her and Fang. And what had ever happened to her crush on Johnny Depp? It was almost as though Daniel had simply stepped into the vacuum created by Vera’s initial desire.

  Surely Daniel didn’t realize she was only seventeen. I would have to have a talk with him. I didn’t want to embarrass Vera by being too direct about it, but I could at least make him aware that she was so young. Although it occurred to me that I could choose not to. That I could just let myself slip into this prickling, delicious dream. That I could give in to the part of myself that wanted to lick Susan’s sternum even though she looked like my mother. That I could order a beer in Užupis and watch the River Vilnia flow past. That I could let my daughter, who was now sane, no longer my charge but a person in her own right, a young woman, just a few months shy of eighteen, that I could let her flirt with a handsome young man in a pirate shirt in the town where my grandmother had been born.

  What could go wrong? What was it that I was so terribly afraid of?

  —

  After darkly pointing out a memorial marking a Jewish cemetery destroyed by the Soviets, Darius returned us to the central square of Užupis and set us free to go find dinner. Susan and I stayed close to each other, wordlessly willing ourselves to wind up in a cluster of people who would all go to dinner together. Vera and Judith and Daniel drifted over. Everyone was chatting. A small man named Kenneth who had a reddish beard and thick plastic bifocals inserted himself into our group. He was in his mid to late forties, old enough that I never interpreted him as a peer, and truthfully, I had been avoiding Kenneth for reasons obscure to me. If I hadn’t been under some peculiar spell, standing there with Susan, I would have simply taken Judith and Vera and gone off on our own for dinner as we did most nights. I hated splitting the bill in a big group. But Kenneth was very friendly. He was from Kentucky. He clapped his hands together. “Let’s go!” he said. “I know a great little place!”

  And so we all allowed ourselves to be led blindly by this man whom none of us knew. We were tired and no one made a lot of conversation as we followed him. Daniel had sweated through his maroon silk pirate shirt in big dark circles at the armpits.

  The restaurant that Kenneth brought us to was in a basement, brick walled with low arched ceilings, and one entire wall was cold case after cold case of fine beers. During the hubbub of pushing tables together to accommodate our large party, I floated over to the glass case to ogle. All the labels were in Lithuanian, and they all appeared to be microbrews.

  Once seated, Kenneth and I were transformed into comrades by our mutual excitement over the beers. We proceeded to over-order a multitude of beers for the table to sample. The food menu was quite limited, however, and it turned out that Kenneth had brought us to a bar and not a restaurant. We ordered fried bread and charcuterie and a cheese plate.

  Judith was very upset that there was so little to eat. She was a vegetarian, so the charcuterie was useless to her.

  “I must learn to be thin, like you,” she said to Vera.

  “Nonsense, you must eat,” Vera said, and reached across the table to snag Judith some of the fried bread.

  It was very hot down there and the only light was candlelight and very quickly we were all drunk. I did not even try to stop Vera from having some of the beer, though I did try to keep track of how much she drank. She was almost eighteen, which was the legal age to drink in Lithuania anyway, and honestly, it had always seemed to me like kids were better off drinking around their parents who could look after them and make sure things didn’t get out of hand. I said these things loudly inside my own head as I watched her at the table, her face luminous in the candlelight, smiling over something Daniel had said.

  Vera and Daniel were speaking softly at one end of the table, which left Judith, Susan, Kenneth, and me in a foursome. Kenneth was not a writer, and he was also, he mentioned, not Jewish. He was very red in the face, perhaps from the beer, perhaps from the heat. “But I find Jews very interesting. I like to study them,” he said.

  An awkward silence fell. There was something off in the way Kenneth had phrased this, but I was sure he meant well. He was just clumsy, like the Owl People. A bit tone-deaf. After all, this was a largely Jewish history tour—we were all here because we found the Jewish experience interesting.

  “They’re mysterious!” Kenneth went on, laughing. “Always keeping to themselves, refusing to mix with the rest of us.”

  Judith cringed politely as though Kenneth had just blown his nose into his napkin at the table, but she nodded and said, “It is true—the extent to whi
ch Jews, especially in Eastern Europe, were uninterested in assimilating does imply that they did not find the pretty glass beads and top hats of Western civilization to be of much value.”

  “Oh, but Civilization, man,” Kenneth said, “you can’t ignore her! She’s coming for you! Can’t turn your face away from steam engines and guns or you wind up like Anne Frank!”

  I was just drunk enough that I was having a hard time keeping track of exactly how outrageous Kenneth was being. In some moments, especially in the dim light, Kenneth’s sweaty red face seemed animal and gross, and I was sure he was an anti-Semite come to this history tour out of some dark impulse, the way a serial killer likes to revisit the crime scene. I knew a boy in high school named Scotty Nicholson who collected Nazi memorabilia, plates and cups engraved with swastikas, hidden under his boarding-school bed. Maybe Kenneth was like Scotty Nicholson. Or maybe, Kenneth was just some fumbling average Joe, unable to couch his very human observations in a politically correct way. It was unclear and I wished I were more sober.

  “Civilization as some kind of advancing monster,” Judith mused, clearly trying to be generous.

  “I sometimes think part of it,” Kenneth said, leaning in conspiratorially, “part of the Jew Hate, is that they kept their women so covered up.”

  There was a heavy silence at the table, though at the phrase “Jew Hate” both Vera and Daniel had tuned back in.

  Susan cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, what? What did you just say?”

  “Covering their hair and everything, doesn’t it kind of imply that other people aren’t good enough to even look at their women? I think it’s part of why people don’t like Muslims, either. Subconsciously, I mean.”

  Susan made a “hmm” sound and nodded, but around the table there was the growing feeling that Kenneth was a creepy weirdo. But was he enough of a creepy weirdo that he must be stopped? In a group of mostly women like this, any confrontation would fall to me. I accepted this as part of being an adult and an able-bodied man, but I was also a naturally conflict-avoidant person. I didn’t have a lot of practice at drawing lines in the sand.

  “As a Jew,” Susan said, and I was grateful that Susan had thought to do that—to make Kenneth aware that he was talking to Jews and not just about them, “it is hard for me to relate to what you’re saying.”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Kenneth cried. “Jesus Christ, are you all Jews?”

  Susan and Judith and Vera and Daniel all nodded, and I realized I was the only non-Jew.

  “I’m not an anti-Semite or anything,” Kenneth said, holding up his hands as though to say, Don’t shoot. “I’m just a history teacher!”

  There was a deflation of tension at the table—he was a history teacher! To each of us, this instantly meant that he was on our side: the side of human knowledge, the side of rationality. There was a collective sigh of relief.

  “These history tours are tax deductible,” Kenneth explained, “and they’re great fun. I’ve done them all! And, I gotta say, I do just find all the Jew stuff fascinating.”

  Kenneth went on to talk about his job teaching history at a community college, about his recent divorce and his ex-wife who was apparently very coldhearted. He was in a confessional mood, and he became maudlin when discussing his dogs. Apparently, he bred cocker spaniels and one of his bitches had been impregnated by some neighborhood monster, some Doberman or something, who got into his yard.

  “I was going to let her keep the puppies,” he said, “but then they exploded inside her.”

  “What?” Susan said.

  “Killed her. Pups got too big, just exploded her insides.”

  None of us knew what to say to this, except Judith who said, “Well, that is horrifying!”

  But then Kenneth didn’t respond. He was staring at Vera and Daniel who had paid no attention to his story and were in their own world again. Kenneth’s eyes were very glassy and there was a nasty expression on his face.

  He set down his beer. “She was the only reason I wanted to have dinner with you all, but it looks like he beat me to it!” He gestured at Daniel.

  The idea that Kenneth had thought he was a possible suitor for Vera was so shocking that I had a hard time even making sense of the words. As soon as I did, I wanted to punch Kenneth in his fat red face. I stood up without thinking about it, but then just stood there, swaying at the table.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  Vera and Daniel looked up from their end of the table.

  “Don’t get so uptight, man,” Kenneth said.

  “I’m not being uptight,” I said. I wanted to hit Kenneth, or shove the table, or do something, but to throw a punch or break glass in a bar was a serious thing. And besides, Kenneth was still sitting down and he was older, there was white in his red beard, he was drunk and wearing glasses that were smudgy with finger grease—I could see all this in the candlelight.

  “Maybe you should just go and call it a night,” Susan said, touching Kenneth’s arm.

  “Guess that’s my cue, eh? Thanks for dinner,” Kenneth said, and chugged the rest of his beer, stood, and threw his napkin on the table, then walked out of the bar, so drunk he was weaving.

  Watching him go, it occurred to me that maybe there was something wrong with people who decided they wanted to visit the past on vacation. Maybe what was obviously broken and weird in Kenneth was more subtly present in all of us. Judith was barely able to function or open her own apartment door and she wore a red beret and red lipstick at all times. Daniel was wearing a pirate shirt. I, myself, was so inwardly tangled that I wasn’t able, even to myself, to admit what I wanted, or even that I wanted. I was a fool. We were all fools. And possibly creepy fools.

  “Well!” Judith said. “That was an adventure!”

  Susan cracked up and then could not stop laughing. There had been so much tension that the laughter was contagious and manic and it overtook all of us, not because anything was genuinely funny but because we were all so relieved. There had been something about Kenneth and his constant forays into creepiness, about the way the candlelight played on our faces, making our skin seem pink and shiny, the hollows of our eyes so deep, our expressions exaggerated and plastic. We had been in a subtle kind of nightmare for almost two hours, and now it was over and the relief was immense.

  Judith was pinching the bridge of her nose and laughing, hunched over, saying, “It hurts! It hurts!”

  “His dog exploded!?” Susan crowed. “Did he really say that? I mean, Jesus Christ!”

  Even Daniel was laughing, though he kept his mouth closed and so he sounded eerily like Winnie-the-Pooh or Dr. Carmichael. “The Jew Hate?” he asked, and we all moaned, laughing so hard we were crying.

  Chapter 7

  “Stage 2”

  Word doc

  Created by User on 7/15

  I have lost contact with ground control. That’s what it feels like, this blockage between me and Fang. I’m untethered. Maybe that’s part of what made me come clean with my dad. I had been wanting to tell him, but the situation with Fang forced my hand. Telling my dad was a way of tethering myself just a little bit to him so that at least one person will know what is going on with me. So that I won’t feel so entirely alone.

  I know rationally that there is a possibility that Fang is telling the truth and he just had his arm around that girl to have their picture taken. People do that. They put their arms around each other when someone says, “Say cheese!” They just do, although why it is better to be clasping each other in a picture is really mysterious when you think about it, I mean, why not just sit side by side! But people do all sorts of weird things in pictures. I had a friend once who compulsively made the peace sign. She just couldn’t not. Tracy Arbuckle. I wonder whatever happened to her.

  Anyway, sometimes my mind runs along that track, and I think that mostly everything is exactly the same as it was before, that Fang sees me and I see him, that we are in the same world together, and that that is rare and sacred a
nd worthy of being protected. It feels almost like an act of violence to mistrust him. Every single hour I take the marble of my mind and I place it on this track, the track that goes: Nothing happened ==> Everything is fine ==> You and Fang still love each other. And every single hour, the marble falls through an invisible hole and slips down into another track that goes like this:

  People are animals ==> Love is just hormones, just rutting, just chemicals, we fuck whoever is closest to us ==> Reality is thin ==> Fang slipped from the reality of being bonded to you and began to look for a new animal to rub up against, just the same way you got off the plane and saw Johnny Depp and thought: Hello, I’d like a slice of that! ==> It isn’t just sex, all of life is this way, we forget everything we know to be true, everything we know to be sacred. Only one rabbi is brave enough to try to stop the destruction of the Great Synagogue. Only one rabbi is willing to have the hose shoved down his throat. The rest of us just shuffle around, hoping it won’t be us, hoping to avoid the merciless sword of blind, haggard Justice ==> When death comes for us, it too will be only chemical. Our organism will die and then all light, all narrative, will be extinguished ==> In which case, why not just rut with the animal closest to you? Why not let the Great Synagogue be destroyed? Why not look the other way while your neighbors are exterminated? Why not?

  And so I let Daniel kiss me tonight. I didn’t just let him kiss me, I courted him into kissing me, I arranged it, I hypercharged the atmosphere until he had no choice but to kiss me. After a deeply bizarre and uncomfortable dinner with that anti-Semitic hick who got so drunk I don’t think he could see out of his eyeballs, we all decided to go to a jazz club that Susan knew about.

  I had never been to a jazz club, but it was pretty high up there on my list of romantic to-dos for adulthood, so I agreed immediately. Even Judith decided to go. We were all jolly to have gotten rid of Kenneth. And it didn’t seem that late because the sun had only just gone down, but of course that meant it was already really, really late.