Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  “This searching, this constant searching, it’s like a disease of the mind,” she said. “Trying to piece things together, but none of it can be put back together. But you can’t stop searching. It’s a compulsion.”

  I kissed her foot. She looked at me. I kissed her toes, one by one, light little kisses. She smiled. She arched her foot, and I kissed her heel. I kissed her ankle and then her shin bone. She laid back on the bed and spread her legs, and I kept on kissing upward.

  She was the descendant of a sly rabbit of a boy, and I was the descendant of a wild, murdering girl. What did it mean about us, on this rented mattress, in this rented room, in this world that would be ours for such a short time?

  “Please,” she said, “just keep me from being me for a little while. Just make me stop thinking. Just make me—” She broke off.

  I didn’t want to be me, either. I didn’t want to think about Agata or Grandma Sylvia or Katya or Vera. I didn’t want to think about my father, his arched eyebrows, his Iago, his rabbits dissolving into air. I didn’t want to think about Chloe, who still burned in my memory, crying on the bed, saying, “I just miss my mom. That’s all. I just miss my mom.”

  I wanted only Susan’s thighs, Susan’s globed breasts like dangling fruit, Susan’s amber hair in wet curls, Susan’s salt, Susan’s cries, Susan’s lip pulled back over her teeth. I wanted sour-plum skin and ripped fruit. I wanted to be nothing but a body moving over Susan’s body, nothing but our cells, dying and dividing, the chemicals of pleasure rolling loose into our bloodstreams.

  Chapter 12

  Date: 7/18/2014 5:34 PM

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: re: Are you ignoring me?

  Dear Fang,

  Please do not give up on me. Please. I’m sorry. I take back everything. I am the same as I always was. I am yours. Please. I need you so badly.

  With love,

  From Vilnius,

  Eternally,

  V

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the apartment it was dark, and the waitresses in the restaurant downstairs had turned off the light in the stairwell and I couldn’t find the switch, so I ascended in such pitchy black that I couldn’t even tell if my eyes were open and kept blinking to make sure. I pushed open our door, which was unlocked, and bumped into a wire drying rack covered in wet men’s clothes. I recognized the drying rack, but not the clothes. Why were another man’s clothes drying in our apartment?

  “Vera?” I called. There was a light on in the kitchen.

  “Papa, go away and come back later,” Vera yelled.

  “Please come in here, sir,” said a male voice.

  I tried for a second to just edge the rack by pushing with the door, hoping it wouldn’t tip, but then I heard the man’s voice again, “Please, Lucas!,” and realized it was Daniel. I opened the door hard, knocked over the rack of wet clothes, and tripped over it on my way to the kitchen.

  I saw Daniel sitting in a pair of running shorts, shirtless at the kitchen table. I saw Vera in a nightgown holding a large butcher knife. She pointed it at me as I entered the room, the tip following me like the barrel of a gun.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “You, sit,” she said, gesturing with the knife at the other chair at the table. I hesitated.

  “Sit!” Vera screamed, and slashed at the air with her knife.

  I sat. “What’s going on?” I asked Daniel. He didn’t say anything, just gave me a long look that I couldn’t entirely interpret. It was a look of pleading, but not entirely a look of panic.

  “I know about the conspiracy,” Vera said. “I know about the Great Synagogue and I know what’s underneath. I know you want to help me, Daniel. Or why would you have given me that book?”

  Daniel sighed. “I gave you that book because I thought you would think Tesla was interesting.”

  Vera laughed, a big, rich stage laugh. “Oh, get real,” she said. It was becoming clear that I was walking in on an interrogation. “You don’t want to fuck me, you don’t want to date me, you just thought I would think Tesla was interesting?”

  Daniel nodded. “That’s why I gave you the book.”

  “Vera, can you back up and tell me what’s going on?” I said.

  “Be quiet,” she told me, flicking the knife in my direction. “The thing about you, Daniel,” she went on, “is that you have no idea how obvious you are about what you are hiding. You think you are wearing normal clothes, but you are not. You think you are behaving as all people behave, but you are not. You do not belong to any system of power that I am aware of. You are operating mysteriously outside of the regime. It is obvious just looking at you.”

  Daniel sighed. “Yeah, you keep saying that.”

  I had never before been so aware of how physically small Vera was. She was tiny, but she was practically vibrating with energy, and being in the room with her felt more like witnessing a horrible storm or a flood than talking to a person.

  “We are alike in that way. Cut loose of our places in the social hierarchy. I was deemed medically unfit. They were going to chemically alter me. But I think you already knew that.”

  The words were pouring out of her now, not in response to either Daniel or me but almost as though she couldn’t control the ideas that were multiplying in her brain, forcing their way out of her mouth as sentence after sentence. “Darius was lying when he said that the Soviets used the lot of the Great Synagogue to build a kindergarten. Think about it. Why would the Soviets take a place of such immense spiritual power and just destroy it? Think about how much rock or gravel or earth it would take to fill in that hole. The Great Synagogue was five stories tall, but dug into the ground. They would have had to haul in truck after truck after truck of soil just to fill it in. There’s something underneath, there’s a secret building underneath that kindergarten, and Daniel knows what it is.”

  I looked at Daniel. He shook his head at me. He had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t think Daniel knows anything about it, Vera,” I said. “And can you put the knife down? It’s really freaking me out.”

  “Papa, don’t make me slit your throat.” She walked toward me with the knife. I don’t think I had understood she was insane until that moment. In a way, I knew the second I walked in on her holding the knife that she was having an episode, but I hadn’t known until she walked toward me with the knife that she was unreachable. As unreachable as a bird or a fish, her pupils so dilated that her eyes were all dark mirror, her hands not so much shaking as vibrating.

  “I don’t want to kill you, Papa,” she said. “I was just starting to actually like you.”

  “Put down the knife, Vera,” I said. “You’re not going to kill anybody.”

  She sighed, whirled away from me and back to the counter, her arm extended so that the knife cut through the air. There was something childlike about the gesture. “Death isn’t permanent,” she said. “There is no self, Papa. I don’t know how many times I have to try to explain that to you. You are so dense, you know that? I try to feed you just tiny morsels of new ideas and you spit them out like a toddler. It’s exhausting. But I won’t give up on you, I promise.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to Daniel. “She’s been through a lot and—”

  Vera turned on me. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here! God! What disrespect! Am I not a person? Have I not ears?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I could hear the washing machine chugging in the bathroom with another load of clothes. It clicked over into the spin cycle and the kitchen was filled with the high-pitched whine.

  “What I’m trying to explain, Papa, what I’ve been trying to tell you ever since we got here, is that there is no such thing as reality. Everything is a metaphor. All of this is just shadows on the cave wall. What is real is something else, something that we can’t see. Don’t you get that? If I kill Daniel, or look, even if I were to cut my arm—” She gestured with the knife and I winced,
but the knife didn’t cut. The blade just rested there, kissing her skin. I could see the bulge of flesh above where it pressed, and I thanked God the knife was dull. All of the knives in this stupid apartment were dull. “It’s just like a line in a poem: It reflects something real, but the words are not the same as the actual objects. I am part of God and you are part of God, and even Daniel is a part of God. That is what is real. These are just bodies, like puppets. Even the dragon is a part of God!”

  “The dragon?” I asked.

  “She keeps talking about a dragon,” Daniel said softly. “I haven’t been able to figure out what she means.”

  “Dragon is the name of the project,” Vera said. “The Great Synagogue project. But Daniel already knows that.”

  “That’s the problem,” Daniel said, clearly exasperated. “I don’t know that.”

  “So what are you doing here?” Vera asked, gesturing around us at the kitchen with the knife. “Why did you come over here?”

  “You said I could use your washing machine,” Daniel said.

  “No, I mean in Vilnius.”

  “I don’t know!” Daniel yelled, clearly on the verge of losing it. “What do you want to hear? We’ve been over this a dozen times already. I came here because I think Vilnius is interesting! I like history! I came here because my girlfriend just broke up with me because I’m a loser. I don’t know, Vera! What do you want to hear?”

  Vera growled with exasperation. The black eyes were unnerving. It seemed impossible that she could see out of them. “You are making me do this by lying to me! Don’t you get that? Please stop, please stop lying to me!”

  The spin cycle paused, then started again. No one spoke. She had said it herself: We were making her do this. It occurred to me that she didn’t want to be holding that knife. That she was scared and out of control, and if I could simply take the knife out of her hand, she would let me. She was just a girl and we were two grown men, pretending to be hostages. I could walk up to her and take the knife out of her hand. I outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. The worst that would happen is I might get cut badly enough to need stitches. I stood up.

  “What are you doing?” Vera asked.

  I didn’t want to telegraph what I was doing in case she decided to fight me. “You’re tired,” I said.

  “I am,” she said, nodding.

  I walked over to her, and I wrapped my hand around hers, the one that was holding the knife. “You don’t need this,” I said. She relaxed her hold. With my other hand, I removed the knife and dropped it in the sink. It made a loud clatter as it fell, but she didn’t react, almost as though she hadn’t heard it.

  “You’re right,” she said. “The knife was silly. Daniel will either tell me the truth or he won’t.” She was about to continue her interrogation, unaware that the spell had been broken, that the knife had been her only power.

  “I’m calling the cops,” Daniel said. He was already over by the phone on the shelves.

  “Please don’t,” I said. I had no idea what the ramifications would be, what they would do to Vera. Obviously I had made a grave error about her medication, but I could fix it. We just needed to get her home to her doctors. “She needs her meds—they’re in the bathroom. Just get them,” I said.

  “You have her meds and you didn’t give them to her?” he asked, stunned, his hand still on the phone. “You knew she was sick?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just looked at him.

  “You’re as fucking crazy as she is,” Daniel said, and he picked up the phone and dialed.

  Vera had turned in toward my body and stayed huddled against the front of me. I wrapped my arms around her. She was jittery like she had drunk too much coffee or done too much coke.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to her.

  “I’m so tired,” she said. “I’m so tired and I can’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep for days.”

  On the phone, Daniel spoke in an orderly way. He had to wait until they found an operator with fluent English. I would not have been so coherent if I had been the one making the call. Now that I was holding Vera in my arms, all my muscles were shaking, exhausted, as though I had been lifting weights for hours. “Not sure if we need police or an ambulance. There is a girl here suffering from a psychotic break. She’s been threatening people with a knife.” He paused. He looked up at me. “No, she is currently unarmed. No, no, I don’t think anyone wants to press charges, we just need to transport her to a mental hospital or a psych ward or something. She’s sick. She needs to be seen by a doctor.”

  “Papa,” Vera whispered into my neck, “don’t let them take me away. Don’t let them.”

  “I’m going to stay with you the whole time,” I said. “I won’t let them do anything bad to you.”

  “Do you believe me? About the dragon? I know you do—I’ve known this whole time that you knew. That’s why you brought me here. That’s what this whole thing has been about.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just held her. I couldn’t look at Daniel. He could have easily pressed charges. He could have made things a living hell for us. What he had done was the right thing, no more and no less. And I had told him not to call. I stared at the little red ceramic statue of a toadstool on the shelf beside his head. I was burning with shame.

  He hung up the phone. “Someone will be here in ten or fifteen minutes.”

  I nodded. “Vera,” I said, “do you want to put on different clothes?”

  She looked up at me. “Yeah, I don’t want to go in a nightgown. I’ll put on jeans or something.” She slowly untangled herself from my arms and floated off toward her room. “I think this is actually a good thing,” she said.

  “You do?” I asked.

  “I’m excited to talk to them. I think they will understand what I’m saying. There is just too much I have to catch you guys up on and as hard as I try to explain, you don’t get it! It’s so exhausting!”

  Daniel and I stared at her. She smiled as though she were filled with great peace and took a deep breath. “I’m going to get changed,” she said, and went into her room.

  For a moment, we just stood in the silence.

  “Thank you,” I said to Daniel. He shook his head, shrugged.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “I never thought she was actually going to stab me. I didn’t really think that.”

  I nodded, sucked my lower lip into my mouth and ground it with my teeth. “Let’s get your clothes packed up,” I said. Together we picked up his wet clothes from the knocked-over drying rack in the hall and stuffed them into his laundry bag. We went to see if the washing machine was done with the second load. There were a few minutes left in the cycle, it seemed. “I’ll wait,” he said. “I might have to give a statement or something anyway.”

  I nodded. We were both standing in the tiny, brightly lit bathroom, staring at the washing machine.

  “Do you want to check on her or something?” he asked. It was like being startled awake. I rushed to her door, already panicked.

  She wasn’t in her room. Her window was gaping open, letting in the velvet night sky. I stuck my head outside, screamed her name. I looked down into the courtyard, but I couldn’t see anything, any sign of her. Then I heard whimpering, and I turned my head to find she was right there next to me, hugging the sloped roof on her belly, terrified.

  “I don’t know how to get down,” she whispered. “I’m really scared.”

  Her feet were braced on the roof gutters. She was barefoot and still in her nightgown. The way our rooms were deformed by the gables of the building was extreme, and the window I was standing in was at a steep angle and was almost like a skylight. With my hips pressed against the window frame, I was already halfway out on the roof. I turned in the opening of the window, tried to keep my legs and hips facing forward as I arced my torso over toward her. I knew that if I sat on the window frame, even though it would get me closer to her, it would also make it possible for me to fall backward out of the
window. There was a little radiator under the window and I stuck my feet under it, flexing them to try to create some kind of lock, as I reached my arm out toward her beside me on the roof.

  I could just barely wrap an arm around the back of her waist. “You’ve got to edge back this way,” I said.

  I heard Daniel behind me, saying “Holy fuck” over and over in a harsh whisper.

  “I feel like I’m gonna break the gutter if I move,” she said. “I can’t move. I can’t move.”

  “I’ve got you,” I said. I had my right arm around her waist, but if she fell there was no way I could hold her weight. The angle was too extreme. She edged toward me with baby steps. The gutter made a loud sound and she screamed, stopped moving.

  I heard pounding at the door of our apartment. “For God’s sake,” I shouted at Daniel, “let them in!” But he was already doing it. The apartment filled with low voices asking questions in Lithuanian.

  “Just a couple more steps, baby,” I said. She was looking only into my eyes. I tried to smile. “You can do this,” I said. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

  She was close enough now that I had my hand linked all the way under her other arm, tight around her back, and I pulled her to me, trying to get her to budge a little bit, come a little bit closer. Instead, she gave a hiccuping little leap sideways, and I got my arms around her, but there was a teetering moment where I thought she might pull us both out of the window. My feet were still wedged under the radiator, flexed, but my legs were shaking from trying to keep us both from falling. She was entirely in my arms now, and I could feel the weight of her, the pull of gravity, the light breeze outside ruffling her nightgown. For a moment, we both remained perfectly still, just breathing, and then I was able to shift one of my legs, and I found my balance again, knew I could hold her. Slowly I pulled her inside, hugging the top of her body as the window ledge scraped the front of her thighs, then her knees and shins, until she was inside.