Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  I turned on my cell phone and dialed Katya.

  She was less interested in recriminations than I expected. I choked out my story, and mainly she wanted to go over the details again and again, what had happened, what had Vera said, what had Daniel said, what had I said, what had the police said, what had the doctor said. It was hard to keep it all straight, I was so hollow-hearted and dizzy by that point, and she grew frustrated with me.

  “I’m so sorry, Katya,” I said. “I’m so sorry I let all of this happen. You have no idea how guilty I feel.”

  Katya tsked, loud, annoyed. “I don’t care about you, Lucas. I don’t care right now what you should have done, what you could have seen or noticed or done different. None of it matters. What I care about is Vera. The fact that I’m not there is—” She broke off. “I need you as absolutely together as you can be. I need you to sleep. I need you to be her father. I need you to have lists of questions for her doctors. I need you to write down what they say so that you can tell me exactly. I need you to make it so that it is like I am there, as much as possible. At least until I can fly out.”

  “Oh, don’t fly out,” I said. “They’re only holding her for forty-eight hours. By the time you even got here, she’d be released and we’d be heading home.”

  Katya was silent. “I just want to get on a plane,” she said. “That feels like the only thing to do.”

  “I know,” I said, “I know. But it doesn’t make sense. Just wait and we will come to you. I will get her home. I can promise you that much.” I was sitting on the foot of Vera’s bed with my eyes closed. It would still be hours and hours before I could visit Vera in the mental hospital.

  Katya was silent, then sighed. “This dragon business is, well, it’s baffling, don’t you think?”

  “It is the hardest part,” I said.

  “So Christian,” she said, though that wasn’t what had occurred to me as difficult about it. I hadn’t noticed that dragons were a particularly Christian element, though once Katya pointed it out, I could see it.

  “You would be happier if she were having a more Jewish delusion?”

  “No,” she said, “I would just be able to understand it better.”

  “Well,” I said, “Puff the Magic Dragon, Dungeons and Dragons, fuck, Game of Thrones, dragons are just part of the larger cultural collective at this point, I think.”

  Katya groaned as though this bothered her. She did not want to share a cultural imagination with anyone else. She did not want her daughter to be sharing a mind with unrefined American cinema, with TV shows and comic books, a soup of high and low, holy and unholy. But that was how it was. That was the world now.

  “Is she scared?” Kat asked. I wondered if she had her eyes closed too. Her voice seemed so near, it was almost like it was inside my own head.

  “I think she’s terrified, but she was handling it really well. At least last night. Maybe it was the sedative, but she was incredibly brave.”

  “I know it doesn’t make sense for me to come,” she said. “But it’s so hard to accept that. It’s so hard to stay here.”

  “You must hate me,” I said.

  “I never hate you,” she said. She must have her eyes closed, I thought. I pictured her in her house, in her kitchen with garlic hung above the sink, the dishrag printed with little pigs. I pictured her dark hair, now cut short. Her face that had grown pointier and more feral and even more beautiful as she had gotten older. I closed my own eyes tighter.

  “You hated me when we left the farm,” I said.

  “No, not hate.” She sighed. “I was disappointed. But you did what you were going to do, you know? You were a Lucas being a Lucas. You didn’t like that place. I was foolish to think you would, but I was a young girl and I didn’t understand people then. I didn’t understand things seemed so different to different people. I thought you and I were the same person. But it turned out better, don’t you think, Lucas? You were right. We couldn’t have stayed there.”

  “Do you ever think about Chloe?” I asked.

  “Chloe? Who is Chloe?”

  “The girl on the farm.”

  “Oh,” Katya said, “I had forgotten her. You still think about that girl?”

  “All the time,” I said. A breeze was drifting into Vera’s room through the open window that I had failed to close after pulling her back into the room. I had not told Kat that Vera had tried to escape by climbing out onto the roof. I had not told Kat about the moment I had Vera in my arms, but knew I wouldn’t be able to keep her from falling if she slipped. “I wonder how she is. If she stayed there, or where she wound up. If she ever got to go home. She kept saying she missed her mom, and I’ve always wondered about her mom, and about what made her run away from home in the first place.”

  “You worry too much about such things,” Kat said.

  “Probably.”

  “I never hated you. Who could hate you, Lucas? You are too full of light.”

  “I always felt guilty. I left you stuck with all the responsibility. The guy always gets away scot-free, the girl has to raise a baby. It’s not fair. I got to go to college, I got to—”

  Katya laughed. “No, Lucas. You got nothing. I never thought that, that I was stuck with her. You would send me these desperate letters, and it was so clear you had nothing. I had everything. I had her.”

  I opened my eyes. I was looking at a jumbled pile of Vera’s clothes. I saw the pretty purple sundress I had bought her.

  “But you are a very good person, Lucas,” she went on. “You don’t have even an ounce of meanness in you. Your whole life, I am willing to bet there is not one single person who hated you. Sure, I was mad at you because you didn’t do what I wanted you to do. But you are really a very good person. The joke is on you if you don’t already know that.”

  The joke was on me. That phrase kept coming back to me as I walked to the hospital, as I climbed the steps past a melty bronze statue, as I waited in the waiting room to be taken to Vera. I was impatient to see her. I had brought a notebook in which I had written down all of Katya’s questions and where I could take down everything the doctors said. I also brought a slice of chocolate cake and a plate of cabbage rolls from a bakery/cafeteria thing I found on the way, as well as some clothes for her to wear, casual things, jeans, T-shirts, some frighteningly skimpy underwear that appeared to be the only kind of underwear she owned. I didn’t bring her any books or her laptop. The hospital, when I called to check that I had the visiting hours right, had said that I could bring books, just not the laptop, but I didn’t think it was a good idea.

  But when I got to the ward, they wouldn’t let me see her. At first I couldn’t get anyone who spoke English, but after a while they found someone for me.

  “She is too agitated for visitors right now,” the nurse said.

  “But I’m her father,” I said.

  “She can’t have any visitors,” the nurse said again. She was a blonde in her forties with a wide, practical mouth. She’d had to deal with family members like me a thousand times, her look said. “Right now she is very agitated and she is in the quiet room.”

  “She’s in isolation?” I asked. I imagined the quiet room as the padded cell so often depicted in movies, Vera straitjacketed and flailing. Last night she had been so calm, it was hard for me to understand why she needed to be locked up by herself. What had they done to her?

  “Someone checks on her every fifteen minutes or so,” the nurse said.

  “But you’re saying I can’t even see her. I can’t even visually ascertain that she is actually here?” I had made a horrible mistake. I should never have left her here. These people were not to be trusted. They were holding her hostage, practically. “Can I at least look at her? Can I just watch her through a window or something?”

  “As I said, she is too agitated.” The nurse was clearly getting irritated with me. Her English was really very good. It was weird that my brain could register being impressed by her at the same time as I was sta
rting to get really and truly frantic.

  “Can I speak with a doctor?” I asked. “I need to speak to a doctor.”

  “It’s the weekend,” the nurse said, “so we don’t have much staff on, but I will see what I can do. Maybe I can find a doctor to talk to you.”

  “Maybe you better,” I said, in a tone that was so childish and impotent that I was immediately embarrassed for myself. The nurse just stared at me for a beat and then sighed.

  She left me in the waiting room for a long time, and I sat, awkwardly cradling my sweaty paper bag of cabbage rolls and chocolate cake, the duffel of Vera’s clothes at my feet. There were surprisingly good oil paintings on the walls. But then, it seemed painters were abundant in Vilnius. You could buy an oil painting for thirty bucks off a blanket on Gedimino prospektas. Art was easy here. Alcohol was ink.

  —

  It was a different doctor than last night, not the tall, bald man with the shiny pate, but a woman in her early fifties with dark hair in a braid. She was short and trim, almost girlish, and she bounced on little leather loafers as she led me to her office. In American hospitals, mental or otherwise, my consults with doctors had usually taken place in hallways, waiting rooms, or at the foot of the patient’s bed. Grandma Sylvia’s death, a protracted process, had been full of such conversations, my mother and some doctor in a hallway, as I sat on the floor, leaning against a wall, reading a sci-fi novel.

  But here I was led to an actual office, filled with books and simple furniture, an academic’s office. It reminded me of my own office at Orange Coast College. But the doctor had very little information. She had diagnosed Vera as bipolar I. They had not yet contacted her doctor in the States because such contact had to be made through written official correspondence. She listed Vera’s medications and their dosages, and I wrote them down studiously in my notebook, as well as the doctor’s name, which I had her spell for me twice but which I was still pretty sure I had gotten wrong. All of this was attended by a peculiar physical sensation that my chair was slowly sinking into the floor as though into sand.

  “Why is she in solitary?” I asked.

  “Sometimes when a patient is first admitted with acute mania, the drugs that block the production of dopamine initially cause the brain to go into overdrive producing more and more dopamine to try to fix the blockade. This can result in an intensification of the existing mania, and in your daughter’s case, very acute psychosis.”

  I stared at the doctor. It appeared that what she was saying was that the drugs they had given Vera had actually made her worse. I almost wanted to laugh, it was so awful. “What did she do, though? Surely she must have done something?”

  “I wasn’t on duty at the time, I only got here in the morning, but my understanding is that she removed her pajamas and she entered the rooms of other patients naked and was trying to wake them up and assemble them so she could…give a kind of sermon, or a speech.”

  I nodded. I thought of the video Fang had shown me of Vera naked, claiming to be God’s daughter. I thought of the way she had talked to me and Daniel, oratorical, unstoppable, her knife almost an afterthought, a kind of shiny, dangerous conductor’s baton. I understood suddenly that even if this place was stupid, even if their medication didn’t work, even if they kept Vera in padded cells and refused to let me see her, I still had no choice but to put her here. Because I didn’t know how to take care of her on my own. My mouth was incredibly dry.

  “When will I be able to see her?” I asked.

  “It could be hours, it could be days.”

  —

  I left the duffel of Vera’s clothes with an orderly and threw away the chocolate cake and cabbage rolls in a trash can on the street. I had nowhere to go, but I found the idea of returning to the apartment repugnant. I began walking, and walking felt like the answer, felt like the only thing that could help me, and so I just kept doing it.

  It turned out that you could traverse pretty much the entire old town of Vilnius in a big triangle, simply by making lefts on the three main drags, so I did this for maybe three hours. At times I stopped and bought coffee. Once I bought a cinnamon bun that I immediately threw away. I bummed a cigarette from an old man. That seemed to help. I walked until the balls of my feet were on fire and I had blisters on my heels.

  On Gedimino prospektas there was a small museum, a portrait gallery, and I paid thirty litas to go inside. I wandered through the paintings. Most of them were of men, historically or locally significant men. They were fat and red-nosed and jowly, or else thin-necked and hollow-eyed, like mean turkeys. They all looked like alcoholics. They all looked incredibly sad. I kept picturing them as babies for some reason. They looked like babies holding broken toys, trying not to cry. One of the uncanny things about the actual experience of walking around Vilnius was that everyone looked the same. City of diversity though it was, Poles and Lithuanians and Russians and Belorussians looked remarkably alike. In the States, there were so many kinds of faces. In California, there were people from all over Asia, people from Mexico, people from Polynesia. Black people, white people, all colors and shades of brown people. But here, all of the people looked related, like one huge extended family. The men in these portraits could have been brothers or cousins. And they all looked like me.

  Katya had called to accuse me of having the genes for mental illness on my side of the family because she knew about my father. She was the only one I had told. I had written her a letter, pouring out the whole truth at the end of that summer, and it was the only one she had responded to. “He sounds like a nut job,” she wrote. “Try to forget him.” At the time, I thought it was hilarious that Katya of all people would impugn someone else’s mental stability. She was herself such a nut. But the idea stuck with me. There was no proof that my father was actually mentally ill, but there were details that suggested it. When he had shown up to that “date” with my mother, he had been wearing a trench coat, and he kept asking her questions then scribbling her answers in a small notebook. She found out later he was also tape-recording all their conversations. Was he really mentally ill? I didn’t know. But I worried about it enough. Enough so that when Vera was first diagnosed, I felt guilty.

  It was my greatest fear—that I was carrying his genes like undetonated grenades, and I had given them to Vera by mistake. Maybe that was why I had wanted to believe Herkus was the grandson of a Nazi. I wanted to believe there was someone who was more genetically tainted than myself. Or I wanted to believe that genetics didn’t matter, that even though my father was inside me, in every single cell of my body, he couldn’t touch me. He didn’t know me. He had nothing to do with my fate, with my life, with my choices. I had to believe that or else the quarantine that I had spent my life building against him would be for nothing.

  I left the portrait gallery when I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe. Outside, it was bright and sunny. I realized I was in front of the jewelry shop where I had bought the amber necklace that I had given to Susan, and the guilt was immediate and lacerating. I had given Vera’s necklace to someone else. I had taken something special, and I had given it away like it didn’t matter. Obviously it was absurd to think Vera wouldn’t have had the episode if I had just given her the necklace, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I went inside, determined to buy Vera something. It was the same woman who had helped me before. She had long curly hair and she wore glasses on a chain around her neck.

  “Back again,” she observed, and I only murmured, not wanting to talk. I was scanning the cases and cases of jewelry, looking. I ran my fingers through some necklaces hanging on a stand on the countertop and they seemed too light, made of plastic. Was any of this amber even real? It all looked so cheap.

  I left without buying anything. A blister had burst on my heel. The blood and fluid had stuck my sock to it. I walked quickly, finally understanding where I was going, where I had been trying to walk all along.

  —

  I banged on the door to Susan’s hotel room with
my fist like I was in a rainstorm, waiting to be let in, but there was no answer. I don’t know why I had been so sure she would be in. Perhaps because I needed her to be. Feeling weirdly off script, I wandered back downstairs and was just about to leave when I saw her eating lunch in the hotel restaurant. When she saw me, she waved, delighted.

  I sat down at her table. I felt like I was intruding into another world. She was wearing a white button-down shirt that seemed too white, impossibly white, and she was eating salmon carpaccio and drinking mineral water. Her skin was visibly moist and soft-looking, as though she had just applied lotion. The sun shone in her hair. I felt like a crusty monster and I had an instinct to hide my hands under the table even though they were perfectly clean.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “I’ve been having the most gorgeous lunch and then what could be more perfect but that you show up! Order something. I’ll get you a menu.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” I said. I would have preferred to have this conversation in her room. I felt exposed in the bright and airy restaurant.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, and I was grateful to be given such a clear cue to begin my narrative. I told her as best I could about the night before, about the situation with Vera, her episode earlier in the fall, all of the complicated reasons we had taken this trip together. She listened sympathetically, nodding, her brow knit. And the more she listened, the more I let the story pour out of me. The sense that there was something tainted in our very bloodline. My growing unease with Grandma Sylvia and who she may have been. What did it mean to escape with your life? What did it mean to live through all of that? Was it possible ever to heal?

  “I just feel like an utter failure as a father,” I said, “and an utter failure as a human being.” My eyes were hot and stinging and I worried that soon I would begin openly weeping at her table.

  She nodded, pressed her lips together. I waited, but she didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly aware that something was wrong. “Should I not have told you that?”