Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“I have to tell you something,” Vera said.

My fatherly ears pricked. No one announced they were going to tell you something before telling you unless it was something big. Or something bad.

“One time,” Vera said, setting down her roll, leaning back in her chair, “Fang and I were lying in this field, and it was fall, before the episode, but it was really sunny, a really pretty, pretty day, and the grass was green, and we were lying there, just watching the clouds, and I was thinking that we would never be that young again. That every moment that passed, we were moving closer to death, and I felt like I could feel myself rotting. I kept thinking I could smell us rotting, just underneath the regular smells of sweat and skin and perfume or whatever. I remember thinking that it was my job to keep Fang from ever noticing that we were dying. I started doing this thing, of kissing him between his eyes, and in my mind, I thought I was keeping his third eye shut so that he wouldn’t see, so that he wouldn’t know that we were dying. And maybe you think that’s crazy, but at the same time it was true, you know, every day you live, you get closer to dying. That’s a fact.”

She eyed me uneasily, as though she were waiting to see if I would agree. “Death and taxes,” I said. “They’re inevitable.”

She nodded, seemingly reassured. “And then,” she went on, “when I had the episode. Part of it was that I thought, well, that there is so much more to life than what’s cool or uncool in a high school in Rancho Cucamonga. I was watching these cheerleaders getting drunk and I started to see the muscles under their skin, and their skulls, and all their veins, and I realized they were rotting too. They were dying and they had no idea. They were like corpses in party dresses, worried only about who had the cutest shoes. It was revolting. Revolting the same way it is revolting to watch everyone just listen, nodding, as Darius talks about murder, about that poor rabbi, about all of it — the mass graves, the torn-down buildings, people’s whole lives erased. How can the world go on? How can you just go out to lunch like we’re doing right now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wanting so badly to steer her, to force her to think about it differently, less melodramatically, even though on some level I thought she was right. “What else is there to do, though?”

“Papa,” she said. “Do I sound insane to you? Are the thoughts I’m thinking really insane? That’s what I want to know.”

I sighed. I didn’t want to contribute to some kind of delusion that she wasn’t mentally ill. That was one of the recurrent themes in all the narratives of mental illness I had read in books, on message boards, in forums: The desire to believe that they weren’t actually crazy was one of the chief dangers for the mentally ill. The suspicion would build in them until eventually they stopped taking their medication and then they would have another episode and their lives would unravel further. But at the same time I worried I would lose Vera — that this tenuous intimacy would slip through my fingers. And I didn’t think what she was saying was truly crazy. Kat and I had said far, far crazier things to each other when we were her age. “No,” I said. “You don’t sound crazy to me.”

She nodded, leaned toward me over the table. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Now I need to tell you the big thing. And you are going to be really, really mad at me, okay?”

I nodded, unsure what she was going to say and praying, just praying that she was not going to tell me she was pregnant. I don’t know why, it was the only thing that occurred to me: that she was pregnant with Fang’s baby and she was going to try to convince me she would be sane enough to mother it.

“The night of the episode,” she said, “that night at the party? Fang and I had taken acid. I was on acid that night.”

This new fact was like something injected into my bloodstream and for a time I was unable to say or even think anything as it traveled through me causing a series of chemical reactions, complex recalculations that I couldn’t compute fast enough. My mental state was really more like a strobe light than an opinion.

“I didn’t want to tell the cops I was on drugs!” Vera rushed on. “It was one of those decisions you make at the time that then you can’t take back, and also, well — it was complicated. Papa, are you listening?”

“I’m listening,” I said. I had never done acid myself — it had been one of those drugs that scared me a little. But it was starting to click together — Vera’s story, her own sureness that she wasn’t mentally ill, her scorn for the doctors and for all of us, her worry that the self was not a solid thing but instead a swarm of chemicals, a collection of the little men inside of her. Dear God. If she wasn’t mentally ill, had we been drugging her, poisoning her, all this time for no reason? It was terrible to think about, but also building in me was a wild, irrepressible hope that it was true — that she was not mentally ill, that it had just been a big mistake.

“So what you are saying is that you don’t think you have bipolar?” I asked.

“Well,” Vera said, “I don’t really know. I mean, Fang was on acid and he didn’t take off all his clothes and start telling the cheerleaders they were sinners. So I really did think I had an episode, and I just didn’t want to tell the drugs part, but then over the past few months me and Fang have been thinking, well, what if I’m sane? What if it was just the acid?”

I took a sip of my beer. “I’m not going to lie,” I said. “I’m so relieved that I don’t even know what to say. I should be furious with you, but right now I am just — fuck it — I’m overjoyed.”

“You are?”

“Jesus,” I said, “I’m sorry — I’m reeling. There’s a lot to consider. We need to tell your mother. We need to get you off the medication. We’ve gotta call your shrink.”

Vera made a face. “Fuck,” she said.

“What? I know it’s scary, but we’ve got to.” My mind was already a scrolling marquee of to-do lists. I was thinking that I would turn my phone on and to hell with the charges and we would start calling people that very afternoon. Everything could be handled. Everything could be sorted.

“No,” she said. “There’s something else. That I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“I went off my meds three weeks ago.”

There was a heavy pause. She was holding her linen napkin in her lap, twisting it in her hands until it was a thick little rope. Of course she had. I thought of the way her skin had cleared up. Of the way she had seemed to come out of herself and get excited about the trip to Vilnius. I had thought it was Grandma Sylvia luring her, tempting her back into the land of the living, but of course it wasn’t.

“Vera,” I said. “That’s really serious. You need to taper off medications like that, and you really shouldn’t have done that without getting your shrink involved.”

“We did taper off!” she said. “We did — Fang looked it up online, and we figured out how to do it, and we just did it over a couple of weeks.”

“Christ,” I said, feeling grim but also giddy. She had gotten off her medication and she was fine. She was going to be fine.

“It was making my hair fall out,” she said apologetically. “I thought maybe if I could just see — because then I would know for sure whether I was or whether I wasn’t before I told people.”

I almost laughed — it was so much a teenager’s line of reasoning. It was so stupid: thinking about being in trouble for taking acid when her mental health was on the line. Worrying about her hair falling out. And Fang — Fang I wanted to just strangle. Giving her acid. Playacting at doctor.