Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

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!”

Date: 7/14/2014 9:16 PM

From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

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!!!