Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

My mother does not believe me. We waited until it was seven in the morning California time and called her and she told him that acid can trigger bipolar and blah blah blah. He got really mad at her! I’ve never seen my dad mad before, and it is true that it does make him look kind of impotent because he holds it in too much, and he turns all pink, but at the same time it was really kind of impressive. He threw his cell phone against the wall after she hung up, and it broke into two pieces, but then we had to quick-fix it so he could call my doctor and see what my doctor had to say, but it was easy to fix. It was just that the plastic casing had popped apart. Thank God the screen didn’t shatter because I left my phone in Cali.

Dr. Carmichael said I had to get back on my medication. Which, I mean, what else is he gonna say, he doesn’t want to get sued, right? And I’m all the way over here, he can’t evaluate me. And you know what my dad says? He says NO!!! Fang, he said no! And he called Dr. Carmichael a joke! He actually said that, he said, “You’re not a doctor, you’re a joke.” All sorts of insane things began spewing out of him: “My daughter’s life is on the line here,” “I am serious, sir, I’m deadly serious,” and, my favorite, “What exactly would she have to do to make you reconsider your diagnosis? Walk on water? Swallow a sword? I mean, really, once you’ve diagnosed someone is there anything they could ever do that would make you reconsider, or are you infallible?”

I mean, Fang, he lost control. He totally did. Not that Dr. Carmichael didn’t deserve it, he is a joke, but still, my dad is supposed to be a grown-up, he should never have said any of that stuff, but you know why he did?! Because he is simple!!! Wonderfully, lovably, adorably, perfectly pure and simple!!!

After the phone call to Dr. Carmichael, which ended a little anticlimactically with scheduling an appointment for as soon as we get home, it was like he was transported by what had just happened into the locker-room scene of a football movie, and he sat down at the table with me and he said, “Listen, Vera. I need you to listen to me. This is not going to be easy to undo. It is not going to be easy to get people to believe you. But we will fight. And we will win. We will win, Vera.”

I legitimately got the shivers!!! Oh, it was amazing, Fang. I wish you could have been here.

With Love,

From Vilnius,

Your triumphant,

V

PS: I totally got caught smoking pot with Judith Winter this morning. But just GUESS who she got the pot from?! That little tenor shaped like a teapot from that crazy concert the first night! She says he is a total sweetheart. Judith is absolutely the best. Also there is a ton of Vilnius stuff I need to tell you about, but I am too happy and too excited to talk about it now. I am going to go just sprawl on my bed thinking about how perfect the world can sometimes be.

THE MOST DISTURBING THING ABOUT Vera’s confession was that it didn’t “change everything,” so much as it revealed everything as having been other than it had seemed to be. Nothing had changed, in fact, it was just that I now knew more about what had happened and so it all looked different to me. I had heard a story once of an Amazon tribesman who had lived his whole life in the jungle where line of sight was limited to thirty paces or so. The first time he was taken on a road and driven through fields where you could see long distances, he saw a building far away and asked what the miniature house was for. Having never had to calculate perspective, his brain simply didn’t know how to do it. That was how I felt in the days after Vera’s confession: like a man baffled by miniature houses that got mysteriously bigger as you approached them.

It wasn’t just seeing Vera as suddenly sane that was a mind trip, it was also the literal trip we were on: It was Vilnius. It was seeing Grandma Sylvia differently, and by extension seeing my mother differently. It was seeing European history differently by getting to know this peculiar and really rather small city, which didn’t seem to be a city so much as a concatenation of different cities happening on top of one another, both simultaneously and consecutively. War, genocide, and even the weather had conspired to make Vilnius a place people were constantly fleeing. Darius mentioned quite casually Vilnius had lost ninety percent of its prewar population. With such an unstable population, Vilnius was literally a different city than it had been. For this reason, it was a city without memory. A city of strangers, Darius called it.

The day after Vera’s confession, our history walk was through the district of Užupis, technically the Republic of Užupis, a small area that, either in earnest or in prolonged jest, had proclaimed itself independent of all of Lithuania, Europe, and the world, though its statehood was recognized by no government. It was difficult to know how seriously Užupis took itself, Darius explained, since they declared their independence on April 1. I hadn’t known April Fools’ Day was a thing in Lithuania, but when I asked, Darius looked at me with his ice-blue eyes, unamused. “You think America made up April Fools’ Day?”

I had already framed Vilnius in my mind as a liminal place, a portal between East and West, but also, as Darius had mentioned, a portal between the living and the dead, and I didn’t like the idea of crossing the river into Užupis. It made me think of the River Styx. But the River Vilnia was narrow and picturesque, not haunting or misty, and the bridge railings were bristling with love locks. It was a custom around there, Darius told us, for young couples to have their initials engraved on a lock, which they attached to the bridge, and then together they would throw the key into the river. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of locks on the bridge, covering every bar of the railing. “They do this now in many cities,” Darius explained, “but it has been a custom in Eastern Europe for at least a hundred years.” Vera was clearly delighted by them, and ran her hands over the clumps of padlocks as we passed by.

On the other side, there was a sign letting us know we had entered Užupis. Darius translated: “Smile, drive slowly, create masterpieces, and be careful of the river.” The Republic of Užupis was small, only a little over half a square kilometer with seven thousand residents. Užupis even had its own army, Darius said, though it was comprised of only eleven men. “This is the artists’ country,” he said. “The president himself is a poet, musician, and filmmaker. Everyone here is either involved with the arts in some way or wishes they were.”

I wondered what Dr. Carmichael would think about such a place. Would he become furious and begin impotently writing prescriptions for every passerby, or would he melt with repressed desire and throw himself at the foot of some tangle-haired poetess and beg to be remade? I thought it was rather more likely to be the latter, honestly. Dr. Carmichael, as hateful as he was, didn’t ever seem to enjoy being himself.

It was a big group that day. I noticed that both Daniel and Susan were with us. Even Judith had come and was walking along steadied by Vera’s arm. I forced myself not to turn around and catch Susan’s eye, but I couldn’t help being aware of where she was in the group, closer or floating farther away, as Darius led us around.

He took us to a square with a statue of the angel Gabriel blowing his horn to rouse the artists, or else to announce the end of the world. Previously this square had housed a statue of an egg, but the egg had now been moved to another part of town. “There were a lot of empty plinths,” Darius said and stared at us, pausing, almost as though he were uncertain if he would go on. Was it worth it to explain the history of his country to these people, most of them idiots? I was aware of my own beer gut, of the Owl People in their bright clogs, of the general distracted, ragtag appearance of our group and I felt embarrassed, but also thought that what Darius was doing in taking us on these history tours was possibly heroic. “When Lithuania became independent of the Soviet Union and all the statues of Lenin were torn down, there were many empty plinths. Užupis actually began as an idea two years before the republic was founded when a group of artists decided to erect a statue of Frank Zappa. It is not in Užupis, however, it is over by the children’s hospital. If anyone wishes to go looking for it.”