Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

Watching him go, it occurred to me that maybe there was something wrong with people who decided they wanted to visit the past on vacation. Maybe what was obviously broken and weird in Kenneth was more subtly present in all of us. Judith was barely able to function or open her own apartment door and she wore a red beret and red lipstick at all times. Daniel was wearing a pirate shirt. I, myself, was so inwardly tangled that I wasn’t able, even to myself, to admit what I wanted, or even that I wanted. I was a fool. We were all fools. And possibly creepy fools.

“Well!” Judith said. “That was an adventure!”

Susan cracked up and then could not stop laughing. There had been so much tension that the laughter was contagious and manic and it overtook all of us, not because anything was genuinely funny but because we were all so relieved. There had been something about Kenneth and his constant forays into creepiness, about the way the candlelight played on our faces, making our skin seem pink and shiny, the hollows of our eyes so deep, our expressions exaggerated and plastic. We had been in a subtle kind of nightmare for almost two hours, and now it was over and the relief was immense.

Judith was pinching the bridge of her nose and laughing, hunched over, saying, “It hurts! It hurts!”

“His dog exploded!?” Susan crowed. “Did he really say that? I mean, Jesus Christ!”

Even Daniel was laughing, though he kept his mouth closed and so he sounded eerily like Winnie-the-Pooh or Dr. Carmichael. “The Jew Hate?” he asked, and we all moaned, laughing so hard we were crying.

“Stage 2” Word doc Created by User on 7/15

I have lost contact with ground control. That’s what it feels like, this blockage between me and Fang. I’m untethered. Maybe that’s part of what made me come clean with my dad. I had been wanting to tell him, but the situation with Fang forced my hand. Telling my dad was a way of tethering myself just a little bit to him so that at least one person will know what is going on with me. So that I won’t feel so entirely alone.

I know rationally that there is a possibility that Fang is telling the truth and he just had his arm around that girl to have their picture taken. People do that. They put their arms around each other when someone says, “Say cheese!” They just do, although why it is better to be clasping each other in a picture is really mysterious when you think about it, I mean, why not just sit side by side! But people do all sorts of weird things in pictures. I had a friend once who compulsively made the peace sign. She just couldn’t not. Tracy Arbuckle. I wonder whatever happened to her.

Anyway, sometimes my mind runs along that track, and I think that mostly everything is exactly the same as it was before, that Fang sees me and I see him, that we are in the same world together, and that that is rare and sacred and worthy of being protected. It feels almost like an act of violence to mistrust him. Every single hour I take the marble of my mind and I place it on this track, the track that goes: Nothing happened ==> Everything is fine ==> You and Fang still love each other. And every single hour, the marble falls through an invisible hole and slips down into another track that goes like this:

People are animals ==> Love is just hormones, just rutting, just chemicals, we fuck whoever is closest to us ==> Reality is thin ==> Fang slipped from the reality of being bonded to you and began to look for a new animal to rub up against, just the same way you got off the plane and saw Johnny Depp and thought: Hello, I’d like a slice of that! ==> It isn’t just sex, all of life is this way, we forget everything we know to be true, everything we know to be sacred. Only one rabbi is brave enough to try to stop the destruction of the Great Synagogue. Only one rabbi is willing to have the hose shoved down his throat. The rest of us just shuffle around, hoping it won’t be us, hoping to avoid the merciless sword of blind, haggard Justice ==> When death comes for us, it too will be only chemical. Our organism will die and then all light, all narrative, will be extinguished ==> In which case, why not just rut with the animal closest to you? Why not let the Great Synagogue be destroyed? Why not look the other way while your neighbors are exterminated? Why not?

And so I let Daniel kiss me tonight. I didn’t just let him kiss me, I courted him into kissing me, I arranged it, I hypercharged the atmosphere until he had no choice but to kiss me. After a deeply bizarre and uncomfortable dinner with that anti-Semitic hick who got so drunk I don’t think he could see out of his eyeballs, we all decided to go to a jazz club that Susan knew about.

I had never been to a jazz club, but it was pretty high up there on my list of romantic to-dos for adulthood, so I agreed immediately. Even Judith decided to go. We were all jolly to have gotten rid of Kenneth. And it didn’t seem that late because the sun had only just gone down, but of course that meant it was already really, really late.

As for the jazz club itself, I guess I had been picturing a dark bar with little tables and maybe people smoking and everybody crowded together, quietly watching jazz being played by old guys up front, but that was not what it was at all.

It was a straight-up club. Or, like, a clubby bar. There were bright white-and-orange hypermodern chandeliers that looked like dangling globules of pure light. The dance floor was packed with people dancing in the most primal manner I have ever seen. Maybe it is just because mostly all the dancing I have been part of has taken place in high-school gymnasiums or people’s darkened living rooms, but these people were sweaty and they had glow sticks and wore body paint and they were gyrating and spasming and it looked less like pretend sex, which is what dancing normally looks like in my experience, and more like people trying to convince God to make it rain. What I am saying is that it was seriously cool dancing.

My dad totally could not get the bartender’s attention, so I took over and I barked in Russian at the girl and ordered us five mojitos, which, honestly, it was just the most grown-up drink I could think of and I didn’t want to get carded, but she actually listened to me and brought the drinks and I learned a new thing which is that I LOVE mojitos.

I was worried that I would wind up babysitting Judith, but right after we got our drinks we ran into the teapot tenor and she was miraculously absorbed into their group. They all like totally loved her, which, you know, I love her too, but I wasn’t expecting random Lithuanian strangers to understand her awesomeness right off the bat. I guess since she met them by buying pot maybe they already had a pretty good idea that she was more than a grandma in boss lipstick. But then it was kind of weird because it was my dad and the Susan lady and me and Daniel, awkward foursome! And we all go to the dance floor together with our drinks because honestly, what else is there to do? There is no way to talk to each other over the music.

And so then, on top of the nerve-racking-ness of trying to seduce Daniel, who is totally older, he’s like twenty-six, hell, he could be thirty, I have no idea, and he has no idea I’m seventeen, and the queasiness of feeling at every single second that what I am doing is wrong and immoral and picturing Fang’s face if he could see me dancing with this guy, and on top of trying to figure out how to dance to this weird music, which is definitely not jazz but like someone took the idea of jazz and then applied it to pop music and threw in some trance and techno, just, like, for flavor, on top of ALL THIS, I have to do it while watching my father dance.

I mean, on the one hand, it was a spectacular display. I wish I had fucking video. His main move was the handclap, and he would do it big up over his head. But then, at the same time, he was so weirdly confident and so clearly hot for that Susan woman that sometimes his dorkiness would loop back around and become cool again in some kind of ironic, really confusing way. Oh, it was bizarre and impressive and very very funny, and it took me two mojitos to be able to calm down enough to ignore it and just focus on Daniel.