Rufi Thorpe: Dear Fang, with Love

“It’s difficult to hear because it’s bullshit,” Katya said, suddenly hostile. “Bullshit is what it is.”

I was jealous of her ability to believe in Vera, and knew it was a failure in myself that I believed this doctor I had just met over my own daughter. But I couldn’t help listening to the doctor — it was some kind of reflexive respect for authority, as involuntary as an eye twitch. However, he could sense this and it caused him to begin addressing all his statements to me, ignoring Katya and infuriating her even further.

“This is a phase,” she kept insisting. “I know it is. In my heart. As a mother. It’s a phase.”

But what kind of phase was it to strip naked and try to baptize cheerleaders with liquor? Who cuts up their arm with a kitchen knife at a party for kicks?

And yet Katya was just trying to protect her daughter. Even Dr. Sneed seemed to understand this and he spent more than an hour with us in that tiny office, gently arguing with Kat until finally Vera asked if she really had to sit through this, got up, and walked down the hall.

—

After her psychotic break, Vera was only held at the mental hospital for three days. She stabilized remarkably quickly, though I didn’t know enough to appreciate that at the time, had zero context for understanding what was happening. But in retrospect, we were lucky. She responded well to the drugs. For a little while, it seemed like maybe we were out of the woods. Vera seemed pissed off, distant, but not insane. We would get through this. She would take the pills. Maybe eventually she could taper down. Everything would go back to normal.

After her release from the psych ward, we said goodbye to Dr. Sneed, and Vera was appointed a psychologist by the state named Dr. Carmichael, who spoke in a high, breathy voice like Winnie-the-Pooh. It was difficult to keep a straight face when he was talking. It didn’t seem possible that it was his real voice. It must have been caused by some kind of medical condition, so it shouldn’t have been funny, but it was. After our first session, Vera, Katya, and I all stood in the parking lot for a while, awkwardly making small talk, before Katya suggested we get frozen yogurt. It was right next door to Dr. Carmichael’s office in the same strip mall, one of those places where you are allowed to serve yourself and the smallest size available is basically a cardboard bucket. The three of us ate sitting at the counter, staring out the window at the parking lot. “Can we please,” Katya said finally, “just acknowledge the voice? What was going on?”

“What do you mean?” Vera asked. The medication she was on made her slow and literal, or else it was an affectation she was trying out, a way of punishing us by refusing to be her usual loquacious self. She blinked slowly, like a cow.

Katya did an impression of Dr. Carmichael’s high, ridiculous voice, and Vera’s face lit up, almost in slow motion. She burst out laughing. “I guess it was kind of weird,” she said.

Katya went on and on as Dr. Carmichael, “And how does that make you feel, Vera? Can you think of a better way you could have solved that problem? Let’s revisit that a little later. Was that uncomfortable for you?”

I watched, amazed, as Katya goaded her until Vera was in hysterics, the two of them happily laughing, waving their plastic spoons like batons as they conducted, sentence by sentence, the crushing idiocy of the kindly and ridiculous Dr. Carmichael. How did Katya know how to do it? How could she perform such alchemy, turning tragedy into comedy, like straw into gold? Even as I was jealous, I was grateful for the reprieve, however momentary. Grateful to be included, eating yogurt and watching the two of them laugh.

Ever after that, we all used the Dr. Carmichael voice, especially when we were talking about something boring or something we didn’t want to do: asking Vera if she had done her homework, explaining we had to take the car in for an oil change. Probably it was cruel of us, but it was a necessary cruelty, a way of surviving a situation that was actually terrifying.

The absurdity and the banality of the mental health system were almost unreal: the paperwork, the weird scripts of questions used in therapy sessions, not to mention the problems with insurance and billing. And in the midst of it, Vera, beautiful even when zitty and dull-eyed, wearing cutoffs and stained, revolting, sweaty Ugg boots, telling truths that horrified everybody.

About the medical establishment: “You want to police my thoughts, and if I have thoughts you don’t like then you say I am mentally ill and you drug me against my will. This is criminal. Show me a brain scan, show me a blood test that proves any of this!”

About Katya: “Mama, you are enjoying this too much, you should try to hide it better. You are not in a movie. This is real life. Nobody cares how you feel. Pull it together.”

About me: “Papa, you are so awkward at comforting me it makes me tired just looking at you.”

When she wasn’t saying these cutting things, she was generally morose and silent. She slept twelve and thirteen hours a night. She was in a support group for people living with mental illness that she absolutely hated going to. There was a schizophrenic there who did nothing but describe various salads he had eaten. It bothered her, the salads, and she complained about them. “How is that supposed to help me?” she would ask.

None of us knew. None of us knew the answers to any of the questions she was asking. We just told her to keep going to the support group anyway and that “things would get better.” But she knew we were lying to her.

—

It wasn’t just the bipolar diagnosis. Her psychotic episode had been in October, and by November she was back in school but being bullied. Some shitty kid had taken video of her episode with his phone and posted it on the Internet. I was clueless about it until Vera’s boyfriend, Fang, showed it to me.

Fang, having evidently procured my schedule from Vera, simply appeared one Friday at Orange Coast College where I taught English. He found me sitting in the courtyard, avoiding grading papers by means of drinking bad coffee. He sat down at the picnic table with me, though when he did, he eschewed sitting opposite and instead sat down close beside me, making the whole picnic table groan and creak. I thought for a moment that we were going to tip over.

Fang was a confusing and intriguing mixture of things: Mormon, but born on the island of Tonga in Polynesia, huge and hulking, a defensive tackle for Rancho Cucamonga High’s Cougars, and yet strangely dreamy and easily bossed around. Vera was constantly making him do small errands and chores for her. In Rancho Cucamonga, there was a surprisingly large Polynesian population, and Tongans were notorious defensive linemen. “Tongan tough, Tongan lazy,” the football coaches liked to say, and Vera hated it. “Racist blowhards,” she called them, all the while stroking Fang’s hair, as if he were an oversize pet, a trained bear or tame lion lounging in her lap on the couch.

But there was no denying the Tongans were a wild bunch. Once Vera went to a barbecue at which a live pig was slaughtered and then roasted. She reported that the boys not only killed the pig with spears but kicked it, punched it, literally fought the pig to death, all in the parking lot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Such things went on in Rancho Cucamonga, though I never would have guessed. From the outside, the town was culture-less, bland, a collection of middle-class families with a propensity for big trucks and eyeliner. Katya worked at the nearby elementary school in special ed — that was the reason they had moved there, so that she could be the director of a new program in the district. Their condo was only about an hour inland, depending on the traffic, from my apartment in Irvine.