Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“So probably timing-wise,” Herkus said, “the baby was from the forest husband, not the officer.” I understood now what Herkus was trying to piece together, why Justine had been shooting me warning glances. Herkus’s mother could have been the child of that SS officer. Which would mean that sweet, goofy, beautiful Herkus had a Nazi for a grandfather. A rapist Nazi even.

“I am sure,” Justine said, “that your mother was the daughter of the forest husband.”

“Yes,” I agreed, because it was the thing to do, the thing to reassure Herkus. But I imagined that if the baby were the Nazi officer’s child, Grandma Sylvia would have had even more reason to leave the baby with her brother and not stay, even more reason to turn her back and return to the darkness of the forest. There was a compelling psychology to this explanation that I couldn’t entirely let go. And maybe it was just because I was so woozily drunk, but when I looked into Herkus’s face, his eyes seemed uncannily blue, merciless. It seemed like a foregone conclusion, almost, that he was the progeny of that SS officer. It was, I felt, a terrible tragedy, but also an unavoidable one, like the ending of Romeo and Juliet.

It was closing time at the bar and suddenly we were on our feet and being herded to the door. I realized as we were almost outside that I hadn’t paid for any of my drinks.

“Don’t worry about it,” Herkus said, patting me on the back. “They are my friends here. On the house.”

“No,” I said, “but I didn’t just have this one beer — I had — I need to pay.”

“Next time you treat me!” Herkus said. Herkus had put on a brown leather jacket that was cool and buttery soft when I hugged him. It was raining very lightly outside, but it was still warm.

“Will I see you again?” I asked, confused, misty-eyed, as though Herkus and Justine were angels who had visited me and might not come again.

“Of course! Of course!” they said.

“I will call you,” Justine said.

And then I was walking down a street by myself. The rain was pleasant. I wandered for what seemed like a long time. When I came to the River Vilnia, I realized I was lost and I should not cross it. I knew for certain that I didn’t live on the other side of the river, so I doubled back the way I had come. I thought of Grandma Sylvia in the forest, killing Nazis. She killed four Nazis. That had always been the story I was told. One of them she stabbed in the neck with a knife while he was taking a shit in the forest.

At one point, I realized I was outside of Susan’s hotel. I stood in the gutter, swaying, looking up at the darkened windows. I didn’t even know which room was hers. I wished desperately that I could go to her, that I could tell her everything I had learned from Herkus and Justine, that I could put my head on her lap and she would stroke my hair and possibly give me a glass of water and some Advil.

“Inadvisable,” I said to myself, still swaying, looking up at the dark windows.

But I realized I now knew where I was and I could find our apartment.

Once my key was in the lock of our front door, I understood that I had been terrified for hours, unsure if I would ever be able to find my way home. My mind had not registered the fear, but my body was full of it, and I was shaking and unable to breathe normally.

Inside, I sat on my bed in the dark and looked out at the moon as I listened to my heart pounding like a lonely drum in my ears.

“Off the Record” Word doc Created by User on 7/17

I have been thinking more about the possibility of there being no self at all. My mind goes in two directions. One is that if my perception of my self is determined by my brain chemistry, which seems like a duh since the invention of SSRIs and antidepressants, then I am really just a pot of bubbling chemical soup and my consciousness is just a by-product of my being. Which means that consciousness isn’t some magic pebble that only human beings, made in God’s image, possess. Probably all biological beings have varying levels of consciousness and self-consciousness: there is something it is like to be a dolphin or a pig or a dog or even a clam or a bug. The complexity of the self-perceived self is probably just a reflection of the overall complexity of the organism. In other words, maybe even rocks have really simple primitive rock-consciousnesses.

It is five in the morning. I have not slept and I don’t think I am going to. It is bright as day outside. My father is snoring in the next room and it is so loud it is impossible to believe he is actually making that sound with his body.

The other direction I head in, is what if we are not single people but, like, genetic collages, so that part of my grandmother goes on in me, or part of my great-great-great-uncle. I mean, genetically that is EXACTLY what happens, but I am just saying: We have this illusion that we are somehow separate from our ancestors as though our stories have nothing to do with their stories and maybe that is an incredibly stupid thing to think. Maybe people who remember “past lives” are actually remembering their ancestors. What is ancestor worship all about? I know it is a thing, but I don’t know much about it.

After my fight with Judith, I couldn’t sleep and my dad was still out, so I decided to maybe go find him, only I ran into Daniel at a café, so I sat down with him. He had been out running, I guess, because he was wearing a T-shirt and running shorts instead of his usual pirate outfit. He was drinking a vanilla milk shake. I knew as soon as I laid eyes on him, “Oh, this is the night I have sex with you. I was wondering how this all was going to happen, but this is the way it transpires.” Sometimes I know things like that, and everything feels gentle and predestined, and all I have to do is let it happen.

A lot about Daniel is confusing. For instance, going on a run and then stopping for a vanilla milk shake on your way home. That’s a weird thing to do at ten at night. Also, he is incredibly physically attractive: tan skin, dark hair, a robust, almost phallic-looking nose, and a really wonderful body. And yet he wears the pirate shirts and those khaki Dockers that come all the way up to your belly button. I think the shirts are cut the way they are because currently he is living in Saudi Arabia, or at least that’s what he told me the night we went to the jazz club. So I guess it isn’t his fault, but still. It is even weird that he is living in Saudi Arabia.

“What do you think about what’s going on in Ukraine?” Daniel asked me. The lights of the café where we sat were bright-hot neon and it reminded me of a carnival against the swimming darkness outside. I sighed. So he was going to make me work for it. I would have to be intelligent in order for him to have sex with me. He knew about my Russianness and now I would have to perform for him. I resented it, even as I knew I would oblige.

“I think Putin is winging it,” I said, quoting almost exactly from a Times article I had read and just praying like hell he hadn’t read the same one. “Everyone keeps analyzing what he’s doing, but I don’t think analysis will help. There has to be an underlying pattern in order for you to analyze something. But Putin is just winging it and when he gets scared he tends to double down.”

“The CIA released something where they had some analysis of him done in secret and they think he has autism,” Daniel said.

I shrugged. I didn’t care if Putin had autism. The man was cracked. Maybe autism was part of it, but it barely seemed like useful information to me.

“Maybe the CIA leaked that because they knew it would irritate Putin to hear they thought he was autistic.”