Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

I saw Daniel sitting in a pair of running shorts, shirtless at the kitchen table. I saw Vera in a nightgown holding a large butcher knife. She pointed it at me as I entered the room, the tip following me like the barrel of a gun.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“You, sit,” she said, gesturing with the knife at the other chair at the table. I hesitated.

“Sit!” Vera screamed, and slashed at the air with her knife.

I sat. “What’s going on?” I asked Daniel. He didn’t say anything, just gave me a long look that I couldn’t entirely interpret. It was a look of pleading, but not entirely a look of panic.

“I know about the conspiracy,” Vera said. “I know about the Great Synagogue and I know what’s underneath. I know you want to help me, Daniel. Or why would you have given me that book?”

Daniel sighed. “I gave you that book because I thought you would think Tesla was interesting.”

Vera laughed, a big, rich stage laugh. “Oh, get real,” she said. It was becoming clear that I was walking in on an interrogation. “You don’t want to fuck me, you don’t want to date me, you just thought I would think Tesla was interesting?”

Daniel nodded. “That’s why I gave you the book.”

“Vera, can you back up and tell me what’s going on?” I said.

“Be quiet,” she told me, flicking the knife in my direction. “The thing about you, Daniel,” she went on, “is that you have no idea how obvious you are about what you are hiding. You think you are wearing normal clothes, but you are not. You think you are behaving as all people behave, but you are not. You do not belong to any system of power that I am aware of. You are operating mysteriously outside of the regime. It is obvious just looking at you.”

Daniel sighed. “Yeah, you keep saying that.”

I had never before been so aware of how physically small Vera was. She was tiny, but she was practically vibrating with energy, and being in the room with her felt more like witnessing a horrible storm or a flood than talking to a person.

“We are alike in that way. Cut loose of our places in the social hierarchy. I was deemed medically unfit. They were going to chemically alter me. But I think you already knew that.”

The words were pouring out of her now, not in response to either Daniel or me but almost as though she couldn’t control the ideas that were multiplying in her brain, forcing their way out of her mouth as sentence after sentence. “Darius was lying when he said that the Soviets used the lot of the Great Synagogue to build a kindergarten. Think about it. Why would the Soviets take a place of such immense spiritual power and just destroy it? Think about how much rock or gravel or earth it would take to fill in that hole. The Great Synagogue was five stories tall, but dug into the ground. They would have had to haul in truck after truck after truck of soil just to fill it in. There’s something underneath, there’s a secret building underneath that kindergarten, and Daniel knows what it is.”

I looked at Daniel. He shook his head at me. He had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t think Daniel knows anything about it, Vera,” I said. “And can you put the knife down? It’s really freaking me out.”

“Papa, don’t make me slit your throat.” She walked toward me with the knife. I don’t think I had understood she was insane until that moment. In a way, I knew the second I walked in on her holding the knife that she was having an episode, but I hadn’t known until she walked toward me with the knife that she was unreachable. As unreachable as a bird or a fish, her pupils so dilated that her eyes were all dark mirror, her hands not so much shaking as vibrating.

“I don’t want to kill you, Papa,” she said. “I was just starting to actually like you.”

“Put down the knife, Vera,” I said. “You’re not going to kill anybody.”

She sighed, whirled away from me and back to the counter, her arm extended so that the knife cut through the air. There was something childlike about the gesture. “Death isn’t permanent,” she said. “There is no self, Papa. I don’t know how many times I have to try to explain that to you. You are so dense, you know that? I try to feed you just tiny morsels of new ideas and you spit them out like a toddler. It’s exhausting. But I won’t give up on you, I promise.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Daniel. “She’s been through a lot and—”

Vera turned on me. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here! God! What disrespect! Am I not a person? Have I not ears?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could hear the washing machine chugging in the bathroom with another load of clothes. It clicked over into the spin cycle and the kitchen was filled with the high-pitched whine.

“What I’m trying to explain, Papa, what I’ve been trying to tell you ever since we got here, is that there is no such thing as reality. Everything is a metaphor. All of this is just shadows on the cave wall. What is real is something else, something that we can’t see. Don’t you get that? If I kill Daniel, or look, even if I were to cut my arm—” She gestured with the knife and I winced, but the knife didn’t cut. The blade just rested there, kissing her skin. I could see the bulge of flesh above where it pressed, and I thanked God the knife was dull. All of the knives in this stupid apartment were dull. “It’s just like a line in a poem: It reflects something real, but the words are not the same as the actual objects. I am part of God and you are part of God, and even Daniel is a part of God. That is what is real. These are just bodies, like puppets. Even the dragon is a part of God!”

“The dragon?” I asked.

“She keeps talking about a dragon,” Daniel said softly. “I haven’t been able to figure out what she means.”

“Dragon is the name of the project,” Vera said. “The Great Synagogue project. But Daniel already knows that.”

“That’s the problem,” Daniel said, clearly exasperated. “I don’t know that.”

“So what are you doing here?” Vera asked, gesturing around us at the kitchen with the knife. “Why did you come over here?”

“You said I could use your washing machine,” Daniel said.

“No, I mean in Vilnius.”

“I don’t know!” Daniel yelled, clearly on the verge of losing it. “What do you want to hear? We’ve been over this a dozen times already. I came here because I think Vilnius is interesting! I like history! I came here because my girlfriend just broke up with me because I’m a loser. I don’t know, Vera! What do you want to hear?”

Vera growled with exasperation. The black eyes were unnerving. It seemed impossible that she could see out of them. “You are making me do this by lying to me! Don’t you get that? Please stop, please stop lying to me!”

The spin cycle paused, then started again. No one spoke. She had said it herself: We were making her do this. It occurred to me that she didn’t want to be holding that knife. That she was scared and out of control, and if I could simply take the knife out of her hand, she would let me. She was just a girl and we were two grown men, pretending to be hostages. I could walk up to her and take the knife out of her hand. I outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. The worst that would happen is I might get cut badly enough to need stitches. I stood up.

“What are you doing?” Vera asked.

I didn’t want to telegraph what I was doing in case she decided to fight me. “You’re tired,” I said.

“I am,” she said, nodding.

I walked over to her, and I wrapped my hand around hers, the one that was holding the knife. “You don’t need this,” I said. She relaxed her hold. With my other hand, I removed the knife and dropped it in the sink. It made a loud clatter as it fell, but she didn’t react, almost as though she hadn’t heard it.