Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“I love you,” I said. I had said that to her before. I had said it a million times. I said it as she was getting out of my car at her mother’s, as we said goodbye on the phone. I had said it a million times, but this time it seemed to be shredding my vocal cords.

She didn’t say anything back. When the nurse came, she was holding a pair of gray pajamas that had been washed so many times they were almost white. Vera climbed off the bed and accepted the small bundle, and together the three of us left the little curtained room. The nurse said something in Russian and gestured me back the way I had come, as she steered Vera down the hall in the opposite direction. I just stood there, watching as the woman guided Vera by the shoulder. Before they rounded the corner, Vera turned back to me and mouthed, “Dragon. Go find the dragon.”

“Revelations” Word doc Created by User on 7/18

It is unclear to me yet whether Dragon is merely the name of the project, or if it is a metaphor (for that which is on fire, that which is molten and chaotic, yet housed within a scaly exterior, just as murder/genocide/etc. is, i.e., an irrational principle cloaked in the disguise of reasonable behavior), or if there is an actual literal dragon. Not sure about the line between literal and metaphorical in general. Could be a trick, way the government is duping us, possibly convincing all populace that reality has only one layer, whereas clearly it is multilayered as evidenced by metaphysical activities like falling in love, etc. And about dragons, I am unclear what kind of creature is indicated. The Hebrew word for dragon is tannin, which is also the word for serpent, but I need to look up which word is used in Genesis, because if Eve was tempted by the dragon, then that would be a very interesting thing to know.

Pits are another interesting feature. The huge, unfillable pit left by the Great Synagogue. The pit full of bodies in Ponary. If there is a hole, something will rush in to take its place. A vacuum. This is how Tesla comes into things, maybe. But curious as to the relationship between pit in the ground and pit in a fruit. Connection? Coincidence? Even if they are not etymologically related, aren’t they still phonically linked? Possibly there is no such thing as coincidence?

And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority. One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast. And they worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast and who can fight against it?” And the beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months. — Revelation 18:1–18

Hitler ==> Modern Germany ==> European Union ==> Internet ==> Tesla ==> Daniel

“Ways to Keep Papa from Noticing” Word doc Created by User on 7/15

1. Remain calm and collected at all times

2. Do not let him notice the way strangers have begun to respond to you

3. Feed his ego by letting him feel close to you

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I READ THROUGH these documents and more on Vera’s laptop as I sat on her bed, in her little slant-roofed room that was so similar to my own but which felt entirely different. It had taken me only three tries to guess the password to her computer log-in, and then her laptop was completely open to me. The password was “FangBoy76,” which was easy to guess because it was also her Pandora password that she had given me so she could play music on my stereo at home.

Her room had a little chair by the door and her dresser was wider and lower than mine was. These two tiny differences seemed enormous, maybe because I kept assuming I was in my own room as I read and then getting startled that I was not. I read her e-mail first, skipping around in time, then finally deciding to go all the way back to the beginning of our trip and read linearly forward. Then, once I had a better idea of the narrative, I started to go through her Word documents, of which there were literally hundreds. Some of them went on for pages, some were only a few lines. Lots were from before our trip, but a shocking number of them were from just the last few days. Yesterday she had created twenty-three new Word documents.

It was like watching an instant replay of a bad fall. There was an almost physical revulsion to reading bad logic, like looking at pictures of people badly wounded or deformed, and I realized, reading, that I had always been afraid my own thinking was like this. Writing anything was to stare this kind of madness in the face. All you could do was move through the links between one idea and the next, testing each one out, hoping they held. You were all alone with the words and the page, going further and further away from anything social, civil, conventional, or agreed-upon. At times, I came away from reading my thesis thinking it was like this. I would close the document, horrified, revolted. And that had been a well-formatted academic paper.

Her ideas were something like this:

The persecution of the Jews was not a historical accident. (How could it be? How weird was it to hate Jews? Why hate, they were like everyone else?) Instead, the Jews, in their worship of God, had created a positive polarity, which, by virtue of some physical law (enter Tesla), had engendered the dragon as a corresponding negative polarity. There were incomprehensible math equations trying to explain all this. Nazi Germany had harnessed the power of the dragon, but after Hitler’s fall, those dark powers had only been shattered, not slain. The ghosts of those slain in Ponary had tried to bind the dragon to their bodies and sink him in the pits, but had failed precisely because the Soviets had destroyed the Great Synagogue. Again there were references to Tesla, trying to argue that spiritual energy operated by similar principles to electric energy and that Tesla’s work had been repressed because it was too dangerous. She suggested that the Soviets had found a baby dragon somewhere in the region (there was some supposition in the text that the dragon had actually been Grandma Sylvia’s lost child, and that Agata was a fake planted later by the EU) and had built a secret laboratory in the ruins of the Great Synagogue where they could keep the dragon and study it. For some reason I could not understand, she had decided that in the global power vacuum created by the crumbling of the USSR, the EU had become a kind of dream team of power-hungry scientists and Freemasons, who were also secretly trying to suppress Tesla. They had taken over the care of the dragon, but eventually the dragon would grow too powerful for them to contain.

The poor girl didn’t know a thing about alternating or direct currents and she kept trying to guess what the “War of the Currents” was about. Clearly she had been reading the book Daniel had given her, but her brain had been too exhausted from the mania to take much in. In the end, she decided that Daniel was acting as some kind of agent for the EU (because of the pirate shirts, or at least the pirate shirts figured prominently on a list of reasons Daniel might not be a “real” person) and that he had been planted in the history tour to discover how much she, Vera, “knew” so that the government could decide whether or not to kill her.

“I wouldn’t mind if they killed me,” she wrote, “but it would make Fang so sad. For his sake, I must somehow untangle all of this.” It was a herculean task she had set for herself, impossible if it were real, but even sadder and more impossible because it was not. In addition to this, there was a lot of speculation about whether or not human beings were animals or if there was such a thing as a higher self, a soul. The more manic she got, the more able she was to believe in the soul, in God, in beauty. This struck me as profoundly tragic. I did not want madness to be her only way in to believing in those things. I did not want her choices to be between No Meaning, a desert landscape presided over by bland Dr. Carmichael and his vials of pills, and Too Much Meaning, a lightning storm of connections that amplified and built upon one another until everything was connected to everything else and the government was hiding a dragon in a kindergarten.