Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

The joke was on me. That phrase kept coming back to me as I walked to the hospital, as I climbed the steps past a melty bronze statue, as I waited in the waiting room to be taken to Vera. I was impatient to see her. I had brought a notebook in which I had written down all of Katya’s questions and where I could take down everything the doctors said. I also brought a slice of chocolate cake and a plate of cabbage rolls from a bakery/cafeteria thing I found on the way, as well as some clothes for her to wear, casual things, jeans, T-shirts, some frighteningly skimpy underwear that appeared to be the only kind of underwear she owned. I didn’t bring her any books or her laptop. The hospital, when I called to check that I had the visiting hours right, had said that I could bring books, just not the laptop, but I didn’t think it was a good idea.

But when I got to the ward, they wouldn’t let me see her. At first I couldn’t get anyone who spoke English, but after a while they found someone for me.

“She is too agitated for visitors right now,” the nurse said.

“But I’m her father,” I said.

“She can’t have any visitors,” the nurse said again. She was a blonde in her forties with a wide, practical mouth. She’d had to deal with family members like me a thousand times, her look said. “Right now she is very agitated and she is in the quiet room.”

“She’s in isolation?” I asked. I imagined the quiet room as the padded cell so often depicted in movies, Vera straitjacketed and flailing. Last night she had been so calm, it was hard for me to understand why she needed to be locked up by herself. What had they done to her?

“Someone checks on her every fifteen minutes or so,” the nurse said.

“But you’re saying I can’t even see her. I can’t even visually ascertain that she is actually here?” I had made a horrible mistake. I should never have left her here. These people were not to be trusted. They were holding her hostage, practically. “Can I at least look at her? Can I just watch her through a window or something?”

“As I said, she is too agitated.” The nurse was clearly getting irritated with me. Her English was really very good. It was weird that my brain could register being impressed by her at the same time as I was starting to get really and truly frantic.

“Can I speak with a doctor?” I asked. “I need to speak to a doctor.”

“It’s the weekend,” the nurse said, “so we don’t have much staff on, but I will see what I can do. Maybe I can find a doctor to talk to you.”

“Maybe you better,” I said, in a tone that was so childish and impotent that I was immediately embarrassed for myself. The nurse just stared at me for a beat and then sighed.

She left me in the waiting room for a long time, and I sat, awkwardly cradling my sweaty paper bag of cabbage rolls and chocolate cake, the duffel of Vera’s clothes at my feet. There were surprisingly good oil paintings on the walls. But then, it seemed painters were abundant in Vilnius. You could buy an oil painting for thirty bucks off a blanket on Gedimino prospektas. Art was easy here. Alcohol was ink.

—

It was a different doctor than last night, not the tall, bald man with the shiny pate, but a woman in her early fifties with dark hair in a braid. She was short and trim, almost girlish, and she bounced on little leather loafers as she led me to her office. In American hospitals, mental or otherwise, my consults with doctors had usually taken place in hallways, waiting rooms, or at the foot of the patient’s bed. Grandma Sylvia’s death, a protracted process, had been full of such conversations, my mother and some doctor in a hallway, as I sat on the floor, leaning against a wall, reading a sci-fi novel.

But here I was led to an actual office, filled with books and simple furniture, an academic’s office. It reminded me of my own office at Orange Coast College. But the doctor had very little information. She had diagnosed Vera as bipolar I. They had not yet contacted her doctor in the States because such contact had to be made through written official correspondence. She listed Vera’s medications and their dosages, and I wrote them down studiously in my notebook, as well as the doctor’s name, which I had her spell for me twice but which I was still pretty sure I had gotten wrong. All of this was attended by a peculiar physical sensation that my chair was slowly sinking into the floor as though into sand.

“Why is she in solitary?” I asked.

“Sometimes when a patient is first admitted with acute mania, the drugs that block the production of dopamine initially cause the brain to go into overdrive producing more and more dopamine to try to fix the blockade. This can result in an intensification of the existing mania, and in your daughter’s case, very acute psychosis.”

I stared at the doctor. It appeared that what she was saying was that the drugs they had given Vera had actually made her worse. I almost wanted to laugh, it was so awful. “What did she do, though? Surely she must have done something?”

“I wasn’t on duty at the time, I only got here in the morning, but my understanding is that she removed her pajamas and she entered the rooms of other patients naked and was trying to wake them up and assemble them so she could…give a kind of sermon, or a speech.”

I nodded. I thought of the video Fang had shown me of Vera naked, claiming to be God’s daughter. I thought of the way she had talked to me and Daniel, oratorical, unstoppable, her knife almost an afterthought, a kind of shiny, dangerous conductor’s baton. I understood suddenly that even if this place was stupid, even if their medication didn’t work, even if they kept Vera in padded cells and refused to let me see her, I still had no choice but to put her here. Because I didn’t know how to take care of her on my own. My mouth was incredibly dry.

“When will I be able to see her?” I asked.

“It could be hours, it could be days.”

—

I left the duffel of Vera’s clothes with an orderly and threw away the chocolate cake and cabbage rolls in a trash can on the street. I had nowhere to go, but I found the idea of returning to the apartment repugnant. I began walking, and walking felt like the answer, felt like the only thing that could help me, and so I just kept doing it.

It turned out that you could traverse pretty much the entire old town of Vilnius in a big triangle, simply by making lefts on the three main drags, so I did this for maybe three hours. At times I stopped and bought coffee. Once I bought a cinnamon bun that I immediately threw away. I bummed a cigarette from an old man. That seemed to help. I walked until the balls of my feet were on fire and I had blisters on my heels.

On Gedimino prospektas there was a small museum, a portrait gallery, and I paid thirty litas to go inside. I wandered through the paintings. Most of them were of men, historically or locally significant men. They were fat and red-nosed and jowly, or else thin-necked and hollow-eyed, like mean turkeys. They all looked like alcoholics. They all looked incredibly sad. I kept picturing them as babies for some reason. They looked like babies holding broken toys, trying not to cry. One of the uncanny things about the actual experience of walking around Vilnius was that everyone looked the same. City of diversity though it was, Poles and Lithuanians and Russians and Belorussians looked remarkably alike. In the States, there were so many kinds of faces. In California, there were people from all over Asia, people from Mexico, people from Polynesia. Black people, white people, all colors and shades of brown people. But here, all of the people looked related, like one huge extended family. The men in these portraits could have been brothers or cousins. And they all looked like me.