Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“Hey there, Mr. Lucas,” Fang said, and then continued so solemnly and carefully that I wondered if he had written out what he wanted to say ahead of time. “I hope I am not out of line in calling you, but Vera has told me that you know about weaning down from her medication, and so it is my belief that there are no secrets between us anymore. I’m worried about her. She has been sending me long, occasionally incoherent e-mails. I worry that she is manic again and that it is my fault. At the same time, there is little that I can do from this distance. I hope that you will attend to this matter. Hopefully, I am wrong, but I do not think so. Thank you for allowing me to call you.”

And then he hung up.

What a simple and straightforward warning. One day too late.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment, dazed. Then I called Katya.

“Just get on a plane and come here.”

Date: 7/14/2014 11:16 PM

From: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

To: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

Subject: Re: What’s done is done

My Lovely V,

As you can imagine, defending myself against your recriminations is wearying and agonizing and weirdly boring, all at the same time. It is not that I hold them against you. I understand that we are far away and you are insecure. But let me be clear: I do not care if you do not forgive me because there is nothing I need to be forgiven for. NOTHING HAPPENED.

I am profoundly relieved that you have confessed all to your father. It is a weight off my shoulders, perhaps more than you imagine. I was also quite taken with your description of him as simple. I like your image of him as perfectly transparent, like some kind of crystal or very clean water. It is summer in California as you well know, and when you go off on such tangents it causes small cascades of thought, flights of fancy in my mind that keep me from sleeping and give me that sense of late-summer magic. Indeed, you above all other people convince me that magic is real. Not the cheap transubstantiation of handkerchiefs into doves but the abiding ontic mystery of june bugs dancing under yellow streetlights.

Vera, we are lucky that we found each other. Before the spectacle of you, I become a toothless baby clapping in delight. Or maybe it is that you animate me, so that I become a friendly snowman instead of a pile of lumpy snow. Whatever it is, doll: You are my magic hat.

Still, I am unhappy, lover. Your obsession with the photograph of me and Stephanie Garrison appears to be ongoing, and I do not know what to do or say to break you of the habit of that train of thought.

Think instead of this: That we are all as simple as your father. That we are all, at heart, so breathlessly childishly clear. That is our true nature, Vera. Everything else is a mask.

Yours truly,

Fang

Date: 7/17/2014 1:30 AM

From: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

To: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

Subject: Re: The Shoah and your pretty idiot

My Lovely V,

I wish you could know how helpless I feel when you present me with your wild emotions and I am able only to read them on this blinking blue eye of technology as all around me the household sleeps, except for the occasional somnambulistic pilgrimage to the kitchen by my mother. She keeps a key lime pie in the freezer and feeds off of it in the night, like a pie vampire. She prefers it frozen. She does not want it thawed. She passes by me here at the computer without saying a word. I believe she knows that I am writing to you and that I am like a love-sick puppy.

It is time for me to confess what I have been withholding. If only it were as simple as having kissed Stephanie Garrison! You can’t know how badly I wish I had done something so straightforward. But we are not straightforward, you and I.

I have been harboring in my heart, Vera, the secret and treasonous suspicion that all is not well with you. I try valiantly to keep from viewing you with a distance. I do not wish to become your doctor or your keeper. I dislike the idea of evaluating you, as though everything you utter to me, every idea, must be judged fit by me. I am not your judge, nor do I wish to be your jailor. And yet I am filled with the icky certainty that something is going wrong with your brain chemistry.

Please reassure me and tell me that I am wrong.

In either case, I am very sorry that you fought with Judith. But I would also remind you that she is your elder and that listening to her wisdom will serve you more deeply than getting to practice running your mouth. You can practice running your mouth on me.

Yours truly,

Fang

Date: 7/17/2014 11:15 PM

From: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

To: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

Subject: Are you ignoring me?

My Lovely V,

There has begun to be a disconnect in our letters. I write to you with my concerns. I cite passages in your letters, explaining why I am worried, and you ignore these and persist in writing me as before. Now you say the ghost of your grandmother is contacting you.

I am concerned.

I am afraid for your safety.

But I am also increasingly angry. We have always said that we were a team. We were a team before your episode, we were a team afterward. Together we waded through it all, the drugs, the disbelief of your parents, the unfortunate situation at school. Even at your most lost, I felt I could count on you to be honest with me. We were in this together.

But I no longer feel that this is the case. Worse, I feel you have cast me in some villainous role that I cannot escape from. I cannot spend all day worrying about you. By the way, I was recently fired from Fat Burger. This does not seem like the proper venue for the story, but I assure you it was both humiliating and rather humorous. Suffice it to say, I am not a good multitasker. I was supposed to be working the grill station, most abhorrent and hellish of tasks. I do not understand how other people, people far more stupid than I am, are so good at these menial jobs. Truly, I am baffled by it. I am like a tortoise among them, trying to manipulate burger tongs with my digit-less hands.

I am not having a good summer. Sometimes I feel the strain of trying to be myself in my current maladapted life, along with worrying about you, feeling somehow responsible for you, and yet helpless to actually do anything to assure myself of your well-being. Sometimes the strain of all this makes me feel I will snap.

Did you know I considered lying and telling you I did kiss Stephanie Garrison, just to make it stop? Just so I could be cut free and no longer tied to the heavy anchor of my love for you? Are you really determined to tug me to the bottom of the sea after you?

Wearily, I will follow, for I do not know how to stop.

Yours truly,

Fang

PS: I am sorry I refused to ever acknowledge the note you left in my underwear drawer. I did receive it, but the effect was perhaps more claustrophobic than you intended. I have no desire to “turn into you” or to be your mental twin. That was never the plan. I wanted to love you, but as myself, and for you as yourself. Do you understand the difference?

Date: 7/18/2014 5:21 PM

From: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

To: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

Subject: Re: re: Are you ignoring me?

V,

I no longer believe there is anything I can do for you through e-mail. I have left a voice mail for your father, explaining my concerns. I cannot do this anymore.

Please stop writing me. It is torturous for me. I cannot take any more of it.

I hope some day you forgive me.

As ever, just more distantly,

Fang

AFTER I GOT THE VOICE MAIL from Fang, it occurred to me that I had not really read his half of the e-mail exchange with Vera. Feeling much more like a snoop than I had the first time, I logged on to her computer and started to go through her mail folder. As I tried to piece together their whole correspondence, what she wrote to him, what he replied next, what she had said to that, I found that I couldn’t, and that was when I realized that a lot of his letters to her and her letters to him had been deleted. But they were right there in the trash folder of her mail program. So I read those too, and gradually a fuller picture began to emerge.