Rufi Thorpe: Dear Fang, with Love

All afternoon, Katya and I worked in a frenzy. At the apartment, she called the airlines on her phone, fuck the charges; I called my mother on my phone, fuck the charges. I sat, hunched on my bed, listening to Katya’s strident Russian through the wall, as the line rang.

I had let my mother know what was going on in the flurry of phone calls and canceled plane flights right after Vera’s episode, but because talking on the phone was so expensive, I hadn’t talked to her since, and in all the upset over the Vera situation, I still hadn’t managed to tell her about Agata or Herkus, or the red farmhouse outside of Vilnius with grass on the roof. When she picked up, I explained we were finally coming home and gave her all the latest on Vera’s condition. I told her I would e-mail her our flight information as soon as Katya had it pinned down.

“And there’s more I have to tell you,” I said. Because it was beginning to be awkward and monstrous to have not told her about her own sister. So I told her. But something happened when I confessed about Herkus and Agata, a weird kind of logorrhea that I couldn’t stop. I just went on and on.

“And it was really beautiful. A little girl put a pink sash on her and everyone sang, and there were all these little kids everywhere. It was such a beautiful day and I just wished you could have been there, but then Vera told me that Herkus had left his wife and three kids for this other, younger woman, the genealogist actually, and I just — I feel gross about it. He even called me because I guess he got word about Vera from the program, through Justine or whatever, but I never returned his call. He was just so drunk and I felt like — of course, of course, he’s a drunk loser just like me!”

“Oh, Lucas,” she said, and her voice was filled with tenderness. My mother was not always tender. She could be abrasive and cold and arch. She could be anything at all, anything the moment called for. But when she was tender, there was no one more tender in the world.

“And I never told you this,” I said, “but when I was living in New York, I found my father.” The whole story spilled out of me. Our first meeting. Our mutual love of The Tempest. The nasty things he had said about her. Everything, even the tape of himself as Iago that he had given me as a Christmas present.

“You poor boy,” my mother said. “I’m so sorry you had to find out like that. I should have told you he was a real shit. I just didn’t want to talk bad about him to you. I wanted you to imagine any kind of father you wanted for yourself, you know? You used to say so proudly to the other kids in school that your father was a famous actor. And I was always like, what am I? Chopped liver? But still. I wanted you to get to keep that.”

I laughed a little, not because this was funny but because I was relieved that I wasn’t going to cry.

“I just hate that I’m related to him,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t bother being upset with things you can’t change.”

“But all the really upsetting things are things you can’t change!” I said, almost shouting in a kind of play anger.

She laughed. “Well, that’s certainly true.”

We didn’t say anything, and then she made a little noise in her throat. “Lucas, Lucas, Lucas, my boy. I love you so much. I wish I could take all the hurt in the universe and swallow it so that there was nothing left for you to find, no single crumb of evil in the whole universe, and you could wander around just happy.”

“Yeah, but I’m a grown-ass man, Mom. I’m supposed to deal with shit.”

“I know,” she said, “but every mother feels that way.”

—

After Vera was discharged, and her bills were all paid, a minor nightmare in itself since we did not have Lithuanian insurance, everything returned suddenly to normal, or to some slow dreamlike facsimile of normal. She spent that night at the apartment, sharing a bed with Kat, and the next day we took a cab to the airport after ceremoniously placing the cat on the roof outside the window and shutting it one last time. At the airport before our flight, we were all three exhausted but weirdly lighthearted. We were happy to be released, just to be in an airport. Vera asked if she could buy a Russian Vogue from the newsstand, and I was overjoyed to say yes, happy to see the greedy way she read it, devouring the images of strange-looking women in bizarre clothing. Katya ate a little packet of sunflower seeds in a way that was hilariously disgusting. The flight to Helsinki was uneventful.

On the flight back to America, I had been sleeping when something, I didn’t know what, woke me up. Vera was beside me, her black eyes open in the dim light of the cabin, though she sat still and seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. On the other side of her, Katya was asleep, her head pressed against the shuttered window.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Am I going to have a life?” Vera asked. “Those people in my group therapy — they’re — they can’t even hold jobs. No one will marry them. Am I going to be like that?”

“No,” I said, “of course not.”

“But Papa,” Vera said, “I’m really mentally ill. I really have that. I’m one of them.”

“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my forehead. There was something creepy about the way Vera was talking, looking straight ahead of her in the darkness.

“I just keep thinking, why would God make me and then make me be ruined like that? What’s the point of making something that’s ruined?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The engines of the plane created such huge, engulfing white noise that I felt like I was going deaf, even though I could hear her perfectly. We were flying through space at five hundred miles per hour. It seemed impossible, but that was what was happening. I might throw up. I held my hand over my mouth and tried to breathe. It was the word ruined.

“Am I ruined?” Vera asked, turning to look at me. “I’m ruined!”

“No, you aren’t ruined,” I said. “You’re not.”

“The medicine makes my hair fall out,” she said. “It makes me fat. It makes my skin break out in these huge, goose-egg pimples that hurt. I’m going to be fat and bald and zitty.”

I just stared at her frantic face. I didn’t understand why these things bothered her so much more than the fact that she was delusional. But then she said, “People will know, just by looking at me. They’ll know that something is wrong.”

“We will find you the best doctor,” I said. “We’ll find medicine that doesn’t do that.”

“There is no medicine that doesn’t do that,” Vera said. We both knew this was true. It was the constant complaint in her group therapy, on every message board online: the endless attempts to lose weight, the endless attempts to switch medications. Nothing worked. What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both. Even their mental lives were often dim and awful. They felt sleepy all the time. Their mouths were constantly dry or else tasted of metal. They couldn’t hold jobs or even really maintain friendships. They were sedated, kept from madness, but not really able to live, either.

I did not know how I would keep her from that fate. But doing without the medication was no longer an option. There was a part of me now that was afraid of her. Afraid of how easily she held the knife, as though she had known all along how to unzip herself from the rules of everyday life. That line that kept people from deviating from the norm, that kept them from killing or stealing, it wasn’t there for her. She wasn’t even aware when she was crossing it.

I wanted to take her to America where she would be safe. That was what I kept thinking: “You’ll be safe. If we can just get home, you’ll be safe.” The regularity of the planned streets, the laid-out neighborhoods, the new-construction houses, the strip malls, the perfectly paved massive freeways with eight lanes in each direction. All of it seemed like salvation. I kept thinking of the darkness of our stairwell in Vilnius when the waitresses would turn off the un-findable light switch, that darkness so complete you couldn’t tell if your eyes were open or closed. It was a darkness that made my heart pound. I thought of Kenneth in the candlelight, of all our faces looking like the faces of animals. The world before electric light must have been a very different place. A place where reality was much looser, and where maybe you could fall off of it without noticing and suddenly find yourself holding another person at knife point, or stabbing a Nazi in the neck, or giving away your baby in the woods. Had it even been truly possible to say who was mad and who was not in such a world?