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.
I had been so busy. I had been so busy with Susan and with history and even with Judith and the stupid cat, with blini and beers and glasses of wine and shots of vodka, with thinking I was such a great father and I was going to vanquish the absurd foe Dr. Carmichael, that I had failed to notice any of this.
Then again, what kind of father snoops in his daughter’s laptop? What kind of asshole would I have been if that was how I treated our new intimacy? Hacking her password that was her boyfriend’s name and jersey number?
I had let her drink. I had let her go off her medication. I had let her go out unsupervised with Judith. She and Judith had smoked pot! I had almost forgotten about that. Why hadn’t I asked her how she was doing? But maybe I had. We had been spending every day together. We had been talking. She had seemed fine. Maybe it was because she had always been so insightful that it had been possible to overlook her madness. Vera had always been able to see through people. Like at that birthday party when she was just a child: “If you wanted a birthday party so badly, maybe you should have thrown one for yourself.” I was so confident in her assessments of reality, in her ability to penetrate and see the truth, that it took a delusion as ridiculous as a conspiracy involving a dragon to make me actually believe, really and truly believe, that she was sick.
It was a bitter, burned-tasting irony that clear-sightedness and insight, her greatest gifts, were the very things that had been taken from her.
I set down the laptop next to me on her bed and rubbed my eyes. I had not slept at all. I had come straight from the mental hospital and begun reading at around one in the morning. Go find the dragon, she had said. And I had.
Now it was bright out and about 4 a.m. So it would be 6 p.m. in California. Dinnertime.
I turned on my cell phone and dialed Katya.
She was less interested in recriminations than I expected. I choked out my story, and mainly she wanted to go over the details again and again, what had happened, what had Vera said, what had Daniel said, what had I said, what had the police said, what had the doctor said. It was hard to keep it all straight, I was so hollow-hearted and dizzy by that point, and she grew frustrated with me.
“I’m so sorry, Katya,” I said. “I’m so sorry I let all of this happen. You have no idea how guilty I feel.”
Katya tsked, loud, annoyed. “I don’t care about you, Lucas. I don’t care right now what you should have done, what you could have seen or noticed or done different. None of it matters. What I care about is Vera. The fact that I’m not there is—” She broke off. “I need you as absolutely together as you can be. I need you to sleep. I need you to be her father. I need you to have lists of questions for her doctors. I need you to write down what they say so that you can tell me exactly. I need you to make it so that it is like I am there, as much as possible. At least until I can fly out.”
“Oh, don’t fly out,” I said. “They’re only holding her for forty-eight hours. By the time you even got here, she’d be released and we’d be heading home.”
Katya was silent. “I just want to get on a plane,” she said. “That feels like the only thing to do.”
“I know,” I said, “I know. But it doesn’t make sense. Just wait and we will come to you. I will get her home. I can promise you that much.” I was sitting on the foot of Vera’s bed with my eyes closed. It would still be hours and hours before I could visit Vera in the mental hospital.
Katya was silent, then sighed. “This dragon business is, well, it’s baffling, don’t you think?”
“It is the hardest part,” I said.
“So Christian,” she said, though that wasn’t what had occurred to me as difficult about it. I hadn’t noticed that dragons were a particularly Christian element, though once Katya pointed it out, I could see it.
“You would be happier if she were having a more Jewish delusion?”
“No,” she said, “I would just be able to understand it better.”
“Well,” I said, “Puff the Magic Dragon, Dungeons and Dragons, fuck, Game of Thrones, dragons are just part of the larger cultural collective at this point, I think.”
Katya groaned as though this bothered her. She did not want to share a cultural imagination with anyone else. She did not want her daughter to be sharing a mind with unrefined American cinema, with TV shows and comic books, a soup of high and low, holy and unholy. But that was how it was. That was the world now.
“Is she scared?” Kat asked. I wondered if she had her eyes closed too. Her voice seemed so near, it was almost like it was inside my own head.
“I think she’s terrified, but she was handling it really well. At least last night. Maybe it was the sedative, but she was incredibly brave.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense for me to come,” she said. “But it’s so hard to accept that. It’s so hard to stay here.”
“You must hate me,” I said.