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.
In a way, I think Fang would have figured out what was going on even earlier if he hadn’t been so thrown off-balance by Vera’s jealousy over the Stephanie Garrison debacle. I hadn’t gone on Facebook to actually check, but it seemed that the picture in question was totally harmless: Fang smiling for a picture in a group, his arm thrown casually around the girl who happened to be standing next to him. But for Vera to be irrationally jealous was not something Fang would immediately connect to her bipolar, especially since he himself was convinced she had been misdiagnosed. Vera was quite capable of being volatile and irrational all on her own, and jealousy can cause anyone to seem insane.
But the letters she sent to him during their fight were vile. And there were even more of them in her trash file, as though she had been aware that she should not have sent them and wished they could be stricken from the record. Fang must have been enraged by these letters, even as he sought to comfort and console her.
Ultimately, Fang was an even stranger and more interesting person than I had guessed. It was easy to see why he and Vera had fallen for each other. I in no way blamed him for wanting to try to disentangle himself from what seemed to him the crushing moral weight of being Vera’s sole guardian, but at the same time, the idea of the two of them truly severing ties made me sad. And the timing of it. She must have gotten his last e-mail right before Daniel came over.
I shut the laptop and rubbed my eyes. The cat jumped down through the window and came to lay beside me on Vera’s bed. The afternoon was wearing interminably on. Katya was coming, but she wouldn’t be here for almost two days. I thought of Vera in the quiet room, her padded cell, and suddenly hoped Fang stuck by his resolution to be done with loving her, to let go the heavy anchor. No matter how weirdly right they were for each other, I wouldn’t wish Romeo and Juliet on her and Fang. I wouldn’t wish for him to be the one waiting to see her at the mental hospital, or the one who has to realize she doesn’t actually want to be holding the knife, the one who has to find a way to take it from her hands. No matter how smart he was, he was still just a seventeen-year-old kid.
I was also experiencing an almost physical sense of revulsion caused by some complicated aggregate of spiritual wrongs I had recently committed. I felt like a spy for reading such intimate exchanges between two people who would never have wanted me to read their correspondence. I felt embarrassed by Vera’s psychosis, and so added to my unease while snooping was the embarrassment of being let in on someone else’s shame.
I remember my mother had a lover once, not Jerry, but someone just after him, who would let his house get horribly, disgracefully messy. He would keep buying new clothes so that he didn’t have to do laundry, so the dirty clothes in his back bedroom got to be waist high almost. The kitchen was unusable and putrid. My mother recruited me once to help her clean his apartment and it took us three days. I remember finding an open can of cat food among the clothes, a bag of gummy worms that had mysteriously begun to liquefy. It was appalling that a human being could live like this, and both my mother and I had an instinct to never voice to each other, nor to her boyfriend, how upsetting his house was. It was like that reading Vera’s trashed e-mails. I wanted to delete them even more permanently, to keep anyone else from ever reading these things and knowing how unreasonable she was capable of being.
It was a horrible, queasy feeling. And dancing over this feeling were images of Susan, retinal burns almost. I could still see her plate of carpaccio in my mind, her knife fallen across the little rectangles of raw fish. She had told me she only wanted an adventure. She had told me I would ruin it with feelings. “You’re young,” she had said. And I had thought it was a compliment. I had misread her completely. Just as I had misread Vera.
Had I misread Katya all those years ago? Was I really so bad at knowing what was real, at discerning what was true?
I napped, disconcerted, the rest of the afternoon, the owner-less cat curled up beside me.
—
By evening, I did not know what to do but return to the mental hospital. Visiting hours were long over, but I went to the desk and asked if Vera was still in isolation and if she was not, could I please be allowed to see her. The nurse could not understand a word I said. I wrote my request on a piece of scrap paper, handed it to her to do with what she would, and then sat down in the waiting room and waited. I waited for three hours. Finally, at about nine o’clock, someone must have taken mercy on me or finally deciphered my note, because the nurse called me over and an orderly took me to Vera’s floor and let me see her in her room.
She was lying on her bed, not like a sick person tucked under covers and propped up neatly, but like a mannequin that has simply been set down. She was fully dressed in some of the fresh clothes I had left for her, and her eyes were open. She gazed steadily at the ceiling. When I approached her bed and whispered her name, she did not sit up or turn to me, just lifted her eyebrows and said, “You decided to come after all.”