The Family Fang: A Novel (14 page)

“Where do you come up with those images?” Buster asked.

His mother lightly tapped her forehead and shrugged, embarrassed. “Somewhere in here,” she said, smiling.

Mr. Fang then walked into the room, holding the phone, suspicious of any gathering in which he was not included. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“We were just talking, honey,” Mrs. Fang said.

Mr. Fang’s eyes narrowed. “Talking about what?” he said.

“Our feelings,” Annie said, and Mr. Fang quickly lost interest. He tossed the phone toward Buster and said, “It’s that Kizza fellow. He wants to talk to you,” and then he walked out of the room.

Buster held the phone like it was a live grenade, Annie and Mrs. Fang now slowly backing away from him. “Hello?” came the faint voice of Lucas Kizza, and Buster, dazed by the images painted by his mother’s hand, lifted the receiver to his lips and answered, “Yes?”

L
ucas Kizza turned out to be a powerful, insistent force, expertly wielding the necessary amount of flattery to maintain Buster’s reluctant attention. “I think
The Underground
is one of the most unheralded works of genius that I’ve ever read,” Kizza said, and Buster was too shocked to disagree. “Sometimes, Mr. Fang, I drive around this town and wonder how this environment might have helped to produce such an important voice.”

“This place had very little to do with it,” Buster admitted.

“I can understand that,” Kizza continued, Buster’s interjections like weak volleys to be returned so emphatically that all Buster could hope for was to delay the inevitable. “With such an artistic family, I imagine your development was only hindered by the outside world. Nevertheless, Mr. Fang, I work with a group of promising students, the school’s creative writing club, and I cannot help but wonder what your presence could do to encourage these students to continue their creative endeavors.”

“I’m in kind of a weird place at the moment,” Buster said.

“I imagine, if I might be frank with you, Buster, that you spend most of your time in kind of a weird place,” Kizza offered, not unkindly.

“What would I have to do?” Buster asked, giving up.

“Come to the college, talk to my students.”

“When would I have to do this?” Buster asked, feeling the improbable harden into fact.

“Tuesday, perhaps? We’re having our monthly meeting at one
P.M.
in the school library.”

“I guess so,” Buster said. “I guess I’ll do that.”

“Wonderful,” Lucas Kizza exclaimed.

“Wonderful,” Buster repeated, just to hear what it sounded like coming out of his own mouth.

He placed the phone on the ground and then felt nausea pass like a train through his body.

“You’re going?” Annie asked him.

Buster nodded.

“Are you going to wear the eye patch?” Annie asked.

“I haven’t had time to think about it,” Buster answered.

“I would vote no,” Annie told him.

“I would vote yes,” his mother said.

Mrs. Fang then stood and walked into the closet. She returned with two paintings and handed one to each of her children. “I want you to have these,” she said. “In exchange, if I die before your father, I want you to destroy the other ones.” Buster and Annie nodded and then looked at their gifts. Buster held the image of the boy fighting the tiger and Annie’s portrayed the girl in her coffin. Mrs. Fang placed her hands on Buster and Annie, as if to bestow some kind of blessing, and then said, “I’m glad we talked.” Buster and Annie nodded and waited until their mother had left the room before they turned the paintings over, the objects uneasy in their hands.

U
neasy and itching in one of his father’s ancient tweed suits, Buster sat on the sofa in the registrar’s office, the secretaries ignoring him, as he clutched a copy of his second novel. Not for a million dollars would he have claimed authorship of the book in his hands if the secretaries, popping gum and filled with petty grievances, had demanded a reason for his presence in the school.

His sister, off to watch a movie at the dollar cinema in the near-empty ghost mall on the outskirts of town, had driven him to the front of the building in their parents’ second car, a rattling heap of a station wagon that took ten minutes to start. “Have a nice day at school,” Annie told him, and then left tire marks as she peeled out of the parking lot, leaving him alone on the sidewalk. He instantly wished he had some kind of note, documentation to support his arrival, a mystical object to ward off bullies and truancy officers.

As he waited for Lucas Kizza to claim him, Buster’s hands worried the pockets of the suit, searching for a diversion. In the inside pocket of his father’s jacket, he found a digital recorder the size of a stick of chewing gum, some kind of spy-games invention that was either very, very expensive or very, very cheap. He pressed the play button and listened to his father’s voice, serious and slow, say, “We live on the edge . . . a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” Buster, stunned by the strangeness of it, pressed repeat, turned up the volume, and held this matchstick of a device to his ear as if listening to radio static for the voice of a long-dead lover. “ . . . the law is skinny with hunger for us,” the recorder said, and Buster took out a pen, opened to the title page of his novel, and scribbled the phrases down so that he could see the arrangement of the words on paper.

He had an image of a plantation, ruined with flame from a slave uprising, long since abandoned. He saw a group of people, barely adults, ragged and lean, prying open the boards that covered one of the windows and spilling into the mansion like an infestation. He saw them making weapons out of bone and wood, everything sharp points, and patrolling the grounds, the fields newly planted with marijuana, wild dogs running up and down the deep furrows in the ground. He hit the button on the recorder one more time. “We live on the edge,” it began, and then Lucas Kizza was standing over him. “The unexpected visits of the muse,” Lucas said, smiling, gesturing toward Buster’s open book. “One must always be prepared,” he continued. Buster, never prepared for a goddamned thing, immediately agreed.

Lucas Kizza was tall and lanky, his face baby-smooth and pale, easily mistaken for a student. Wearing a crisp white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, flat-front khakis, an argyle sweater vest, and black leather sneakers, he looked like an idealistic young teacher who had thus far, by luck or by talent, managed to avoid having his guts ripped out by the handful. Reeking of mothballs, his uncovered eye still adjusting to the light, holding the source of his creative shame like a peace offering, Buster wished only to make it through the day without crying.

The frowning members of the creative writing club were seated in a circle in one of the unused rooms within the library. The nervous, desperate energy contained within the room was palpable, and Buster felt as though he had walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. There were six men and five women, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, though there was one man who was in his forties, all of them holding notebooks, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. “So, students, this is Buster Fang,” Lucas began. “He’s the author of
A House of Swans,
which was universally praised by the critics and won the coveted Golden Quill award. His second novel,
The Underground,
was, befitting a second novel, a more complex and divisive book. He’s here to talk to us about the creative process, so I hope you’ll give him your full attention.” Lucas then turned to Buster and smiled. Buster had not prepared. He had assumed that Lucas and the students would ask questions and he would patiently try to answer them. He had no speech worthy of anyone’s full attention.

“Well, okay, thank you. It’s nice to be here. I thought, well, rather than bore you to death with my talking, you might like to ask questions and I would be happy to answer them as best I could.” He waited for questions and then, with a sickening realization, understood that there would be none. Lucas said, “Perhaps you might begin your presentation and that will generate questions?” Buster nodded. Then he nodded again. Then, to negate that extra nod, he shook his head. The students stared at their shoes with even more interest. “We are fugitives,” Buster thought. “We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” He resisted the urge to say this out loud.

“I like,” Buster began, unsure of what would follow, “well, I like to write on a computer.” One of the students wrote this statement down in his notebook and then, looking at what he had just written, frowned. “They used to make this gum,” Buster continued, “it had a kind of minty gel inside of it.” He looked at the students for recognition of this gum but found no sign of it on their faces. “Anyways, I liked to chew that while I wrote. It’s hard to find now, though.” He closed his eyes for a second and concentrated. “God, I can’t remember the name of that gum to save my life.”

Lucas Kizza finally interjected. “Um, Buster, perhaps you might want to speak in more general terms about your process. For instance, because these students are only beginning to find their own voice, perhaps you can talk about what drives you to put pen to paper?”

“Well, I write on a computer, like I said,” Buster replied.

Lucas Kizza’s patient smile, for the first time, began to disappear from his face. Buster felt his only ally, the one person who seemed to think that he wasn’t a total fuckup, pulling away from him. Buster dug deep. He touched the spot where his eye patch had once been and waited for the ESP to work its magic.

“Okay, I can do that,” Buster said. He looked at the students, who were almost willfully ignoring him now, and tried to say something that would bring them into his arms.

“Do you ever have a moment when you have this horrible thought and you can’t get rid of it, even though you want to?” he said. A few of the students looked up.

“Like, when you were a kid, did you have this idea pop into your head where you wondered what would happen if your parents suddenly died?”

Every student in the group was now listening to Buster. A few of them nodded and leaned forward. Lucas Kizza looked worried, but Buster felt something click into place.

“You don’t even want to be thinking about it, but you can’t stop. You think, well, I’ll inherit whatever money they have, but I probably won’t be able to access it until I’m eighteen. And I’ll probably have to live with my aunt and uncle who never were able to have kids and seem to hate me just because I exist. And then you realize that they live on the other side of the country so you’ll have to go to a new school. And if you’d managed to make any friends where you live now, you’re going to have to leave them behind and start all over again. And your new room is like the size of a closet and your aunt and uncle don’t eat meat and one time they find you eating a hamburger and scream at you for an hour. And on and on and on, until, finally, you’re eighteen and you can do what you want and so you move back to your old hometown and get a job, but no one knows how to act around you and most of your old friends have left for college and so you just kind of sit around in your apartment and watch TV and then you watch a movie that you had watched when you were a kid with your parents and you miss them so much and it’s the first time, really, that you understand that they’re gone for good.”

One of the students said, “I think about that kind of stuff a lot.”

Buster smiled. If he had any money in his pocket, he would have given it to this guy. “Well, that’s why I write, I guess. These weird thoughts come into my head, and I don’t even really want to think about it, but I can’t let go of it until I take it as far as I can, until I reach some kind of ending, and then I can move on. That’s what writing is like for me.”

“Well,” Lucas Kizza said, visibly relieved that Buster wasn’t totally psychotic, “that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here with this group, to learn how to take an idea and make it into a story. Thank you, Buster, for explaining it in such wonderful terms.”

“That’s okay,” Buster said.

Another student, a girl who was wearing a tank top that said
DON’T TREAD ON ME
, asked if he was working on something new. Buster felt a quick twinge of embarrassment, having nothing to show for the past few years, but he nodded and said that he was indeed working on something big, but it was slow going. He wasn’t sure if it was any good. He wasn’t sure if he would even finish it. “ . . . The edge . . . a shantytown filled with gold-seekers,” he thought, but then pushed the words away for the time being.

A young man wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses and sporting a thick beard was holding a copy of
The Underground
and said, “I read some of this, and then I went online and I read some reviews of it and people really seemed to have problems with it.” Buster nodded. He found that he was not very fond of this kid, and the beard obscured his mouth so that it was hard to tell if he was smirking. “Well,” the guy continued, “I wondered how you deal with bad reviews when you spent a long time working on something that you thought was good.” Professor Kizza stepped in to remind the class that
The Underground
had also received some very favorable reviews and that there were many classics that had initially been met with resistance from the critics. Buster waved him off. “No, that’s fine. It mostly got awful reviews. At the time, it made me sick to my stomach. I wished I were dead. But that went away, after a while. And then I just felt relieved that, even if people had hated it, I made it myself. I don’t know what I’m saying, really, but I guess it’s like having a kid, though I don’t have any kids. It’s yours, you made it, and no matter what happens, you have that pride of ownership. You love it, even if it didn’t amount to much.”