The Family Fang: A Novel (19 page)

“You’re welcome,” Suzanne said.

“So let’s eat,” Buster said, unwrapping the aluminum foil from the lasagna, but Annie pushed away from the table, pen and pad in her hands, and said, “I’m not hungry right now. I’ll leave you two alone and get to work on this in my room. Thank you again, Suzanne.”

“I really loved you in
Date Due,
” Suzanne offered to Annie’s retreating form, and Annie said, just before she shut the door to her room, “That’s nice.”

Now it was just Buster and Suzanne, the food on the table. “I really should go,” Suzanne said. Buster stared at her short, thick fingers, her dark red fingernails, dozens of rings, cheap trinkets, that ran all the way up to her knuckles. He knew that Annie was waiting for him in her bedroom, The Case of the Missing Fangs still unsolved, but he liked having Suzanne in the house, having a guest. “Have dinner with me,” he asked her. “I don’t want to eat alone.” She nodded and he retrieved plates and silverware, filled two glasses with ice and water. He filled his plate with food she had prepared and took careful bites, suddenly embarrassed about his missing tooth. “This is good,” Buster said, and Suzanne thanked him.

“I read your book,” Suzanne said.

“When?” Buster asked.

“The day after you came to talk to our group,” she answered. “I looked you up online and then I borrowed your book from Professor Kizza. I skipped class to read it in the park. It was so good.”

“Thank you,” Buster replied.

“It was so sad,” she said.

“I know. The more I wrote, the sadder it got.”

“But the end is hopeful,” she said. “Kind of.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes.

“I really didn’t know if I should come over here,” she said.

“Why?” Buster asked, having a decent idea of why, but wanting to hear her say it.

“I was pretty sure you were just hitting on me when you called me out of class.”

“Oh, god,” Buster said. “I’m sorry about how weird that was.”

“It’s okay. So, I read your book, and I read about you and your sister and your parents online, and I realized maybe you’re just . . . lonely. And I’m lonely. And I really want to be a writer, and I think you could help me get better. So I want to be friends.”

“Okay,” Buster said.

“I’m nervous,” Suzanne said. “I think I’m doing a good job of hiding it, but I don’t do stuff like this.”

“Well, I’m glad you came over.”

“I’m sorry about your parents.”

“Thank you,” Buster said.

“I better go,” she said.

“Thank you,” Buster said again.

Before she left, Suzanne removed a large stack of papers from her backpack and placed them on the table. “This is more of my writing,” she said. “It’s just fragments of stories and false starts, and it’s not very good, but you said you wanted to read more of my work.”

“I do,” Buster said, looking at the sheer number of pages in front of him and feeling overwhelmed and slightly jealous. Even if it was terrible, goddamn, there was a lot of it.

“Bye,” Suzanne said, walking quickly out of the kitchen, and Buster stayed at the table, waving to her retreating form while she let herself out. He hoped, washing down the lasagna with a gulp of ice-cold water, that Suzanne was not crazy, was not overly prone to depression, and was instead a hopeful and kind, if somewhat eccentric, young woman who would find a way to make his life better. He put the rest of the food in the refrigerator and searched the kitchen drawers until he found a sharpened No. 2 pencil. There was, in his mind, a faint glimmer of something wonderful in his future. Suzanne. He looked toward his sister’s room and thought of what waited for him, the mystery that would perhaps never reveal itself. He felt a renewed sense of purpose, the desire to finish what he and his sister had begun. He would find his mom and dad, solve the unsolved, and then he would be free to break off this section of his life and begin laying down a new road that would lead somewhere wonderful.

shot, 1975

artists: hobart waxman and caleb fang

H
obart would not stop talking about “that goddamned fraud of an artist” Chris Burden, and Caleb began to grow worried, his body tensing for the inevitable moment when his mentor decided to do something about it. Burden, who a few years earlier had actually been shot in the arm with a rifle for a performance, had just completed his newest piece, “Doomed,” where he lay motionless under a leaning sheet of glass, a clock ticking on the wall of the gallery space. He’d stayed like that for almost fifty hours, until some museum worker put a pitcher of water close to Burden, which caused Burden to finally get up, go get a hammer, and smash the clock. “Motherfuckers should have left him there until he died,” Hobart said to Caleb, who shook his head. “No, see, that was the point, Hobart. He wouldn’t move until acted upon by the museum staff. They controlled the terms of the piece, but they didn’t know it. It’s pretty interesting.” Hobart looked at Caleb as if everything he had taught his favorite pupil had been for nothing. “It’s horseshit, Caleb,” he said, waving his arms over his head, drawing the attention of the other diners in the cafeteria. “What have I told you about anything that takes place in a controlled environment? It’s not art. It’s dead, inanimate. Who cares if you let somebody shoot you in a goddamn art gallery? There’s no danger; there’s no surprise. It has to take place in the world, around people who don’t know that it’s art. That’s how it has to be.” Caleb nodded, embarrassed once again at having disappointed his idol. He vowed that he would do better, would burn away all his previous notions of art. He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.

C
aleb had gained Hobart’s attention ten years ago, when Caleb was still a student at UC Davis, when he’d unveiled his senior project. He had wheeled a motorized contraption into the room and announced that he had built a device that would “make anything you’ve ever lost or ruined instantaneously grow back.” Hobart had lost the pinkie finger on his left hand in a car accident some years back, and the students in the class instantly focused on his hand. When Caleb flipped the switches, the machine began to hum, metal rubbing against metal. After only a few moments, smoke began to pour from the slits in the machine’s frame, and Caleb ordered everyone to leave the classroom, that something was going wrong, but no one moved, they were transfixed by the simple machinery that Caleb had devised. A few seconds later, the machine exploded, a small screw embedded in Caleb’s right cheek, his hands bright pink from contact burns, his lip bleeding profusely. No one else in the class had been harmed, and, once the smoke had been cleared from the room, Hobart asked Caleb a few questions. What was the art? The machine? The explosion? The refusal of the students to leave the room? The failure of Hobart’s missing finger to grow back? Caleb replied, his Tennessee accent still so thick that the other students often had trouble understanding him, “All of it. Everything. Every damned bit of it.” Hobart had smiled, nodded, and a few months later, Caleb was his assistant and closest confidant.

T
he problem was that Hobart hadn’t produced anything noteworthy in years. “It’s the university,” he complained. “It sucks the creativity right out of you.” Caleb, barely scraping by with his stipend from Hobart and his adjunct teaching jobs, was not so sure that a secure job, with benefits, would do anything other than help his art. “Trust me, Caleb, art works best when it’s born out of desperation. The only reason I stay here is that someone has to teach the children so that we aren’t stuck with the same terrible art we’ve got now.” One night, Hobart asleep in his easy chair, Caleb sifted through the notes his mentor had been working on for weeks and found that they consisted of hundreds of representations of Hobart’s signature, nothing more. It was at that moment, tracing his finger along the lines that made up Hobart’s name, that Caleb realized that if something meaningful was going to happen, he would have to be the one to set it in motion.

T
hat night, Camille in his bed, technically still his student, he outlined his plan. She wasn’t even twenty-one, and yet he understood that she had a keen eye for what would and would not work, how art should be made. Three months previous, entirely on her own, she had developed a performance piece where she stole expensive items from department stores and pharmacies and then held a raffle for people to win those stolen goods. She then used the money to pay back the stores, usually a significantly higher amount than the actual price, and she would explain her transgressions to the manager. Not a single store had decided to press charges and one department store wondered if she might be interested in continuing the performance. He was ten years her senior, would be fired from his middling job if anyone discovered their relationship, and yet he found it impossible to stay away from her. She was poised, confident, the product of an affluent upbringing, everything that he wasn’t. All they wanted to do was create something important, and they were beginning to understand that they might need each other to accomplish anything of value.

“This is a bad idea, Caleb,” she told him, smoking an expertly rolled joint with intense focus. “It’s got failure written all over it.”

“I don’t think so,” he replied. It could work, and if it did, Hobart would be the most famous artist in the country. If it didn’t, Caleb allowed, then Caleb would probably end up in jail for a very long time. “Great art is difficult,” he said, hoping that hearing it said aloud would convince him that it was true.

W
hen Caleb unveiled the plan to Hobart, explained the potential ramifications of such an ambitious project, the older man smiled, waved his hands as if to say that he needed no further explanation, and said, “Yes.”

C
amille would not let him do it alone. The day of the happening, she threatened to ruin the whole thing if she wasn’t allowed to take part. Caleb, secretly, was relieved to have someone accompany him, an accomplice, another name in the police blotter to take attention away from his own. For the most part, however, he simply welcomed the idea of collaboration, for which he had suspected he was best suited, and so they left his apartment that morning hand in hand, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

They set up in Hobart’s own office, his only window facing the courtyard, and waited. While Camille kept watch for Hobart, Caleb began the process of assembling the M1 Garand, his father’s rifle from the war, a piece of his inheritance after his parents had died. His father had shown him how to operate the weapon, but Caleb found it difficult for his hands to obey the memory of his father’s instructions. With each click of the gun assuming its rightful shape, he questioned the soundness of his decision, the ramifications of failure. By the time he had assembled the rifle, loaded the ammunition, tested the heft of the weapon in his hands, he was almost certain that he would not go through with it. And then Camille whispered, “It’s him,” and Caleb felt the drug-like rush of inspiration, of making something worthwhile, and he leaned out the window and aimed the rifle at his mentor.

He watched Hobart walking through the courtyard to the Arts Building, all of his weight on his toes, looking as if he would fall forward with the slightest touch. There was an ongoing sea of movement that swirled around the professor, each person, by their proximity to the event, now a part of the piece. He took a deep breath, held it, felt his body slip into a calm that he believed preceded sound decisions, and fired the rifle. Camille, standing just over his left shoulder, made a tiny yelp, bringing her hands to her mouth, and Caleb watched Hobart fall to the ground as if the bones had been instantaneously removed from his legs. A handful of onlookers, realizing what had just happened, began to run in all directions, the sound of confusion echoing through the courtyard, and Caleb quickly pulled away from the window. He was unsure of where he had hit Hobart, how significant the damage was, but he focused on the frustrating, time-consuming work of breaking down the rifle. Camille stowed the pieces of the rifle in the duffel bag and, before she left the office and returned to Caleb’s apartment, where she would wait for him, they kissed. “It was beautiful, really it was,” she said, and then walked confidently out of the office, down the hallway, and out of sight. Caleb sat on the floor, knowing that he needed to get moving, to get as far away from the event as possible, and willed his hands to stop shaking. He calmed himself with the knowledge that, whatever the outcome would be, he had made it happen. His hands had made the thing in front of him.

H
e managed to sneak into the hospital the next day, the radio and television still buzzing with the news of Hobart Waxman, shot in the right shoulder, tearing up quite a bit of necessary musculature, all in the name of art. In his pocket, the police had found a typewritten note that read, simply:
On September 22nd, 1975, I was shot by a friend
. The friend had not yet been located, but there were serious charges in the offing. On the local news, the police chief had been interviewed, saying, “I understand that art is a necessary component of a civilized society, but you just cannot go around shooting people. That’s going to be a problem.”

When Caleb met Hobart in his hospital room, tubes and machines and the antiseptic smell of delayed death, Hobart could not manage even the tiniest smile. “I’m sorry,” Caleb said. He now realized how ill-equipped he had been, how horribly wrong it could have gone if not for dumb luck. Hobart managed to speak, a hissing radiator, “It was beautiful, Caleb. I felt the impact and then I was on the ground. I could hear the chaos around me and I could see people’s feet moving in all directions. And I thought I was going to pass out from the pain, from shock, but I kept telling myself to stay awake, to soak it in, that I might never see anything like this again. And it was beautiful.”

Caleb knew what would have to come next. He would turn himself in to the police, hand them his own typewritten letter, explaining the piece, signed by both Hobart and himself. There would be jail time, though less than a reasonable person would expect, thanks to the strangeness of the crime, and he would lose his job, having discharged a firearm on campus, and things would be very bad for an undetermined length of time. He knew all of this. He was prepared for it.

Hobart would recover. He would become one of the most talked-about artists of the decade. He would win an NEA grant the following year. The university, desperate to compete with UCLA, would present him with a distinguished chair. He would get to live off the infamy of this piece for years to come, and Caleb did not begrudge him this windfall. He had received an apprenticeship from Hobart, had learned the almost magical skills necessary to make the world reconfigure itself in order to fit your own desires. Hobart had taught him what was important. Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.