The Family Fang: A Novel (23 page)

They collected the equipment, retrieved every reel of film so they could edit it together later. Once things were cleared up, Caleb suggested that they go out to celebrate, and the children began to cheer. “I think I should probably go back home,” Bonnie said. “The hard work is over,” Caleb told her. “Now we can relax and talk about how it went.” Bonnie could not imagine anything she would want to do less, to relive the strangeness of the past few hours. “I don’t think I can,” she said. “I don’t think I can do what you do. I’m not a real artist.”

Camille touched Bonnie’s arm and said, “It’s always hard the first time. There are all these emotions and you don’t know which ones to trust. You know it’s not real but it feels so real that you can’t help but feel uneasy. It goes away, trust me.” Bonnie shook her head. “I can’t do it,” she said. “You have real promise, Bonnie,” Caleb said. “You are going to be something special, I can tell. You’re going to make something really bizarre and the four of us will be so happy to see it.” The entire family encircled Bonnie, hugging her until she felt like she was going to scream. And then the Fangs bounded away, their bodies electric with the pleasure of having created something worthwhile, and Bonnie watched as they disappeared down the street, a family bound so tightly they could not be separated.

Chapter Ten

I
nside the house, Buster could not shake the feeling that he and his sister were being watched. By whom he could not say. Or, rather, he could say it: Caleb and Camille. One night, Buster removed each of the air vents, looked under all the lampshades, ran his fingers lightly over the fibers of the carpet in order to check for listening devices. Annie walked into his room while he was on the floor, his fingers moving deftly over the carpet as if he was reading something in Braille. “What are you doing, Buster?” she asked. He looked up, his ears rushing with blood, a humming in his head, and replied, “I lost something.” “What?” she asked, and he answered, his gaze returning to the carpet, “I don’t know.”

There was a growing certainty in Buster’s heart that he and Annie were a crucial part of the happening that their parents had devised. His parents had disappeared and now it was up to Annie and Buster to decode the series of actions that would bring their parents back from the missing world, to complete the piece. How often had their parents sent them into the wilderness of a mall or public park or private party and asked them only to be prepared, to open themselves up to the infinite possibilities that their parents, god-like, would create? And how often had Buster and Annie, their reflexes so attuned to the chaos that rumbled just beneath the surface of every living and nonliving thing, been able, once the event began, to respond in just the right way to push everything into a better—stranger—place?

His fear was that he would tell Annie all of his suspicions, that they were supposed to keep looking for their parents, and she would refuse. It was a delicate thing, wanting something that might not be the same as what his sister wanted. He was unaccustomed to the position he was in, and so he continued to press his ear against the walls of the house, listening for the sound of his parents’ voices.

“H
ave you tried reaching out to them spiritually?” Suzanne asked him as she sat in his car, the motor running, a copy of one of her stories in his hands. Buster had been meeting with her every couple of days since he had returned to Tennessee, waiting in the parking lot of the Sonic Drive-In, where she worked nights as a car hop. During her breaks, she would fly across the parking lot on her roller skates, slip into the car, the wheels on her skates still rolling, and they would discuss her stories and how to fix them. He ate the food that she brought him and they would sit, their shoulders nearly touching, as the windows fogged up around them.

“What did you say?” he asked, putting down the story.

“Well, if they’re dead, then you could try to communicate with them through a séance or something. Or a Ouija board. You can get one of them at Walmart.”

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” he replied. “I don’t believe in that stuff, so I wouldn’t accept anything it told me, even if my parents were dead and trying to communicate with me.”

“I don’t believe in that stuff either,” she said, “but it means something, right? You put your hands on the little wooden arrow, and you make it move around the board and it tells you something, even if it’s something that you already knew. It’s you doing the talking, but maybe it’s something you wouldn’t say otherwise.”

“I don’t think so,” Buster said, eager to change the subject.

“I guess I don’t understand what’s going on,” Suzanne said quietly, suddenly shy. “You think your parents are dead?”

“Maybe.”

“But you also think they’re alive.”

“Yes, maybe so.”

“And you think that maybe they’re doing this on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t know how to find them, if they were alive?”

“Yeah, we tried, but we’re not very good at it.”

“Well,” Suzanne said. “It seems like you won’t be satisfied until you know for sure what happened to them. And you don’t have any good ideas left for finding them. So maybe you need to start doing stupid things in order to find them.”

“Go on,” Buster said, suddenly interested in her logic.

“You need to do something stupid, something unexpected, and maybe that will draw them out or get you closer to them.”

“And you want me to use a Ouija board?”

“Maybe something even more stupid,” Suzanne admitted, her eyes like slits, as if she was thinking very hard about ridiculous things, as if ridiculous things did not naturally come to her.

“That makes sense,” Buster admitted. “That’s not bad.”

“You help me,” Suzanne said, gesturing toward the story which Buster had obliterated with a red pen until it was unclear what belonged to Suzanne and what belonged to Buster. “It’d be nice if I could help you, too.”

She kissed him on the lips, quickly, the taste of mayonnaise and ketchup on her breath, and then she rolled away from him before he could respond. He watched her, pumping her arms, swinging them like precise machinery, as she moved toward the rear lights of other cars.

B
uster walked into the living room, where Annie was reading a book from their parents’ limited collection, a how-to manual for overthrowing governments.

“I think I have an idea,” Buster said, immediately feeling embarrassed. He could not decide if he was embarrassed for saying this out loud or the fact that this was the first time he could remember ever saying it.

“What is your idea?” Annie said.

“We kill ourselves.”

“Terrible idea,” Annie replied.

“Not really kill ourselves. We pretend to kill ourselves. To make Mom and Dad come out of hiding.”

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Annie said, then added, “that’s not a good idea, Buster.”

“Why not?”

“If they really are dead—” she began.

“But you don’t think they’re dead,” he interrupted with enthusiasm.

“I don’t,” Annie admitted.

“I don’t either. So why don’t we try this?”

“Because if we pretend to kill ourselves, we’ll be fucking up our lives for the sole purpose of finding our parents, who willfully let us think that they were violently killed. Does that sound healthy to you?”

“They
want
us to do something,” Buster told her. “I can feel it. I’m certain of this. They are hiding somewhere, waiting for us to take the next step and make this thing happen.”

“We don’t do this, remember? We don’t let them run our lives anymore,” Annie replied, her body now electric with anger. “They are hurting us, Buster. And if they are hurting us on purpose, to make us do what they want, then I want them to stay disappeared forever. I don’t want them near me.” As soon as she finished the last sentence, she slumped back onto the sofa, her anger replaced by a sadness that left Buster temporarily mute.

They would forever come to this impasse. Buster wanted to believe that his parents still loved them, that they had planned all of this as a way to save their children from falling apart, to make them strong. Annie, however, was certain that their parents had created something just for themselves, and that they did not care what pain they caused in service of this idea.

“I’m sorry, Buster,” Annie told him. “I won’t let them do this to us.” She returned her gaze to the book.

“This is something,” Buster said, and he immediately had no idea what he meant. So he said it again, louder, until Annie dropped the book and stared at him. “This is something,” Buster said again, but there was no force behind it. He thought of his parents in some kind of cell, the cinder block walls leaving chalky residue on their hands. He thought of them huddled together at night, waiting for their children to unlock the clues they had hurriedly left for them, to free them from the awful thing they had themselves created. Annie stood and pulled Buster into an awkward embrace. “It’s something, goddamn it,” Buster said. “We are in it, and it’s happening, and even if we do nothing, we will still be in it.” Annie held him tightly and said, “They fucked us up, Buster.”

“They didn’t mean to,” he replied.

“But they did,” she said.

B
uster sat in his room, Annie asleep next door, the air moving through the vents of the house sounding exactly like his parents’ breathing. He had been working on something, a book maybe, and he said the line again, a prayer he repeated each time he dug into the story he was telling himself, “We live on the edge, a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” He understood now who the fugitives were, a brother and sister, twins. Orphans. Orphans, in this world, were shipped off to terror orphanages as preparation for the next stop, to fight in a pit against other children for the entertainment of the rich and powerful. The brother and sister had escaped, had set up camp along with several other orphans, at the edge of the country, hoping to stay hidden long enough to become adults and therefore undesirable to the people looking for them. Buster had started with the words, his father’s own voice reading it aloud to him from the tape recorder, and he now had nearly ninety pages of something so strange that he had to remind himself to slow down, to let the words arrange themselves on the page, in order to prevent himself from smashing the story into tiny little pieces.

He knew what was happening. He was not stupid. The twins, they were him and Annie. The dead parents who had left them orphans were Caleb and Camille. The pit where the children fought was just a way for Buster to write about the violence that he sensed would be the ultimate end of all things. It would not, Buster understood, end well. But he had nowhere else to go but to the end of the story. He wrote for hours before exhaustion sent him to his bed, and he felt the satisfaction of creation, of making something that, while perhaps not yet successful, was made by his own two hands.

W
hen he found himself unable to continue, the bend in the story obscuring what would come next, Buster would uncover the painting his mother had given him, which he kept hidden under his bed for fear that continued exposure to the image would turn the air he breathed radioactive. The boy in the painting was so intertwined with the tiger he was battling that it sometimes seemed to Buster that the two of them were embracing, were consoling each other for the inevitability of one of their deaths. The boy’s hands, wrapped in barbed wire, the rusted metal digging into his knuckles, were so expertly painted, so detailed, that Buster felt his own hands ache when he stared at the painting for too long. He was not sure, if asked, how he would place himself in the painting. Was he the boy? The tiger? One of the children who watched the struggle unfold? Sometimes he imagined that he was the barbed wire, an instrument used to cut open whatever resisted its touch. Other times, he imagined that he was already inside the tiger’s belly and the boy was fighting to retrieve him. His mother had chosen this particular painting for Buster. She had put it in his hands. And it was at this moment, holding the painting, sitting on the floor, the world still and frozen around him, that Buster felt he had found the thing that would bring his parents back to him and Annie.

He pushed open the door to Annie’s bedroom, the floor creaking beneath him, and Annie quickly snapped upright, her eyes wide open, something spring-loaded and delicately calibrated. There was no hint of sleep in her voice when she said, “What now, Buster?” He held out the painting for her. “This,” he said, offering the painting like a treasure that he could not possibly keep to himself, “is how we find them.”

W
hen Annie returned from the kitchen, a coffee mug filled with vodka, Buster was arranging the rest of the paintings, until now hidden away in Annie’s closet, on the floor of her bedroom. “This will give me nightmares, Buster,” she told him, but Buster continued to lay out each tile, each baffling image of unrest. She took a long sip from the mug and then settled onto the bed. “Just tell me what you’re doing,” she said.

“These paintings,” Buster told her, sweeping his hand over them as if giving a benediction. “If Mom wanted them to be such a secret, why did she keep them in this closet? Why would she make it so easy for us to find them?”

“She wasn’t hiding them from us,” Annie answered. “She was hiding them from Caleb.”

“Maybe she wasn’t, though,” Buster said, growing more and more excited as he kept talking. “This is something,” he said. “This is the something that we’ve been waiting for.”

“I don’t understand you, Buster. I don’t understand,” she gestured toward the paintings without looking directly at them, “any of this.”

“This is Fang art, unknown to the rest of the world. I don’t think she wanted us to destroy them. I think this is how they’ll come back, a way for Mom and Dad to finally reveal themselves.”

“These paintings?” Annie asked.

“A show,” Buster said. “We get a major gallery to show these paintings, the hidden art of Camille Fang. We get as much press as we can. We give them a public forum and let them disrupt it.”

“You’re not thinking this through, Buster,” she said.

“This is how we bring them back,” he continued, unflinching in the midst of Annie’s doubt.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t want any part of this.”

Buster looked at the paintings, the tools he felt certain his mother had left for him to utilize. He imagined them hanging on the walls of a prestigious gallery, a multitude of people bringing their faces as close as possible to the canvas in order to understand their intent. He imagined standing in the middle of the gallery, his sister beside him, and then watching as the sea of people parted and their parents revealed themselves to the world, reborn, no aspect of art beyond their control.