The Family Fang: A Novel (28 page)

“Soon,” Annie said, instantly regretting having said it. She began to correct herself and then decided to let it stand. It seemed like the truest statement she could make, truer even than “I don’t know,” or “they probably aren’t coming,” or “they’re already here.” She freed herself from his grip, not even looking to see how he processed her comment, and pushed her way into the restroom, forgetting, for a few moments, what she was doing in there, what in the world she was doing.

When she returned to the gallery, Lucy was still standing in her spot, Annie’s glass of wine now empty. Buster intercepted Annie before she made it back to her post.

“I’m worried,” he told her.

“Don’t be,” Annie said.

“Worried isn’t the right word, maybe,” Buster continued. “I’m scared.”

“Don’t be,” she said again. “Either one of those things, don’t be.”

“I don’t think they’re coming,” Buster admitted. He seemed to be shrinking inside the suit.

“They operate on the element of surprise,” Annie said. “They won’t show up until we think they won’t show up.”

Buster nodded, convinced of the logic, and it made Annie want to scream, the understanding that their parents had done so much weird shit to them that it seemed plausible that Caleb and Camille could read their minds. She could feel her anger, which lived so easily inside of her, become ragged and unstable, working its way into her blood and her muscles. She knew there was little remedy except to hold on to the anger, keep it from spilling over, until it could be properly unleashed, directed toward those who deserved it, those who were, goddamn, still not fucking here.

Annie walked over to Lucy, who moved just a few inches to allow Annie to reclaim her spot. “What’s your favorite one?” Lucy asked, her neck craning to stare at one of the paintings over her right shoulder.

“None of them,” Annie responded. She wished she had a glass of wine and when she found that there was not one in her hand, she felt an intense disappointment, the shock of not seeing the thing you expected to see.

“I should probably leave,” Lucy said, not checking her watch, not trying to pretend that she still had any tangible reason to leave other than she knew it was time to go. “I wanted to tell you something, though I don’t know if this is the time. But I’m here and you’re here and I haven’t seen you in so long, so I want to say it. I hope it’ll make you feel excited.”

“What is it?” Annie asked, wanting good news. She needed something that had the possibility of being realized. She softened for an instant, which was enough for her muscles to stop spasming, and she focused on Lucy and whatever good things she might proffer.

“I got the green light on the film. We’ve got the money, we’re finalizing the location, and we’re starting auditions for the other roles. I’m going to make this movie, Annie. You and I are going to make this movie.”

Annie smiled, reached out for Lucy, who returned the hug. “It’s happening, Annie,” Lucy said. “Whatever else you have going on, you’ll have this movie, and you’ll have me to help you, whenever you need it.”

“Thank you,” Annie said. “I want this to be good. I want to be good in it.”

“It will be,” Lucy said, disentangled herself from Annie, and began to walk away, waving good-bye. “You will be,” she said, amending her statement.

Buster walked over to Annie and gestured to the almost-empty room. “They’re not coming,” Buster said, sucking on his teeth, as if the air was so sharp it hurt him to breathe it in.

There were ten people left in the gallery, fifteen minutes until closing, and Annie and Buster stared at the floor, unblinking, as if waiting for something to emerge from the floor beneath them. A few more people started to leave, a man and a woman, but they hesitated, watching Annie and Buster as if waiting for some sign that they should actually stay. Annie waved to them. “Bye,” she said, and the couple nodded and left, looking very disappointed, having probably expected the same thing as Annie and Buster. After that, the others trickled out the door, leaving Annie, Buster, Chip Pringle, and his mother. Even the caterers had already left, nothing to do but turn off the lights and lock up.

Chip walked over to Annie, shaking his head. “They didn’t show,” he said to her. Annie nodded, unable to speak. “I guess that was always a possibility,” Chip admitted. “If you expected it to happen,” Mrs. Pringle said, swaying, tipsy, radiant, “then Caleb and Camille Fang wouldn’t go through with it.” She seemed the only person in the room who was happy; she had loved the paintings for nothing but what they were, and she seemed content to let them do the work that the disappeared Fangs could not.

What else was there for Annie and Buster to do? They would return, would wait for their parents every single day of the exhibit’s lifespan, until something happened, until the hidden was revealed.

Buster started to cry, shaking his head, holding up his hand as if to apologize or perhaps to ask for a second so that he could compose himself. “They’re not coming,” he said. Annie placed her hands on Buster’s shoulders, facing him, breathing deeply, showing him how to breathe, how to keep the air moving in and out of his system, how to stay alive. “The door’s locked. Just finish turning off the lights when you leave,” Chip whispered, and he awkwardly escorted his mother out of their own gallery, leaving behind the kind of art that Annie and Buster were making, which was not, at all, the kind of art they desired.

Annie understood Buster’s sudden collapse, should have been waiting for it to happen. The exhibit had been his idea, everything riding on this final feint. And now, after Buster and Annie had lined up everything they believed their parents required in order to return, Caleb and Camille again refused to make themselves known. It was failure, yet another failure, and even for Buster, so used to the feeling, it was simply too much to take.

“They’re dead, Annie,” Buster finally said, his voice as clear and as calm as if he was reading the weather report for a country where it had never rained, and never would.

“Buster, don’t say that,” Annie said. At this moment, the gallery dark and empty, no sign of their parents except for the brushstrokes that created the paintings on the walls, Annie could not tolerate, would not allow, any deviation from the singular fact that their parents were alive, were hiding, were awful people that needed to be punished.

“Maybe they’ve been dead from the start and we just missed the clues,” Buster said. “We kept thinking that it had to be a ruse. It was just too much like a Fang event to be real.”

“That’s right,” Annie said. “It was too strange to be unplanned.”

“So, what if it was planned?”

“That’s what I keep saying, Buster.”

“No,” Buster continued, waving her off frantically. “What if it was planned, and the plan was for them to die?”

Annie didn’t respond; she simply stared at Buster and waited for the inevitable.

“You saw how bad the chicken thing went at the mall, how sad it made them to fail in such a ridiculous way. What if they thought they couldn’t make art anymore? And if they couldn’t make art, then what did they have to live for? And if they had nothing to live for, why not just end it all? And if they were going to end it all, why not do it in some bizarre, mysterious way that would get people to talk about them, to remember the best of their art, one last time?”

“Please, Buster,” Annie said.

“Maybe it felt like a Fang event because it was. We just didn’t understand what it really meant.”

Annie felt the sudden sickness of an uncertainty becoming certain. Had she been holding this possibility at bay for so long, with all of her strength, that it was only a matter of time before she gave in to the inevitable truth? She tried to locate the uneasy, shifting plates inside of her, the way her emotions clanged against each other and formed mountains that could not be scaled. There were stages of grief; she understood this. The first stage was denial, the next being anger. She had no idea what came next, and she had no illusions that she would ever reach it.

B
ack at the hotel, once Annie had deposited Buster in his room, her brother falling asleep the minute she helped him into bed, and returned to her own room, she fell onto the bed, still processing the fact that her parents would always be missing, were not capable of being resurrected. In some ways, it should have been a relief, the understanding that, no matter what they did, the line that connected them to their parents had gone slack. But Annie found herself wishing that her parents, even if they were not alive, were not dead. She wished for animation, even if there was no spark behind it that gave the actions meaning. She wanted, she supposed, the sounds of their voices but for them to speak a language that she did not understand. She rolled over, picked up the hotel phone, and dialed her parents’ home phone number. The phone rang and rang and rang and then, crackling and slightly too loud, there was her mother’s voice.

“The Fangs are dead. Leave a message after the tone and our ghosts will return your call.”

Annie waited, her silence filling up the answering machine back at home. Finally, everything unspoken, Annie returned the receiver to its cradle. Ten minutes later, Annie lifted the receiver once more, hit the redial button, and again listened to her mother’s voice, a disembodied sound, the ghost of a ghost. “The Fangs are dead. Leave a message after the tone and our ghosts will return your call.”

Annie hung up the phone just as her mother finished the message, not allowing the machine to record the sound of her grief, however faint. She would not call again. She had heard everything she needed to hear. Annie lay there, not thinking, not moving, not aware of anything except the sound of the air conditioner in the corner of the room, rattling like a machine that could not possibly make it through the night, though, of course, it would.

the inferno, 1996

artists: caleb and camille fang

T
he Fangs, the three who still remained, were in a rut. Since Annie had left for Los Angeles to become a movie star, Caleb and Camille and Buster had spent the past six months sinking deeper and deeper into the crowded interior of the house, unsure of how to proceed. After the
Romeo and Juliet
incident, which had hastened Annie’s departure, Buster wanted no part of the spotlight. He was content to observe and, even then, he would rather keep his eyes closed and simply listen. Camille insisted that it wouldn’t be the same without Annie, that they were a family and it was this unity that had made the art so successful. Caleb continued to proclaim that Annie was no longer necessary, that they were entering into a new and productive phase of their career. He only needed time to figure out what it would be. So they waited, and Buster felt himself becoming invisible in the house, his parents sometimes shocked to find him in the kitchen, as if they thought that he had left along with Annie. To Buster, his parents seemed edgy, every object in the house likely to explode in their hands. They were, in short, a family in flux and they were unused to being in such a state. They
caused
flux, for crying out loud. Flux was their
thing
.

T
o occupy his time while his parents fretted over their next piece—he had heard the word
crossbow
whispered more than once—Buster focused on his writing. Before she left, preparing him for life without her, Annie had encouraged him to do something artistic, something that wasn’t associated with Caleb and Camille. “You need to find something, like playing the guitar or writing novels or arranging flowers,” she told him, “so that you can see that creating something doesn’t have to be as fucked up as Caleb and Camille make it seem.” Of the suggestions, writing seemed the easiest to hide from his parents. He held a fistful of pencils as if they were a bouquet for a date way out of his league. He flipped the empty pages of a notebook and imagined symbols bleeding into the paper. And then, nothing.

He was unsure of how to begin. He had no idea what to write about. What else was there but his family? Could he write about his family? That seemed like a bad idea. But he would write about
a
family. The Dang family. The parents would be midgets. The brother would be older than his sister. This seemed, to Buster’s nascent powers of imagination, to be enough to hide their true identities. And then he simply placed the Dangs in all manner of trouble. Inside the belly of a whale. Locked in the trunk of a car about to drive off a cliff. Falling through the sky, not a single parachute opening. All of these calamities were the result of bad parenting, Mr. and Mrs. Dang dragging the family into danger. And, just when it seemed the family would be saved, thanks to the calm and inventive actions of the children, one of the parents would make some critical mistake that would doom all of them. Every story ended the same, with the family spectacularly dead, only to be resurrected for the next tale. When he first read one of these stories to Annie, she had been silent and then said, “Do you think you might want to play the guitar instead?” No, he did not. He had found something that he could do. He could create conflict. He could see it through to the end. And when it was over, he was the only one left unharmed. He was, he decided without anyone else telling him, a writer.

B
uster would call Annie late at night so as not to arouse his parents’ suspicion. Not that his parents would care. Annie had not been exiled. Unlike Camille’s family, Mr. and Mrs. Fang did not disown their child because she had disappointed them. They would support her, but, if she was not going to be a part of their own work, they could not spend too much time thinking about her. They had, in fact, handed over to her a large sum of money to help her get started in California. “It was a lot of money, Buster,” Annie had told him once on the phone, “like
rich people
kind of money.” It reminded Buster that his parents were, technically, rich. In addition to the yearly grants and fellowships that they seemed to receive without fail, Caleb and Camille had won a MacArthur Genius grant when Buster was ten years old, a windfall so great that it was exactly like winning the lottery. His parents, however, simply kept on as if nothing had changed, perhaps occasionally buying more expensive props for their pieces. The thought that his parents had given some of that money to Annie made Buster happy, because it showed that his family, fractured as it was, might someday heal. It also showed him that, if he played his cards right, there would be a wad of cash for him when he moved on to the thing that was next.

Annie’s roommate, Beatrice, a lesbian who helped run a complicated, illegal-sounding mail-order pornography company, answered the phone. “Is Annie there?” he asked. “She’s right here,” Beatrice said. “How come you haven’t sent me the thirty dollars like I told you?”

“I don’t have that kind of money,” Buster replied. How to explain that he had the money in a sealed envelope under his bed, too radioactive to deliver, its intentions seeping through the floor and into the ground, tainting the water supply.

“If you sent me that money,” she said, as she always did, “I could send you something wonderful.”

“Is Annie there?” Buster asked again.

“Fine,” Beatrice said. “Hang on.”

Annie answered the phone and she and Buster talked about the usual things. Annie’s auditions (“I got a callback for the TV movie about a bank robbery gone wrong. I get to try and talk some sense into the stupid bank robber before the smart one catches on and beats the shit out of me”). Buster’s stories (“Then they realize that one of the grenades is missing its pin. Oh, man, you can guess what happens next”). Annie’s dreams of being a movie star (“I don’t want to be some kind of huge movie star. I just want people to see me in a movie and remember that they saw me in some other movie and that I was good in it”). Buster’s sudden dreams of being a writer (“I don’t think Mom and Dad would read any of it”).

“We’re going to do incredible things, Buster,” Annie would always tell him. “People will remember Caleb and Camille only as the parents of Buster and Annie Fang.”

“They still haven’t performed since you left,” Buster said, unable to hide the worry in his voice.

“That can only be a good thing, Buster,” Annie said.

“It’s easy for you to say that,” Buster replied. “You’re in California. I’m right here.”

“Soon you can leave too,” she said. “Soon you can come with me to L.A. and we’ll never have to go back.”

“Never?” Buster asked.

“Never ever,” Annie said.

I
n the supermarket, Buster’s father, mid-sentence, did an awkward dance across the floor, tumbled into a display of spaghetti sauce, and sprawled on the ground, looking not unlike a murder victim as he lay there, stunned. Buster, his mother in another aisle, froze, unsure of how to proceed. They had not discussed this in advance. His father’s right hand was bleeding in a way that suggested a need for stitches. People were coming to Caleb’s aid, shouts were echoing through the aisles. Buster quickly slid to the floor, the knees of his jeans darkening, and began to frantically scoop handfuls of the sauce into his mouth.

“No, no no,” his father whispered, still grimacing in pain. Buster felt the shame burn across his face, and he began to rethink the situation. Now a crowd was beginning to form around them. Buster shouted, “I saw the whole thing. We’ll sue. We’ll sue the pants off this place.” Buster’s father grabbed him by his T-shirt and used it to awkwardly sit up. “I just fell, Buster,” his father said. “That’s it. I just fell.” Buster hung his head, refused to look at the people surrounding the two of them, and waited for someone else to restore order. In his mouth was the tiniest grit of glass from the broken jars. He let it rest on his tongue for a few seconds and then swallowed it.

Later, in the car, Buster and his father sitting on dozens of plastic shopping bags to keep the seats clean, his father shook his head. His cut hand, not nearly as bad as it seemed when covered in tomato sauce, was wrapped in napkins. “Pratfalls,” he said to his wife. “B thinks we’ve been reduced to pratfalls.”

A
few weeks after the incident in the supermarket, Buster came home from school to find his parents blasting thrash metal and dancing so furiously that it was as embarrassing to Buster as if he’d walked in on them having sex. “Buster!” they both shouted over the music when they saw him standing in the hallway. His mother walked over and then led him into the living room. The table was covered with candy bars. This was how his parents celebrated, loud music and sugar. Buster knew something was going to happen, and he simply waited for his parents to show him how he fit into the dangerously unstable structure they had finally designed.

“Look at this,” his father said when things had calmed down. Buster sat between his parents on the sofa, eating his third candy bar, this one filled, somehow, with two different consistencies of caramel. His parents handed him an article from the
New York Times
titled “Burning Down the House.” In the photo that accompanied the article, there was a close-up of a man holding a lit match while standing on the doorstep of a house. It seemed that the man, a performance artist named Daniel Harn, intended to burn down his house and everything in it, a statement regarding materialism and the cruelty of nature. His house, all the memories inside of it, would be reduced to ash, all in the name of art.

“We’re going to burn our house down?” Buster said.

“No,” shouted his father. “Jesus, no. I would never steal another artist’s idea. Especially one this bad.”

“Buster,” his mother began, “this Harn character is trying to create this spectacle, but it’s as dull as any typical piece of art. He’s telling everyone about it in advance. He’s inviting an audience to come to upstate New York with the understanding that they will see his house burn down. He’s telling them what to think about it before it happens.”

“That’s not art,” his father continued. “It’s an art show. The work has already been done.”

“So, will we put out the fire?” Buster asked.

“That’s not bad,” his mother admitted, “but we have a better idea.”

“Much, much, much better,” his father said, sugar high, starting to laugh. Then his mother started to laugh. And they were laughing with such vigor, so genuinely moved, that Buster tried it out, to see what it felt like. He laughed and laughed and, though he did not yet know what the joke was, he hoped it would be worth the effort he’d already put into enjoying it.

D
uring their next phone call, Buster told Annie about the proposed Fang performance, the burning house, their parents’ plan.

“You don’t have to do what they tell you to do,” she reminded him.

“
You
don’t have to do what they tell you to do,” he replied. “I still have to live with them. And I want to do it. At least this way, I’m part of it. They have some affection for me. If not, I’m just this guy in their house.”

“That’s not how people are supposed to feel about their children.”

“I’m just taking pictures anyways,” he continued. “I am in no danger of getting arrested.”

“Be careful,” she told him.

“It won’t be the same without you,” he said.

“It will be,” she replied. “It will be as awful as it always is.” Neither one of them spoke for a few seconds, and then Annie said, “I am finding myself wishing I was there, all of a sudden.” She hung up the phone, as if she did not want to discuss that feeling any further, and Buster was left on the other end of the line, still holding the phone to his ear, thinking that if he listened hard enough he could still hear his sister in Los Angeles, rehearsing her lines, clearly enunciating every syllable.

T
hree weeks later, Buster was in Woodstock, New York, wishing he’d brought a heavier coat, holding a Leica R4 camera that he wasn’t quite sure how to operate, waiting for some guy to burn down his house. He was sitting with about eighty to one hundred other people, folding chairs set up a safe distance from the house, the youngest person by far in the audience. There seemed to be a mix of New York artist types and people who just wanted to watch some kind of spectacle. There was also a crew of firemen; apparently this kind of thing required permits and the artist had obtained them. Buster could not imagine what his parents would say about an artist who filled out paperwork in order to realize his vision. His parents were no longer in sight, having disappeared twenty minutes earlier, according to the plan. Buster was simply to wait for the fire and take as many pictures as possible.

He sat down in a folding chair on the edge of the third row and began to turn the camera over and over in his hands. “You come for the art?” he heard someone behind him ask. Buster quickly turned around to see an older man, bow-tied, nice warm coat, smiling at him. “Or did you come to see a big fire?”

“Both,” said Buster.

“I came mostly to see this fool burn down his house,” the man said. It seemed to Buster that the man was just slightly drunk and that the man probably spent most of his time in this state. “My sister is a big-time artist. She makes protest signs or some such nonsense. I’m afraid I don’t understand contemporary art anymore,” he said. He pointed to Buster’s camera. “That,” he said, “I understand. Photographs. Paintings. Sculpture. Even when it’s not very good, I understand it. Burning down a house? Eating your own feces? Standing up for three straight days? You do that under most circumstances, you get locked up.”