The Family Fang: A Novel (11 page)

Three bites into her meal, the phone rang and Annie, no longer needing the protection of the answering machine, answered. “Hall-ow,” she said, the bread sticking to the roof of her mouth, the mayonnaise like caulk in the ridges and indentations of her palate. “Annie?” the voice said.

She swallowed and then, her tongue able to move freely in her mouth, responded, “This is Annie.”

“You sounded like you were pretending to be retarded,” the voice said.

“Daniel?” she asked.

“Buster,” her brother said.

It was always a strange sensation to hear her brother’s voice, how it sounded not like an actual voice but a sound inside of her own head, that her brother was held in the cage of her ribs and only occasionally made his presence known to her. She hadn’t heard from him in months, when he had specifically told her that she should, under no circumstances, take off her top. She had then, of course, taken off her top. That she had not heard from him felt like a justified punishment.

“What’s going on?” Annie asked, genuinely curious as to her brother’s current status. “Did you kill someone? Do you need money?”

“I almost killed myself and I need about twelve thousand dollars, but that’s not why I called.”

“Wait, what happened?”

“It’s a long story that will make you very sad, so I’ll hold off on telling it. The real news is that it turns out that you can go home again.”

“Buster,” Annie said, her voice impatient and sharp, “I’ve been drinking all day so I’m having trouble understanding what the hell you’re talking about.”

“I’m back home,” Buster said.

“In Florida?”

“Tennessee.”

“When did you move to Tennessee?”

“I’m living with Mom and Dad.”

“Oh, Buster,” Annie said. “Oh no.”

“It’s not so bad,” Buster said.

“It sounds bad,” Annie responded and then, as if he could not wait for her to finish her sentence, he said, “It’s pretty bad.” Slowly, as if he could not quite believe it, he told her the story of the potato gun and the rearranged face and his new living situation.

“A few times, they’ve called me Child B. They say it, and then, when I call them on it, they pretend it didn’t happen. Maybe it didn’t. I’m not sure. I’m pretty loose on pain pills.”

“Get out of there, Buster,” Annie said, nearly shouting.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m stuck here for the time being.”

“You can’t stay there,” Annie continued, refusing to take no for an answer. “You need to escape.”

“I thought, actually, that you might come here,” he said. “Keep me company. See how old age is treating Mom and Dad.”

Annie imagined her childhood bedroom unchanged since she had left, lobby cards still hanging on the walls, a half-empty bottle of rigid collodion on the dresser, an unsmoked bag of weed in a hidden compartment beneath the floorboards of the closet. She had not been home since she was twenty-three, always seeing her parents in neutral locations, places agreed upon by both parties to be free from incident. They would gather on holidays and birthdays in nondescript hotels in cities none of them had ever visited. The thought of returning seemed to be exactly the kind of thing that would, if entertained, ruin her in spectacular ways previously unimagined.

“I can’t, Buster,” she finally said. “I’m going to Wyoming.”

“Do not leave me here, Annie,” Buster replied.

“I’m in a weird place right now,” she said. “I need to figure things out.”

“You’re in a weird place right now?” Buster said, his voice rising. “Right now, right this very minute, I’m sitting on my childhood bed, drinking Percocet-laced orange soda out of a straw that I’m holding in the gap where my tooth used to be, before it got shattered by a potato. Mom and Dad are in the living room listening to La Monte Young’s
Black Record
at a ridiculously loud volume. They’re wearing Lone Ranger masks, which seems to be a recurring thing for them. For the past hour, I’ve been reading an issue of
Guitar World
from 1995, because I’m afraid to go on the Internet and see another picture of my sister’s tits.”

“I can’t, Buster,” she said.

“Come get me,” Buster said.

“I just don’t think I can do it.”

“I miss you, Annie.”

“I’m sorry, Buster,” she said and then hung up the phone.

W
hen she was making the first
Powers That Be
movie, she talked to Buster every day on the phone, for hours at a time while she waited for someone to come to her trailer and lead her to the set. She would tell him about the bizarre things that went into making a blockbuster action movie, techniques and constructions that seemed, even to a Fang, to be overwhelming and ridiculous. “There’s a guy here,” Annie told Buster, “and his entire job is to make sure that Adam Bomb walks correctly.”

“What’s his title?” Buster asked.

“Ambulation consultant,” Annie said.

She began to look forward to their next conversation as soon as the previous one ended. Late at night, after a long day of shooting, her hair rigid and aching from being teased by a team of hairdressers, she would lie in bed and listen to Buster read from his second novel, a book about a boy who is the only person unaffected by the nuclear fallout from World War III. As she drifted in and out of sleep, she would listen to his voice, shaky and serious, read what he had written only hours earlier. “The boy kicked a soup can, which skittered across the ravaged and broken asphalt road,” Buster read. “When it came to a rest, a family of roaches poured out of the can, moving in all directions as if afraid that one of their own had been responsible for the disturbance. The boy resisted the urge to stomp the insects into nothingness and continued on his way.” Annie readjusted the phone and sat up, intent to hear every word precisely the way that Buster intended it. The story was terribly sad; hope was a flickering match that, at any moment, seemed destined to be extinguished. And yet Annie imagined the boy, randomly saved from the awful effects of the world, to be Buster and hoped that there would be a kind of happiness waiting for him at the end. “It’s happening for us, Buster,” she would tell him. “Whatever comes next will be so big that we won’t recognize ourselves when it’s over.”

And then the movie had been the biggest blockbuster in years and Buster’s book had been dismissed by the critics and remaindered. When they talked after that, everything seemed filtered by the understanding that one of them had made it across the ocean, her feet solidly placed on an undiscovered country, while the other had been lost at sea.

Buster would call late at night from a hotel room, on assignment for some magazine, noticeably impaired. Annie would half-listen to him as she watched movies with the volume turned down low enough that he could not hear. “You’re a movie star now,” Buster once told her, “and I am the brother of a movie star.”

“And I’m the sister of Buster Fang,” she replied.

“Who?” he said. “Never heard of him.”

“Buster,” she said. “Come on now.”

“I am,” he muttered, his words so slurred and shapeless it was only after he had slammed the phone down that she understood what he had actually said, “the least of the Fangs.”

T
he next morning, Annie resisted the urge to make another drink and waited for Daniel to take her to the airport. She had hardly slept last night; she had a dream where Daniel stood in the doorway of their cabin, wearing fringed buckskins, his arm torn off by a grizzly bear. “Big, wonderful Wyoming,” he said to her as she tried, and failed, to apply a tourniquet.

When Daniel arrived, cowboy hat returned to prominence, an unlit Marlboro hanging from his lips, sporting a pair of waterproof boots that looked like something astronauts or ice fishermen would wear, he quickly took her bags out of her hands and wedged them into the tiny trunk of his sports car. Annie found it difficult to follow him to the car, still standing on the front steps of her house, wondering, now sober, what the hell she was doing. “Tell me again what I’m going to do in Wyoming,” she asked him.

“You’re going to be my muse,” he said.

“I know this is a little late to be asking, but is there a TV?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s just you and me.”

“I’m going to get a deck of cards,” she said, hurrying back inside the house.

A
t the airport, checked in, through security, waiting for the plane to depart, Annie listened to Daniel discuss his initial ideas for the third installment of
Powers That Be
. “No more Nazis,” he said, nodding wisely. “Nazis are played out. I’m thinking we need to go bigger than that, raise the stakes.”

“Okay,” Annie said.

“Dinosaurs,” he said.

“What?”

“They’re going to fight dinosaurs. It’ll be awesome, trust me.”

“How about Nazi dinosaurs?”

Daniel frowned and then said, “Annie, part of being someone’s muse is not to make fun of their ideas.”

It occurred to Annie that, aside from Buster, no one but Daniel knew where she was going. She was heading to a remote cabin in Wyoming with her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had a volatile relationship. She would listen to Daniel talk for hours about dinosaurs and rocket launchers and the catchphrase “Bomb them back to the Stone Age.” This seemed, suddenly, to be a big mistake.

She had no publicist but she still had an agent and a manager, people that, one would hope, would want to know of her plans. “I better call my agent,” Annie said, “and let him know I’m going to be out of pocket for a little while.”

“He probably knows by now,” Daniel said.

“What’s that?”

“I sent word out to a few contacts in the media about our trip, how we were heading into the wild for business and pleasure.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Daniel?” Annie asked.

“I leaked some information to several key entertainment journalists about my being offered the
Powers That Be
sequel and how you were coming with me to Wyoming to work on the script. And . . .”

“Yes?”

“And I told them that we were back together,” Daniel said.

For an instant, Daniel looked exactly, every feature correct, like Minda Laughton.

“We’re not back together, though,” Annie reminded him.

“Jesus, Annie, what do you think is going to happen? We’re going to be in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, just the two of us.”

“We’re going to work on the screenplay. The Nazi dinosaurs and whatnot.”

“Without me, Annie, honestly, you’re done. Together, we’re a power couple. We can rule this town.”

“Daniel, you’re sounding like an evil scientist.”

“You need me, and, I know this may be hard to understand, I need you.”

“You need many, many things, Daniel, most of them pharmaceutical.”

“I hate turning this into something ugly, but if you don’t come with me to Wyoming, I’ll do whatever I can to ruin your career to the point that it can’t be fixed.”

Annie felt the words pass through her, which rendered her body fuzzy and uncoordinated. “I need a second,” Annie said. Daniel nodded and then told her that he was going to use the restroom. “When I come back, we’ll pretend like this never happened. We’ll head to Wyoming and get back to what we do best.” Annie had no idea what it was that they did best; the two of them together seemed below average in all categories.

“Take your time,” Annie told him as he walked away from their gate. As soon as Daniel was out of sight, she hurried over to the counter, manned by two airline employees, and waited for them to acknowledge her. The two women shuffled papers, squinted at the computer screen, and then said, in unison, “Well, that’s wrong.” Annie looked over her shoulder for Daniel to reappear, feeling like ominous violin strains should be playing over the airport’s sound system, a movie score for a thriller about an incredibly stupid woman and her insane ex-boyfriend.

“Can I ask you something?” Annie said, and both of the women looked up from the screen and set their mouths into thin expressions of annoyance that might, if challenged, be called a smile. “Uh-huh?” they said in unison.

“I’m wondering about my plane ticket,” she said.

“It’s in your hand there,” the woman on the right said.

“I know,” Annie continued, trying to convey the necessity for speed, “but I wondered if I could change it.”

“You want a different seat?” the woman on the left said.

“I want a different airplane,” Annie told her.

“Say what?” they said.

“I want to get on a different flight.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Well,” the woman on the right said, “it’s pretty complicated to switch your plane ticket.”

“Okay, fine,” Annie said, still no sign of Daniel, thank god. “My ex-boyfriend asked me to go on a trip with him to Wyoming to try and get back together and I said yes and now I think I should have said no.”