The Family Fang: A Novel (15 page)

T
here were a few more questions, which Buster struggled to answer truthfully, then he read a section of
The Underground
when the main character, the boy, first comes out from the bomb shelter and sees the devastation that surrounds him. It was depressing as hell, and Buster wished he hadn’t read it, but the students seemed to like how bleak it was. Lucas thanked him for coming, the students filed out of the room, and then it was just Lucas and Buster.

“I hope that was okay,” Buster said.

“It was wonderful,” Lucas replied.

“They seem like good kids.”

“Wonderful students.”

Buster noticed that Lucas was holding a stack of papers. “These are some stories they’ve written, Buster,” Lucas then said. “I know it would be a real thrill for them if you might look at them.”

“Oh,” Buster said. “Oh.”

“You don’t have to of course,” Lucas continued. “I just thought you might be interested.”

Buster could not think of anything he’d be less interested in reading, but then he thought of how they had patiently listened to him ramble, talking about some fucking brand of gum like he was Andy Rooney, and he felt his resistance falter.

“Sure,” Buster said. “Load me up.”

Lucas smiled and handed him the stories. He then reached into his bag and produced another story. “I wrote this one,” Lucas said, his face reddening.

“Oh,” Buster said. “Oh.”

“I’d be interested in hearing what you think of it.”

“Certainly,” Buster said. The story was titled “The Endless Wordening of Dr. Hauser’s Living Manuscript.” Lucas informed him that it was a postmodern fantasy, a kind of punk rock fairy tale. Buster forced such a broad smile that his missing tooth showed. “Certainly,” he repeated.

Then Lucas Kizza wrapped his arms around Buster and hugged him. Buster hugged him back. “We live on the edge,” he thought, and then Lucas released his hold and walked out of the room.

B
uster sat on the curb in front of the college, waiting for his sister to pick him up. To pass the time, he skimmed the stories of the creative writing students. One was about a wild party and the story consisted almost entirely of a detailed explanation of a drinking game called Flip ’N Chug that seemed, to Buster, to be too complicated to facilitate the simple goal of getting drunk. Another story was about a girl who finds out her boyfriend is cheating on her and so she hires a hit man to kill him during the prom. There was an inscrutable story that Buster believed was about a boy trying to talk his pregnant girlfriend into having an abortion. Something was odd about the story, the strange perspective, the old-fashioned language, the terse sentences, and then Buster realized it was an exact copy of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” but the title had been changed to “Listening in on Someone’s Conversation.” He considered telling Lucas about this plagiarism but wondered if perhaps there was some kind of experimental explanation for the story, a textual reappropriation. It made his head hurt trying to explain away some kid’s stupid decision to plagiarize a famous story. He imagined that it was the kid who had asked him the question about his bad reviews, and felt a little superior. He read a story about another wild party, another complicated drinking game, and felt calm again.

After thirty minutes, he began to wonder if Annie had simply forgotten about him, returned to the house after the movie, and got drunk on vodka tonics. “Come get me,” Buster whispered, hoping to create a psychic link to his sister.

To ease the sting of being forgotten, Buster leafed through the papers until he found a story called “The Damaged Boy.” He liked the sound of that. The story, which was written in brief, itemized paragraphs, was about a boy who had, seconds after his birth, been dropped by the obstetrician. His skull, still unformed, had been dented. A broken arm followed when the boy climbed out of his crib. A dog bit off one of his fingers when he tried to feed it a piece of zwieback toast. A sled’s runner sliced his leg open, the warm stream of blood spilling down the hill, melting the snow. He was hit by a car while crossing the street and broke his collarbone. The story proceeded in this way, a never-ending account of all the physical pain the boy accumulated on his path toward adulthood. It made Buster want to cry. By the end of the story, the boy, now an old man, bent and hobbled, placed his hand on the eye of a stove and found that he felt no pain. His hand, taken from the burning red eye, showed no signs of injury. His body, inside and out, had become as hard as a diamond, impervious to pain. It was a bizarre story, depressing as hell, and Buster instantly fell in love with the author. He checked the name, Suzanne Crosby, and walked back into the school to find her.

The secretaries in the registrar’s office, strangely enough, seemed unwilling to tell him where Suzanne Crosby was. “Who are you again?” one of them asked. “I’m Buster Fang,” he said. She stared at him. “I’m a guest of the college,” he offered weakly. “Sorry,” she told him. “Can you just give her a message?” he asked the woman. “I don’t want to be a party to any of this,” she said, which Buster admitted was fair enough. He was a strange man trying to find some young student. Frankly, he was surprised the police hadn’t been called yet. He thanked her for her time and then walked back outside to wait for his sister. A few minutes later, a girl appeared beside him, tapping him on the shoulder. She had long, blond hair and perfect skin. Her eyes were an intense shade of blue, and she stared at him without emotion. “Suzanne?” he asked, and she visibly blanched. “God no,” she said. “I’m an office aide,” she added, “work study. I heard you talking to Mrs. Palmer about Suzanne. I can take her a message.” Buster thanked her and then the girl held out her hand. “Twenty-five bucks,” she said. Buster told her that he didn’t have any money. “You can write me a check,” she informed him. He laughed. “I don’t have any money at all,” he said. “Fuck,” the girl said and turned to walk back into the building. And then Buster’s sister pulled up to the curb. “Wait,” Buster shouted at the girl, and he ran over to Annie.

“Where have you been?” he said. “The car wouldn’t start,” she replied. “I had to get someone to jump-start it.” He asked her for twenty-five dollars. “What?” she said. “I need twenty-five dollars to give to this girl over there,” he told her, growing impatient. Annie looked at the girl, who kept staring at Annie with a puzzled look on her face. “Buster,” Annie said, “are you doing something really stupid here?” Buster told her it was a long story and tried to explain, but then the girl was standing beside him, pointing at Annie. “I know you,” the girl said, smiling. “You’re really famous.” Annie nodded, uninterested in pretending to be someone else, and asked the girl, “Why are you asking my brother for twenty-five dollars?” The girl replied, “He doesn’t have to pay me anything if you’ll let me take a picture with you.” Buster said, “That sounds like a pretty good deal, Annie.” Annie nodded, too confused from having arrived late, and the girl handed Buster her cell phone. Buster snapped the photo and the girl took the phone back and looked at the picture with some satisfaction. It would probably end up on the Internet. “So now you’ll give Suzanne a message for me?” Buster asked. “I’ll do you one better,” the girl said to Buster. “I’ll bring Suzanne out here.”

Buster explained the situation in more detail to Annie, the car still running for fear that it wouldn’t start again if shut off. “Please, Buster,” Annie said, squeezing his arm as hard as she could, “do not go crazy here. This is why we’re together, remember? We’re here to keep each other from going crazy.” Buster began to consider his circumstances, standing in front of a college, about to tell a student that he was in love with her. The more he thought about the story, which was indeed very accomplished for a nineteen-year-old, the more he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t so good that he had to fall in love with the author. Perhaps he didn’t have to profess his love every time someone came around and made him feel less unhappy than he had been previously. Perhaps he could just walk away from this and save himself the further complication of his life. “There she is,” Annie said, and Buster turned to see Suzanne, utterly confused, walking toward them.

Suzanne was short and heavyset, her eyes tiny and clouded behind a pair of wire-framed glasses. She had long, strawberry-blond hair that she had pulled into a ponytail. Her pale skin was crowded with a crazy pattern of freckles and her thick fingers were covered with dozens of cheap rings. Her big toe was poking out of her busted-up sneakers. Buster was amazed to realize that he did not recognize her from the class, that she had gone undetected even in that tiny room. “What did you want?” she asked, almost angry to be disturbed. Buster fumbled for her story and then held it up like it was a passport, an official document that would gain him some degree of access. “I read your story,” he said. She looked startled by this fact, and Buster noticed that she instantly began to blush. “Did Professor Kizza give that to you?” she asked. Buster nodded. “I didn’t tell him to do that,” she said. “It’s an amazing story,” Buster said, and Suzanne finally looked up from the sidewalk. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s nice of you to say.” Buster told her that he would love to read anything else she had written and she said she would think about it. “Let me give you my e-mail address,” he said, and he tore off the first page of Lucas Kizza’s story and wrote his address on the back of the paper. Suzanne took the paper and nodded and turned to walk back to the entrance, but by then about a dozen students, led by the office aide, were standing in the way. “There she is,” the girl told them. “She’s famous.” The students walked forward, slowly, as if moving toward a cornered animal. “Get in the car, Buster,” Annie said, and Buster ran around to the passenger side of the car and shut the door. Annie drove off as the students now stood at the curb, surrounding Suzanne Crosby. Buster looked back at the scene and waved to Suzanne. Just before the car turned onto the street, he watched Suzanne waving back.

B
ack home, the car rolling to a dead stop in the gravel driveway, Annie and Buster found the house empty, a note left on the kitchen counter. It read:

A & B,

We have art to make in North Carolina. We’ll be back in a few days. Don’t go into our room.

Love,

Caleb and Camille

The thought of going into their parents’ room terrified Annie and Buster. The things that had spilled out of the room and into the common areas, the fake knives, the plastic bags of chicken livers and fake blood, scrawled notes for future art projects that all required some form of explosives, were enough to make them wary of what their parents would then deem so strange that it must be kept hidden in their room.

The house to themselves, unmonitored, they popped some popcorn, mixed some drinks, and it was nearly thirty minutes into a flimsy Edward G. Robinson noir that Annie turned to Buster, frowned, and then said, “You never put your eye patch back on.” Buster touched his eye, perfectly adjusted to the light, his spatial dexterity returned to him, and resisted the urge to retrieve the patch from his room. “I guess I don’t need it,” he said, and Annie kissed him on the cheek and smiled. “We’re taking care of each other,” she said. “We’re getting better,” Buster replied, and the two siblings watched with glee as some poor sap on the TV screen walked unknowingly toward his own doom.

more woe, 1995

artists: caleb and camille fang

O
n the opening night of the Hazzard County High School production of William Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,
Buster was going to play Romeo. His sister, Annie, was to play Juliet. Other than Buster, no one backstage seemed to understand that this was a problem. “Let me ask you something, Buster,” said Mr. Delano, the high school drama teacher. “Have you heard of the phrase
the show must go on
?” Buster nodded. “Well,” Mr. Delano continued, “this is the kind of moment for which that phrase was coined.”

The original Romeo, Coby Reid, had driven his car into a tree only a few hours earlier, though no one was sure if it was on purpose or not, and no one seemed interested in knowing for certain. Since Coby was not dead but merely in the hospital with a broken collarbone and a collapsed lung and spectacular damage to his wonderful smile, the cast and crew decided that the show need not be canceled but rather recast. That Buster, the stage manager, had memorized every line of the entire play seemed to make the decision fairly obvious. That his sister, two years his senior and in her final performance as a high school student, would be playing the role of Juliet was seen as only a minor inconvenience.

“I
’m an actor, Buster,” his sister said to him when he went to her dressing room. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and carefully brushed her hair, dyed from its normal golden blond to a deep brown for the role. She looked, to Buster, as if she had been drugged or hypnotized. “I won’t be kissing you,” she continued, “I’ll be kissing Romeo, my one true love.” Buster spoke slowly, as if to a small child. “Yes, but, I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, while you’re kissing Romeo, you’ll also be kissing me.” Annie nodded, bored with the conversation. “And,” Buster continued, dumbfounded that he was forced to elaborate, “you see, I’m your brother.” Annie nodded again. “I understand what you’re saying,” she said, “but this is what actors do.”

“They make out with their siblings in front of a crowd of people?” Buster asked.

“They do things that are difficult in the service of their art,” Annie responded.

H
is parents loved the idea. When, over the loudspeaker, it was announced to the audience that the role of Romeo would be played by Buster Fang, his mother and father forced their way backstage, video camera in tow, and found Buster pacing in a circle, ill at ease in his tunic and stockings, rehearsing the lines he did not want to speak.

“Think of the subtext,” his father whispered to Buster, gripping him in a bear hug. “A play about forbidden love will now have the added layer of incest.”

Buster’s mother nodded. “It’s pretty brilliant,” she said.

Buster told them that no one cared about the subtext. “Mr. Delano is just desperate for someone who knows all of Romeo’s lines,” he said.

His father seemed to consider this statement for a few seconds. “Hell,” he replied. “I know all of Romeo’s lines.”

“Jesus, Dad,” Buster said. “No one is going to ask you to play Romeo.”

Mr. Fang held up his hands in surrender. “Well, I wasn’t suggesting that,” he said. He turned to his wife and said, “Can you imagine, though? That would really be incredible.”

Mrs. Fang again nodded. “It would be incredible,” she said.

“I really need to prepare,” Buster said, closing his eyes and hoping that, when he reopened them, his parents would be gone.

“We’ll see you at the
cast
party,” Mr. Fang said, “after you
break a leg
.”

“Caleb,” Mrs. Fang said, giggling. “You’re awful.”

Buster kept his eyes closed and began to spin in a tight, controlled circle, as if he was trying to fly away from the auditorium. When he opened his eyes, his parents were gone and Mr. Delano, his sister, and the school principal, Mr. Guess, were standing in front of him. “This is a problem,” Mr. Guess said. “What is?” Buster asked. “This,” Mr. Guess answered, pointing at Buster with one hand and Annie with the other, before bringing both of his hands together, fingers interlocked.

“Buster knows all of Romeo’s lines,” Mr. Delano said.

“Is the day so young?” Buster said and attempted to smile, as if trying to sell a defective product to a suddenly wise customer.

“Mr. Delano,” Mr. Guess continued, ignoring Buster, “are you familiar with the plot of this play?”

“I am, Joe, very much so.”

“Then you know that Romeo falls in love with Juliet, they kiss, they get married, have sex, and then kill themselves.”

“That’s a rather cursory—”

“Romeo and Juliet kiss, correct?” Mr. Guess asked.

“They do kiss,” Mr. Delano conceded.

“Mr. Delano,” Mr. Guess continued. “Are you aware of the fact that Buster and Annie are brother and sister?”

“Buster knows the lines, Joe. Without him, we don’t have a play.”

“O, I am fortune’s fool,” Buster said, desperately wanting to shut up without being able to do so.

“This is what’s going to happen, Mr. Delano,” Mr. Guess said. “We’ll do this play but in those moments when Romeo and Juliet are to undertake any kind of romantic interaction, these two kids need to scale back the romance. Instead of a kiss, they’ll shake hands or hug or something of that nature.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Annie said.

“That’s the deal, Ms. Fang.”

“It’s stupid,” Annie said.

“Henceforth, I never will be Romeo,” Buster said, and Annie slapped his shoulder in frustration.

“We’ll make it work, Joe,” Mr. Delano said.

“Never cared for tragedies,” Mr. Guess remarked. “Give me a comedy of errors or a historical play.”

As Mr. Guess walked away, Annie bit her thumb at the principal.

K
eeping a safe distance from his sister backstage, Buster watched the brawl erupt between the two households, both alike in dignity. The swordplay was clumsy, the nerves of opening night, the entire cast still unsure of how the interaction between Annie and Buster would play out. Buster could see his parents in the audience, his father standing in the aisle, camera fixed on the action, nothing worthwhile if not recorded. In fact, the play now had the feeling of a Fang event, the threat of upheaval, Buster and Annie the harbingers of some great disturbance. And, as with those performances, Buster slowly felt the familiar sensation of giving in to the possibility that everything would soon be changed, and not for the better.

He had chosen the position of stage manager for the express purpose of staying out of the spotlight. He could supervise and coordinate, place his hands on every aspect of the performance without anyone in the audience knowing he was there. And now, thanks to Coby Reid’s misplayed suicide attempt, he was Romeo, the idiot boy of Verona, so desperate for sex that he’d leave dead bodies in his wake.

W
earing an itchy, air-reducing mask, a ferocious tiger, Buster held his sister’s hand and asked, in a way that he could not imagine ever being successful, if he could kiss it. Annie, thank god, rebuffed him. Buster, oh god no, then asked if he could kiss her lips. As he looked at his sister, he noticed the smirk on her face, the playfulness of this exchange. She was flirting with him and he, because William Goddamn Shakespeare decreed it, would give in to her. “Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take,” Buster said and, leaning forward, made to kiss his sister. Then, inches from her mouth, he loudly smacked his lips, kissing the air, and pulled away from Annie, the threat avoided, the audience tittering but not outraged. Annie scowled at him and then smiled, saying, Shakespeare on her side, “Then have my lips the sin that they have took.” Buster, no other choice, said his line, “Give me my sin again,” and, as Annie quickly leaned forward to deliver the kiss, Buster feinted, moved slightly to the left, and again kissed the air, wet and loud. The audience now began to laugh outright. Annie stared at Buster without emotion, though her hands were balled into tight, damage-seeking fists, and said flatly, “You kiss by the book.”

Once the scene finally ended, the first act closed, Buster looked in the front row at Mr. Guess, who gave Buster a thumbs-up, obviously pleased. Tragedy, in Buster’s hands, had become comedy.

As the curtain fell, obscuring the stage, Annie punched Buster in the face, a looping overhand right that sent Buster crashing to the ground. “You are ruining this for me,” Annie said. “This is my last high school play and people are laughing at us because of you.”

“Mr. Guess said no kissing,” Buster reminded her, a bump already forming on his right temple.

“Who gives a shit?” Annie yelled. “This is
Romeo and Juliet
. We are Romeo and Juliet. We are going to kiss.”

“No we aren’t,” Buster said.

“Buster,” Annie continued, her voice breaking. “Please. Do this for me.”

“I can’t do it,” Buster said.

“A plague on your house,” Annie said, and stomped away from him.

“Your house is my house,” Buster said, but she was already out of earshot.

“O
, Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” Annie asked.

Beneath the balcony, in shadow, Buster had no answer for her.

J
ust before the end of act two, Buster stood next to Jimmy Patrick, rotund and balding at age sixteen, a perfect fit for Friar Laurence, as the friar counseled him that “violent delights have violent ends” and that “the sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness” and, finally, understandably, that Buster should “love moderately.” The advice given, Annie walked onstage, so light a foot, and took Buster’s hands in her own, gripping them tightly, squeezing the feeling out of them until they were ghosts of his own hands. Annie greeted Jimmy, who then said, “Romeo shall thank thee, daughter, for us both.” The crowd began to laugh, a thunderclap of applause, and Buster stared at his sister’s reddening face, embarrassed and angry at the same time, her eyes unblinking and watery. He had ruined it all; he understood this. And with the rudimentary tools he possessed, without any skill for fixing things, he leaned forward, pulling his sister toward him, and kissed her so forcefully that it took her half a second before she responded, two star-cross’d lovers. It was soft and sweet and, except for the fact that it was his sister, everything that Buster had ever hoped his first kiss would be.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Mr. Guess screamed, jumping out of his seat and awkwardly climbing onto the stage. The audience began to boo and cheer in equal measure, though Buster wasn’t sure if it was directed at the kiss or their principal, who was now pulling the Fangs apart, pushing them to opposite ends of the stage, grunting obscenities. Annie looked over at Buster and smiled. Buster only shrugged and then the curtain fell, not to rise again this night. And thus ended the story, though somewhat premature, of Juliet and her Romeo. More woe, of course, would follow.

S
ix months later, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Buster and Annie sat at an otherwise empty table and finished the glasses of wine left by people old enough to be nonplussed by free alcohol. Their parents were talking to the MCA curator and a gaggle of museum patrons. “I wish we could have stayed at home,” Buster said and his sister, stone-cold sober after seven glasses of wine, said, “It’s like bringing those sharecroppers from
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
to the Museum of Modern Art for Walker Evans’s opening. It’s like, hey guys, here’s the source of your shame, framed and much larger than you remembered it.” In the main room of the exhibit, which the Fang children refused to enter, the entirety of the play flickered against a huge screen. Despite their best efforts, they could not avoid the amplified sound of their own voices, Shakespeare’s lines echoing in their heads. “Overrated melodrama,” Annie muttered. “Why must I be a teenager in love? Give me a break,” Buster added. Teenagers killed themselves all the time, the two of them agreed. They stared at their parents and decided that the real miracle was how the two of them, A and B, had kept themselves alive this long.

Mr. Delano, drunk and happy, suddenly appeared at their table and fell into an adjacent seat. “Children,” he shouted, and then began to snicker. Annie and Buster had not seen Mr. Delano since the night of the performance; he had been fired as soon as the curtain fell and he emptied his apartment and left town before the end of the next day. “Children,” Mr. Delano said again, now composed, though his face was still frighteningly red. “How I have missed you.”

“What are you doing here, Mr. Delano?” Buster asked.

“I wouldn’t have missed the opening,” Mr. Delano responded. “After all, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for me.”

Annie took the glass of wine out of Mr. Delano’s hand and replaced it with an empty one. She pushed a plate of shrimp toast in front of him, but he seemed not to notice.

“Mr. Delano,” Buster asked, “what are you doing here?”

“Your parents invited me,” Mr. Delano said. “They said it was the least they could do after I got fired for putting on such a forward-thinking production.”