The Family Fang: A Novel (29 page)

Buster began to disengage himself from the conversation by turning his body away from the man as much as possible while still looking at him. Buster felt like his head might twist off his body.

“I mean, am I not right? If I punched you in the face right now, could I call that art?”

Buster held up the camera and took a picture of the man.

“Is that art?” the man asked, his face getting redder and redder, his anger puffing out his cheeks.

“This is for evidence,” Buster said. “In case you punch me.”

“Art,” the man said, and then made a wanking motion with his hand. Buster stood and then moved to put a row of seats between himself and the man. He was cold. When was the fire going to come?

Nearly twenty minutes later, a man walked out of the house with a can of gasoline. He did not address the audience. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a book of matches, struck one, and tossed it through the open door of the house. The fire sparked immediately but it took a long time for it to begin to move through the rooms of the house. Buster could hear the popping of the heat rearranging molecules, but it wasn’t nearly as spectacular as he had imagined. He realized he had pictured an explosion, not a fire. He revised his expectations. It was a house and it was on fire. What else did he want? He thought it would be polite to clap, to acknowledge the effort that went into this display, but no one else was doing it, so he simply sat in his seat and waited for his parents.

A window shattered and smoke began to pour out of the house and Buster watched as his parents, hand in hand, calmly walked out of the house, flames dancing around their hazy forms. Buster framed his parents through the viewfinder of his camera and clicked away. His father’s arm was on fire and he waved in such a way that Buster wasn’t sure if he was greeting the stunned onlookers or if he was trying to put out the fire. As they moved closer, it was apparent that his mother’s entire back was covered in flames. They seemed unsteady, smoke-sick, but they kept walking, past the crowd, past Buster, and it appeared that they would walk all the way back home, but one of the firemen ran up to them and sprayed them down with an extinguisher. They looked like poorly made snowmen, flecked with a foamy substance. They fell to the ground, hacking the smoke out of their lungs. By the time they had regained their composure, Buster and the rest of the crowd had formed a circle around them. Aside from Buster, still snapping away, no one made a sound. They were staring at these two strange creatures while, behind them, the skeleton of the house continued to burn, the flame throwing strange shadows over everyone. Buster watched as his parents embraced, kissed, and then pushed away from the crowd, out of the grip of the firemen, and ran into the woods, toward their van, and Buster suddenly realized that they would, he was quite certain, leave him behind if he did not meet them there soon.

As if reminding the crowd of the reason for their attendance, the rear half of the house began to cave in, and Buster used this distraction to run after his parents. It was hard to see where he was going, and he was careful not to damage the camera, so expensive that his father made him name it (
Carl
), so he would treat it more carefully. He felt like he was perhaps running in the entirely wrong direction. He felt like perhaps his parents were also running in the wrong direction, smoke-drunk as they were. He knew this period of time well, the space between the event and when the family could safely reunite. However, this time, Annie was not with him. He was alone. His parents were together, but he was alone. He stopped, took a picture of the darkness, and then followed his instincts back to the van.

When he finally made it, his parents were waiting for him. They sat in the backseat of the van, the door open, each of them inspecting the angry pink marks on their bodies, rapidly swelling. They waved him over and he took a picture of them. “Here’s the deal, Buster,” his father began. “If someone tells you something is fireproof, what they really mean is fire-lessening. It still burns like a son of a bitch.”

“It looked really great,” Buster assured them. His father nodded in agreement, but his mother offered up a weak smile. “When you came through the woods just then,” she said to Buster, “I thought Annie was going to be right behind you.”

Buster focused on his mother, who winced in pain as she shifted her weight. The air smelled of burned hair. “I miss her too,” he said.

His mother gestured for him to come closer and then she hugged him. These were rare moments, and Buster did not let anything distract him from how wonderful it felt to share the same emotion with his mother, even if it was sadness. And then his mother began to sob. “It’s not the same, is it?” she asked.

“Camille,” his father said, but he did not continue when he saw the awful look on his wife’s face, the look of someone holding on to the edge of a cliff, knowing they are about to let go.

“The whole reason we did this was so that we could still be a family. We could create these beautiful, fucked-up things and we could do it together. Your father and I made you and your sister and then the four of us made these things. For her to not be here, I don’t know, I feel like whatever we make from here on out will be lacking. It will be missing something essential.”

Buster’s father leaned in close to the both of them. “We knew this was going to happen at some point. Either we would die or the kids would leave, but it couldn’t always be the four of us. We just have to adapt. Our art will evolve. It will become something different, something better.”

“Don’t say that,” his mother said.

“Not better, okay, that was a poor choice of words. But still rewarding.”

“I don’t know if I can keep doing this without you two,” his mother said to Buster. “I don’t know if I want to.”

Buster hugged his mother again and then said, “It’s just temporary.”

“Is that how I should think of it?” she asked him.

“We’ll go away, and then we’ll come back and it’ll be better because Annie and I will know more about what we can do, how we can help you guys.”

“You’ll come back,” his mother said.

“We’ll have to teach you all over again,” his father said.

“And then we’ll make something wonderful,” Buster said.

His mother stopped crying and stroked Buster’s cheek. “I know that’s not true,” she said, “but let’s pretend for now.”

Chapter Twelve

H
aving finally accepted their parents’ death, Annie and Buster were surprised to find the process of grieving to be so ordinary, so boring. Without a funeral, which they agreed was a terrible idea, there seemed no concrete way to mourn. The notion of creating something violent and bizarre in their parents’ name passed through them without any serious consideration. It seemed that their parents’ disappearance from this world had left them without any options other than to simply continue their own lives, to move forward and see what kind of a world awaited them.

Annie would soon be back in L.A., resettling her life before she was asked to leave it behind again and start filming Lucy’s movie. She had invited Buster to stay with her, the house more than big enough to contain the two of them, but he had already enacted plans to stay in town, hoping he was not making a huge mistake. He had, due to some begging, some false praise for Lucas Kizza’s insane, rambling story, obtained an adjunct teaching position at the community college, teaching composition and technical writing. People would call him Professor Fang, which sounded so much like a supervillain that he wasn’t sure he could go through with it. He would move in with Suzanne, what they had talked about for a few weeks now and had been unable to find any reason not to do so. The Fang house would be left unattended, tied up in the vagaries of the law until someone made a decision on how to proceed. Annie and Buster had some ragged desire to burn it down or to blow it up, but they were done with this kind of messy grief, with how it was really just anger masquerading as mourning. They would simply leave it behind, never return, and if they were lucky, their brains would do the careful editing necessary to omit this part of their lives from memory.

For the time being, Annie and Buster went about a revised routine. Buster wrote, and Annie rehearsed. Sometimes Buster, as he had years ago when he had still been living with his parents and Annie had been in Los Angeles, would run lines with his sister, trying his hardest to keep up with her, finding it impossible. Any attempts to find their parents, all that work, that embarrassingly earnest effort, simply ended, and the two of them were shocked to find out how much more free time they had without it.

On one of the last evenings in the house, Annie locked in her room doing some kind of jazzercise along to a videotape she had found at a thrift store, Buster heard Suzanne’s car tires crunching over the gravel driveway, but he kept typing, trying to wring as many words as he could out of the story in his head. The novel seemed to be a cave of sorts, twisting, maze-like passages, but Buster focused only on finding an exit that was not the original entrance, pushing his way through the dark until he found a path that held the promise of escape. He knew that Micah and Rachel would emerge, finally, from the pit and take their places aboveground, but he had to get there, had to find the correct sequence of events that would unlock that image. He heard Suzanne’s voice calling from the hallway and he finally removed his hands from the keys of the computer. Suzanne held two paper bags of food from Sonic, the bottom of the bags wet with grease and steam, and, in her other hand, a tray that held two sodas in a size so large that the cups looked like barrels. “Dinner,” she said. He nodded, cleared off the coffee table in the living room, and they sat on the floor and tore into their burgers. Buster hadn’t eaten since that morning, and he let the food, the salt and the grease and the shocking tang of condiment, serve as a reward for having written enough to be satisfied. “Good day?” he asked Suzanne.

Suzanne had finished her burger and was carefully opening packets of mustard to dress up a corn dog. “Not bad,” she said. “Okay tips, no jerks, day went by fast. And I think I had an idea about the story I’m working on. I wrote it down on a napkin during my break.” Buster smiled. “I did okay, too,” he said. She smiled and kissed his cheek. “I knew you were doing okay,” she said. “It made me happy at work to think that you were writing the hell out of your book.” They ate their food, took sips of soda so sweet that it tasted like liquefied candy, and Buster allowed himself the excitement of knowing that this could go on forever if he didn’t fuck it up.

“I brought some music,” Suzanne said, reaching into her backpack. “I ordered new stuff for you, off the Internet. It sounds like the crazy shit you listen to on that record player, but it’s brand-new.” She produced a CD by a band called The Vengeful Virgins, the cover art consisting of hundreds and hundreds of guitar strings, wound into strange shapes. “It’s two twin brothers and they’re, like, savants or something. They’re fourteen years old or close to that, and they make this really weird music. It’s just drums and guitar, but it sounds like animals.” Buster shrugged. He didn’t want to get into a long conversation, but he only listened to his parents’ music because he had never developed his own tastes. He had found it too difficult to search out other music, to constantly listen to something and wonder, “Is this any good?” His parents had selected worthwhile music and so he listened to it, but he did not say this to Suzanne. He said, “Put it on,” and went back to the Tots that Suzanne had instructed the fry cook to fry twice so as to make them extra-crunchy.

The first song opened with the sound of a bass drum, the beat slightly off, spastic. It went on for over a minute until he heard a voice, a pitch that suggested sudden pubescence, singing, “When the end comes, and it always comes, we will drown in our own dust. We will watch the sky as it slowly darkens and we’ll be left with rot and rust. But we won’t die. We won’t die.” Suzanne pointed at the stereo, nudging Buster with her elbow. “Was I right? Weird.” Buster nodded. A guitar, or something like a guitar, squealed, and then, suddenly, the drumming tightened up, became as steady as a heartbeat, and the song began to bend and twist and Buster felt like something wonderful was happening that would soon implode. By the end of the second song, he said, “This is good,” confident of the proclamation, turning the volume up so the house began to vibrate. Suzanne kissed him again. “I knew you would like it,” she said.

“It’s a sad world,” the voice on the CD screamed, shredding his vocal cords, as a new song began without warning. “It’s unforgiving.” Buster sat up, the song tripping the hard wiring of his memories, and he placed his hands firmly on the coffee table, pressing so hard that the table began to softly vibrate. “Kill all parents, so you can keep living,” Buster sang, in perfect time to the voice on the CD. “Kill all parents,” he repeated, his voice cracking, “so you can keep living.” Suzanne touched his shoulder. “You know this song?” she asked, and Buster could only nod.

Annie emerged from her room, dumbbells still in her hands, her expression one of such confusion that her facial features seemed scrambled, some kind of cubism. “What the fuck is this?” she asked, one of the dumbbells pointing at the stereo. Buster held up the CD case and Annie dropped the dumbbell, shaking the floor, and snatched it out of his hand. “Number three,” Buster said, pointing to the track list on the back cover. “Song number three, ‘K.A.P.’ ” “What’s wrong?” Suzanne asked, backing away from the intensity of the Fang children.

“This is a Fang song,” Buster said, as he and his sister ran out of the room, to his computer, the Internet, a sudden interest in The Vengeful Virgins. “What?” Suzanne asked. “Our parents,” Annie shouted, her voice echoing throughout their parents’ house, where they had somehow grown up. “Our goddamned parents.”

A
s the Fang children searched every inch of the Internet, Suzanne having let herself out of the house, leaving the two of them to their own wicked devices, Buster scrolled through the Google results so quickly that Annie had to keep slapping his hand to get him to slow down. The Vengeful Virgins were signed to Light Noise, a tiny indie label based in the Northwest, one that had discovered The Leather Channel, another band Buster and Annie had never heard of, who had subsequently signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Interscope Records. The two boys who made up the band, Lucas and Linus Baltz, thirteen years old, had no real Web site, nothing but a bare-bones MySpace page with little beyond a few of their songs playing on a loop and a few pictures of the two boys, shaggy-haired, their eyes so dark they seemed black, thin and lanky, big smiles that showed slightly crooked teeth. It seemed impossible that these kids were responsible for the brain-rattling songs that Buster had heard. Though there were numerous bloggers who breathlessly championed the album, always mentioning the boys’ bewildering youth, Buster could find only a few articles that had any personal information about the boys. He learned that they lived in Wayland, North Dakota, were self-taught, obsessed with the apocalypse. They were, according to the label’s Web site, currently on tour.

Buster looked at the tour dates for The Vengeful Virgins. They were playing this very night in Kansas City, Missouri. Tomorrow they would be in St. Louis.

It was shocking to Buster, after how hard he and his sister had forced themselves to let go of their parents, to accept their deaths, how quickly the two of them jumped right back into the frenzy and uncertainty of searching for Caleb and Camille. The plan, which Buster devised quickly, was that he and Annie would travel to St. Louis, go to the show to see The Vengeful Virgins. They would figure out some way to get backstage, and then confront the kids with their knowledge of the song, and try to get them to tell Buster and Annie where their parents were. That was it. That was the whole plan. It had some holes, he admitted. If their parents had made the decision to allow these two kids in on their disappearance, then they must have known that these two boys could be trusted. So how would they get the kids to tell them what they needed to know? And what if the twins had no idea what they were talking about? What if their parents really were dead, as they had finally accepted, and this was all some strange coincidence? He tried not to think about it, focused only on the sharp, painful feeling inside of him that he was closer to the thing that he needed to know.

Annie sat on Buster’s bed as he packed a duffel bag with clothes and toiletries. “Okay, so let me ask you this,” she began. “You think these fucking kids somehow know Caleb and Camille and they gave them this song?” Buster considered the statement and then nodded. “So,” Annie continued, “that means that The Vengeful Virgins probably know about the Fangs and that we made all this art.” Buster again nodded. “So they probably know who we are, if they know enough about our parents to know that they’re hiding out. So don’t you think they’ll recognize us when we meet them?” Buster had not considered any of this. “Maybe,” Buster admitted. “Definitely,” Annie corrected. “It won’t work this way. We have to be smarter than them. We have to find a way around their defenses.” He began to unpack his bag. “I guess we’re not going to St. Louis,” he said, frowning.

And then, before he could return a single article of clothing to his dresser, he heard his sister laugh. He turned around to find Annie, smiling as if she knew the secrets of the world and did not care if revealing them would ruin everything, signaling for him to move closer to her. “Caleb and Camille only care about art,” she told him. “Nothing else matters.” Buster nodded in agreement, still puzzled as to what was coming. “These kids, they’re so young, I imagine there are still some things they couldn’t resist.”

“Money?” Buster asked, still struggling to catch up to whatever his sister had already realized.

“Fame,” Annie replied.

As she continued to outline the rudimentary elements of her plan, Buster half-listened to The Vengeful Virgins still pounding through the speakers of the stereo and felt the overwhelming urge to carve his name into something, letters so large that they could be seen from space, to claim everything that was undeniably his own.

L
ater that night, unable to enact their plan until daylight, Buster sat on the sofa in the living room and, once again, listened to The Vengeful Virgins. He closed his eyes and let the screeching and thumping work its way into his muscles like a medically disproved balm. He imagined his parents, hiding in some basement in North Dakota, listening to these same songs, sending some strange clue as to their disappearance out into the world, traveling from city to city, until Annie and Buster discovered its existence. Or was this clue even meant for Annie and Buster? Was it their parents’ own joke, some way to continue their work in anonymity? And perhaps, worst of all, something that Buster had forced out of his mind since he’d heard the song, these two boys were a replacement for Annie and Buster, the new children that Caleb and Camille Fang would use to restore their name to prominence. They had tired of Annie and Buster, their failures, the simple fact that they were no longer children, and now they had Lucas and Linus. And, as a show of this new partnership, they had given the boys a song that had once belonged only to the Fangs, knowing that they would be able to send it out farther into the world than Annie and Buster could have ever imagined.

Buster turned off the music, sat in the dark silence of his parents’ house. He sucked on an ice cube, rubbed the curve of the ice against the back of his teeth. He concentrated until it seemed that his body temperature had adjusted to the cold ice in his mouth. His arms and legs were numb, nothing but his heart pumping blood to the extremities that he refused to utilize. Thirty minutes passed and then Buster suddenly came back to life, lifting off the sofa, his feet taking him back to his computer. He erased the last few pages of the novel, a mistake of imagination, and began anew. It was the only thing he could control, the world he had made, and he made it bend to his will, feeling the satisfaction of saying something was a certain way and having no one tell him differently.