The Family Fang: A Novel (31 page)

“That was a secret,” Camille said to the children, trying to smile. “I only shared it with you two.”

“But we moved past it,” Caleb continued, though Annie and Buster could see the doubt lingering on his face. “I do not for a second doubt your mother’s devotion to what we have been doing for our entire lives. I love her and she loves me and, most importantly, we love making real, genuine art. We love this thing that we’re making.”

“And now what?” Buster said, noticing without surprise, confirming his worst fears, that he and Annie had not been included in the list of things their parents loved.

“Well, we have to be declared dead, and then we come back to life,” Camille answered.

“And all of this?” Annie said, gesturing to the air above them, their lives in North Dakota.

“We leave it behind,” Caleb said.

“Bonnie? Lucas and Linus?”

“We leave it all behind,” Caleb said.

“I talked to them on the phone,” Buster said. “They called you their dad.”

“I am their dad,” Caleb said. “But things will have to change.”

“Do they know about all this?” Annie asked.

“God no,” Caleb said, his voice rising. “Can you imagine? They aren’t like you two. They aren’t real artists. They wouldn’t know how to handle it. They’d find a way to ruin it. I guess they did ruin it. That fucking song.”

“I told you it was stupid,” Camille pointed out.

“What happened?” Annie asked.

“The twins were always playing with instruments, making this awful racket. So I taught them the song. I had no idea they would become somewhat proficient, would make an album, would sign to a label, would go on tour. How could I have anticipated that? I mean, you’ve heard them. It was a mistake though. I do take the blame for that. I got lazy and I paid for it.”

“This is insane,” Annie said.

“You’re upset,” Camille replied. “You don’t like that we kept you in the dark. But you have to admit this is an amazing piece.”

Annie stared at her parents. Their demeanor had changed since they first entered the food court. They were enjoying the explanation of their grand design. They spoke with reverence about the way they had deformed the lives of those around them so that their idea could take shape, be willed into existence.

“You have never cared for us, for anyone but yourselves,” she began. “You’ve done as much as you possibly could to wreck our lives. You made us do everything you wanted, and when we couldn’t do it anymore, you left us.”

“You left us,” Caleb said, the anger a heavy thing in his voice. “You two left us to pursue inferior forms of art. You disappointed us. You nearly ruined what we’d made. So we moved on without you. And now, we’ve made something better than anything we’ve done before, and you two are not a part of it.”

“We are a part of it,” Buster said. “We’re your son and daughter.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Caleb said.

“Honey,” Camille said. “That’s not true.”

“Okay, fine,” Caleb said, composing himself. “It means something but it doesn’t mean as much as the art.”

“If we didn’t make a fuss about you disappearing then no one would notice or care that you had disappeared. Without us, what does your dying mean?” Annie said.

“And we do appreciate that. Like we said, we had hoped that the two of you would add something to the piece, though we had not imagined you would actually find us. You did a little too much, in that respect. What would be great is if you went back to your own lives, forgot about this meeting, and continued to look for us. That way, you would be a genuine element of this piece.”

Annie put up her hand and shook her head. “We don’t want any part of this. In fact, we want this to end. We want to fuck this up so badly.”

“But why?” Camille asked. “Why would you do that?”

“Because you hurt us,” Annie said.

“You’d ruin more than ten years of difficult artistic work just because your feelings got hurt?” Caleb asked.

“I don’t understand,” Camille said. “You didn’t want to be with us anymore. You removed yourselves from our lives.”

“We didn’t want to make art anymore,” Buster said. “Not your kind of art. We still wanted to be with you.”

“You can’t separate them,” Caleb replied. “We are the things that we make. You have to accept that.”

“We did,” Annie said. “That’s why we left.”

“Then why did you come back?” Camille asked. She was beginning to lose her composure, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

“We needed help,” Buster said.

“And we helped you, goddamn it,” Caleb responded.

“No, you didn’t. You left us,” Annie said.

“Because we had to,” Camille answered.

“This is ridiculous,” Caleb said. “I’m sixty-five years old. This is it. This is the last big thing I’ll ever make. I am begging you not to take that away from me.”

“You’re willing to live like this for six more years, until the state declares you legally dead, just to make an artistic statement?”

“Yes,” Caleb said. Annie looked at her mother, who nodded in agreement.

Annie pushed away from the table, and Buster did the same. They stood over their parents, who waited for an answer.

“We won’t tell,” Annie said.

“Thank you,” Camille said.

“But we don’t ever want to see you again,” Annie replied.

“Okay,” Caleb said. “We understand. We can agree to that.” Camille hesitated for a few seconds but then nodded. “If that’s what it takes,” she said.

“This is the last time we’ll ever see you,” Buster said, emphasizing each word, wondering if his parents understood exactly what this meant. He watched their faces for recognition of the finality of the moment, but there was nothing there but a certainty that they had rescued what was necessary in order to keep living. Buster was about to repeat himself, but he knew that nothing would be changed, and so he simply allowed the moment to pass.

The Fangs looked around the sparsely populated mall.

“All these places are going out of business,” Camille said. “It’s a shame.”

“They were perfect for what we wanted to do,” Caleb said. “It was like these places were built for our particular kind of art.”

“It was so much fun,” Camille continued. “We would walk into some mall, fan out, and no one had any idea what we were going to do. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I could see each one of you, Annie and Buster, but it was a game. I couldn’t even acknowledge you, because it would ruin everything. And I just waited for whatever amazing thing to finally happen, all these people walking past us, movement on all sides of us.”

“It was so wonderful,” Caleb agreed.

“And then it happened, whatever we had made. And no matter what it was, I remember how much I loved the aftermath, the confusion on everyone’s faces but ours. We were the only ones in the whole world who knew what was happening. And I couldn’t wait for that moment, when we were all together again, just the four of us, and we could finally allow ourselves the satisfaction of having made something beautiful.”

“It was the most incredible feeling,” Caleb replied.

Caleb and Camille, perhaps forgetting their cover, held hands, kissed each other. Buster and Annie began to walk away from their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fang. Annie, still holding on to the fantasy of causing unrest, wanted to scream out, to make a huge scene, get the police involved, grind everything that mattered to their parents into dust. Buster, sensing her whirling anger, touched her softly on the shoulder, squeezed, kissed her on her cheek. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get far away.”

Annie, her anger unabated, resisted the urge to do what her parents would have done in the same situation, to cause chaos no matter whom it hurt. This, she finally understood, was not what she and Buster had to be a part of anymore. They had stepped mere inches away from the life their parents had made for them, and all they had to do now was to keep moving. She nodded her assent to her brother and her posture relaxed. As they continued to put distance between themselves and their parents, Annie and Buster resisted the urge to turn around, to change that final image of their parents, embracing, happy, nothing in the world that mattered but the art that was inside of them.

Annie and Buster walked out of the mall. They stepped into their rental car and pulled onto the highway. They did not speak, could not find the words to say what they felt. They had brought their parents back from the dead, some kind of strange magic that only the two of them possessed. Annie held out her hand, and Buster took it, the way their joined hands could steady the rotation of the Earth. They listened to the sound of the car’s tires on the road and hoped that wherever they ended up next would be a good place, a place of their own making. And they believed, for the first time in their lives, that it would be.

favor fire, 2009

artist: annie fang

A
nnie sat on the floor in the middle of a cavernous bedroom, a row of tiny beds lining the west wall, as she stared at the four children, two boys and two girls, who surrounded her. “Your hair is short like a boy’s,” the youngest of them, Jake, seven years old, as beautiful as a doll, said. “It is pretty short,” Annie admitted. “But it’s very pretty on you,” said the oldest, Isabel, a fifteen-year-old girl with huge blue eyes and crooked teeth. The other boy, Thomas, twelve years old and already awkward in his body, said, “Your hair smells nice, too.” Annie nodded at these children, who seemed to close around her. “Can I kiss you?” the last child, Caitlin, a ten-year-old girl with a dusting of freckles across her nose, asked Annie. Annie paused, looked down at the floor and then over at the closed door to the bedroom. “I guess so,” Annie said. “If she gets to kiss you,” Thomas said, “we should all get to kiss you.” The children held hands and danced in a circle around Annie, screaming, “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss.” Annie looked at the door one more time and then said, “Okay. Okay. One at a time.” The children shook their heads. “All at once,” they shouted. Annie nodded and then closed her eyes. She felt their little mouths, slightly wet, press against her cheeks, her forehead, her own mouth. The children made a single, sustained sound, a humming noise that rumbled in their throats. And then Annie smelled smoke, spiraling around her, emanating from the children, and she pushed them away. “No, no, no, no,” she whispered to the children, who merely laughed and ran to the far corners of the room, smoke trailing them, kicked into strange shapes by their tiny feet.

“Cut,” Lucy shouted. And then the shapes of nearly a dozen people, who had somehow made themselves invisible up to that point, began to scurry around the room, setting and resetting lights, clearing the smoke-like fog from the room. One of the crew members held out his hand for Annie and she took it, pulling herself up from the floor. “Looked good,” the man said, and Annie smiled. It was the first day of shooting, but it felt to Annie, who had spent so much time in Lucy’s presence leading up to filming, that it had been going on for months. Lucy then walked over to Annie, embraced her, and said, “You are so fucking good at this.” Annie, still not recovered from the strangeness of the last scene, merely nodded, too confused to disagree.

Before filming that first scene, Lucy had recommended that Annie spend as much time with the children as possible. “They’re supposed to love you. So it would help if you could make them love you for real.” Annie shook her head. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” At the rehearsals, Annie had treated the children as she did all actors, with a polite cautiousness, a respect for their space. But on the final night before shooting, Annie had screwed up her courage, knocked on the door of the children’s room, and then walked in to find them playing a video game on their PlayStation. “What is this game?” she asked the children, who, without looking away from the screen, replied,
“Fatal Flying Guillotine III.”
Annie smiled. “Is there some kind of half-man, half-bear in this game?” she wondered, already knowing the answer. “Major Ursa,” said Thomas. “Move over,” Annie said, and proceeded to beat the hell out of these four children for nearly an hour. “You are so good at this,” Isabel said to Annie, who nodded. “I am,” Annie said. “I am so good at this.”

T
he evening after shooting the first scene, Lucy called Annie’s hotel room. “Do you want to come over?” she asked, and Annie, in her pajamas, walked down the hall to Lucy’s room. There was a bank of screens, each showing different angles of the same scene, Annie’s body nearly obscured by the children, all in bone-white sleeping gowns that ran from their necks to the floor. She sat next to Lucy, each of them donning headphones, and watched the camera slowly zoom in on Annie’s face, her eyes shut, the children leaning closer and closer to place their mouths on her. It was more sensual than Annie had expected, though terrifying as well, how Annie shrank and shrank beneath the children’s forms, the creeping, twisting smoke that threatened to swallow all of them. “It’s really great,” Annie told Lucy, whose eyes, unblinking, reflected the final shot of Annie prone on the floor. Over the headphones, they could hear the sound of the children’s laughter, echoing against the high ceilings of the bedroom.

B
uster had sent Annie the most recent draft of his new novel, which she read at night. One afternoon, Isabel found the pages in Annie’s bag during a break in filming and said, “What is this?” Annie told her that it was a story. “What’s it about?” she asked. “It’s about a bunch of kids who get kidnapped and have to fight each other in order to earn their keep.” All at once, the children lined up in front of Annie. “We want to hear about that,” Thomas said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for kids,” she told them. “I hate it when people say that,” Caitlin yelled. “Why do people write stories about kids if they don’t want kids to read them?” They begged her to read some of it, and so she grabbed a random page from somewhere in the middle of the novel and read: “The children grew restless when they weren’t in the pit. They took their frustrations out on their own bodies, pressing lit matches against their skin, rubbing against the sharp edges of the holding pen so that they would not lose the anger that they needed to survive.” Thomas clapped his hands. “You are so going to read this to us,” he said, and so, when they weren’t being tutored, as they waited to walk onto the set and burst into flames, the children listened to Annie tell them about the children in Buster’s story, who would do unspeakable acts in order to please the adults who watched over them.

One time, Lucy walked into the room just as Annie was telling the children about another expedition by the child wranglers, who set nightly traps in the outlying towns to capture the children who were brave enough, and foolish enough, to stray from their houses. One girl, wrapped in an ever-tightening net, ripped at the ropes until the skin rubbed off of her hands, kicking and screaming as the wrangler dragged her over the rocky terrain. The children looked horrified, but they kept nodding whenever Annie paused, eager for the next awful thing. Annie could not wait for the chance to talk to her brother, to tell him what an amazing, unusual thing he had created. “What are you doing to them?” Lucy said to Annie. “They like it,” Annie said. “They really like it.”

A
nnie sat on her bed in her tiny room, nothing but the uncomfortable bed, a small nightstand, a desk, and a cheap, unsteady chair. There was a single window, but it was too high for her to look out of it. She pulled open the nightstand drawer and removed a small packet of wooden matches. Opening the box, retrieving a single, sturdy match, she struck the head of the match against the flint and watched the tiny, flared flame spark into existence. She stared at it until her eye held nothing but the dancing flame, always threatening to drown itself in the cramped air of the room. She held the match even as the flame inched further and further down the wood, leaving a brittle, black ash still struggling to retain its previous shape. The match crept closer to the soft pads of her fingertips until, just as she felt the kiss of the flame, she extinguished the match with her own breath.

“That’s great, Annie,” Lucy said. “I think we got it.”

“One more time,” Annie said. Lucy considered it and then nodded her assent. The crew reset the scene and then Annie performed the same task, another match sizzling awake. Annie let the flame burn down until it was at the same point as the previous take. She did not allow a single spasm within her own body to disrupt the tiny fire that she held in her hand. The heat of the flame bit into her fingertips, the skin turning the softest shade of pink, and then, unable to resist any longer, she extinguished the match.

“That’s even better,” Lucy said. “We’ll use that one.”

“One more time,” Annie said. She felt like she could do this forever, inviting the flame closer and closer until it made a home beneath her skin, traveled throughout her entire body, and lit her up from the inside.

I
sabel was painting her nails, even though she would have to remove the polish as soon as it dried in order to film the next scene. “Lucy is in love with you,” she said to Annie, who was sharing a bowl of chocolate-covered pretzels with Jake as they watched a cartoon where aliens had entered a skateboard contest. “What makes you say that?” Annie asked her. “I can tell,” she said. “She’s really nice to you.” Annie said, “But she’s nice to everyone. That’s just how she is.” Isabel smiled, as though she had already deciphered the code that the adults had constructed to keep her in the dark about important things. “She is extra, extra nice to you, though,” Isabel said.

“If the two of you get married,” Jake said, his mouth filled with a paste of pretzel, “you should have four children and name them after us.”

A
nnie stood at the desk of Mr. Marbury, the father of the afflicted children, and stared at the numerous drafts of strange architecture, seemingly unrelated to the laws of physics. He had once been a distinguished architect, had designed this very house, but now he spent hours upon hours in this room conjuring up structures that could only exist in another realm. When Marbury and his wife entered the study, the door slamming shut behind them, Annie stiffened and then quickly backed away from the materials.

“Please sit down, Ms. Wells,” he said to Annie, who obeyed his request. The only other time she had been in this room was when they had interviewed her for the position. Mr. Marbury had the same countenance as he did then, the disgusted air of having to deal with such an unbecoming situation and the smug certainty that, even with the utter lowliness of the task, Annie was not worthy of the position. Mrs. Marbury, silent as ever, simply stood at her husband’s side.

“We no longer require your services,” he informed Annie.

“Why?”

“I’m sure you can imagine. There have been far too many
incidents
in recent months. You have proven incapable of restricting the children’s
impulses
.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Annie responded.

“I cannot imagine how that factors into my decision.”

“And the children?”

“We have obtained residence for them at a hospital in Alaska, one that specializes in such unique cases. The children will be separated, to dissuade any collective hysteria, and treated with scientific methods that are beyond your capabilities.”

“But they’re children,” Annie said, as if Mr. Marbury had forgotten this. “They are your children.”

“Children are not guaranteed the luxuries of family, Ms. Wells,” he said. “If people are unable to exist within the parameters that have been created for them, they lose any claim to titles like son and daughter.”

Annie felt the heat radiating within her body, her heart an engine of combustion so powerful that she threatened to crack open and fill the entire house with her fury. Annie, who eschewed using her own personal history to inform her performance, simply allowed her actions to come directly from the material at hand: these parents, so certain of their infallibility, terrified of their children’s capabilities, sought to erase any evidence of discord in their lives. These were not her parents; she had no desire to create such a flimsy lie. They were only the people that they were, standing in front of her. And they were deserving of punishment.

Annie’s hands curled into fists, her nails digging into her own skin, and she struck out at Mr. Marbury, sending him crashing to the floor with the force of her blows. She pounded him into unconsciousness and then, his legs spasming uncontrollably, she ran out of the study, leaving Mrs. Marbury frozen to her spot on the floor, unable to step toward her downed husband.

Lucy ended the scene and Annie immediately ran back into the room to check on Stephen, who played Mr. Marbury. “Did I hurt you?” she asked him and he rose unsteadily to his feet. “You hurt me just the right amount,” he said, “but I’d rather not do too many takes of it.”

Lucy beamed, staring directly at Annie. “That was perfect,” she said. “That was exactly what I needed from you.”

Annie turned to head back to her dressing room, avoiding Lucy’s gaze. As she walked past the crew, she clenched and unclenched her fists, admiring the ease with which her character could welcome disaster into her life.

A
nnie called Buster. “How is the movie business?” he asked her. She said it was fine, that she was deep enough into the movie that she was operating on instinct, which was when she knew things were working. “How is the novel?” she asked. He told her that he had sent it to his agent, who was shocked to find out that he was still alive, still writing. “He thinks it could be big,” Buster told his sister, and she could hear the excitement in his voice, his desire to show her that he was in a good place, that they had both made it to the other side of their unhappiness.

“I think he’s right,” she told him.

“And Suzanne just sold a story to the
Missouri Review
. She wants to frame the acceptance letter.”

It struck Annie that Buster was on such solid ground, having always been the most fragile of the Fangs, that he had surpassed her. She had always taken care of him, protected him from the worst of the chaos, and now he was happy and in love and she was in a frozen place, still trying to figure out how her own body worked.