The Family Fang: A Novel (13 page)

“I wouldn’t eat this sandwich if you paid me,” Caleb said. He was pounding his fist on the counter. People were starting to watch the event unfold.

B
uster filmed the entire thing. “Oh, shit,” he said.

“S
ir, I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave,” the manager said.

“You people have the tiniest responsibility. All you have to do is your job and I do the rest. I do all the hard work. All you have to do is let the thing happen.”

“Sir, leave right now.”

Camille came over to Caleb. “Let’s just leave, honey,” she said.

“I do all the goddamn work and you get to witness the beauty of it all. That’s all you have to do.”

Camille pulled her husband away from the Chicken Queen. The entire food court was watching them. Caleb took the rest of the coupons from his wife and threw them into the air. No one moved to retrieve them.

B
uster turned off the camera. “That,” he said to his sister, “was awful.”

Annie nodded. “That was bad.”

As they waited at the van, Annie and Buster talked about the inescapable fact of their parents. They were losing it. Not just their artistic sensibility, but also their minds. Without Buster and Annie, is this what had become of them?

“I mean, they always had a radical idea of what constituted art,” Annie said, “but this was almost silly. Did he really think he was going to lead some coup on the Chicken Queen? Did they really expect people to lose their minds over a free chicken sandwich?”

Buster nodded, still hazy with pain pills. “They’re in a bad way,” he said.

After nearly a half hour, their parents finally appeared. It looked like both of them had been crying, their faces somber and tinged red.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Buster said, but Caleb didn’t respond.

For almost the entire ride back home, they traveled in silence. Annie watched the unfamiliar scenery become familiar once again. Buster held his sister’s hand, feeling safe in the tense atmosphere of the van. Finally, only a few minutes from home, Caleb began to snicker. “Goddamn Chicken Queen,” he said. His shoulders were shaking. Then Camille began to chuckle. “What a disaster,” she said, shaking her head.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Buster said again. “I’m sorry, Mom.” His parents waved him off.

“Great art is difficult,” Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, “But I don’t understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.” He tried to smile, but to Annie and Buster, he seemed ridiculously tired. His hands trembled as they gripped the steering wheel and Annie resisted the urge to ask him if he wanted her to drive them home. Caleb took his wife’s hand and kissed it. She pinched his ear and smiled. By the time they arrived at the house, their parents were already thinking of new ideas to create the chaos that they believed the world deserved.

They paused before they stepped out of the van, every Fang in their place. The four of them then walked up to the house, their home, and each of them had the undeniable feeling that, now that they were together again, they could not hope to prevent the thing that would come next, whatever it would be.

Chapter Six

T
hough the swelling had gone down, his body inexplicably capable enough to repair itself, Buster continued to wear the protective eye patch. The lack of depth perception that it induced seemed to be canceled out by the pain pills in a way that made him feel as if he had extrasensory perception. Half-reading a comic book from his childhood about superpowered elephants, he tested his newfound abilities by guessing the time without looking at the clock. The numbers flickered in his head, just behind his covered eye, and he said out loud, “Three forty-seven
P.M.
” He then looked over at the nightstand clock, which read 9:04
A.M.
The ESP, he determined, came and went.

He pushed away the covers and tested the floorboards beneath his feet. His long underwear was baggy and unwashed, a uniform he refused to shed while he was in the house. As he walked down the hallway, the repetitive sound of a phonograph needle rubbing against the edge of a record filled the living room. His parents, still masked but sleeping, lay across the sofa. Scattered on the floor were books about fire manipulation and pyrotechnics, a fine coat of black ash across the coffee table. In the kitchen, his sister, two weeks returned to the Fang household, fried some bologna in one pan and an entire carton of eggs in another. While she moved the food around with a spatula, she took deep, serious sips from a sweating tumbler filled with vodka and tomato juice. “Morning,” she said, and Buster responded, “Yes.”

Buster slid two slices of bread into the toaster and, when they emerged toasted, he placed them on a plate and sat at the table, chewing softly, trying to keep the soggy scraps of dough out of the gap that used to hold his tooth. His sister walked over to the table, the spatula balancing a slice of bologna with a fried egg atop it, and deposited the meal on Buster’s plate. Buster, uncertain of when he last ate, mashed the food into a paste with his fork until the food resembled some kind of cut-rate pâté. His sister returned to the table with her own plate, the size of a ride cymbal, heaped to overflowing with bologna and eggs, charred pink and sickly white and bright yellow.

“You have any plans for the day?” Buster asked Annie.

“Watch some movies,” Annie replied, taking careful sips of the Bloody Mary. “Take it easy.”

“Me too,” Buster said. “Take it easy.”

They had been taking it easy since they had returned. Annie had settled into her old room, stocked a full bar under her bed, and Buster would pass her as they walked back and forth through the house, their parents working on various artistic projects in which the Fang children tried not to take any interest. Buster would share his medicine with Annie and they would watch silent films and read comic books and avoid any mention of the parts of their lives that existed outside of this house. Buster and his sister might have been turning into shut-ins but, thanks to his sister’s simple presence, they were now doing it together.

Their parents entered the kitchen and complained about the smell of grease in the air. “Just breathing the scent of fried bologna will ruin my stomach,” Mr. Fang said. Working as a team, the routine imprinted on their muscles, Mr. and Mrs. Fang assembled the makings of their breakfast: spinach leaves, orange juice, plain yogurt, bananas, blueberries, and ground flaxseed. They dumped the contents into the blender and, thirty seconds of whirring later, they came to the table with their glasses of purple-green liquid. They each took a heavy swig of the drink and then breathed deeply. Mrs. Fang reached across the table and lightly tapped her children’s hands. “This is nice,” she said.

The phone rang but no one moved to answer it. There was not one person that the Fangs wanted to speak to that wasn’t already sitting at the table. The machine took the call into its own hands, Mrs. Fang’s voice flatly saying, “The Fangs are dead. Leave a message after the tone and our ghosts will return your call.” Mrs. Fang, the one at the table, holding her smoothie, began to titter. “When did I leave that greeting?” she said.

Once the tone sounded, a man, seemingly thrown off by the silliness of the answering machine greeting, said, “Urmm . . . yes, this is a call for Mr. Buster Fang.” Buster immediately assumed that it was the hospital in Nebraska, looking for its money. How had they tracked him to Tennessee? he wondered. Had they placed a chip in his head when he had been unconscious? He touched the eye patch, concentrated, and tried to detect something alien inside his body.

“This is Lucas Kizza, and I teach English here at Hazzard State Community College. I recently became aware of the fact that you are back in town and I wondered if you might be interested in meeting with some of my students to discuss the creative process and perhaps even read from your work. I’ve been very much impressed by your two novels and I think the students would benefit from talking to you. I can’t offer any financial compensation, but I hope you still might consider my offer. Thank you.”

Buster immediately looked at his parents. “Did you set this up?” he asked. Mr. and Mrs. Fang held up their hands as if to defend themselves from physical attack. “We did not,” Mr. Fang said. “I don’t even know who this Kizza guy is.”

“Then how did he come to learn that I was back in town?” Buster said.

“It’s a small town, Buster,” Mrs. Fang answered. “When you got here, you had a grotesquely swollen face. It attracted attention.”

W
hen they first arrived back home, Buster, still adjusting to the high dosage of the medication he had given himself, woke in the van and demanded that they stop for fried chicken. “Buster, I don’t think solid food is a great idea yet,” his mother had told him, but Buster had leaned into the front of the van and reached for the steering wheel, saying, over and over in a strange monotone, “Fer-ide chick-hen.” The Fangs pulled into a Kentucky Fried Chicken ten minutes later and walked inside the restaurant. Buster swayed unsteadily as his parents directed him to a table. “What do you want?” they asked him. “Fer-ide chick-hen,” he said, “all-you-can-eat.” They left the table and returned a few minutes later with a breast, wing, thigh, and leg, a mound of gravy-soaked mashed potatoes, and a biscuit. Everyone in a five-table radius was staring at the Fangs by this point. Buster, oblivious, unpacked some bloodstained gauze from his mouth, picked up the chicken leg, extra crispy, and took a ravenous bite. He felt something come loose inside his mouth, his muscles stretched beyond comfort after so much time in atrophy, and he began to moan, a funeral dirge, dropping the leg back onto the tray. The barely chewed scrap of chicken fell from his mouth, stained a foamy red with Buster’s blood. “Okay,” Mr. Fang said, sweeping the tray off of the table, dumping it into the trash. “This little experiment is over. Let’s go home.” Buster tried to pack the gauze back into his mouth, but his mother and father were already carrying him into the parking lot. “I’m a monster,” Buster bellowed, and his parents did nothing to dissuade him of this belief.

“W
ell, I’m not going to do it,” Buster said.

“I think you should,” Annie said. Mr. and Mrs. Fang agreed.

Buster did not want to talk about writing. It had been years since his last novel had been published, a spectacular failure at that. His literary career was encased in ice, held in suspended animation, lost to future generations. And the thought of working on something new, in this house, surrounded by his family, seemed like the worst possible idea. His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover.

Mr. and Mrs. Fang finished their drinks and returned to the living room to continue working on their latest project. Buster, his appetite having never appeared, gave up the pretense of eating and scraped the remaining food into the garbage. “See you later,” he said to Annie, who looked up from her rapidly diminishing plate of food and nodded.

T
wo hours into a nap that he had taken for no reason other than he was bored, Buster was shaken into consciousness, his muscles aching from the effort of staying asleep for so long, by his sister. “I found something weird,” she told him. “How weird?” Buster asked, unconvinced that it warranted getting out of bed. Annie held up a tiny oil painting, the size of a dental dam, which featured a small child with his arm, up to his elbow, inside the mouth of a wolf. Around them were gleaming surgical instruments, flecked with blood. It was unclear whether the child was placing the items inside the wolf or pulling them out. “There’s like, I don’t know, a hundred of these paintings in the back of my closet,” Annie told him. At the prospect of overwhelming weirdness, not simply an isolated case, Buster found his interest wax. “Okay, I’m up,” he said, and he followed his sister into her bedroom. On their hands and knees, Buster and Annie moved the nearly one hundred paintings from the faint light of the closet to the middle of the bedroom, arranging them like tiles on the floor. When they had retrieved every last painting, they looked in stunned silence at the resulting disharmony that now filled the room.

A
man, covered in mud and thin, lash-like wounds that dripped blood, wandered in a field of palominos.

A little girl, buried alive, played jacks by match light while her parents wailed above her grave.

An ocean of dead, decomposing geese were stacked like cordwood by men in biohazard suits.

A woman, her hair on fire, held a brush made of bone and smiled in an exact reproduction of the Mona Lisa’s expression.

A young boy, his hands wrapped in barbed wire, wrestled with a tiger while the boy’s classmates circled around them.

Two women, handcuffed to each other, stood over the steel teeth of a bear trap.

A family sat cross-legged on the floor of a cabin, surrounded by rabbits, and hurked entrails from the still-living animals.

“W
hat
are
these?” Buster asked, his eyes moving from painting to painting as if they told an interconnected story.

“Maybe someone sends these to Mom and Dad. Remember that lady who kept mailing them Ziploc bags filled with teeth?”

“They’re not bad,” Buster said, with some admiration. Technically, the paintings were nearly perfect, especially considering the tiny dimensions of the canvas. They were the work of an artist of some accomplishment, however unsettling the subject matter. He imagined these paintings made into animated movies and those movies being watched with great reverence by people who were steeped in psychedelic drugs. He then imagined that, if he were a better writer, he could make an entire career out of explicating the circumstances that created each one of the images on display. Instead, all he could do was stare at the paintings and feel like he and his sister had found something akin to pornography and that they should not be looking at them out in the open.

As they stood, afraid to move, the paintings surrounding them in ways that now seemed alive and threatening, the door swung open and their mother walked into the room. Whatever words were poised to be spoken aloud were replaced by a gasp so resonant that it seemed their mother had inhaled all of the oxygen in the room. Then a dark shadow passed over her expression, her eyes narrowing. “Don’t you dare look at these,” their mother said, her voice barely above a whisper. She pushed her children out of the way and hesitated for a few seconds before she began to turn over each painting so that the image was concealed. Annie and Buster stared at the ceiling as their mother removed the offending articles from their sight, a procedure that seemed as perilous as defusing a bomb or handling unsafe chemicals. Once it was finished, their mother, her breathing now unsteady, as if she was on the precipice of a long crying jag, sat on the bed and said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Buster and Annie, unaccustomed to emotion, kept their distance. “What’s wrong, Mom?” Annie asked. “I don’t know,” their mother responded. “What are these?” Buster then asked. “I don’t know,” their mother again responded. “Where did they come from?” Annie asked. “Me,” their mother said, finally looking up at Buster and Annie, “I made them.”

W
orking together, the three of them moved the paintings from the floor back into the closet as Mrs. Fang explained their origin.

“I used to be a painter,” she told them. “That’s how I got a scholarship to study art in college. And then I met your dad and I fell in love and, well, you know how he feels about visual art.”

Their father, on several occasions throughout their childhood, had referred to painting and photography and drawing as dead forms of art, incapable of accurately reflecting the unwieldy nature of real life. “Art happens when things fucking move around,” he told them, “not when you freeze them in a goddamn block of ice.” He would then take whatever item was closest to him, a glass or a tape recorder, and smash it against the wall. “That was art,” he said, and then he would pick up the pieces of the shattered object and hold them out for his children to inspect. “This,” he said, offering the remains of the broken thing, “is not.”

“The thing is,” their mother continued, all the paintings safely hidden away, “your father and I are getting older, entering the twilight of our artistic careers, I’m afraid. Still, I’m a good ten years younger than him and, god forbid, if he dies before I do, what am I going to do? It’s Caleb and Camille Fang, the two of us, and that’s why it works. I’ll have to do something else. So, for the past few years, I’ve been painting these little, I don’t know what to call them, scenes. If your father found out, good Lord, it would be such a betrayal to him.”