The Family Fang: A Novel (22 page)

“We’ll go back to Tennessee in the morning,” she replied.

“What about Mom and Dad?” he asked.

“Maybe Hobart is right,” she said, finally giving voice to what she had been considering for the past few hours. “It might be possible that they mistakenly put this distance between us without considering that we would forget about them. Maybe we’re in the position of power now.” It was, in the game she had decided existed between her and Buster and her parents, the only way she could now imagine winning, to simply end the game on their own terms.

“Maybe,” Buster said, without conviction, and, before Annie could answer, he was asleep again. Annie closed her eyes, the car a thin shell that protected them from the rest of the world. She slept as soundly as she had in weeks, locked with her brother inside an object that had come to a complete and total stop.

A
nnie and Buster checked with the police almost daily for updates as to their parents’ whereabouts, but there was still no activity on their credit cards, no reports of any strange activity from people matching their descriptions. “The longer it takes, the harder it is,” the sheriff told them, and they fully understood what he meant.

Annie kept the house clean, prepared their meals, went on daily three-mile runs, and watched at least one old movie on the VCR, while Buster spent nearly the entire day in his room, at work on something so necessary to him that he could not explain it to Annie. She had walked into his room one time when he was writing and she saw a piece of paper, which read:
We are fugitives. We are the fugitives. We live at the edges. We live on the edge. The law is hungry for us. The law is skinny with hunger for us. A town filled with gold-seekers. A shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We live on the edge, a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us. We=? The edge=?

“Buster,” she asked, pointing at the scribbled words, “what is this?” He shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I’m going to find out.” She left him to bang away on his computer, the violent sound of his hands building something out of nothing. She was slightly jealous of how easily he could carry his art around with him. Unlike Buster, she needed screenwriters like Daniel to give her lines and directors like Freeman to tell her how to say them, and actors like Minda with whom to interact. She had always thought that Buster’s solitude, writing all alone in a tiny room, had helped to undo him, but now she thought that making something with no one else’s interference might be interesting. And yet it was impossible for her to imagine anything other than acting, the way she took the lines and made them believable, the way she processed direction and made the action possible, the way she looked at another actor and convinced herself that she loved them. She sat in her room, watching a movie where an actress, beautiful and predatory, stood under a streetlight, a handkerchief in her mouth, having transformed from a panther back into a woman. Annie wished she had been an actress in those days, when things were bizarre and yet no one seemed to notice or care.

Annie had only checked her e-mail once since fleeing L.A. There had been an e-mail from Daniel, which she had deleted without reading. There had been an e-mail from her agent, which had the subject line of
Rethinking our business relationship
. She had deleted that without reading it. There had been nothing else but spam.

When she logged on again, she saw that she had a new message from Lucy Wayne, her director from
Date Due
. Annie had not talked to her in quite some time, had been so embarrassed by Freeman’s movie and the subsequent hoopla over her personal life that she avoided contact with Lucy, afraid of being told that she had proven to be a disappointment. The subject line read:
News
. Annie clicked on the message and it read:

Hey Annie,

I have tried to call you about a hundred times. Your agent said you had gone AWOL, but he gave me your e-mail to try and reach you. I’ve been thinking about you, and, after I heard about your parents, I got worried. I hope you are okay, though I can’t imagine that you are in a good place right now. I know how complicated your relationship was with Caleb and Camille and, though we haven’t talked in a while, I’d love to see you again.

The main reason I’m writing is that I’ve finished the screenplay for my next film, and I’ve been thinking about you a lot. This character, this woman I’ve been writing about for the past year and a half, is someone that I couldn’t picture in my head without thinking of you. I guess, in a lot of ways, I wrote this character with you in mind. And I don’t know what your situation is right now, how interested you are in acting, but I think you’d be perfect for the part. I’m lining up financing, though after Paramount basically killed my last movie with all their bullshit, I think I’ll be going the independent route again. So there won’t be much money, but I hope you’ll consider it. I’ve attached it so you can read it if you’d like, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it and I would love it even more if the two of us could team up again. I would like to get that same feeling of excitement that I had when I was doing
Date Due,
and you played a huge role in that happening.

Write me if you can,

Lucy Wayne

Before writing and directing
Date Due,
Lucy had been a conceptual artist of some renown in the Chicago art scene, her own parents having been minimally famous photographers. Lucy would cross-stitch blankets with black thread to make strange phrases such as:
This Is the Best I Could Do for You
and
Run to the Ocean and Back Again, Barefoot
and
Clap Your Hands and Make Rain
. She would then hand out these blankets to the city’s homeless, and soon Chicago was filled with these blanket-sized billboards. Lucy would then wander the city with a video camera in search of her own handiwork, the results of which would be shown at galleries. She started adding narrative, converting some of the material into several short films that she showed at various film festivals, which finally brought her fully into moviemaking. Annie remembered how awed Lucy had been when she found out that Annie was Child A. “I was so in love with your parents,” Lucy told her. “I wanted to be their kid.” Annie, still trying at that point to escape any connection to the Fang legacy, had only said, “They would have torn you to pieces.”

L
ucy’s new script,
Favor Fire,
was about a woman who becomes a caretaker for a couple in Western Canada whose children periodically catch fire. The children are not harmed by their own combustion, but it is the woman’s job to keep the house from burning down, to contain the flames. The matriarch and patriarch of the family, wealthy and intellectual and endlessly cruel, rule over the mansion and seek to find fault with everything the caretaker does. The four children, ranging in age from six to fifteen, are sweet but made lonely by their circumstances, their parents’ obvious distaste for their affliction, and so they rely on the woman for entertainment and news from the outside world. Over time, as the woman grows more and more capable with her responsibilities, she develops an obsession with fire, matches, and sparks, and has to resist the temptation to goad the children into catching fire. The house—how could it not—burns to the ground at the end of the movie, the children swept up by the woman, leaving the parents behind, driving out of British Columbia and into the pristine cold of the Yukon.

Annie could not help but be moved by the strange emotions in the script, the unpleasant ways in which the woman finds herself giving in to the danger of this family. The movie, which would be filmed almost entirely in a single location, the mansion, had a claustrophobic feel, the constant threat of the fires, and she could see how the making of the movie would be difficult and somewhat thrilling if it all managed to come together. Like
Date Due,
it was about someone who gives in to her worst impulses and yet somehow manages to survive the ordeal. She wondered if this was how Lucy saw her, a woman incapable of being harmed by the terrible choices she would always make. She minimized the document and wrote an e-mail to Lucy that read, simply: “I love it. I’m in.”

Once she sent the e-mail, she allowed herself a vision of the future that did not include searching for her parents. And then, because she realized that she could, she imagined a future where her parents were already found. And then, no one to prevent this unfounded optimism, she imagined a future where her parents had never existed in the first place. Once she allowed herself this miracle, as soon as it had taken shape, it immediately burned up in the atmosphere, turned to vapor, as Annie realized that, without her parents, there would be no way into the world for her. She could not, despite every attempt to do so, figure out a way that she could arrive ahead of her parents, to outpace them. It would have to be her parents, young and still tender, entirely unaware that their children, Annie and Buster, were moving, inexorably, toward them, waiting to be named.

lights, camera, action, 1985

artists: caleb and camille fang

B
onnie watched the Fangs pacing around the studio, none of them acknowledging the others’ presence. They simply waited for whatever would come next. Their faces were so impassive that it seemed to Bonnie that they were not human, that they were robots programmed to perform their task without deviation, no matter how dire the circumstances, despite the inevitable disorder that would ensue. Finally, everything perfectly arranged, Caleb arose from his director’s chair and stood behind the cameraman. “Action!” he called. And now Bonnie, sweating through her nurse’s outfit, trying so hard to keep her hands from shaking, wondered how she was going to keep up with this family, how she could possibly help them make something beautiful.

S
he had learned about the Fangs earlier that year, when she had taken Hobart Waxman’s
Introduction to Meaningful Art
class. In the class, they had studied one of the earliest works by the Fangs, where Caleb Fang had taped a series of homemade, flare-like devices to his back and, while holding his nine-month-old son in the middle of a crowded mall, caught fire, the flame shooting from underneath his coat and smoke issuing from the legs of his pants, while he continued to walk through the mall with the baby in his arms. The whole event was captured on video by Camille, who was standing on the second level of the mall, hanging over the railing to focus on the unemotional faces of both Caleb and, even more amazingly, the baby, as the other shoppers tried to make sense of the event unfolding before them. “This,” Hobart had told the class, “is so rudimentary, so unencumbered by the traditions that have come before it, that it almost strains the notion of what constitutes art. The Fangs simply throw their own bodies into a space as if they were hand grenades and wait for the disruption to occur. They have no expectations other than to cause unrest. It is, if you are one of the few to witness it firsthand, deeply unsettling because of how little the Fangs seem to care about the psychic and sometimes physical pain that accompanies their performances.” Bonnie had watched the way Caleb Fang, obviously suffering some degree of burns on his body, walked so steadily through the mall that it felt to Bonnie as if she was being hypnotized by his movements. Caleb Fang walked, on fire, and shielded his own son from the flames. It felt so unnecessary and yet so arresting that Bonnie immediately fell in love, not with art but with the Fangs.

She had received a mailing address for the Fangs from Hobart Waxman, after some degree of flirtation, her considerable beauty something she was only recently learning to utilize for her own benefit. She proceeded to write Caleb and Camille letter after letter, hoping for a response, though not knowing what she would want them to say. She told them of her own artistic desire, which was merely to be yet another component of the performances that the Fangs enacted.

There was no response from the Fangs, and Bonnie could not blame them. They had developed something perfect and why would they seek to disrupt that process by including another person, especially one with no vision of her own? She had tried for months now to think of her own performance, some unique revelation of the absurdity of life, but she had no capacity for new ideas. She could see an existing artwork and understand why it was or was not successful. But she could not take that knowledge and arrange it into something wholly original, or even a reinterpretation of that existing piece. She was, as Hobart had explained to her, as kindly as possible, simply a critic.

She watched a few other videos of the Fangs that Hobart had loaned her, the quality so grainy and inexpertly framed that it was sometimes difficult to immediately ascertain what had just happened. If only the Fangs were able to stage their events with actual lighting, a cameraman who knew what he was doing, multiple cameras to pick up all the nuances of the happening. If only the Fangs could make their art as if they were making movies, but Bonnie realized this was impossible, that you would lose the most important aspect of the performance if you were to draw attention to the fact that something was about to happen that needed to be documented.

And then she realized what she could offer the Fangs, how she could improve their work, how she could make herself essential. They could utilize the equipment of an actual film, all the people who go into making a movie pleasing to the eye, but they could still maintain the spontaneity that was so crucial to their art. It was so perfect that, for the first time, Bonnie allowed herself the small hope that she might actually be an artist after all.

C
aleb had flown to Los Angeles to work alongside Bonnie while Camille and the children prepared themselves for their eventual roles. When she had met him at the airport, in her tiniest dress, her hair teased in such a way that it seemed she had fallen from a great height and landed right at Caleb’s feet, he merely shook her hand and then began to outline all the things he would need in order to make his vision a reality. Bonnie struggled to find her notepad in her purse and followed at Caleb’s heels as she jotted down the rapid-fire instructions that he expected her to follow exactly to his specifications. “I have to believe that you are a capable woman,” he told her when they were finally seated in her car, driving through the city streets. “My family is nothing if not capable, and so I will proceed with the understanding that you can do what I ask you to do.” Bonnie nodded. “I will do whatever you want, Caleb,” she said. “Whatever you ask me to do, I will make sure that it happens.” Caleb smiled and drummed his fingers against his thigh. “This could be quite special, Bonnie,” he said. “A new chapter for the Fang family.” Though he had not said it explicitly, Bonnie allowed herself to believe that she was included as part of the family.

They worked quickly to rent cameras, lights, a small studio space for one week. They hired a crew to work for three days on a short film, promising them cash up front. They hired a documentary crew to film the making of the movie. Caleb worked on a script for the film while Bonnie, having skipped classes for the past two weeks, arrived every morning at Caleb’s hotel room to update him on how things were progressing. “I want you to be in the movie,” he told her, and Bonnie felt like maybe the two of them would have sex, but Caleb never once acknowledged any physical attraction to her. He was focused on only one thing, making something amazing, and this made Bonnie want to fuck him even more.

Finally, the rest of the Fang family arrived. The children, Annie and Buster, were so emotionless that Bonnie found it difficult to be around them. Though they were eight and six years old, they seemed like tiny adults and Bonnie, who felt nothing like an adult, simply found it easier to avoid them altogether. They devised complicated games that Bonnie could not understand and would play them for hours, never once acknowledging the activity in the room until finally one of their parents would call for them and the children would immediately stop their game and walk quickly to Caleb and Camille. And Camille, well, that was complicated for Bonnie. She was very warm, constantly offering words of encouragement, and eventually Bonnie began to wonder if perhaps she could sleep with Camille instead of Caleb; she found that she no longer cared how she gained entry into the family. She just wanted to be one of them.

F
inally, cameras rolling, Bonnie, who was playing the nurse, led the children into the room. Camille, playing the bedridden mother of the children, weakly propped herself up and called for the children to come closer. “Let me see my beautiful children,” she said, and, before she had even finished the line, Caleb called out, “Cut!” The crew worked to reset the shot and Caleb said, “Okay, Jane, I need a little more emotion from you. You haven’t seen your children in months and now here they are. Does that make sense?”

Camille nodded. “I can do that,” she said.

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie once again led the children into the room and Camille leaned forward and said, “Let me see my beautiful children!”

“Cut,” Caleb shouted. “Okay, that’s maybe a little too much emotion. You are dying of cancer. So somewhere in between.”

“I got it,” Camille replied, flashing a thumbs-up sign.

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room, and Caleb shouted, “Cut!” As the regular crew scrambled around the set, the documentary crew focused on Caleb as he said, “Okay, Bonnie, I think you’re bringing those kids in a little too quickly. Their mom is dying; she’s in a bad way. You’re going to be hesitant to show them what has happened to their mother.”

Bonnie nodded, too nervous to speak.

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room and Camille leaned forward and said, “Let me see my beautiful children,” and Caleb shouted, “Cut!” He pressed his index finger against his forehead, thinking, and then said, “Jane, let’s try that line without the word
beautiful,
okay? I think maybe that’s laying it on a bit thick.” Camille gave the director another thumbs-up sign.

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room and Camille leaned forward and said, “Let me see my chil—” and Caleb shouted, “No, okay, cut. Okay, sorry, Jane, but we do need that
beautiful
in there. Sorry.”

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room and Caleb shouted, “Cut! Okay, you kids are walking a little strangely. You’re not moving your arms. It’s weird. Can you move your arms for me?” Buster and Annie nodded.

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room and Camille leaned forward and said, “Let me see my beautiful children,” and Caleb said, “Cut! No, wait, I’m sorry. Did we decide to go back to the
beautiful children
line?” Camille smiled patiently and said, “Yes, we did.
Beautiful children
is what you wanted.”

“Okay,” Caleb said, holding up his hands in apology. “We’ll get it on the next take.”

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room and Camille leaned forward, and Caleb yelled, “Cut! Okay, Jane, you’re leaning a little too far forward. It looks desperate. I need a slow, gradual movement toward the children. The beautiful children.” Camille’s smile became a little tighter, and she said, “Maybe you can show me how you want me to move,” but Caleb waved her off. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room and Camille leaned forward and said, “Let me see my beautiful children,” and Caleb, of course, yelled, “Cut! Okay, you’re not emphasizing the word
me
in that line. Let
me
see my beautiful children. You haven’t seen them in months.” Camille looked confused but nodded anyway. “I’ll give it a shot,” she said.

“I’ve got a good feeling about this take,” Caleb shouted.

T
hree hours later, they did not have a single take that met with Caleb’s approval. While he focused most of his anger on Camille, the dying woman in the bed whose voice was nearly hoarse from saying the same line over and over again, he did not hesitate to lecture Buster and Annie at length as to the obvious mistakes they were making in their nonspeaking roles. The children had begun to cry in between takes, and Caleb would say, “Use that. Use that emotion in the next take.” Camille had flipped him the bird from her bed. “Fuck you,” she said. “Action!” he shouted.

After a while, he found fault with the lighting, the camerawork, the boom mike operator. “Listen, guy,” one of the crew said, “just tell us exactly what you want before we shoot, and we’ll give it to you.” Caleb looked toward the documentary camera and shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know what I want until I see it,” he said. The crew member replied, “Well, that’s not how it works.” Caleb snorted. “Well, that is how I work, and I have dozens of prestigious awards from various film festivals to back me up.”

Lights, camera, action.

Bonnie led the children into the room and Camille leaned forward and said, “Let me see my beautiful children.” Caleb said nothing, arms crossed, and so Bonnie guided the children to the foot of the bed so that Camille could brush her hand across Buster’s face. “Cut!” Caleb shouted. “I want you to touch the girl’s face before you touch the boy’s.” Camille began to slam her fists into her pillow. “What is wrong with you?” she shouted.

“I just want it to be perfect,” Caleb replied.

Buster and Annie began to sob loudly and Camille pulled the children into her arms. Bonnie could not tell if this was real or part of the performance. One of the crew members was trying to reason with Caleb and placed a conciliatory hand on the director’s shoulder, which caused Caleb to slap the man’s hand away. “You get your hands off of me,” Caleb shouted. He gestured toward the documentary crew and said, “Keep filming, this is the process of a genius and you need to capture all of it.” Right after he said this, Caleb grabbed the script from his chair and began to rip it into tiny pieces. “Okay,” he said, “no more script. We’ll totally improvise this thing.” The film crew was simply standing around the set, staring at Caleb. “Lights, camera, action,” Caleb shouted, but no one moved. He pushed the cameraman toward the camera and that’s when one of the crew rushed Caleb and put him in a headlock. Another man grabbed Caleb’s legs to keep him from kicking anyone, and they dragged him off the set. Five minutes later, Caleb stormed back onto the set and began to swing the director’s chair like a weapon. He then grabbed the camera from the documentary film crew and summarily fired all of them. He shouted, “That’s a wrap,” and the crew quickly shuffled off the set, screaming obscenities at Caleb as they passed by. Once the set was totally empty except for the Fangs and Bonnie, the children immediately ceased crying and began to smile. Camille started to laugh and then clapped her hands slowly as Caleb took a deep bow. His nose was bleeding and his shirt was ripped so badly it was hanging off his body, but he shrugged and then said to his family, “What do you think?” Camille nodded and replied, “Absolutely beautiful.” Bonnie could not move, felt as if she was suffering from shock, and it wasn’t until nearly ten minutes had passed that Caleb noticed that Bonnie was crying, stuttering sobs that turned into hiccups. “Bonnie,” he said. “You did great. You did just fine.” He motioned toward the rest of the family and they stood around Bonnie and placed their hands on her shoulders, rubbing her back. “I was so scared,” Bonnie said. “That’s good,” Camille said. “That’s exactly how you should feel.”