The Family Fang

by Kevin Wilson

Buster said that she should climb out the window of the bathroom and run away, which was his solution to most problems.

“Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes,” their father told them. “Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.”

It’s like, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you have to try like hell to keep from getting bored to death.”

In the car, driving home from the airport, the Fangs did not speak a single word. It had all been fake, a choreographed event, but they could not escape the dread that rattled inside their chests. It was a testament to their proficiency and talent as artists. They had affected themselves with the authenticity of the moment.

Daniel Cartwright had written two novels that felt like movies and then started writing screenplays that felt like TV shows. He wore a cowboy hat all the time now. He’d recently sold a script for a staggering million, something about two guys who build a robot that runs for president. It was called President 2.0 and Annie was not sure, other than the fact that he was unhinged and handsome, why she had ended up with him, and why, after she had left him, she would end up with him again.

“I’m going to get a drink,” she said, and pushed away from the table. It was two in the afternoon, but it was the afternoon, and evening followed the afternoon, and she was going to drink. She was going to drink well into the evening, she believed. She asked for and received a glass of gin, no ice, no mixers, no olive. She brought it back to the table and took a get-to-know-you sip that got the ball rolling.

Maybe she was going crazy. She didn’t feel crazy, but she was sure that this was not the way that sane people behaved.

She pressed a washcloth against her face and imagined that she was a giant, remorseless, half-bear, half-man creature. She pounded all of her enemies into the earth, leaving bloodstains in all directions, buzzards circling overhead. She killed everything that needed to be killed, and when she was done, when all had been made, if not right, at least less wrong, she crawled into a cave, dark and deep, and hibernated for months, waiting for a new season to arrive and find her sated. She looked at her own hands; her right hand was purple, swollen, perhaps broken. She could not smash anything without breaking herself.

What you’ll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.”

“Honestly, Annie,” Mrs. Fang said, her tongue probing the points of her new teeth, “there’s something to be said for subtlety.” Annie almost broke character, the idea of her parents, wearing custom-made veneers to look like werewolves, calling for subtle gestures.

It was always a strange sensation to hear her brother’s voice, how it sounded not like an actual voice but a sound inside of her own head, that her brother was held in the cage of her ribs and only occasionally made his presence known to her. She hadn’t heard from him in months, when he had specifically told her that she should, under no circumstances, take off her top. She had then, of course, taken off her top. That she had not heard from him felt like a justified punishment.

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.

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.”

“We live on the edge . . . a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”

Buster waved him off. “No, that’s fine. It mostly got awful reviews. At the time, it made me sick to my stomach. I wished I were dead. But that went away, after a while. And then I just felt relieved that, even if people had hated it, I made it myself. I don’t know what I’m saying, really, but I guess it’s like having a kid, though I don’t have any kids. It’s yours, you made it, and no matter what happens, you have that pride of ownership. You love it, even if it didn’t amount to much.”

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.

“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.

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.

“They did all this to us,” Annie said, “for art.” “For art,” Mr. Delano shouted, raising his empty glass over his head. “They used us,” Buster said. “No, Buster, that’s unfair. Your parents withheld certain information in order to get the best performance possible from you. Think of your parents as directors; they control the circumstances and make all the independent pieces come together to create something beautiful that would otherwise not exist. They directed you so skillfully that you didn’t even know they were doing it.”

“We’re finished with you,” Annie said, and the Fang children walked softly into the main exhibit room as the shocked audience, unclear as to whether this was some sort of artistic performance or simple assault, made way with haste. Their hands dripping blood, their own and their parents’, granules of glass under their skin, Annie and Buster watched themselves on the screen, two children so unwilling to follow their parents’ decree that they would rather end it all as spectacularly as their limited means would allow.

The point, she realized, was that, yes, she had made some substantial mistakes, as evidenced by the fact that she was living with her parents, but she could handle it. She could take the things that were broken and, if not put them back together, get rid of them with a minimum of unpleasantness.

Buster removed the dozens and dozens of gauze and bandages from his night table, crusted with blood, still wet with ointment, which he’d never bothered to throw away, had simply put aside to grow into some strange, living sculpture of his recovery.

“It’s fake,” Annie said, wanting desperately to save this patient man the effort of finding her parents, doing exactly what they wanted him to do. She recalled the odd, unsettling feeling that occurred after Fang events, of realizing that you might not have been in control of your thoughts and actions when Caleb and Camille were involved.

A trite concept rendered so awkwardly as to erase any shred of meaning. This was the final line of the review of Thirty-Seven Weddings in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The act is not the art,” he told himself. “The reaction is the art.”

Caleb had been arrested several times and had never felt any animosity toward the police. He understood their reaction to his actions. It was a predictable element of his work; he would create disorder, and, once he achieved the desired effect, order would need to be restored.

The baby was a hummingbird inside of his cupped hands, and Caleb could not hold on tightly enough to believe that she was real. It was a form of art for which he had no innate talent.

Despite her parents’ explanations, she could never see Santa Claus as anything other than a drunk man who kidnapped children. Later, she began to think of Santa Claus as a true artist, crafting elegant toys in his remote studio, fucking elves when he got bored, uninterested in making a profit.

Camille knelt beside Santa and carefully placed Annie in his lap. “Now what does this pretty little—” and before he could finish his sentence, Annie unleashed a shrill, glass-shattering wail that seemed conjured by the dark arts, the image of the tiny baby and the sound emanating from her so incongruous that Caleb at first seemed unaware that his own child was the source of the chaos that enveloped Santa Land.

Camille was shocked by the seismic shift in emotion that crossed Annie’s face, her mouth open so wide it seemed possible that a horde of demons might fly out. She knew she should take the child into her arms and comfort her but she did not move from her position on the floor, a small part of her unwilling to come into contact with the baby until she was sure that Annie was not going to burst into flames.

The elf paid, Caleb carefully opened the commemorative photo frame and stared at his daughter’s bottomless well of a mouth, her eyes pinched shut, the sound of her screams seeming to blur the space around her body. It was beautiful. It was chaotic and shocking and reverberated long after the Fangs had left Santa Land. It was, Caleb realized, talking so quickly that Camille almost couldn’t understand him, art.

“Malls are perfect. Aside from college campuses and sporting events, where do you find this many people? And a mall has the most diverse makeup. You have a bunch of people, hypnotized by all this material consumption, stuck inside a big maze of a building that throws off their equilibrium.”

Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.

Your parents were right. They beat me by completely inverting my theory. Kids don’t kill art. Art kills kids.”

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.”

Did he think their parents had loved them or held them hostage? She was afraid to ask.

“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.”

It would not, Buster understood, end well. But he had nowhere else to go but to the end of the story. He wrote for hours before exhaustion sent him to his bed, and he felt the satisfaction of creation, of making something that, while perhaps not yet successful, was made by his own two hands.

“You are very sweet,” she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, “but it’s like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don’t know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.”

“If a movie is really amazing,” she said, “you can’t ruin it by giving the plot away. The plot is incidental to everything else.”

And I still think, though I am old and I’m not as connected to the art world as I used to be, that something strange is always better than something beautiful.” “Something can be both,” Buster reminded her. “Sometimes,” she admitted, and then she handed the phone over to her son.

“You talk as if you think there’s going to be a time in the future when things aren’t completely weird. I don’t know if that’s going to happen, based on your life history. And I guess all I want to tell you is that it isn’t really that big of a deal to me. If this is how strange your life is, that’s okay with me. It’s fun.”

“It’s no different than other times, Annie,” Mr. Fang said. “We always tell you that something is going to happen. Even if you don’t know exactly what it is, you are always a part of it. You see now, don’t you? You and Buster are Fangs. You are a part of us. We put you in a situation and, without even trying, you made something happen. You created something amazing.”

“You think we’re mean, but we’re just trying to show you how it all works,” Mr. Fang said. “Even if we die, when it’s just you and Buster, you’ll be able to do this. You are true artists. Even when you don’t want to make it, it manifests itself without your permission. It’s in your genes. You make art. You cannot help it.”

Still, with her hair cut short like Seberg’s, she felt like a movie star in the dress. She reminded herself that she was kind of a movie star, but it felt better to pretend to be a full-on movie star than to actually be kind of a movie star.

“They operate on the element of surprise,” Annie said. “They won’t show up until we think they won’t show up.” Buster nodded, convinced of the logic, and it made Annie want to scream, the understanding that their parents had done so much weird shit to them that it seemed plausible that Caleb and Camille could read their minds. She could feel her anger, which lived so easily inside of her, become ragged and unstable, working its way into her blood and her muscles. She knew there was little remedy except to hold on to the anger, keep it from spilling over, until it could be properly unleashed, directed toward those who deserved it, those who were, goddamn, still not fucking here.

He held a fistful of pencils as if they were a bouquet for a date way out of his league.

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.

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.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she asked him. “Whatever it is,” he answered, “I think you’ll be terrified when it happens. Don’t let that stop you.”