The Family Fang: A Novel (12 page)

“Ooh, this is good,” the woman on the left said.

“He’s in the bathroom, and I need to get on a different flight, something leaving right now, before he finds out.”

“This is real good,” the woman on the right said.

A few keystrokes later, the women, taking turns, read off destinations while Annie considered the possibilities. She did not want to go to New York or Chicago or Dallas. “Somewhere else,” she said. “Better hurry,” the woman on the right said. “Your boyfriend’s been in the bathroom for a long time.”

“He’s probably staring at his reflection in the mirror,” Annie said.

“I know the type,” the woman replied. “You don’t want to go to Wyoming with a man like that.”

She was escaping. It was a great escape. She took out her cell phone, afraid that it would begin to ring at any moment, and tossed it into a nearby trash can. There would be no one to tell her to do anything other than what she was doing right this minute. She was off the grid now and she felt the excitement that went along with cutting the lines of communication. She would be somewhere far away by evening and she would, well, she wasn’t sure what she would do except try to turn herself invisible with substances. As the women magically moved her from one plane to another, mere minutes from leaving everything behind, Annie thought of Buster, propped up in his childhood bed, face distorted, trapped in that house while their parents tried, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, to fix what was broken in him. She knew that she was falling apart and that Buster had already been disassembled and she wondered if there was any possibility that, every Fang restored under one roof, they might be good for each other. It seemed unlikely, but, standing in the airport terminal, people moving in all directions, she was willing to risk it. She was not going to Wyoming with Daniel. Wherever she ended up would be better than that.

“Do you have any flights to Nashville?” she asked.

“Got a flight leaving for Detroit in ten minutes, and then you can catch a flight to Nashville.”

“You need to decide right now,” the woman on the left said. “I think I see your boyfriend coming.”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Annie said. “And, I’ll take it.”

A new boarding pass in her hand, she thanked the women, who assured her that they would relay her message to Daniel—that she could not go with him—in their own unique way. “It’ll be real good,” the women said. “He’ll be crushed.”

Annie unwound the electrical tape on her hand and tossed it into the trash, flexed her fingers and found them to be without pain, and then she began running to catch her flight, pumping her arms, a movie star in a movie that did not exist. She imagined the cameraman moving alongside her, trying to keep her in the frame. She was running, however ill-conceived and doomed to failure it might be, and her character’s motivation was simple and understandable. Escape. She ran through the expensively designed set, past all the extras that might slow her down, the cries of the director so faint that she could not even hear them any longer.

untitled project, 2007

artists: caleb and camille fang

W
hen Annie walked off the escalator to baggage claim, she saw her brother, Buster, holding a sign that read:
FANG
. His face was as damaged as he had led her to believe, and she relied on her natural talent to feign a lack of surprise, feeling her stomach knot and tighten in response to the struggle to maintain her composure on the surface. Neither one of them knew what to do when she finally walked up to him and took the sign in her hands. They stared at each other for a long second, A and B, the easy way they fit together in sequence, and then Buster reached for his sister and hugged her.

“I can’t believe you came back,” he said.

“I know,” Annie said. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

“We’re in a bad way,” Buster told her and she agreed with him.

“Where are Mom and Dad?” she asked.

Buster looked away, took a deep breath, and then said, “They’re in the van, planning. They’ve got an idea.”

“No,” Annie said, a familiar heat radiating through her body. “Please, no.”

“Welcome home,” Buster said, and walked to the carousel to retrieve her luggage.

I
n the parking lot, Caleb and Camille were standing beside the van, waving wildly as if their arms were on fire, as Annie and Buster tentatively approached. For Annie it was more shocking to see her parents for the first time in years than it had been to see Buster’s swollen face. Her parents seemed like miniature, crooked versions of themselves. Their hair had gone completely gray. Yes, they were still thin and they still possessed an electric kind of enthusiasm that was hypnotic to witness, but they were, it shouldn’t have surprised her but it did, so old.

Their father was holding a clothes hanger that held a bright blue T-shirt that read:
THE CLUCK TEAM
just below the
CHICKEN QUEEN
logo, a plump, regal woman holding a drumstick.

“Annie!” Camille shouted.

“What’s that?” Annie asked, pointing at the T-shirt as her mother kissed her on the cheek.

“A gift,” Caleb said, thrusting the shirt toward his daughter.

“No thank you,” Annie said.

“Hear us out,” her parents said in unison.

“Please,” Annie said, “I just got back.” She looked at her brother, who, she now realized, seemed slightly drugged, a sheepish smile on his face.

Her father slid the back door of the van open and gestured for Annie to climb inside.

“I need a drink,” Annie said.

“This is better,” Caleb said, placing his arms around both of his children. “This is better than any drug ever made.”

Annie took a deep breath, nowhere else to run, and stepped into the van. Buster joined her and their parents smiled and then slammed the door shut.

T
he plan was simple enough, their parents explained. They were driving to a mall near the airport, all the necessary elements arranged in advance by Caleb and Camille. Annie and her mother would don the Chicken Queen T-shirts and take the massive stack of forged coupons. Camille handed Annie and Buster one of the sheets, a fairly professional job, a coupon that offered a free chicken sandwich, no strings attached. The coupon was good enough that a customer wouldn’t think twice about it, but sloppy enough that a cashier at Chicken Queen would know it was a fake. “How many of these did you make?” Annie asked her parents. “One hundred,” they said. They continued to explain the event, how Annie and Camille would pass out the coupons, while Buster sat at a table in the food court next to the Chicken Queen. He would record the initial confusion when customer after customer came bearing bogus coupons. Then, when enough customers had been refused, the terror of the situation becoming apparent to the underpaid and overworked staff, Caleb would walk up to the counter to push things over the edge, to organize the angry customers, to overtake the Chicken Queen.

“It’ll be a thing of beauty,” Caleb told his children.

“I don’t want to do this,” Annie said.

“Yes, you do,” Caleb responded.

“I’m not well,” Annie said. “Buster is not well.”

“This will make you better,” Camille said. “We’re a family again. This is what we do. This is what the Fangs do. We make strange and memorable things.”

“I can’t do this,” Annie said, looking at Buster for help. Buster touched his eye patch and then said, “I don’t want to do this either.”

“Don’t you start,” Caleb told his son.

“No,” Annie said. “We aren’t going to do this.”

“Kids,” Camille began, but then Caleb slammed his hand on the horn, a shock of anger, before he regained his composure. “Fine,” he said. “You’re out of practice anyway. You’d fuck it up. Your mother and I will do it all. We’ll do everything. We’ve done it for years on our own. We were just trying to include the two of you. We wanted to make you feel a part of this again.”

Annie felt her resolve slipping. “Dad, it’s not—”

“No,” Caleb said. “We shouldn’t have asked. We’ll do it. We’ll make this happen. Could you at least work the camera? Could you do that much for us?”

“Sure,” Buster said, looking at Annie for support. “We’ll do that.”

“You’re just out of practice,” Caleb mumbled, staring straight ahead. “You just need to relearn what all this means. Who you are.”

T
heir lazy children parked at a table in the food court, Caleb and Camille separated to opposite ends of the mall and laid the groundwork for the event. “Free chicken sandwich at Chicken Queen,” Caleb shouted, waving a coupon toward a passing woman in a way that seemed vaguely obscene. “No purchase necessary,” he said.

“No thank you,” the woman said.

“What?” Caleb asked her, the paper drooping in his hand.

“I don’t want any, thank you,” the woman explained.

“It’s free, though,” Caleb said, shocked at the refusal.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Are you watching your weight?” Caleb asked, genuinely curious. “It’s one of the healthiest things in the food court.”

“No,” the woman said, her voice rising. She slapped at the proffered coupon and quickly walked away from Caleb.

“Do you not understand?” Caleb said. “It’s free.”

C
amille handed one of the coupons to a man wearing headphones, who took it without breaking stride. After he had walked a few feet, he tossed it in a trash can. Camille ran to the trash and retrieved the coupon. She caught up to the man and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, annoyed. “You dropped this,” she said, smiling.

“I don’t want it,” he said, too loudly, his headphones still playing.

“It’s good for one free sandwich at Chicken Queen,” she continued. “No purchase necessary.”

“No thanks,” he said, walking away from her, nodding his head to a beat that Camille couldn’t hear.

A family of five walked past Camille and she offered them a sheaf of coupons. “Free chicken sandwiches for everyone,” she shouted, her face strained from smiling so much.

“We don’t eat meat,” the mother said, shielding her children from the coupons.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Camille said. She’d been standing here for thirty minutes and she’d only managed to hand out twelve coupons.

“I
don’t understand,” the man told Caleb, trying to back away from the coupon.

“What’s not to understand?” Caleb said. “You take this coupon, get a free chicken sandwich, bring it back to me, and I’ll give you five bucks.”

“Why don’t you just do it yourself?” the man asked.

“I’m an employee,” Caleb said, exasperated. “The coupons don’t apply to employees.”

“Then why don’t you just go buy one yourself? It’ll be cheaper than five bucks.”

“Do you not want free money?” Caleb asked.

“I guess not,” the man said, and hurried off.

“Free goddamn chicken sandwiches,” Caleb shouted.

A
t the food court, Annie and Buster filled each other in on the details of their lives, how they’d become untethered.

“What about the tabloids?” Buster asked. “Do you need to wear a disguise or something?”

“I’m not that kind of a movie star,” Annie said. “I don’t get recognized all that much. Or maybe no one cares. Plus, the tabloids think I’m in Wyoming with Daniel now. I can’t imagine he would notify them that I’d left him at the airport. I’m incognito.”

“Well, if you want an eye patch to go undercover, I can loan you one of mine,” Buster offered. “No one has come by with a coupon,” he added.

“These poor cashiers,” Annie said. “They’re not getting paid enough to deal with Caleb and Camille.”

Finally, a teenager walked up to the counter with a coupon. Buster watched the action through the viewfinder of the digital recorder their father had given him. “Here we go,” Buster said.

The boy made his order and then, when the cashier rang it up, he presented the coupon. The cashier immediately frowned, snatched the coupon out of the boy’s hands. The boy pointed to the word
FREE
on the coupon. The cashier called for her manager, a guy who seemed the same age as her, the same age as the customer. She showed him the coupon and he also frowned, held it up to the light as if looking for a watermark. He stared at the customer, sizing him up, and then handed the coupon back to the cashier and nodded. The cashier put the coupon in the register and then presented the boy with a chicken sandwich.

“Oh,” Annie said, seeing the thing fall apart in an entirely different way. “Shit.”

A few minutes later, an older couple each produced coupons and the cashier accepted them without any hesitation. Three coupons, three chicken sandwiches, three customers now sitting within ten feet of Buster and Annie, eating free food courtesy of their parents.

“Should we go tell Mom and Dad?” Buster asked.

“No,” Annie said. “Let’s just stay out of it.”

Watching the people eating their chicken sandwiches, Annie realized that she hadn’t eaten since the day before. She still had the coupon her father had given her, crumpled in her purse. She smoothed the coupon out on the table, took it to the Chicken Queen, and came back with a free sandwich. She slowly ate the sandwich while Buster filmed more and more people walking to the counter, each one getting the very thing they had been promised.

A
n hour and a half later, having finally handed out a decent number of coupons, Caleb and Camille met at the fountain in the center of the mall. “Good Lord,” Caleb said to his wife. “People have become so stupid that you can’t control them.” Camille nodded. “They are so resistant to any strangeness that they tune out the whole world. God, it’s so damn depressing.”

“Well,” Caleb said, shucking off his Chicken Queen T-shirt, “let’s go make some art.”

There was no angry line at the Chicken Queen when they arrived. There was no sign of hostility, of frustration. There were, however, about twenty-five people in the food court eating free chicken sandwiches. Camille noticed Buster and Annie at one of the tables and held out her arms in confusion. Annie and Buster merely shrugged. “What the hell is going on?” Caleb whispered. “I don’t know,” Camille said, visibly scared by the lack of pandemonium. “Give me one of those goddamn coupons,” Caleb said, snatching it out of his wife’s hand. “You can’t rely on anyone these days to make a proper piece of art,” he mumbled, striding with great purpose toward the Chicken Queen.

“Can I take your order?” the cashier said, typing a message on her cell phone with one hand, not even looking at Caleb.

“I want a free sandwich,” he said. “I want it right now.”

“Okay,” the girl said, walking back to the food prep station to grab a wrapped sandwich.

“Wait,” shouted Caleb. “Don’t I need a coupon?”

“Okay,” the girl said, holding out her hand.

Caleb handed the coupon to the girl. “I got this from some shady-looking characters at the front of the mall,” he said. “It doesn’t seem on the up-and-up.”

“No, it’s good,” the cashier said. “Here’s your sandwich.”

“I think this is a fake coupon,” Caleb said.

“It’s not, sir.”

“It is, though, for crying out loud. Look at it for two seconds. It’s not real.”

“Do you want this sandwich or not, sir?” the girl asked.

“Let me talk to your manager.”

The manager came out. “Something wrong with your order, sir?”

“This coupon is fake.”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Did you even look at it?” Caleb said. He was shouting now.

“I did, sir. It’s official.”

“Oh god, you people. You people. It’s a fake. You’ve given out all these free sandwiches for counterfeit coupons.”

“Sir, please take your sandwich and step out of the line.”