The Family Fang: A Novel (17 page)

Annie felt the slight betrayal of ruining whatever elaborate plan her parents had concocted, but she had no desire to get herself involved in police matters if she could avoid it. She was on the road to recovery. She came clean.

“Officer,” Annie began. “It’s all staged. My parents are artists of some sort, somewhat famous, and this is all some kind of performance to them. They aren’t really missing; they just want you to think that they are. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“We know all about your parents, Annie. I did a little research and talked to the police in your county and I’m well aware of the, um, artistic nature of your parents’ actions. However, that being said, we are very seriously treating this as a missing persons case.”

“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.

“Ms. Fang, I think we should talk in person, but you need to understand that this is serious. There is a significant amount of blood around the car, there are signs of a struggle, and we have been dealing with similar incidents occurring at rest stops around this area for the past nine months. I don’t want to alarm you, but there have been four incidents in East Tennessee involving rest-stop abductions, all ending in homicides. I know you think this is something your parents cooked up, but that is not the case. You need to prepare yourself for the possibility that this is very real and might not have a good outcome.”

Buster walked into the kitchen. “Who is that?” he asked, but Annie shook her head and put a finger to her lips to quiet him.

“When was the last time you talked to your parents?” the officer asked her.

“Yesterday morning, over breakfast.”

“Did they mention where they were going?”

“No, they didn’t say anything about a trip, but when my brother and I got home yesterday afternoon, they had left a note that said they were going to North Carolina.”

“Do they know anyone in North Carolina?”

“I have no idea,” Annie responded.

“Do they know anyone in Jefferson? Someone they might have met up with at the rest stop?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m going to give you my number, Ms. Fang, and I want you to call me if you hear from your parents. I want you to call me if you think of anything else that could be of help. I want you to call me if you think there’s something we’re missing. We’ll do everything we can on our end.”

“You think they’re dead, don’t you?” Annie asked.

“I don’t know that,” the officer said.

“But that’s a possibility,” Annie continued.

“It is one of the possible scenarios, yes.”

“I wish I could make you understand,” Annie said, growing frustrated. “This is not real. You are not dealing with anything real. It’s all made up. It’s what they do. They make something crazy happen and then they watch you try to deal with it.”

“I hope you’re right, Ms. Fang, I really do,” Officer Dunham replied, and then hung up the phone.

Annie replaced the phone in its cradle and then took the half-empty bottle of vodka from the kitchen counter. “Not yet,” Buster cautioned, pointing at the microwave clock. “Sit down, Buster,” Annie said. “What did Mom and Dad do?” Buster asked. “Something awful,” Annie replied, taking a testing sip from the bottle, finding it sufficient, and tilting the bottle even more.

A
fter she had explained everything to her brother, the rough outline, the what-ifs, Annie sat on the bed while Buster searched the Internet to learn more about the rest-stop killings. True enough, there had been incidents in the area, women and men cut up or shot, their bodies moved from the rest stops to garbage Dumpsters at gas stations or fast-food restaurants. The cops suspected a truck driver, someone regularly traveling the interstate from North Carolina to Tennessee. It all made sense, which made Annie even more certain that this was all part of her parents’ elaborate plans.

“Oh, please. You don’t think Camille and Caleb knew about these murders, knew they could take advantage of the situation?” Annie said. Her parents’ deception seemed so obvious to her that she found herself stunned that the police were so clueless.

Buster, who had grown quiet, withdrawn, only shook his head.

“Don’t let them do this to you, Buster,” she said, almost shouting, her anger against her parents amplified by the fact that Buster seemed to be falling for it. “This is what they want, goddamn it. They want us to think they’re dead.”

“They might be, Annie,” Buster said. He looked like he was about to cry, which only made Annie angrier. She thought about her parents’ bedroom, door shut, barricaded from the rest of the house. Suddenly, with total clarity, she saw her parents hiding in their bedroom, giggling, waiting for someone to find them. She imagined them hiding under their bed, cans of food surrounding them, jugs of water, a bomb shelter to protect them from the rest of the world.

Annie pulled Buster into the hallway and the two of them paused in front of the door to their parents’ bedroom. Annie leaned into the door, listening for any sound on the other end. “Annie?” Buster asked. Annie shushed him. “They’re in here,” she said. “They’re hiding from us.” She slowly turned the doorknob and felt it turn without resistance. For the first time in forever, Annie and Buster stepped into a room they had only pictured, and even then reluctantly, in their minds. “Okay,” Annie shouted into the open room. “We know you’re in here. Caleb? Camille?” Annie looked around the room, which was nearly empty of possessions. There was a bed, unmade, and two nightstands that held multiple glasses of water and multivitamins. There was no other furniture in the room. There was none of the chaos and disorder of the living room, not a single piece of paper out of place. “They’re not in here,” Buster said to Annie, but Annie then ran to the closet and pulled open the doors with a flourish. Nothing but clothes, a normal closet filled with shoes and shirts and pants, but no Fangs. “Annie,” Buster said, “this is weird.” Annie turned to him. She did not understand if he was referring to their search for Caleb and Camille or the fact that the bedroom was so lacking in weirdness. “I thought they might be hiding in here,” she said. “But they’re hiding somewhere else.” Buster shrugged, allowed his face to register fear, and said, “Or they’re in trouble. Or worse. Annie, they really could be dead.”

Annie took her brother’s hands in her own. She stared at him until he finally met her gaze. “They are not dead, Buster. They are doing what they’ve always done; they are creating a situation in order to elicit an extreme emotional response from those closest to the event. They waited for us to come home, for all of us to be together again, and then they dreamed up this horrible event to, I don’t know what, make us feel something that they can use for their own designs.”

“Maybe,” Buster admitted.

“Definitely,” Annie replied. “This is classic Caleb and Camille Fang. They have put us in a situation, left us in the wilderness, and they’re waiting to see what will happen.”

“Well,” Buster said, regaining his composure, “what
will
happen?”

“I’ll tell you,” Annie said, feeling the certainty of her thoughts click into place. “I’ll tell you exactly what will happen, Buster.” She pressed her forehead roughly against her brother’s, the warmth of his skin against hers. A and B, the Fang children.

“We’re going to find them.”

a christmas carol, 1977

artists: caleb and camille fang

T
he Fangs were to be married, the union of two souls, till death do you part, I do, I do, the whole ridiculous charade.

C
aleb slipped the ring on Camille’s finger and repeated the minister’s unenthusiastic recitation of the vows. To the left of the altar, the minister’s wife, her fee for playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” on the chapel’s organ too expensive, filmed the proceedings on Caleb’s Super 8 camera, which whirred and clicked throughout the ceremony. Caleb feared the woman was missing the subtlety of the event, ruining the shot with static, uninteresting angles. He reminded himself that next time he would figure out a way to film the marriage while also taking part in it, to maintain artistic control at all costs.

Camille, her stomach a tight, round ball of expectancy, could not remember if she was supposed to be happy or sad. She decided to act nervous, which could work for either emotion. Throughout the ceremony, she rubbed her obscenely pregnant belly, took deep, weighted breaths, and grimaced suddenly from time to time as if to suggest labor was imminent, as in right this second, as in right here in the chapel, as in, does this place do baptisms as well? Each time she brushed her fingers over the convex curve of her stomach, she noticed that the minister’s wife, the upper part of her face a whirring glass eye, would purse her lips with disgust. Camille began to rub her stomach more and more often, smiling as the minister’s wife expressed her sour displeasure with the proceedings like a Pavlovian response. Camille was amazed, once again, at the ease with which she could elicit outrage, when she realized that Caleb and the minister were staring at her. “I do,” she said quickly, though they’d already gone through the vows.

“He wants to kiss you now,” the minister said to her as he gestured dismissively toward Caleb. “Do you want to kiss him?” he asked.

“Okay,” she said. “Why not?” and leaned toward her husband, her belly pressing against his cheap tuxedo.

The minister’s wife threw a handful of confetti with such force it seemed she was trying to blind them, and Caleb and Camille turned and walked silently out of the chapel. As soon as they reached the doors, they turned around and walked back to the altar. Caleb retrieved the camera from the minister’s wife, tipped the minister, and then posed with Camille for the wedding portrait, ten dollars, a single Polaroid.

“You want I should make this official?” the minister said, counting the ten one-dollar bills and then folding the money in half before handing it to his wife.

Camille bent over the pew and fished the marriage license, official and sealed, out of her purse. She signed the paper and then handed the pen to her husband. He signed it and then handed the pen to the minister’s wife, who waved it off and produced her own pen. She scratched her name on the license, a witness to the events, and then handed the pen to the minister, who signed his name, shook the document as if it was wet and needed drying, and then handed the official record to Caleb.

“You’re married,” the minister said.

“Yes, we are,” Camille said.

“Be good to each other,” the minister said.

“And that baby,” the minister’s wife added.

“But mostly to each other,” the minister said, looking sternly at his wife, who had already turned to clean the chapel for the next scheduled wedding.

B
ack in the car, Caleb and Camille stared at the marriage license.
Mr. George De Vries and Ms. Josephine Boss
. Camille awkwardly hiked up the skirt of her cut-rate wedding dress and slipped off the fake belly, which fell to the floorboard of the car like a sack of gunpowder, ready to explode. They removed their wedding bands and the cheap, fake-diamond engagement ring and placed them in the ashtray of the car, clinking like change.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Camille said, arching her back to soothe the ache from wearing the heavy belly.

“Great art is difficult,” Caleb said.

“I’m serious, Caleb,” she said. “No more weddings.”

“You don’t want to marry me anymore?” he said, smiling, coaxing the car into first gear with some difficulty.

“Thirty-six marriages,” she said. “It’s enough.”

“Fifty,” Caleb replied. “We agreed on fifty.
Fifty Weddings: An Exploration of Love and the Law.
Thirty-six Weddings
. That sounds awful.”

Camille remembered
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,
which she had studied in her first art class. She could see the crashing waves off Kanagawa, the tiny people in their boats, completely powerless, endlessly threatened with disaster.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“Okay,” Caleb said without comprehension, fighting with the gearshift to keep moving forward, unfamiliar with the streets in this town.

“I’m pregnant,” she repeated.

The car came to a stop, the sound of metal gears grinding imprecisely. Someone behind them honked their horn and raced around the car, now parked in the middle of the street.

“I’m pregnant,” Camille said once more, hoping that three times would be enough for Caleb to understand.

“Well, what do we do?” Caleb said.

“I have no idea,” Camille answered.

“We have to do something,” Caleb said.

They sat in the car without speaking, the engine running, each of them unsure of every single possibility that presented itself.

“We have no money,” Caleb said.

“I know,” Camille answered.

“Hobart always says, ‘Children kill art.’ He’s told me that a million times,” Caleb continued. He wanted to roll down the window, get some fresh air, but the handle was broken.

“I know,” Camille replied. “I’ve heard him say it.”

“It’s an unfortunate situation at the worst possible time,” Caleb said.

“I know,” Camille said, “but I’m going to have it.”

Caleb put his hands on the wheel and stared at the empty street. Thirty yards ahead of them, the traffic light changed from green to yellow to red and back again. He felt the nausea of nonfulfillment, having carried Camille, ten years his junior, his former student, into possible ruination. He felt certain that he was a failure, every artistic endeavor ending with his own surprise at how little had come from it. Perhaps that was how life worked, the expectation of success after each failure the engine that kept the world turning. Perhaps retrogression was an artistic endeavor in itself. Perhaps he might sink so far that he would find himself, somehow, returned to the surface.

“Okay,” Caleb finally answered.

“What?” Camille said.

“Okay,” Caleb replied. “Let’s do it.”

Camille leaned over and kissed him, softly, a more perfect kiss than any from the thirty-six weddings.

“We should get married,” Caleb said.

Camille reached into the ashtray and found the engagement ring. She put it back on her finger. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay?” Caleb responded.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll marry you.”

T
hree months later, they were married for the thirty-seventh time. Four months after that, their child was born, a girl, Annie. Less than a month later, their show,
Thirty-Seven Weddings,
opened at the Anchor Gallery in San Francisco, the walls covered with the marriage licenses, each expertly forged by Camille, and the amateur, post-ceremony portraits of the happy couple in various states of happiness. An entire wall of the gallery flickered with the looped footage of each one of the weddings, a never-ending reel of ring exchanges and bride-kissing. The final piece of the exhibit, the genuine marriage certificate, was displayed with a photo from the final wedding, Caleb and Camille surrounded by their friends and colleagues, his parents long dead and her family, having long posited that Caleb had brainwashed their daughter, declining the invitation. Hobart Waxman, Caleb’s mentor, had performed the ceremony, a certified minister yet another hidden title on his résumé. “A terrible idea,” Hobart had said after the ceremony, embracing the Fangs, “elegantly rendered.”

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
. Nine months after the show, Caleb still found the line invading his thoughts in the rare moments when Annie wasn’t filling the tiny apartment with her cries, raging against some unspoken grievance. “What does she want?” he asked his wife. “Something,” Camille responded, rocking the baby in her arms. Camille’s face, he noted, was glowing, a radiance that never failed to confuse Caleb. Was she happy or sad? He could not tell. He was, on the other hand, as he had told Camille endlessly since the review, not happy.

Since the review, Caleb had not begun work on any new projects. He taught his classes on postmodern art, watched the easy way that Camille cared for the baby, and read the classifieds section of the newspaper for some bizarre personal ad or horrible employment opportunity that might ignite the next idea for his work.

Desperate for expression, he came up with the idea of digging a hole to the center of the earth. One weekend, his morning coffee working its magic on his internals, he spent nine dollars that they could not spare on a shovel. When he returned to the apartment, Camille was spooning strained peas into the baby and looked over her shoulder at Caleb, shovel in hand, explaining the piece. “I’m just going to dig,” he said.

Camille was supportive. A hole? Yes, a hole. Interesting. It could be. Where? To the center of the earth, through the center, to the other side of the world. Like the mantle wasn’t even there. How? With this shovel. A primitive tool, perfectly made. The baby marveled at the shiny blade of the shovel, her hands reaching for it. Caleb held firmly to the handle and stepped away from the baby.

“I’ll just dig until it makes sense,” he said, and Camille gestured for him to kiss her. He kissed her, then stroked the soft curve of the back of the baby’s head, her face streaked a mossy green, and strode out of the apartment, in possession of an implement, trying to ignore the thought that he was losing his mind.

In the park, he jammed the shovel into the earth and put his weight into the effort. A quick motion and then, where there had not been seconds earlier, there was a hole. He repeated the procedure and watched the way the ground opened up for him. If this was art, it existed on the furthest part of the spectrum, the part that touched up against yard work. “The act is not the art,” he told himself. “The reaction is the art.”

Standing knee-deep in a hole in the middle of a public park, Caleb tried to explain this to the policeman. Caleb looked up at the uniform towering over him, hand resting easy on his holster, and said, “It’s a hole in the earth. It’s a depression. I think it means something.”

“Fill it back up and get out of here,” the cop said.

“Yes, Officer,” Caleb responded. He stepped out of the hole as if emerging from the shaft of a mine, dazed by the world he had reentered.

With each heave of dirt, tapped down with his foot, Caleb saw the made thing become unmade.

“Don’t come back here,” the police officer said, “or I’ll arrest you.”

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. “Have a nice day,” Caleb said and the police officer simply nodded.

Back at the apartment, the shovel hidden in the back of the closet, he confessed to Camille that he might be going crazy.

“I suspected as much,” Camille said.

“If only we had done fifty weddings,” Caleb said.

“Oh, Caleb,” Camille replied, her face full of what he suspected was pity. “It just didn’t work. That’s all. We made a bomb and it didn’t go off. The wiring was faulty. We’ll just make another one.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

The baby sputtered and spit, drool covering her onesie, darkening the fabric. Held loosely in Camille’s arms, she reached for Caleb and he let her hands, soft and barely corporeal, worry his face. She lightly tapped his eyes and mouth and nose as if to say, “Here, here, here,” or “Mine, mine, mine.” He smiled.

“We made her,” Camille said.

“Ill-conceived,” Caleb thought, and then he said, “Handcrafted by the finest artisans.”

For Caleb, Annie was Camille’s project. He changed diapers, bathed her, attended to the grunt work of upkeep, but Camille understood the innate needs of the baby and addressed them with little wasted effort. The baby was crying and then, somehow, it wasn’t. The baby was glassy-eyed and unfocused and then, suddenly, Camille would coax a smile to the surface of Annie’s face. “How did you do that?” Caleb would ask, and Camille would pull on her earlobe and wink at him. “Magic,” she would say. 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.