The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [112]
“Buster, don’t say that,” Annie said. At this moment, the gallery dark and empty, no sign of their parents except for the brushstrokes that created the paintings on the walls, Annie could not tolerate, would not allow, any deviation from the singular fact that their parents were alive, were hiding, were awful people that needed to be punished.
“Maybe they’ve been dead from the start and we just missed the clues,” Buster said. “We kept thinking that it had to be a ruse. It was just too much like a Fang event to be real.”
“That’s right,” Annie said. “It was too strange to be unplanned.”
“So, what if it was planned?”
“That’s what I keep saying, Buster.”
“No,” Buster continued, waving her off frantically. “What if it was planned, and the plan was for them to die?”
Annie didn’t respond; she simply stared at Buster and waited for the inevitable.
“You saw how bad the chicken thing went at the mall, how sad it made them to fail in such a ridiculous way. What if they thought they couldn’t make art anymore? And if they couldn’t make art, then what did they have to live for? And if they had nothing to live for, why not just end it all? And if they were going to end it all, why not do it in some bizarre, mysterious way that would get people to talk about them, to remember the best of their art, one last time?”
“Please, Buster,” Annie said.
“Maybe it felt like a Fang event because it was. We just didn’t understand what it really meant.”
Annie felt the sudden sickness of an uncertainty becoming certain. Had she been holding this possibility at bay for so long, with all of her strength, that it was only a matter of time before she gave in to the inevitable truth? She tried to locate the uneasy, shifting plates inside of her, the way her emotions clanged against each other and formed mountains that could not be scaled. There were stages of grief; she understood this. The first stage was denial, the next being anger. She had no idea what came next, and she had no illusions that she would ever reach it.
Back at the hotel, once Annie had deposited Buster in his room, her brother falling asleep the minute she helped him into bed, and returned to her own room, she fell onto the bed, still processing the fact that her parents would always be missing, were not capable of being resurrected. In some ways, it should have been a relief, the understanding that, no matter what they did, the line that connected them to their parents had gone slack. But Annie found herself wishing that her parents, even if they were not alive, were not dead. She wished for animation, even if there was no spark behind it that gave the actions meaning. She wanted, she supposed, the sounds of their voices but for them to speak a language that she did not understand. She rolled over, picked up the hotel phone, and dialed her parents’ home phone number. The phone rang and rang and rang and then, crackling and slightly too loud, there was her mother’s voice.
“The Fangs are dead. Leave a message after the tone and our ghosts will return your call.”
Annie waited, her silence filling up the answering machine back at home. Finally, everything unspoken, Annie returned the receiver to its cradle. Ten minutes later, Annie lifted the receiver once more, hit the redial button, and again listened to her mother’s voice, a disembodied sound, the ghost of a ghost. “The Fangs are dead. Leave a message after the tone and our ghosts will return your call.”
Annie hung up the phone just as her mother finished the message, not allowing the machine to record the sound of her grief, however faint. She would not call again. She had heard everything she needed to hear. Annie lay there, not thinking, not moving, not aware of anything except the sound of the air conditioner in the corner of the room, rattling like a machine that could not possibly make it through the night, though, of course, it would.
the inferno, 1996
artists: caleb and camille fang
The Fangs, the three who still remained, were in a rut.