The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [116]
He sat down in a folding chair on the edge of the third row and began to turn the camera over and over in his hands. “You come for the art?” he heard someone behind him ask. Buster quickly turned around to see an older man, bow-tied, nice warm coat, smiling at him. “Or did you come to see a big fire?”
“Both,” said Buster.
“I came mostly to see this fool burn down his house,” the man said. It seemed to Buster that the man was just slightly drunk and that the man probably spent most of his time in this state. “My sister is a big-time artist. She makes protest signs or some such nonsense. I’m afraid I don’t understand contemporary art anymore,” he said. He pointed to Buster’s camera. “That,” he said, “I understand. Photographs. Paintings. Sculpture. Even when it’s not very good, I understand it. Burning down a house? Eating your own feces? Standing up for three straight days? You do that under most circumstances, you get locked up.”
Buster began to disengage himself from the conversation by turning his body away from the man as much as possible while still looking at him. Buster felt like his head might twist off his body.
“I mean, am I not right? If I punched you in the face right now, could I call that art?”
Buster held up the camera and took a picture of the man.
“Is that art?” the man asked, his face getting redder and redder, his anger puffing out his cheeks.
“This is for evidence,” Buster said. “In case you punch me.”
“Art,” the man said, and then made a wanking motion with his hand. Buster stood and then moved to put a row of seats between himself and the man. He was cold. When was the fire going to come?
Nearly twenty minutes later, a man walked out of the house with a can of gasoline. He did not address the audience. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a book of matches, struck one, and tossed it through the open door of the house. The fire sparked immediately but it took a long time for it to begin to move through the rooms of the house. Buster could hear the popping of the heat rearranging molecules, but it wasn’t nearly as spectacular as he had imagined. He realized he had pictured an explosion, not a fire. He revised his expectations. It was a house and it was on fire. What else did he want? He thought it would be polite to clap, to acknowledge the effort that went into this display, but no one else was doing it, so he simply sat in his seat and waited for his parents.
A window shattered and smoke began to pour out of the house and Buster watched as his parents, hand in hand, calmly walked out of the house, flames dancing around their hazy forms. Buster framed his parents through the viewfinder of his camera and clicked away. His father’s arm was on fire and he waved in such a way that Buster wasn’t sure if he was greeting the stunned onlookers or if he was trying to put out the fire. As they moved closer, it was apparent that his mother’s entire back was covered in flames. They seemed unsteady, smoke-sick, but they kept walking, past the crowd, past Buster, and it appeared that they would walk all the way back home, but one of the firemen ran up to them and sprayed them down with an extinguisher. They looked like poorly made snowmen, flecked with a foamy substance. They fell to the ground, hacking the smoke out of their lungs. By the time they had regained their composure, Buster and the rest of the crowd had formed a circle around them. Aside from Buster, still snapping away, no one made a sound. They were staring at these two strange creatures while, behind them, the skeleton of the house continued to burn, the flame throwing