The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [41]
“I can’t, Buster,” she finally said. “I’m going to Wyoming.”
“Do not leave me here, Annie,” Buster replied.
“I’m in a weird place right now,” she said. “I need to figure things out.”
“You’re in a weird place right now?” Buster said, his voice rising. “Right now, right this very minute, I’m sitting on my childhood bed, drinking Percocet-laced orange soda out of a straw that I’m holding in the gap where my tooth used to be, before it got shattered by a potato. Mom and Dad are in the living room listening to La Monte Young’s Black Record at a ridiculously loud volume. They’re wearing Lone Ranger masks, which seems to be a recurring thing for them. For the past hour, I’ve been reading an issue of Guitar World from 1995, because I’m afraid to go on the Internet and see another picture of my sister’s tits.”
“I can’t, Buster,” she said.
“Come get me,” Buster said.
“I just don’t think I can do it.”
“I miss you, Annie.”
“I’m sorry, Buster,” she said and then hung up the phone.
When she was making the first Powers That Be movie, she talked to Buster every day on the phone, for hours at a time while she waited for someone to come to her trailer and lead her to the set. She would tell him about the bizarre things that went into making a blockbuster action movie, techniques and constructions that seemed, even to a Fang, to be overwhelming and ridiculous. “There’s a guy here,” Annie told Buster, “and his entire job is to make sure that Adam Bomb walks correctly.”
“What’s his title?” Buster asked.
“Ambulation consultant,” Annie said.
She began to look forward to their next conversation as soon as the previous one ended. Late at night, after a long day of shooting, her hair rigid and aching from being teased by a team of hairdressers, she would lie in bed and listen to Buster read from his second novel, a book about a boy who is the only person unaffected by the nuclear fallout from World War III. As she drifted in and out of sleep, she would listen to his voice, shaky and serious, read what he had written only hours earlier. “The boy kicked a soup can, which skittered across the ravaged and broken asphalt road,” Buster read. “When it came to a rest, a family of roaches poured out of the can, moving in all directions as if afraid that one of their own had been responsible for the disturbance. The boy resisted the urge to stomp the insects into nothingness and continued on his way.” Annie readjusted the phone and sat up, intent to hear every word precisely the way that Buster intended it. The story was terribly sad; hope was a flickering match that, at any moment, seemed destined to be extinguished. And yet Annie imagined the boy, randomly saved from the awful effects of the world, to be Buster and hoped that there would be a kind of happiness waiting for him at the end. “It’s happening for us, Buster,” she would tell him. “Whatever comes next will be so big that we won’t recognize ourselves when it’s over.”
And then the movie had been the biggest blockbuster in years and Buster’s book had been dismissed by the critics and remaindered. When they talked after that, everything seemed filtered by the understanding that one of them had made it across the ocean, her feet solidly placed on an undiscovered country, while the other had been lost at sea.
Buster would call late at night from a hotel room, on assignment for some magazine, noticeably impaired. Annie would half-listen to him as she watched movies with the volume turned down low enough that he could not hear. “You’re a movie star now,” Buster once told her, “and I am the brother of a movie star.”
“And I’m the sister of Buster Fang,” she replied.
“Who?” he said. “Never heard of him.”
“Buster,” she said. “Come on now.”
“I am,” he muttered, his words so slurred and shapeless it