The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [55]
“Sure,” Buster said. “Load me up.”
Lucas smiled and handed him the stories. He then reached into his bag and produced another story. “I wrote this one,” Lucas said, his face reddening.
“Oh,” Buster said. “Oh.”
“I’d be interested in hearing what you think of it.”
“Certainly,” Buster said. The story was titled “The Endless Wordening of Dr. Hauser’s Living Manuscript.” Lucas informed him that it was a postmodern fantasy, a kind of punk rock fairy tale. Buster forced such a broad smile that his missing tooth showed. “Certainly,” he repeated.
Then Lucas Kizza wrapped his arms around Buster and hugged him. Buster hugged him back. “We live on the edge,” he thought, and then Lucas released his hold and walked out of the room.
Buster sat on the curb in front of the college, waiting for his sister to pick him up. To pass the time, he skimmed the stories of the creative writing students. One was about a wild party and the story consisted almost entirely of a detailed explanation of a drinking game called Flip ’N Chug that seemed, to Buster, to be too complicated to facilitate the simple goal of getting drunk. Another story was about a girl who finds out her boyfriend is cheating on her and so she hires a hit man to kill him during the prom. There was an inscrutable story that Buster believed was about a boy trying to talk his pregnant girlfriend into having an abortion. Something was odd about the story, the strange perspective, the old-fashioned language, the terse sentences, and then Buster realized it was an exact copy of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” but the title had been changed to “Listening in on Someone’s Conversation.” He considered telling Lucas about this plagiarism but wondered if perhaps there was some kind of experimental explanation for the story, a textual reappropriation. It made his head hurt trying to explain away some kid’s stupid decision to plagiarize a famous story. He imagined that it was the kid who had asked him the question about his bad reviews, and felt a little superior. He read a story about another wild party, another complicated drinking game, and felt calm again.
After thirty minutes, he began to wonder if Annie had simply forgotten about him, returned to the house after the movie, and got drunk on vodka tonics. “Come get me,” Buster whispered, hoping to create a psychic link to his sister.
To ease the sting of being forgotten, Buster leafed through the papers until he found a story called “The Damaged Boy.” He liked the sound of that. The story, which was written in brief, itemized paragraphs, was about a boy who had, seconds after his birth, been dropped by the obstetrician. His skull, still unformed, had been dented. A broken arm followed when the boy climbed out of his crib. A dog bit off one of his fingers when he tried to feed it a piece of zwieback toast. A sled’s runner sliced his leg open, the warm stream of blood spilling down the hill, melting the snow. He was hit by a car while crossing the street and broke his collarbone. The story proceeded in this way, a never-ending account of all the physical pain the boy accumulated on his path toward adulthood. It made Buster want to cry. By the end of the story, the boy, now an old man, bent and hobbled, placed his hand on the eye of a stove and found that he felt no pain. His hand, taken from the burning red eye, showed no signs of injury. His body, inside and out, had become as hard as a diamond, impervious to pain. It was a bizarre story, depressing as hell, and Buster instantly fell in love with the author. He checked the name, Suzanne Crosby, and walked back into the school to find her.
The secretaries in the registrar’s office, strangely enough, seemed unwilling to tell him where Suzanne Crosby was. “Who are you again?” one of them asked. “I’m Buster Fang,” he said. She stared at him. “I’m a guest of the college,” he offered weakly. “Sorry,” she told him. “Can you just give her a message?” he asked the woman. “I don’t want to be a party to any of this,” she said, which Buster admitted was fair