The Egg-Shaped Room

by F. Simon Grant

Part IV: The Reception

  “How did you know that Misery...? How did you know that was my name?”

  “It’s your sister,” Eudaemonia said on the other line.

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  “Stop it, Misery. Listen, Dad is dead.”

  “What?”

  “Our father, Bob Tone, the man who, though you may deny it, fertilized our mother’s egg two or three decades ago. I was working, and I just happened to see him.”

  “What, you mean like a ghost, like he was walking around in chains?” Missy said with a timbre of honesty.

  “No, stupid, I was at his funeral.”

  “Why didn’t anybody call me?” Missy said. “I would’ve come.”

  “I didn’t know either. I was there totally by accident.”

  “How can you go to your own father’s funeral by accident?”

  “That’s what I do for a living. You didn’t know that?”

  “You go to funerals for a living? How depressing.”

  “You totally knew that, Misery.”

  “Why would you choose to go to funerals?”

  “Remember when I was in second grade and that girl with the blue hair, what was her name?”

  “Joyce, right, I always liked her. She was pretty.”

  “Well, remember when her evangelist dad died of lung cancer and she paid me ten bucks to put on a blue wig and go to the funeral? And ever since then...”

  “That’s a little too weird for me.”

  “I told you about that a hundred times.”

  “Whatever. I don’t care. That doesn’t matter right now. Tell me about Dad. How did he die?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old was he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he look good?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, are we going to have some kind of ceremony?” Missy said. “Like a wake, or whatever it’s called?”

  “Well, he already had his funeral. He’s probably in the ground by now. Anything we do will be redundant.”

  “I think we should at least meet somewhere. Are you busy this afternoon?”

  “No,” Eudaemonia said and instantly regretted saying it.

  “Well, my boyfriend is in the middle of a very important presentation, and as soon as he gets done we were going to go to Gerald’s Bastard. Do you know Gerald’s Bastard? It’s a delightful restaurant. Got great key lime. Anyway, meet us at Gerald’s Bastard around one o’clock. We can talk about our father, you know, reminisce a little. I mean, I can’t believe he’s gone.” There in the lobby, she put her head in her hand and sobbed.

  Eudaemonia said, “Oh please. Don’t try the fake weeping on me. I see it all the time. Didn’t they take out the tear ducts when they injected the collagen?” The phone beeped and the silence became a dial tone.

  Missy put her phone away and stood there, alone now, concentrating, trying to force tears into her eyes. Then she heard a cell phone ring, an entirely normal thing to hear. She didn’t look over. Then she heard someone answer it and say, “Dad died? I guess ... No ... No ... You went to his funeral by accident? I guess ... No ... No ...” Missy looked over and saw a face, unfamiliar, hard to concentrate on, but why was he having the same conversation? Then she said out loud before it registered consciously, “No-face?” She waited until he finished with his call and walked over and said, “No-face? Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” he answered simply.

  “What an amazing coincidence. What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ... I was working. I was on my job. In the middle I couldn’t finish. I came out here.”

  “What do you do? What kind of exciting career are you up to nowadays?”

  Oa paused and stared at her. “I’m a contractor.”

  She pointed to his cell phone indicating a topic change. “So you heard about Dad?”

  “Yeah,” Oa said in the same emotionless voice.

  “Isn’t it horrible?”

  “I guess.”

  “I suppose Eudaemonia told you we’re meeting at Gerald’s Bastard at one o’clock.”

  “No.”

  “Well anyway, you’re invited. It’ll be sort of a family ceremony since none of us could go to the funeral. Well, Eudaemonia did, but that was an accident.” She laughed her little Missy-laugh. “You can meet my fiancée. I think it will be nice to celebrate life and new beginnings. Dad would like it that way.”

  Oa looked at Missy and realized there was no way out of it. He thought back on a hundred Missy-plans he failed escaping. When Doctor Tobey Stevenson finished, he came out to the lobby, and Missy gave her usual embarrassing introductions: “Honey, I’d like you to meet my brother, No-face. What was your real name again? I mean, we never used it.”

  “Oa. My name is Oa.”

  “Like the two letters?” Doctor Stevenson said with a tone that intimated an attempt at humor, but his tone was the only thing humorous about it.

  Oa said matter-of-factly, “Yes. O and A are two letters.”

  They went to Gerald’s Bastard a block away because Oa couldn't escape it. When Oa sat down, his rifle still on his back, the waitress came over and said a little timidly, “Excuse me, sir, you can’t bring that in here.” Oa looked at her. Her mental process was very evident from her facial expression. You could see reflected in her eye Oa and his brazen rifle dropping out of her head, and a few seconds later she said, “What ... um ... what can I get ya’ll to drink?”

  When the waitress was gone, Doctor Tobey Stevenson said, “I was wondering about the rifle myself.” Learning Oa’s name or Eudaemonia’s name made the face and other details somehow easier to remember, if only in small bits. Oa nearly never gave his name. “Are you a hunter, Mister Tone?”

  Oa reacted non-verbally like “hunter” was a racial slur, and he said with restraint, “No.”

  Doctor Stevenson said, “There’s no shame in being a hunter. Ernest Hemingway was a hunter.”

  “I don’t like Ernest Hemingway.”

  “If you find great literature hard to understand, there’s no shame in that either,” Doctor Stevenson said with a smile.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t understand it. I said I didn’t like it. It’s too realistic. It’s all meaningless and arbitrary. All the male comradery is nauseating.”

  “Homophobic are we?”

  Oa’s face reddened a bit giving his features a momentary discernibility. But Oa pressed on: “And it’s immoral. I think the glorified murder of lions and bulls is an immoral abomination. I think men who spend their lives in such a foul occupation should be damned, not celebrated.”

  “What do you do for a living, Mister Tone?”

  “I kill people for money.”

  “So you think killing bulls and lions is evil but killing people is peachy keen?”

  “I have no moral qualms with that view.”

  Missy cut in, “Oh, don’t listen to him, Tobey. He doesn’t kill people for money. No-face always had a vivid imagination. He always had these imaginary friends he would talk to. For the longest time, past when most kids gave up on imaginary friends, Oa would be out in the yard playing by himself. He would play cowboys, and he was always the Indian. I always thought that was funny. If you’re playing alone, why would you make yourself the villain? He was always so weird. I remember one time we had this pet rabbit -- What was its name? Abel? Arthur? Arpheus? Animal? Beats me. Anyway, it died and we buried it in the back, and I tried all day to write an epitaph, but I couldn’t think of one. And Oa just sat there perfectly still in the woods for a week it seemed like, sitting there with his little toy guns. You know a lot of big stars come from very quirky families. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Yes, but a lot of those black sheep come back to haunt them,” Doctor Stevenson burbled, adjusting his glasses.

  “No-face isn’t a black sheep. Eudaemonia is another weird
one. It’s more like I’m a white sheep in a family full of black sheep,” and she laughed at herself. They both found themselves very amusing. Even when he excused himself to the bathroom, Doctor Tobey Stevenson said, “Somebody drew an ‘S’ on the toilet sign. It says ‘Toilest.’ How humorous. Like some Elizabethan was trying to describe the act. I’ll have to tell the boys at the lab about that one. ‘Toilest,’” he said again and he laughed. “Actually, that was me. I did that yesterday. ‘Toilest!’ How hilarious. Excuse me,” and he laughed again, and he left the siblings sitting at the table alone, and he said “Toilest” again before he opened the door and entered.

  When Oa was sure Doctor Stevenson was out of earshot, he said, “I know you hired me to kill your fiancée. I have to know why.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, No-face?”

  “I get all my assignments over the phone. My friend Buck. You remember him. He calls me and tells me the target and the place and the time. He never tells me who the client is. He never tells me the motive. But there’s an agreement between us. I only kill for good reasons. I only kill immoral people. I can never kill out of greed. I could never kill if there isn’t a good reason behind it. I was assigned to kill your fiancée. Buck didn’t tell me you hired him. I just know it. But now I have to know the motive. It’s not for greed is it? Not for his money? What is this work he does? Is it evil somehow?”

  Missy looked at him with a half-smile and said, “You always had a fun imagination, No-face. So melodramatic.”

  “I’m serious, Misery. This is my life.”

  “See what I mean, always so sold on your life and death matters. You missed your calling as an actor. I have a lot of actor friends. I could introduce you if you want me to.”

  Doctor Stevenson came back to the table. Oa, very intently concentrating, said, “Tell me about your work, doctor. I have to know every detail.”

  “Well, it starts with accepting that Hemingway isn’t ... what did you call it?”

  “Meaningless and arbitrary.”

  “Right, very clever. My work is a very difficult thing to explain to laymen. It all happened when dead Doctor Abel Pluripont quoted all of ‘Kilimanjaro’ in his epitaph under the witty pseudonym X. Nihilo. After that it was all a matter of deciphering. After the homiletical level it was all...”

  “I don’t really care how it works, Doctor. I want to know if there’s any sort of evil intent behind it.”

  Missy said, “Life isn’t your black-hatted cowboys, No-face.”

  Doctor Stevenson said, “Of course there’s no evil intent behind my work. We’re trying to extend the human life span. I can’t think of a nobler intent. You know what, why don’t I show you? Why don’t you come with me and you can experience the procedure for yourself? You’ll see, there’s no evil in it.”

  “Oh, I can’t pay you.”

  “No, it’s perfectly free. Eventually we’ll start charging money, of course, but right now, in the proto-type stage, it’s free. Think of it as a gift. In fact, I think I’ll make it precisely that, a gift to the Tone family. You’ve been through a lot with the passing of your father. As soon as your other sister gets here we can go to the room, the procedure room. That will be perfect. The system is set up for three slots, so it works ideally when three people go at the same time. How convenient, how convenient. I hope your sister wasn’t caught in traffic or something.”

  Oa said, “You don’t wait for Eudaemonia. She won’t show up. We have to go find her. She shouldn’t be that hard to find.” Oa got up and left the restaurant, no thought of paying a bill.

  Missy and Doctor Stevenson lagged a little, paid the bill, dropped a dollar in the Babylonian Exile and left the restaurant, soon catching up with Oa. They found a graveyard, then a church, then another church, and a graveyard. At the next graveyard Oa saw a big family all in black, umbrellas mushroomed out even though there was only a light mist. And the grass was bright green, mocking their showy depression. Oa hopped the fence, picked Eudaemonia out of the crowd. She was in the middle of reaching out, slowly, slowly, to the gloved hand of the man in front of her; she was staring at the man’s eyelashes dripping with water from the waning rain; like prey, he was unaware, and Eudaemonia came so close to touching him. Oa snatched her hand instead and dragged her away. She whispered a, “Hey, hey, stop it,” a little too loudly.

  The prey lurched, and the other funeral-goers glared. Oa said, “She doesn’t belong here. She doesn’t know any one of you.” He wasn’t apologizing. He wasn’t embarrassed or self-conscious. He just couldn’t resist saying it. He kept walking as he said it, never looking at the genuine mourners. And they soon forgot anything disruptive happened at the funeral of Uncle Such-and-such.

  Oa’s grip on her hand was tight and a little painful and a little frightening, but Eudaemonia appreciated this contact at least. It felt nice to hold the hand of someone she knew. She hadn’t touched, let alone hugged, a genuine loved one in years. She let a half-smile escape, but she couldn’t resist saying, “Oa, let go of me. What the hell are you doing? I’m on my job.”

  In her mind, she flashed back to walking together home from school, Eudaemonia dragging Oa behind her, Oa crying, and Oa said, “Who wrote Genesis?”

  And the young Eudaemonia, plodding along on her little legs, replied, “I don’t know. God I guess.”

  “No. I mean who wrote it? Who wrote it down first?”

  “I don’t know. People I guess.”

  “What happens to people like that? All those people are dead and forgotten now like all of us will be.”

  And the young Eudaemonia tried to think of what their faces must’ve looked like, but she never could settle on a complete face, and she glanced back at her brother’s crying eyes; they looked less brown in the sun light. Brown, they were brown, weren't they?

  And Eudaemonia’s mind came back to the present as she heard herself say, “What the hell are you doing? I’m on my job.”

  “No you’re not,” Oa said. “I can always tell by the look on your face when you’re doing one for money and when you’re doing one for pleasure. There’s always funerals. You can find more games in a little bit. I need your help right now. I have a serious problem on my job. I have to kill Misery’s fiancée.”

  “What? What are you crazy? Misery has a fiancée? She’d never get married.”

  “I need your help. Check him out. You have that whole empathy thing. Tell me if he’s honest. Tell me if he’s, you know, emotional. Tell me if he's good or bad. I have to know if he's good or bad.” So they climbed over the fence, and Eudaemonia saw Misery in her newness and had no thoughts. And Missy gave more embarrassing introductions. Doctor Stevenson told her about his gift to the family without specifying directly. Eudaemonia went along without really understanding the wheres and whys, without fully understanding the whos. She wasn’t used to talking to people when it wasn’t in phrases like, “It’s for the best; she was suffering,” or, “It’s too bad it takes a funeral to get us all together like this.” Eudaemonia mostly nodded and agreed with Doctor Stevenson and smiled an obviously fake smile. She wasn’t good at faking.