Part II: No-face
And then there was the middle child. His name was Oa Tone. He had the same eerily forgettable face as Eudaemonia. His nickname was “No-face.” But the people who gave him that nickname drifted away -- So-and-so the bully namer started forgetting; So-and-so the friend who appropriated the name as irony started forgetting -- and Oa remained No-face, a word without a speaker. To an idealistic comicbook/television-minded little boy, his indiscernibility was a superpower. It was like being invisible. But when he grew up, starting in his teen years, the superpower was most useful for id-driven and generally illegal activities. For fun, he told himself the first time; for ideology, he later told himself; by necessity, he told himself much later.
He could pick anything up in the store and walk out. Half the time the storekeeper would notice. Half those times the storekeeper couldn’t keep the young man in his brain long enough to register a need to stop him. And when the storekeeper did try to stop him, he’d run out to the sidewalk and look for the thief, but Oa ignuana-ed himself in crowds. Even if there wasn’t a crowd, he could blend non-physically into the sidewalk, without effort or superficial camouflage. He always wore brown, but he might as well have worn a garish color and danced his way out of stores.
He valued those who forgot him less and less, stealing food off of plates, stealing annoying baby rattles out of strollers and tossing them down sewer grates as parents watched, bumping people out of the way everywhere he went.
He became a killer. A friend from high school, Buck, the last one to not forget, he was the one who got Oa started: it was his perfect occupation, Buck said; he’d only kill the bad people, Buck said; he’d really be cleaning the world of bastards, Buck said. Oa snatched a rifle out of a Gayo-Mart and strapped the rifle on his back; he would walk down the street with his murder weapon and no one would notice. He could shoot someone at point blank range in perfect light of sun and walk away, calm, unhurried; people would scream and run to the body and look around for the cause, even looking straight at the blood footprints, but then their eyes would blur and they’d lose concentration: nobody could make No-face Oa Tone stick to their memories.
He was not like other killers he met. He wasn’t a charming man. He didn’t talk more than he had to. He had a very bad aim, which didn’t matter considering how close he could get. He was never afraid of police; he never made an effort to hide or run away. If he was ever caught, it might have been some form of relief. He never saw Buck in person. He’d only ever hear words over the cell phone Buck provided him. And Oa didn’t actually live anywhere. He could easily take whatever food he needed, take a shower anywhere, and if he needed to sleep somewhere he’d just walk in a house and be quickly forgotten, and he’d leave no other reminiscence than the odor of an unwashed body. He could even sleep in the bed next to a woman -- always a woman -- and she wouldn’t be able to pay enough attention to realize he wasn’t a dream
And now I’ll tell you the strange thing that happened to No-face Oa Tone during what seemed like an ordinary assignment. Buck called him over the cell phone and said, “On Wednesday, at nine o’clock, at the Peyzer Center for Adult Education, bottom floor of the Bogey Oppenheimer building, room nine, there will be a speaker. His name is Doctor Tobey Stevenson. You have to kill him in the middle of his speech. Very important: during the words; never during silence.” Oa hung up without saying anything.
On Wednesday he walked very casually into the Bogey Oppenheimer building. The rifle made the metal detector flash, but Oa kept walking. The security guard shouted out of formality or instinct, “Hey, stop! Come back here!” But by the time he ran after him, Oa was already walking in the crowd, a place where it was impossible to find him. Even if the security guard was looking for a man with a rifle on his back, his eyes would uncontrollably pass over Oa like soapy glass. It must’ve been a glitch or phantasm that affected the technology like that, nothing more.
No-face Oa Tone found room nine and entered and saw the man speaking at the podium: a frumpy, curly-haired man with glasses. The man was nothing frightening, not the least bit villainous. But the room was the thing that disturbed Oa the most: it was completely one shade of nineteen seventies orange; everything was curvy, oval, elliptical, like a maze of eggs. Oa had a hard time concentrating on anything in that place. It made his eyes blur a little, he had to shake it off, made the blood come up to his eyes, made him breathe a little heavier. He walked down to the front of the auditorium, holding his rifle in his hands. Nobody in the audience noticed. He sat in the third row.
This is what Doctor Tobey Stevenson was saying when Oa sat down: “And we know now that life can be prolonged. With the continuing of our research, perhaps in five or ten years, man will be living well into his second century, maybe to age two hundred. What glory when the first person celebrates his two hundredth birthday. Of course, there will be a ... certain amount of physical pain and the things we do may cause certain disorders, emotional disturbances, causing perhaps the semblance of agony. But to save so many lives from an unneeded early death is worth such a risk. We have to remember, prolonged life is the goal, nothing else. And we are capable of achieving that fairly easily. One of the funniest things about this research,” and he laughed at himself, “is that all of it was inspired by Ernest Hemingway. All this time we were trying to find a way to extend the life span to two hundred years and there it was encoded in Ernest Hemingway ... ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’ mostly.”
Oa lifted his gun to fire. A student behind him glanced at Oa for half a second and looked back at the speaker, never registering danger. Doctor Tobey Stevenson said, “The real inspiration has been my fiancée, Missy. Stand up, Missy.” And a beautiful blonde in front stood up and waved. Doctor Stevenson said, “Who wouldn’t want a beauty like that around for two hundred years? Oh, I’m sorry, don’t take that the wrong way. The body still deteriorates at the same rate. We don’t make you beautiful for two hundred years. You still have to rely on plastic surgery. Ha ha. Maybe one day we’ll figure out how to do it all. And, you know, hopefully one day with good science the question, ‘Are you 486?’ won’t be rude. Get it? My little joke.” And he laughed at himself.
Oa looked at the blonde, standing there waving, taking in attention like a drug. She looked familiar. Oa scoured his brain. He remembered the face of everyone he killed, and at this point in his life that’s the only faces he could remember. Then he said out loud before he understood what he was saying: “That’s my sister.”
The Egg-Shaped Room Page 2
