“I like story-books that are simple,” Melanie declared as she spun around from the stovetop and delicately placed plates of perfectly scrambled eggs down in front of each of the three long-frustrated writers. One wanted to cry, one wanted to laugh, and one wanted to fall out a third-story window. But Melanie had perfected the art of delivering good and bad news simultaneously through practice in a long-crumbling marriage and instinctively deployed the persuasive rhetoric of hot food to pre-empt resistance.

Story-books? She wasn’t so dim as to not recognize how that term would go off like a hundred car alarms in the heads of three grown men who had spent the last 24 years and then some struggling to write “serious novels,” another term she considered using as she slowly turned the eggs in the pan, before concluding that that term would be gratuitously cruel.

At the same time, neither Matthew, Luke or John were so dim as to not recognize the obviously intentional affront the term “story-book” was meant to elicit. Nor were they ignorant of the well-executed ploy involving hot, perfectly scrambled eggs delivered to just below their salivating maws at the precise moment the offending gaseous term was farted in a cloud that darkly filled the entire space of the kitchen.

Of course no one touched their eggs, even while steam rose from them in curls more seductive and enchanting than a dancing belly inside a Bedouin tent perched in the middle of the Empty Quarter. To eat the egg now meant to acknowledge one had devoted a lifetime to working up a mere story-book.

Unsure how to proceed, both Matthew and Luke swept their gazes up from their weepingly delicious looking plates through the tops of their eye sockets to John’s face in the contingent manner of pack dogs at a fresh kill awaiting the first move of the lead dog with regards the matter of eating.

John’s eyes, however, remained locked onto a corner in a crease in the geological formation of the folded eggs spread out on his plate like a Google Earth photo of a vast mountainous and yellow region of an unknown continent.

While everyone else was focused on that term “story-book,” John, who saw atomically through Melanie’s intrigues, was fixating on the other term she smuggled in there so expertly and silently: “simple.” “I like story-books that are simple,” she had declared. Twenty-four years of untangling the impossibly tangled wires of ecclesiastical history, of European medieval history, of monarchical fraud, of time dilation stretching years of records to decades and decades by slight-of-mind into centuries, made nothing about John’s proposed novel simple. He had to master algebra, for starters, to understand what his completely fictional Timbuktu mathematicians accomplished on commission from a new Papacy needing to invent a plausible millennium of history where only a century or less actually existed. A is to B as C is to D sounds simple enough, until A represents a cabal of secret plotters, B represents a period of time between the collapse of Roman authority and the rise of Europe, C represents the collective European monarchical succession, and D represents the vast sweep of world history.

“Simple?!” John finally bellowed, raising his face up from his plate of untouched and steaming scrambled eggs to the simple and Mona Lisa-smiling face of Melanie. Her eyes had all along remained fixed on his because she knew that it would be John who would get it first. He was all prairie thunder-storm now, a gathering knot of blackness with bolts of lightening charging around behind his eyes. “Simple?! he repeated, now looking murderous, now looking like Beethoven at his most raging moment.

Melanie remained mute as Mona Lisa on the wall of the Louvre, but inside she trembled. She didn’t have the painting’s protective cover of plexiglass. Perhaps the prod she had dreamt up lying in bed the night before was terribly ill-advised after all. Maybe the whole idea of trying to help three holed-up guys living in a crazy crooked house for twenty-four years desperately—literally beyond words—trying to write novels, was a bad one.

But then, what would be the better idea? She had quit her career, she had left her home, she had walked out on her husband. She had looked into the abyss of pointlessness deeply herself, out the tiny thick round window in the door of the jet beside her airline purser seat, one of those that face backward, it’s back to the wall. And scanning the folds and creases of the yellowish mountainous region of the vast and unknown (to her) American west, what did she see down there at the bottom stuck in a corner of a crease but the love of her life, back when she had one, mired in a monumental tangle that had condensed out of the sheer saturation of purpose that intersected from all angles running through him.

She wrote John a letter in the lobby of a hotel marooned in a sea of freeway lanes racing around it on all sides like electrons around an atom, a simple letter saying nothing more than “Hi! Is that you? It’s Melanie!” Upon landing in Phoenix for an overnight before another flight to Atlanta, or Chicago, or Toronto—they’re all the same—she pulled out her laptop, ordered a glass of wine, and Googled her old flame. A Facebook entry turned up, but no photo. She wrote the brief note, pressed the send button, and settled back, thinking it was no more an act of consequence in the world than if she had actually lurched for the handle on the airplane door, yanked it to the right, flung the door open, and let the pressure of the cabin push her out into the beautifully unordered landscape below like a Buddhist monk leaping off the summit of Emi Shan into the Chinese painting below him, and on into Nirvana some number of seconds after that.

The message sped to John. “Ping” went his computer. An email alert notified him that a message had arrived. “From Melanie,” it said, and it might as well have been a fully loaded and fueled Airbus 380 super-jumbo jet that had smashed through the roof of his crazy house blowing him and everything around him to smithereens. No, it was more than that for him, it was as if an Earth-sized rogue planet had, out of the blue, entered the solar system and collided face on with Earth atomizing both planets into a cloud of widely scattered dust and vapour filling up lightyears of space. Who was in orbit and who was the rogue could be a matter of debate, though.

“Is that you?” the note read. Well, yes, that is the question, isn’t it; she always did have the knack for cutting straight to the bone of the matter, didn’t she. Is this me? John yanked the computer’s plug out of the wall. He paced around his room. He shrieked out his window (kids, mothers, dogs not looking up), he went downstairs, back upstairs, and back down again, he went outside and banged his head on the disused ‘fridge standing silent sentinel on the porch, he went back inside and attacked Luke sitting in the living room amidst stacks of books and newspapers, nearly burying him in toppled piles, went back upstairs and held his computer monitor out the window with his outstretched arms, one electron of thought away from letting it fall into its own Nirvana below, an archeological midden of paper pizza plates, empty water bottles and the spilled entrails of a TV. “Yes,” he wrote back, after getting everything back in place, plugged in, turned on, and booted up.

“Ping” went Melanie’s laptop, about five glasses of wine, two ingratiating conversations, and one awful meal of airport hotel pasta with alfredo-lite sauce later.

The unfathomable vacuum of pointlessness had met the singularity of the universe at t-minus one moment, and for both of them, the Big Bang was on the very precipice of actualization.

Once time and space have exploded into existence, can you ever repack the universe back into that single point from which it came? Can Melanie ever call back the message saying “Is that you?” and can John ever call back the message saying “Yes”? Of course not.

And so Melanie sat there at the church door table wearing her most tremulous Mona Lisa imitation and John sat there wearing his most ferocious Ludwig Beethoven imitation, and for a moment it did seem as though matter and anti-matter might annihilate each other, leaving behind four plates of eggs plus Luke and Matthew, sitting there stupefied at the sudden disappearance of their housemate and his unexpected guest.

“Yes, simple. I like it simple,” Melanie finally said. Their eyes locked like tectonic plates. An eon passed.

“Okay,” John finally replied. “I’ll try that.” He cut egg from his plate and fed it into his mouth and swallowed it. Then Matthew pulled a piece loose with his fork and fed on it, followed by Luke who tucked into his plate as well.

As did Melanie. It was a start, wasn’t it? Melanie allowed her lips to curl up ever so slightly at their corners, but didn’t dare let anyone see it.