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As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy
dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic
insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back
and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like
brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which
the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to
slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully
thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before
his eyes.
What has happened to me? he thought. It was no
dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small,
lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the table on
which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out
- Samsa was a commercial traveler - hung the picture which he
had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into
a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and
a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator
a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!
Gregor's eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky
- one could hear rain drops beating on the window gutter - made
him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and
forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be
done, for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side and in
his present condition he could not turn himself over. However
violently he forced himself towards his right side he always
rolled on to his back again. He tried it at least a hundred times,
shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs, and
only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull
ache he had never experienced before.
Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting job I've
picked on! Traveling about day in, day out. It's much more irritating
work than doing the actual business in the office, and on top
of that there's the trouble of constant traveling, of worrying
about train connections, the bed and irregular meals, casual
acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends.
The devil take it all! He felt a slight itching up on his belly;
slowly pushed himself on his back nearer to the top of the bed
so that he could lift his head more easily; identified the itching
place which was surrounded by many small white spots the nature
of which he could not understand and made to touch it with a
leg, but drew the leg back immediately, for the contact made
a cold shiver run through him.
He slid down again into his former position. This
getting up early, he thought, makes one quite stupid. A man needs
his sleep. Other commercials live like harem women. For instance,
when I come back to the hotel of a morning to write up the orders
I've got, these others are only sitting down to breakfast. Let
me just try that with my chief; I'd be sacked on the spot. Anyhow,
that might be quite a good thing for me, who can tell? If I didn't
have to hold my hand because of my parents I'd have given notice
long ago, I'd have gone to the chief and told him exactly what
I think of him. That would knock him endways from his desk! It's
a queer way of doing, too, this sitting on high at a desk and
talking down to employees, especially when they have to come
quite near because the chief is hard of hearing. Well, there's
still hope; once I've saved enough money to pay back my parents'
debts to him - that should take another five or six years - I'll
do it without fail. I'll cut myself completely loose then. For
the moment, though, I'd better get up, since my train goes at
five.
He looked at the alarm clock ticking on the chest.
Heavenly Father! he thought. It was half-past six o'clock and
the hands were quietly moving on, it was even past the half-hour,
it was getting on toward a quarter to seven. Had the alarm clock
not gone off? From the bed one could see that it had been properly
set for four o'clock; of course it must have gone off. Yes, but
was it possible to sleep quietly through that ear-splitting noise?
well he had not slept quietly, yet apparently all the more soundly
for that. But what was he to do now? The next train went at seven
o'clock; to catch that he would need to hurry like mad and his
samples weren't even packed up, and he himself wasn't feeling
particularly fresh and active. And even if he did catch the train
he wouldn't avoid a row with the chief, since the firm's porter
would have been waiting for the five o'clock train and would
have long since reported his failure to turn up. The porter was
a creature of the chief's, spineless and stupid. Well, supposing
he were to say he was sick? But that would be most unpleasant
and would look suspicious, since during his five years' employment
he had not been ill once. The chief himself would be sure to
come with the sick-insurance doctor, would reproach his parents
with their son's laziness and would cut all excuses short by
referring to the insurance doctor, who of course regarded all
mankind as perfectly healthy malingerers. And would he be so
far wrong on this occasion? Gregor really felt quite welt apart
from a drowsiness that was utterly superfluous after such a long
sleep, and he was even unusually hungry.
As all this was running through his mind at top
speed without his being able to decide to leave his bed - the
alarm clock had just struck a quarter to seven - there came a
cautious tap at the door behind the head of his bed. "Gregor,"
said a voice - it was his mother's - "it's a quarter to
seven. Hadn't you a train to catch?" That gentle voice!
Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers,
unmistakably his own voice, it was true, but with a persistent
horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, that
left the words in their clear shape only for the first moment
and then rose up reverberating round them to destroy their sense,
so that one could not be sure one had heard them rightly. Gregor
wanted to answer at length and explain everything, but in the
circumstances he confined himself to saying: "Yes, yes,
thank you, Mother, I'm getting up now." The wooden door
between them must have kept the change in his voice from being
noticeable outside, for his mother contented herself with this
statement and shuffled away. Yet this brief exchange of words
had made the other members of the family aware that Gregor was
still in the house, as they had not expected, and at one of the
side doors his father was already knocking, gently, yet with
his fist. "Gregor, Gregor," he called, "what's
the matter with you?" And after a little while he called
again in a deeper voice: "Gregor! Gregor!" At the other
side door his sister was saying in a low, plaintive tone: "Gregor?
Aren't you well? Are you needing anything?" He answered
them both at once: "I'm just ready," and did his best
to make his voice sound as normal as possible by enunciating
the words very clearly and leaving long pauses between them.
So his father went back to his breakfast, but his sister whispered:
"Gregor, open the door, do." However, he was not thinking
of opening the door, and felt thankful for the prudent habit
he had acquired in traveling of locking all doors during the
night, even at home.
His immediate intention was to get up quietly
without being disturbed, to put on his clothes and above all
eat his breakfast, and only then to consider what else was to
be done, since in bed, he was well aware, his meditations would
come to no sensible conclusion. He remembered that often enough
in bed he had felt small aches and pains, probably caused by
awkward postures, which had proved purely imaginary once he got
up, and he looked forward eagerly to seeing this morning's delusions
gradually fall away. That the change in his voice was nothing
but the precursor of a severe chill, a standing ailment of commercial
travelers, he had not the least possible doubt.
To get rid of the quilt was quite easy; he had
only to inflate himself a little and it fell off by itself. But
the next move was difficult, especially because he was so uncommonly
broad. He would have needed arms and hands to hoist himself up;
instead he had only the numerous little legs which never stopped
waving in all directions and which he could not control in the
least. When he tried to bend one of them it was the first to
stretch itself straight; and did he succeed at last in making
it do what he wanted, all the other legs meanwhile waved the
more wildly in a high degree of unpleasant agitation. "But
what's the use of lying idle in bed," said Gregor to himself.
He thought that he might get out of bed with the
lower part of his body first, but this lower part, which he had
not yet seen and of which he could form no clear conception,
proved too difficult to move; it shifted so slowly; and when
finally, almost wild with annoyance, he gathered his forces together
and thrust out recklessly, he had miscalculated the direction
and bumped heavily against the lower end of the bed, and the
stinging pain he felt informed him that precisely this lower
part of his body was at the moment probably the most sensitive.
So he tried to get the top part of himself out
first, and cautiously moved his head towards the edge of the
bed. That proved easy enough, and despite its breadth and mass
the bulk of his body at last slowly followed the movement of
his head. Still, when he finally got his head free over the edge
of the bed he felt too scared to go on advancing, for after all
if he let himself fall in this way it would take a miracle to
keep his head from being injured. And at all costs he must not
lose consciousness now, precisely now; he would rather stay in
bed.
But when after a repetition of the same efforts
he lay in his former position again, sighing, and watched his
little legs struggling against each other more wildly than ever,
if that were possible, and saw no way of bringing any order into
this arbitrary confusion, he told himself again that it was impossible
to stay in bed and that the most sensible course was to risk
everything for the smallest hope of getting away from it. At
the same time he did not forget meanwhile to remind himself that
cool reflection, the coolest possible, was much better than desperate
resolves. In such moments he focused his eyes as sharply as possible
on the window, but, unfortunately, the prospect of the morning
fog, which muffled even the other side of the narrow street,
brought him little encouragement and comfort. "Seven o'clock
already," he said to himself when the alarm clock chimed
again, "seven o'clock already and still such a thick fog."
And for a little while he lay quiet, breathing lightly, as if
perhaps expecting such complete repose to restore all things
to their real and normal condition.
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"Out there in the President's mountainside retreat, subjects
such as the Soviet Union seem to haunt Mr. Reagan the way vows
to read Proust dog other Americans at their leisure."
- Francis X. Clines, The New York Times, mid-Eighties.
"This may be the only time in history in which the words
'Mr. Reagan' and 'read Proust' will appear in the same sentence."
- Geoffrey Stokes in The Village Voice, the following month.
For a time, in the days before he read Proust, Bill
went to bed early, the way he thought Mr. Reagan might do before
a lively day fighting the Evil Empire. Today, however, it was
taking him longer to wake up than it takes Mr. Reagan's horse
to read Proust. He lay slow-headedly on the bed and gave a quick
kick to try and rouse himself - the way Mr. Reagan would do,
perhaps, if asked to read Proust. He hiccoughed and sat up, looking
like Mr. Reagan on a BBC show called "How To Read Proust".
Then he sank down again, feeling as out of place, suddenly, as
Beowulf or Mr. Reagan or a Blackfoot Indian in a competition
to see who could read Proust without sounding hollow.
What's goin' on? he wondered, yawning, with a
sudden desire to do more than just read Proust with Mr. Reagan's
cute intern. Her biological clock, she kept reminding him, was
like a tollbooth collector on the Mr. Reagan Parkway that would
just as soon collect your soul as read Proust. He tried to fight
off the metaphor but ended up giggling "c'est la vie!"
- a phrase Mr. Reagan might have uttered if he hadn't been so
lightweight an intellectual as to not even know why to
read Proust.
In a flash he threw off the filthy bedcovers,
fully awake, and then had a frightful scare - almost as bad as
when half of Mr. Reagan's staff decided to read Proust 'ex officio'.
"Something is wrong, Mr. Reagan," he hinted to the
air (for affecting an official relationship with the Oval Office
was one of the highlights of his convoluted way of fighting off
the obsessive-compulsive affliction that made him constantly
want to read Proust). He noticed that, illogically, he was clutching
Mr. Reagan's autobiography in one hand, holding the Kama Sutra
in another (open to the page with a diagram of the position called
"How Not To Read Proust"), and yet two more hands still
wiggled in the air. He admitted to himself that last night had
been quite a Bacchic feast, involving three bottles of Mr. Reagan's
private label and a dinner companion who often collected and
read Proust, but finding himself turned into a more-than-quadruped
was, he thought, a bit much (to be blunt, unbelievable). "Not
to quibble, with either Mr. Reagan or those who read Proust,"
he quietly winced, "but I feel like the Seventh-Day-Adventist
envoy to the Twelfth Scottish Colloquium on Prudent Thinking
- i.e., sheepish."
Bill heard the strains of violoncello music coming
from the hall, reminding him of Mr. Reagan's bewitching assistant
- the one who liked to read Proust while standing on one leg.
Despite looking like the nightmare Mr. Reagan might have about
being forced to read Proust during a bucolic holiday, his twelvefold
symmetry was, he concluded, mind-bogglingly unforgettable. He
recalled something about a fellow named Sam-something turning
into a beetle (did he read Proust to find that, or someone else
pointless, like Kafka or Beckett?), and this seemed frightfully
appropriate, like Mr. Reagan showing up at a peace summit without
his vice president. "One thing is certain, Mr. Reagan,"
he effused again, "I won't have to read Proust any more
to impress chicks - just think what my volleyball skills'll be
like!"
So, though he could have stayed in that bed all
day and read Proust, Bill collected his things and set off for
his office - one in which Mr. Reagan had once famously exhibited
his tendency for flatulence, without so much as a 'pardon me'
to excuse the chocolate smell. On the way he passed by the local
hotel and the outdoor market, with its well-grown vegetables,
fortune-teller booths (decorated with occult symbols that one
might have to read Proust or Baudelaire to understand) and vans
of movie memorabilia (ten-cent pictures of virile Mr. Reagan
in his salad days, etc.), then ended his daily voyage by the
building fence, just as the nine-o'clock bell sounded.
He beavered away 'til lunchtime, except for a
quick stop at the water cooler, where his fellows were obsessed
with the solemn discussion of two quite different topics: last
night's football game between Mr. Reagan's home team and Senator
Blodgett's West Coast buffoons, and whether one should read Proust
to help make the weighty choices in the upcoming election. Maybe
it was the quickness with which he muttered "Mr. Reagan
sucks" and left, or maybe none of his colleagues had ever
actually read Proust, but somehow Bill managed to fortify himself
in his office again without anyone noticing that he had been
transmuted during the night into something resembling the order
Flagellata. Which, now that he thought about his tendency to
read Proust and fixate on Mr. Reagan, might be a fitting appellation
for him in more ways than one.
Bill went through the shelves looking to find
some easier task to keep his mind occupied, but ended up once
again childishly imitating Mr. Reagan's Chief of Staff helplessly
trying to read Proust while clutching a small vat of formaldehyde.
The strangeness of this left even him speechless - kind of like
the time his wife's vehicle (whose license plate read PROUST)
popped its clutch and nearly flew into Mr. Reagan's parking space
at Dulles Airport.
As he thus cheerlessly occupied himself, he heard
the gentle strains of music from the conference room down the
hall, after which one of his colleagues (who sat, along with
the others, by the synthetic bust of Mr. Reagan, working on the
new ad campaign that shrewdly attempted to get teenagers to read
Proust by depicting the whole thing as tragically hip) began
to sing, somewhat loudly:
Cheesecake on Monday and steelheads on Tuesday,
Bands that read Proust playing music on Blues Day,
While Mr. Reagan seductively swings,
These are a few of my favorite things!
Vowelless words or an anagram nifty,
One lovely girl who can read Proust (or fifty),
Old Mr. Reagan's selected sayings...
These are a few of my favorite things!
He thought it was rather catchy, though still
maybe as worthless as a self-help book called "How To Read
Proust Whilst Bewitching Mr. Reagan". Whistling himself,
Bill started to switch off the lights and exit for the day when
the hostess from Mr. Reagan's favorite restaurant came through
the door, clutching a technical manual on switching circuits
in one hand with a well-read Proust in the other. He got a bit
twitchy: whether because of the illusion that her stylish shoes
reflected well enough to read Proust in, or the fact that her
level of cholesterol was so clearly much smaller than Mr. Reagan's,
he wasn't sure... but her small, fixed shadow cast a tender spell
on him: this was entirely clear. "Most likely, Mr. Reagan,"
he once again affected, "I need to read Proust", as
he felt the sudden chill from outside and heard the Hitchcockian
blackbirds whoosh by the window - what an evil sight!
As Mr. Reagan shiftlessly spoke on TV about the
latest petty hostilities in the foothills of the Carpathians,
Bill thought about what he might do later (should he read Proust,
or some other unworthy novelist?). A quick wave of exclamations
welled up in him (including "Hell!", "Christ!",
"Whatever...", "Oh, shit!", "Honestly!",
"Oh, bother!", "What the Devil?" - even "Mr.
Reagan!" - and a bunch of others that a good Catholic would
have to read Proust to discover) after which - good nihilist
that he was - he decided that he didn't give a damn what he looked
like: he was going to defy the odds by indulging in his favorite
fetish tonight, multiple limbs episode or no.
He passed through the trendy Twelfth St. Heights,
whose twenty-odd eclectic residents were as likely to read Proust
as to be Buddhists, and then turned beyond the hotels onto the
street before Pennsylvania Ave (y'know, the one Mr. Reagan resides
on), displaying his usual panoply of endowments: the shifty squint
in his eye, his technique of dressing in filthy clothes to avoid
being noticed, the confident way he would descend the church
stairs (past the bent-over drunks and sensitive effusions of
Methodist doctrine), the hypnotic look of someone placid enough
to summon the Heavenly Hosts the while in the throes of childbirth.
A bisexual cyclist wheeled past on the way to a Celtic Festival,
so Bill quickly attempted to look like he read Proust until the
thoroughfare was empty enough for him to approach the vicinity
of Mr. Reagan's seemingly invincible yet decidedly un-Benedictine
enclave.
Mr. Reagan's staff began to exit the White House,
looking to a man (and woman) like the scientists who insisted
that the inability to read Proust could be definitively located
in a specific defective gene (the seventieth, if he recalled
the Eyewitness News story adequately). Inevitably, after the
quixotic Chief of Staff, the handsome agent who was wounded before
he could read Proust, the dishonest Fed Chairman devoted to Voodoo
Economics, the clownish soldier, the lively Viennese envoy...
there SHE was, the childish yet exquisite intern that made the
whole administration of Mr. Reagan worthwhile: white, healthy,
statuesque, chesty, uninhibited, splendid: the queen of Bill's
loincloth, the ultimate bittersweet obsession; and, as was his
habit, he decisively stepped behind the shrub and unzipped the
front of his pants (making sure that no one was downwind, of
course). In a short time he finished, then stood, ebullient,
as the queenliest of women went by the shrub on the other side,
unaware of the indecent delinquent who viewed her still, hidden
like the quiet fellow who once tried to kill Mr. Reagan when
he refused to read Proust during the President's Conference.
He looked down at his hands, and - after wiping
them off - realized that he suddenly had the same complement
of limbs as Mr. Reagan or Elvis Costello or the guy who read
Proust out loud in the subway - not a thousand, not nine, but
two. It must have been bad whitefish the night before, he decided,
that led to this inherently odd daydream (either that, or friendly
Mr. Reagan actually read Proust, and a host of other counterfactuals
were true!). Whatever it was, he was happy it was over (as Mr.
Reagan was to say two decades later when he finally did
read Proust), and as he listened to the buses and autos on the
thoroughfare he noticed a woman approaching, and so he softened,
swallowed, and met her with his least shifty look, touching her
gently on the arm: "Hey, sweet Hillary" he invited,
"Ready to go for a good bottle of Chianti?"
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