The Metamorphosis

As I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, I found myself transformed in my bed into Franz Kafka. I was laying on my soft, as it were soft and engulfing, bed mattress and when I lifted my head a little, I could see the thin imprints of my ribs against the stretch of skin; the slip of my breast plate sinking downward; the expanse of my stomach being round like an unused cushion with a punctuation lying dead-center, coming in the form of a neat inward turned naval. Beyond this region, far and spanning to the lower edges of the mattress, rolled two very human and unordinary legs which sprouted out of the bottom of my hips like hardened roots dug up from the earth. Most of what I was witness to—this body, my body—made me imagine myself staring at works of art displayed in a museum. There was a definite beauty in these outstretched limbs and thumping pulse, but there was also a severe disconnect to whom it all belonged to. Even the roll of my toes held no value within my memory.

What has happened to me, I asked, but quickly retracted, rethought, edited, and republished it by asking, Has anything happened to me?

My room, a regular human bedroom, fashionable and wide yet terribly vacant, surrounded me like the discarded shell of some long deserted insect. Above me on the small nightstand, sat the picture of my son on the beach. His hair was spinning and curling about in the summer wind as the surf behind him dragged away at the beach; reaching then retreating. The boy’s body resembled the sunbaked sand—still void of the creases and scars which time can provide. His shadow sprawling out behind him was long and aged, as if a man’s silhouette had been stitched to his heels.

My eyes turned to the window. This wide portal sat as a moving picture, casting vagrant shadows against the already drab walls. The trees outside rocked gently and sopping wet as the sky, with its swollen clouds, littered raindrops against the panes. The trickles of water slithered against my windows in their chaotic translucent trails. I remember feeling sad that some of nature is understandable while humanity, for reasons much like the morning I was having at the time, was an absolute mystery. I realized there, in that moment, that this was the characteristic of a thought which would normally spin me out of bed like a top; one which would send me scrambling for a pen to push into paper, or for the striking of keys to display their fonts on screen. But as I’ve said, I trusted very little in the workings of the new state I had awoken to and so I turned away from the seductive call of the window to stare up at the ceiling. Normal is no longer my normal, I supposed.

What about closing your eyes to let sleep erase the rest of the day, I thought. But I found this on a two-bulleted list of impossibilities. The first reason dealt with the unknown or, to speak as plainly as possible, that I had never researched the safest action to take in the event that one rises from bed one morning as someone else. Do you strive to fall asleep or to wake up?

The second, and definitely the crux of the matter, was that I was in another man’s body and it was not at all comfortable. To be more precise, I was another man. For what it was worth, I had already grown to be a man in my own right and, not surprisingly considering my profession, one which was already not too comfortable in his own skin. So the matter of someone else’s flesh serving as the casing to all of my odds and ends instilled in me a rotten sense of distrust: in my appendages, my breathing; the soft swelling of my lungs and even the light itch on the tips of my fingers. I’ll even go as far as likening it to looting a stranger’s closet in that I felt that the “fit” was all too alien in some places: too tight on the breastplate; too loose around the shins and ankles. Altogether, I was not me. I had this knowledge, knowledge of the name and characteristics I had held before, but only in a way one can try to recall a childhood birthday–objects and colors, not full memories of a time that was. And even these, I felt, were beginning to drift away from me in the same way a boat leaves a man on a pier (the only difference was that I was both the man on the boat AND the man watching him off, if that makes any sense at all).

I pulled myself up (It shouldn’t be this easy, I told myself) and paused to see the world swim and settle. Oh god, I thought. What an exhausting profession I had picked out for myself. A writer! Scratching my unspeakable thoughts into paper. Prodding and teasing language. Blowing out phrases like candles when they had run their course. How has evolution helped the writer? Such an old and arrogant practice, expression is. Let me paint you the beasts we hunt on this cave wall. Let me chip away at this stone until you can see the woman hiding underneath- the curvature of her bosom, the column of her neck, the wreath upon her brow. Let me express and be misunderstood by people who take pictures of my art with pink colored cell phones and argue which is better, the book I wrote or the movie I did not. Duende can take it all back if she likes.

I thought about the things Alcy had to do and wondered if I should get to it at all. The nearby clock read a quarter to seven and that allowed me most of the day to get them done (Alcy usually did not even stir until after 10am), but I held a reservation about doing another man’s work and instead sat frozen on the edge of the bed.

“Alcy?” A voice. It was my wife’s. “Are you up already?” That gentle voice!

“Yes, yes. I’m getting up now.”

I was completely taken aback by the sound of my response: the depth of the vocal breaths. While reading his work, I had always pictured Kafka with a lighter voice, but this one was direct and blunt on the edges like a hammer. I wanted to explain everything at length to her, to tell her what had transpired and what we should do to move on from here, but instead I simply stayed quiet and watched the shadow sneaking in from the hallway light beneath the door shuffle away. And I finally stood.

At the breakfast table, I sat slightly hunched over my plate of softly scrambled eggs and cooked ham which was pan-fried in butter until it had browned. I recognized it as being put together as a meal I should have greatly enjoyed–as one Alcy would have eaten piling one fork-full over the other until the plate would have look polished and new–but I never made a move for my utensil. I just threaded my fingers together and watched the heat billowing up from the eggs. This food, the food meant to feed another man, went cold before my eyes.

My slouching is so severe, I thought, but had no way of correcting the issue. I realized that the rounded ends of my shoulders still had yet to fit on my bones properly. I also surmised that Franz (that is, I) sported particularly bad posture and was beyond my ability to control.

My wife, staring at me from those brown framed glasses hovering in a sea of freckles, with our son, now three, splayed out onto the carpet at her feet as she watched television, began to notice that the breakfast she had cooked was sitting in front of me undisturbed.

“Alcy—” she started to say.

I stopped her. “Franz.”

“What?”

“Franz. My name is Franz.”

She studied me for half a breath and then dismissed it. “You’re still coming out tonight, right? We’re meeting up with Manny and Liz and Berry and Mel, remember? Couple’s night.”

I wasn’t married to her. I wasn’t sure how to break the news.

“Sure.”

My voice, I realized, put Alcy’s to shame. So much bass. It seemed like the words were going to shake apart in my mouth.

I cast my dark hair back. Alcy had had no hair to speak of but I, I had enough to run back in tight streaks. I did this as I watched my son playing; taking his yellow train caboose and blue train engine and linking them together through the tiny magnets on the base. He dragged them along the plastic track he himself had built on our brown carpet; not yet a boy who would emulate the cartoonish sounds of boyish entertainment with his mouth. Instead he watched them with a dull quiet, reservation, and attention to detail as if the only sounds that mattered were spinning and rolling and chugging around in his mind. As if this is the only place such things could exist.

Later that night, three couples sat around a raised table in a bar in Soho. Two couples–really–if you disqualify the relationship Alcy’s wife and I had. I was dressed accordingly: pressed shirt and tie, white and black respectively; a jacket, and slacks. By our company’s standards, I was overdressed, but there was no way I was going out to re-meet people without looking presentable.

“What’s with the accent there, Alcy?” one guy asked.

“He says his name is ‘Franz’.

I turned to see that Alcy’s wife was slowly twisting the straw in her cup, swirling the clear liquid this way and that. The second round of drinks was for our overindulgent company. The only two people who had gone without the taste of alcohol was myself–who had thought better than to consume spirits when first meeting strangers (especially ones I had met before) and Alcy’s wife. She spun the half-chewn straw through the seltzer water and pinned a strand of her red hair behind her ear.

Her friends laughed and patted me on the back, as if this was either the biggest joke they had ever heard or one whose punchline they were always ready to hear. That Alcy, their laughs seemed to say. Always the enigmatic. He does strange things. None of this was laced with either affection or compliment, and I wondered if the man they knew, drifting away- the one creeping farther and farther in the distance, a mere point now, a mere flake- stepped onto that boat on his own accord.

His wife stood beside me, smiling to her friends about the happy things and the emptiness in their lives, and yet all the while stirring the liquid in the cup as if this were keeping the world spinning as well.

By the time we got home that evening, we had stopped speaking the same language.

Eight months later, I rapped gently on the glass window and a nurse’s head bobbed up from the computer. She fetched us a wheelchair and we were off, navigating the labyrinthine hospital hallways, only pausing to wait for one of the numerous automatic doors to slowly reveal the next few feet of our future.

The nurse asked a question of the red-haired lady in the wheelchair. She paused and looked up at me—me, with my slumping shoulders and her night bag in my hand—and she nodded a hushed approval. The nurses then dressed me in a green apron and even gave me smaller ones to slip over my shoes. But when they wheeled her away, I stayed planted in the hallway just outside of the doors to the operating room. One of the nurses said something to me and gestured to follow the small procession. I only understood one word of the entire block of language, but I walked right in and cupped her hand in mine.

Four hours later, I sat in a particularly uncomfortable reclining chair a few feet from the bed she was resting in. My clothes smelled of blood and sweat and, in my own way, I was exhausted to the point that I didn’t hear the new nurse come in and introduce herself for the early morning shift. The sun had yet to come up, but she drew the curtains on us anyway and turned off the light as if to force us to sleep. The nurse left.

The woman asked me to climb into bed with her.

I laid there, her head resting on my shoulder- the way a stranger would absentmindedly do so on public transportation- and I stared right ahead. There was something so blatantly apparent of the moment, so obvious, that it became too much to bare and the sleep was dragged out of me. There on the wall sat a clock with large, red digital numbers leaping out at us from the darkest region of the room. Is this time a measurement of what has happened or what will come, from the unknown or from what we think we know, I asked aloud, but she neither understood nor wanted to reply.

It had been an entire month since I had become myself and this was the closest we had been, by proximity and by intention, since the hazy night in Soho. I was suddenly taken by the thought of who we were and how, for the both of us, the names on our birth certificates gave us the right to be. And this led me to be aware of the plush hospital bed which, when sleep quickly took root, I dreamed of her.

She was standing on the dock with me, her red hair draped over my right shoulder the way it was in real life, and I was pointing out at sea. I kept telling her, He’s there. He’s there. But she kept saying that she couldn’t see. We took turns laughing and crying.

In the morning, with the curtains drawn back and the winter sun pouring into the room, I held a son that I was told had my eyes, though his initials—the ones spelled out on his birth certificate—clearly said A. L.

—

Alcy Leyva is a Bronx-born writer who received his MFA in Fiction from The New School. His first two books, AND THEN THERE WERE CROWS and AND THEN THERE WERE DRAGONS, were published by Black Spot Books. He currently teaches in New York and dreams impossible dreams.