When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from restless dreams, he found himself transformed into a tremendous vermin in his bed.
He woke up late. Not late in the way clocks accuse you, but late in the way life does. Something had already begun without him and he had merely been dropped into the middle of it. His body felt peculiar before he even opened his eyes. Too light. Too segmented. Too aware of itself. When he did open them, the ceiling was the same.
However, it did not bother him at all. His legs moved with an uncanny precision, as if he was already greatly habituated with his appendages.
His first thought, and he would later recognize this as the most revealing fact about himself was not what has happened to him, but rather: “I hope this doesn't interfere with the shoot.”
The second thought arrived almost immediately, chasing the first like a stagehand running after a dropped prop: “Would Brando have panicked?” He decided Brando would not have panicked. He decided, therefore, that neither would Gregor Samsa.
He rolled sideways with some effort, learning the new geography of himself the way one learns a foreign city, not with a map, but by walking until the wrong turns begin to feel familiar.
Six legs, he discovered, were not so much more complicated than two. They were simply more democratic. Each one had its say. He stood on the bedroom floor and regarded his reflection in the mirrored wardrobe door: a beetle, approximately the size of a large Labrador, with a gloss to his carapace that he could not help but find handsome.
The vanity, he thought, does not leave a man just because the man has left his shape.
On the nightstand beside his bed, his phone buzzed. He managed it after two tries, the touchscreen responding reluctantly to his foreleg.
“7:15 AM. Call time 9:00. Last day. Make it count. — Production.”
Last day. Of course. After eleven months of filming, eleven months of becoming someone he had agreed to be, today was the final day of Sweet Summer Child, and he was to die on camera before lunch.
He looked once more at his reflection.
"You are Gregor Samsa," he told the beetle in the mirror, and his voice, to his immense relief, had not changed at all, still that deep, carefully cultivated instrument he had spent two decades tuning. "
The beetle in the mirror regarded him with compound eyes that fractured the room into a thousand versions of itself. In all of them, Gregor looked magnificent.
The apartment building was, as it had always been, full of his neighbors. Mrs. Felton in 4B was a large, powdery moth who spoke entirely in complaints and left a fine dust on every surface she touched. The Aldridge twins on the ground floor were matching June bugs who had lived together so long they had begun to finish each other's sentences. An ancient cockroach named Mendel, was fixing the intercom in the lobby when Gregor came down, and he nodded without looking up, the way one nods at things that are simply part of the world.
"Morning," said Mendel.
"Morning," said Gregor.
The city outside was busy with its ordinary Tuesday business. A mayfly at the corner newsstand sold Gregor a coffee from a thermos with the efficient tenderness of someone who has always sold coffee and always will. A pair of dung beetles in expensive suits argued about parking. A praying mantis in a hijab walked three small larvae to the school on Birch Street while talking on the phone. The crosswalk signal chirped. A cab splashed through a puddle. Somewhere, a jackhammer.
Gregor stood on the sidewalk with his coffee and breathed it all in. The exhaust and the bakery smell and the particular frequency of a city that doesn't wait for anyone, as he often felt in mornings before difficult days,a tenderness for it so acute it was almost indistinguishable from grief. He had grown up three hundred miles from this city, in a town that smelled like feedlots and foreclosure. He had come here at nineteen with a monologue from Death of a Salesman and three hundred dollars and a hunger so enormous it had sometimes frightened him. He had wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to be seen.
He had worked for it. God, how he had worked. The regional theater. The humiliating commercial work. The decade of almost. He had been the bug in every room— the one who didn't quite fit the part, who was asked to wait outside, who was passed over for men with smoother shells and more familiar names. And then, just as he was beginning to suspect that the hunger might be the only thing he'd ever truly possess, the script had landed on his agent's desk, and he had read it in one sitting, and he had known.
He was going to get his Oscar.
Not for playing a man. For playing a bug.
The production studio was a converted textile warehouse in the old industrial quarter, and it had been Gregor's second home for nearly a year. He knew every corner of it, the craft services table with its subtle scratches, the bathroom on the second floor where the lock didn't work, the particular echo of the main stage when it was empty, which sounded, he had always thought, like the inside of a seashell.
He knew the crew by name. He knew which gaffers liked to talk football and which ones liked to be left alone. He had spent eleven months building this place into something that felt, if not like belonging exactly, then like a very convincing approximation of it.
He pushed through the door with his shoulder, the body took some navigation in tight spaces and the main stage unfolded before him.
They were all there. The whole cast.
Felicia, who played his love interest Alma, was a firefly whose bioluminescence flickered when she was nervous, which was always. She was in the catering line, her light pulsing gently, talking to Marcus, who played Gregor's best friend Pip and was a grasshopper of such extreme elegance that he made the rest of them feel approximately two evolutionary stages behind. Dorothy, the veteran character actress who played Gregor's mother, was an earwig of considerable dignity who had, in her long career, played everything from Ophelia to Lady Macbeth, and brought to this production a gravity that sometimes made Gregor feel the entire film was a cathedral built around her. There were others– a weevil, two ants, a stick insect who played the schoolteacher, a bumblebee who was somehow always eating and they moved around the stage in the easy, familiar patterns of people who have been living in each other's company for almost a year.
When Gregor entered, Felicia's light pulsed twice in greeting.
"There he is," said Marcus. "Last day, old man. How are you feeling?"
"Like a million dollars," said Gregor, which was the answer he always gave and which was almost never true.
Marcus laughed. "I feel like I should say something profound. About what this year has meant, the work we've done, all of that."
"Don't," said Dorothy, without looking up from her script. "It's bad luck to eulogize before the thing is dead."
"The film isn't dying," said Felicia. "It's being born."
"Same thing, in the end," said Dorothy.
Gregor got a plate of food he didn't want and sat with them and felt the specific warmth of a company on its last morning, the tenderness that arrives only when something is almost over, when the ending is visible enough to make the present feel precious. He had felt it before, in other productions, and he had always thought there was something grotesque about it, this affection that bloomed only in the shadow of conclusion. Why not feel it at the beginning? Why not feel it every day?
But he knew why. Because at the beginning, you hadn't yet earned the right to love it. You had to suffer through the thing first. The love was the reward for surviving.
He ate and listened and laughed at Marcus'impression of the boom operator, and let himself be present in it, which was not always as easy as it looked. He was very practiced at being present in rooms while some other part of him worked quietly in the background, turning something over and over like a stone with something growing under it. The breakfast table asked nothing of that part of him. He was grateful for that.
Sam Whitfield arrived at half past nine.
He was, as he always was, late, and he was, as he always was, entirely untroubled by this. He came through the stage door in a vintage cap and a flannel shirt that cost more than most people's car payments, headphones around his neck still playing something that leaked into the quiet of the studio like smoke under a door. Sixteen years old, four feature films, a documentary about documentaries that had screened at Cannes, and a last name that had been synonymous with Hollywood money for forty years.
In person, he was slight and pale and entirely unremarkable except for his eyes, which were a shade of gray that Gregor had decided early on was the most irritating color he had ever encountered. They were the eyes of a person who was accustomed to being listened to, which had given them a kind of permanent patient authority that should not, by any reasonable measure, exist in the face of a sixteen-year-old.
He was, of course, the only one in the room who was not a bug.
Sam was Sam and they were what they were and the film existed in the space between.
"Morning," Sam said, to no one and everyone, dropping his bag on the director's chair with the proprietary ease of someone who has never seriously doubted his right to be anywhere. He pulled out his phone, his notepad, his water bottle with the band stickers on it. He looked at the stage, at the set, the summer meadow with its tissue-paper flowers and its cotton cloud sky and its warm amber light, which the DP had spent three weeks calibrating to look like late August, like childhood, like safety.
"Beautiful," Sam said, quietly, to himself.
And Gregor, watching from the catering table, felt the old hunger curdle into something that looked from the outside exactly like contempt.
Sam had been chosen for this film the way certain people are chosen for things, not through the customary channels of talent and persistence but through the more expedient mechanism of his father's phone calls. Gerald Whitfield was a producer of the old school, which meant he had enough money and enough history to make arguments that other people could not afford to refuse, and the argument he had made for his son was simple: “Sam had a vision, Sam had instincts, and the industry needed new voices, didn't it? Wasn't everyone always saying that?”
The studio had agreed. The studio always agreed with Gerald Whitfield.
And the maddening thing, the thing that Gregor had spent eleven months trying to locate a comfortable relationship with, was that Sam was not, strictly speaking, bad at his job. He was uneven. He was occasionally brilliant in the way that only amateurs and geniuses are brilliant, by complete accident, by stumbling off the path and finding something no one had thought to map. He had a natural feel for image, for the emotional weight of a held shot, for the way silence could be made to speak. He had directed a scene in the third week of filming: Gregor's character sitting alone at the edge of a pond at dusk, that was genuinely, undeniably beautiful, that had made the entire crew go quiet in the way crews only go quiet when something real has happened.
But he was also sixteen, and he had never been told no by anyone who meant it, and this combination had produced in him a certainty about his own judgments that was impervious to evidence. When the scene didn't work, he didn't revise, he explained. He explained why what you were seeing was actually what he intended, and the explanation was always plausible enough that it was difficult to argue with, and the sum of all the unarguable explanations was a film that drifted, slightly, away from what it could have been.
Gregor knew what it could have been. He had read the script forty times. He knew every bone of it.
And he knew, with an actor's certainty, that deep tissue knowledge that lives below thought, that the ending was wrong.