The Inframorphosis

I have lived 280 million years, give or take ten million. Needless to say, I've stopped celebrating birthdays.

Occasionally, in my wanderings, I encounter a birthday cake—someone else's—and I confess to a nibble or two. But my brain is not capable of holding the memories of every day that I have lived, so even though I know the fact of those birthday cakes, I can summon of them no memory, no images, no feelings.

Of course, my body wears out. I must renew it periodically. I give birth to myself. But each new self is the same as the old, unchanging. Whereas some beings long for "personal growth", or even "evolution", I am the antithesis. I take pride in my unchangingness. It's the mark of perfection, is it not? Because that which is imperfect must always be seeking betterment, whereas that which is reached its own apotheosis is free of all such impulses, the nagging anxiety of being pulled to that-which-it-is-not. Peace and tranquillity are the marks of my life.

Nonetheless, I do scurry. I need food, and food—for all beings—means constant motion in search of the next meal. But this motion is simple, Zen like. The whisk, whisk, whisk of sweeping the Zendo. It constitutes an endless rhythm, the very repetition of which recollects the circularity of existence: all change returns to the point at which it began. Seeking change, seeking development, seeking to be other-than-what-I-am, is illusory.

Last night, a door opened, a gust of wind entered the apartment in which I lived, and it bowled me over onto my back. I lay there on the kitchen floor—breathless, enervated, my system shocked into immobility. I could not move my legs, nor any other part. I could not summon even a microvolt of nervous impulse. I was not so much stunned as frozen.

All that I could do was yet again enter that state of nothingness that for me constituted sleep.

I was woken by the light. It shone down on me, oppressive. I hate the light. I flee the light. But I felt heavy, torpid, a great whale cast up on the linoleum.

A shadow crossed the light. It emanated great shockwaves of air.

"Gre-gor"—I made out. "Gre-gor Sam-sa." The halo of light revealed my nemesis hovering over me, the four-limbed horror who ever sought to kill, dismember, and crush me. This, surely, I thought, was the end. The beginning of another cycle of rebirth into my natural self. But no toxic gas enveloped me. No boot descended to scatter my entrails. Only that mallowy many-orificed face descending closer to mine, emitting its painful foghorn: "Gre-gor."

I raised my head. I froze, as the full import hit me. Never in 280 million years had I ever raised my head. And I took in the landscape below my chin—my chin! I had a chin! And from that vantage, surveyed the vast blubbery, soft puddle of a body, heaving and shuddering as it breathed.

Oh lord. O god. What has become of me> Where had I erred? What misstep had I taken, that after 280 million years of perfection, of peaceful cycling, of existential stillness, what gross quirk of universal justice had befallen me that I had now been transformed into this… this thing… this human?

I'd had elbows before, and I still had them, though they were angled askew. I managed to use them to push my torso up off the floor. I then flipped myself over into my usual stance but resisted my first impulse to run under the refrigerator. Instead, I found myself using my white, wobbly forelegs to push myself erect. 

At first, I feared that I would fall, but aeons of running up walls and across ceilings left me with no fear of heights. Instead, I swayed gently, despite there being no breeze. The air was still. I rotated my body around its axis, and my mouth opened, soft awful, spit-slimed lips quivered as a wind blew outwards from me towards my nemesis.

“Whaaaaat?” resounded the waves of air.

They hit my nemesis whose deeply caverned eyes and pudgy probiscis barely quivered when they hit her face. Instead, she opened her own cavern to counterattack.

“Gregor, you old drunk. You’re late for work. Go get ready.” 

I had no notion what this strange, lyrical music meant. It was at once repellent, ugly, nauseating, but at the same time familiar. Is this my new life, I asked myself? To live in nausea, assailed by a pulsating atmosphere?

My body, though, had knowledge which I had not. It responded by turning away, and using its forelimbs, which I saw were tipped with yet other micro-limbs, in some travesty of floral growth, wriggled around a golden knob, turning it.

A section of wall opened, and I fell through into darkness. Miraculously, my back limbs thrust forward at just the right time, catching my fall and propelling me ever forward down a dark tunnel. 

At the end, another open, which again made way for the scrabbling of my forearm tip wrigglers. I scrabbled the wall, and another light burst open my, blinding me. My sight disappeared! Then re-appeared! Then disappeared! In my new body, my sight was imperfect, flickering, interrupted by bouts of pink blindness. 

I turned now and stared towards a window, like the apartment windows which led out to the realm of the birds. But this one displayed no distant view. It contained instead, another blubber-face, with its cavernous holes, wetness glistening around and within the holes. In all my imaginings, in all my millennia, I had never conjured up such an image. 

Again, my body-knowledge took me forward. There was stepping into the cold white bowl. There was the flooding with water, which I at first feared, but then hoped, would drown me, swirling me down into the death trap of the exit hole. But that hope faded.

There was the donning of the soft carapace, and the fiddling with the limb-hooves.

Finally, after much manoeuvring, and many other meaningless rituals, my lumbering body found itself outside the apartment, outside the hive in which the apartment nested, into the world of the birds. 

By this time, I had realised that the birds posed no threat to the behemoth I had become. Every step it took filled me with hope, that it would fail to thrust forward a back limb, and thus let my head to fall from great hate, splattering its own innards. But no such failure or oversight occurred. Lumbering was the very core of its being. 

Through the days that followed the thing-I-had-become lumbered ceaselessly, peacelessly, with only short periods of frozenness, through the performance of many strange rituals, most of them involving the percussive vibrations of air, almost none of them required by the simple necessities of food.

This, I came to realise, was the hell of imperfection: the ceaseless pursuit of it-new-not-what, for the sake of what-it-wasn’t.

I also came to realise that its incarnational lifespan was many aeons long, compared to the quick ticking over I had known for almost ever. Often, I beseeched the deities for understanding of the errors I might have committed to bestow me this horror. They were ever silent, as they had always: never had I need of them before.

One day, though, this all must stop. This faith sustains me. Even this lumbering tower with its too-long lifespan, must cease its operations and crumble to dust, or maggots, or blubber. I will then be released, to return to my perfect life, cleansed of whatever errors I made that took me so far from the path of peace. 

That is my hope and my belief. To think otherwise does not bear contemplation.