One morning, Gregor Samsa woke from a night of uneasy dreams to find that he had become a series of questions and answers on an exam.

The beginning of Gregor asked about the picture of the girl he had on his wall; the answer Gregor answered to himself was that the picture represented his repressed sexuality. A question in the middle of Gregor asked Gregor to consider his relationship to his father; the answer, apparently—found somewhere in small type at the very end of himself—was that Gregor resented his father and that his father resented him, and that this was all very Lacanian, but that Freudian would also be acceptable. There were two questions about the apples that had been lodged in his back by his father: one asked him to consider the symbolism of fruit in general, the other asked him to make a clear connection to ‘biblical antecedents’ and discuss the possibility that apples could be considered an example of “typology” similar to that used by the Pre-Raphaelites. An essay question at the end asked Gregor to consider his sister’s ripening sexual maturity after Gregor’s death and stipulated that the answer needed to be a minimum of 700 words long and demonstrate that the writer could support a complex interpretation with evidence from the text and that this word count and the complex interpretation were absolutely necessary for matriculation.

After Gregor finished reading himself, he considered.

Most of the answers to the questions were correct; they were, strictly speaking, true.

Most of the questions were incorrect; they were, strictly speaking, outrageous lies disguised as intellectual activity. The questions asked about and created a reality that—in the very act of their being asked—proved to be too thin to exist for any more time than the exam existed.

Thus, even as Gregor finished a draft of a response to the essay question, he began to fade, and he found that he could only come back into existence by rereading the exam and providing the true answers to the false questions.

And thus, for some time—it could have been an hour or it could have been a millennium—Gregor read and reread and reconsidered himself. Greg quickly memorized the answers in self-existential defense, and this cycle, repetitive as it was, seemed to help him keep himself a bit more solid, somehow. Gregor knew where he was, what he was, what he wasn’t, where he wasn’t—when he thought about the right answers. He had telos, of a sort, and just enough ontology, and really, what more can any of us ask for?

Purpose, Gregor sometimes muttered to himself, I could do with some actual purpose, maybe with a pleasant side of pleasure as well, but then he got back to taking himself again and he scored very well and he felt a little bit better. The right answers to the bizarre, sometimes violent questions may not have been comforting, not exactly, but keeping all the answers in his head stopped him from forgetting what he was.

Then one morning—after even more than the usual spate of somewhat eccentric dreams—Gregor woke up and began to answer the questions about himself.

Except that, this time, he answered them with the wrong answers.

Or, rather, he answered the questions that he had longed for others to ask.

Just one sample, for you, reader—for I see you with that look of lust for knowledge you can never really know in your eye—of the question that no one had ever dared ask Gregor: given your ongoing existence in a shadow world determined by second-rate intellectuals, artists (some good, many bad) greedy to steal ideas, teachers too lazy or unimaginative to come up with a new way to teach your classic text, undergraduates desperate to plagiarize answers about the apples in your back , and as the answer to no less than 37 Jeopardy! questions, do you think that it would have been better if Max had simply incinerated the story that endlessly recreates you, thus destroying you as your creator instructed him to do? Do you feel this existence worth existing in, Gregor Samsa? Or do you need the possibility of finitude, death, the final curtain, etc., to give your existence shape and meaning, just like everyone else?

Gregor went far over the prescribed word count in answering this question that no one had ever even thought to ask. Had anyone bothered to tell the ministry of education they may not have fully approved, but as it turned out, no one cared to tell the Ministry of Education much at all and so they never got the chance to be disapproving.

Gregor thought and he drafted answers to the question and he threw out those drafts and he wrote some more and he contacted his agent and his editor and his former dissertation director and an ex-lover who happened to be a semi-successful playwright in Paris now and he told all of them, many times—often on rainy Tuesday nights when nothing was going right—that none of it was working he was going to have start again in the morning and this time he would put away the whiskey he would go to bed sober so that he could think clearly in the morning goddamn it and really write for jesus’s sake and he was going to shut the wifi off in his apartment while he worked because the fucking notifications on his fucking jesus phone would just not let him alone and he was going insane, he really was, and maybe he would start therapy again, except his insurance only paid half and maybe it was time to give the gym another go

And then one surprising day in mid-April, Gregor’s answer was finally complete.

Greg mailed the answer off to his editor and his agent and they were very pleased, and when emailed a few of the pages to his ex-lover she wanted to fly back from Paris in a few days and talk and maybe figure out where it had all gone wrong.

And then Gregor slept.

And after a night of pleasantly erotic dreams—mostly about his agent who he had always had a bit of an unexpressed thing for—Gregor Samsa awoke to find that he had been transformed into a delicate, translucent jellyfish.

And he never had to read or write himself into existence again.