Excerpt
FRANZ KAFKA AWOKE one morning from unpleasant dreams, to find himself face to face with an enormous insect that was attempting to take his temperature; the insect, however—either confused as into which end the thermometer was to go or set upon giving Franz an abrupt and rude awakening—had the thermometer nowhere near Franz's mouth.
Franz recoiled, and was surprised to find he had the strength to recoil. When last he checked—the night before?—he had been too weak to do anything except close his eyes in what he thought would be his final slumber, but here he was, awake and recoiling from the insect with the thermometer.
Insect.
"I didn't mean to awaken you," it said. "I do hope you'll forgive me."
Franz took in the insect's domed brown belly, divided into stiff arched segments; and its numerous legs, pitifully thin compared to the rest of its bulk, which moved in various unsettling directions all at once. At the moment, one leg wielded the dreaded baton-sized thermometer while two others poured water from a battered ewer into a glass tumbler.
"I'll forgive you so long as you change the destination of that thermometer," Franz said.
Said. He hadn't croaked, he'd said. His clear voice surprised him more than the fact that the giant insect tending to him also possessed the power of speech.
Franz assumed he was deep in a dream, although it was unlike any of the dreams he'd endured his forty years of life: bright, sunny, calm, and courteous. He ruled out 'dream' and tried to adjust his thinking to reality.
The room, a regular human room, only rather too small, sat in stillness between four antiseptic walls. Beyond the bed was a spindly chair meant for visitors and a shabby wardrobe missing its knobs. Next to Franz was the bedside table, to the surface of which a small electric lamp had been screwed. The lamp and the table stood in front of the room's sole window, its shadeless panes clear and giving onto a view of—where?
"You're still in the sanitarium," the insect said, offering Franz the water. Franz, reacting from instinct, grimaced and turned away before it could touch his lips. "You must be thirsty," the insect said. "Drink."
The insect's voice was soft and unrefined, crude but not unpleasant, like velvet gravel running down a sluice. Its head was a brown sphere of exaggerations: shiny black eyes the size of dinner plates and a mouth resembling a complicated gardening tool, which made scissoring motions when it spoke.
"You can manage this now," the insect said, pressing the water upon on him. "Trust me."
Franz nearly trusted the thing, but aggressive memories of pain kept him from taking the water. His throat was raw and dry, a convulsive hell useful only for producing spasms of red hot knives followed by blood, neither of which could be considered joyful.
"Trust me," the insect repeated.
Franz did not.