True Lies
The great historian Maximillian Marsis, in his Treatise on the Death of Truth, noted “The city of Lamentia flooded when the hurricane struck.”
He interviewed Noah (unknown last name), an arkeologist, who rescued animals. “I’ve been around for a long time, Max. If you want the story, check out the bible.”
Noah’s beeper rang. “Noah , here. Yeah. Yeah. Global what? Gotta go, Max. The polar bears are drowning.”
After visiting Lamentia, Marsis stumbled into an arroyo. “Arroyo!” He said. “Hmmm. Steep, dry, and brownish gray.” He tried to climb out of it, pausing when he saw Holden Caulfield from “Catcher in the Rye,” leaping and sliding down one side of the gully, grey-haired underneath his red hunting cap.
“C’mon, Max,” he said. “I’m sick of playing ball with those kids in the field above us. I’m exhausted from trying to catch them before they fall over the edge of the cliff. Let’s go get the New York Times. I want the truth.”
They walked out of the gully. Holden put his arm around Max’s waist to keep him from falling. Max looked down at Holden’s hand. It felt like a huge catcher’s mitt… sure enough, it was…the one his dead brother Allie used to wear with love poems scribbled all over it in faded green ink.
That Sunday, Max accepted an invitation to a lawn party that Gregor Samsa threw for Dr. Kevorkian before he was jailed. Now Max knew Gregor died at the end of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “If you woke up one morning and found yourself a beetle, you’d want to die too.” Gregor’s family was horrified. Max had interviewed them for a magazine article on family living.
“We hated the stinking little beetle,” they told him.
His father had thrown apples at him. Hit his back with such force Gregor almost bled to death. All that insect juice had to be cleaned up. Thrown into the garbage. His beetle shell dried up and he found himself writhing as a worm.
Max knew Kevorkian helped people take their lives after hooking them up to his suicide machine. What Max didn’t know concerned Gregor’s escape in one of the apples his father threw at him. Kevorkian had bought the rotten apple in a supermarket. He bit into it, gagged on the worm, and spit it out.
Gregor pleaded, “Please don’t eat me.”
“Who are you?” Kevorkian asked.
“I was a human being, but one morning my legs wouldn’t move. I had become a giant beetle.”
“You’re a worm.”
“I know. Back to where I started.”
“I’ll help you,” Kevorkian promised. “Only human beings make it out of the larva stage.” He hooked Gregor up to his new life-giving invention. Voila! Gregor became a new man!
The next day, Maximillian Marsis sat reading Miss Lonelyhearts. He heard footsteps. “Ah, Dr.Freud,” he said. “Welcome. Help me understand Lonelyhearts’ dreams.”
“The link between the unconscious and responsibility, no?”
“Is Lonelyhearts responsible for his dream?”
“Call my secretary,” Freud said. “Let’s discuss dreams and floods.”
Marsis wept.
“Here,” Freud said, handing him a tissue. “I have a closet filled with them. In a way, I’m a historian, too.”