“I’m sorry. You don’t trust me. All right then, I may as well come out with it. You see, I’m a Martian.”
The person to whom the Martian is speaking is Professor Jumpei Nara, who is about as famous as one can be when one’s claim to fame is being one of the “foremost critics of contemporary civilization.” He is very self-involved and does not suffer fools gladly and even before the strange fellow who has dared to interrupt him makes this stunning announcement, Nara has decided he is a fool not worth suffering. But the Martian may not be as crazy as he seems. He goes on to explain that he is envoy charged with the official power to conduct business with the people of Earth as well as explaining how the coincidence of looking like earthbound humans has not been the boon to the Martian mission it was assumed to be.
The story is a perfect example—and the above bombshell announcement a perfect example within the example—of why these stories work the way they do. Most of them are patently absurd, but conveyed in a language that downplays that absurdity. They take much the same approach to presenting often horrifyingly ridiculous—or ridiculously horrifying—premises that makes Dr. Strangelove so funny: the character never act as though they realize they are in anything other than a very realistic and dramatic situation.
Two or three of my colleagues, none of whom I was on very close terms with, rested their gazes on me, but only in a random, meaningless sort of way; they didn’t really see me. It was odd that they didn’t see the card for what he really was, and odder still that they failed to recognize the real me.
This is a story of pure modern horror. A Kafkaesque nightmare through and through, the short tale relates the circumstances by which the narrator, Mr. S. Karma, discovers that his identity has been stolen by a business card. When he complains that his co-workers failed to “see the card for what he really was” he literally means that they fail to recognize that the entity calling himself S. Karma is life-sized business card. The anonymity of office cubicle life meets with the dehumanization of the urban nightmare to create a very weird transformation far removed from Gregor Samsa’s turning into a cockroach, but occupying a comfortable spot along the same spectrum.
Was this sort of thing so commonplace that ordinary rules applied? With no warning, a man finds a total stranger dead in his room. Did this conceivably happen often enough that it would be dealt with mechanically, as a routine nuisance? No, of course not. This incident was bizarre that no amount of caution on his part could be excessive.
There is one story in which the main character does realize he is trapped within a remarkably surreal circumstances, but in this case the whole point of the story is his reaction. While many of the dark tales in this collection qualify to some degree as “Kafkaesque” this particular entry veers closer to being Hitchcockian. A man comes home to find a corpse in his apartment with no knowledge of who the dead man is or why he was murdered much how or why he happened to wind up where he is. In the grand tradition of innocent men struggling mightily to escape the suspicion that is bound to press hard upon them even though they know they are completely free from guilt, the protagonist spends the rest of the narrative figuring how to dispose of the body and rid himself of even the taint of suspicion. Kafka finally winds up meeting Hitchcock at the end when the man comes to the slow, horrifying realization that the very actions he has taken to throw off the heavy weight of suspicion may now become the very things which he cannot now adequately explain away.
