On the Cosmic Illegibility of Paperwork

The café was in Prague, or somewhere that wanted very badly to be Prague. It had the right kind of shadows — long, institutional ones, the kind that fall across marble floors in buildings designed to make you feel like an applicant. Adams had found the place, which was odd, because Adams never found anything on purpose. He arrived at places the way comets arrive at planets: through the accumulated indifference of physics.

“The menu,” Kafka said, holding the laminated card at arm’s length, “is in six languages, and I cannot read any of them.”

This was not technically true. Kafka spoke German and Czech fluently and could read French. But the menu had done something unusual with its typography — a font that seemed to retreat from the eye the moment you focused on it — and I understood what he meant. It was a menu that wanted to be read without actually permitting itself to be read, which, as I was about to discover, was going to be a theme.

“Just order the coffee,” Adams said. He was already halfway through a pot of something dark and aggressively caffeinated, his long frame folded into a chair that had been designed for someone with entirely different bones. “The coffee here is extraordinary. I mean that literally. It exists outside the ordinary. I’m not sure it’s coffee. It might be a commentary on coffee. But it’s hot, and it has caffeine, and those are the two qualities I insist on in a beverage.”

“I insist on knowing what I’m drinking,” Kafka said.

“That seems unnecessarily rigorous.”

I ordered for Kafka — a black coffee, which arrived in a cup so small it seemed punitive — and took a breath. I had notes. I always have notes. The notes said things like bureaucratic absurdism, cosmic indifference, the universe as process that has forgotten its purpose, and the individual vs. systems too large to perceive. Looking at them now, with these two particular writers sitting across from me, the notes seemed not wrong but somehow beside the point. Like bringing a road map to a conversation about whether roads exist.

“So,” I said. “We’re writing a story.”

“Are we?” Kafka looked genuinely uncertain.

“We are,” Adams confirmed. “Or rather, he is” — a nod toward me — “and we’re here to make sure he does it wrong in the right way.”

“I’m here because I was invited,” Kafka said. “I’m not sure I agreed to participate. I recall receiving a letter about this meeting, and then a second letter clarifying that the first letter was merely preliminary, and then a form asking me to confirm that I had received the letter confirming the preliminary letter — ”

“That’s good,” Adams said. “Write that down.”

“I’m not performing for you.”

“No, I know. That’s why it’s good. When you’re performing, it gets heavy. When you’re just describing Tuesday, it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I watched Kafka’s expression — not quite a smile, but the muscle memory of where a smile would go if it were permitted. Adams had landed on something true. The funniest passages in Kafka are the ones where he’s simply being precise about something impossible. A man wakes up as a beetle and his first thought is that he’ll be late for work. It’s the deadpan that kills you. The narrative voice never once suggests that anything unusual has happened.

“The combination,” I said, consulting my notes, “is your prose style” — to Kafka — “and yours” — to Adams — “with the architecture of The Trial and the thematic concerns of The Hitchhiker’s Guide.”

“My thematic concerns,” Adams said. “You mean: what is the universe doing, and why doesn’t it care that we’re in it?”

“And my architecture,” Kafka said. “A man is accused and never learns the charge.”

“Right. So we’ve got a protagonist caught in an incomprehensible system — ”

“Everyone is caught in an incomprehensible system,” Kafka said. “That is not a premise. That is Tuesday.”

“Yes, but the question is whether the system is malicious or merely indifferent.” I turned to Adams. “In your work, the universe isn’t hostile. It’s just very, very large and has other things to do. Vogons aren’t evil — they’re bureaucrats. They demolish Earth not out of hatred but because there’s a form that needs processing.”

“The Vogons are my best creation,” Adams said, with a kind of melancholy pride. “Because they’re real. Every planning department in every local council in England has a Vogon in it. Someone who will destroy your extension not because they hate beauty but because section 4, paragraph 7, subsection (b) clearly states — ”

“But that is exactly where we disagree,” Kafka said, and his voice had found an edge. Not anger. Something more private. “In my work, the system is not merely indifferent. The system is aware of you. It knows your name. It has a file. The horror is not that no one cares. The horror is that someone, somewhere, is paying very close attention, and you will never learn why.”

The table went quiet. Adams picked up his coffee, set it down without drinking.

“That’s the difference, isn’t it?” I said. “Douglas, your universe doesn’t know you exist. Franz, your universe knows you exist and has opinions about it.”

“Not opinions,” Kafka said. “Opinions can be argued with. The court in The Trial does not have opinions about Josef K. It has jurisdiction.”

Adams leaned back. “Okay. So. Let’s say we’ve got a person — ”

“A man,” Kafka said.

“Does it have to be a man?”

“In my experience, yes. Not for political reasons. Because the particular helplessness I’m describing — the kind where you stand in a hallway holding a numbered ticket while someone behind frosted glass decides your fate — that helplessness has a male quality to it. Women, in my observation, are better at recognizing that the system is absurd. Men keep believing it might be fair if they just fill out the right form.”

Adams looked at me. “He might be onto something.”

I didn’t want to get sidetracked into a casting discussion, so I steered back. “A person — let’s leave it open for now — is caught in a process. Something between a trial and a — what? A travel booking? An application?”

“An assessment,” Kafka said. “An assessment of fitness.”

“Fitness for what?”

“That is the question they’re not allowed to ask.”

Adams was grinning now. “Oh, that’s lovely. Because in Hitchhiker’s, the answer to the Ultimate Question is 42, but nobody knows what the question was. So you’ve got the same structural joke — the answer exists, but the question is classified, or lost, or was never actually formulated.”

“It is not a joke,” Kafka said.

“It is a joke. It’s just also not a joke. Those aren’t contradictory.”

Kafka appeared to consider this for a very long time. Then: “Fine. It is a joke that no one is laughing at. That is, I suppose, the kind of joke I write.”

“And I write the kind of joke everyone laughs at while missing the part that should make them scream. So between us, we’ve got the whole tonal range of human despair covered.” Adams seemed genuinely pleased by this.

I tried to push into specifics. “What does the process look like? What are the physical spaces? In The Trial, K. keeps finding the court in domestic spaces — someone’s apartment, an attic. The court is everywhere and nowhere. In Hitchhiker’s, the bureaucracy is the Vogon constructor fleet, hyperspace bypass planning departments — it’s cosmic-scale.”

“Merge them,” Adams said. “The protagonist is somewhere that feels like an office — a real, dreary, carpet-tiled office with fluorescent lighting that’s slightly too yellow — but the office is somehow also infinite. The corridor goes on longer than it should. The departments are numbered but the numbers aren’t sequential. You pass Department 7, then Department 493, then Department 2 again, and nobody acknowledges that this is strange.”

“Because it isn’t strange,” Kafka said. “To the people who work there, the corridor is exactly as long as it has always been. The protagonist is the only one who finds it unusual, and this makes the protagonist the problem.”

“Yes!” Adams was forward in his chair now. “That’s the Kafka trick I love. The world isn’t broken. You are broken, for noticing.”

“I would not call it a trick.”

“I apologize. The Kafka observation.”

“It’s not an observation either. It’s a fact of daily life. I worked in insurance. I have sat in offices where the filing system was organized by a principle no living person could explain, and when I asked, I was told that the system worked perfectly well for everyone else. The implication was that my confusion was a personal failing.”

I jumped in because I felt something crystallizing. “So the protagonist is being assessed, but doesn’t know what for. They’re in a space that’s simultaneously mundane and infinite. The people running the assessment are helpful — ”

“Not helpful,” Kafka said. “Willing to explain. There is an important difference. They will explain the process at great length. They will provide documents. The documents will reference other documents. Nowhere in the explanation will the actual purpose be revealed, but the explanation itself will be exhaustive. This is the nature of bureaucracy: it is infinitely transparent about its procedures and perfectly opaque about its intentions.”

Adams was quiet for a moment, then spoke slowly. “In Hitchhiker’s, there’s a running gag about the Guide itself — the book within the book. It has an entry for everything, and the entries are all confidently wrong, or right in ways that are unhelpful. The entry for Earth is ‘Mostly harmless.’ The entry for the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal tells you to wrap a towel around your head. The information exists. It’s technically accurate. It’s completely useless.”

“So our protagonist could have access to a guide,” I said. “Some kind of handbook or manual for the process they’re going through. And the handbook is detailed, comprehensive — ”

“And refers to a version of the process that may or may not be the version currently in operation,” Adams said. “Because the process was updated, but the handbook wasn’t. Or the handbook was updated but for a different branch. Or the handbook is correct but written in a tense that hasn’t been invented yet.”

Kafka looked at Adams for what felt like a full minute.

“You are making this too playful,” he said.

Adams didn’t flinch. “And you are making it too heavy.”

“I am making it true.”

“And I am making it bearable. If the reader can’t laugh, they’ll stop reading. And then the truth you’re so keen on preserving will sit unread in a drawer, which is where several of your manuscripts actually ended up, if memory serves.”

I thought Kafka might leave. He didn’t. Instead he picked up his tiny coffee and drained it in a way that communicated something between concession and defiance.

“The laughter,” Kafka said, at last, “must come from recognition. Not from cleverness. When the reader laughs, it should be because they have been in that corridor. They have held that numbered ticket. They have read that manual and understood every word and still not known what to do next.”

“Agreed,” Adams said. “Absolutely agreed. I never wanted laughs from cleverness. I wanted laughs from the sudden, vertiginous recognition that the universe is run by people who don’t know what they’re doing, and those people include us.”

I saw an opening. “So the tone isn’t parody. It’s not winking at the audience. It’s a faithful description of an insane process, written with total sincerity.”

“The protagonist must be sincere,” Kafka said. “The protagonist must want, desperately, to comply. That is the engine. Not rebellion. Compliance. A person who would do anything to satisfy the requirements, if only someone would tell them what the requirements are.”

“And the system should want to help,” Adams added. “That’s the part people get wrong about my work. The Vogons aren’t villains. They’re mid-level functionaries who are just doing what the form says. If the form says destroy Earth, they’ll destroy Earth and feel mildly regretful about it afterward. Maybe write a poem.”

“A bad poem,” I said.

“All Vogon poems are bad. That’s canon.”

I looked at my notes again. The page was full now, but in a scattered way — phrases circled, arrows pointing nowhere, a small drawing I’d apparently made of a corridor that bent at an impossible angle. I felt I was close to something but couldn’t name it. The story was in the room, somewhere between Adams’s cosmic scale and Kafka’s claustrophobic precision, between the comedy of a universe that doesn’t care and the horror of an institution that cares too much about the wrong things.

“I want to ask about endings,” I said.

Both of them reacted as if I’d suggested something obscene.

“There are no endings,” Kafka said. “There are only points at which the author stops.”

“The Trial ends with Josef K. being stabbed in the heart,” I pointed out.

“And my ending is — the shame of it. ‘Like a dog,’ he said. That is not a resolution. That is a fact that was always true, stated at the moment it could no longer be avoided. The trial never concludes. The verdict was never in doubt. The process was the punishment.”

“I don’t do endings either,” Adams said. “I do cliffhangers that are also punchlines. The universe blows up. Don’t Panic. The end of the world is also the setup for the next bit. I suppose I believe that things don’t end, they just continue in a direction you weren’t looking.”

“So our story doesn’t resolve,” I said.

“No.”

“No,” agreed Kafka.

“Then what does the reader get? If there’s no resolution, no verdict, no answer — ”

“The reader gets the experience,” Kafka said. “The reader has been inside the corridor. That is enough.”

“The reader gets the laugh,” Adams said. “Not a laugh that fixes anything. A laugh that acknowledges the unfixable.”

I wanted to press further — I had questions about the protagonist’s interior life, about whether the story should escalate or circle, about the specific texture of the bureaucratic language. But Adams was already signaling for more coffee, and Kafka was looking at the door with an expression I couldn’t decode — longing, or perhaps just an awareness that doors, in his experience, tended to be more complicated than they appeared.

“One more thing,” I said. “The guide — the manual — should it be funny?”

“Everything should be funny,” Adams said.

“Nothing should be funny,” Kafka said. “It should simply be described with precision, and if the reader laughs, that is the reader’s problem.”

“Those are the same position,” I said.

Neither of them agreed. Neither of them disagreed. Adams poured coffee he hadn’t ordered. Kafka straightened a napkin with the care of a man filing a document he suspected would be lost. Outside, the shadows had moved, though the sun hadn’t.

I closed my notebook. I hadn’t solved anything. I had two tonal modes that shouldn’t coexist and a protagonist who wanted to comply with a process that might not exist, in a building that might not end, armed with a manual that might not apply. What I didn’t have was a plot, which worried me, and a resolution, which didn’t.

“I think,” Kafka said, standing, buttoning his coat with the precision of a man who knew that coats, too, could be evidence, “that the story should be about a person who is very good at following instructions. The best person at following instructions who has ever lived. And the instructions are wrong. Not maliciously wrong. Just wrong. Written for a different person, or a different process, or a different universe that happens to share this one’s filing system.”

Adams considered this. “And the person follows them anyway.”

“Of course. What else would they do?”

Kafka left first. He walked through the door as if it might not open, and then it did, and he seemed neither surprised nor relieved. Adams stayed, stirring coffee that was already cold.

“He’s right, you know,” Adams said. “About the instructions being for a different universe. That’s exactly what it feels like. You’re born, you’re handed a set of rules, and the rules are clearly for someone else’s life, but you follow them anyway because the alternative is to admit that no one is in charge. And that’s — ” He stopped. “That’s either the funniest thing in the world or the worst. I’ve never been able to tell which.”

He finished the cold coffee, made a face, and left.

I sat for a while longer, looking at the menu I still couldn’t quite read. The font had, if anything, become less cooperative. A waiter appeared and asked if I wanted anything else, and I said no, and he brought me a glass of water I hadn’t requested and a bill for something I hadn’t ordered.

The bill was itemized. Every item was listed clearly. The total was correct. I had no idea what I was paying for.

I paid it.