On May 5 20XX, the newspapers ran the story of an office worker who had suddenly stopped showing up to work. Leni, 65 years old and working hard almost for four decades, wasn’t a low-ranking nobody. He had a team of 6 that he ordered around and higher-ups who respected his work ethic. When he didn’t show up to work the first day, his team thought that he had been out on a work trip. The possibility that he might have suddenly stopped working did not occur to anyone. As days flew into one another and became weeks, his absence started to weigh heavier than his presence. People noticed that the flow of paperwork and bureaucracy was slightly more obstructed than usual. By the middle of the second week, the big boss caught wind of the situation. One of his employees, somewhere down the hierarchy, wasn’t showing up to work. 

First, he ordered his secretary to call the police and the municipality to check local death lists. His name wasn’t on any lists. Out of curiosity and obligation, the boss sent an inspector to the employee’s house. The Inspector went to Leni’s house. Right as he was about to knock on the door, he stopped and looked around. Nothing was extraordinary but a lemon tree tucked away in the garden. It had two large lemons dangling from the weak branches. The Inspector had the urge to walk up to the tree and steal a lemon. He made sure that no one was looking and tugged on the tree’s branch. After inspecting the lemon carefully, he put it in the pocket of his trench coat. 

The Inspector collected all sorts of aromatic things: eucalyptus leaves, pine needles, lemons, and apples. He liked collecting when no one was looking, when only he could witness his little crime. What a joy it was to find a rotting lemon nestled in one of his pockets and trace a timeline of its decay, pointing toward the moment of its collection. He stamped his faint memories with the scents he gathered.

The grim face of his boss flashed into his mind, replacing the sensory satisfaction he drew from the lemon with a habitual discomfort. He wasn’t quite sure how to feel about his boss, a figure he had seen more in his dreams than he had in actual life. He could barely remember what the man looked like. The image of a boss was less about the person himself and more about the paralyzing sense of duty that took a hold of The Inspector’s body. He continued with his new task: to find the lost administrative worker. What was his name? Levin? Lenin? 

He knocked on the door. No one answered. He knocked again and waited for a minute or two. He suddenly noticed two eyes glimpsing at him from between the shutters. Startled, he nodded “hi”. The eyes disappeared. He waited patiently for the eyes to open the door. A few minutes later, a young woman–presumably in her early 20s–opened the door. Behind her was an older woman, possibly her mother. 

The inspector took off his hat and bowed slightly. 

“Is Mr. Lenin home by any chance? I’m coming from “The Symposium Co,” where he works. We haven’t seen much of him around recently.” The young woman giggled mechanically.

“Oh yes, ugh hmm about that… Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?” the older woman responded hastily. 

“Ah no ma’am, thank you, but I shouldn’t.”

“No, no, you must,” the woman repeated, approaching the Inspector. She grabbed him by the arm and dragged him inside. She patted on his back lightly to direct him to the living room, and pushed down his shoulders to seat him on the couch. 

The Inspector tried to object, raising his index finger–just like he used to do in class. The woman did not let him talk and went to the kitchen to prepare the tea. After a few minutes, she returned with a cup of green tea, some biscuits, and madeleines. Her daughter was standing behind her like a shadow the entire time. 

The old woman sat across from the Inspector, and started to talk about the weather:

“Isn’t it awfully rainy for an April day? When I was young, seasons were more true to themselves. Spring was spring, summer was summer. Now it rains and shines whenever. We’ve lost the small regularities. Everything’s blending into each other. Life used to be simple and easy. We can’t see clearly anymore.”

The Inspector wasn’t sure who she meant by this “we”. Was she talking about her family, her generation, or the entire fate of humanity? She continued:

“And my eyes, I have astigmatism. When I walk at night the stars start to fall on me. I feel unsteady.”

She had a great talent for talking about nothing and everything. She went on until the Inspector finished his cup of tea, and she gained a reason to abandon the conversation. She quickly grabbed the cup and ran to the kitchen. The Inspector was left alone with the daughter, who didn’t follow her mother this time. She was still standing up across from him by the couch where her mother had spent the last hour recounting mundane details. She looked fixedly at him. One could think she was a doll. The Inspector felt unsettled from her gaze and started rubbing his knees anxiously. He wanted to shrink into the couch. Why was he there sitting on a stranger’s couch drinking green tea and being watched by this strange young woman? 

She coughed to break the silence and unexpectedly started to talk:

“Who are you exactly?”

“An inspector,” he felt the need to be honest with her–not that he had anything to hide. 

“What do you inspect?”

“A little bit of everything. My boss sends me anywhere, mostly cases that deviate too much from the ordinary. I’m the sniffer dog of the company.”

“What have you sniffed so far?”

The mom came back from the kitchen with more food. This time it was carrot cake and potato salad. She continued to offer more:

“Would you like a nip of whiskey? It’s prime aged whisky. Someone gifted it when my daughter was born.”

“No thanks.”

“Young man, you must be more open to life. You only have so many years, you know. Your taste buds will be blind to the wonders of the world soon and your body won’t listen to you like it used to. You won’t remember a single thing if you don’t experience life. You won’t have stories to tell when you’re old and retired,” responded the woman. 

Anything he said seemed to bounce off her brain and land on a metaphysical plane different from their small reality. She made an existential treatise out of every little detail. All she talked about was life as a concept and he couldn’t penetrate into her life as it is. He hopelessly attempted again:

“So back to our original topic, where is Mr. Levin?”

The daughter giggled in the background at The Inspector’s goofiness. She was probably thinking about how bad of an inspector one must be to get his object’s name wrong. 

The woman sighed deeply. The Inspector was getting excited about the change in her attitude. She looked at her daughter:

“Nana, tell him about your dad. We’ve nothing to lose.”

Nana, that was her name, finally sat down on the armchair between her mom and The Inspector. She crossed her arms and legs:

“There is no story to tell.”

“But there must be,” responded The Inspector, getting high on the suspense.

Nana searched her pockets and pulled out a piece of paper. She handed it over to The Inspector. It had a short message printed on it:

“Leni is off to plant lemon trees :)) ”

The Inspector looked at the daughter in confusion. The daughter shrugged:

“One day I came back from school. Mom was out with friends. Dad was frantically running around the house, filling up a suitcase with some of his stuff. I thought he was going on a work trip. He didn’t even see me although I was standing right in front of him. I said ‘dad’ and he didn’t respond. Then he took off without his shoes and coat, only with whatever was in that old suitcase,” she giggled toward the end of the story, finding the barefoot image of her dad amusing. 

“Then I found the note on the table along with an envelope with a check from the bank. It was his handwriting, but he referred to himself as ‘Leni’.”

The mother sighed deeply, and broke into tears:

“Oh Leni, he left without a trace. Oh, I wish I could have done that too. Young man, I suffer too. We all suffer. But look at me, sitting still in my living room. I still wake up every day. I clean the house and bake. I smile at our neighbors and tend to the plants. Why couldn’t he suffer in silence, just like me, just like us?”

The daughter kept giggling intermittently. She didn’t seem particularly saddened about her dad’s sudden departure from her life, but her reactions weren’t exactly joyful either. Nana’s reactions were puzzling. Perhaps she didn’t know how to process her situation, and all she could do was giggle—a short and simple response in face of a complicated and incomprehensible change in her life.

The Inspector could no longer stand them. Everything about the living room from the lace adorning the TV to the reproduction of Munch’s The Scream got on his nerves. While it was a suburban house, just like his own, with a very familiar design, there was something he found very foreign in the entirety of the house. The physical space of the house, the mother and daughter’s attitude and Leni’s story felt somewhat disintegrated, overwhelming The Inspector with inconsistencies and driving him nowhere. He feared that their neurosis could be contagious. He sprung up from the couch and hastily said a few consoling words and a disingenuous goodbye. 

II

The big boss had given up on Leni. Just as his absence was growing more habitual than his presence, The Inspector couldn’t stop thinking about the note Leni had left. It eerily lingered in his mind, and even seeped into his dreams. He kept seeing Nana hysterically laugh at Leni’s note. In one dream Nana’s face morphed into his own, and when he looked in the mirror, he saw Leni’s face instead of his own. Haunted by Leni’s image, The Inspector decided to find Leni. He had only seen Leni’s ID photo that the boss had emailed him, but even without having met him in person, he could picture him clearly. It wasn’t necessarily the visual of his face that he pictured, but a pervasive sense of his presence. 

After a few days of asking around and connecting the dots, the Inspector was led to a small apartment in a two-storey building right outside the city. He arrived there on a Saturday morning, waiting for Leni to leave. He saw a bike outside the apartment and put a tracker device on it. 

Two hours later, Leni appeared by the doorstep with a box of seedlings. He put them in the basket of his bike and took off. The Inspector followed him on the tracking app. He seemed to be headed to the cemetery. 

When The Inspector arrived at the cemetery, he saw Leni plant the seedlings. After a few minutes, The Inspector also noticed that Leni was carving notes in pieces of wood and leaving them by the seedlings. He waited for Leni to leave and then saw the note: “I’ll drift as mist on morning breeze/A formless wisp, at last, I’ll seize.”

For two weeks, The Inspector watched Leni lead his quiet life. He noted Leni’s every action in his notebook:

Sunday, April 28

9am – Leni goes to the bakery to get bread and a pistachio éclair. 

9:25am – Leni stares out the window. He smiled at the pigeons on the windowsill. 

10am – Leni leaves for the cemetery. I watched him water the seedlings again. Some of them have grown quite fast. These will be the first lemon trees in the cemetery.

12pm – Leni returns home for a nap. 

2pm – Leni is cooking. He has only one meal per day and sometimes does not cook at all. 

4pm – Leni is out for a stroll. He is walking very slowly, slower than usual.

The Inspector occasionally thought about introducing himself to Leni. He made up coincidental scenarios of bumping into him and becoming friends. The eeriness he had felt at his house had first melted into an itching curiosity and then into a yearning to understand Leni. If anything, he wanted to become friends with Leni. 

The Inspector showed up at 8 am on his third Sunday, ready to be Leni’s shadow. Leni did not leave the house at his usual time. The Inspector waited for a few more hours, thinking he might have overslept. When Leni did not leave the house on the second day, The Inspector started to get worried, and decided to knock on Leni’s door. His plan was to announce that he was a new neighbor. He got a cake and some orange juice as gifts. He even changed his outfit, a white t-shirt and baggy jeans to fit the image of someone living nearby. 

Excited to meet his long-due friend, The Inspector climbed up the outside stairs leading to Leni’s second floor apartment and knocked on his door. Leni did not open the door. The Inspector looked inside from the window that had no curtains. The apartment looked bear and unsuitable for human life. Too invested to leave, The Inspector tried to think of a way to get into the apartment. He tried to lift the window open, which didn’t work. He noticed that the window atop the kitchen sink was left open and thought of sneaking in through there. It was large enough to fit him. The Inspector stepped on the railing lining the balcony and elongated his arms on top of his head as though he was about to dive. He then jumped in from the window, hitting his head on the window frame. He landed in Leni’s apartment, face down on the floor and one foot on the sink. Rethinking the situation, he felt like giggling at his own silliness.

The apartment’s silence flooded his ears, disorienting the Inspector and dimming the space’s sense of warmth. He saw that the basil on Leni’s desk, its leaves drooping and withering. Leni hadn’t been home in the past few days. 

The room seemed to betray his expectations of Leni. In their short time together, he had associated Leni with a bright tranquility. Yet his room–with notebooks and various objects scattered on the floor–told of his inner chaos. He looked at the books. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter were on his desk. 

On the floor were drawings of silhouettes steadily getting blurrier and merging into shapes. There was a picture of his family next to them. The first drawing resembled the picture, then it gradually morphed into indistinguishable shapes that looked like machines. The three of them–mother, father, and daughter–resembled a production line. 

The Inspector sat on Leni’s desk and closed his eyes for a moment. His consciousness was flooded with images of Nana giggling. He felt the familiar eeriness from Leni’s family house. How had he ended up here, in Leni’s hideout from his past life, as a stranger in Leni’s familiar world?

He went through the drawers to find Leni’s notebooks filled with doodles, poems, incoherent sentences, and short essays. Every entry had a drawing of the clock above the door showing the time. The last entries were from Friday:

“The clock stopped ticking. Leni will not fix it. By the window, I left a cup of water for the pigeons. I watched them quench their thirst. Leni is also thirsty. Leni has been drinking nothing but water. He feels as if his internal organs are aflame. He walks around naked in the house and keeps chugging water. He told me that he wants to get rid of the fire within. When I asked him what that was, he didn’t answer.”

“Leni is sad. Leni wants to empty his body. He wants to get rid of all his human stuffing. He wants to turn his skin inside out. Leni wants to leave his body. I want to help him, but I can’t.”

“Leni cut down my lemon trees. Why would he do that? He used to love lemon trees.” 

There were many notebooks dating back to 6 months earlier. The first note was from November:

Metastasis. I googled its etymology. https://www.etymonline.com/word/metastasis says “change of substance, conversion of one substance into another,” 1570s, originally in rhetoric, from Late Latin metastasis “transition,” from Greek metastasis “a removing, removal; migration; a changing; change, revolution,” from methistanai “to remove, change,” from meta, here indicating “change” (see meta-) + histanai “to place, cause to stand,” from PIE root *sta- “to stand, make or be firm.” A rhetorical term in Late Latin for “a sudden transition in subjects,” medical use for “shift of disease from one part of the body to another” dates from the 1660s in English.”

I’d heard of the word from my mother when I was little. She’d talk about our neighbor who had metastasis. It was one of those words that I couldn’t comprehend and whose obscurity left me with a yearning to hear it over and over again. Every time she said it, I would jolt and get excited at its sound. 

Metastasis. Cellular betrayal. Here is our neighbor whose cells couldn’t stop betraying her, those whose only fight is against their own molecules. Metastasis. Take over my body. Metastasis, how is it different from metamorphosis?

The first few entries were more coherent and written from the same point of view. The first month consisted of explorations of various themes related to metastasis. Leni had written about articles, novels, and poems as though he were preparing to write a thesis. By the third month, his research had culminated in a fiery treatise. He wrote:

“Today I decided to renounce my humanity. I had always yearned for water. I dreamt of shedding my human skin to escape the boundaries of mortality. I’ve seen many seas and rivers across the world. All of them instilled in me a desire to become something of their nature.”

 

III

“Metastasis. I have mutated. I have set myself free,” Leni’s last note read. Leni had filmed himself walking straight into the sea the day his clock had stopped ticking. The Inspector had found his note and turned it over to the police. It had made the headlines for a day “Man with Metastasis Films Himself Become a ‘Formless Wisp’”. The Inspector held onto Leni’s notebooks, read, and annotated them vigorously. He started running a blog site called “Metastasis” that got popular among the terminally ill. He has been invited to give talks at universities, temples, churches, and care facilities. The motto of metastasis is “saving humanity from humanity.” He claims that metastasis is a necessary process, “a way for individuals to shed their old selves and evolve into something greater.”