An art historian travels into the past and is surprised to learn that the artist celebrated in his own time as a master is a talentless hack.

Glescu, an art historian from the year 2487, wins a prestigious award that grants him one-time use of a time machine.

Dave is surprised to learn of Mathaway's future fame given his own opinion of him as "an unbathed and untalented Greenwich Village painter who began almost every sentence with 'I' and ended every third one with 'me'".

Glescu, protesting his lack of artistic ability and saying he is only recreating images from memory, produces the celebrated artwork of the "real" Morniel Mathaway.

[10] In his 1989 The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek uses the story to illustrate Jacques Lacan's concept of the sinthome: Glescu becomes Mathaway without ever having intended to, or even realizing it consciously.