“Errand” is an altogether surprising short story among the works of Raymond Carver. The usual characters and themes are not to be found, nor are the settings, nor even is the so-called minimalist narrative mode or style. The story initially presents itself as a conventional biographical narrative (covering the illness and death of Chekhov), but it is soon transformed by excisions, extensions, and expansions. The writer’s work on the implicit hypotext fictionalizes the biographical facts, to which he adds imaginary episodes.1 These episodes become increasingly detailed, and the last part of the story (there are four parts) has no connection at all with what seemed to be the subject and its treatment at the beginning. Chekhov is dead, and the scene the following day that brings together Olga Knipper and the young bellboy, whom she requests to go fetch a mortician, constitutes an unlikely development. The episode is a temporal “bubble” that soon turns spatial when Olga becomes the narrator and develops her own story within the story. She moves her protagonist, a young bellboy, through time, from the prospective conditional (“would”), to the narrative past, and finally to the present. She also moves him in space, from the hotel bedroom to the street and thence to the mortician’s house. By shifting from hypotext to hypertext, from one narrative level to the other, from the imaginary story to the illusion of reality, Carver for the first time in his career experiments with the richness and complexity of narrative performance and inscribes into his text the fragile boundaries that separate the real from the imaginary.2 In this way, he prompts readers to interrogate the very realism that critics have called the main attribute (or major defect) of his work.