It is a disappointing end to such an interesting beginning, and some of us are not ready to go home yet.  We get a large table at Mum’s House of Spaghetti and Ice Cream.  Half of us order the spaghetti and the other half order the ice cream, and while we are waiting for our waitress to mix up the two sets we bandy about various theories on the day’s strange occurrence. We talk about radiation, industrial pollutants, secret government labs.  The usual suspects.

Inevitably someone brings up the Bible, end-times and all of that.

A swarm of locust, he points out.  Classic stuff.

But it was no swarm, we argue. It was just one.  And it was a cricket.

Still…

After that we argue some about the difference between a cricket and a locust, but none of us did that well in biology and we cannot arrive on any definitive answer.  The food comes, and we eat.  The check comes and we leave.  We will go home now, watch the TV and see what the experts think, but they will not think much. A giant cricket came and went.  The world goes on.

2.

Last week, all the tabloids and local new stations were talking about the famous tenor, the faded Olympian and the cuttlefish caught in a compromising position in the coat closet of a local restaurant.  Spokespersons for all  parties involved denied the charges categorically, while unnamed sources, friends and a marine biologist confirmed everything.

“How does a cuttlefish have a spokesperson,” my wife asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her.  “I am still trying to figure out what categorically means.  Why do they always deny it categorically?  Is there a list of charges somewhere, arranged in categories?  Does anyone ever say: well sure the tenor, but not the cuttlefish?”

“Let’s not over-think this, shall we?”

“Would you like another cup of coffee?”

“Yes,” she said. “Categorically yes.”

Later, on the drive to work, the radio was talking about the same thing, and the Deejays of the Mortarville Morning Zoo Crew Commute were bantering inanely back and forth about it.

“Turn that off,” my wife said.  I did. A little Morning Zoo Crew goes a long way.

“What is a cuttlefish?”

“Beats me.  Some kind of fish.  That cuttles.”

“They’re a zoo crew.  You’d think they’d have explained that part a little.”

After I had dropped her off at her job as a receptionist for United Conglomerations Incorporated, I drove to my own faceless office building downtown.  It was not the place I used to work at—which was a newer and shinier building along the nicer, greener edges of town.  I had liked that job, it paid better and I had my own office, but things had gone horribly awry at the last Christmas party through no fault of my own.  It had been difficult to explain to my wife, but I think she finally believed that I was only the victim of biological forces.  Now I was on the road three months of the year hocking products from a catalogue that is too tiresome to explain. When I wasn’t on the road I was at my cubicle, pretending to correlate sales numbers and explaining expense reports.

I took the long, joyless elevator up the 42^nd floor.    Ken, the guy in the cubicle next to mine, was already grinning about last nights events.

“He stranger, did you hear this shit about the soprano and the blowfish?” he asked me.

“I heard it was a tenor and a cuttlefish,” I told him.  “And I think a forgotten Olympics star was somehow involved in the equation.”

“Whatever.  It’s weird shit.”

“Undoubtedly.”

But I really didn’t want to talk about it anymore.  My computer screen was already flashing with six or seven little envelopes with red exclamation points next to them and that is never a good sign.

“I tell you,” Ken said. “I don’t think I’ll be going to that restaurant anytime soon.”

“Just don’t let them check your coat and you should be all right.”

“Still,” Ken said.

I tried to look busy for awhile, without actually clicking on any of the ominous envelope icons.  I pretended to mutter work related things to myself.  Then I pretended to be doing a math problem in my head.  Ken  took the hint and turned back to his own computer, unwisely placing an ace of spades onto a two of diamonds. 

Half an hour or so went by and I had almost started to actually do something when Ken said: “I haven’t been to that restaurant. ”

“I hear the cuttlefish is good.”

Ken laughed a lot.  It became embarrassing how much he laughed and in the end I finally took a look at those important messages waiting for me.

I picked my wife up at five and we drove home again.  We didn’t turn on the radio.  The Mortarville Rush Hour Riot would be on and neither one of us can stand those guys.  My wife told me about her day at work.  It had something to do with phone calls and a great deal of acronyms I didn’t understand but didn’t bother to have her explain them to me.  I tried to tell her about the funny thing I said at work but those stories never turn out right. 

“You had to be there,” I usually end up saying and she will say: “I guess.”

At home we ate dinner in front of the TV.  The news was on.  Fortunately a rocket ship had crashed into the moon,  disrupting the lunar orbit  and causing massive tidal  flooding and riots over half the world.  So we never had to hear about the Tenor, the Olympian and the Cuttlefish again.

2.

Ken left his cubicle, washed out his company-issued coffee mug in the sink and got on the elevator.   “Moonlight Becomes You” was playing from the ceiling speaker– an elevator specific rendition featuring an arrangement of one-thousand violins and one disgruntled guitarist.  What a disappointment it must have been to the guitarist and his parents, Ken thought.  All those lessons.  All those hopes and dreams.

On the 32^nd floor one of Ken’s many bosses got on and began humming, then singing along to the tune.

 “Moonshine becomes you, it goes with your pair,” he sang.  Ken did not correct him; he knew better than that.  They both got out at the parking garage level.  The boss got into his shiny black two-seater, roared the engine two or three times, squealing the tires as he sped from his reserved space.  Ken read the license plate as it bounced defiantly over several speed bumps before disappearing like an ascending angel up the ramp.  The letters and numbers spelled out something proud, it  spoke of the joys of conspicuous consumption, ownership and success. The world was his, his license plate said, and so was this car.

Ken got in his own piss-yellow Ford.  It roared too, but mostly from a hole in the muffler.  No message could be taken from the randomly generated numbers and letters issued to him by the state.

He went home. He made supper.  He ate it over the sink.

He watched TV.  On the local news there was a follow up report of the giant cricket that had fallen from the sky and then returned.  Nothing new was known, but several hopeful fanatics held candle light vigils in the parking lot every night.  On the national news, the altered moon continued to play havoc on the oceans.  A few small islands had disappeared and several city blocks had been swallowed up.  The world was changing.  Large and mysterious things were happening, but every weekday Ken still went to work and every evening he came home.  Time passed, the celery stalks in his crisper drawer grew limper and he could find no more apt description of time and its personal effect on him than that.

Time for sleep and he set his alarm for the usual ungodly hour, stripped off his outer layer of clothes and got into bed.  The moon outside his window was noticeably bigger and he imagined he could even make out the dent in it from where the rocket had hit. 

In the apartment above him he heard his neighbor beginning his nightly ritual of dropping dumbbells and slamming toilet seats, then a smaller sound coming from outside in the distance–beginning as a flutter in his eardrum then growing into a vibrato roar that rattled the walls and windows of his apartment.  A giant moth—the cricket’s story book friend—obliterated the moon.  No.  It was not a moth—only the police helicopter making its nightly flyby.  Were they searching for an escaped prisoner, a wanted felon, a lost child, a stolen car?  It had been all these things at one time or another.  The world in general and his crumbling neighborhood in particularly, was filled with the fugitive and the missing. The spotlights swept across the rooftops and parking lots one more time and moved on.  There was something like silence now, if one did not listen too closely, and only the too big moon remained to light his bed and meager furniture of his room.

The knob of his bedroom door rattled and turned.  Ken sat up.  I live alone, he thought. He actually thought that, as if reminding himself that he had no wife, lover or angel who might be making their belated appearance now.

A large, disheveled man appeared in the doorway.  The two men stared at each other in equal shock and bewilderment, no one moving for a moment.

“Christ,” the man in the doorway finally said, “I…uh…”

“This is my place,” Ken told him.  “Maybe you got confused…”

“Ha! I guess I did!  Crazy, huh?  Jesus…Sorry, man.”

“It happens,” Ken said.

“I guess so.  These doors all look alike!”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe I had too much too drink tonight.”

“Maybe.”

The man stood there for another moment, as if trying to think of some more graceful exit that was actually possibly.

Finally, he said: “Yeah.  So…um…goodnight.  Sorry. Goodnight. Go back to sleep. Goodnight.”

The man backed out of the room. Ken heard him stumbling his way back to the front door, and then he was gone.  When Ken finally fell asleep he dreamt that it had indeed been an angel who had entered unbidden through his bedroom door.  She had crawled into the sheets and curled warmly beside him.  She had kissed his forehead, petted his hair and whispered sweetly into his ear, explaining the purpose of everything to him.

3.

The disgraced Tenor sat in a booth in the darkest corner of the hotel bar, nursing his rye and soda and carefully avoiding the accusatory stares emanating from the fish tank across the room.

Oh that he had never set foot in that gray, paved over wasteland of a city, he thought. Never met that forgotten but still attractive Olympian, never listened to his ecstatic talk about the wonders of marine life, the miracles of nature, the mind expanding powers of goof balls with a herb chaser. Particularly he wished he had not listened to any of that crap about the orgasm-enhancing effects of the cuttlefish. What the hell was that about? He still had a rash, and much more to the point, he had no career.

One day you are on top of the world, he thought. You are singing arias in enchanted forests, you are playing the handsome young prince despite all girth, age and male pattern baldness to the contrary. What a world that was, with its paper flames, cardboard moons, canvas skies. He always got the girl–though occasionally, it was true, he sometimes got her dying of consumption in his arms.

And there were real women too. Not the wide and middle-aged princesses he wooed on stage but hopeful ingenues in hotel rooms who would endure his sweat and hairy back for the chance to hear him sing to them alone or make an important phone call on their behalf. If he wanted to see the flesh of a woman now he had to pay a cover charge. He had to slip one-dollar bills into the G- strings of some woman name Tangerine or Mahogany or Monet. And he did not have so many one-dollar bills to go around anymore.

I was on stage once, he wanted to yell to them as they smelled his failure and moved on to some more promising businessman at the other side of the stage. I had philanthropists and industries gazing up at me from the footlights, offering to shove thousand dollar bills into the tight spaces of my cummerbund. He could have done it too, he could have yelled after the departing stripper and she would have noticed. She would have turned and seen him as if for the first time. He had the kind of voice that would have carried above the booming bass of the speaker system and the clattering of ice cubes.

How the mighty have fallen, he thought, like so many mighty and fallen before him.
He finished his drink, left the hotel bar, and went up to his room. He must go to sleep early.  He must rest. Tomorrow, at least, could be a big day. He was the understudy to King Arthur in a dinner theater production of Camelot. He had a feeling about the current Arthur. He had looked a bit wobbly yesterday during the second act, sweating more than usual and three times nearly tripping over his own sword. Possibly food poisoning, the fallen Tenor thought.  Possibly the fish.

4.

On Sunday, the moon was gone. By then we had all become used to its vagaries of size and force since that unfortunate rocket crash. But its orbit became a thing less stable than that–a matter greater than our oceans, asylums and prisons bulging or emptying by the whims of its pull, it was finally flung from our planet’s hold like child from a merry go round. A sickly pale and pockmarked child sent hurtling into space to bounce and crash and cause havoc on distant worlds that we could only imagine.

Look in the sky now: there are more stars but less romance. It is darker, these nights, and the mayhem of those first few days, with its riots and inevitable prophecies of doom have past, leaving behind a world more mundane than apocalyptic and more neurotic than crazy.

The doomsayer have come out of their cellars and gone back to work. The floods that had re-zoned half the world, creating and destroying beachfront property with no regard to economic status, have crested and receded. We are like any planet without a moon now, and must accustom ourselves now to a June without its usual rhyme. The crescent rolls we pull out of our ovens will become, in a few generations time, meaningless and will be renamed like so many other things, or keep their names to hearken back to those mythical days that our children will not understand.

Those astronauts who where fortunate enough to take their billion dollar stroll upon its dusty surface are already astringent old men, bitter for not having a place to point to with pride and say “I was there; where were you?”. They too will die off, be buried with military honors, with guns fired and young men saluting. But how do we explain the significance of their accomplishment to our children who have never known the beauty of that sort of night, never see their loves under its flattering glow and cannot understand the references in so many of our ancient songs. “Moonlight Becomes You,” we sang but it does not become them.

We are old men too now. We retire to warmer climates, wear windbreakers and clutch our plastic cup of nickels as we play the slots and hope for a jackpot. We are surrounded by imitation splendor—by the columns and stained glass of the casinos, by the artificial skies and imitation Greek statues of Jupiter and Juno. But it all means so much less now. We feed in another nickel and pull the lever, but what we really want is the moon.

5.

I would have the vodka and grapefruit juice, but I am allergic now. It sounds good–it really does, and I used to love that drink above all others until three years ago at the office Christmas party when I swelled up like zeppelin, staggered into the copier then knocked over the punchbowl. My boss was there. He thought I was drunk. I toppled a table of snacks and went down in flames. Oh the humanity.

I check my watch. The client is late. He will miss the opening, and this place was his idea.

The lights dim once, and I think it is about to start but it turns out to just be a warning. I look around, I look anxiously to the door, but he is still not here.

Christ, I don’t want to sit through this crap myself.

How can a person suddenly become allergic to something they had loved their whole life, I wonder as I always wonder now in solitary moments while I wait for some unpleasant client and remember that I had an office once, a personal assistant, embossed business cards. Does the body rebel? Has something changed within me on the cellular level, unnoticed until one night I am swollen face down in cheese dip, I am vomiting into the boss’s lap and passing out against his daughters nineteen-year-old cleavage? Or maybe the nature of grapefruits themselves have changed in some subtle way that only we rare and sensitive few could detect. We chosen few. We unlucky few.

The client will not come. I realize that now. He was never interested in my product or the show and only suggested this place to meet as some parting, sadistic gesture, some random act of unwarranted cruelty. What a world, I think, as I often think now. What a world where a fruit or a fellowman can so quickly turn on you.

I should be grateful. He was an annoying. His name was Bob, but they called him Bobtail in college because he was always getting or chasing tail. He told me this story no fewer then five times while I had tried to draw his attention to any number of the fine products offered and attractively displayed in my companies catalogue.

The lights dim. A curtain rustles in darkness, and opens to reveal a bright cardboard castle. A large man, bigger than his costume, steps onto the stage. A plastic crown sparkles on his head.

I have paid for and finished my martini. Would it be wrong to make a run for the door now? But it seems to me that the world was thoughtlessly cruel enough. I do not know this pretend king, but wouldn’t he too be hurt to see a man fleeing just as he opens his mouth to sing?

I stay. The king opens his mouth and the most beautiful sound I have ever heard comes out.

I do not understand the words or recognize the melody–which I suppose is odd since the play he is in is an overly familiar and English-speaking musical. I think he is singing Italian, maybe French.  The vowels soar, the consonants roll.  The orchestra is left behind and gives up. At stage left a small man is sweating, trying to wave the King back into the obscurity of the wings. From stage left there are the sounds of confusion, panicked whispers, swords clattering.

The audience barely looks up from their veal cutlets, their chicken paprikash, their stuffed flounder.

But the Kings voice transcends all this. It rises above the scrape of knives, the clink of glasses, the grinding of teeth. And it occurs to me, after only one martini, that this is the purpose to it all. It is thing that makes bearable this petty and petulant existence. And it is there, tucked away in every crass corner of the world, hidden beneath happenstance and villainy, inside and beyond all the vagaries of love and fate.

I know that the curtain will crash down soon. The King will be dethroned and a member of the chorus will be promoted to royalty. But this sound will stay.  It will echo.  It will crackle in every ice-cube,  bubble up from every beer. And even when the echo has faded it will still exist, dormant and ready to awake. It is even there nestled amongst the mysterious and malignant molecules of a grapefruit. It is in everything–you may call it God or love or nature. I will only call it beauty