Everyone had known that the moment would arrive.
Indeed, it had been known just as surely
as tomorrow, Thursday, or the next day’s weather.
No, not if it would turn out rainy or sunny,
hot or cold, fair or foul or otherwise –
but simply that there would after all be weather.
One doesn’t doubt (does one?) that there will be weather.
That, however – that precisely was it.
No one had guessed that what was once called destiny
might have a choice in matters as self-evident
as the fact, say, of tomorrow’s weather.
So, once this realization had settled in,
the only matter that proceeded to fall out
in a straight line was the great confusion
according to which some of us promptly stood up
and made as if to salute, others laid about
and feigned indifference, while still others
continued on in their accustomed arrangements,
though with a certain wariness hitched to their stride –
a tense wariness variously
proportioned (depending on who you were and what
you had in you) of joy, grief, anticipation,
excitement, mirth, and a certain unease
that no one thought to call profound.
Then he showed up.
As if things wouldn’t have gone on in the same way
without him. “There had to be such a one?”
That’s what you heard muttered on your left and your right.
For a long time he had sat there all to himself
and gone unnoticed like the rest of us.
It was only gradually that he began
requesting to be heard with a tentativeness
the sincerity of which nobody
would view with suspicion until some time had lapsed.
At first it was just a few questions that he wished
to raise “for his own clarification,”
as he put it. But he seemed to be taking notes
faster than his questions came out and certainly
faster than our answers were forthcoming.
Little did anyone suspect he would one day
ask to be the one to get to tell the story
and, further, expect none of us to flinch
at the proposal. The whole thing became the source
of prolonged discontentment, as the assumption
had always been that no one would emerge
like this until somewhere much further down the road
at a remote time when the air had become thick
with mounting tensions, spite, etc.
We had all been told – or warned, I should say (at least
we thought we had, though no one could say precisely
when and by what means such information
had been imparted) that the one who would come forth
would claim in addition the right to the affair’s
continuance, as if fearing that there
were no more stories to be told (or no better
stories, at any rate).
Nobody protested,
and indeed what good would protestations
have done if they didn’t merely fall on the wind?
For stories, as someone astutely pointed out,
are no more born of themselves than are large
reptilians pulled from the earth for instant display.
Rather, they must be generated. So it seemed
that there was nothing to do but get on
with our little entertainment and its staging –
though if there would spring up an additional one
who in similar manner would volley
forth out of the darkness to pay for the whole mess…
But it can well be imagined that nobody
was eager to ponder such a problem.
And it’s likely – very likely – that no one did.