Top Sushi

“Earth is for people, so they say.”

When I was a kid, people used to joke about it. How times got tough for a while there. And if they got that tough again, we’d all go crazy and be eating bugs again before we knew what happened. Overanxious people predict the future and see apocalyptic scenarios around every corner. They create models. They start talking to philanthropists. Then all hell breaks loose. Pretty soon, you get billionaires putting up money to build cricket farms. And the rest of us all thinking, you first, creepo. Bon appétit.

When you talk to people these days of the bug craze of the early 21^st Century, they have a hard time believing it was real. Cricket farmers? Bug burgers? “Sustainable” protein from mealworms? How did that ever get beyond the spit-balling phase? These days, almost universally, when asked what they think about eating bugs, people say something like: “No. Bleck. Not unless I’m starving to death, and even then, probably not. I’m not eating bugs, you creepy weirdo. Bugs are for lizards and aliens.”

The history of how aliens started eating bugs goes back to first contact, of course, but not many people know the truth about that story. In some ways it was lucky a merchant found Earth first. That way we were already on the register when the gulmotids showed up. Earth already had a galactic merchant ID number. Contracts. Guild rules protecting the planet. The gulmotids couldn’t just roll up and start ransacking everything in sight, the way they would otherwise. The provedor for the Sagittarian quadrant would have his say, then arbitration, then more contracts. A fair price for each commodity. Our goods were apparently too good to pass by.

At first, the culicidae was marketed as a pet, and though they were short-lived by galactic standards, they were such beautiful and delicate creatures that mosquitoes—as we earthlings called them—became sought after throughout the galaxy. Then, an impatient verthacrid ate one of the host’s pet mosquitoes between courses at a dinner party on Krakis 4 and declared the thing the most delicious cuisine in the history of the universe. Demand ticked up. But the discovery of the mosquito’s deliciousness was complicated by the obvious problem that verthacrids are miniscule creatures, and obviously, somebody would need to scale up the whole operation to make mosquito meat a commercial enterprise. Of course, we knew none of this when the gulmotids showed up in Florida asking about mosquito meat. We’d pretty much forgotten all about mosquitoes altogether—and the great bug craze of the early 21^st, for that matter. Because, who eats bugs apart from that kid in your second-grade class that ate his own boogers? Lizards and aliens and weirdos, that’s who.

I was just a boy when the gulmotids arrived. It was funny to me to see the grown-ups freaking out. I’d pretty much taken it for granted that aliens were real and would be visiting us in my lifetime. Practically every show I watched as a kid had an alien theme to it, and when I was twelve, I heard about the top-secret space wealth—rumors of gold and platinum and other precious metals being stealthily deposited in the moon’s orbit. Everyone thought it was a conspiracy theory, but it seemed to fit with everything else I’d heard about aliens. What they were paying us for was the real interesting question to me.

Then, the following year, just before I started high school, the gulmotids showed up one night—landed right in the middle of Day Street in Naples, parked their ship, and strolled right down to the waterfront like they owned the place. Nobody batted an eye. Everyone thought it was a double-sided drone-projected hologram prank like the holo-sharks the spring breakers had been jumping out of the water to scare people and put on social media.

But there they were—real gulmotids walking right up to Rodolphio’s on the waterfront and trying to order an aperitivo speaking Gulmotix, which went about as well as you might think. They got furious that no one understood them, cantankerous creatures that they are, and Rodolphio’s daughter, Elena-Dahlia had to call the sheriff’s office because they stank so badly half the customers bailed mid-meal without ever paying their tabs. That incident got swept into a memory hole elsewhere, but us folks down here in Florida wouldn’t soon forget, even if all the videos got banned and then disappeared.

Then the government told us aliens were coming, as though we weren’t supposed to know they were already here. But they did that whole “First Contact” ceremony anyway, and we all watched. The only thing anyone in Naples thought about was how damn funny it was—all those dignitaries and fancy-hats sitting around trying not to barf from the stench of those alien ambassadors. Nobody else knew what was going on but us Floridians, who’d heard all about how they’d cleared out Rodolphio’s and the two restaurants downwind.

Sure, that was how it started. And I thought it was all a hilarious change to an already absurd world. Add smelly aliens to the mix.

I consumed every bit of media I could on the gulmotids, trying to learn about what these aliens were all about. I found some way to twist every assignment in school into a project about our new visitors. I even tried college for a bit after I graduated, but I found that the “Gulmotid Studies” major wasn’t close to what I thought it was going to be. Instead of actually studying about their history and culture, all my professors wanted to hear about was how the gulmotids were oppressed, marginalized, and othered by the dominant human cultures because of their “hideous appearance and disgusting stench.” I knew it wasn’t going to work out when I suggested the professor could maybe start out by not labeling the gulmotids’ appearance and smell as disgusting, hideous, or other such adjectives herself.

“You don’t get it, Groober,” my professor told me. “You need to learn how the system works.”

“What system?” I said.

“The dialectic,” she said.

“What the hell is that?” I asked her. “I thought we were talking about aliens.”

She just put her head in her hands.

I decided that if I wanted to learn anything about these aliens, I’d have to go see them for myself, which meant a lot of late nights in downtown Naples. I thought it would be a great time. All my dad and uncle used to talk about was what great times downtown Naples used to be when they were my age.

There were help wanted signs all over the area, and when I walked into three different places, the owners all looked at me like I was crazy for wanting the work.

“Why do you want this job, kid?” was the nearly identical question they all asked me.

“I want to meet aliens,” I told them.

“You won’t as soon as you meet them,” they all said.

“What’s with all the crickets?” I asked them.

“You really don’t know anything, do you, Groober?”

“I guess not,” I said. “But I want to learn.”

I didn’t know anything. Apparently, when the gulmotids started coming down to Naples, it had killed the nightlife in the city. They didn’t show up during the day because the sunlight torched their thin skin, and they didn’t bother staying on the surface, on account of human accommodations seeming so foreign to them. All they did was pop down from orbit to frequent the restaurants downtown and along the waterfront. They’d spend all night eating.

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I told my new boss, Mr. Domingo.

“Wait till they get here,” he said. “Your first day will probably be your last. Almost always is.”

The restaurant I chose was called Top Sushi, which, I thought was still a Japanese cuisine. Raw fish. Not anymore, or at least not in Naples, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, and the other warm cities the gulmotids had taken over the nightlife. It turned out they couldn’t pronounce most human words. Food came out sounding like a really creepy mummy at Halloween saying “booooo” for an inordinately long period of time. Meal came out sounding something like “weasel.” And dinner sounded like they were saying “daaark.” For some odd reason, though, these gulmotids had walked into a Japanese restaurant on sixth and asked for “sushi,” and ever since, that became their word for food.

Food, I quickly learned, for these aliens, meant bugs. And like sushi, the fresher the better. I’ll never forget that first day of work—or night rather. Not just because it was when I first saw the gulmotids in person for the first time, I also met the love of my life, Jackie Masterson, who everyone at the Top Sushi knew as Jackie Earmuffs.

Her family hailed from the wild country that bordered the everglades—alligator territory. And her great grandfather had been a pioneer in the great bug craze of the early 21^st. He’d collected a ton of money from one of those weird international nonprofits of the time. They were trying to encourage humans to eat bugs. They gave him millions to start a cricket farm. And, of course, it went bankrupt the second the seed money ran out, because, obviously, nobody was going to pay anyone to eat bugs. They weren’t even going to eat them if you paid them. So the Masterson Cricket Farm went bust, but not before seven tough years that changed the family’s history for generations. Old Man Masterson thought he was getting in on the ground floor of something special. He poured all the family’s money and years of hard labor into the venture, which took its toll on the poor fellow. Apparently, he developed a case of tinnitus so bad from being around billions of crickets constantly chirping in his ears, that he never quite heard correctly again. It was so bad that it became the first freak case of transgenerational tinnitus, when Jackie’s grandfather was born with his very own little baby ears ringing too. Jackie even showed me the publications in the medical journals. Lots of fancy words about baby eardrums. It was legit. Apparently, the whole family suffered from residual insomnia from ’28 to ‘47, too. I felt bad for them, I guess; but what can you expect when you take a buttload of seed money from rich weirdos to do weird things? Anyway, when the gulmotids arrived and the call went out for people willing to farm bugs, the Mastersons already had the equipment sitting in one of the back buildings on their property collecting dust, as well as files and files of Old Man Masterson’s notes on cricket farming, the most important of which was: NEVER HANDLE THE BUGS WITHOUT EARMUFFS!!!

Jackie’s mom was adamant about it. So even when she was making deliveries, she never took off her earmuffs till the bugs were delivered.

I could see why. Even in the closed boxes she carried them in, those suckers were loud. I couldn’t imagine a building full of them. Two hundred fifteen decibels loud, she told me.

I helped her unload the truck that first night, trying desperately to get her to take off those earmuffs so I could talk to her. She had this kind of quirky beauty about her that drove me crazy. But she wouldn’t take off those earmuffs for anything, until finally, when she was finished gesticulating to me how I should carry the crates, she shut the back doors to the truck, took off her earmuffs and said, “What’s your name, kid?”

“I’m Groober.”

“If you’re still here tomorrow, Groober, I’ll be surprised.”

“How bad could these aliens be?” I said.

“Why don’t you tell me tomorrow if you’re still here, Groober.”

Oh, Jackie Earmuffs, I thought, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Then came the changeover. Not only were there other strange vendors bringing in rare and unusual bugs, worms, and grubs, the day shift was punching out and the night shift was turning the restaurant over. Domenico Domingo wasn’t just a restaurant owner for the business of it. He loved food. But the thing was, once the gulmotids came into the city and drove out all the human customers, restaurateurs like Mr. Domingo had little choice but to cook for the gulmotids, who paid more than enough to make up for the loss.

Mr. Domingo’s location was so great that during the day, as long as the place had been scrubbed down well enough to get the stank out, people would still come in for a daquiri and a dish of Domenico’s famous paella. But the key, for both parties, humans and aliens alike, was to make a great show of the changeover, scrubbing down the counters, the floors, the tables, the chairs, the walls, and cleansing the kitchen inside-out so thoroughly there wasn’t the faintest hint of the gulmotids when the humans were there.

Being the new guy, they gave me the nastiest duty, or so they said. It didn’t seem so bad to me, scrubbing out the frontside of the house—which I learned was restaurant lingo for the dining area. That kitchen must have been sparkling if this was the bad part. All I had to do was pick up a few napkins, sweep, and mop the place down with bleach.

Then Damien Seyward, the longest-serving server on the waterfront, helped me get dressed.

“What’s this?” I asked him when I saw my uniform, which was a long, flowing white robe with a ridiculous, flapping red hood that wrapped all the way around my face.

“These gulmots, or whatever, they hate hair,” Damien said. “They think it’s the most disgusting thing in the universe. So they freak out if they so much as catch a glimpse of a sideburn. And if a hair gets on their table while you’re in reach, God help you, Groober.”

They even made us wax our eyebrows down and cover them over with skin toner so it looked like we’d shaved them off our face. Some servers, Damien told me, even did shave off their eyebrows just for the convenience of it.

The last thing before the sun went down, Mr. Domingo went out front, flipped the signage by remote, and shook his head. “Good luck on your first night, Groober,” he told me. “I hope I’ll see you again tomorrow.”

Then the town got quiet. I remember thinking that this was what it must have been like in the wild west before a showdown, waiting for the gunfighters to ride into town.

Then, in came the gulmotids. I was hiding around the corner in the back, waiting for Damien to call me up for something. I was the low man, the busser, so my job was to clear plates and clean up spills and help the servers make sure everything ran smoothly. I heard the aliens before I saw them. I caught the top chef, Mitra, grimacing about something.

“Don’t you smell them, Groober?” he whispered to me. “Gross.”

I didn’t though.

“There must be something broke in your nose, boyo.”

I just shrugged. Then things got wild.

The first time Damien flagged me out was to pick up a spilt bucket of seltzer. They liked it by the bucketful apparently, lime, raspberry, and sometimes grapefruit. And for appetizers, the gulmotids ate buckets of crickets like popcorn, live and chirping. They’d throw them at each other’s face and try to catch them in their mouths like school kids. Then crickets would be all over the floor, scurrying away like mice when the lights come on. Apparently, the gulmotids had tongues like geckos, and they’d snap at the scattering crickets from halfway across the front of the house. I was rushing out to try and gather up the crickets before they ran behind the counter and disappeared into the cracks, but Damien grabbed me.

“Good way to get your leg broke, Groober. Two guys…no, three guys before you showed up, Matty English…he got his kneecap broke by one of those overeager bastards snapping after a loose dung beetle. Make sure you’re out of range first.”

I hadn’t even hit the first main course and all hell had broke loose in there. But for some reason, half the staff kept telling me how great I was doing and the other half was watching me like a hawk. I thought it was to make sure I wasn’t messing up, but apparently, they had a pool on new employees the first day. Over-under on me barfing was forty-seven minutes.

By the time I’d won the pool for Damien, Chef Mitra, and the maître d’, six more gulmotids had shown up. I registered that it was a little more humid and warmer in the place, even with the front windows open, but I was starting to get the hang of things. The maître d’ sat that second party and went running off suddenly behind the counter. I heard her booting into an empty cricket bucket, which she picked up by mistake, and apparently that set off Mitra and very nearly Damien too.

“Your nose is broke, Groober,” he said to me, shaking his head. “You need to get that checked out!”

I didn’t smell a thing.

It went on like that for the rest of the night. Those gulmotids were pretty nasty creatures as far as table manners went. They slopped their tongues all over the place, spat on the floor, and hocked out lumps and chunks of bugs. They were gross, but for the money I was making—even as the low man—I couldn’t believe there were help wanted signs up all over the waterfront.

When sunup finally rolled around, I could see why they’d considered cleaning up that front part of the house the worst job. It took a full hour and three passes with the mop to finally get that floor back to human standards.

Damien was flabbergasted I’d done so well. When everyone had their stations cleaned, he called me out back to the alleyway with the rest of the staff. We threw our robes in a barrel and sealed it for the cleaners; gargled mouthwash and brushed our teeth; scrubbed our faces down with a deep pore cleanser that tingled; and vaped a spearmint and hydrogen peroxide formula to clear the gulmotid stank out of our nasal passages. At least that’s what Damien said it was for. I got a little lightheaded after.

“You didn’t smell those nasty goblins at all, did you, Groober?” Damien asked me.

I shook my head.

“You lucky bastard,” Mitra said.

“They smell like the inside of a donkey’s asshole,” Damien said. “If the money wasn’t good, you couldn’t find a person on Earth to serve those monsters.”

“How come nobody talks about this?” I said. “I mean, I heard they come down to the restaurants, but everyone talks about it like it’s good for business, for tourism.”

“They’re just worried about upsetting them,” Damien said. “There’s no way we could stop them, and rumor has it there’s worse than them on the way, other aliens that like Earth bugs too. Can you imagine when they get here?”

I couldn’t. It was a weird enough night with just the gulmotids.

“So, you coming back again tonight, Groober?” Damien asked.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “How else am I going to see Jackie Earmuffs again?”

Damien looked shocked. “Jackie the cricket girl? You like her, Groober?”

“Why? Does she have a boyfriend?”

“God, no!” Damien said. “That girl smells like cricket farts.”

Mitra, the maître d’, Damien, and the other two servers nearly fell over laughing.

“Your nose must be broke, Groober,” Mitra said. “She’s all right, I guess, but it takes a special guy to fall for a girl working the bug wagon.”

Everyone was laughing. I just shrugged it off. I didn’t think she smelled funny at all. Plus, you can’t help who you like. Jackie Earmuffs seemed nice.

So that was how my first night went.

Mr. Domingo was thrilled to see me back the following afternoon. He couldn’t believe his luck.

Jackie didn’t give me an answer when I asked her out that night. “If you’re still here in a week, I’ll be impressed, Groober. Maybe then I’ll let you know.”

So I made it a week, and she said yes. I was starting to get in the flow of things. Damien and Mitra and I started hanging out together too.

“We bug slingers need to stick together,” Mitra told me. “Most regular folks don’t understand our kind.”

I couldn’t believe how much money I was making as a busser. When I showed my dad my balance, he was like, “Groob, I didn’t make that kinda money till I was twice your age. What are you doing again?”

“Bussing tables for aliens,” I said.

“I heard they smell like a rat’s ass,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know, pap,” I told him.

I did think the fact I couldn’t smell them was curious enough that I made a doctor’s appointment to get my nose checked out. Everyone kept telling me it was busted. But the earliest date I could get was a few months out.

Those early days at Top Sushi were some of the best days I could remember. Sure, the job was a little gross, but I didn’t mind it. I had plenty of money, a nice apartment, and a good group of friends—my fellow bug slingers. And after a few weeks together, on busy nights when Jackie had to make multiple trips back and forth to the farm, sometimes she stayed with me come sunup. I was loving life.

The only problem was that my friends didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves nearly as much as I was. Damien hated the job. Mitra, even though he hid out in the back and didn’t need to interact with the gulmotids, he was ashamed of what he did for a living and was more or less isolated from his family.

I found Mr. Domingo in a terrible mood one evening on the changeover. He was outside flipping the signs to Top Sushi. He looked sad every time he did.

“How are you doing, Groober?” he asked me.

“I’m doing fine, Mr. D. How about yourself?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on with this. Almost seven years now.”

“The place is doing great, though,” I said. “You should be happy.”

“I should be proud,” he said, letting a streak of genuine emotion escape. “A man should be proud of what he does, Groober. The thing you don’t get about this industry, because you’re too young to know it yet, is that a chef is like an artist. Just like a musician takes pride in making great music, we take pride in making great meals. Then to see my place turned into a slop house for a pack of bug-eating, unappreciative monsters? But what am I going to do? I own the building. Who’s going to buy? Especially with more on the way.”

“More aliens?”

“That’s the rumors.”

“Any idea what they’re like?”

“I doubt they’ll be any better. I just wonder, how much more can the city take before people don’t come back during the day anymore. What if they’re daylight aliens? Then I’m cooking for no one. At least now, during the sunlight, I can open up the windows, let the air blow through and watch couples on dates enjoy the food and the atmosphere. Earth is for people, Groober,” he said, echoing the slogan of the fringe protest movement.

That night I had a real hard time keeping focused. If Damien hadn’t been watching my back, I’d have walked right into a nutshot from a gulmotid tongue when a stray dragonfly flew in from the beach.

I couldn’t help but notice the sadness on the faces of my friends as we washed off in the back alley when the shift was over. Sure there were the usual jokes and smiles, but Mitra was unusually glum, and Damien? He just looked tired. Worn down.

I had to get up early that afternoon and head to the doctor finally. There was an ENT specialist who’d had an opening in his schedule and heard all about my case. He was anxious to figure out why I couldn’t smell the gulmotids.

Doc Ryerson looked me over and said I looked young and healthy. Then he looked up my nose. He didn’t say anything and then held up a couple of vials of liquid under my sniffer.

“Isolated congenital anosmia,” he said.

“What’s that, doc?”

“Happens from time to time, Groober. Do you remember smelling anything ever?”

I shrugged. “I guess not. I just usually pretended I did to fit in.”

“Does it bother you, son?”

I shrugged again.

“I could hook you up with some of my colleagues at UCF who’d love to see if they could fix that for you. The question is whether you’d want it.”

“I never really thought about it, doc. Everyone at work just kept saying my nose must be broke, but it doesn’t seem broke for what I do.”

“Feed aliens, you said?”

“Yes, sir. Clean up after them, more like. Everyone says they smell like—well everyone has a different description—gates of hell, rotten eggs, a body farm, a donkey’s asshole. To me it’s just a little stuffy in there.”

“I’m a nose guy, Groober, so I think it’s pretty strange to go through life without smelling.”

“I don’t know any different, but I got some friends might want to go the other way. Anything you can do for them to make it so they don’t smell those aliens, doc? They’re pretty miserable.”

“Not at present,” Doc Ryerson said.

But he had a look on his face like he might say something more.

“I’m just glad there’s not something seriously wrong with me, doc.”

“Just make sure to test your smoke alarms regularly, Groober. Maybe consider a dog.”

There was something about that last comment Doc Ryerson said that got me thinking. I had a problem I wasn’t even aware of, and he already had two very good solutions for that problem without even thinking about it. If my problem were that easy to solve, there had to be a solution to Mr. Domingo’s and Damien’s and Mitra’s. I mean, it was basically the same problem for the entire city. Somebody had to get rid of the aliens.

I talked with Jackie Earmuffs that night when she came by Top Sushi for her regular delivery. She shut the truck doors, took off her earmuffs, and asked me about my snooter. I told her it was born busted but that I didn’t mind.

“That’s good, I suppose,” she said. “At least you know what it is now.”

“Congenital anosmia was what Doc Ryerson called it—absence of stank, in the layman’s terms. I been thinking about these aliens instead, Jackie,” I told her. “Everyone else around here seems to be depressed, and no one else is coming down to the city at night except for us workers. Mr. Domingo says there’s more species on the way too, maybe even daylight aliens.”

“Damn,” Jackie said. “I don’t know what we’d do without the daylight off at the farm. I’m not sure we could even grow that many crickets to keep up.”

Jackie didn’t know what to do about it either, but when I asked her, she said she’d look into who managed the laws about aliens and bringing in bugs. Her family had a lot of knowledge about that kind of stuff, because they had to be a licensed vendor.

A few weeks later, Jackie’s mother got us an appointment with the deputy city manager, Morgan Frost, who only took the meeting on account of Jackie’s family name being such an important part of the city’s nighttime economy.

At first, Ms. Frost didn’t like what I had to say—that I wanted to find a way to get rid of the gulmotids.

“That’s speciesist,” she told us.

“Well, we are humans after all,” I told her. “And no one knows these gulmotids near as good as us. No humans are even willing to come downtown anymore after sundown.”

“You should learn to be more tolerant, Groober,” she said. “Gulmotids are here to stay.”

“Oh, I tolerate them just fine,” I said, “on account of my congenital anosmia.”

“Your what?”

“In layman’s terms that’s a full-on lack of stank in the nose membranes, ma’am. A lucky affliction for one in my occupation. But most people who work at night in Naples aren’t so lucky. And as the saying goes, Earth is for people, or at least it should be anyway.”

“Well, it can’t change,” she said. “On account of the treaty and the contracts. And those are federal. You’d have to change federal law.”

She pointed out the particular statutes and explained how all the policy flowed from that. There was literally nothing any establishment could do but serve the gulmotids where and when they wanted to be served. Places like Mr. Domingo’s just had to hope they either didn’t show up at all or didn’t take a liking to the place when they did.

Jackie and I talked about that meeting with everyone—Chef Mitra, Mr. Domingo, Damien, even with Fletcher, the owner of Mega Sushi down the block. It was Jackie’s mom who had the jackpot idea. By law, we couldn’t deter them, but what if we could find a way to draw them someplace else? Make up some kind of alien honeypot so tasty no gulmotid would ever think of coming back to Naples again. Alien central. Some kind of gulmotid Shangri-la. It was such a rich idea, I thought, it warranted a full-on convocation of all the restaurant owners on the waterfront.

Sure enough, Jackie put it best to them. Basically, what she had in mind was the same thing as Vegas, just the alien kind. There was so much empty land out in the desert where nobody ever went, those gulmotids could land their ships by the thousand and never bother the air traffic controllers one bit. All we needed was a little money to get things started and a purpose to lure the gulmotids out there.

“The money won’t be a problem,” Mr. Domingo said. “If you kids figure out a way to get these aliens out of our city, legally, and keep them happy and fed out there in the middle of the desert? Hell, I’ll give you each a share in the restaurant just for making this city whole again.”

“Battle!” Ollie Mercator, one of the servers at Line Sushi, said. “Battle!”

“What battle?” Jackie said.

“We stage a tournament. Tell the gulmotids it’s an old tradition we’re bringing back in their honor. Gladiator bug fights. Make a spectacle of it. Not only can they eat their fill every night, but we can stage a whole tournament of bug fights and let them bet on the winners and losers. They can even auction off the rights to eat the winner. We’ll make as much money off the tournament as the bugs!”

There were about fifty people in that room, and the second the smart ones like Mr. Domingo started talking finances and logistics, it was clear we wouldn’t even need to go begging for financing. Trucks, tents, and a big open space in the desert was all we needed. There was a lot of planning to do, but it was an idea—more than an idea—a plan.

For the first couple weeks, we met regularly, trying to figure out a way we could keep this little secret to ourselves here in Naples. But the more complicated it got, the more we realized we were going to need help from the restaurants in Dallas, in Miami, in New Orleans, in Biloxi.

There were so many complications—moisture condensation systems, solar generation stations, portable biowaste recycling plants, growth portals, regular food convoys for humans. It was a good thing I wasn’t in charge.

My dad would come by every now and again and ask me what I was up to. He was worried I was getting into some bad scene, living nocturnally. I tried to explain, telling him about Jackie and the cricket farm, moving everything out to the desert. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

“We’re investing in a motor home,” I told him. “Going to go live in the desert for a few months and raise crickets to feed to aliens.”

“Well, Groob, it isn’t the path I’d have chosen for you, son,” dad said. “But it’s your path. And I guess if you like this Jackie girl? As long as you’re not hurting anyone.”

“Strange as it may sound, pap, I think we’re really going to help a lot of people.”

He thought that was good.

The final piece once we had everything planned, was to convince the gulmotids that there was something amazing about to happen out there in that desert. We hired a production team to piece together an entire season-long series of computer-generated Mega Bug Battles. It had tournament fights complete with announcers and commentary, breeder interviews, amazing graphics and statistics—all made up, of course. Hell, Jackie and I started watching the first episode after work one morning and we watched through the whole thing just to see if a dozen bulldog ants could take down a pair of banana spiders. It was a ripping battle.

When it was over, I rolled over and looked at Jackie to gauge her reaction, thinking that whoever made that series was some kind of genius.

“I’m not going to lie, Groober,” she said. “That was kinda hot.”

“Damn, Jackie Earmuffs,” I said. “You are some kind of freak.”

That night, me, Damien, and Mitra had it all planned. Damien was going to start flipping casually through the sports channels and then Mitra would call him to the back for something. Damien pulled it off like a pro. I was mopping up a bucket of seltzer when he walked out of the front house to the kitchen, yelling at the chef. There were fifteen gulmotids crammed in to Top Sushi’s front room and three at the counter. They were blurping and bumbling through their bugs like usual, speaking in that deep guttural blurging language of theirs, and the second that series came on, the place went from boisterous to dead silent in a single heartbeat.

“Sushi,” one of the biggest aliens said, looking at me while pointing to the screen. “Sushi!”

We had rehearsed it. I knew my line.

“Battle!” I said. “Battle!”

“Sushi!” the big boy said.

“Yes, battle! Big battle!”

We left the TV on with the series cycling through all night. The gulmotids were transfixed, watching the fights, tracking the wagers, sometimes jumping out of their seats when the fight went the right or wrong way, making bets amongst themselves. By the time the sky was starting to get gray, instead of getting up like normal, they looked off at the horizon and then back at the screen, tracking how much time they had left to watch before the sun came up. Damien finally had to shut the TV off for fear they’d get caught out in the light, which caused a tremendous uproar.

“Barrooww!” the big boy said as he was getting up to leave.

“Battle!” I shouted back. “Are you boys going? Because we are. We’ve got a champion horned beetle that’s going to bring us home a championship!”

“Sushi!” big boy said as he was walking out.

“Next Tuesday,” Damien said. “We’re all going to be there. Top Sushi!”

We had the producer of the series pan down to the desert coordinates like it was a live satellite feed before every fight. It was a regular feature of the broadcast. Not subtle, but it looked real. The gulmotids knew exactly where to go for the bug fights.

After we’d cleaned the place up and the sun was out, we all went out back to the alleyway per usual. Domenico Domingo was waiting for us out back. He didn’t sleep at all that night.

“How’d it go, everyone?” he asked.

“Battle!” I shouted, and everybody burst out laughing.

“I think they bit,” Damien said.

When Mr. Domingo heard that, he looked like he was ready to cry.

The final piece was to close the place down Friday night with a note on the door with coordinates for the tournament and bold letters that read: GONE TO MEGA BUG BATTLE! TOP SUSHI AVAILABLE THERE!

Then we rode clear across the country in a long convoy. I rode in the motor home, Jackie Earmuffs the bug wagon, and the rest of the Masterson clan each shepherded a truck full of Old Man Masterson’s bug gear. I had the most bizarre moment of clarity in Oklahoma at one point, wondering, what the hell, Groober? How is this your life? There was an ancient radio system and I tried to explain it to Jackie.

“Battle, Groober! Battle!” was all she said back over the scratchy radio. Jackie Earmuffs was a trip.

We got out there Sunday night with two days to put the whole thing together. Here I was, a dumb kid with no idea about nothing and hardly a year’s experience bug slinging, and I thought there was no way this thing was going to work. But the company the restaurants had hired to put up the grandstand arrived with damn near ten thousand robots and erected a stadium almost overnight. Then they wired the place, laid out about ten square miles of solar panels and batteries out into the desert, and piled back into their trailer, disappearing back into the wavering heat at the desert horizon like they might have been a mirage themselves. Once that stadium was built, it was real. Booths went up, tents went up, Jackie and the Mastersons started raising bugs out under a giant tent in the desert. It was a good thing those Mastersons had enough earmuffs to go around, because there must have been a thousand crews like theirs that came from all over the country. Crickets barking everywhere.

On Tuesday, damn near ten thousand people were out there, ready, waiting, all looking at each other wondering whether it was actually going to happen. As the sun was starting to go down, me and Jackie were sitting in our lawn chairs by the Top Sushi stand watching the sky, when a drone lowered some cargo right to my chair. There was a video that triggered on my phone to coincide. I had no idea what the hell it could be. When I picked up the phone, I was shocked to see Doc Ryerson’s face.

“Mr. Domingo told me where to find you, Groober,” he said. “This won’t be of any use to you. But I talked to some of my colleagues at UCF, and they rigged up these prototypes for your friends. Let us know how they work.”

He said a bunch more medical mumbo jumbo about the nerves in the nose and magnetic stimulation. High-tech nose-clips—that’s what it looked like to me, but Jackie and Damien said they worked great.

“This is what it’s like for you, Groober?” Damien said.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

The next thing to drop out of the sky were the gulmotids. They were so excited the ground shook as they came storming into the grandstand.

“Barrooww!” they shouted, one after another, buying crickets on their way in by the bucketful. We must have poured a swimming pool’s worth of seltzer that night. Damien said he didn’t smell a thing anymore. He was ecstatic. Mitra didn’t say nothing about the odor, but I could tell he wasn’t even thinking about it. He just kept smiling, saying, “Damn, Groober, we’re gonna be rich!” whenever I picked up an order.

Between the bugs we sold, the bets we booked, and the ticket money we took from the tournament, we came about halfway to completely recouping our investment money in one night.

By the time morning finally rolled around Damien and Mitra called up Domenico in Naples. He hadn’t seen an alien visitor for three days. This time, Domenico did cry. If it kept up, he said he was going to open the restaurant at night again.

Night one of Mega Bug Battles was in the books. An unqualified success. Before we knew it, weeks and then months had passed.

Me and Jackie stayed out there for about six months straight before taking any time off. By then, the Mastersons were training new people to work their gear out in the desert. Domenico, too, was investing in a permanent structure along the Battle Row for Top Sushi, and he sent four new staff members to give me, Mitra, and Damien a break for the holidays. Life was going good.

When we got back to Naples, Jackie and I decided to go down to Domenico’s place for dinner the week of Christmas just to see what the city was like at night without the aliens. I was watching her as she looked around, smiling.

“What’s it smell like?” I asked her.

“An ocean breeze,” she said.

“Is that pretty good?”

“Yeah, Groober. It’s pretty good.”

There were people out on dates, smiling and holding hands. Kids partying and shouting, having fun. People walking back and forth between the beach and the bars. The temperature was perfect. It felt like a magical place, like how Domenico and my dad used to talk about the city before.

The restaurant was totally different. Mr. Domingo had renovated the inside completely. It looked great. Cozy, classy, with great folding windows that he opened all the way up on nights like that. We didn’t tell him we were coming, but we hadn’t even made it in the door before he came running out from the kitchen.

“Groober! Jackie! Come, sit!”

He gave us the best table in the place and told us not to worry about a thing. That he’d make us the best paella we’d ever had. I’d never had it before, so I was certain he was right on that count. Me and Jackie were still pretty excited, though. We’d never been on a date like that in a nice restaurant—Domenico’s now, Top Sushi never again. No bugs, no earmuffs. All those aliens were having a grand old time out in the desert.

There wasn’t much to say. The two of us sat there enjoying the moment, enjoying each other’s company like all those people we’d seen on the way in. But because we were quiet, we started hearing everybody else talking. Jackie was watching the table behind me as they ordered, grinning. I could hear why. They were on a date too.

“I can’t believe I got matched with a carnivore,” the girl said. “I thought the app would have blocked you out!”

That boy had ordered a Texas strip steak, cooked rare.

“What are you, some sort of vegetarian?” he said.

“Vegan,” the girl spat back. “I can’t believe this.”

Jackie Earmuffs was grinning from ear to ear, “Ha! Drama!” she whispered to me, laughing.

The girl was getting ready to storm off. I turned around.

“Before you go,” I asked her. “I’m just curious. You like eating vegetables, right?”

She looked at me funny, shrugged, and said yes.

“And you like eating steaks?” I said to the young man.

“Hell, yes,” he said.

“How do both y’all feel about eating bugs? Like them aliens do?”

“Disgusting,” the boy said.

“Disgusting and immoral,” the girl said.

“See,” I said, looking over at them both. “Common ground.”

It  didn’t work. She shook her head at me and walked off still.

“Thanks for trying,” the young man said after she was gone.

“We gotta look out for one another,” I said. “Earth is for people, so they say.”

“Earth is for people,” he said back.

“And Naples is for lovers,” Domenico said approaching the table with a pile of plates in each arm.

He was smiling from ear to ear.

Paella, it turned out, was a particularly tasty kind of rice served up hot for free at Domenico’s to anyone who helped turn sushi back into what it used to be—raw fish, which it also turns out, some people find disgusting. I tried it, though, at a Japanese place later that week. It’s delicious. Jackie had some and said she’d rather eat bugs. She was lying, though. I can always tell when Jackie Earmuffs is lying. She gets all wrinkled up around the nose. Plus, bugs are for lizards and aliens, not people. Jackie knows that. Eating bugs is gross.