Unless they'd climbed to the top of an Andean or Himalayan mountain, the ancients never saw anything like it -- a huge, pale, circular moon hanging motionless over an infinite panorama of clouds.

The moon burning feebly through the waning hours of the day. A white cumulus patchwork woven over the farms and water and skeletal roads.

And on the plane -- everyone asleep or hunched over electronics. Not noticing the whorls and eddies and moraines. Not noticing the ridges and penninsulas. Not noticing the phantom wisps of cirrus clouds peeling out over the vaporous mass, racing by the window in monochromatic stripes of speed and insubstantial elegance. Clouds over a rolling landscape of clouds. The chariots of angels.

We are crossing a continent faster than an arrow shot from a recurving bow, and because we are used to it, no one on the plane gives a damn.

Myself included. My heart is not beating quickly, and I haven't sweat a drop. I glance outside my window only sporadically, prompted by a stunted sense of guilt. An irritating voice within me suggests that such an amazing scene cannot be ignored, even if I've seen it three dozen times this year.

My laptop computer, slowing losing its charge as I fondle its applications on the tray table in front of me, contains the seeds of a divorce.

Amend that -- faded love was the fertilizer enriching the soil, the infidelity was the crops, the digital photos are the seeds, and I am a sharecropper.

Strike that -- a well-compensated tenant farmer. Brought in... for the harvest only. A harvest of pain.

Maybe the plant is more of an acorn squash or pumpkin, and the seeds need to be extracted by scooping. Which would make my digital camera... a knife? Or maybe more of one of those orange safety scoops that children use on Halloween to get all the pulp out without severing a finger?

Those things take the fun out of Halloween.

And I guess you don't usually hire other people to carve your pumpkins. Unless you're really wealthy. But that's just a guess. Everything I know about wealth I learned from P.G. Wodehouse, and he was out of date just about as soon as he started writing his first book.

The moon has become a beacon of white by now. The sun has faded, and the clouds have gone from an atlas to a sleepy floor of fog.

This guy's infidelity was amazing. He slept with his own second cousin at a family reunion, which is in extremely poor taste, if not technically illegal.

I have a photo of him getting a BJ in his car. I just strolled over, leaned toward the couple, and snapped. It was still daylight out, after the family's big annual game of gin rummy. The cousin's small conical breasts had been greedily slid out of their sweater and bra, entirely visible but still constrained by the fabric, her gold crucifix necklace swaying with the slow, deliberate motions of her neck.

Go get 'em, Jesus!

The moon is higher now, impossibly high -- much higher than the plane, occupying a strata of the sky that makes the cirrus clouds look like chumps.

I am flying back to La Guardia International Airport in order to destroy a marriage. I stand to make $2,500. This is a lot of money for me. I am used to writing stories for newspapers, 500 or 1000 words at a time, lucky to score $200, $300, enough money to go grocery shopping, or pay my cellphone bill, or go out for drinks with my more successful friends who were smart enough to choose law, or advertising, or PR as their professions.

Before this job, I was a reporter. I guess that I am still a reporter, in that I have obtained information and am now going to present it in a clear format, and be rewarded with a check. But the information is pornography, and the audience is very specialized. It's a new line of work.

I am listening to angry music as I fly over Ohio. It has a roaring trumpet line, the rhythmic scratch of vinyl, and the soulful wailing of divas. It's electronic. This made me young at one point, but is now reminding me that the things I grew up with are now getting pushed back -- no longer two steps behind, I am three steps behind, fading, irrelevant.

I am killing the marriage of my friend David. I probably should not be doing this. I should be doing this to strangers, or maybe to no one at all. David won his marriage with Melanie fair and square. He was loud, and reckless, and funny, and fearless, and I was quiet and cautious and unable to say the right thing at the right time. I don't begrudge him his sprawling Italian-style wedding reception, or the comfortable, clean apartment that he and Melanie rarely inhabit, what with their international travel.

I've housesat for them before. I've slept in their bed, which is a four-poster with a deep blue comforter and cloudlike down-stuffed pillows.

I've flipped through their photo albums, remembering the night they met, the way Melanie talked about him, the implicit knocks at me -- he was so ambitious! So exciting! So focused, so passionate. Blah, blah, blah, yes, I knew all this -- David and I had grown up together in Wisconsin.

We'd gone to school together. I'd always anchored him, counseled him against rash action, watched him commit rash action, and watched the world reward him time and time again.

Maybe this detective thing is what I want to do now. I feel like I am carrying a gun with me, and that I am going to shoot bullets of pure karma at something organic and rotten. I feel like an assassin. I feel fantastic. It is with great difficulty that I resist looking at the photos right now.

David and Sharon, brushing fingertips as they leave the rented house. David guiding Sharon to the white Saab, his hand on her back. The two of them driving for 50 feet, and stopping in an oak grove. The first kiss.

The plane is touching down now. I have an appointment at an airport hotel. And then I'll fly away again. Maybe the stars will be out by then.