A Cloud Is a Place That Happens

It was this. One September day. Sky clear save one cloud. 

He lay on the living room carpet and watched the cloud. He knew a cloud was a thing and a place. A place where a thing happened. A clouding. He knew the science. Water vapor condensing, a cloud forming. The cloud being the place where it formed.

He bored himself. He was a place where nothing happened.

He lay on the carpet. Standard industrial wall-to-wall. Short pile and bland hue. The room it decorated? The living room of a standard American apartment in a three-story balloon frame building pitched up and assembled, topped off and marketed, rented at the going rate to such as he and his wife, young urban strivers. The building one of a nest of a dozen essentially identical, arranged in a simple complex. 

Out the sliding glass balcony door that opened one wall of this living room he saw, from his place on the carpet, the roof of the boxy building next door, pitched and slated, and above that, the sky. No sky like this sky. A deep, clear, infinite blue, this sky of the desert at altitude. 

In this sky this September day, one cloud. He would watch this cloud.

Colt 45 came, or could come, in glass bottles of forty liquid ounces. Slightly more than a quart. Why more than a quart? He never knew and he never cared enough to find out. The contents a sparkling amber malt liquor. This day of the carpet and cloud the only day he ever drank it. The reason would be, as far as he could remember, that he never again got around to it.

Three bottles of Colt 45 from the convenience store next door to the apartment complex. Very convenient. His wife gone for the day to her office job. More convenient still. She was the worker. He was, on this and other days, the man on the carpet. Not called. Marooned, more like it. Clouding in place.

A cloud was a place that happened. A living room was a place where—what? Living happened? 

This was living? 

He watched the cloud. It never moved from its place in the sky. It never remained the same. Constantly growing and diminishing, never still yet going nowhere.

Three bottles of Colt 45. One hundred and twenty fluid ounces. Six and three quarters of that alcohol. A half-pint of vodka would have had much the same effect, though with less pissing.

There was no sofa. No couch, no settee, no divan, no chair. No chair? He no longer remembered. There must have been chairs. Wasn’t there a table, a dining table? In the little space between the kitchen and the living room? If there was a table, there would have been chairs. Had to have been chairs.

He couldn’t remember.

He remembered there was no sofa, no couch, no loveseat, nothing like that. If there had been, he’d have been lying on that instead of on the carpeted floor.

Watching the cloud.

There must have been a chair. At least one. Two? They ate meals, he and his wife. Tacos from the fast food place once a week when they were on sale. Pot pies from the supermarket across the street. The bargain brand was very cheap. TV dinners probably, though he no longer remembered.

TV trays they had. A wedding gift, a set of four.

And a television. Of course they had a television. Everyone did.

He had gone looking for something, and he had found it. The lure of an easy life and he was hooked.

He was supposed to be writing the great historical survey of the years approaching the first Christian millennium. His wife would ask him, How’s it going? He would tell her, Slow. It goes slow.

She knew he was lying. She never asked to see his work. She’d seen the receipts. Knew where the money was going, frittered away––same as the time.

It had been a small cloud when he first noticed. He resolved to watch its being and progression until it dissipated. 

He can’t remember the resolution of this project. He remembers the cloud, he remembers it was the day he drank the three large bottles of Colt 45, he remembers that for some time on that day, he could not get up off the carpet.

She played solitaire while sitting at one of the TV trays. Every evening after she got home from work, after they ate their tacos or pot pies or processed items from colorful boxes, she arrayed her deck of cards on the tray before her.

He never asked her to play a hand of anything.

Colt 45 was also the name for a pistol. He didn’t have a pistol. He had fired a Colt 45 once. Didn’t much care for it. Flopped around in his hand from the recoil. You’d want to be real close to something before you shot it with a pistol like that. Make sure you could hit it. You’d want to put the barrel right up against it. Put it into its mouth. You’d hit your target then.

He had no pistol.

There is no pistol here. It is not over the mantel and it will not be fired.

There is no rifle.

No shotgun, barrel single or double.

No sword to fall on.

No thin blade to slice the wrists.

No vial full of medication for an overdose.

No baggie full of fine white powder for same.

No way out.

Have to go around or go through.

He and his wife had just wed. This was their first home, this apartment with its dearth of furnishings, its carpet, its sliding glass door through which he could watch the sky.

His wife sat at her TV tray and played solitaire.

There is no pistol to fire, but there is a television to watch. He remembers they watched the game, whatever the game was. Whatever the season in its season. Baseball, football, basketball. Drink beer and watch the game. 

She loved the game. He loved her, or thought he did.

The resolution of the project to craft and draft the great historical survey? Abandoned. There was never much more to it than there was to that cloud. Even less. The cloud was a place where something was happening. The project was a place where nothing happened.

He remembers now. He watched the cloud. Small, white, in one place in the huge blue sky, cloud slightly striated as it formed the place where it came into and passed out of itself, its being, its function—though function implies intent. Was there intent? In this cloud’s existence? He knew he could not say. He couldn’t discern any intent behind this cloud’s existence any more than he could determine any intent behind his own. He just was. The cloud just was.

He remembers. He watched that cloud, that spot of condensation in the sky, through its convolutions, through its growth and diminishment, until it was gone. How much time went by? He thinks it must have been hours. He’s likely right.

They lived—if that was living, and it was—in that apartment. She went to work. He didn’t. She came home from work. They ate dinner. If there was a game on, they watched the game. If there wasn’t, she played solitaire.

In the place where nothing happened, everything happened, forming and dissipating, until it was gone.