Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“You almost made Mamma angry,” she says.

“Whose mamma? Or should I say: who is Mamma?”

“Mamma Earth. She’s helping drive away the negative detritus and the painful memories.”

I look down at the mound of dirt. “You’re allowed to stick candles in Mamma, but I’m not allowed to lovingly brush her with the bottom of my high-tops?”

She pulls herself to her feet. She smiles bemusedly, clearly dealing with a less-evolved creature. Then her full lips turn in, a slight frown. Slight. Sam can command a thousand complex emotions but for the sake of being straightforward with the universe, she tries to reduce them to three: mild displeasure, peacefulness, mild joy. She blinks.

“Whoa.” She studies me. “Yellow with bits of orange.”

To anyone who hasn’t met Sam, this makes no sense. But I’ve spent years having her read my aura, or Karmic glow, or whatever it is.

“Serious unresolved tension.” She states the not-so-mysterious. She stands up, walks over to me, flips on the light by the door. “And green. Gross.”

“What’s green? My aura?”

“The throw-up stain on your shoulder.”

“Isaac. Serious unresolved dinner.”

She shakes her head, looks at me quizzically. “It’s nearly ten.” Maybe meaning: Why are you here and not at home?

I shrug. Half smile. She knows I can take refuge here since the breakup.

She leans in and kisses my cheek, tenderly, like a mom or big sister, which she is, in a way. She pulls back and holds my gaze, betraying sympathy in the wrinkles around her soft brown eyes. She’s got a round face that I sometimes think of as a distant, wondrous planet.

Samantha Leary and her husband, Dennis, ten years my senior, are great friends, limitless sounding boards, and my veritable family, despite being two of the kookiest people in a city filled with their like-minded, soulful ilk. Sam is a masseuse, spiritual healer, and uncannily accurate reader of moods who has freed herself of all conventional wisdom in a search to feel peaceful and help others do the same. Recently, she spent two weeks taking natural hallucinogens in marathon sessions in a rain forest in Chile and claiming to get wisdom by talking to ancient plants. She is known to those of us who love her as “the Witch.”

Dennis goes by “Bullseye,” thanks to the time he hit a bar waitress with a dart, ostensibly by accident. He’s the Witch’s polar opposite, a clinical, coldly logical thinker, and borderline autistic in his focus on math and all things computers. He says little, preferring to spend his time perched on a stool sipping an Anchor Steam at the Pastime Bar, which has long been our hangout. For the last six months, the Witch and I have spent more time at our joint office, which we decided to get when I started making money from journalism and she said she decided to treat her healing efforts more like a business.

She’s got a way to go. Her business card is blank. She says people will find her when they need her.

It makes me wonder if she has different motives. She’s been keeping a close eye on me. She says I’m working too much, am more likely than ever to see conspiracies and look for great stories, and then pursue them to obsessive end.

She avoids putting too fine a point on it but I know what she thinks: when things ended with Polly, the vivacious entrepreneur who birthed Isaac, I moved ever closer to the fine line between journalism and madness.

The Witch puts her hands on my chest and closes her eyes. Her palms are not just warm, but hot. She’d say that’s because we’re exchanging energy. Maybe. A different explanation for the heat, the clinical medical explanation, is that the hands act as veritable temperature controls for the body, the heavy blood flow to and from the palms allowing for feelings of hot and cold disproportionate to the rest of the body.

Samantha inhales deeply. I know she’s trying to shake something loose inside me, but I’m resistant, partly a skeptic, mostly a still racing mind. I look around our ratty one-room office, 120 square feet of yin and yang. On the right, my desk, a study in scrap heap: strewn papers and magazines, my laptop asleep in the midst; my only decoration a grainy picture of an embryo-Isaac at just a few seconds old, the first time I saw him-taped to the wall above my faux-wood pop-together desk of Scandinavian design.

To my left, Samantha’s oak desk, with a single sheet of paper aligned in the middle. No computer. Her chair is a wooden stool, which she says forces her to focus on her posture, allowing energy to flow more easily in and out of her body.

Samantha’s hair smells clean but flat, fragrance-free, and she’s got a ton of it. I’ve never seen anything grow so quickly: thick, wild and relentless, a veritable bird’s nest. One month, she shaves it to the scalp, the next it’s a whirlwind of brown. I’ve wondered if she’s got a variation of hirsutism, abnormal hair growth, all of it serendipitously placed on top of her head.

“Faith.” The word pops out of my mouth.

“That’s right. Have faith.”

“No.” I step back.

“Faith. The brunette from the subway.”

For just an instant, the Witch grits her teeth, betraying frustration at the failed trance. But maybe it had its impact after all, and shaken loose a valuable revelation.

“I’m being played.”

Iclose my eyes and picture the subway station. When I’d first entered the train station, I’d seen Faith, the brunette do-gooder, give money to a beggar.

I look into Samantha’s wise eyes. “The beggar was the same man who knocked me over.”

“What are you talking about, Nathaniel?”

“Maybe the beggar wasn’t a beggar at all,” I venture. “Maybe Faith wasn’t giving him money, but just talking to him. Were they coordinating something?”

Samantha shakes her head. She’s heard me do this before, begin stories in the middle, or the end.

“Let me get unloaded and I’ll explain.”

I take the short walk to my desk, dodging candles. I remove my backpack, noticing with a slight grimace the likely mortal tear to the black fabric. I’ve taken pride in its longevity, maybe like a construction worker gets worn into boots. I put the bag down. I look at the picture of Isaac, pink and crinkly. What a gift.

I gesture for Sam to join me on the blue futon that lies near a far wall and that she uses to give massages when I’m not around and to meditate even when I am. I tell her what happened at the train station, leaving out the part about the blow to the head. I imagine that Sam, hostile as she generally is to Western medicine, would pile me immediately into the hair on top of her head and fly me to the emergency room.

When I finish, she says: “May I risk upsetting you?”

“How so?”

“I’m going to tell you what the plants told me.”

I gather she’s referring to her Chilean visit and communing with the ancient vegetation. “The plants told you about what happened at the train station, or what was going to happen?”

“They told me that obsessing about mystery is a neurosis, a kind of pathology. Worrying about the unknown or anticipating an outcome is the biggest test to our true happiness.”

“Getting run over by a train would be a true test of my happiness?”

“You weren’t run over.”

“So you’re saying let it go?”

“Of course not. Call this Faith, or ask some questions about that poor woman who got hit by a car. But don’t spin yourself into conspiracy theories. That’s your way of-”

I finish her thought. “Uncovering vast international conspiracies.” I smile.

“Of not dealing with your personal life. I should go.” She stands. She’s made her point. “Go home. Skip the late-night conspiracy spinning.”