I.

The alarm clock rang at six-thirty. Bill turned it off. He sat up in bed. He put his feet on the floor. The floor was cold. He walked to the kitchen. He made coffee. He drank coffee standing at the window, looking out at the parking lot of the apartment complex where he had lived for eleven years.

The parking lot was cracked. There were weeds growing through the cracks. There was a trash can that overflowed every Tuesday. There was a light that flickered and nobody fixed it.

Bill drank his coffee. He thought about nothing. He went to work.

He worked at a warehouse on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio. He had worked there for nineteen years. He packed boxes. He labeled boxes. He moved boxes from one place to another place. The boxes contained things he didn't care about—the products of companies he didn't know the names of—for customers he would never meet.

His boss was a man named Larry. Larry was fifty. Larry had back pain. Larry drank beer on Friday nights and watched football on Sunday mornings and complained about his wife and his kids and the economy and the weather. Bill complained too. They complained together, the way men do when complaining is the only form of communication they have left.

"It's the weather," Larry said on a Wednesday in November. "Always the weather. Cold rain. That's all we get."

"It's always the weather," Bill said.

"Yeah," Larry said. "It is."

They packed boxes in silence.

II.

Bill came home at five-thirty. He ate dinner. His wife, Carol, had made meatloaf. It was good. He liked it. He didn't say he liked it. Carol knew he liked it. She made it every Wednesday. She didn't need him to tell her.

After dinner, he washed the dishes. Carol dried. They worked in silence. It was a comfortable silence. It was the silence of two people who had been together for twenty-six years and had said everything important to each other and had nothing left to say about anything that mattered.

After the dishes, Bill sat in the recliner in the living room. He turned on the television. He watched a baseball game. He didn't really watch it. He let the sound fill the room.

Carol sat on the couch. She knitted. She was making a blanket for a baby that wasn't born yet. Their daughter was pregnant. The baby was due in March. Bill didn't know whether he was excited or nervous or both. He knew he felt something, but he couldn't identify it.

"You think it's a boy or a girl?" Carol asked.

"I don't know," Bill said.

"We could find out," Carol said. "If you wanted to."

"No," Bill said. "I like the surprise."

"That's what everybody says," Carol said. "Till they find out."

Bill didn't respond. He turned up the television. The baseball game continued.

At ten o'clock, he went to bed. He slept. The alarm clock would ring at six-thirty.

III.

The change came slowly. It always does.

It started with the warehouse. Bill noticed things he had never noticed before—the way the fluorescent lights hummed at a frequency that made his teeth ache. The way the conveyor belt sounded like a river. The way his coworkers' faces blurred together, not because they looked alike—they didn't—but because he couldn't remember what any of them looked like on a Tuesday versus a Thursday.

Then it started with the weather. Bill realized he had been complaining about the weather for nineteen years. Nineteen years of "cold rain" and "hot and humid" and "snow that don't stick." He was complaining about the weather to the weather. He was talking to an abstraction.

Then it started with the coffee. Bill realized he didn't actually like his coffee. He drank it because it was six in the morning and coffee was the thing you drank at six in the morning and if he didn't drink coffee he would have to do something else and doing something else felt impossible.

One morning—in late January, a Tuesday, cold and gray—he stood at the window and looked at the parking lot and he thought: I have looked at this parking lot for eleven years. I will look at it for eleven more years. And then I will be dead and somebody else will look at it.

It was not a sad thought. It was not a happy thought. It was a thought. That was all. But it stayed with him, the way a song stays with you after you've heard it three hundred times and can't get it out of your head.

IV.

Three months later, Bill was fifty-five years old. He went to the doctor for his annual physical. The doctor was a young woman—maybe thirty, with bright eyes and a notebook and a clipboard.

"How are you, Bill?" she asked.

"Fine," he said.

"Anything wrong?"

"Nothing," he said. "That's the thing."

She looked at him. She was trained to notice things—vital signs, lab values, subtle indicators of stress or illness. But Bill's numbers were fine. His blood pressure was normal. His cholesterol was acceptable. His heart was strong. He was, by every measurable standard, healthy.

"What do you mean, nothing?" she asked.

"I mean there's nothing wrong," Bill said. "I go to work. I come home. I eat. I sleep. I watch television. I don't have pain. I don't have sickness. I don't have problems." He paused. "And that's the problem."

The doctor closed her notebook. She looked at him with the kind of look that doctors give when they don't know what to say. It was a look of professional concern mixed with personal discomfort.

"Bill," she said slowly, "are you depressed?"

"No," he said. "I'm not depressed. I'm just... here."

She didn't know what to do with that. She wrote something in her notebook—probably "existential distress" or "adjustment disorder NOS"—and sent him on his way.

Bill walked home through the parking lot. The flickering light was still flickering. The trash can was still overflowing. The weeds were still growing through the cracks.

He went inside. He made coffee. He sat at the window. He looked at the parking lot.

And he thought about the girl who was going to be born in March. His granddaughter. Or grandson. He didn't know which. He liked the surprise.

He wondered what the world would be like when the child grew up. He wondered if the parking lot would still be there. He wondered if he would be dead.

He wondered if it would matter.

He drank his coffee. The coffee tasted like coffee. That was all.

And that was enough. It wasn't happiness. It wasn't sadness. It was just... the thing. The long stay. The thing you do when nothing else is happening and you are still here and the alarm clock will ring at six-thirty and you will turn it off and put your feet on the floor and the floor will be cold and you will walk to the kitchen and make coffee and drink it at the window and look at the parking lot and the light will still be flickering and the trash can will still be overflowing and the weeds will still be growing through the cracks and you will think about nothing and nothing will think about you and that will be your life and you will have lived it and it will have been enough and it will not have been enough and both things will be true and you will understand that, one day, without anyone telling you.

The alarm clock would ring at six-thirty.