After the Ninth Inning

The orange sat in my palm like a tiny sun, luminous against the gathering dusk. I hadn't eaten it. Just held it while I watched them dismantle the baseball field, workers like small insects under stadium lights, folding up the American dream piece by piece.

Raj used to love baseball. Before the pyramid schemes, before the cryptocurrency obsession, before he became something else entirely. We'd sit right here, section 214, drinking overpriced beer and pretending our lives weren't hollowing out like old trees. He was my oldest friend — since we were seven, trading baseball cards like they were sacred texts.

"You're just jealous," he'd told me three years ago, eyes glittering with that frightening intensity. "You think you're so moral with your middle-management job and your modest apartment. But you're just afraid. I'm building something. A hierarchy. We're at the bottom now, but we climb."

The pyramid. Always the fucking pyramid.

I hadn't seen him in eighteen months. Not since his mother called me, weeping, because Raj had drained her retirement savings to invest in some "sovereign citizen" cryptocurrency scheme. Not since I found him living in his car, still preaching about decentralized currencies and the coming revolution.

The stadium lights flickered off, plunging the field into sudden darkness. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed.

I had visited him last week. At the facility. He sat in a common room, wearing someone else's clothes, staring at a television that wasn't turned on. The doctors said frontal lobe damage — probably from the unregulated supplements he'd taken during his "productivity phase." He didn't recognize me. Just kept murmuring about ascending to the next level, about the pyramid, about how close he'd been to the top.

My phone buzzed. His mother. Another update. Another small decline.

I finally peeled the orange. The spray was sharp against my knuckles, citric and honest. I ate one section, then another, while the workers below finished their task and the field returned to being just grass and dirt, nothing sacred about it at all.

The stadium felt enormous without the crowd. Just me and the ghosts of who we used to be, and the persistent, quiet understanding that some people don't fall. They just slowly, gradually, become zombies to their own ambitions.