Cable Tied

Elias sat in his cubicle at 2:47 AM, feeling like a zombie risen not from grave dirt but from fluorescent-lit exhaustion. His third shift as tech support drained him incrementally, customer by customer, until he was hollowed out, moving through scripts and troubleshooting steps with rote, decaying efficiency.

"The ethernet cable's loose, ma'am. Check where it connects to your modem."

He could picture her—the lonely widow in Des Moines or the insomniac student in Boise. They were all voices through his headset, disembodied spirits seeking resurrection through internet connection.

Then came the call that broke his cycle.

"My cable's not working," a man's voice said, thick with something Elias couldn't place. "But I think that's not really what I called about."

Elias blinked. The script said to redirect, troubleshoot, resolve. But this voice carried the weight of something else—something that reminded him of the sphinx riddle he'd studied in college: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The answer was man, but Elias had been thinking about it lately as something else: What creature burns itself to death repeatedly, hoping something different will bloom from the ashes?

"What did you call about?" Elias asked, breaking protocol.

"My wife left. Took everything. I'm sitting in an empty living room with a TV that won't turn on, and I just realized I don't know who I am without someone to watch it with."

The silence stretched between them, taut as a cable about to snap.

"I feel like I've been walking through my own life like a zombie," the man continued. "Just going through motions. And tonight, sitting here alone, it's like the sphinx finally asked me the riddle, and I don't have an answer."

Elias thought about his own apartment, his own empty rooms, the way he'd been surviving instead of living for years now. He thought about all the cables connecting everyone to everything, and how somehow they'd all ended up more disconnected than ever.

"The riddle's answer," Elias said softly, "is that you have to learn to sit in the empty room alone and still be there. Not as a zombie. Not as someone waiting for connection. Just... there."

The man laughed, a broken, genuine sound. "I called tech support and got a philosopher."

"Happens," Elias said. "On third shift, we're all a little dead anyway."

He helped him fix the cable, but they stayed on the line for another hour, two strangers in the darkness, finally, mercifully, awake.