Cable to Nowhere

The betting pool had reached three thousand dollars. Nobody knew exactly who managed it—some junior analyst in Accounting, probably—but the entire floor was obsessed with the question: When would Meredith finally crack?

Meredith, our sphinx of a director, sat in her glass office, inscrutable as ever. She'd been through three rounds of layoffs, two reorgs, and the slow, agonizing death of the cable division. Still she remained: perfectly composed, her facial expressions revealing nothing, her decisions mysterious and often cruel.

"She's made of stone," Sarah whispered to me by the coffee machine. Sarah, thirty-two and sharp-eyed, with copper hair and a smile that made my chest ache. A fox in every sense. "Half the VP's gone, and she hasn't blinked."

"Maybe she knows something we don't," I said, though I suspected Meredith simply didn't care anymore. None of us did. Not really.

My phone buzzed. Elena: *dinner? 7?* I stared at the message for a long moment. My wife had sent the same text every Tuesday for twelve years. Some weeks I loved her desperately. Some weeks I couldn't remember why I'd stayed. This week, I felt nothing at all.

That afternoon, I found myself by the hotel pool during a mandatory "wellness retreat" that nobody wanted to attend. The cable division was being sunsetted; this was HR's idea of mercy. I watched the water's surface, that hypnotic blue, thinking about how easy it would be to just walk into the ocean and keep going.

Sarah appeared beside me, her feet dangling in the water. "You know what the pool's really about?"

"Layoffs?"

"Hope," she said. "We're betting on Meredith cracking because if she breaks, it means the nightmare ends. Either we get fired, or she does, but something finally happens."

"And if she never cracks?"

"Then we stay in limbo forever." She looked at me, really looked at me, with those knowing eyes. "Sometimes I think you're already halfway out the door, Michael."

I didn't answer. But later that night, standing on my balcony, staring at the dark ocean and listening to Elena breathe in the room behind me, I deleted my response to her text. Instead I opened my email and drafted my resignation.

The sphinx could keep her riddles. The fox could find someone else to read. It was time to cut the cable.