Concrete Gods

The retirement party dragged into its fourth hour, the open bar doing its job too well. Marcus found himself standing on the hotel pool deck, clutching a tumbler of scotch he hadn't touched in twenty minutes. Behind him, through the glass doors, he could see his colleagues dancing to music that was popular when they'd all started at the firm. He was fifty-three tomorrow, and the sphinx of a question that had haunted him for three decades finally demanded an answer.

You're a bull in a china shop, she'd told him the night she left. That was the polite version. The truth was, he'd trampled through their marriage with the same single-minded determination he applied to every acquisition, every merger, every hostile takeover. He'd won, of course. He always won. The house, the car, the "amicable" division of assets. Victory felt different when you were standing alone in a hotel room at age forty-five.

Marcus walked to the pool's edge. The water was still, perfectly still, reflecting the moon like a polished mirror. He thought about swimming—really swimming, not the lap swimming he did three times a week at the club, but the kind of swimming that meant letting go, sinking beneath the surface and staying there until your lungs burned. There was something tempting about that weightlessness. Something like surrender.

The company had installed a bronze bull statue in the lobby last year, a twelve-foot monument to aggression and market dominance. Marcus had walked past it every morning, telling himself it represented strength, power, indomitability. But standing here in the quiet darkness, whiskey-heavy and suddenly exhausted, he saw it for what it was: a monument to fear. The fear of softness, of vulnerability, of anything that couldn't be quantified in quarterly projections.

"Mr. Wheeler?"

He turned. A young woman stood in the glass doorway, maybe twenty-five, holding a plate with a slice of retirement cake. "They're doing toasts inside. Your assistant said you'd want to..."

"Be toasted?" Marcus finished. "Celebrated? Enshrined?"

She shifted, uncomfortable. "She just said you'd want to be there."

The sphinx smiled, finally satisfied. Here was his answer: he could keep being the bull, charging forward, accumulating victories that meant nothing, or he could admit that he was tired, that he'd been swimming upstream so long he'd forgotten what still water felt like.

"Tell them," Marcus said, setting the untouched scotch on a nearby table, "tell them I went for a swim."

He didn't wait for her response. He kicked off his shoes, dove into the pool, and for the first time in thirty years, let himself sink.