Dead Bull Walking

The fluorescent lights of the trading floor hummed at a frequency that made Marcus's teeth ache. At 47, he'd become what he once swore he'd never be: a zombie in an Italian suit, shuffling from subway to desk to bar, eyes glazed over by the relentless green tickers climbing ever upward on screens mounted like altars to a god he'd stopped believing in years ago.

The bull market had raged for a decade now — a monstrous, unstoppable thing that trampled everyone who couldn't keep pace. Marcus had kept pace, barely. His father had been a bull of a different sort: thick-necked, lineman shoulders, hands rough from honest work. They used to play baseball in the park every Sunday until the old man's knees gave out. Marcus still remembered the sound of the ball hitting his father's glove — a satisfying thwack that meant something, meant everything.

"You're staring at your sandwich again," said Elena, the woman from risk management who'd been sharing his corner booth at O'Malley's for three months now. She was the only thing that felt real anymore.

Marcus looked down at his turkey club. The spinach was wilting in the heat, dark green and slick like something that had washed up on a beach. "My dad loved baseball," he said, the words coming out of nowhere like they always did when he drank too much. "He threw himself into every game like his life depended on it. Catch, throw, run. Mean something.

Elena's hand covered his. Her fingers were cool, dry. "You think you're dead, Marc? You think the bull market killed something in you?"

"I know it did."

"Then prove it." She slid her phone across the table. "Quit. Tonight. Right now." Her eyes held that look — the one that said she'd leave the city with him, leave everything, if he just said the word.

Marcus thought about his father in the hospital bed, still talking about that perfect game in 1988. He thought about the spinach on his plate, the bull markets and bear markets, all the animals that would keep running long after he was gone. He thought about how he'd been playing dead for so long he'd forgotten what it felt like to be alive.

He picked up his phone and opened his email. There was a draft he'd started six years ago and never sent. His thumb hovered over send.

Outside, a siren wailed like something dying in the street. Marcus pressed send.