Dead Man's Float

Marcus hadn't slept properly in three weeks. Not since the merger announcement turned him into what his colleagues jokingly called a corporate zombie—moving through each day on autopilot, signing documents he didn't read, nodding in meetings he couldn't remember. The fluorescent lights of the forty-third floor seemed to drain something essential from him, hour by hour, until he felt hollowed out, a shell of the man who'd once believed this promotion would mean something.

The office pool was his only sanctuary. At six in the morning, before the city fully woke, he would swimming laps in the building's basement facility, the water offering a temporary baptism from his daily existence. The rhythmic motion, the silence broken only by his own breathing, the weightlessness—it was the only time he felt like himself anymore. He'd float on his back sometimes, staring up at the concrete ceiling, wondering how he'd ended up here.

"You're burning out, Marcus," Elena had told him two nights ago, sitting across from him at their kitchen table, the knot of their relationship growing more tangled by the day. She worked from home now, freelance design work that paid half her corporate salary but allowed her to keep some version of her soul. "You're not living. You're just... existing."

She'd left the next morning with a suitcase, leaving only a note about needing space and a loose cable from her laptop charger coiled on the floor like a snake.

Now it was Thursday, and Marcus stood before the building's maintenance entrance, ready to make the most pathetic stand of his professional life. Regional Director Crawford—a man nicknamed "The Bull" for his tendency to charge through any obstacle, human or otherwise—was demanding they complete the fourth-quarter projections by Friday. Everyone else had agreed to work through the weekend, sacrificing yet another chunk of their lives to the spreadsheet gods.

Marcus's hand hovered over his badge. He could go up there. Could join the others, their faces illuminated by monitors at midnight, ordering takeout and making jokes about how they'd sleep when they were dead. Could become another ghost haunting the forty-third floor, another body barely keeping itself alive through caffeine and cortisol.

He lowered his hand. He turned around and walked out into the morning sun, pulling out his phone to book a flight to somewhere with an ocean. The Bull could charge without him. For once, Marcus wasn't going to be the one getting trampled.