Dead Things Don't Swim

The vitamin D sat untouched on my nightstand for three months. My father had sent them, concerned about my "pale city complexion," but I'd been too busy—or perhaps too dead inside—to care. Then came the corporate retreat to Cancun, five days of mandatory team building at a resort shaped like a glass pyramid, rising absurdly from the jungle like an alien spacecraft.

I'd been feeling like a zombie for years. Not the pop-culture kind with ripped flesh and vacant stares, but something more insidious: the living dead of corporate America, moving through motions I'd performed a thousand times, smiling at jokes I'd heard a thousand times, becoming hollowed out by the slow erosion of passion and purpose.

The third morning, I found myself at the pool at dawn, unable to sleep. The water was still, glass-like, reflecting the pyramid's geometric perfection. That's when I saw the fox—a sleek rust-colored shape moving between the palm trees, impossibly wild in this manufactured paradise. It stopped at the water's edge, watching me with intelligent eyes, before silently vanishing.

"She comes every morning," said a voice behind me. Lena, the VP of Marketing, sat two chairs over, already on her second glass of champagne. "The fox, I mean. She's the only real thing here."

We talked for hours as the sun rose. Lena had been with the company twenty years, climbing the corporate pyramid rung by blood-sacrificed rung. She told me about the vitamin cocktails she took every morning—B-complex for energy, magnesium for calm, D for hope—trying to pharmaceuticaly manufacture the vitality that this life had systematically stripped away.

"The secret," she said, gesturing at the zombie-like attendees beginning to emerge from their rooms, "is that they're already dead. They just haven't had the decency to lie down yet."

Six months later, Lena was gone. Early-onset dementia, the email said. Her vitamins hadn't been enough. I heard she'd walked into the ocean off Cancun's coast one night, leaving behind her corner office and her vitamin collection and her fox stories.

I take the vitamin D now. Every morning with breakfast. And sometimes, when the fluorescent lights of my office pyramid begin their daily work of hollowing me out, I close my eyes and remember: dead things don't swim. But for a few hours that morning, neither of us had to.

The fox, I like to think, is still watching.