Lightning Strikes the Pyramid

The office building rose like a glass pyramid against the Seattle skyline, forty-three floors of corporate ambition where I'd spent the last seventeen years climbing toward something I could no longer remember wanting. My phone buzzed. Sarah. Again.

'You coming to dinner?' she asked. 'Your mother wants to know if you're still married.'

'I'm finishing the presentation,' I lied. I was staring at a loose ethernet cable dangling from my desk, swaying gently from the air conditioning vent. It had been hanging there for six months. Nobody fixed anything anymore.

Miller—the department head everyone called The Bull behind his back—had scheduled a 6 PM mandatory meeting about 'synergy and vitamin D deficiency in the workplace.' He'd discovered wellness culture like it was a new continent. Last month it was standing desks. This month we were apparently all suffering from scurvy of the soul.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the absurdity of it all. I was forty-two years old, making two hundred grand a year to help sell data analytics to companies that didn't need them, swallowing synthetic vitamin supplements in the company kitchen, pretending this meant something.

'Miller can get his own vitamins,' I said. 'I'm coming home.'

'Finally,' she said. 'There's pot roast.'

I stood up, gathered my things, and left the ethernet cable swaying in the conditioned air. The Bull could have his meeting. The pyramid could keep its faithful. I was going home to eat real food with my wife, and for the first time in years, that felt like something true.