Pyramids in the Afterlife

The spinach stuck in my teeth during the eulogy. I could feel it, a green defiant flag, while David's sister talked about his kind soul and his untimely departure at forty-two. Everyone else saw a tragedy; I saw the man who'd dismantled my career like a predator, then asked me to dinner the same week.

Running into his widow at the reception felt orchestrated. She touched my arm, her gray hair—same silver as David's had started showing in the final year—falling across eyes that knew too much. "He spoke of you often," she said, and I believed her. David had collected people like souvenirs.

We'd built our department's success into a corporate pyramid: David at the apex, me supporting the structure below, until he decided my absence would improve the geometry. That was three years ago. I'd spent the intervening rage running every morning until my lungs burned, training for nothing, escaping nothing.

"You look tired," his widow said. It wasn't unkind.

I excused myself to the balcony. Below, the city lights arranged themselves into ordinary hierarchies, unremarkable lives stacked upon lives. I'd spent years climbing, then years resenting those who climbed faster, and now David was dead and I was forty-five with nothing to show for my victories but a promotion in a department that felt empty without an adversary.

His widow joined me, carrying two drinks. "He cheated," she said simply. "In business, in marriage, probably at cards. But he was terrified of being ordinary. That's the tragedy, isn't it? The bull inside him never learned to graze."

I looked at her—really looked—and saw the exhaustion of someone who'd spent decades loving someone who'd forgotten how to be loved. She handed me a drink. "He respected you," she said. "That's more than most got."

The spinach was still there, I realized later in the restroom mirror. A green absurdity. I left it there. Some things don't need fixing.