Riddles by the Pool

The corporate retreat was hell, as expected. But the swimming pool was decent, and after midnight it was empty. I found myself there, laps rhythmic and mindless, until I saw Clara standing at the edge.

Clara, the sphinx of our department. She'd been there six years, watched three directors implode, said nothing. Her performance reviews were always cryptic—riddles management decoded as needed. Now she stood in that awful hotel bathrobe, watching me swim.

"You're loud," she said. "I can hear you from my balcony."

I treaded water. "Sorry."

"No. It's reassuring." She sat on the deck, legs dangling. "Like someone's actually awake in this mausoleum."

I swam to the edge. "You hate it too."

"Hate isn't the word." She fished a pack of cigarettes from her robe pocket. "It's the neutral evil. The bureaucracy that eats you slow."

"So why stay?"

"The benefits." A sharp, cynical laugh. "And someone has to remember where the bodies are buried."

We sat there, steam rising off the pool's surface. I'd known Clara three years, exchanged maybe fifty words with her. She was our department's sphinx—enigmatic, unreadable, essential.

"Tom got fired today," she said suddenly. "Did you hear?"

"No." Tom had sat two desks from me. "Why?"

"Asked the wrong question." Her cigarette flared. "So what's your riddle?"

"What?"

"Everyone has one. The thing they won't say out loud. The thing that keeps them swimming in circles." She exhaled smoke. "Mine's obvious—I'm waiting for the revolution that won't come."

I looked at my hands, pruned from water. "I'm thirty-five and I don't know what I'm doing. That's not a riddle, it's a tragedy."

"Better than knowing exactly what you're doing and doing it anyway." She ashed her cigarette with careful precision. "My friend Elena died last year. Lung cancer. Never smoked a day in her life. What's the riddle there?"

"There isn't one."

"Exactly." She stood, knees cracking. "Some things just are."

A figure emerged from the hotel's sliding doors. Mark, from Sales. Mark the fox, everyone called him—not for his cunning, but because he'd sleep with anything that moved. He wore nothing but boxers and a grin.

"Party's out here," he announced, eyeing Clara's loosened robe.

"Fuck off, Mark."

"Just being friendly."

"We're not friends," Clara said. "We're colleagues who tolerate each other's presence because capital requires it."

He slunk back inside.

"Direct," I said.

"He'll remember that longer than anything else I could say." She tossed her cigarette butt into a planter. A palm tree, fake and dusty, caught the embers. "I'm turning in."

"Clara."

She paused.

"What's the answer?"

"To what?"

"The riddle. What's the point?"

She smiled—rare, genuine. "That you're asking. That's the only answer that matters." She walked toward the hotel, then stopped. "You're a good swimmer. Don't drown."

I watched her go. Then I swam another lap, then another. Until the sky began to lighten, until the water stopped feeling like escape and started feeling like water again. Until I could breathe.