Riddles in the Ash

Mara handed me the orange, her fingers stained with juice like she'd been crying in color. We were sitting on the balcony of our Cairo hotel room, three years of marriage stretched between us like a desert I couldn't cross anymore.

"You're like the sphinx," she said, not meeting my eyes. "All riddles, no answers."

I wanted to tell her the truth—that I'd spent our entire marriage as a corporate spy, leaking her company's prototypes to competitors. But the pyramid scheme of my double life had finally collapsed. Her brother had figured it out yesterday. The money had stopped flowing. My cover was blown.

Instead I said: "I never meant to hurt you."

"That's the zombie part," she laughed, bitter and sharp. "You're not even alive enough to mean anything anymore. Just walking through the motions, eating away at everything that was real between us."

She was right. I'd been hollowed out by the lies, by the constant surveillance of my own life. The spy game had turned me into something that mimicked humanity without actually possessing it.

The sun set over the city, turning the Nile the color of old bronze. Below us, tourists were taking pictures of things they'd never really understand.

"The riddle," I said finally, "is what happens when the person who betrayed everyone discovers he was the one who was truly betrayed."

She looked at me then, really looked at me, for the first time in months. "What did you lose?"

"Everything that actually mattered," I said.

She didn't ask me to leave. She didn't ask me to stay. She just finished her orange and watched the first stars appear over the pyramids, ancient and indifferent to the small human ruins we made of our lives.