Swimming Past Sphinxes

The vitamin C tablet caught in my throat at 6:47 AM, same as every morning. Sarah's routine. The woman who left me three months ago for a man who drives a convertible and doesn't believe in supplements. I swallowed it dry, feeling like a zombie moving through someone else's life.

At the office, Marcus cornered me by the coffee machine. He was in full bull mode today, chest puffed out, demanding to know why the Q3 projections weren't on his desk yet. His assistant stood behind him like a sphinx—inscrutable, knowing, eyes that had seen every version of this conversation and would see it again.

"You're not sleeping," she said later, when I found her smoking outside the building. Her name was Lena. We'd never spoken beyond pleasantries. "You look like the walking dead."

"Vitamin deficiency," I said, trying for humor and failing.

She laughed anyway. Smoke curled around her face. "I swim at the Y. Midnight. No one's there. The water's almost warm." She looked at me then, really looked. "You should come."

I went. The pool was exactly as she'd described—empty lanes, water still as glass, fluorescent lights humming overhead. We didn't speak. Just swam, lap after lap, while the world slept. Something about the water, the rhythm, the way she moved through it like she was solving a riddle she'd been working on for years.

Afterwards, sitting on the pool deck in the damp, Lena said, "Sarah called me. Asked if I'd seen you—said you might do something stupid."

The bull in the office. The zombie in the mirror. The sphinx watching it all. And now this—swimming at midnight with a stranger who knew my ex-wife's number by heart.

"Did she say why?" I asked.

Lena stubbed out her cigarette. "She said you forgot to take your vitamins."

I laughed. It felt like breaking the surface after too long underwater. "She would remember that."

"You want to get dinner?" Lena asked. "Somewhere that serves real food. Not supplements."

The water dripped from my hair onto the concrete. For the first time in months, I didn't feel like I was waiting to begin my real life. This was it. The riddle wasn't something you solved. It was something you swam through.

"Yes," I said. "Yes, I do."