The Architecture of Regret

The baseball sat on Marcus's desk, a Rawlings from 1987, scuffed and signed by a minor leaguer who'd washed out before hitting Triple-A. His son had left it behind when he moved to Seattle, along with the childhood posters and the old trophies that now gathered dust in the garage.

Marcus turned away from it and picked up his iPhone, the screen lighting up with another Slack notification from his VP. Something about Q4 deliverables and pyramid schemes—no, pyramid structures. The corporate kind. They'd reorganized the department again, reshuffling the org chart like a deck of cards, and somehow Marcus had ended up with three direct reports and twice the responsibility.

He tapped the notification, then set the phone down. His hat hung on the coat rack behind him, a fedora he'd started wearing ironically after his divorce, until it stopped being ironic and just became part of his armor. fifty-three years old and playing at being a character from a noir film, because the alternative was admitting he'd become the kind of man who described meeting deadlines as "exciting."

Outside his office window, Chicago stretched toward the lake, steel and glass catching the October light. He thought about the real pyramid he'd visited in Giza two years ago, during that week-long escape he'd taken after his mother died. Standing at the base of those limestone blocks, he'd felt small in a way that had nothing to do with status or position. The ancient Egyptians had built toward something eternal, while he spent his days constructing PowerPoints about synergies and deliverables.

The baseball rolled slightly when his phone buzzed again. Marcus picked it up: his son. "Dad, found something of yours in storage."

"What is it?"

"That baseball card collection. The one you thought Mom threw out."

Marcus closed his eyes. He hadn't thought about those cards in thirty years. "You kept them all this time?"

"Some things matter." His son paused. "How's work?"

"Same. Pyramid schemes and baseball cards. The usual."

"You coming home for Thanksgiving?"

Marcus looked at the baseball on his desk, then at his hat, then at the corporate pyramid reorg diagram on his screen. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I think I will."