The Architecture of Regret

The goldfish had been dead for three days before Marcus finally noticed.

He stood before the bowl on his mahogany desk, the tiny orange body floating near the plastic treasure chest, and felt a sickening kinship. Forty-two years old, VP of something that required a pyramid-shaped org chart nobody understood, and he couldn't keep a single living thing alive.

Outside, lightning fractured the Chicago sky—a violent crack that made the tower's glass exterior vibrate. His office was on the 47th floor of the Amquad Building, a brutalist slab that dominated the skyline like a tombstone. Somewhere down there in the dark, Eleanor was probably eating dinner, maybe serving the papaya he'd picked up from that specialty grocer in Wicker Park. She'd laughed when he brought it home. "Exotic," she'd called it, running her thumb along the fruit's strange, mottled skin. That was six months ago, before the promotion, before the late nights became every night, before he forgot what it felt like to be the kind of man who bought exotic fruit for his wife.

Another flash of lightning illuminated his reflection in the window—gaunt, suit jacket discarded, tie loosened like a noose he'd given up on. The goldfish's bowl caught the ambient light from the street below, creating a warped fisheye view of Marcus's face, distorted and swimming.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to the dead fish.

His phone buzzed. Another message from the West Coast office about the merger. Another brick in the pyramid.

Marcus watched lightning strike somewhere over the lake, a spiderweb of electricity that seemed to hold for a fraction of a second before vanishing. Sudden clarity, then darkness. That's how it worked. That's how it had always worked.

He poured himself a scotch and ate a slice of the papaya he'd brought to work, trying to remember what Eleanor's laugh sounded like when she wasn't being patient with him.