The Art of Bearing Witness

The corporate retreat had been Elena's idea, of course. Team-building in the Poconos, she'd called it. A way to reboot our stagnant office culture. Now I stood with half my department in a replica 1920s baseball diamond, wearing oversized wool uniforms while someone explained the rules of America's pastime as if we were exchange students from Mars.

Mike and I had barely spoken since the merger announcement—the one where his division got absorbed into mine, where I'd had to "bear the bad news" about headcount reductions. We'd been friends for seven years. Friday happy hours, fantasy football leagues, the time his marriage imploded and I slept on his couch for three weeks. Now I was his boss's boss.

"You pitching or batting?" he asked, not meeting my eyes.

"Does it matter?"

He laughed, but the sound was hollow. We moved like zombies through the drills—mechanical, joyless, going through motions we'd forgotten how to feel.

Then, in the seventh inning stretch of this meaningless game, a grizzly bear emerged from the tree line. Not metaphorical. A half-ton of muscle and fur, ambling toward home plate like he owned the place.

"Stand still," someone whispered, though twenty people were already scrambling toward the clubhouse.

Mike didn't move. He stood at second base, watching the bear approach with a strange calm, like he'd been waiting for something to interrupt this farce.

The bear sniffed the leather mitt someone had dropped, then looked directly at Mike. For a heartbeat, they locked eyes—predator and prey, or maybe something else entirely.

Then it turned and lumbered back into the woods.

"You should've run," I told Mike later, when we sat on the clubhouse porch watching the sun dip below the ridge.

"I know."

"Why didn't you?"

He poured us both bourbon from his flask. "Because for the first time in six months, I felt something real."

We drank in silence, two friends who'd somehow become strangers, bound together by the weight of everything we couldn't say.