The Geometry of Leaving

The Red Sea stretched before Elena, its water deceptively calm—much like the life she'd left behind in Chicago. She sat at the resort's edge, nursing a gin and tonic that was mostly tonic, watching the sun descend toward the horizon in that agonizingly slow way suns have in places far from home.

Her iphone buzzed against the table. Marcus again. Three missed calls, twelve texts. She'd told him she needed space after finding the forwarded emails—the ones where he'd taken credit for the Qatar proposal, describing their work as "my vision." The corporate pyramid had proven itself yet again: the people at the top would always find ways to stay there, usually by standing on someone else's shoulders.

"You let him read your future?" A voice in accented English.

Elena looked up. An older Egyptian man stood there, his face weathered like papyrus, wearing a galabia that had seen better decades.

"Sorry?"

He pointed at her phone. "You stare at it like it contains your fate. But the screen—" he waved his hand dismissively—"it shows only what others want you to see."

He held out his own hand, palm up. Lines mapped his skin like ancient riverbeds. "The hand knows what the heart refuses to admit."

Elena considered him. She was thirty-five, vice president of regional development at a multinational consulting firm, educated at Kellogg, fluent in the language of leverage and synergies and "let's circle back." She didn't believe in palm readings. But then, she hadn't believed Marcus would undermine her either.

She extended her hand.

The old man traced her lifeline with a calloused finger. "You think you're building something," he said softly. "But you are only building walls. This one here—" his finger crossed her heart line—"someone has placed a stone upon it. A heavy stone."

Her throat tightened. The gin and tonic suddenly seemed insufficient.

"And here—" he touched near her palm's edge, "you have forgotten how to receive. You only know how to give, even when what you give is taken."

The pyramids of Giza were visible from the resort's eastern edge, ancient monuments to ego and eternity. Elena had taken a selfie there yesterday, posting it with some caption about timeless ambition. The irony hadn't escaped her then, though she'd pretended otherwise.

"What should I do?" she asked, and heard in her voice how long it had been since she'd asked anyone anything genuine.

The old man smiled, revealing teeth that had known many years. "The structures we build—the pyramids, the careers, the facades—they eventually fall to sand. But what grows from water?" He gestured toward the sea. "It returns. It adapts. It finds new paths."

He released her hand and began to walk away, then paused.

"Your device—" he nodded at the iphone—"it is a mirror. If you do not like what you see, perhaps the reflection is not the problem."

Elena watched him disappear into the gathering dusk. The phone buzzed again. Another notification. Another demand upon her attention, her energy, her carefully constructed life.

She picked up the phone, felt its familiar weight, its seductive promise of importance, of being needed, of being seen. The water lapped at the shore beyond the pool, rhythmic and indifferent to human ambition.

She turned off the phone.

The silence that followed was terrifying.

It was also, she realized, the first real thing she'd heard in years.