The Golden Years

Martin stood at the window of his corner office, thirty-third floor, watching the pyramid of corporate headquarters gleam against the smog-choked sunset. At fifty-two, he'd finally ascended to the apex—the executive suite where the air was rarefied and the coffee was exceptional. His hair, once thick and brown, was now a silver thicket he paid too much to have styled every Thursday. It was his armor, his last rebellion against the aging process that had claimed his knees and his optimism.

The baseball sat on his mahogany desk, a paperweight from another life. Little League, 1978. He could still smell the leather, feel the weight of possibility in his palm. That summer, his father had missed every game. The cancer was already eating him from the inside, though nobody said the word out loud back then. Martin had pitched a no-hitter the morning of the funeral. Nobody had been there to see it.

"They're waiting for you, Martin," his assistant's voice crackled through the intercom. "The merger announcement."

The merger. The final move that would secure his legacy, eliminate three competitors, and cost two thousand people their livelihoods. A perfect corporate pyramid scheme, legal and bloodless.

He picked up the baseball, ran his thumb over the stitching. In the boardroom below, the other executives would be arranging themselves hierarchically, preparing to toast their cleverness. They'd call it synergy. They'd call it progress. They wouldn't call it what it was.

Martin walked to the window instead. The city sprawled beneath him, millions of people building their own pyramids, chasing their own baseballs, pretending their hair wasn't thinning, pretending they had time.

He set the baseball in his pocket, felt its solid weight against his thigh.

"Cancel the announcement," he said into the intercom. "I'm going to a ballgame."

For the first time in thirty-four years, Martin walked out of the building while the sun was still high enough to cast a shadow.