The Last Day of the Living

The fluorescent lights of the office always gave me a headache, but today the throb behind my eyes felt like something more. Like my brain was trying to evacuate its skull.

"You sure about this?" Marcus asked, leaning against my cubicle wall. He held an orange — always peeling them at his desk, the scent drifting over to mingle with the coffee-breath and printer-toner air of the open plan.

"Never been more sure of anything." I dropped the last of my personal items into a cardboard box. The company logo on the box felt like a joke.

We'd both been recruited into this division three years ago with promises of rapid advancement and, yes, I cringe to admit it now, equity. The whole structure was a carefully constructed pyramid of upward-facing ambition, each of us climbing over the backs of the next layer down. I'd watched good people burn out, watched Marcus's eyes grow duller by the month, watched my own reflection in the bathroom mirror become someone I didn't quite recognize.

We'd become workplace zombies, really — animated corpses moving through the motions of caring, pretending that the next promotion would finally make us feel alive again.

"What will you do?" Marcus asked.

"Honestly? I bought an old motel with a pool in Palm Springs. Going to figure out how to be human again."

His expression shifted — something like hope, quickly suppressed. "A pool, huh?"

"Yeah. Blue water. Sky. Real light." I lifted my hat from the box — my grandfather's fedora, worn at the brim. "You could visit."

Marcus set his orange on my desk. "Give me six months," he said quietly. "Maybe less."

That was three years ago.

Now I sit by the pool most mornings, coffee in hand, watching the sun paint the water gold. Marcus never visited — I heard through the network he finally quit too, opened that woodworking studio he'd always talked about. Sometimes I wonder if he's alive, or if I am, or what either of those words really mean.

The orange tree I planted died last summer. But the hats — I've started collecting them. There's something about the weight of a well-made hat, the way it sits on your head like a small, careful philosophy.

Yesterday, a woman checked into room 12. She saw my collection by the pool and smiled — really smiled, like she meant it.

"My grandfather had a hat like that," she said.

And I felt something shift inside, some small frozen thing beginning to thaw.

"Coffee?" I asked.

She's still here. We talk about real things now — the kinds of truths that only emerge when you're no longer climbing, no longer performing aliveness, no longer pretending that the pyramid was ever anything but a grave we'd dug for ourselves, standing in it with the dirt up to our waists and calling it ambition.

The water ripples in the breeze. I am, against all probability, beginning to believe I might actually be alive.