The Living Dead

Three years of grad school and I ended up here—trading derivatives at a firm that even the SEC forgot existed. A zombie bank, we called it, shuffling forward on momentum and cheap credit, dead inside but too bloated to collapse.

I bore it. The commute, the fluorescent lights, the way my colleague Marcus would lean against my cubicle at 4 PM with bloodshot eyes and say, "Just one more drink, one more night, you'll feel like yourself again."

Marcus was the friend who made everything worse. The kind who mistakes proximity for intimacy, who buys you shots so you'll buy him shots, so you'll both have a reason to stay out until 2 AM on Tuesdays.

The morning it happened, I'd slept three hours. My hands shook over the keyboard. A bear market had opened—red across every board—and I was executing trades I couldn't remember authorizing. Marcus texted: Drinks tonight? We'll ride it out.

I went to the roof instead. Twenty stories up, the wind actually moved. No recycled air, no Marcus, no screens blinking with numbers I was supposed to care about.

A woman stood there. Coffee mug, blazer, the same dead look I'd seen in the mirror for three years. She worked on twelve. We'd never spoken.

"Zombie," she said, like she was reading my mind. "That's what we are. The walking dead. But there's a difference between dead and gone."

She handed me her coffee. It was good—dark, no sugar, the first real thing I'd tasted in months.

"I'm Elena," she said.

"David."

"You can bear it, David. Or you can change it." She smiled, actually smiled. "My firm's hiring. We do something real. Clean energy. It pays less, but I sleep at night."

I deleted Marcus's text. I went back to my desk and printed my resignation letter.

That was six months ago. Yesterday, Elena moved in. The zombie's gone. I don't know if I'll ever love the work, but I love the woman who reminded me that feeling something—anything—is better than shuffling through half-life, waiting for a collapse that never comes.