The Pyramid's Silent Top

The corporate pyramid stretched above me, each level a glass office housing someone more disconnected from reality than the last. I'd been climbing it for fifteen years, and somewhere around the middle tiers, I'd stopped feeling like a person.

My father's deterioration had paralleled my ascent. First came the confusion, then the vacant stares, the shuffling walk—the medical euphemisms couldn't disguise it. He'd become a zombie in slow motion, his personality eroding like limestone in acid rain. I visited him Sundays, placing his favorite fedora on his head, watching his fingers trace the brim with ghost recognition.

"He liked that hat," my mother would say, as if invoking the past could summon it back.

The morning I received the partnership offer, I found myself in front of the Egyptian exhibit at the museum. The pyramid replicas stood pristine and geometric, tombs built for men who believed they could outrun death. I thought of my father, whose legacy now consisted of a closet full of clothes and a hat that no longer fit anyone.

"They built these thinking they'd live forever," a woman said beside me. She wore a vintage cloche, dark velvet with a single jeweled pin. Her eyes reflected the same exhausted recognition I felt.

"Instead, they just ended up as exhibits," I replied.

She laughed, and something in the sound stripped away the corporate polish I'd been applying for years. "I'm Sarah. I work on the forty-second floor. I've been feeling like a zombie for approximately three years."

"David. Forty-fifth floor. I think the zombies are the lucky ones—they don't know they're dead inside."

We left the museum together, neither of us returning to our glass towers that day. We sat on a park bench while she told me about her failed marriage and I told her about my father's hat and the pyramid I'd been climbing only to find the top completely empty.

"What if," she said, reaching for my hand, "we stopped trying to reach the top and started actually living?"

I kissed her then, and for the first time in fifteen years, the pyramid beneath us didn't matter at all.