The Pyramid Scheme of Regrets

The cat meowed at 3 AM again — Marina's cat, left behind when she moved out. Their shared apartment now felt like a museum of artifacts from a life that no longer fit. Her cat tower stood in the corner, a carpeted pyramid of memories he couldn't bring himself to dismantle.

David's iphone buzzed on the nightstand. Another Slack notification from the channel he'd been obsessively refreshing since the layoffs began. His boss — that bull in a china shop, Richardson — had been promising reorg clarity for weeks.

'Everything's fine,' Marina had said the night she left, packing her ceramic fox collection into boxes. 'You're just seeing patterns where there are none.'

But David had seen the Slack messages. The private channels. The way Richardson's favorites gathered at the corner table during lunch, their heads bowed together like conspirators. The pyramid scheme wasn't financial — it was social, structural, the way power consolidated itself in hierarchies that nobody admitted existed.

His phone lit up again. A calendar invite: 'Career Development Discussion with Richardson.' The bull wanted to see him.

David dressed in the dark. The cat wove between his ankles, hungry for attention. He poured food into the bowl, watched the animal eat with single-minded devotion. No existential crisis there. No questions about whether loyalty would be rewarded.

At the office, the fluorescent lights hummed. Richardson's office had glass walls, the better to display his domain. Inside, the bull sat beneath a framed poster of a corporate org chart — a perfect pyramid, Richardson's name near the top.

'David,' Richardson said, not looking up from his iphone. 'Close the door.'

The fox collection flashed through David's mind. Marina had called them her spirit animals — clever, adaptable, survivors. 'You're too rigid,' she'd told him. 'Sometimes you need to be the fox, not the bull.'

'Are we being let go?' David asked.

Richardson finally looked up. 'What? No. Jesus, who told you that?' He laughed, a harsh sound. 'I'm promoting you. Taking over the pyramid scheme — I mean, the team structure.' He gestured at his poster. 'Someone needs to wrangle all this.'

David stood in the glass-walled office, suddenly aware of how visible he was. How anyone could look in and see exactly where he stood.

'Marina left me,' he heard himself say.

Richardson's expression shifted. The bull softened, for a moment. 'Yeah. Well. Can't win 'em all.' He tapped his phone. 'So? You in or out?'

David thought of the cat waiting at home, the fox figurines in boxes somewhere, the iphone that connected and disconnected him in equal measure. 'I'm in,' he said.

The pyramid needed someone to climb it. Might as well be him.