The Riddle of the Orange Wednesday

The office walls were painted an aggressive orange that management claimed would stimulate creativity. Instead, it felt like living inside a traffic cone.

I'd been working at AdHorizon for six years, and somewhere around year three, I'd become what my colleagues jokingly called a "corporate zombie" — moving through my days on autopilot, showing up to meetings I barely remembered, responding to emails with the mechanical efficiency of the undead. The difference was, zombies were supposedly motivated by brains. I couldn't remember what motivated me anymore.

"You look like you need this."

I looked up. Elena from accounting stood beside my desk, holding out an orange. Not the vitamin C supplements I popped religiously, but an actual piece of fruit she'd obviously peeled herself.

"I'm good," I said automatically.

"You're not good, Marcus. You're not even here anymore." She perched on the edge of my desk, something sphinx-like about her posture. "I've been watching you. You ask questions like you already know the answers. You smile like it's a reflex you forgot you had."

The orange sat in her palm, bright against her skin, vivid and real in this place of beige carpets and fluorescent lies.

"Since when does accounting conduct performance reviews?"

"Since someone started disappearing three hours before he actually leaves." She leaned closer. "My grandmother had a saying. 'The first step to becoming a zombie is forgetting you're alive.' She grew up during wartime. She knew what it looked like when people died before their bodies did."

Something tightened in my chest.

"What's the cure?" I asked, half-joking. "A vitamin? A vacation?"

"The cure is remembering." Elena placed the orange on my desk. "Meet me after work. Not here. Somewhere that's actually real."

"Why?"

"Because you're the only person here who still asks "why" instead of just "how."" She stood up. "And because that's the first sign I've seen in years that you might not be completely gone yet."

The orange sat on my desk, smelling faintly of citrus and possibility. For the first time in a very long time, I found myself wondering what happened next.