The Riddle of the Unliving

You wake at 3 AM, heart hammering, and there it is again—that distinct shuffle outside your door. Your husband of seven years, pacing in his sleep-walking state. You've stopped calling it sleepwalking. The more accurate term would be what you whisper to your therapist: "He's become a zombie."

Marcus wasn't always like this. Once, he was the man who'd quote Rilke while cooking you risotto, who'd debate the ethics of AI until dawn. Now he works twelve-hour shifts installing fiber optic cables for a telecom giant, coming home hollowed out, eyes fixed on nothing you can see. The cables he strings through the city—miles of invisible tethering—seem to have replaced his own neural pathways.

"It's just stress," he says, when you ask if he remembers the concert you missed last month. "We needed the money for the house."

The house. The white picket fence you'd once mocked together, now your shared investment in a future that feels increasingly hypothetical. You've started leaving him notes on the refrigerator: "I love you," "Remember Egypt?" You are your own sphinx, posing riddles to a creature who no longer speaks in complete sentences, hoping something in him will solve the mystery of how to reach through the numbness.

Tonight, you follow him into the kitchen. He's standing before the open refrigerator, its light casting him in pale blue ghosthood. He turns to you, and for a moment, something flickers behind his eyes—recognition, perhaps. Or just the refrigerator's reflection.

"I had a dream," he says, the first full sentence he's offered in weeks. "We were in Cairo, and you asked me something important. But I can't remember what."

Your throat tightens. "I asked if you were still in there."

He closes the refrigerator, plunging you both into darkness. "I don't know," he whispers. "But I'm trying to find my way back."

In that honest admission, more tender than any empty reassurance, you feel the cable between you—frayed, yes, but not yet severed. The sphinx's riddle has no simple answer, but perhaps the asking itself is what keeps you both from becoming truly unliving.

You reach for his hand in the dark. His fingers are cold, but they close around yours.