The Riddle of Us

The gallery was empty except for us and the dead. Outside, **lightning** fractured the sky, illuminating the Egyptian wing in stuttering flashes that made the **sphinx** seem to blink.

"I wore my lucky **hat** the day I met you," Marcus said, adjusting the battered fedora that had become his signature. Twenty years of corporate climbing, and still that ridiculous hat. "At the recruitment fair. You were standing by the refreshments, looking like you wanted to be anywhere else."

"I was hungover," I said, peeling an **orange** I'd brought from home. The citrus scent cut through the museum's preserved air. "You offered me a pamphlet about organizational structures. You drew a diagram shaped like a **pyramid**—layers of hierarchy, you called it. Said I'd fit perfectly at the top."

He laughed, but his eyes kept sliding to the glass case beside us. Inside, a gold necklace lay dormant, waiting for a neck that had turned to dust three thousand years ago.

"I never asked what you were doing there," he said quietly.

"I told you. Between jobs."

"You were wearing an interview suit. At 4 PM on a Saturday."

The sphinx watched us with its carved stone gaze. riddle me this, it seemed to say. What destroys memory but preserves desire?

"I knew," I said, separating the orange into segments. "About the restructuring. About how you proposed the elimination of my department last week."

Marcus went still. The lightning flashed again, painting his face in ghostly white and shadow.

"How?"

"You still draw pyramids when you're nervous," I said. "I saw the diagram on your desk. MY position at the top, with a line through it."

"It's just business," he said, but his hand went to his hat, fingers tapping the brim. "I have to think about the company—"

"—and I have to think about myself." I finished the orange, wiped my sticky fingers on a tissue. "The hat never was lucky, Marcus. It was just camouflage."

"What happens now?"

"Now?" I walked toward the exit, where the storm was visible through the glass doors, a tempest that had been building for years. "Now you solve the riddle of the sphinx alone. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?"

"Man," he whispered. "Throughout his life."

"Exactly," I said. "And sometimes, man learns to walk away."