Vitamins for the Pyramid

Margaret stood before the vanity mirror, her reflection fragmented by age-spotted glass. The vitamin C tablet sat on her tongue—orange-flavored optimism, she called it—before washing it down with lukewarm coffee. Three decades of daily rituals, each pill a small prayer against entropy.

The corporate pyramid had been her religion since 1989. She'd started on the ground floor, selling vitamin supplements door-to-door, climbing each level with the desperate energy of someone who believed the view from the top would justify the climb. Now, at fifty-three, she stood three rungs from the apex: a regional director with a corner office and a Lexus she rarely drove.

But something had curdled inside her. Maybe it was the way the new recruits looked at her—with the mix of pity and contempt reserved for those who'd drunk the Kool-Aid and lived to tell about it. Or maybe it was finding her predecessor's journals in the desk drawer, forty years of identical entries about 'breaking through to the next level.'

The coaxial cable behind her television set had been fraying for months. She'd meant to replace it, but there was something poetic about the static that now ghosted across her screen during the mandatory leadership webinars. The company's founder, a man who'd sold his first vitamin formulation out of a garage, preached eternal optimism from a beach in Belize. His face pixilated and dissolved in waves of digital snow, his voice breaking apart like a bad connection to God.

'You are the architects of your own wellness,' he'd said. 'Every vitamin you sell is a brick in your pyramid of success.'

Margaret looked at the supplement bottles lining her bathroom counter—hundreds of dollars' worth of pills and powders, the employee discount applied. She thought about her sister, dead at forty-nine from breast cancer, who'd sworn by the same products. Thought about the divorce papers sitting on her kitchen counter, Robert finally tired of coming second to the business.

The vitamin dissolved on her tongue, bitter this time. She picked up the phone and called the number she'd been avoiding for three weeks—the cable company, to cancel her subscription. Then she drafted her resignation email, subject line: 'Wellness achieved.'

Tomorrow she would start dismantling her pyramid, one brick at a time. Tonight, she poured the supplements down the toilet and watched them swirl away—tiny, artificial prayers returning to the water.