Waters of Lethe

The corporate hierarchy was a pyramid, and Marcus had spent two decades climbing it, rung by bloodied rung. Now, standing in his corner office on the fortieth floor, he watched his cat Bast stretch across his desk and wondered what it had all cost him. Bast, named for the Egyptian goddess, seemed to mock him with her effortless contentment.

downstairs in the lobby aquarium, the company's goldfish continued their endless revolutions around a plastic castle. Marcus had always found them soothing — creatures with a reputation for three-second memories, blissfully unaware of their circular prison. Sometimes he envied them. Sometimes he wondered if they were the sane ones.

"You're bearing up well," Sarah had told him at the funeral, her voice tight with the awkwardness of grief. "Considering."

Considering what? That he'd failed to protect Elena from the slow erosion of her spirit? That he'd chosen board meetings over her last months of treatment? The weight he bore now was heavier than any corporate responsibility.

That evening found him at the community center pool, swimming lap after lap as the water swallowed his sounds. The rhythmic stroke, breathe, stroke, breathe was the only thing that quieted the voice that kept asking what came next. His body moved through the water while his mind replayed the pyramid of choices that had led here.

He surfaced, gasping, to find a bear of a man standing at the pool's edge — Jack, the building's superintendent, with a towel in his massive hands.

"You're here every night now," Jack said, not unkindly. "My daughter — she's six — she asks about the man who swims like he's trying to outdistance something."

Marcus laughed, a sound that surprised him. "Maybe I am."

"Mind if I join you?" Jack gestured to the empty lanes. "I've got my own things to outpace. Wife left last month. Took the cat, left the goldfish. Can't figure out how to keep a fish alive without killing something inside myself."

They swam in companionable silence as the pool's lights flickered off, leaving only the glow of distant city windows reflecting on the water's surface. Two men swimming circles in the dark, each carrying weights that no pyramid scheme of success could lighten.

"You know," Marcus said finally, treading water, "goldfish don't really have three-second memories. That's a myth. They remember. They just choose to keep swimming anyway."

Jack considered this. "Well then," he said, heading for the ladder. "See you tomorrow."

Marcus watched him go, then began another lap, the water holding him up as he finally let himself remember everything.