From the moment the awakening had occurred, Jack knew what he would do. It was morning again, in the endless, mindless repetition of day and night that had gone on for eons and would continue for eons to come. He thought that he would feel the weight of those eons fall upon his shoulders as he stepped outside his well-appointed and appropriately placed domicile. A better cave, he thought as he regarded the structure from which he had just emerged. A two story English Tudor stood there, a darker gray than the light gray of the overcast sky that spread before him, isolating him from the warmth of the star. No matter, he thought. One star amongst billions. The expected weight did not fall upon him, in fact, the cool air flowing into his lungs and back out again seemed to pull all weight from his being. He shuffled down the walkway from his house and turned onto the cracked and broken sidewalk that rambled beside the street. Other structures nearly identical to the one he had just departed lined the asphalt road along both sides. There were no trees here, they had all been removed so as not to obscure the view of the structures from the road. It was important for his fellow citizens to see each other’s status, so they could know how they measured up. This morning, however, a dejected, thin haze had settled over the community, casting a ghostly pall over the solemn morning proceedings. Jack snickered and continued to plod up the street, enveloped by the cold, seeing other people emerge from their structures and get into their conveyances of various sizes and colors and shapes. They all did this after kissing their spouses, of various sizes and colors and shapes, all of them headed to their jobs, or whatever activity would hypnotize and distract them for that day. 

He approached the security gate that stood sentinel over the community he was leaving. In the guard shack, a small citadel constructed of ramshackle gray stonemasonry and wood painted black sat a plump, older man, with a white mustache and wire rimmed spectacles reading a newspaper.  The mists draped themselves over the structure like feeble decorations, the accouterments of a wake, or the get well cards scattered across the end table of old man dead in his hospital bed. The entire front edifice of the community’s fortification was constructed of the same gray stonework, and the shack sat in the middle of the entrance, between two rain soaked streets that merged to become the one that Jack had just traversed. Both streets were blocked by brightly colored, mechanized barricades that swung up to allow entrance and egress to the few who were allowed it. As Jack approached, the man’s name flashed into his awareness. Rick.

“Rick.” Jack said, the word escaping his mouth simultaneously.

“Morning, Jack!” Rick said, looking up from his newspaper and smiling, a grimace that was almost inhumanly wide. “You walking in to work today? Not a nice day for it if you are.” The weak lamp above his head shaded his eye sockets, and in the blurry vision of the mist, the old mans face appeared to Jack to be a peach toned skull chattering at him.

“I have to go to work.” Jack said and slid past the barricade that enclosed the collection of people and buildings behind him. As he exited, the whirr of the mechanism sounded, the gate swung up, and a shiny black car crept through the gate and out on to the street in the direction Jack had turned, fouling the cold air with it’s exhaust as it passed him and sped up the street. Jack inhaled the miasma, the air tasting bitter on his tongue, and continued to walk down the road.

“I have to go to work.” he said aloud to no one. The world fell away, turning to endless gray mist as he walked.

Wrapped in the workings of his own mind, he marveled at how differently he looked at the world than he had only yesterday. One realization, one awakening was all it had taken, one stone loosed, and the entire wall collapsed.

He had been so caught up in his mind that he did not know how far he walked or in what direction he had been going. When he returned to the world around him he was standing in the middle of another part of town, the sky above him only a lighter gray than it had been before. The watch on his left wrist was cold now, and he became aware of it. He turned it up reflexively and looked at the hands and the numbers. They lined up in such a way that was supposed to mean something, and only a day ago would have. Now he could only chuckle at the watch face’s insane, inchoate display. Looking around him, he saw there were more structures, much like the ones in the community he had left. But no one had lived here in decades. The structures were broken, with shattered glass looking out in some, and wooden boards nailed up, marked with graffiti, covering the openings of others. Most of them were Victorians of bricks once red, now so weathered and worn that the red itself seemed brighter, almost bloodied. Dead grass stood waist high in between the structures, with bushes and vines long dead, stripped bare of leaves, climbing up the walls and scrambling along the paved areas where the former inhabitants had brought their conveyances to rest. The vines spread out from open gaps that were once doors, windows and vents. Jack saw the vines pulling the structures back down into the earth, returning their raw materials to the ground from which they had been extracted, a task that would take many more decades to complete. To his left he saw a decrepit Victorian, bereft of glass and doorway, vines spread out next to the open entrance like a spider crawling toward the warmth of an open, sleeping mouth. The darkness within called to him, and without questioning why, Jack turned and waded through the dead grass and brambles, and ascended concrete stairs nearly ground into powder by pile upon pile of dead plant life up to the entrance of the structure. This one too was made of bleeding brick, and as Jack approached, he could smell a musty odor wafting from within. The wood that had once held the doorway was a weatherbeaten grey and spotted with black mold well into the process of decomposition. Flecks of white paint indicated the former state of the boards around the empty windows and the soffits of the covered porch, where holes made by wildlife and rain had rotted the wood. Piles of moldy, decayed board and degenerated insulation lay to either side of him from where the roof had begun to disintegrate. Peering through the opening that had once been a doorway he saw through to the other side of the structure, where a once-window had been shattered inwards, allowing a shaft of grey-white light to stab into the dark and gloom of the interior and cast slight reflections from the broken bits of glass on what had once been a hardwood floor. From the doorway, Jack could see a hole in the floor had been made, either by decay or animal teeth, and had swallowed up much of the area next to where the shaft of light fell. 

Jack stepped through the opening, feeling the dusty floor sag beneath his footstep. The area around him was bare, supported by the same hardwood floor that was now being devoured by time and water in the adjoining room, which he now saw contained the collapsed remnants of a porcelain sink that had once stood beneath the shattered window, the metal finishings now rusted brown and leaving red trails down into the bowl. A stove was next to it, close to the intersection of two outer walls that were covered with brown-streaked green wallpaper. The stove pitched forward slightly toward the hole in the floor. Eventually the stove will fall in, Jack mused. As he crossed the empty room, he heard the wind roar up from outside, causing a whistling and a groaning sound to echo through the empty structure. It also brought a pungent smell from up through the hole in the floor in the once-kitchen. Jack crossed through the entryway into that room and peered into the hole. It opened into a crawl space underneath the structure, a bare patch of brown earth, devoid of plant life, and Jack could see that it was currently being used for human beings to relieve themselves, as the piles and puddles of feces and urine glistened in the pale gray light that spilled into the hole.

Unconcerned that the deteriorating structure might somehow be inhabited he turned back into the room containing the main entranceway and turned to his right. He could see a slight glow coming from what appeared to be the base of a staircase that led upward to the second floor. He moved toward the light, the dust and grime that his steps disturbed drifting up to irritate his nose as he went. The staircase to his left spilled the light from an open window above onto the floor before him. Looking up the claustrophobic, narrow stairs, he saw the white light being spilled by an open doorway, the door of which had been pulled off of the top hinge and lay slanted against the opposite wall. The stairs were covered with bits of wood and rotted drywall. The skeleton of a long dead rodent lay curled at the bottom step. 

Jack stepped onto the second step and ascended the stairway, hearing the boards groan beneath him. He stepped onto the second floor and saw that it opened onto a hallway that extended to his right and left, with the fallen door blocking his passage down the left side of the hall. Immediately before him was a room with three empty window panes that looked out onto the structures lining the street outside. He stepped forward and looked down the gap between the broken door and it’s frame to see down the left side hallway, but only saw pieces of decayed wood, collapsed drywall and mold blocking a door that had been shut for what appeared to be several years. The drywall had been covered by a white, flower patterned wallpaper, now spotted and stained with grayish brown smears. An electric sconce light hung out from the wall by it’s wires, with a large hole in the wall underneath it exposing the skeletal frame that it was once attached to. Looking to his right, he saw into another room, one that had a single small window which still retained it’s glass, but was so covered with grit and grime that only the suggestion of light outside was permitted to enter. 

Jack stepped forward into the room facing the stairway, feeling the cool wind blow through the gaping holes. Incomprehensible graffiti covered the walls, dingy colors atop dingy wallpaper and plaster. The floor of the room was littered with papers and dust. One particular square of white paper caught his attention, and he bent over and picked it up. Turning it over revealed a photograph, decades old, of a middle-aged white man kneeling with his arms around a young girl with long dark hair standing in front of him. Their eyes were similar, and they both smiled at the camera, their matching eyes curling with similar emotion. Jack dropped the picture, letting the air carry it back to the musty floor. Vapor blew in, and drops of rain began to click against the roof and sides of the structure.

A rattling sound and movement outside caught his attention and he gazed out the window to see an old man, withered and gnarled, pushing a shopping cart past the structure Jack stood in, moving up the road to the left, farther into the blighted area of decaying buildings. The old man shuffled along, ignorant that he was being watched, and, as if to prove it, stopped in the middle of the cracked asphalt, shoved down the rags he wore around his waist and legs for pants, and urinated onto a patch of dead weeds that had taken up residence in one of the larger pits in the road. Jack could hear the old man groan with relief as his piss spattered the maimed roadway. Finally the man finished, pulled up his rags and tied them back into place, and continued to trundle his cart along his way.

The rain continued to fall, heavier now, large cold drops smashing their way to the ground. He heard the rain falling into the interior area of the floor beneath him. He descended the stairs and peered into the once-kitchen and saw water leaking from a gaping hole in the plastered ceiling, down into the shit-pile in the crawl space under the hole in the floor. The sticky odor wafted around him, carried by the water vapor seeping into the structure from all the open entrances. Jack turned and crossed the hardwood floor for the last time and stepped out onto the dilapidated porch, the stink of wet, rotting wood surrounding him. He stepped down the stairs and back onto the street near where the old man had relieved himself.

“I have to go to work.”, he said again to no one. He had no idea where he was. Finding his workplace was effortless, however. He worked in the tallest structure in the city. He turned around in a circle and saw, off in the distance, the black and silver building, the spire on it’s top flashing a harsh white beacon every second. The flash stood out against the grey, pregnant clouds, and Jack could see rain falling in dark streaks all around it. No matter, he thought as the rain began to soak into his topcoat and pants. It’s only water. He faced the direction of the tower and began to walk, wrapped in his own mind and gray mist yet again, while the drops fell around him.

As he approached the center of the city, the sounds of civilization grew louder and more irritating. The constant chatter of people walking and talking alongside the city’s thoroughfares, the smack of the rain pelting umbrellas and awnings, and the wheezing of motors accelerating and braking reflected off of the walls of the tall, gray structures that surrounded Jack. He walked with his head held level and direct, despite the rain that had matted his stringy hair against his face and continued to pour into his eyes, blurring his vision. The stream of humanity against which he walked parted around him. He looked several of his fellow citizens in the eye as he passed them, and he could tell, even with his own vision occluded, that no one was meeting his gaze as he passed. He hadn’t expected anyone to, it was merely a diversion as he made his way in. He turned a corner to his right, and could see a gathering of people cordoned off from the street by brightly colored movable barricades two blocks ahead of him, directly across from the structure that housed his employer. Umbrellas sprouting at random from the hemmed in crowd reminded Jack of how the vines had strode up from the grass to cover the walls of blighted area he had just left. He heard some droning din arising from the group, but could not determine any actual organization in the mumbling. As he got closer he could see that many of them were holding signs, demanding this thing be stopped, or that thing be started, along with the usual attempts at wry humor pressed into the service of making some sort of point. Uniformed men with guns, clubs, protective body armor and helmets stood in front of the barricade. Jack laughed out loud. The powerless and the more powerless, he thought. The officer closest to him turned, and attempted to wave him off in another direction. Jack continued to walk forward, eventually stopping at the intersection that had been blocked off, directly across the street from his employer. The officer that attempted to wave him off turned and spoke to him.

“Buddy, you probably should go ahead and get across the street. These people are here to protest what you types have been up to. I’d move along if I didn’t want any trouble.”, he said.

“I have to go to work.”, Jack said. 

“Do you work there?” said a thin, almost skeletal woman in glasses and a grey knit toboggan. “Are you one of them, one of the one’s that’s killing us out here?”

“I work there.”, Jack said, pointing across the street to the looming structure of glass, steel and concrete. Even in the boiling gray of the stormy weather the structure cast a cold shadow on all of them here, even Jack. People around the girl began to pay attention to what was going on, turning and leering at Jack, many of them with looks of disbelief and shock. Jack wasn’t sure if it was because he was there, or because of the disheveled and waterlogged appearance he held. Grunts and threatening noises came from behind the girl.

“Yeah, well why don’t you just go on back in there and destroy some more lives, and ruin some more families, you fucking pig. You’re like parasites! You’ve been sucking our blood for so long you’ve almost bled us dry. So go on…go and finish the job! You sack of shit!” She leaned back and then spit in his face, her saliva landing on his cheek. Jack stood there looking at the woman while the rain washed the white foam away and onto the concrete beneath him. The woman’s face had contorted, as well as the faces of those around her, into masks of glaring disapproval, while the noise that emanated from their mouths coalesced into a drone of boo’s, hisses, threats, and demands for his departure. He turned and neared the crosswalk that would take him across the bustling two lane road, stopping in between one of the officers and the crossing signal that displayed the rough likeness of a hand in a brilliant orange light that stood out against the soggy gray everywhere else. The officer leaned in to Jack and muttered.

“Your time is going to come.” he said with a hard gaze and a sneer. Jack turned to face him.

“No, it’s not. It’s already here.” he said. The hand on the signal across the street still displayed the orange hand, but Jack stepped out into the street anyway. Automobiles came screeching to a halt and a hail of horns blaring and curses rose behind him as he stepped onto the sidewalk on the other side. He turned to see people leaning out of their car windows, yelling gibberish and making gestures at him. He knew that they were supposed to be rude gestures, and that they were meant to indicate anger. Jack chuckled to himself and blinked some of the rain from his eyes. He turned back towards the building that held his employer and approached the massive and ornate heavy glass door, appointed with gold and silver. A red light shone from a small panel beside the door. Jack stopped, looked at the panel, and shook his head. He reached into the pocket of his topcoat and withdrew a slim plastic card with a blue logo on it. He laid the card against the panel and the light changed from red to green. He heard a very loud click as the locking mechanism for the door disengaged. He grabbed the gold plated handle and swung the heavy door open, feeling the cams click in to assist with the door’s motion. The sounds of the mob outside slowly subsided as the door swung shut, and the silence of the building’s lobby settled upon him. He stood in a vast, open space that glowed with soft tans and warm wood textures that reflected the gray white light outside from their laminated surface. A vaulted ceiling stood above him, carved from white marble and so tall that Jack had to crane his neck as far back as it would stretch to see the top. Ceramic tiles arranged in patterns that were supposed to be pleasing and intricate covered the floor. A pinkish-orange glow came from the elaborate sconce lights that stood in perfect rows all around him. To his left was a series of small offices, the glass doors of which were stamped with elaborate script revealing the names and occupations of their inhabitants. Directly opposite the entranceway was a row of four heavy doors where the structure’s elevators could be accessed. Jack heard a voice call to him from his left, cracking the silence like a metal plate smashing to the marbled floor.

“Man, you look like hell. You work here, right? How did you get in?” said a younger man with shiny black hair, sitting behind an information kiosk.

“I have to go to work.” Jack said, holding up the security card he used to gain entrance to the building.

“If so, man, you’re probably pretty late from lunch…it’s two thirty.” the young man said pointing up at a massive clock that was built into the wall above the elevator. The hands and numbers were aligned again, differently than they had been before. Jack walked forward and regarded the display.

“Two thirty what?” he muttered.

“Its two thirty nine to be precise…are you okay? Do you need to go see a doctor or something?”

“I have to go to work.” Jack repeated, keeping his eyes on the massive clock as he shuffled forward, his clothes dripping the rain they had collected from outside onto the floor and swishing as he stepped up to the elevator and pressed the button pointing up. The button lit up with a reassuring white light, and the display above the elevator signaled that the car was descending from the fortieth floor. From behind him, he heard the young man pick up a telephone handset and punch numbers into the receiver. The words he spoke were barely audible to Jack, who watched the numbers indicating the descent of the elevator car with a glazed detachment. The door bulged slightly as the car landed in place and the doors slid open with a inoffensive chime. Jack stepped into the car and without thought pushed the button for the fortieth floor. There were several buttons above the one he pushed, scaling to a maximum height of fifty nine floors. Jack stood in the center of the car, hearing the water spit from his clothes onto the floor of the elevator car and its’s hum as it rose in the shaft. Soft music sounded from speakers placed all around him, the toneless female singer lamenting a broken heart and the loss of a love. No effect was to be had on Jack, who stood in the center of the car waiting for the door to open. As each floor passed, Jack wondered if the door would stop unexpectedly at an earlier floor to allow someone else to enter, someone who needed to ascend into a higher floor of the building. He quickly dismissed that thought. There would be nobody who needed to do so. Everyone was at work, where they had been placed. Nobody would need to go higher.

As expected, the car reached the fortieth floor with no interruption. The car halted, and the same inoffensive chime sounded as the door slid open. Jack stepped out of the car, leaving the lamenting soft rock singer to her pain as the door closed behind him. Sprawled before him were rows of cubicles and desks, all of which were situated around a central cluster of computers and standing work stations. Small monitors were everywhere, each displaying faces babbling what appeared to Jack to be more incomprehensible gibberish. He understood the words, but their importance was completely lost to him now. Beneath the faces on the screens, near the bottom, were rows of numbers and arrows sliding from right to left. Jack turned to his right and walked down a corridor between the pristine, marbled white wall containing the elevator accesses, and a bank of cubicles, their walls covered with maroon carpeting, each one high enough to give the occupant the illusion of their own space, but low enough to allow anyone who cared to look to deprive them of their privacy. As he walked, Jack was assailed by the sound of people chattering on their phones, the sound rising like a horde of angry locusts, turning their teeth to that which they would devour. Telephones rang and buzzed, fingers clattered with tranced repetition over identical keyboards. All of their energy and effort was channeled to the nerve cluster in the center of the room, and Jack saw the men there, white, balding men, each wearing identical blue jackets, clones of each other, prostrating themselves before the central mechanism. They punched buttons, dashed notes and calculation onto bits of paper, each of them enthralled with utter devotion, seeking omen and portent from the monitors they communed with, prayerfully. Some were even on their knees, reaching up to push numbers of contrition into brightly colored keypads. 

Jack passed the nerve cluster in the center, the moans and undulations of the devoted caught up in their ecstasy temporarily drowning out the hungry hiss of the locusts behind him. He passed more cubicles, arrayed in the same unflinching manner as those he encountered upon exiting the elevator on the other side of the nerve center. Beyond that were the offices, the places where those who’s work was important enough for them to deserve real privacy were stationed. The offices stood along a central hallway, the walls of which were constructed of a shiny dark wood. The doors stood on either side of the hallway, separated by a dark green carpet that extended from the tiled floor of the sanctuary he was just leaving to an open area at the end of the hallway that contained a lounge that was currently empty, but held massive leather couches, divans and chairs, ficus trees and other hearty plant life. The far wall was constructed of large panes of glass, tinted to relieve the eye from the sun’s glare. One of the panes contained a door that opened out onto a lavish, concrete deck that looked out over the city. The vista was obscured today by the rain and fog, but Jack recalled several occasions where he had went out onto that deck, usually with a co-worker, to sip brandy or some other alcohol while smoking a celebratory cigar of some import or another. The memory of the warm sun on his face, the laughter and the feelings of triumph and accomplishment they were associated with no longer moved him. He became aware of a presence standing before him as he entered the carpeted hall, his clothing still dripping, leaving small, dark dots in the fabric. It was his boss, a wiry man with shiny black hair and a royal blue tie knotted around a white collar, starched stiff. A small pin of the American flag fastened the length of his necktie together.

“Holy shit, Jack. Are you okay? What happened to you this morning? We were all worried about you!”

“I’m at work now.” Jack said.

“Yeah, but Jesus Christ. You look like you’ve been out in the rain for hours! Come into my office, we’ll get you cleaned up.” The boss walked up the hallway and opened a door on the right side, indicating that Jack should go inside. Jack stepped into the office, noticing how the carpet did not change, and neither did the appearance of the shiny black wood. All of the furniture in the boss’s office was constructed of similar material. Lamps stood on small side and end tables as well as from a large, round, sculpted glass fixture above the center of the room. A massive desk sat beneath it, and a large window opened onto the vista of gray rain, fog, and lesser spires that scattered the dreary landscape. The boss emerged from a room off to the side, the private restroom his position had rewarded him with. 

“Take off your coat and let me hang it up in here.” The boss said, extending a wooden coat hanger to Jack. Jack fumbled with the buttons of his waterlogged topcoat, and then draped it over the hangar and handed it to his boss, who stepped back into the restroom and hung the coat from a peg on the rear side of the door. “Good thing that room has a tile floor. I’ll make sure that the cleaning service knows to mop that room well tonight, you know, to get rid of the mud and such.” When the boss came out of the room again he held a large white towel that he offered to Jack. “Dry yourself off and have a seat.” Jack began to work the towel from his head downward, with mechanical, uncaring motions. After a few such strokes, he then draped the soaked towel over the back of one of the leather chairs that sat before the desk in the center of the room. The boss, who was on his way to sit behind the desk in a gigantic leather covered chair groaned, and changed his course to snap up the towel and took it back into the restroom. Jack heard it fall into the sink with a squish. The boss strode out of the restroom, nearly dashing to his seat as Jack settled into one of the chairs. The wet leather squeaked. After taking his own seat, the boss snatched up a pen and began to twist it between the fingers of both hands as he reclined.

“So what happened to you this morning? You missed the big meeting with the European clients, you know, the big one. I thought you had nailed that deal down and just had to get them to sign. I had to do it all because you weren’t here. The good news is they signed the contract, but the bad news is that I don’t think you’ll be getting the commission, because I had to work out the final details.” the boss said.

Jack simply stared at him. The boss continued.

“So what was it? Did you car break down somewhere? I told you not to get an Audi. They go to shit too fast. You should have listened to me and got a Benz. They last, at least until you want to get a new one.” The boss regarded Jack for a minute, placing the end of the pen against his chin. He continued speaking.

 “You were out in the rain for a long time. Couldn’t you have gotten a taxi? You should have called us and let us know that something was wrong. It’s not like you, Jack.” Jack continued to sit silently, staring at his boss. After a few minutes of a silence caused the boss’s eyes to narrow, he swiveled his chair around to where a mini-bar sat behind him.

“Let’s have a drink.”, he said as he turned the chair. He bent down and opened the bar, and pulled out two small bottles of amber liquid, a gold and red label attached to each. He swiveled the chair around again, holding two small glasses in one hand and the bottles in the other. He placed the glasses and bottles on the table, and poured the entire contents of one of the bottles into a glass and sat it across from Jack. “You don’t take rocks, right? You take it straight, just like me.” He smiled behind narrowed eyes at Jack, who continued to sit without motion. The boss poured the other bottle into a glass and took a sip. He continued speaking. Jack’s glass remained on the table, untouched.

“Come on, Jack. What’s wrong with you? Is it woman trouble? Kid trouble? Is Kate okay? What about your little girl? What’s her name…Kendra?”

“There is no wife, no child.” Jack finally spoke. “Those are just ideas.” The boss leaned back in his chair and held the glass to his lips. He sipped again and leaned forward.

“You sure you’re okay, Jack? I’ve known Kate and Kendra for as long as you’ve worked here. They come to our Christmas party every year. Is something wrong with them, are they okay?”

“They don’t exist. There’s no such thing as a wife or a child. Those are just ideas. It’s all just an idea. An idea that we force each other to accept, and we spend all our energy trying to convince ourselves of. All of it. None of it is real.” 

The boss sat his drink down on a small coaster on the shiny wooden desktop. He leaned forward and chortled.

“Come on man, you’re just messing with me. Seriously, what's going on.”

Jack stared his boss in the eye.

“None of this is real. It’s all just ideas that we’ve convinced ourselves and each other into believing are the best ones. There are no best ones.”

“Jack, do you want to keep your job here?” The boss said.

“Job?”

“Yeah, you know that thing you do that we pay you for. Money. Real money, to support your wife and kid. To provide for yourself, your family.”

Jack sighed, then spoke.

“What you call a family is just what happens when genetic machines mix their DNA with each other and make another genetic machine. That’s all we are. That’s all it is. Everything else is just a dream to keep us from seeing that. From the beginning to the end. All we do is make more little machines just like us, that are going to suffer and die, just like us, so that they can keep making little machines that are going to suffer and die. That’s why we dream. To distract us from the truth. The truth is suffering and death, without end.”

Jack’s boss picked up his drink again and reclined in his chair.

“Jack, that sounds pretty grisly. What is this, some kind of Buddhist shit? Did you join a cult or something? What was it he said.” He took a strong sip from the glass. “‘All being is suffering’ or something like that?”

Jack met his boss’s gaze with an unwavering stare.

“It’s not just suffering. It’s suffering with no purpose. It’s meaningless suffering.”

“And what about us, Jack. Our minds, our ideas, our hopes, our accomplishments. What are those?”

Jack’s eyes strayed to an elaborately carved bookcase behind his boss. On one of the shelves was a photograph of the boss standing next to a woman, with three children sitting before them, all of them wearing brightly colored fabrics and smiles. The smallest child was a girl, her blond hair tied up with ribbons.

“Ghosts.” Jack said. 

His boss leaned forward.

“Jack, look. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you clearly need some help. Tell you what. You go out into the lounge there and have the bartender get you something to drink and have a seat. I’ll call some people and we’ll see if we can get you some help.” The boss’s eyes widened slightly. “Jack, if I call your house right now, will anyone answer?” he said, reaching for a telephone with fingers that had begun to tremble.

“No. There is nobody there.” Jack said.

The boss’s hands shook harder as he picked up the handset and punched three buttons in succession 

“Yeah, you just go on out into the lounge there, and I’ll call some people to come and take you someplace where you can get some help.” While Jack continued to sit, his boss spoke into the handset.

“Yeah, Tom? Yeah, look, do me a favor and send someone from security up here to escort a guy out of here. He needs to go to the hospital, I think…and they may need the police as well. I don’t know all the details. Just get someone up here, now.”

The boss rose from his seat, his hands still shaking and walked to the office door. He opened it, the handle rattling.

“Come on now, Jack. Let’s get you someplace where you can lie down for a bit. Come on.”

Jack rose from his seat, leaving behind small beads of water and mud on the brown leather. He stepped out the door and to the right, down the short distance to the lounge. Spanning the entire wall to his left was a bar, with mirrors and lights reflecting from a hundred bottles of variously colored spirits. Behind the bar was a young man wearing a maroon vest, scribbling notes onto a notepad while he read information from a cash register monitor. The young man looked up at Jack, who continued to walk through the center of the lobby.

“Whoa.” said the bartender. Behind Jack came his boss, who motioned to the bartender to keep his distance while speaking to him.

“Why don’t you make a vodka tonic for Jack here.” The boss said. “Jack, go ahead and have a seat.” Far behind them, from the wall housing the elevator shafts a chime sounded. The boss turned and saw two men exiting the elevator, both of them dressed in black with shining metal badges on their chests. They began to make their way through the web of cubicles to the office area. Jack continued walking however, through the center of the lounge to the door which led outside.

“Jack, come on back, man. You don’t want to go out there.” his boss said.

As if he heard nothing, Jack approached the door and swung it open. The sound of the rain pounding the concrete and metal patio flooded the lounge along with the humidity, sweeping a chill inside that caused the windows surrounding the door to slowly haze, obstructing the view through the door and all the windows as Jack stepped outside.

“Oh shit.” said the bartender, who ran down to the end of the bar and flung the small barricade up to let him out. Jack’s boss stood in the lounge, waiting for the security officers to reach him before following the bartender out the door.

Once outside, they saw Jack standing on the top of the five foot concrete wall that enclosed the patio area. A black metal bench stood beneath him, the footprints he left behind using it to climb onto the partition already being obliterated. Rain fell hard all around them, ricocheting from the surface of the metal tables and chairs that stood there, and streaming from Jack’s clothing as he stood there looking to the ground, forty stories beneath him. The bartender was there too, his white shirt and hair soaked through already, even though he’d only been out in the rain a few seconds. The boss and the security escort both remained under an awning that covered the outside wall of the lounge, safe from the deluge.

“Man, don’t do it!” the bartender shouted, moving closer to the wall. “It’s not worth it! Come on down! You don’t have to do this!”

One of the security men moved forward into the rain, moving to the side opposite the bartender.

“Yeah, buddy. Come on back down down here. It’s all going to be okay.” the security man said.

“Jack!” yelled his boss from under the awning. “You’re the best fund manager we’ve ever had here! We need you! Come on down from there, we’ll get you some help! Whatever it is, it can be fixed.”

Jack turned his gaze from the ground and looked at the bartender, the gray rain streaming down his face. 

“Sweet dreams.” Jack said, staring the bartender in the eye as he pitched over the edge. As he disappeared from sight, the bartender gasped and turned, head in his hands, muttering.

“Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god.” was all the young man could say.

“Shit.” said the security man, who pulled a two way radio from his belt. “Lobby four, this is lobby one, do you copy over?”

“Lobby four, over.”

“Yeah, you need to go check the west side of the building, along the street. We’ve had a jumper.” The security men turned and entered the building again, leaving the boss and the bartender on the patio. The bartender looked at the boss.

“Oh my god. Did you see that? Oh my god. Why would someone do that? He worked for you, right?”

“He did.” The boss said.

“Well…what happened? Why did he do that?”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t think he’d do it. Oh well.” the boss said.

“Oh well? That’s all you can say? You knew that guy. You said he was your best.”

“Everybody is replaceable. I’ll have his spot filled before the week is out.” The boss said. He turned, opened the door to the lounge and strode back to his office, leaving the bartender out in the rain.