On Tuesday, Vadim was fired. It was done with the grace of a guillotine: swift, cold, and under a “thanks for your cooperation.”

Vadim walked outside. November slapped his face with a wet rag. His phone buzzed in his pocket - his wife asking him to buy peas and mayo. Vadim looked at the screen. He was thirty-eight, he had a mortgage on a concrete box in an anthill, and severance pay that would be just enough to drink himself to death like a gentleman, meaning cognac, not vodka.

- The end, - Vadim told the puddle. The puddle shivered in the wind.

He didn’t take the metro. He walked, out of spite for the universe. In an alley that smelled of feline hopelessness, he slipped on someone’s spit (metaphorically, but actually on black ice) and crashed down. The crunch in his ankle sounded like a starting pistol.

Emergency room. A line of life-battered gladiators. Vadim sat with his pant leg rolled up and hated the world.

- Fracture, - the doctor said matter-of-factly, looking at the X-ray like a business lunch menu. - Cast for a month.

Vadim returned home by taxi. His wife, seeing the cast, forgot about the peas. She cried. Vadim lay on the couch, stared at the ceiling, and thought that rock bottom had been breached. He was unemployed, he was crippled, he was dead weight.

Two days later, a former colleague called.

- Did you hear?

- What?

- They raided the office. Financial crimes unit. Took everything, including the coffee machine. The CEO’s locked up, the CFO’s on the run. Everyone who was on payroll as of Tuesday is being dragged in for questioning as accomplices. When did you leave?

- At lunch.

- Lucky son of a bitch. You weren’t on the list anymore.

Vadim hung up. His heart was pounding into the cast.

His wife brought tea.

- How terrible, - she said about the fracture.

- It’s not terrible, - Vadim whispered, feeling goosebumps run down his spine. - It’s an alibi.

He stayed home for a month. His leg ached. He started learning Spanish out of boredom. Just because, out of spite. “La cuenta, por favor.”

They removed the cast. Vadim stepped outside. Sunshine. Freedom. He felt chosen. Neo from the Matrix, dodging bullets.

He went into a coffee shop. The barista smiled. Vadim smiled back with his new, victorious grin.

- Uno café, - he joked.

A man at the next table looked up.

- Hablas español?

Turned out, the man needed an assistant for a project in Valencia. Urgently. Yesterday. And his translator had gotten sick.

Vadim knew three phrases. But the man didn’t need grammar, he needed someone who wouldn’t bail. And Vadim looked like a man kissed by God.

A week later, he was in Spain.

Warmth. Sea. Salary in euros. His wife was packing to fly out to him.

Vadim stood on the terrace, drinking rioja and watching the sunset.

- There it is, - he said. - Happiness. Absolute, pure, distilled. Thank you, fracture. Thank you, layoff. I’m the king of the world.

That same evening he went swimming. Night beach. Romance.

He stepped on a sea urchin.

The spine went deep. Inflammation started. Insurance hadn’t been finalized yet.

They put him in a local clinic. The medical bill devoured all his savings.

While he was laid up with fever, the project collapsed. The investor changed his mind. The guy from the coffee shop vanished without paying.

Vadim was discharged. No money. No ticket. Visa expiring.

He sat on a curb in a beautiful foreign country. Tanned people walked by.

- You bastard, - Vadim told the sky. - What for? You gave me candy with a razor blade inside.

He called his wife.

- Don’t come. Everything collapsed.

- Vadim… - his wife’s voice trembled. - I’m not coming. I met someone else. While you were playing Spaniard over there. He’s a dentist. He has stability. I’m sorry.

Vadim was alone. In Valencia. No money, no wife, with a bad leg.

He walked to the port. To look at ships and think about the easiest way to drown.

They were loading crates of oranges there. A loader, a sweaty Moroccan, dropped a crate. Oranges rolled across the concrete.

Vadim, automatically, kicked one back. Smoothly. Left foot, the healthy one.

- Hey! - the foreman shouted. - Strong legs. Need work?

Vadim looked at his hands. Middle-management hands. Hands that had only held a mouse and a wine glass.

- Si, - he said.

He hauled crates for three months. He lost twenty-two pounds. He tanned dark as night. His muscles became like ropes. In his head, where deadlines and KPIs used to swarm, there was a ringing emptiness.

He slept like the dead. He ate bread with olive oil, and it tasted better than foie gras.

One evening he sat by the water. A tourist approached him. Russian. Lost.

- Excuse me, do you know where Columbus Street is?

Vadim looked at her. She wore an expensive dress, carried an expensive phone, and had the eyes of a beaten dog. The same dog he’d been six months ago.

- I do, - he said. - But you don’t need to go there.

- Why not?

- Because you’re looking for happiness there. And there are only shops.

She sat down next to him. They talked until dawn. She turned out to be the owner of a chain of clinics. The same one his dentist had left for.

- You’re strange, - she said in the morning. - You’re a loader, but you talk like a director.

- I was a director, - Vadim smiled, tossing an orange. - Now I just live.

She took him back. Not as a husband. As a partner. They started a small business. No offices. A farm. Goats. Cheese.

A year passed.

Vadim stood in rubber boots in the middle of manure. It stank terribly. Masha the goat was chewing his sleeve.

The bank account was frozen due to a tax office error. The barn roof was leaking.

Vadim wiped sweat from his forehead.

Old Vadim would already be having a meltdown. Old Vadim would already be building charts: “How We’ll Dig Out of This Shit” or “Why We’ll Die in Poverty.”

Vadim looked at the hole in the roof. Through it you could see the sky. Gray, heavy, pre-storm.

The phone rang. Tax office? Or maybe a customer for a batch of cheese? Or his ex-wife wanting to come back?

Vadim didn’t know.

He stood ankle-deep in shit, smelling the storm and goat’s milk.

There was a coin in his pocket. Heads or tails? Good or bad?

He pulled out the coin and, winding up, hurled it far into the bushes.

- Screw it, - Vadim said.

And went to milk the goat.