Page 1 of The Centaur’s Impulse

The Centaur’s Impulse: AJ

Seventh hole. I sliced it deep into the trees.

I’d barely slept. That was the real answer. The other excuses, the wind, my grip, and the new driver, were the ones I’d been saying out loud all morning because they were easier and didn’t require an explanation.

“AJ.” Kavi’s voice behind me, careful. “Come on, man.”

“I saw it.”

“You want a mulligan?”

“No.”

“You should take a mulligan.”

“I said no, Kavi.”

I swung the driver in a tight arc at my side. My shoulders were locked up. My back was locked up. My grip felt off in a way I couldn’t diagnose. Four hours of sleep the night before, three the night before that, and it was showing up in everything now. Not just my swing. Everything.

I dropped another ball on the tee.

This one didn’t slice. This one hooked. Hard. Into the rough on the other side of the fairway.

“Great,” I said. “Cool.”

Kavi didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he sat his driver down, walked over, and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Let’s just walk to the ball,” he said. “Take a beat. Talk on the way.”

I let him steer me toward the cart path.

Kavi Rajan had been my mentor before he was my board member, and before he was my friend. By this point in my life, he was pretty much my best friend. My only friend. He’d helped lead our company out of the economic turmoil that was the late two-thousands when the market collapsed. And he was there again when lockdowns forced us to restructure our entire way of doing business. He was there through the backlash, the tarrifs, and the bullshit that seemed to plague us at every corner. He was fifty-four now. Silver at the temples. He moved like a man who’d been through hell and found his way out with a smile on his face.

I still didn’t understand how he did it. He’d never told me his story. I’d never asked. But he’d found something. I could tell.

The afternoon light was doing that low gold October thing that makes everything look like it belongs in a magazine. The fairway was too green, the trees were going red at the edges of their leaves, and the sky was a clean cold blue. It was a beautiful day. Hell, I’d even chosen to be here instead of working.

And I wasn’t enjoying any of it.

Anything and everything else seemed to occupy my thoughts besides enjoying my well-deserved break. The board deck from Wednesday was in my head. I wondered whether Nadia had signed off on the revised metrics or not. The term sheet from the strategies team that had come in Thursday night, and I still hadn’t had a chance to look at it. There were at least seventeen new unread emails piled up in my inbox in the past hour I’d been on the course. Not because anything from my company was urgent on a Saturday morning. But because I’d built the company that way, and the people who worked for me had learned to match my drive. But now, at the age of thirty-nine, I was running out of steam.

“AJ,” Kavi said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“When’s the last time you took a vacation?”

“I took a vacation in June,” I said automatically.

“You took a long weekend in June. You worked through most of it. Chidi told me.”

I scoffed. “Chidi is a snitch.”

“Chidi is your COO. He is legally required to be a snitch about the fact that you don’t sleep.” Kavi glanced at me. “When’s the last time you took a real one? A week or more?”

I had to think about it. That surprised me a little. I had to go back a lot further than I expected.

“Bali,” I said. “Right after we closed on that new location.”