Leo viewed the organizational chart of Goldman-Sachs not as a map of a company, but as a mountain to be climbed. He was an analyst in the first-year pool, one of a hundred identical young men in identical navy suits, all fighting for a spot in the Associate program.

To Leo, the corporate ladder was a form of asceticism. He believed that to reach the top, one had to shed the "excess weight" of humanity.

In his first year, he shed his sleep. He learned to function on four hours of caffeine and adrenaline, treating his body as a machine that existed only to produce flawless spreadsheets.

In his second year, he shed his empathy. He learned that the fastest way to rise was to identify the weaknesses of his peers and use them as stepping stones. He didn't do it out of malice; he did it out of a cold, mathematical necessity. If there were ten spots and a hundred candidates, nine hundred people had to lose.

By the time he became a Vice President, he had shed his family. He stopped calling his mother, ignored his sister's wedding, and let his long-term girlfriend walk away when she told him that he had become "a hollow shell of a man."

"I'm not hollow," Leo had told himself, staring at the skyline from his 40th-floor office. "I'm streamlined."

He spent a decade in this state of constant subtraction. He became a master of the "corporate void"—the ability to say everything and mean nothing, to be perfectly agreeable while calculating the exact moment to betray. He was a ghost in the machine, a man who had optimized every second of his existence for the sole purpose of upward mobility.

Finally, the day arrived. The board of directors called him into the penthouse office. He was being promoted to Managing Director, the highest tier of the firm.

Leo stepped into the office. It was a vast, circular room with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. The view was breathtaking; the entire city of New York lay beneath him, a miniature world of ants and electricity.

He waited for the feeling of triumph. He waited for the rush of victory, the sense of completion.

But there was nothing.

He looked at his hands and realized he couldn't feel the texture of the mahogany table. He looked at the Managing Director, a man who had been in the position for twenty years, and saw a mirror. The man's eyes were not eyes; they were two gray stones, devoid of any spark of life.

Leo realized that the "top" was not a destination, but a state of total erasure. He had climbed the infinite staircase by cutting away pieces of himself—his love, his guilt, his joy, his grief—until there was nothing left to climb.

He had reached the summit, and he found that he was no longer a man capable of enjoying the view. He was just a perfectly optimized void, sitting in a glass box, staring at a world he no longer knew how to feel.

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