Good Property

Chapter One

The fluorescent lights in the office always hummed a half-second too long before they caught, and every morning Nani stood under them counting the flicker like it meant something. Three blinks and the day would be fine. Four, and it wouldn't.
Today it was five.
He didn't believe in omens. He believed in numbers, in spreadsheets that balanced or didn't, in the particular ache behind his eyes that told him exactly how many hours it had been since his last hit - fourteen, going on fifteen - and in the fact that nobody at this company had ever once asked him how he was doing and actually waited for the answer.
"Nani, the Hendricks report?" His supervisor didn't even look up from her monitor.
"Sending it now." He wasn't. It sat half-finished in a tab he hadn't touched since lunch, but he'd have it done in twenty minutes, because he always did. That was the trick of it - you could be unraveling completely and as long as the numbers came in on time, nobody looked twice. Competence was its own kind of camouflage.
He liked his desk. Liked the small, stupid order of it - pens in a cup, a sticky note pad squared to the corner, a photo of no one, because he didn't have anyone to put there. His mother hadn't spoken to him in four years. His father had stopped being a person he thought about around the same time. He had colleagues who said good morning and never asked follow-up questions, and that suited him, mostly, because follow-up questions led places he didn't want to go.
The loneliness didn't announce itself loudly. It just sat under everything, low and constant, like a second heartbeat he'd stopped noticing until the office went quiet and he was the only one left at 6 p.m., packing up a bag for an apartment that would be exactly as empty as he left it.
His phone buzzed as he was locking his desk drawer.
Unknown: you still good for tonight
Not a question. Never a question, with Podd. Nani's thumb hovered over the screen for a second too long before he typed back.
yeah. same place?
Unknown: usual spot. bring what you owe or bring a plan
He read it twice. Bring what you owe or bring a plan. Podd didn't usually bother spelling it out like that - normally it was just an address, a time, the transaction itself wordless and efficient. This felt like a warning dressed up as a reminder, and Nani told himself it wasn't, because thinking otherwise meant admitting how bad it had actually gotten.
Two hundred thousand baht. He didn't let himself do the math on it often, because when he did, the number stopped being a number and started being a wall with no door in it. He'd been telling himself for three weeks that he'd figure something out - an advance from work he couldn't ask for without questions, a loan he had no collateral for, a version of himself six months ago who might have known how to claw out of this before it became a hole he couldn't see the top of.
Instead he had a plan that wasn't really a plan. He'd talk to Podd. Explain. Offer a payment schedule, a percentage every month, something. Podd wasn't unreasonable, not exactly - a little cold, sure, but they'd known each other three years, ever since a party where Nani had been too shy to talk to anyone and Podd had been the only person who hadn't needed him to.
That counted for something. It had to count for something.
He took the long way to the train, past the noodle stall where the old woman always gave him extra chili without asking, past the little shrine tucked between two shophouses where he sometimes stopped, not because he believed, but because stopping felt like doing something other than moving toward the thing he was moving toward. Tonight he didn't stop. His hands wouldn't stay still in his pockets, and the ache behind his eyes had sharpened into something with teeth, and underneath the fear of the debt was the uglier, more honest fear - that he needed a hit more than he needed to survive the conversation about how he'd pay for the last one.
He hated himself a little for that. He hated himself for a lot of things, quietly, in a register no one else could hear, and had gotten so used to the sound of it that silence felt stranger than the self-loathing did.
The meeting spot was an underground parking garage two train stops from his apartment, close enough to walk home from if things went well, close enough to disappear from if they didn't. Podd was already there when he arrived, leaning against a black car with two men Nani didn't recognize standing a little too still behind him.
That should have told him something. He let himself not notice.
"Nani." Podd's voice was flat, pleasant in the specific way that meant nothing good. "You look like shit."
"Long day." He tried for casual and heard how it cracked halfway through. "Listen - about the money. I know I'm behind, I know, but if we could work something out, even a monthly-"
"We had an agreement." Podd wasn't smiling anymore, hadn't been for a while, Nani realized, maybe hadn't been smiling since before Nani even said hello. "You don't get to renegotiate an agreement because you ran out of ways to keep it."
"I'm not trying to get out of it. I'm trying to actually pay it, Podd, please, if you'd just-"
"This isn't a conversation." One of the men behind Podd shifted his weight, and something in Nani's stomach dropped through the floor. "This is business. You understand business, right? Company man?" The words landed like they were meant to cut, and they did. "You don't pay, there's a cost. That's not cruelty. That's just how it works."
"Podd-"
"Two hundred K doesn't disappear because you asked nicely."
Nani took a step back before he'd decided to, and that was the moment - he understood it even as it was happening, the way you understand you're about to fall before your body actually hits the ground - that this had never been a negotiation. He'd walked in already having lost.
The first hit caught him across the jaw and the world tilted sideways, sound going thin and far away, and somewhere in the part of his mind that hadn't gone completely white with pain, he thought, almost calmly: of course. Of course it was going to be like this.
He didn't fight back. He'd never been built for fighting back - that had never been the shape his survival took. He curled instead, arms over his head, and let it happen, and the last coherent thought he had before everything folded into a single dark, ringing note was that no one, anywhere, was going to come looking for him tonight. Or tomorrow. Or after that.
He had made himself very easy to lose.