His boss's office exuded a cold, masculine scent. Expensive Arabica coffee, bergamot perfume, and air-conditioning forced to work at maximum capacity. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, Jakarta looked that afternoon like a gray smear beneath the blaze of the midsummer sun. Humid. Suffocating.
Arka watched a speck of dust float across a beam of light at the end of his boss's mahogany desk. It drifted and slowly spun, with no choice but to follow the current of air from the AC. Just like him.
"You understand, right, Ka?"
Mr. Hendra's voice slid out flat. Neat. Without a trace of the warmth left over from the five years they'd spent handling dead-end projects at this office. The middle-aged man pushed a sheet of thick printer paper across the desk. There was no red folder. No written notice three weeks in advance as required by Human Resources regulations. Just one clean, spotless white sheet with ten-thousand-rupiah stamp duty that hadn't yet received its official stamp.
Arka didn't answer. His eyes fixed on the seventh line of the letter. His younger cousin's name was there—Rian. More precisely, there was falsified financial reporting, a fictitious fund transfer to a holding account under Arka's name, and a series of confirmation emails sent from the IP address of his own work computer.
Rian. His mother's younger sister's son. A twenty-four-year-old man who, two months ago, had begged and cried at Arka's rented room after getting buried in gambling debt and online loans. Rian, whom Arka had fed leftover boxed rice that night, whom he'd let sleep on his narrow sofa, and whom he'd given access to his work laptop because Rian claimed he needed to write a résumé to apply for jobs.
It turned out the résumé Rian had written was the road to Arka's death.
"Rian is your own cousin, Ka," Hendra said, his voice softening as he adopted the sympathetic tone executives usually used when cutting operating budgets. "He came to the internal audit last week. He brought the transaction logs. He said you threatened him if he refused to help forge the fund-disbursement signature for the Cikarang project. He even brought proof of the chat history from your number."
Arka wet his cracked lips. The salty taste of blood mingled with the aftertaste of the cheap instant coffee he'd had at five that morning. "My number was cloned, Mr. Hendra."
"Don't make this complicated."
"The signature—"
"Your own family said so," Hendra cut in quickly. His fingers tapped the desktop. Tap. Tap. Tap. "Your aunt... Rian's biological mother. She called me two days ago. She was crying as she said you'd changed lately. She said you needed quick cash to pay off personal debts. She said you'd gotten greedy ever since you learned about your late maternal grandfather's land certificate in Bogor."
Land certificate.
The words triggered a loud clang inside Arka's head. Like scrap metal struck by a sledgehammer.
Two hectares of land in Parung. The only inheritance from his maternal grandfather that hadn't been sold when the economic crisis spread. The only reason Arka had survived the scorn of his extended family for the past ten years. His grandfather had verbally asked that it be written in his old notebook that the land was meant for Arka, in compensation for the education costs his biological parents had never paid. But the old note had no legal force. And now, by dragging Arka into a corporate embezzlement case, his extended family had a legitimate reason to strike his name from the inheritance. The convicted son. The office con artist. The parasite.
"Mr. Hendra," Arka said. His voice cracked in his throat. Dry. "Can you check the CCTV footage from my room on Friday night two weeks ago?"
Hendra let out a long sigh. He leaned back in his leather chair, which gave a soft creak. "This building was having its network renovated that night, Ka. All the servers were down from eight p.m. to six in the morning. You know that. You were the one who signed the power-shutdown report."
Arka closed his eyes.
Every puzzle piece fell into place with horrifying obedience. Rian asking when the building's network maintenance was scheduled. Rian pretending he'd forgotten his rented-room key so he had to come work late with Arka. Rian fetching him a drink while Arka lay slumped in exhaustion at his desk.
It had all been planned. Meticulously. And Arka, with his heart laid bare in its constant desire to be a "good person," had opened the door for his own executioner.
"You have two choices." Hendra leaned forward. The bergamot perfume grew sharper, stabbing Arka's nostrils until he felt nauseated. "You sign this resignation letter. No severance pay for your years of service. But I'll keep the case at the internal level. No police. No news reports. Your name stays clean in public, though you can't use me as a job reference."
"The second choice?"
"I call security right now. The audit documents go straight to Polda Metro Jaya before lunch."
The sun outside shifted slightly. Its light now struck Arka's face directly. Scorching. Burning the pores of his sleep-deprived, pallid skin. Beneath the desk, the fingers of Arka's left hand gripped the fabric of his cheap slacks so tightly that his nails turned white. He wanted to rise. A wild urge pressed him to grab the thick glass ashtray from Hendra's desk and smash it into the sanctimonious middle-aged man's face. He wanted to scream, curse, and destroy every manufactured semblance of order in the room.
But Arka didn't move.
He was paralyzed.
A cold sensation closed around his chest. Not the refreshing kind of cold, but the cold felt by an animal carcass on the side of the road before it's covered with coarse sand. He had always believed in karma. He had always believed that if he gave in, if he held back his anger, if he forgave his cousin for stealing his money, if he let his aunt take the larger share of the food at family gatherings, then the universe would repay him with peace.
That peace never came. All that came was a harder stomp.
"A pen," Arka whispered.
Hendra gave him a faint smile. A smile loaded with meaning. He slid a gold-tipped pen toward Arka.
Arka's hand trembled as he gripped the pen's metal barrel. Cold. Heavy. He pressed its tip to the paper. Black ink flowed and seeped into the fibers, forming the characters of his name: Arka Danuar.
The signature was done.
"Thank you for your understanding, Ka," Hendra said, standing and extending his hand.
Arka didn't take it. He stood. His knees felt unsteady, like the hinges of an old, rusted door that had lost its pins. He turned without saying a word.
As he stepped out of the air-conditioned room, the hot air of the office corridor rushed at him, burning. Several of his coworkers—people Arka had once helped finish their monthly reports when their children were sick, people he'd lent money to without interest—suddenly became very busy staring at their own monitor screens. Not one pair of eyes met his. No one asked what had happened.
They already knew. Gossip traveled faster than the truth in a high-rise building like this.
Arka walked to his desk. On the gray Formica surface sat a used instant-noodle box prepared by the cleaning staff. His belongings had already been packed inside: a ceramic mug he'd received as a gift at a company event three years ago, a small succulent that had dried up and died after he forgot to water it the previous week, several cheap pens, and a thick wooden-framed photograph.
A photo of him with his mother before she died eight years ago.
Arka lifted the box. It was fairly heavy. The bottom was slightly damp from a spilled bottle of mineral water. He headed for the elevator.
In the gleaming elevator doors, Arka saw his own reflection. A twenty-eight-year-old man with shoulders curved inward. His eyes were sunken, ringed by thick dark circles like bruises. His white shirt had yellowed around the collar, was wrinkled, and smelled faintly of cold sweat. There were no sharp lines to his face. Only the remnants of a man who had tried far too hard to be loved by a world that hated him.
Ding.
The elevator doors opened. Arka stepped inside. As the metal-paneled doors slowly closed, cutting off his view of the office floor where he had surrendered five years of his youth, Arka heard faint laughter from Rian's cubicle not far away.
Crisp laughter. The laughter of a winner.
The doors shut tight. The elevator descended, dropping Arka to the darkest depths of his life while his heart remained upstairs, rotting all alone.