Holden woke to heat and the smell of something that had been alive recently and wasn’t anymore.
His mouth tasted chemical.
The ceiling was water-stained and cracked and not the ceiling he’d gone to sleep under.
He sat up.
His head went liquid for a moment and then hardened into a single clean spike of pain.
Phil was asleep in a chair with his mouth open.
Stu was on the floor curled into himself.
Alan was on the other bed with his head shaved clean and a monkey sleeping on his chest.
Holden’s phone said it was Saturday afternoon.
He had no memory past Thursday night’s single beer on the beach.
Thirty-six hours, gone.
He stood.
The room lurched and settled.
The monkey woke, shrieked once, and bounced to the bathroom doorway.
Holden followed it with his eyes and saw Doug in the tub, asleep, fully clothed, the shower curtain half-torn.
Stu woke with a sound like drowning.
He touched his face.
His hand stopped.
He touched again.
“No,” Stu said.
“No no no”
Phil jerked awake.
“What. What’s”
Stu crawled to the mirror over the dresser and made a noise Holden had never heard a man make.
There was a tattoo on his face.
Tribal, dark, clean lines from his temple to his jaw.
“Okay,” Holden said.
The word came out steady.
He didn’t feel steady.
“Okay. Nobody panic.”
“PANIC?” Stu turned.
His eyes were wild.
“There is a TATTOO on my FACE, Holden, and I think” He looked down.
His hands were shaking.
“I think I’m missing a tooth.”
Alan sat up.
The monkey climbed onto his bald head and sat there like a hat.
“Why is there a monkey,” Phil said.
“Why is Alan bald,” Stu said.
“Why am I in a bathtub,” Doug called from the bathroom.
Holden closed his eyes.
He reached for the last thing he remembered.
Thursday night.
The beach bar.
One beer.
Stu laughing.
Alan asking the bartender a question Holden hadn’t heard.
Then white noise.
He opened his eyes.
Stu was crying.
The monkey was eating something it had found in Alan’s satchel.
Phil was standing now, looking at his phone like it might explain things.
“Where’s Teddy,” Holden said.
They all looked at him.
“Where,” Holden said again, “is Teddy.”
Stu’s face went pale under the ink.
“Oh God. Oh God, Lauren’s little brother”
“He was with us,” Alan said.
“He wanted to see the city. I remember that part.”
“What part,” Phil said.
“What do you remember.”
“The beach. The beer. Then I was” Alan frowned.
“I was in a chair. Someone was shaving my head. I didn’t mind.”
Phil shook his head.
“I’ve got the beach. I’ve got a rooftop. I’ve got a woman who said something about cards and then” He stopped.
“That’s it.”
Stu was breathing too fast.
“I was at the beach and then I was somewhere loud and I was singing and then it’s just nothing. Nothing until now.”
Holden’s phone buzzed.
Pim.
You are awake?
He texted back.
Yes.
You owe me three thousand more.
Prepare yourself.
I am coming.
He put the phone down.
The pressure behind his sternum was building and it felt wrong, too wide, like it was pulling in three directions instead of one.
Doug appeared in the bathroom doorway.
“Where are we.”
“I don’t know,” Holden said.
“What happened.”
“I don’t know.”
“Holden.” Phil’s voice was tight.
“You always know.”
Holden looked at Stu’s tattoo.
The monkey eating what looked like a granola bar.
Doug’s shirt stained with something purple.
Thirty-six hours erased and the wedding was in two days and Teddy was gone and Fohn would arrive expecting his future son-in-law intact and not tattooed like he’d joined a tribe.
The pressure widened.
He felt it reach for Phil’s memory and Stu’s and Alan’s like fingers in the dark.
“Tell me everything you remember,” Holden said.
“Every piece. Don’t skip anything.”
They talked.
Phil: the rooftop, cards, a man with gold teeth.
Stu: the singing, a woman who knew his name, a room that smelled like flowers.
Alan: the shaving chair, a market, Teddy laughing.
Doug: a tuk-tuk race, money changing hands, the purple drink.
Holden listened.
The memories were fragments, overlapping in some places and gapped in others.
Phil’s rooftop wasn’t Stu’s singing bar.
Alan’s market wasn’t Doug’s race.
They’d been apart.
Different places, different nights somehow compressed into one.
The pressure pulled harder.
Holden felt something in his chest crack open and the fragments began to move.
Phil left the beach at midnight, went north to a rooftop card game, lost three hundred dollars, won it back, left at two a.m.
with Teddy.
Stu stayed at the beach until one, found a karaoke bar, sang four songs badly, met a woman who worked there, left at three without his wallet.
Alan wandered a night market from midnight to four, bought things he didn’t remember buying, got his head shaved because the barber said it would bring luck, lost Teddy somewhere near a temple.
Doug raced tuk-tuks in an empty lot from two to dawn, drank something purple, passed out in a tub somewhere and woke up here.
The threads braided.
Holden watched them slot into sequence and overlap and the gaps began to fill with guesses that felt like certainties.
Teddy had been with Phil until two.
Phil had handed him to Alan at the market.
Alan had lost him near the temple at four.
Whoever found him after that was the question.
The braid tightened.
Holden saw a map he’d never looked at.
Saw the route from beach to rooftop to market to temple.
Saw the hours as distances.
Saw the moment Alan turned and Teddy wasn’t there, saw the shaved head and the confusion, saw
A face.
Sixteen, scared.
A stranger leading him somewhere.
Money.
A room with no windows.
Holden gasped.
His chest burned.
The certainty frayed and he was back in the hotel room with four men staring at him and a monkey on Alan’s head.
“He’s alive,” Holden said.
His voice sounded far away.
“Teddy. He’s alive. He’s” The image flickered.
A neighborhood.
A building.
He couldn’t see enough.
“I don’t know where.”
“How do you know he’s alive,” Stu said.
Holden didn’t answer.
He felt something else, a second pull, and the room sharpened.
The tattoo was trouble in two categories: legal and social.
The legal could be managed with money.
The social would cost Stu his future father-in-law’s respect unless it could be undone or hidden.
Holden’s mind priced the removal.
Weeks.
Makeup, maybe.
Not fast enough.
The monkey was trouble in three: legal, medical, social.
It would bite eventually.
It was stolen, probably.
It was loud.
Teddy was trouble in four: legal, familial, international, time-windowed.
Every hour he stayed missing tightened the noose.
The categories bloomed in his head and he tasted metal.
His hands were shaking.
“Okay,” he said.
He sat down hard on the bed.
“Okay. The tattoo’s permanent unless we pay for removal and that’s weeks. The monkey’s stolen or it was sold and either way it’s illegal. Teddy’s” He stopped.
The fourth-category trouble sat in his chest like a stone.
“Teddy’s the priority.”
“No kidding,” Phil said.
“Pim’s coming,” Holden said.
“She’ll know how to move cross-jurisdiction. If Teddy’s in a place that needs police or” He didn’t finish.
His head was pounding.
He felt Stu’s panic in his own throat and shook it off.
Alan raised his hand.
“The man at the market said Teddy was asking about a temple. Maybe he went there.”
“Which temple,” Holden said.
“The one with the” Alan gestured vaguely.
“The big gold thing.”
“Buddy. This is Bangkok. That’s all of them.”
Holden’s phone buzzed.
Pim again.
Downstairs.
Come.
He stood.
The room swayed.
He’d threaded three blackouts into one map and categorized six kinds of trouble and read a memory that wasn’t his and the cost was stacking in his skull and behind his ribs and in the pit of his stomach.
“Stay here,” Holden said.
“Don’t let the monkey out. Don’t let anyone see Stu’s face. I’ll handle Pim.”
“Holden.” Stu’s voice cracked.
“Lauren’s dad is going to see this and he’s going to”
“I know.”
“The wedding’s in two days.”
“I know.”
“We have to find Teddy.”
“I know.” Holden looked at him.
At all of them.
Phil trying to hold it together.
Stu unraveling.
Alan petting the monkey like it wasn’t the worst thing in the room.
Doug still purple-stained and half-asleep.
He’d promised them one perfect controlled night and they’d lost thirty-six hours and a sixteen-year-old and Stu’s face and maybe, if the flicker he’d seen was real, more than that.
“I’ll find him,” Holden said.
Pim was in the lobby.
She looked at him and her mouth thinned.
“You look like a man who has made expensive mistakes,” she said.
“We need help,” Holden said.
“Teddy’s missing. Stu’s tattooed. There’s a” He stopped.
“There’s a monkey.”
“I heard about the monkey,” Pim said.
“Everyone has heard about the monkey.”
“We need to find Teddy.”
“That will cost more than three thousand.” Pim turned the jade ring on her finger.
“He is Lauren’s brother. If he is not found, the wedding will not happen. If the wedding does not happen, her father will remember who was with him last. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“The tattoo cannot be hidden in time.”
“I know.”
“The monkey is stolen from a man who will want it back and he is not a man who negotiates.”
Holden’s chest was still burning.
He felt the categories shift and restack.
Teddy was the only line that mattered.
Everything else could be priced later.
“Find Teddy,” Holden said.
“I’ll pay whatever it costs.”
Pim studied him.
Her eyes were dark and unimpressed.
“You are very brave or very stupid,” she said.
“Perhaps both.”
She made a call.
Spoke in Thai for two minutes.
Hung up.
“My people will ask at the temples. If he was seen, we will know by tonight. If he is somewhere worse, it will take longer and cost more.” She paused.
“You have two days. After that, I cannot help you.”
Holden nodded.
His head felt full of sand and broken glass.
He needed to sit down.
He needed to think.
He needed the three braided timelines to stop moving in his skull.
“Go back to your friends,” Pim said.
“Wait. Do not do anything else stupid.”
He went back upstairs.
The monkey had eaten half of Alan’s granola bars and was now investigating Phil’s wallet.
Stu was sitting on the floor staring at nothing.
Doug had gone back to the tub.
Phil looked up.
“Well?”
“She’s looking,” Holden said.
“We’ll know by tonight.”
“And if we don’t?”
Holden sat down on the bed.
The room was still spinning and the ghost of Teddy’s scared face was still in his head and Stu’s tattoo was still permanent and the wedding was still in two days.
“Then we keep looking,” Holden said.
Alan picked up the monkey and held it like a child.
“Do you think Teddy’s okay?”
Holden looked at him.
At the bare skull and the satchel and the sweetness that had dosed them all and lost a sixteen-year-old in a city that didn’t owe them anything.
“I don’t know,” Holden said.
The monkey shrieked.
Stu put his tattooed face in his hands.
Phil’s phone rang and he didn’t answer it.
Outside, Bangkok roared on, indifferent and hot, and somewhere in it was a boy who’d only wanted to see the city.
Holden closed his eyes.
The braided timelines were still there, turning behind his eyelids, and the fourth-category trouble sat in his chest like a debt he didn’t know how to pay.