I've owned this building for thirty years. I've seen them all: the wide-eyed graduates, the desperate artists, the couples who fight until the walls shake and then stop talking entirely. To me, a tenant is not a person; a tenant is a series of payments and a set of noise complaints. I don't care about their dreams; I care about the plumbing.

The kid in 4B, Marcus, started out as a 'high-potential' type. He wore suits that cost more than my first car and talked about 'disrupting the market.' He was polite, paid his rent three days early, and kept his place spotless. He was the kind of tenant you could forget existed.

Then, the silence started. Not a peaceful silence, but a heavy, suffocating kind. He stopped coming into the hallway. The rent started arriving late—first by a day, then a week. I didn't worry; people have bad months. I just sent a polite reminder.

By the third month, the smell reached the hallway. Not the smell of rot, but the smell of stagnation—old takeout, unwashed laundry, and the metallic tang of depression. I knocked on the door. No answer. I could hear him inside, though. Not talking, just a low, rhythmic thumping, like a heart beating against a concrete wall.

I didn't call the police. I didn't call a social worker. I just waited. I watched through the peephole as his deliveries piled up in the hall, untouched. I saw the mail overflow from his box. To me, it was just a logistical problem. I was calculating the cost of a forced eviction versus the chance of him suddenly finding a windfall.

One night, the thumping stopped. The silence that followed was absolute. I entered the apartment with my master key, expecting to find a body. Instead, I found a room that had been stripped of everything. No furniture, no clothes, no trash. Just Marcus, sitting in the center of the empty white floor, staring at a blank wall.

He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw him. Not as a tenant, but as a mirror. He had reached the zero point. He had stripped away everything until there was nothing left but the raw, shivering core of a human being.

"I'm done," he whispered.

I didn't offer a hand. I didn't ask what happened. I just looked at the empty room and thought about how easy it would be to repaint the walls and find a new tenant who still believed in the market. I walked out and locked the door behind me.

*** OTMES_v2_Code: [M1:6, M3:5, N2:0.8, K1:0.7, TI:45.0, θ:180°]