Severance

by Ling Ma

Anything was better than what we felt. We had shame, so much shame at being the few survivors. Other survivors, if they existed, must also feel this way.

The whole time, I had been half waiting for myself to turn, to become fevered like everyone else. Nothing happened. I waited and waited. I still wait.

I was thinking about how New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.

Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity.

You think like that because you live in a market economy. And you don’t? He didn’t say anything.

The future just wants more consumers.

We spoke until our voices grew hoarse, deepening and breaking and fissuring. It lasted early into morning. Our bodies curled inward, away from each other, dry leaves at the end of summer.

He said it without malice, but it stung anyway. I stepped into the elevator, pretending his comment didn’t cut me.

Only amassed do they really pose a threat.

The sheer density of information and misinformation at the End, encapsulated in news articles and message-board theories and clickbait traps that had propagated hysterically through retweets and shares, had effectively rendered us more ignorant, more helpless, more innocent in our stupidity.

I could do that indefinitely: roam the streets, look up into windows and imagine myself into other people’s lives.

The ghost was me. Walking around aimlessly, without anywhere to go, anything to do, I was just a specter haunting the scene.

He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.

When other people are happy, I don’t have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.

I was enjoying myself, but it was an insulated enjoyment. I was alone inside of it.

No, you’re not hearing me. You’re not hearing me even though you understand. I missed you. All summer, I kept thinking about you.

When I kissed him, it was like I was kissing all his things, all the signifiers and trappings of adulthood or success coming at me in a rush.

It is envisioning the future. It is building the Facility and all of the things that we want to have with us.

You could lose yourself this way, watching the most banal activities cycle through on an infinite loop. It is a fever of repetition, of routine.

It was a comfort to see it again, an artifact from a previous life.

It’s the humane thing to do, Genevieve replied. Rather than having them cycle through the same routines, during which they degenerate, we put them out of their misery right away.

but still I was shooting, past the death barrier and into someplace else, I don’t know where. Where else is there to go. I kept going. A cool, light hand touched my back.

The fact of finding a childhood artifact in such a strange place on the other side of the world, years and years later, I couldn’t put this sensation into words.

She was still marked in the places she desired to be unmarked.

is too depressing, too soul-crushingly sad, to reminisce. The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

May the pot we find help make things more bearable and help us figure out why the hell we’re doing all of this. He paused. What the point even is. Thank you.

We’re not supposed to be here. Let’s go. Let’s just go. Something feels wrong. I kept saying this, repeating the same sentences in different variations, just repeating, repeating.

You are alone. You are alone. You are alone. You are truly and really alone. Such a sound is mesmerizing. It comes into your body. Your breath syncs up with its rhythm. You can feel cells struggling, breaking down, or otherwise proliferating with overcompensating energy, engaging in mitosis and dividing and dividing.

If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can’t see you, but it can crush you. And if that’s the working world, then I don’t want to be a part of it.

The sex we were having was not romantic. It was matter-of-fact sex, sex that was trying to do something, to stake a claim, to mark territory.

I wanted to quit him cold turkey. I emptied myself, lost myself in the work. I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.

Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop. We drive, we sleep, we drive some more.

There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.

She thought that maybe that serenity was inherited from my father, but it was actually, I wanted to say, a quality owed entirely to her. It had to do with the way she managed our days, so steady and constant and regulated. I have looked for that constancy everywhere.

It was as if she had absorbed her husband’s memories as her own. Or maybe she was trying to speak for him, to keep his memories in circulation.

I just want for you what your father wanted: to make use of yourself, she finally said. No matter what, we just want you to be of use.

Why do you want to work a job you don’t really even believe in? What’s the endgame of that? Your time is worth more than that.

Me, I couldn’t sleep. I kept my eyes open, looking at all of the belongings in my apartment, all of the things that would still be there after he had left.

The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.

I have been an orphan for so long I am tired of it, walking and driving and searching for something that will never settle me.