Severance

by Ling Ma

We were brand strategists and property lawyers and human resources specialists and personal finance consultants. We didn’t know how to do anything so we Googled everything. We Googled how to survive in wild, which yielded images of poison ivy, venomous insects, and bear tracks. That was okay but we wanted to know how to go on the offensive. Against everything. We Googled how to build fire and watched YouTube videos of fires being lit with flint against steel, with flint against flint, with magnifying glass and sun.

Our self-appointed leader was Bob, a short, stout man who had worked in information technology. He was slightly older than us, though by how much it seemed rude to ask. He was Goth when he felt like it. He knew about being alone. He had played every iteration of Warcraft with a near-religious fervor; it was as if he had prepared for this, this thing, this higher calling.

The screening was Manhattan, which I’d never seen before, and even though I found the May–December romance between Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen kind of creepy, I loved all the opening shots of New York set to the Gershwin soundtrack, and I loved the scene in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton get caught in the rain in Central Park, and they seek shelter in the Museum of Natural History, wet and cocooned in the cavern darkness of the planetary display. Just looking at New York on the screen, the city was made new for me again, and I saw it as I once did in high school: romantic, shabby, not totally gentrified, full of promise.

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.

What do you call a cross between a yuppie and a hipster? A yupster. Per Urban Dictionary.

Sometime next month. I’m going to help Thom sail on his yacht. The idea is to end up in Puget Sound. I scoffed.

The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers. The future is more newly arrived college grads and tourists in some fruitless search for authenticity. The future is more overpriced Pabsts at dive-bar simulacrums. Something something Rousseau something.

Supermarkets were my favorite American thing. Driving was my mother’s favorite American thing, and she drove in a very American way: fast, down empty freeways before rush hour, skimming through cathedral canyons and red rock, her long black hair billowing everywhere, like in the movies. Why move to America if you can’t drive? she’d say, never breaking her speed as we veered toward exit ramps, stop signs, traffic lights.

I could say that my apartment had been robbed, but that was too big a story. Plus, it had actually happened before. They’d taken everything;

Whenever I asked him where he bought his produce, he’d only say, Not Whole Foods.

My position was Senior Product Coordinator of the Bibles division. No one can work in Bibles that long without coming to a certain respect for the object itself.

I have overseen production on so many Bibles that I can’t look at one without disassembling it down to its varied, assorted offal: paper stock, ribbon marker, endsheets, mull lining, and cover. It is the best-selling book of the year, every year.

Guangdong? Her voice grew incrementally more exasperated. It’s a province in China, where all the gemstone suppliers are centered. This isn’t an isolated incident. Almost all suppliers are suffering from the same problems and are also suspending production to evade lawsuits. Almost all, she repeated. Yes, almost all, I confirmed, then tried a different tack. We could package the Bible with faux gemstone charms instead. We know a plastic supplier— I could almost hear her shaking her head.

Released in 1966, Torn Curtain is a Cold War thriller starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. Though overlooked as one of Hitchcock’s minor works, it is notable for an extended murder scene that shows a man being killed in real time. In the grim struggle, a man is headlocked, stabbed with a knife, struck with a shovel, and gassed in an oven. It is gruesome not for the tactical maneuvers, which are no more or less grisly than other homicidal depictions in movies, but for the scene’s painfully protracted duration.

A human body accumulates stresses. Killing is more an accumulative effect rather than the result of one definitive action.

Later, I watched the show. It was one of those political debate programs. They were doing a segment about unemployment rates among youth just out of college. I didn’t recognize his face right away, not with glasses on, but I recognized the tie I’d helped him pick out and the knot that had taken three tries to get right. The show identified him as Steven Reitman, an economist and author of You’re Not the Boss of Me: Labor Values and Work Ethic Among America’s Millennial Youth.

Hey. I touched his head, his salt-and-pepper hair. I wouldn’t do that. When he seemed not to have heard, I tried again. Maybe we should have a safe word. The safe word is yes, he bristled. I lay on my back, looking up at his high ceiling, trying to relax. I pretended that it was the end of yoga class and I was practicing corpse pose. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just lie there. I’m on my period, I lied. That’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. Really? But, I’m like four days into it. At this point, it kind of tastes like rust, old dried blood. He looked up, smiling. Okay, I’ll stop. Like licking a rusty barbed wire, I added. You don’t have to get into it. His smile had vanished. Yeah, but can I say it anyway? What we ended up doing was something like three-quarters fucking and one-quarter lovemaking—and by lovemaking, I just mean the part that was missionary.

What is that, do you think? I asked. Jane held the bag up to the light. She took out a piece, sniffed. Shark! Shark fins, she pronounced. She smelled again, as if to confirm. For shark fin soup, she added, handing me a fin. How do you even know this? I asked. I brought a dried husk to my nose. They smelled stale, a tinge of oceanic rust, salt crust. We should make shark fin soup! Jane said, too excited to answer. Restaurants don’t serve this stuff anymore because, you know, animal rights. I read that they cut the fins off and then throw the sharks back in the water. What happens to the sharks? I smelled them again. They die, obviously. Slow, painful deaths. That’s why it’s outlawed, and also! That’s why we shouldn’t waste these.

In the evenings, when my father returned to the hotel room, my parents fought, arguing in Fujianese instead of Mandarin because they thought I couldn’t understand. I have always thought of Fujianese as the language of arguments, of fights. And in fact I did understand the language, better known as Hokkien, but never learned to speak it.

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

Stalking, Bob liked to say, is an aesthetic experience. It has its rituals and customs. There is prestalking. There is poststalking. Every stalk is different. There are live stalks. There are dead stalks. It isn’t just breaking and entering. It isn’t just looting. It is envisioning the future.

Bibles are good business. They are always in good style.

He explained that only certain printers in China were granted a license to print Bibles, and even then there were rules. What are the rules? I asked. If there are—how you say—reference maps in the back of the Bible, Tibet and China must be printed in the same color. Otherwise the officials won’t allow the Bibles to ship. Taiwan too. Hong Kong. They must all be printed in the same colors as China. You know, we are all one, he said, letting slip an ironic grin. So it seems like Chinese authorities aren’t as sensitive to religious content as they are to political content?

He showed me the dark, humidity-controlled room where children’s board books were kept after they were bound, so that the glue dried without warping the board pages. He opened the door and switched on the lights to reveal row after row of illustrated board books on wooden pallets. Oh, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I said, locating one stack of board books. Yes, very popular, he affirmed. We do so many reprints. As we turned to leave, he asked: Why is it so popular in America? I shrugged. I guess it teaches children counting skills. They practice counting all the apples that the caterpillar eats. The worm is very greedy, Balthasar said darkly.

He asked where my family was from, what part of China. Fuzhou. That’s where I was born. Ah, Fujian province. He nodded knowingly. I looked at Balthasar uneasily. There was a hierarchy of provinces, and each province carried a stereotype, like the cultural biases associated with different New York neighborhoods. He was probably unimpressed. My knowledge of Fujian consisted of basic encyclopedic details: it is located directly across the strait from traitorous Taiwan; it has been historically separated from the rest of the mainland by a mountain range. With its seafaring traditions, most of the world’s Chinese immigrants consist of the Fujianese. They go to other countries and have children and claim citizenship, sending money back home to their families to build empty McMansions, occupied by grandparents. Fujianese was outlier Chinese.

He lives in Fuzhou, a southern coastal city of Fujian province, aka the armpit of China, aka the Jersey of Asia,

My grandma maintains that of all her daughters, only my mother has married wisely. Of the first and second uncles, she once said: One is weak in the mind, the other is weak in the body.

The important thing about the fourth uncle is his son, Bing Bing, who’s my favorite cousin, the only cousin I get along with, though it’s generally agreed that he’s the failure of the younger generation. No one faults him for it, though. Only my grandma says what everyone else has avoided saying: that Bing Bing is the most intelligent and most sensitive of any of us, but the fourth uncle and the entire family have breathed down his neck his entire life, casting doubts on every decision, disparaging every move, and now what the family has on its hands is a stunted, unmarried thirty-five-year-old man.

It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized. Bing Bing, his face half-submerged in shadow, tells me, One day you’ll want to return permanently. That would be terrible, I say, laughing. I would be henpecked to death by all of my uncles. I begin imagining it: The first uncle would say, When are you getting married? The second uncle would say, What are you looking

As media outlets closed, NY Ghost was the de facto news source of New York throughout the fall.

The mattress hadn’t been dressed with a liner and proper sheets. The surface was itchy against my skin as he attempted to take off my pants. Wait, I told him, and peeled them off cleanly, as he unzipped his jeans and took out his Schwarzenegger dick and plowed into me, harder and more aggressive than circumstances of introductory sex usually dictate, the raw mattress surface chafing our skin pink. 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.

She sets a bowl of shark fin soup in front of me. The smell is so delicious, unbelievably rich, that I understand why sharks have to die to make it.

What are those? Xanax. I’m taking one. Do you want one? No, thanks. You sure? I’ve been saving them on our stalks. There’s at least sixty. They say a person only needs six Xanax to overdose.

We watched Manhattan. That scene when Woody Allen’s character, depressed and lovelorn, lay on the sofa, listing all the things that still made life worth living. Like: Louis Armstrong. Cézanne pears and apples. Swedish cinema.

The best soup dumplings in New York were located in a tiny restaurant in Flushing, according to a prominent restaurant critic. Controversy ensued when kitchen photos emerged showing the dumplings being folded in unsanitary conditions.

I had never been to Lane’s apartment before, on the fifth floor of a loft building. We consoled ourselves with the fact that Lane came from wealth—her father dealt high-end Miami real estate or something—and thus augmented her Spectra salary with her trust fund. We had gone from room to room, Lane flipping on the lights to expose an explosion of exposed brick and midcentury furnishings, beautiful in an obvious way, tits and ass, marble countertops and chrome fixtures. The loft was only a few blocks away, she pointed out, not with insignificant pride, from the building where Heath Ledger had died. The living room, with its high ceilings, was furnished with Eames chairs and a white shag rug, dirtied with kitty litter tracked around by a cat that was nowhere to be seen.

It’s kind of like what you’re doing now, but in Art. And we know you want to get out of Bibles. She caught herself. I mean, who wouldn’t?

wasn’t like them. I didn’t want the same things that they wanted, and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths. All of these distinctions, of course, belied the fact that I very much wanted to work in Art. I wanted to be an Art Girl.

Then I saw her face. It was so ancient it was cadaverous. Her lipstick was all over her chin, her eye shadow was in her eyebrows. It was marked with bruises and scratches, the thin, delicate neck too. Dried flecks of product in her congealed hair, as if she hadn’t bothered to rinse out the shampoo. The cardigan she wore was buttoned up wrong, in a mismatched fashion. Her linen pants had been put on inside out. Without looking at me, she walked straight inside, where she plunked down on the sofa, in front of the blaring television.

Remote in hand, she changed the channels periodically. T-Mobile was offering a new no-strings-attached carrier plan. She laughed. Neutrogena Blackhead Eliminating Cleanser, blasting blackheads all over your face. She laughed. The new Lincoln Town Car. French’s mustard. The latest MacBook. She laughed.

In Jonathan’s apartment, we used to watch single-woman-in-Manhattan movies, a subgenre of New York movies. There was Picture Perfect, An Unmarried Woman, Sex and the City. The single heroine, usually white, romantic in her solitude.

The mall directories mounted on those upright, lit-up billboards, the plastic trays at the food court, the mannequin display at Express, each one modeling this season’s new office trousers. The hours of roaming around, waiting for your mother to finish trying on cardigan twinsets at Talbots. The chemical smell of Sephora, with its walls of perfumes and colognes, arranged with tester bottles and paper strips. The kiosks selling cell phone covers or beauty products made from Dead Sea–sourced mud. The Orange Julius and the Auntie Anne’s, next to each other.

In February 1846, the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embarked on an exodus. They fled their hometown of Nauvoo, Illinois, where, in acts of religious persecution, their homes had been burned and their leader, Joseph Smith, had been killed by a mob of nonbelievers. There was nothing else to do but go. Led by a new leader, Brigham Young, sixteen hundred members loaded up their belongings in wagons and headed west. They trekked across the frozen Mississippi River, the ice cracking underneath, in search of a different future they could not yet envision.

With an unknown destination, the exodus turned into a wandering. It would last for months. Like any venture into the unknown, such a mission required blind faith amongst its constituents, faith in a story

They didn’t know what to buy, so they bought a gallon of whole milk, plucked randomly from a variety of brands and types. In Fuzhou, milk was rare, reserved for children, so an entire gallon seemed incredibly decadent, incredibly American.

The Cultural Revolution had shut down all universities for several years. It was only when they reopened, accepting only a few students, that her husband gained admission. By then, he was already twenty-five and had worked as a foreman at an auto-parts factory. He had aspirations of becoming a literature professor, but he had the misfortune of scoring highest in math on the entrance exams—and was thus assigned Statistics as his major. In those years he had studied so hard that he had developed ulcers and lay in bed for days. After that period, he was plagued with afternoon migraines that, for the rest of his life, never completely abated.

She went home, where she sat on the marigold-printed sofa in front of the TV, playing One Life to Live, as she hooked each individual strand of hair into a synthetic scalp. It took thirty to forty hours to assemble an entire wig. Each wig paid eighty dollars in under-the-table cash.

Everyone would drink beer, shell peanuts and peel tangerines, hold forth on politics. Some were outspoken in criticizing the Communist regime, the same friends who later got jobs working for that same regime. Though her husband had kept his opinions to himself, one night he had spoken passionately about democracy. Every system has its problems, he argued. But any government that granted its people freedom of speech, freedom of protest, showed respect for its citizens. It was the most idealistic she had ever seen him.

As Moses conferred with God on Mount Sinai, in his absence they melted down their earrings and created a golden calf to worship. Bonfires raged. They partied. In the desert, hundreds of miles away from civilization, it felt like the right thing. It felt like a relief. The golden calf gleamed, this tangible thing. Now, upon finding out this sin, this transgression of idolatry, God was infuriated. He said to Moses, Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them. But Moses pleaded, and only because of this did God exercise compassion in exacting a punishment.

The God we know is the God of second chances, the pastor said. But it is also a responsibility to accept and shoulder the second chance that God gives you. A second chance doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.