Severance

by Ling Ma

They say that if God hates your guts, he grants you your deepest wish. But God in this case, as in most cases, was by and large impartial.

He had the right of way when he crossed the street. Because as it says in 1 Corinthians 10:13, But God is faithful; He will not suffer you to be tempted by more than you can bear, I recited imperfectly from memory. We believe that whatever you ordain, it will not be more than we can bear.

My father had worked hard his whole life, taking late hours at the office, coming home to cold leftovers in the fridge. He received promotion after promotion, in part because he went into the office on weekends too. His work ethic was like that of many other immigrants, eager to prove their usefulness to the country that had deigned to adopt them.

Before the train tunneled underground, my phone buzzed in my tote bag, alight with another text from Jonathan: Leaving Sunday. Talk to me plz. What if I texted back: I’m pregnant! It’s yrs lolz.

Splayed out on her desk was a Nan Goldin photograph, Greer and Robert on the Bed, NYC. I could recognize it on sight. I love Nan Goldin, I said, lingering in the doorway. She was my favorite artist when I was a teenager.

I first encountered Nan Goldin’s photographs when I was a teenager, and hoarded a copy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency under my mattress. So many of the people depicted seemed freakish or other in some way; they didn’t fit in. But that didn’t matter, the photographs seemed to say. What mattered was, they styled and remade themselves in the way they wanted to be seen. They inhabited themselves fully.

I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.

While he showered, I pulled out my laptop and checked Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Everyone was posting about the storm. Craigslist Casual Encounters exploded with urgent booty calls. People posted selfies in front of the window, with storm views outside, and filed the pics under #mathilde, the top trending thread on Twitter. Another was #netflixstorm because Netflix was hosting a viewing contest. Participants tweeted their viewing selections during the storm, and a hundred would be selected for complimentary annual Netflix subscriptions. Extra points to those who included a screenshot of their viewing choices.

#Mathilde is mother nature’s wrath for airing Jersey Shore #netflixstorm Showgirls #netflixstorm #lifechoices Watching #Mathilde outside window > Watching movies for #netflixstorm

He had a thin body, hairy and slimy and squishy. I can honestly say that it was my favorite body, his dick an ugly sea cucumber, veiny and brown and wretched. He handled me as if separating egg whites from yolk. He kissed my breasts and stroked the innards of my thighs, reaching into me. I sucked his dick and put it inside me. First I was on top, then I was on bottom, then in front on my hands and knees as he pulled my hair back hard. The hair pulling was new. Maybe he’d changed up his porn viewing, or maybe he had been with someone else in the month I’d been avoiding him, some rail-thin, high-pitched blonde—I bit his neck, he bit my breast—who liked it hard but not as hard as I did, someone who moaned and gasped a lot.

What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.

The Death Knell, as we called the Times homepage victim count, was eventually pulled at the request of government officials, who cited its potential in inciting mass panic. By the end of August, it was difficult to get an accurate victim count—and by difficult, I mean that you couldn’t just Google it anymore.

The seriousness of the epidemic varied depending on which news source you trusted. Some claimed that the disease was experiencing exponential growth, others that it was spreading at a slower, more contained rate. Either Shen Fever was no bigger an issue than the West Nile virus, or it was on the level of the Black Plague.

In the mornings, Evan walks by my cell on his way back upstairs from the meetings. When he passes, he never once looks in my direction. He keeps his eyes averted. Once, I banged on the metal gate, and he quickened his step. Another time, I said hey and he said hey back and continued walking, avoiding my face. I like that my presence makes him newly ashamed every time. It gives me a perverse sense of power. I want him to feel like he owes me something.

The only way to metabolize time, I decide, is to partition it into digestible packets.

Their framed motivational prints hanging on the walls, dispensing career advice. YOUR GREATNESS IS NOT WHAT YOU HAVE, IT’S WHAT YOU GIVE. Or AS LONG AS YOU’RE GOING TO THINK ANYWAY, THINK BIG

citywide blackout forces Monica, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey to hang out together. They light candles and talk about the weirdest places they’ve had sex. Phoebe sings a song. I hate Friends but I’ve seen most of the episodes.

That there’s still civilization. In midtown more than anywhere else, there’s infrastructure. You’ve got the Sentinel guards, guarding our prized institutions. There’s less crime in midtown. The electricity still works. You can still get Wi-Fi here. You can still get a cell phone signal. Being here gives me a sense of stability when I think everything is coming apart.

You’re uncomfortable because the baby was shifting around and you needed to stretch your legs. That’s plausible deniability. What? I’ve just never heard you use the term plausible deniability in real life before. May you live long enough to see how little your children think of you.

My father used to say: Work is its own reward. It was also its own consolation.

live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?