Severance

by Ling Ma

He was Goth when he felt like it.

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

Now I felt myself rescinding, emptying of all personality, emotion, and preferences, so that he would know as little of me as possible.

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

What I do for money or what I actually do?

The alarm had broken a spell. Afterward, everyone began to relax.

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

was like a homeless person in my own house.

It was unbelievable to see it here, of all places. 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.

When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge.

The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.

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.

could feel a gravitational force inside me, a near dread, a stomachache, dragging me toward him. It wasn’t even a choice.

laughter scattering wildly like dice across tile.

New York has a way of forgetting you.

Memories beget memories.

And because memories beget more memories, you always remember more than you think is even there. The ones that are hidden from ourselves are the most revealing, give you the most information.

In early settler photographs of the West, all streams of water—rivers, brooks, waterfalls—looked like milk. Between the motion of the water and the long exposure times of early cameras, the land once looked as if it were lactating.

a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.

They say that if God hates your guts, he grants you your deepest wish.

her remembering elicited my remembering.

She spoke to me in a way that assumed my intelligence, even though I didn’t have the vocabulary to respond.

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,

they styled and remade themselves in the way they wanted to be seen. They inhabited themselves fully.

the man’s voice one big pitcher of water being relieved.

A druggy blast of air-conditioning

He handled me as if separating egg whites from yolk.

In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.

The images of young, healthy protesters chanting, not wearing their masks so their voices could be heard more loudly, only seemed to enrage the public.

The seriousness of the epidemic varied depending on which news source you trusted.

I surprised myself as I spoke; I was frighteningly lucid.

Not working is maddening. Bob understands this. The hours pass and pass and pass. Your mind goes into free fall, untethered from a routine. Time bends. You start remembering things. Past and present become indistinguishable.

Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed.

The only way to metabolize anger is to direct your focus to things at hand.

I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.

How do we know, one skeptical reader wrote, that you’re not fevered yourself?

Trying to talk myself out of my job felt like trying to justify an extravagant purchase I couldn’t actually afford.

Unnervingly, he had undercut my certainty so briskly,

could feel the pain—immediate, jarring—all the way to the bridge of my nose.

By this point, I had seen enough people who were fevered. I knew what it looked like. So maybe that justified the fact that I pulled Eddie out of his own cab, out of his livelihood. There was no struggle. I climbed into the old, shaky Ford and drove away. That is the true story of how I left New York.

To live in a city is to consume its offerings.