Severance

by Ling Ma

I am not living in the suburbs, Janelle announced.

in the apocalypse. lol

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.

The fruits of my immigrant father’s lifelong efforts would be gobbled up and squandered by me, his lazy, disaffected daughter.

The men hunted, and the women gathered. Each of us was assigned a division of sorts. Janelle and Ashley worked Craft Services, gathering cooking supplies and shelf-stable products that the moths and pantry rodents hadn’t touched. Rachel worked Health, accumulating prescription meds, bandages, aspirins, and skin-care products. Genevieve worked Apparel, rifling through the closets for jackets and coats, but more often for quality linen tunics and silk blouses. I worked Entertainment, a broad category that included DVDs, books, magazines, board games, video games, and consoles.

It was a trance. It was like burrowing underground, and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working.

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.

lol so regular life.

Nowhere else was there such an elaborate gradient between the real and the fake. Nowhere else did the boundaries of real and fake seem so porous.

Spirit money, yellow bills imprinted with gold foil, was tied with red string and shrink-wrapped in thick stacks. When I lived in China, my grandmother used to burn it. Once broken down into ashes, she had explained, the money would transfer into the possession of our ancestral spirits. They would use it to buy things or to bargain with others or to bribe afterlife officials for favors. The afterlife, with its bureaucratic echelons and hierarchies, functioned similarly to the government. Nothing turned your way unless you took matters into your own hands.

Some spirit bills were intricately printed to look like U.S. dollars, Chinese yuan, Thai baht, and Vietnamese dong. The spirit world accepted a variety of international currencies. And not only spirit money, but other afterlife luxuries. There were diamond necklaces and cell phones and Mercedes convertibles, all made of cardboard to be easily burned. There were paper Gucci wallets and Fendi handbags, so that the ancestors could organize and store all that spirit money. There were even paper facsimiles of iPods and MacBook Pros.

The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane.

I looked away. There was something unbearably private about this, watching her rehearse her sexuality, informed by the most obvious movies and women’s magazines, with embarrassingly practiced fluency. The posing went on for a while. At some point she winked at herself, her eyes blank but her features contorted to willfully suggest playfulness.

On the freeway, pines and bare branches brushed against us noncommittally. Everywhere we ran, we were touched. We couldn’t not be touched, even if we preferred it that way. The world just felt unbelievably full and dense, bursting.

Memories beget memories. 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.

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.

She says, Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed. She says, Change your clothes. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Moisturize. Exercise. Get yourself together.

I uploaded the photo I just took. I added a caption: If a horse rides through Times Square and no one is there to see it, did it actually happen? If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening? I clicked Publish.

The only indication by which he could tell, from his distant vantage point, that I was not fevered was that I wore a mask. And though Sentinel guards did not wear masks (given the scope of the epidemic, we had begun to understand that the masks were not fever-preventative), wearing a mask meant something. It was a visual shorthand that I was fully cognizant, that I understood the distinction. Thus I always wore a mask outside, to mark myself as unfevered.

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.

I dusted the glass from his enormous desk, which was now my enormous desk, and from his beautiful chaise longue, which was now my beautiful chaise longue.

I just … I floundered, trying to find the right words. I just don’t want my life to narrow so quickly. This job is fine. I just don’t see myself here forever.

maybe I had misidentified him as fevered. It’s possible. I can’t be sure. Because I wasn’t really all that careful. All I thought about was myself. It got me where I needed to go.

Even if it is a secondhand familiarity, it is a familiarity all the same. As if all of the stories Jonathan told of his years in Chicago, while we lay drowsing in bed, had seeped into my own memories. Right before sleep when the brain is at its most porous and absorbs everything and weeps chemicals indiscriminately, I must have been deep in his reminiscing, his intricate, lacelike memories inlaid in me. I have been here in another lifetime.

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 want something different for Luna, the child of two rootless people. She will be born untethered from all family except me, without a hometown or a place of origin.