Severance

by Ling Ma

  I was just leaving. Jonathan stood up and went to the window. I followed him, to close the window after him. When he pulled himself out on the fire escape, he turned around, his face half concealed by shadows.

  Come downstairs and see me sometime, he said.

  I will. Good night, I said, and as I turned away to go, his hand grabbed my arm.

  Candace.

  I smiled. Jonathan. What?

  He leaned over and whispered in my ear. You’re making a mistake. Then, before I could react, he licked my ear. With the tip of his tidy, scratchy tongue, he grazed the bottom of the lobe to the tip of the ear, in one stealthy swoop.

  I stepped back, grabbing my ear with both hands as if someone had cut it off. It was warm, and wet.

  With that, he closed my window and descended the fire escape. I heard the fragile, thin metal clanging as he climbed down. I heard his window opening. Then I heard it close.

  4

  The sunlit days were for driving toward the Facility, but certain days were different. Certain days, we went stalking. As in: Let’s stalk this town. Let’s stalk this street. Pick a house, any house. It wasn’t just houses that could be stalked. Gas stations could be stalked. Strip malls could be stalked. Gyms. Clothing boutiques. Holistic health centers. Coffee shops. But houses, they were our bread and butter. We basked in their homey feeling, imagining the Saturday breakfasts, the TV evenings. And we were familiar with the range of layouts, the types of products, having grown up in similar homes.

  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. It is building the Facility and all of the things that we want to have with us. He couldn’t guarantee what supplies were still available in the Facility, so we stalked everything. Foodstuffs. A library. DVD movies. Office supplies. Throw pillows. Tablecloths, one for every day, one for holidays. Ceramic planters. Soap dishes. Prescription drugs. Toys, though there were no children amongst us.

  Anyway. We had arrived. We were going to stalk.

  We stood outside on the dry brown lawn of a powder-blue colonial. This was somewhere in Ohio. It was in the afternoon. I had to remind myself of how, in the winter, dark always came early. It was December something.

  All right, Bob said. Now let’s join hands.

  We formed a circle and performed our prestalk rites on the frost-encrusted grass of the front lawn. I stood between Todd and Adam. We took off our shoes and held hands. We began the chant, a long mantra that we recited every time. The fact that it corresponded to the rhythm of the Shins’ “New Slang” made it easy to remember, easy to say. You could almost sing it, tumble around on its wistful rhythm. And if we didn’t do any part of this prestalk correctly (to Bob’s satisfaction), if we stumbled over the chant, if we accidentally broke our handhold, we’d have to do it again.

  After the chant, we bowed our heads and closed our eyes, as Bob administered the recitation, part prayer and part affirmation—an ever-changing hokey thing that he improvised on the spot.

  As we gather here today, Bob said, speaking slow and loud, we ask that you allow us the fortitude to stalk with circumspection and humility. We don’t know what we will find behind these doors, but the Lord provideth. Please allow us to respectfully take what you provide. Please allow us to be fair and merciful toward the previous owners, should we encounter them.

  We have come a long way, he continued. The farther we go, the less tenable and certain the path ahead may seem. And while there are those among us who may waver in their faith, I ask that you help us take things one day at a time. For now, for today, may this stalk we are about to embark on be fruitful. And let us receive your fruits not with further demands or expectations, but with humility and grace. His voice trembled. We thank you for the supplies that you are about to give, and which we are proud to receive. Thank you.

  At the end, as a sealant to contain the goodwill and luck we had just created, we went around the circle and stated, with solemnity, our full birth certificate names. Bob started first, then we went clockwise.

  Robert Eric Reamer.

  Janelle Sasha Smith.

  Adam Patrick Robinson.

  Rachel Sara Aberdeen.

  Genevieve Elyse Goodwin.

  Evan Drew Marcher.

  Ashley Martin Piker.

  Todd Henry Gaines.

  Candace Chen.

  We bowed in unison toward the center of the circle, as if preparing to engage in karate. Then we put our shoes back on.

  We considered the colonial in front of us. The doors were framed on either side by skeletal bushes that once bloomed roses. It was one of those prestige new-development homes in middle-class neighborhoods, a heritage property by external appearances but mediocre in quality, all shoddy thin walls and hollow doors inside. It looked easy.

  First, the men made their approach, firearms in hand, and opened up the front door, hung with a molting eucalyptus wreath. It took them about half an hour to scope out the situation, check the gas lines, check the electricity, while Janelle, Rachel, Genevieve, Ashley, and I waited outside. If it was a live stalk, the occupants were still alive, but incapacitated by the fever. They were rounded up and herded into rooms. If it was a dead stalk, then Todd and Adam cleared the bodies and put them in the yard before we entered.

  Through the large dining room windows, we saw Todd and Adam rounding up the fevered into the dining room.

  I guess it’s a live stalk, Ashley said.

  There was a father, a mother, a son. Or that’s what it looked like. It was hard to tell right away because of their skeletal frames. Well, the mother was easy to identify. Her face was a birthday cake, covered in night cream, dripping onto the cable-knit sweater she wore. Todd and Adam left and locked the doors.

  The family seated themselves around the cherrywood dining table, decorated with a cream lace runner, anchored with a bowl holding what looked like moldy, decomposed citrus fruits.

  The name on the mailbox indicated that they were the Gowers.

  As we watched, the mother began to set the table with dishes, white with navy trim, from the matching cherry sideboard, her movements rote and systematic. First she began setting up the dinner plates, then the salad plates on top, then soup bowls on top of that. After place settings were arranged, she distributed the cutlery. She set up four place settings.

  When she sat down, they clasped their hands together on the table and bowed their heads. The father opened and closed his mouth.

  What are they doing? Ashley asked.

  Looks like they’re saying grace, Janelle observed.

  When the father spoke, he uttered sounds but no words, at least none that I could decipher from our proximity. He could have been speaking in tongues. After a few moments, they opened their eyes and began to have dinner, as a family.

  They ran their tongues over the cutlery. They clinked knives and forks to the plates, dashing off chicken cutlet or veal Parmesan. They brought the plates to their lips and licked them, like child actors in Chef Boyardee commercials, as if the plates were redolent of savory spaghetti sauce. A pasta primavera with fresh garden vegetables. A Salisbury steak with canned corn.

  Dinner was over when Mrs. Gower stood up again. She circled around the dining room table, gathered up the dishes and cutlery, then stacked them back in the sideboard. As soon as she finished, she began again, unstacking plates and resetting the table. The Gowers were having dinner once more, the second of dozens of dinners they would have that night. They bowed their heads and said grace, although they likely did not speak words but animal mumblings following the same rhythm, the same cadence, like humming a favorite tune. Words are often the first to go when you are fevered.

  Hey. Hello? Someone was saying something. It was Rachel. Her nails were digging into my arm. You’re blanking out again.


  I blinked, coming out of my trance. Sorry, I said.

  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. But surprisingly, the routines don’t necessarily repeat in the identical manner. If you paid a little attention, you would see variations. Like the order in which she set down the dishes. Or how sometimes she’d go around the table clockwise, other times counterclockwise.

  The variations were what got to me.

  *

  When I was a kid, I used to watch my mother go through her daily facial routine. She subscribed to the Clinique 3-Step skincare regimen: Liquid Facial Soap Mild, Clarifying Lotion 2 (because she had dry combination skin, like me), and Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. Every morning and evening, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, going through this process. It wasn’t always the same. Sometimes she’d wash her face in circular clockwise motions, other times counterclockwise. Then there were times when she’d finish with an extra, unsanctioned step: Fujianese face oil, patted onto her face. The oil was a mystery, tinted emerald green, reeking of some chinoiserie, a fussy floral scent, imparting unknown medicinal qualities. It came in a small broad-shouldered glass flask imprinted with the image of a poppy flower. I have looked for that product everywhere, in both Cantonese Chinatowns, in Fujianese Chinatown, in Sunset Park, in Flushing, and never found it.

  During freshman year of college, she would call to stress the accumulative benefits of a proper facial regimen, her Mandarin always sounding like a reprimand.

  Are you moisturizing? she asked, her thin voice crackling over the cell reception. You need to moisturize properly because your skin is naturally dry. Your father has the same problem.

  Yeah, I’m doing it right now, I answered, as I checked my email, poured myself another coffee. I’m moisturizing as we speak.

  Every day. I sent you a set of Clinique. Has it arrived?

  Yes, thank you, I responded, though she had done no such thing.

  They were having a sale with a free gift. It was a good deal. In your twenties, a skincare regimen is more for preventative measures. Even if you don’t see its effects, the aging process will be worse if you don’t do this, she said. So you have to do the regimen regularly every day.

  Yeah, I said.

  Pat the moisturizer in lightly, don’t just smear it, she said. Then there was a pause, while she waited for me to do as she said. How does it feel?

  Great. It’s very light.

  What you do every day matters, she’d say, before hanging up.

  By that point, she had grown dreamy, her brain flea-bitten by an early onset of Alzheimer’s. She was given to strange, sensuous pursuits like rinsing our silver coffeepot under a cold tap faucet for abnormally long periods of time, or ordering fifty entrées of mapo tofu, her favorite thing to eat, for some imaginary dinner party. There was never not a dinner party. My voicemail filled with invites to lavish nonexistent gatherings. Those parties, if they actually happened, would’ve been kind of amazing, like a cross between a classic Chinese banquet-hall dinner and eighties-era Studio 54. She’d describe the menu she was planning and the guests she’d invited: my dead father, some divorced aunts and uncles, then some other Chinese names of friends or relatives I didn’t recognize, just a tangle of gibberish.

  They’ll be so happy to see you. Don’t worry about airfare; I’ve already bought you a ticket, she’d say.

  Thank you, I’d say, though, again, she had done no such thing. I’ll be pleased to come.

  *

  Todd opened the Gowers’ front door. Okay, ready! he yelled.

  We put on our face masks and rubber gloves. We went inside, carrying empty boxes and garbage bags.

  The door opened up to a large foyer. The walls of the staircase were hung with family photos. The Gower clan included a mother and a father, a son and an older daughter. The father balding and portly, the mother, a bleached blonde, tightly trim with a wan smile, her hands crossed in her lap, displaying a pert French manicure, the manicure of choice among porn actresses and midwestern housewives.

  How tragic, Genevieve pronounced.

  Let’s go, ladies, Todd said. He loved to prod us and make us work.

  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 skincare 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.

  As usual, I started in the entertainment room. This was in the basement.

  Room by room, we amassed boxes. The boxes were placed out in the hallways for Bob to inspect, taking out or adding items as he saw fit. As the rooms emptied and the boxes filled, Adam and Todd and the other guys would take the inspected boxes outside to the supply vans.

  For some reason, this process took hours.

  Every time we stalked, this feeling would come over me, imperceptible at first. It is hard to describe because it is close to nothing. Gradually, the din of other people’s conversations or Todd’s heavy footsteps, his ugly, flat gait on the floorboards would fall away. I would forget where I was or why I was there. I would get lost in the taking of inventory, with the categorizing and gathering, the packing of everything into space-efficient arrangements in the same boxes. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Vertigo. Halo 2. Seinfeld: The Complete Series. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Scrooged. Tales from the Hood. Blow-Up. Apocalypse Now. Waiting to Exhale. The Conversation. Sex and the City: The Complete Series. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Back to the Future. 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.

  The only sound that would cut through this ebb and flow was Bob. In every house, he would take the muzzle of his firearm, a vintage M1 carbine semi-rifle, and run it along the walls as he walked. We would hear that scraping everywhere, in the floors above us, below us, and know where he had been. It left a mark, a black jagged line across fleur-de-lis wallpaper, sponge-painted designs, bare white walls. The scent of French vanilla drifted through the rooms. Occasionally, the scraping stopped, and we braced ourselves for the shot that would ring out. We never knew what he was shooting at: a bat trapped in an attic, a squirrel chasing leaves through the rain gutters, or nothing, nothing at all.

  Finishing up in the entertainment room, I found my way upstairs to the study to collect some books. In the Gowers’ house, the study was on the first floor, adjacent to the kitchen. The unusually small doorframe, so low that I had to stoop my head, opened up to an unexpectedly grand room. The walls were lined with built-in bookcases. There was a fireplace, as high as my shoulder. Tall windows looked out on the backyard. The burgundy plaid curtains, so large and heavy that they sank to the floor, were tightly drawn.

  I went to the books first.

  The shelves were almost all filled with children’s books. Only the top shelf held adult titles, vanity set pieces that gestured toward the cultured minds of the homeowners. In this case, it was a Shakespeare anthology, a Jane Austen anthology, the complete collected poems of Walt Whitman, and so on. They looked stiff, dusty, and barely opened. All except for the Bible, at the very end of the shelf.

  I took the Bible down. It was the Daily Grace Bible. I had produced it, years ago when I first started at Spectra, and overseen several of its reprintings. It was a comfort to see it again, an artifact from a previous life.

  I sat down on the green plaid armchair with the thing in my hands, recalling the production details. The Daily Grace Bible was an everyday Bible
for casual use, but Three Crosses Publishing also wanted to imbue the product with the high-value feel of an heirloom. In order to hit the publisher’s target cost, substitutions had been made. The cover was made of leatherlike polyurethane instead of leather. The book block edges boasted copper-hued spray edge, duller compared to the more expensive gilding. The ribbon markers were made of sateen instead of silk. Most consumers couldn’t really tell the difference between what was mass-produced and what was artisan or handmade. And in fact, real quality heirloom Bibles, with their pungent, heavy leather covers, weren’t always preferred. The Daily Grace Bible had sold very well. I’d always felt fond of it, maybe because it was the least ostentatious Bible I’d produced.

  For the cover, I’d ordered the polyurethane material from an Italian company that specialized in faux-leather. They also supplied the same material to Forever 21 and H&M, to be made into wallets, coin purses, shoes, other lifestyle accessories. For the specialty Bible paper, I’d calculated the number of rolls to be ordered from the Swiss paper mill, I couldn’t remember how many now. But I’d always overorder a bit, accounting for a five percent wastage, because Bible paper was so thin that it often ripped on web presses, fast-spinning and dangerous, the kind of machinery that could slice an arm off. Even before production, I’d have recurring nightmares of Bible paper ripping on web presses, a dream that has never gone away. Swiss Bible paper, famed for its creaminess and opacity despite its thinness, had taken months to be made to order, its slurry stifling nearby rivers, and then shipped to the Hong Kong port, where someone from our Hong Kong office picked the rolls up and delivered them across the mainland China border to Phoenix Sun and Moon Ltd. in Shenzhen.

  At Phoenix, it had taken six weeks for the Daily Grace Bible to be printed, assembled, and packed into custom-made boxes. The initial print run had been a hundred thousand copies, the largest of that year. Once completed, the product traveled back through to Hong Kong, where it cleared customs, was stuffed into a forty-foot shipping container, and departed in a freight vessel at the port. After fifteen days at sea, the Bibles arrived at the Long Beach port in California and were transferred to a freight train. The Bibles traveled east until, at some point, the shipping container was transferred to a truck and driven south to the publisher’s distribution center in Texas, where they were shipped out to retailers. The Gowers could have bought it at a Barnes & Noble, a Books-A-Million, a Christian bookstore, a gas station Christian shop, a Hallmark kiosk, or a megachurch gift shop.