Severance

by Ling Ma

  I shook my head. If that were true, then we would’ve heard a lot more about this.

  The state media in China controls the optics of this, so we don’t know the real statistics. Maybe they don’t want to incite mass panic, but I’ll bet it’s also because they don’t want foreign investors to pull out of their economy. They need to save face.

  That sounds like a conspiracy, I dismissed. One of Jonathan’s constant critiques of me was that I didn’t keep up with the news enough, but I wondered if he wasn’t overinformed, deep-diving into obscure articles and message boards, seeing connections that weren’t there.

  He looked at me expectantly. And Shen Fever is spreading here too. It tends to move the fastest in coastal areas that see a lot of trade, a lot of shipping, imports. The whole tristate area should be on red alert or something.

  Well, I guess you’re leaving at the right time. I drank my water.

  He softened, struck a more conciliatory tone. You could be leaving too. You could just come with me, he said, reaching for my hand across the table. We’ll settle down somewhere new, somewhere cheaper. We’ll figure it out.

  I moved my hand away and said: No matter where we move, it would be the same thing for me. I’d need to hold down a job. I’d need to make rent. I’d need health insurance.

  Jonathan gave me a hard look. Why do you want to work a job you don’t really even believe in? What’s the endgame of that? Your time is worth more than that.

  I returned his look. The way you choose to live is a luxury. It’s only possible for a while, when no one depends on you. But it’s not sustainable.

  He leaned away from me, defiant. But no one depends on you either. Neither of us have a family to support. And yet you choose to be tied down to a job you don’t believe in or even respect.

  But what if you had kids, like, tomorrow? I asked, trying to sound neutral. It could happen. How would you take care of them?

  That’s not going to happen to me, at least not anytime soon, he said, so obliviously confident that I wanted to laugh.

  Instead, I ate my rice, focused on chewing each and every grain. I wasn’t going to tell him, I decided right then and there. It flared up without warning, this protective feeling toward an indeterminate bundle of cells inside of me. In that moment I knew.

  Rosa came over to our table. I’m sorry, but we decided to close early today, she said. The storm. She gestured to our plates. I can wrap up your leftovers.

  I looked down at my plate. I had barely touched my food, but I was no longer hungry. That’s okay, I said. Thank you though.

  Of course we’ll wrap it up, Jonathan corrected.

  Fine. You eat it then, I shot at him.

  Rosa hesitated. You guys used to come here, right? I remember, on the weekends.

  We used to, I said.

  You’re a nice couple. Whatever you’re fighting about, it’s not worth it. She looked worriedly outside. A storm, you know, these forces of nature, they put things into perspective.

  How are you getting home? Jonathan asked her.

  My niece and her husband are picking me up. They should be here soon.

  Sorry for arguing in your establishment. Jonathan boxed up the leftovers in a Styrofoam container and put it in a plastic bag. He put down a tip. We stood up to leave.

  Have a nice night, I added. At the door, I turned around and saw that she was wrapping up all the unserved, uneaten food behind the counter. I thought about her taking the food home to her niece and her husband, and eating the day’s leftovers.

  Come on, he said, grabbing my hand.

  It had darkened outside. The parties had dispersed due to the rain, the rain that started dropping in bigger pelts, faster and steadier, as we ran home. The houses outside, each window flickering with the light of the TV screen, sat in tidy, orderly rows, obediently being cleaned with a good whiplashing. Pretty soon, it was hard to see anything. We clasped hands as we ran, so as not to lose each other along the way. When we reached my building, we were thoroughly soaked. I fished around for my keys and we heaved ourselves up the stairs.

  I took a shower first, then Jonathan. 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.

  Watching twister during #netflixstorm cuz I’m basic

  #Mathilde is mother nature’s wrath for airing Jersey Shore #netflixstorm

  Showgirls #netflixstorm #lifechoices

  Watching #Mathilde outside window > Watching movies for #netflixstorm

  Jonathan sat down beside me, on the floor cushions. He wore a clean T-shirt and boxers that he’d left at my place last time.

  What are you looking at? he asked, speaking with a slight lisp. He had just put his retainer in.

  Look at this, I said, swerving the screen around to show him a photo someone had posted on Twitter. It showed a picture of the East Village partly underwater, with only the awnings of storefronts visible. Boxes of Tide and hot dogs floated erroneously all around. Broken electrical wires flailed.

  He shook his head. It’s fake.

  How do you know?

  The light in this photo is plain daylight, afternoon light. But the storm didn’t really begin until it started getting dark.

  I studied the photo. There was no yellow sky. I scrolled through the comments. Others had picked up on the same thing, labeling the picture #stormhoax. One commenter wrote that it was a picture taken on the set of an apocalyptic movie and reappropriated as reality.

  People have too much time on their hands, I said.

  Okay, I think we’ve reached weather-news saturation, Jonathan said, reaching to close the laptop. Let’s do something else.

  Hold on, I said, still clicking. Let’s read the real news. On the New York Times homepage: Blackout Affects Millions in Manhattan. Mathilde was escalating. Electricity had been lost in parts of lower Manhattan: Battery Park and Wall Street. There were satellite images showing the tip of the island almost completely dark. On other sites, we read, Storm Barrels Through Mid-Atlantic Region, Alert Extended. The storm alert had been extended from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. the next day. Hurricane-force winds were up to 180 miles per hour. The hurricane level had been upgraded from category 3 to category 5, the difference between “devastating damage” and “catastrophic damage.”

  At that moment, the lights in my studio flickered, then shut off.

  Shit, I said.

  I looked out the window. The darkness was total out there too. The only light came from my laptop, which only had a seventeen percent battery charge. It was only 10:13 p.m. The neighbor’s Wi-Fi, KushNKash, which I siphoned, had also succumbed, and Spotify stopped streaming.

  Jonathan closed my laptop before I could protest.

  Let’s just go to bed, he said. Come on.

  We lay down on my bed, on top of the covers. I could barely see his face. He put his arm around me. There were too many terrible things happening in the world. His embrace felt familiar and comforting, as I listened to the sound of our breaths. And the intensity of the rain coming out of tempo in fast, hateful waves, viciously attacking the glass. A car alarm went off in the distance, then another. Pretty soon he was kissing me. His lips were chapped. He never thought to buy himself simple things, like ChapStick. It made me feel tender again toward him, the same throbbing ache as when we first met. I could feel his retainer, the clack of it in the dark. He moved slowly, so that I could stop him at any point, as he removed my T-shirt and bra, a scalloped black lace thing with an elastic that seared into my ribs. It was my best
bra.

  Candace, he said.

  I couldn’t see his eyes. He pulled his shirt off. 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.

  I was moaning. I was gasping.

  Oh god, he lisped, pulling my hair back.

  He didn’t give any warning when he came, something he used to do. Oh, fuck, he moaned. He jizzed all over the place. He jizzed inside me, and on instinct I cried, Wait. Stop.

  We lay under the covers on our backs, side by side but not touching, looking up at the ceiling. His breathing was slow and steady, like a bass line against the relentless rain that continued coming down hard on the windowpanes.

  What’s wrong? he asked. I have this feeling like you want to tell me something.

  I don’t know how many times I can tell you I’m not going with you.

  I guess I have a hard time believing that. We don’t have to go to Puget Sound. We can go anywhere, as long as we don’t stay here. I just want you to come with me.

  I’m not like you, I said.

  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.

  I didn’t say these things because we had fought about this before, or some variation of the same issue. I didn’t want to fight on our last night. I didn’t want to hurt him. Maybe he sensed what I was thinking, because he was silent for a minute.

  He said, There has always been this stubbornness to you that I can’t break through.

  I still love you, I said.

  Whenever you say you love me, it sounds like a criminal confession.

  I laughed sadly, my tired, hoarse voice cracking. After a moment, he began to laugh too, despite himself. We were both laughing, the last few weeks of our fight breaking like heavy clouds finally discharging rain, and for a moment, it felt like the way we were at the beginning, when we didn’t take things too seriously.

  I have a request, he said, out of the blue.

  Okay. You want to store some of your belongings here?

  No, it’s for after I leave. You know that photo blog you used to have?

  I paused. NY Ghost?

  Yeah. You had a good thing going with it for a while. Well, my request is that I want you to start updating that blog again. I’m going to be checking it after I leave. I want to see new work.

  I can’t even remember the last time I posted, I said, amazed. It’s just—the photos aren’t that great. Not fishing for compliments. I just know they’re not good.

  They weren’t that great in the beginning, he admitted. But they got better though. And I remember, you started it the summer when we met. I had a crush on you after that shark fin party, and I used to kind of online-stalk you. The photos on your blog were what drew me in. It’s just something I think you should keep doing.

  Thank you.

  We lay there in silence for a while. How many nights have we stayed up, talking in the dark side by side? I wanted to say more. My mind kept searching for words—words to unite us despite, words to bond us in spite—and coming up empty.

  Soon, his breathing slowed and deepened. He was falling asleep.

  Me, I couldn’t sleep. I kept my eyes open, looking at all of the belongings in my apartment, all of the things that would still be there after he had left. I would get rid of some of the furniture to make room for a few new things. I was going to have this baby.

  18

  Due to Storm Mathilde, the office was closed on Friday. When we came in the following Monday morning, we found out Seth, Senior Product Coordinator of Gifts and Specialty, had come down with Shen Fever. He had managed to return the morning after the storm, as security cameras showed, and been sequestered in his office for the full weekend, sitting at his computer, surrounded by coffee mugs. His email history showed a series of errant messages, sent to the Hong Kong and Singapore offices, about previous projects that had been printed years ago. One of the cleaning ladies had found him.

  So they shut down the office for the remainder of Monday. Some men from an antifungal service came in and treated the office with a kind of spray. They sprayed the walls, and the crevices in the corners. They dusted some kind of powder on the carpets and gave them another vacuuming. Afterward, we fastidiously avoided the corner where his office was located, even avoiding those in his department who worked nearby.

  An email notice came around that it was now company policy for all employees to wear N95 masks in the office (before, this had only been suggested). Spectra would provide each employee with two N95 masks. If we wanted more, we could buy extra from HR for a cheaper, subsidized fee.

  We talked about Seth the rest of the week, our voices muffled by the masks, in elevators in the mornings, in our select cliques during lunch, and later in the afternoons. We sent him—his family, really—a Zabar’s gift basket of fruits and nuts and salamis and cheeses, as if for a summer picnic. A grief basket, Blythe called it. A sympathy card was passed around the office, and we all signed it in our best handwriting. GET WELL SOON, it read, even though that message did not seem to apply to the fevered. There had been no reports of recovery, at least not amongst the patients whom we knew, friends of friends.

  In the afternoon, we talked about him as we gathered around the espresso machine, as Frances from Cookbooks made everyone impeccable afternoon Americanos. Our voices, amplified by the masks, sounded deeper and more grievous.

  So I went to visit Seth in the hospital, Frances said. At NewYork-Presbyterian.

  How is he doing? someone asked.

  Frances shook her head. They only let me see him for a few minutes. He was strapped down to the bed with these wrist things. He looked like he wanted to get up.

  Everyone muttered vague, blurry sentiments of sympathy that muffled our fear of getting it ourselves.

  At least we’ve only had one fevered in our office, someone else said. At Random House, the whole publicity department became fevered. Can you imagine?

  I looked at Blythe. She shook her head, warning me not to mention Lane, who was, as far as anyone knew, taking some personal days.

  We sipped our Americanos warily.

  I went back to my desk, pulled up the news. For the first time, the New York Times homepage listed a count of U.S. victims of Shen Fever, from Boise to Topeka. An official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that since the storm, the number of cases had multiplied. What had seemed like a fringe phenomenon was now regarded as something more serious.

  I Googled Shen Fever.

  The fungus Shenidioides had originated in Shenzhen, then spread to nearby regions of China. The reigning theory, first disseminated by a prominent doctor in the Huffington Post, was that the new strain of fungal spores had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals. To predict the transmissi
on of the fever, the blogger claimed, wind patterns may be analyzed. Not only that, but the holiday traffic surrounding the mass commute of migrant factory workers back to their home villages, such as during Chinese New Year, should also be limited. Traffic carries spores.

  If the United States is to avoid the same situation, the blogging doctor claimed, then the country should quarantine whole regions, especially during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays that usually prompt mass travel.

  Further in my Googlings, the New York Times reported that a travel ban was passing through Congress to prevent citizens of Asian countries from visiting the United States. A list of the banned countries was provided, China at the top of the list.

  *

  In the month after Jonathan left, New York became an impossible place to live. It seemed to happen gradually, then suddenly. I got up. I went to work in the morning. Outside the office windows, the city thinned out.

  Tourists roamed through Times Square in scattered flocks, wearing useless face masks printed with I ♥ NY. It was amazing to me that they still came to visit. With cameras hanging around their necks and socked sneakers, they dressed like 1980s Japanese tourists, except they weren’t from Japan. They were mostly European visitors, from lesser-known countries such as Malta and Estonia, who were taking advantage of the drastically reduced hotel rates, reduced everything rates. They bought hot dogs and chicken rice plates and pretzels from the half-dozen remaining food trucks. They cheesed with the handful of character impersonators still working, all Marvel superheroes. They looked up and took pictures, the flashes from their cameras bouncing off windows of semiemptied office buildings, off the billboards advertising Broadway shows that were on hiatus, soft drink and fitness water brands that were no longer trucked into the city. Supposedly the influx of these tourists kept the reduced operations of the city functioning. It was more their city than ours, at least for now.

  *

  I got up. I went to work in the morning. New York Fashion Week was still being held, but on a smaller scale. Designers sent models down the runway in face masks, gloves, and even scrubs, many branded with designer logos. The accessories industry exploded. The last show of Fashion Week was Marc Jacobs, whose spring collection eschewed obvious references to Shen Fever and aimed for something more subtle. Held at the Lexington Avenue Armory, the show featured the drop-waist, boxy dress silhouettes of 1920s flappers, rendered in muted shades of stone, black, baby blue, the gentlest seafoam. If these were party outfits, they were for the most somber party.