Severance

by Ling Ma

  What about the house you grew up in?

  My parents sold it after they divorced, and it was razed to build a retirement home. So there’s nothing left. But I never used to hang out much at home anyway. My parents fought a lot, and so I’d come here a lot. I’d just walk around. When I was hungry, I’d eat free samples in the food court. When I was bored of walking, I’d play games in the arcade. The employees knew me. They’d give me extra tokens.

  In this light, at this closeness, Bob’s facial expression seems more legible. There is a fragility about him, apparent in his delicate, paper-thin gray eyes.

  So what I’m trying to say, he continues, is that this place is special and important to me, even if it’s just a nothing mall to you.

  I didn’t say—

  I know what you think about this place. You don’t respect it. You don’t respect me. You don’t respect our rules. You or your friends. You put yourselves in danger, meaning you put the whole group in danger. And I can’t just overlook that.

  We made a mistake when we went off to Ashley’s house, I concede. But I’m the only one left. I’m just surviving.

  He watches me observantly. And how do I know that you wouldn’t escape?

  I pause now, choosing my words carefully. Bob. Look at me. Do I look like I’m going anywhere? People take care of me, they feed me, they do my laundry. There’s no reason for me to leave.

  He looks away again, in silence. I don’t know, he finally says.

  Please, I say.

  22

  I got up. I went to work in the morning. I got on the shuttle bus and looked out on the emptying streets, the unused subway tracks on the Williamsburg Bridge. The first bus took me to Canal, where I transferred to another shuttle that headed north to Times Square. There would be a half-dozen commuters on each shuttle, wearing a variety of fashion masks, in all black or leopard print or emblazoned with the Supreme logo. The masks seemed to preclude any conversation. Sitting by the window, I listened to music on my iPhone, to a nineties mix of sweet-sad songs that Jonathan had sent me before leaving. Pavement, the Innocence Mission, Smashing Pumpkins. I walked through the quiet streets and bought a cup of coffee from the street vendor on Broadway.

  The empty lobby greeted me.

  I pressed the button and waited for the single elevator that now serviced the entire building. I sipped my coffee and reflexively glanced at the security desk for Manny. He was long gone. In his place were extra security cameras, mounted in every corner of the lobby ceiling. Someone was still watching.

  The elevator had seemed to take longer than usual to arrive that morning, but then everything seemed to take longer. The city was operating on a different kind of time. The shuttle bus service was spotty at best. I had taken to buying all my household supplies off Amazon, but the boxes, carrying anything from batteries to deodorant, took at least two weeks to deliver, whether the service was FedEx or UPS or USPS or DHL. Making a quick grocery trip to the nearest open bodega meant walking two miles. Everything kept closing.

  When the elevator arrived, I stepped inside and pressed the button for 32. The doors closed behind me, and we began to move. I stepped out of my sneakers and slipped into a pair of office flats.

  The elevator suddenly shuddered, a plane hitting turbulence. The lights cut out. My feet lifted off the floor. Coffee splashed out of my cup, burning my hand. I dropped it.

  Then silence. The emergency light bathed everything in orange.

  The monitor indicated that we were around the twenty-sixth floor. I took a breath. The elevator always caught between the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh floors. It was an old glitch. I took another breath. But it had never lurched so violently, nor had it stood still for so long. I could feel the elevator wavering, as if undecided what to do.

  I hit the 32 button again. I hit buttons for other floors. I hit the Door Open button. I hit the Emergency Call button. The terrible sound of a phone ringing filled the darkness. It rang several times before the call went to voicemail.

  This is City Services of New York. We are currently operating at full capacity. Please leave a message detailing your address and the situation. We will address it at our next available time.

  Hi, hi! I yelled, afraid that my voice wouldn’t carry. I’m trapped in an elevator. I gave the address. I gave my name. I explained what had happened. I said, inexplicably, that I had money. Then, without warning, the voicemail cut me off midsentence.

  I glanced up at the newly installed security camera in the corner. Maybe someone, some security guard in Jersey or wherever, was watching. I grabbed a notebook from my tote bag and in my largest, most demonstrative print wrote, Trapped! Elevator broken. I shoved the sign up toward the lens and waved it around.

  The elevator lurched.

  I dropped the notebook, the pen, the tote bag. They splashed into the puddle of coffee, splattering my legs. I crouched and grasped at the handrail, crushingly sick to my stomach, awaiting a plummet. Please don’t drop, please don’t drop, please don’t drop. Several minutes passed. My ears popped. Please don’t drop, please don’t—

  Abruptly, the lights flickered on and the elevator resumed operation, smoothly ascending to the thirty-second floor.

  The doors opened. I walked out, dragging my tote bag.

  Relief washed over me in cold, prickly sweat. I swiped my key card. My shoes sank in the familiar plush carpets as I wound through the processional of glass offices and dimmed cubicles.

  Sitting down in my office, I picked up the phone and called 911. It rang nine times before someone picked up.

  Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency? It was a woman with a tired voice.

  Hi, I just want to report an elevator malfunction. I was, uh, just trapped inside.

  Is anyone hurt or in danger at the moment? Are you hurt or in danger?

  No, I said, adding, I managed to get out. I’m okay, just a bit, uh, worried.

  Okay. Where is this?

  Times Square. I gave her the address.

  I heard the clacking of keys as she input the data. Wait, she said. Is this an office building?

  Yes, I work here.

  We’ll send someone to check it out, she finally said. But, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you still doing in there?

  I’m working, I said, as if it were obvious.

  It’s just that most of midtown is deserted now, except for the stray fevered that we pick up.

  I have a contract that stipulates I have to work in the office until a certain date, I explained stiffly, defensively.

  Sure, I’ve heard about some companies that do that. But let me ask you a question. Where is your building management?

  What do you mean?

  Is there a building superintendent who still works in the building? Because if not, then you really shouldn’t be in there. It’s not safe.

  I’ll double-check on that, I said, though I knew there was no superintendent in the building. So does this mean the elevator won’t be fixed?

  She sighed. We’ll send someone to take a look at the elevator. But I don’t have an ETA. We’re short-staffed. The fact is, more people are leaving this city than there are staying. The city is curtailing all its services. You may want to consider that if you intend on carrying out this contract.

  The city should do its job, I said, suddenly angry, frustrated.

  Ma’am, she said, her tone sharper and more irritated, if I told you the number of issues we’re facing in the city, you’d realize a malfunctioning elevator is the least of our problems. Now, I’m adding this elevator malfunction to our queue, and that’s all I can really do for you. What’s your name?

  Candace. Candace Chen.

  Thank you, Ms. Chen. Someone will be on the way. But think about what I said.

  I hung up, then picked up the phone again and dialed the number that Michael Reitman had left us for his cell phone. I thought about conveying what the 911 operator had told me, that it was no longer safe to work in the building. While I w
as at it, I might as well update him on the fact that the entire office had cleared of employees.

  It rang a half-dozen times and then went to voicemail. I wanted to leave a recording, but an automated message informed me that the mailbox was full. I hung up.

  My reflection in the computer screen stared blankly at me. I opened Outlook, which showed no new emails. I typed up an email to Michael Reitman and Carole, with the subject line elevator malfunction, that detailed my morning’s travails and the steps I took to implement a solution. I wrote that I would let them know of any updates. It was satisfying to finally execute a task, but the satisfaction was fleeting. I needed more to do.

  I looked out the windows. For the first time, I noticed that Times Square was completely deserted. There were no tourists, no street vendors, no patrol cars. There was no one. It was eerily quiet, as if it were Christmas morning. Had it become this way without my noticing? I walked around the perimeter of the office, trying to spot a fire truck or a police car pulling up outside, trying to discern a siren in the distance, something.

  It wasn’t just the emptiness. In the absence of maintenance crews, vegetation was already taking over; the most prodigious were the fernlike ghetto palms, so-called because they exploded in prolific waves across urban areas, seemingly growing from concrete, on rooftops, parking lots, any and all sidewalk cracks. I’d Googled ghetto palms after seeing them everywhere. Known by their scientific name, Ailanthus altissima, which translates to “tree of heaven,” but informally called “tree of hell.” They are deciduous suckering plants that originated in China, were cultivated in European gardens during the chinoiserie trend before gardeners became wise to their foul-smelling odors, and were introduced to America in the late 1700s. They have lived on this land almost since the formation of this country.

  Looking out the windows, I imagined the future as a time-lapse video, spanning the years it takes for Times Square to be overrun by ghetto palms, wetland vegetation, and wildlife. Or maybe I was actually conjuring up the past, the pine-and hickory-forested island that the Dutch first glimpsed upon arriving, populated with black bears and wolves, foxes and weasels, bobcats and mountain lions, ducks and geese in every stream. Initial European explorers had viewed Manhattan as paradise. Here, I would lead a horse to drink. There, I would build a fire. And there still, I would seek refuge from the sun and rest in the shade.

  In the midst of this imagining, I heard, out from nowhere, the distant sound of sleigh bells. I was going crazy.

  But there, right in front of me, across the street, was a horse—chestnut, with white spots—trotting down the street. It trotted along purposefully, cheerfully, unhurried, down Broadway. Holding my breath, I managed to find my phone and snap a photo before it disappeared from sight, obstructed by other buildings.

  Did I really see that?

  I looked at the photo on my phone. It was a former carriage horse, with its blinders still on, and a harness decorated with bells, jingling with every trot. Once enlisted to give tourists carriage rides around Central Park, it was now free. I wanted to show someone, for someone to marvel at this with me, but there was no one left in the office. There was no one left in sight.

  Sitting down in front of my computer again, I looked up my old NY Ghost photo blog, Googling myself because I had forgotten the URL. It still existed, still showed the same old tired images I’d posted. I tried to log in to the WordPress platform, but it’d been so long that I couldn’t remember my password and had to fill out a request to create a new one. I waited for the password-request form to go to my email. The connection had been slow and staticky since the office emptied, but finally, the form arrived and, after creating a new password, I accessed my blog and created a new post.

  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.

  *

  I got up. I went to work in the morning. It took forever to get there. On the shuttle ride over, I thought about moving somewhere closer to the office, maybe within walking distance. The rents had decreased so significantly that I could definitely afford something in Manhattan.

  In the lobby, I waited for the elevator but it never came. It had still not been fixed. I took the stairs instead, all thirty-one flights. It was my morning cardio, I rationalized, as I huffed and panted, sidestepping the cigarette butts and gum that littered the concrete stairwell, stopping once or twice to take a break. They used to call the stairwell the Smoke Dungeon, because it was where covert smokers, usually the Art Girls, would light up instead of taking it outside during harsh winters. I could still see the soot marks of the Parliaments they smoked before dashing the lit butts against the concrete walls.

  The empty office greeted me. I swiped my key card. The green light came on, and I opened the glass doors.

  The Spectra office was effectively the headquarters of NY Ghost Ltd., I decided. It was a thing now. I focused my efforts entirely on the blog. It was my new job. If there was no work for me to do, then I would make my own work. I wasn’t afraid of being found out since there was no one else around. I couldn’t remember the last time that the antifungal cleaning service had come to spray down the office. Maybe management had stopped paying them, or maybe they had fallen victim to the fever themselves.

  I posted on NY Ghost twice a day, once when I arrived in the office in the morning, and once in the evening. During lunch hour, I would leave to take more pictures documenting the deserted city.

  The lunchtime walks reminded me of my first summer in New York, when I’d roam for hours. It was colder now, and I wore a jacket with many deep pockets to keep my iPhone, a battery charger, my ChapStick. I also carried my wallet, though there were few places to buy anything. As I walked, ideas for the blog snowballed. I took pictures of the meadows where carriage horses congregated, eating grass. I took pictures of all the obvious landmarks, now indefinitely closed: MoMA, Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center.

  There was a haunted look about all of these places. Ambling through midtown, I thought of the Robert Polidori photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a ghost town that formerly housed the nuclear-plant workers. Or the Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre images of Detroit, the images of abandoned auto plants and once-grand theaters. And the Seph Lawless images of the vacant, decrepit shopping malls that closed after the 2008 crash.

  The main difference from those images of decrepit places was that New York hadn’t given up yet. It was deserted but not abandoned. The institutions here were still being maintained, as if someone expected everyone to come back eventually. They were guarded by security guards, uniformed in black muscle tees and pants, emblazoned with the Sentinel logo of a guard dog silhouette. Except for their discreetly holstered guns, they looked like waiters. Often the Sentinel guards were the only nonfevered people I would see for days on end; their presence was both eerie and comforting.

  I devoted a blog post to Sentinel, a security firm that had primarily served as a military contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq. The city had contracted Sentinel to protect public institutions from looters. Private owners also hired the company to guard evacuated homes. One time, walking down Fifty-fourth Street, past my favorite row of town houses, I looked up and glimpsed a Sentinel guard at the top window. He was a glorified house-sitter. He probably watered the white orchids in the windows, slept in the feathery sheets with million-thread counts, and upon waking up made himself petite espressos that he drank out of dainty, gold-rimmed espresso sets.

  I waved, he waved. I snapped a picture.

  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.

  Another time, I ran a photo series of various subway stations. One afternoon, I went as far down the Times Square station steps as I could, pushing aside the caution tape, until I reached the water’s edge. I raised my iPhone and took pictures. The flash bounced off the floating, waterlogged candy bars and magazines, drowned rats, and all the trash that cluttered up the surface. You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage, but standing on the steps, you could hear it, like an enormous animal lapping thirstily. The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.

  The resulting post was called No One Rides the MTA Anymore.

  *

  By late October, all major media outlets, including the Times, had stopped publishing. Visitors trickled in to NY Ghost. Overwhelmingly, they were from Kihnu, Iceland, Bornholm, and other cold-climate islands I had never heard of, where the fever had not reached. They requested photos and updates of their favorite places. It was as if they still couldn’t believe New York was breaking down, and needed confirmation. Everywhere else could fall apart, but not New York. Its glossy, reflective surfaces and moneyed environments seemed invincible. Even after 9/11, even after the attempted bombings, even after the blackouts and the hurricanes and the rising waters due to global warming.

  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. But toward the end, in those weeks of walking and taking pictures, I came to know and love the thing itself. This was partly because I loved the work of documenting it. Even if capturing the city in deterioration was an insurmountable task—New York was too vast and I was too small; there were places too far or too dangerous for me to reach—I didn’t want to stop.