Severance

by Ling Ma

  Business. I just started at my job.

  Congratulations, she said, wrapping everything in tissue paper and putting the items in a bag. Come back soon.

  *

  On our last night in Hong Kong, I was left to my own devices. Blythe was spending the night with her on-off boyfriend, some mystery man whom she took a ferry to Macau to meet. The concierge at the hotel—the name of it escapes me now—hailed me a cab. My plan was simple: I would ride around Hong Kong and take in the sights.

  Where? the cabdriver asked.

  Is there a good neighborhood for walking?

  Shopping? He smiled knowingly. Ah! I know the place.

  I could have clarified, but he seemed so enthusiastic that I didn’t correct him. We coursed through Hong Kong smoothly, guided by his confident, fast navigation. It was pleasurable to sit back and look outside, ensconced in the darkness and silence of the cab. I hadn’t seen Hong Kong this way at night; it almost seemed like a different city from earlier that day. The view became an aching stream of billboards and advertisements. They were advertising Japanese whiskeys, Macau casino-resorts, and skin-whitening creams for women. A Eurasian-looking model with black hair and blue eyes delicately stroked her cheek in a paean of self-care.

  The driver exited the highway. He announced our arrival with, Okay, shopping!

  I emerged onto the hot, humid street. It was a night market, a neon blur of stalls selling jade bracelets, scarves, fortune-telling services, massages, animals, assorted tchotchkes, crowded with locals and tourists. It smelled like sugar and charred meat. You could get a foot massage. You could get your name whittled into a piece of jade to use as a signature stamp. You could eat dumplings, candied crab apples, raw sugarcane, stir-fries, whole crabs, whole grilled squids on a stick.

  The nostalgia of it hit me all at once. I couldn’t think straight. As a kid, I used to eat sugarcane, the juicy fibers unsplit from the cane casing.

  Across the street, a 7-Eleven magically miraged in front of me, a beacon of American summer, and I ducked inside for reprieve. In its cooling, life-affirming fluorescence, I paced up and down the tidy aisles, stocked with American products in Asian flavors. Squid-flavored potato chips. Cherry-blossom Kit Kats. From among the orderly rows of lychee juice cans and soy-milk cartons and neon aloe vera juice bottles with floating pulp, I selected a Pepsi.

  Thank you, come again, the cashier deadpanned in English.

  On the street, the familiarity hit me again, but this time, it was a bit more palatable. I sipped my Pepsi, which I hadn’t had in forever, and the jittery caffeinated high brought me back. I was four when my parents had left for the States and six when I too immigrated. In those interim years in Fuzhou, my first uncle and my aunt would take me down streets just like this in the evenings. It was the same feeling, the thrill of being out on city streets like this. We crossed the pedestrian bridge, arched over the street, into fluorescently lit shopping malls. Bins of printed pajama sets wrapped in plastic.

  I wandered around for a bit, trying to absorb the sights and stopping in at various stalls. One of the larger stalls smelled heavily of incense and featured what looked like shrines. It took me a second to identify what they were selling: accoutrements of mourning and/or ancestral worship. 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.

  I thought of my mother and my father, unhoused and hungry, against a backdrop of hellfire.

  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. On top shelves were dollhouse-sized cardboard constructions of homes, printed with elaborate, intricate details and furnished with paper furniture.

  That night, I bought a stack of spirit money. In U.S. currency, of course. I would make it rain Franklins in the spirit world.

  *

  When I returned to New York, I did exactly that. Out on the fire escape, in a large ceramic bowl, I took a lighter to a stack of the fake bills, feeding them to the fire a couple at a time. The flimsy paper burned pretty fast. The fire cast a warm glow, sputtered, and then quickly subsided.

  It didn’t feel like an adequate-enough offering, for all the time that had passed that I hadn’t burned tribute. I wanted to give them more.

  Underneath the coffee table in our living room were all of Jane’s magazines. She subscribed to all the aspirational lifestyle publications: Vogue, Bon Appétit, Elle Decor, Architectural Digest, a bunch of others. Most of them she had read and hadn’t bothered to throw out, so she wouldn’t mind if I destroyed them.

  For my father, I burned a Jos. A. Bank suit, and Salvatore Ferragamo wing tips to match. For more casual needs, I burned him a bunch of J.Crew clothes. I burned him some Eddie Bauer fleece jackets. Then, thinking maybe it was already too hot in the afterlife, I burned him several sweat-wicking Nike workout shirts. I burned him the latest releases in books. And, ripped from Architectural Digest, a study full of leather wingback chairs to read the books in. I burned him the latest BlackBerry and a Verizon plan. I burned him a silver Jaguar XJ. I burned him a plate of fried chicken from Bon Appétit. He loved fried chicken. It was almost all we would eat when my mother was on one of her extended trips back to Fuzhou. I burned him some Tylenol for his migraines, the afternoons when he’d lie down for hours.

  The magazine paper, laden with laminates and acids, probably printed on web presses, produced a stink that clouded up my nose and throat.

  For my mother, I burned a Louis Vuitton suitcase and a Fendi handbag. And should she be wandering around unclothed, I burned her a stash of apparel, some Gap basics and some Talbots dresses, favoring her preferred shades of cream or beige. She’d always wanted a Burberry trench, so I burned her one of those too. I burned her a Coach satchel. She loved Coach; she liked most classic American brands, their clean lines. I burned her some Ralph Lauren slacks. As the pièce de résistance, I burned her some Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. Clinique anything, I burned. Clinique Moisture Surge, Clinique Youth Surge, Clinique Repairwear Laser Focus. After that I burned her a shrimp cocktail. She loved a good shrimp cocktail, the shrimp arranged on the rim of some crystal-cut glass coupe that held the red sauce. She thought it was classy, in a really American kind of way.

  I watched the last luxury images burn and extinguish into ash, entering some other, metaphysical realm where my parents feasted. As the fire subsided and the embers dimmed, I imagined them combing through the mountain of items, dumbstruck by the dizzying abundance. I imagined that it would be more than they would ever need, more than they knew what to do with, even in eternity.

  9

  It was late. The rest had long gone to sleep, sealed inside their tents. But, like on every night, Ashley, Evan, and Janelle were still awake, sipping beers outside around the dying fire. Many nights I had fallen asleep to their conversation, punctuated by the gentle crackle of embers. Their voices, rising and falling, have drifted into my dreams.

  Ashley, Evan, and Janelle were the closest I had to friends in the group. Every day, we drove together in a champagne-colored Nissan Maxima, the only sedan in a caravan of utility vehicles, all running on gas siphoned from the stilled, unused cars that littered
the roads and parking lots. We listened to music and smoked weed (except me) and blasted the heat. The group road trip toward the Facility proceeded at a snail’s pace. Without GPS, Bob relied on outdated Fodor’s road maps. Sometimes he made miscalculations. The highway routes were often clogged with deserted cars, so under Bob’s directions, we took whatever routes were cleared, meandering through back roads. We got lost often and backtracked.

  Given these circumstances, I came to know Ashley, Evan, and Janelle pretty quickly. We liked the same types of music and we were all insomniacs. We knew one another’s life stories, or at least the basics.

  In the half-dozen times I woke up that night, I’d see their flickering shadows against my tent. There was nothing preventing me from unzipping my tent and joining them. I could lay claim to a log and make bad jokes, contribute gossip, wax and wane about group politics. But a part of me always felt like I was interrupting. It had to do with their closeness, so apparent in the way they laughed at their inside jokes, the rhythm of their rapid-fire rapport, despite the bickering. Even the way they reinforced one another when someone said or did something stupid.

  They were talking about the Facility.

  How far do you guys think we are from the Facility? Janelle asked.

  Bob says we’re less than a week away, Ashley said. We’re almost to Indiana.

  Yeah, but didn’t he say that last week? Evan said. Do you think the Facility even exists?

  Of course it exists! Ashley was indignant. He talks about it all the time, in detail.

  Are his details consistent though? Do they add up? Evan took special pleasure in teasing Ashley, the way a schoolboy might make fun of a girl he crushed on.

  Stop trying to stir things up, Janelle said to Evan.

  Ashley was the baby of our driving clique. She had been a fashion student at Parsons. She was from Ohio and had only lived in New York for two years when the End hit. She had never really taken to fashion school. Teachers and students alike moved in hierarchical herds. Her sweet, feminine, midwestern designs, stitched together from workman fabrics like calico and flannel, contrasted unfavorably with the reigning Goth-lite urban aesthetic.

  What do you think about the Facility? Evan asked Janelle.

  It doesn’t seem unreasonable, Janelle said cautiously. I’m not looking forward to living in the suburbs, but it makes sense, logistically. We’d be close to all those retail outlets and big-box stores, most of which are still stocked, most likely, with an endless amount of food and supplies. We would have access to everything we could ever need for the foreseeable future.

  If I could live anywhere, I’d just go home, Ashley said. I’d live in my own house.

  Of all of us, Ashley was the most homesick. An only child, she spoke often of her parents, gazing delicately off in the distance.

  If I could live anywhere, Janelle said, I’d go somewhere completely new. I’d head south, toward the equator. I’d like to live near a beach. Personally, I’ve never lived in the Chicago area, but I’m not looking forward to the cold. And with winter coming up soon …

  Yeah, but cold is good, Ashley said. Everyone knows that the fever spreads more easily in warmer weather.

  No one could argue with that. The spread of the fever was slower in cold weather, why cold-climate countries like Finland and Iceland were still baseline functioning, at least the last that we had heard. They had also been among the first countries to cut off all imports from Asia, had imposed a travel ban.

  I’d rather move to Scandinavia if I’m going to live in the cold, Janelle said.

  Yeah, good luck getting through their customs, Evan dismissed.

  Good luck learning how to sail a boat across the ocean, Ashley added.

  Thanks for all the support, guys.

  Look, I think we should make a pact, Evan said. If we don’t like the Facility, we should all go off somewhere together.

  Let’s toast to it! Ashley exclaimed, drunk.

  They clinked bottles together, running all kinds of exaltations.

  And Candace too, Janelle added. She can be part of our pact.

  Evan snorted. She’d probably just want to go back to New York.

  I shifted uncomfortably in my tent.

  There were people in New York at the End, Janelle said. Didn’t you ever read NY Ghost?

  As media outlets closed, NY Ghost was the de facto news source of New York throughout the fall. Readers wrote in asking for pictures and dispatches from their old neighborhoods, their friends’ apartments, nostalgic sites. NY Ghost complied. Eventually, as the fever spread across the country, the queries dried up and not long after that, the blog came to a standstill.

  I hadn’t told anyone in the group that I was NY Ghost. I guess I wanted something that was still mine.

  Evan was thinking aloud: In those NY Ghost photos, if I’m remembering right, the city did not look habitable. It looked almost empty, except for some security guards and some random fevered. Then even the guards left. I don’t know why someone would stay as long as Candace.

  Guys, Janelle reprimanded. One day, Candace is going to tell us about what it was like. But leave the girl alone. She’s only been with us for, what, two weeks? The problem with this group is that we all like gossip too much.

  Yeah, Ashley echoed. Then she laughed.

  Okay. Evan changed the subject. He started talking about how he wished it was summer. The thing he liked most about summer was the night sound of cicadas, chirping in sync, like the hum of an electric power generator. It reminded him of growing up in Michigan, the nights he and his friends would climb the water tower to tag it or when they would hang out by the railroad tracks, rickety and rotting, drinking and bullshitting. The smell of old railroad wood, of deep blueberry bushes, of cheap Schlitz beer. When was that? Ashley asked, and he took a moment to answer. It was before art school in Baltimore, before the boring, pretentious magazine internship in New York, which led to the industrial design gig. He worked on toothpaste boxes and tampon wrappers, the sides of cereal boxes. It was artless and inane, and he was glad it was over now. Not that he didn’t do it to himself, he said. Not that he didn’t make those decisions himself.

  From Evan’s wistful, beer-induced narrative, I began to drowse in a free-floating half-sleep. This drowsing was interrupted by a sharp hiss, the sound of the fire being hastily, sloppily put out with water. They whispered in hushed, urgent tones, amid a whirlwind of flurrying and scuttling, nylon whining, dry leaves and branches cracking under their feet.

  I sat up.

  Then, in the distance, the sound of a motor turning, by the side of the back road where all our vehicles were parallel parked. The sound of the engine receded as the car pulled out onto the road, slowly and deliberately. They waited until they had reached a certain distance to turn on the headlights, but in the total darkness, it was still visible. Did anyone else hear this? I waited. Silence. No one in the camp seemed to stir.

  It was none of my business, but the fear that maybe they were running away permanently, and were leaving me behind without telling me, filled me with panic.

  I unzipped my tent and stealthily crawled over to Janelle’s tent, pitched next to mine. By the light of the dying embers, I could glean that all her personal belongings were still inside; her sleeping bag, her ChapStick, her journal with a pen tucked inside. She wouldn’t have left these if she was running away.

  I crept back to my tent, my panic dissipating. But if they weren’t running away, then where were they going in the middle of the night? I zipped myself back into my sleeping bag and crossed my arms behind my head. If I drew attention to their leaving, they would get in trouble. There was nothing to be done but lie back and wait, try to sleep.

  As the sky began to lighten, I heard, once again in the distance, the sound of the motor sputtering. They were coming back. I heard the sound of their tents being slowly unzipped. Within minutes, everything was silent.

  It was not until then that I drifted off to sleep.

&nb
sp; *

  Two or three nights had passed without incident before it happened again. I had begun to think that the excursion, or whatever it had been, had been imagined. The days had begun to seem simpler, easy. The sky was cloudless, a full, heavy orange moon shone low, weighing atop the boughs of trees. We were so close. We had crossed into Indiana earlier that afternoon, marking the penultimate leg of our road trip. The next state was Illinois. That meant we were not too far away from the Facility. To celebrate, not that we needed a reason to celebrate, we broke out the last of our beer rations, clinked the lukewarm bottles together next to the roaring fire, and toasted ourselves, our good fortune, our collective future. We drank to keep warm.

  Genevieve had made her dulce de leche as a special treat. She had been boiling cans of condensed milk in a Dutch oven, because if you boiled this stuff long enough, it turned into a nutty brown, tooth-numbingly sweet caramel taffy. We dipped saltine crackers into it. Around the fire, our tipsy thoughts cast large shadows.

  Candace, Bob announced, standing up. I’d like to give you something. Smiling, he passed a book to Adam, who passed it on to me. It was just a Bible.

  Would you like me to read something aloud from this? I asked, knitting my brows in confusion. He’s already given me a Bible. Everyone in the group has their own copy.

  Open it, he implored.

  Opening the front cover, I saw that it was a trick Bible, one of those with a hollow cut into the pages. The hollow didn’t hold a whiskey flask or a gun as I’ve seen in the movies, it held a smartphone. It was my iPhone, the one I had in New York.

  I looked at Bob in amazement. Where did you find this?

  It was in the cab when we found you, Adam said, beside me. It was in the passenger’s seat.

  I was quiet for a moment. I had always thought my iPhone had been lost, during the chaos of fleeing New York. But Bob had simply, for whatever reason, kept it this whole time. I clasped my fingers around it, feeling the familiar scratches and nicks in its smooth surface, an old relic, and was suddenly flooded with a bittersweet happiness of what I had back. I could access my old photos. I could read my old emails. Maybe I could use it to take photos again.