Severance

by Ling Ma

  But this expression on his face now—I have never seen it like this before. It is blank, not angry or disappointed or frustrated. There is nothing.

  He comes closer and closer. Instinctively, I step back. And he walks past me.

  Could he be sleepwalking? Could I be that lucky?

  I turn around and watch him in disbelief. His body language does not seem to acknowledge my presence. I watch as he walks away, his motions smooth and unselfconscious, as he turns around to descend the escalator.

  The car keys, dangling from his belt loop by an aluminum carabiner buckle, catch the early-morning light coming in through the skylight. They glint, beckoning me.

  I exhale, a deep, shaky breath. I begin to follow. I trail behind Bob, descending the escalator swiftly to bridge the distance between us. A part of me is afraid he’ll snap out of it somehow, that he’ll awaken, so I walk as soundlessly as possible.

  When I reach the first floor, he is already several paces ahead of me, passing the Old Navy. There is a coffee stain on his white T-shirt. I have never seen Bob in a T-shirt, actually. He takes care not to dress casually around us. The material of the shirt is thin, so I can see his pink skin through it.

  The keys jingle and jangle.

  I get closer and closer. I can see the back of his neck, the hairy tufts sticking out of the collar. His fleshy shoulders. I get so close that I catch his morning breath, sour and acrid. I think of teenage Bob, aimlessly wandering through the mall to escape his parents’ fights at home. And I think of his walks at night, the walks he says he doesn’t take.

  The keys jingle and jangle. It dawns on me.

  I run out in front of Bob, facing him. Uncomprehending, he approaches me, not even a flicker of recognition in his hooded eyes. His gaze is unaffixed to any specific object but to a vague middle distance, as if he is watching a secret movie projecting in front of him. As he comes closer, I am certain. It is the gaze of the fevered. I have seen it before, on Ashley’s face the night we tried to stalk her house, which was the last time I saw her, which was the last time I saw Janelle.

  All of my blood pumps to this pulse. All of my blood rises to my head. There is an uneven jagged sound, and it takes a moment to realize that it is the rattle of my trembly, angry breathing. My sudden rage surprises me.

  You have done a tremendous, tremendous job, Michael Reitman says.

  I shove Bob and the force pushes him back. Again and again, until he topples backward, skidding across the floor. He is on his back, a crumpled beetle, his hands clutching the air. The idea is to quickly snatch the keys, but instead I kick him in the ribs, in the stomach, in the groin, in his face, in all of his soft parts. It’s a fury of kicks and blows, quickly, furiously accelerating before he even has a chance to react, if he can even react. Because he doesn’t so much as raise his arms in defense. Which only makes me redouble my efforts. I spit on his face, on his eyes that don’t even blink. The sounds this kicking makes, squelches and crunches, are unreal video-game sounds.

  Candace!

  I look up. It’s Adam, standing a few feet away. He has appeared out of nowhere. His incredulous expression quickly reassembles, neutralizes into one that’s controlled, authoritative.

  Candace. Stop before you do something you regret, Adam says loudly, enunciating every word as if speaking to a child. We can fix this if you stop now.

  He must find his words very funny because I hear the sound of trembly, jagged laughing. Except his face hasn’t changed, his mouth isn’t even open. Someone is laughing. This familiar laughter, like gargling gravel, like rocks in a washing machine, the laughter that doesn’t go over easy at office parties. It’s me. It’s actually me laughing. I’m laughing because I have never had a personal conversation with Adam in all this time and he is telling me what to do. That’s pretty funny.

  In full view of Adam, I lean over Bob’s body and unhook the carabiner key chain from his jeans. There is blood on the floor.

  When I stand up, we look at each other. Don’t follow me, I say.

  With that, I walk deliberately toward the parking lot doors, bluffing the role of victor. Then there is some confused shouting, and at the first invocation, I burst into a run. Rachel comes out of her cell, her expression inexplicable except for the despair. Come with me! I scream at her. She recoils as I get closer, ducks back inside, as I furiously pound my feet toward the exit, where I slam against the doors—maybe I hear them after me or maybe it’s the bark of the push bar—and bound out into the parking lot.

  The Nissan Maxima is only a few paces away in the parking lot, parked, with all the other vehicles, in a handicapped spot. I stab desperately toward it, propelled by my own momentum, stopping only to throw up gashes of vomit across two parking lanes on the dirty asphalt. The door isn’t locked. I get inside and shove in the key. The engine roars to life.

  I look behind on the chance that maybe Rachel has followed me, that she too is looking for an escape route. But no one comes. The doors remain closed.

  I pull out of the parking lot and I get the fuck out.

  26

  For a long time, I just keep driving and driving, not knowing where I am going, just wanting to put as much distance as possible between myself and the Facility.

  It isn’t until I merge onto Illinois Route 21 that I begin to think about where I am going. It is an eight-lane road, which gives me more than enough space to drive. The roads are surprisingly clear, mostly uncluttered with vehicles. I go in the direction of Chicago, following the signs. The light glimmers out of a bank of trees, which obscures a river embankment. Jonathan once told me about the rivers of Illinois, how the land adjacent to a Great Lake is rippled with rivers. On my right side, the land is riddled with corporate parks, auto-parts stores, new housing developments with colonial-style homes, public storage compounds, a Benihana, pancake houses, crab shacks.

  Periodically, I check the rearview mirror, paranoid that there might be headlights behind me. Soon, there’s no need for headlights. The sun comes gradually and then suddenly, all at once, shining into my eyes. Rifling through the glove compartment, I find a pair of sunglasses. They were Ashley’s fake Chinatown Chanels. I crack open the window, and the rush of crisp air douses me in cold. My hair billows around, blowing everywhere.

  For a while, I don’t see a single building. I think I must be driving in the wrong direction; away from the city, not toward it. But then Illinois 21 narrows, turns into the four-lane Milwaukee Avenue and I think, I feel, that this must be the right way. From the stories Jonathan told me, I know it is a big street that runs the span of the city and its outer suburbs diagonally, cutting a cross section through several neighborhoods.

  Glenview. Niles. I decipher the names of each suburb from the names of various car dealerships, furniture showrooms, banks, bakeries, and bridal boutiques that pass outside my window. For what seems like a whole mile, I drive alongside what I think is an overgrown golf course but turns out to be a cemetery, inexplicably littered with abandoned camping tents pitched in the middle of its grounds.

  The trembling of my hands on the steering wheel has calmed. My breathing slows. My heart has slowed.

  Passing underneath a highway overpass, I’m startled to see makeshift Catholic shrines, decorated with Virgin Mary and saint iconography, strewn with burned-down candles. They are accompanied by abandoned sleeping bags and plastic lawn furniture. From then on, I seem to spot these same accoutrements, shrines and sleeping bags, under every overpass. As people made their exoduses out of the city on foot, these spaces must have served as makeshift sanctuaries. They prayed and slept beneath them.

  The sun disappears. The sky becomes heavy with clouds. It is going to rain. The tank is under half full. It’ll take me only so far. I’ll get to Chicago and then take a long rest, load up on supplies, and figure things out from there. A city has so many crevices in which to burrow.

  As I near Chicago, the lanes become increasingly cluttered, jammed with stilled, empty vehicles, squeezing me
into the right lanes. Whenever an opening comes up, I consider exiting and merging onto another route, but instinctively, I right myself before making the turn, jerking back into my lane. I can’t leave Milwaukee Avenue. It is the one thing that feels familiar.

  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 sounds of Milwaukee Avenue from his apartment at night: the owl-service buses that stopped below his window, the fire trucks with their blaring horns, gunshots from warring gangs. Inevitably, the panicky shriek of ambulances. The street seemed to exist in a perpetual state of anxiety, its jittery lanes of traffic diffusing and reorienting at every siren call of emergency vehicles trundling down its outstretched, grandiose expanse. He lived in that apartment for three years, during which time he had distanced himself from his family in southern Illinois, avoiding their drunken calls, declining to return for Christmas. He considered Chicago his real home, and like any place, it was changing. As the neighborhood gentrified, the gunshots at night grew increasingly faint, gang warfare pushed to streets farther west until, over the years, he couldn’t hear them at all. By that point, the taquerías he used to frequent, selling mangoes and carnitas and cream-pumped pastries that looked like horns of plenty, had also disappeared. Other night sounds took over: the soothing hum of whirring washers and dryers from the twenty-four-hour laundromat below the apartment, its reverberations coming up through the floorboards until finally, he would fall asleep.

  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 have been an orphan for so long I am tired of it, walking and driving and searching for something that will never settle me. 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. I want us to stay in one place. Maybe Chicago, the city her father loved, in which he once lived, could be the place.

  The sky buckles and it begins to rain. The windshield puckers with droplets. I turn on the wipers, but they’re broken and I squint my way through the blurring scenery.

  I don’t notice when I enter the city limits of Chicago—no immediate skyline announces itself—but at some point, I sense it. It feels different. And it looks different, a dense amalgamation of strip malls and brick buildings with faded business awnings. Bus stops every few blocks. I pass old immigrant grocery stores, wholesale produce centers, MoneyGram depots, mattress warehouse outlets, a car wash with splashy old signage, and old-world delicatessens and bakeries, their window displays still intact with dangling sausages and tiered wedding cakes, respectively.

  Ding ding ding ding ding. The fuel light blinks, warning me that the gas is running low.

  But I stay on Milwaukee Avenue all the same. It is so straight and smooth, easy to drive. Rarely does it make turns that you can’t predict, though often it gets entangled in confusing three-way intersections. The farther south I drive, the more gentrified the neighborhoods become. The Western Unions give way to banks, the dive bars give way to glossy cocktail lounges, the diners to sushi restaurants, the chiropractor centers to yoga studios, the Payless shoes and Gap outlets to clothing boutiques, the bakeries to cupcakeries. There are newer developments, the scaffolding still up. To my right, I glimpse a subway train on an elevated rail, suspended between stations, raised high above the houses and buildings.

  In the distance up ahead, the skyline comes into view, just barely. It is shrouded in mist, hazy through the rain-speckled windshield. I can pick out the Sears Tower, the Hancock, and it isn’t until I see the skyline that I realize I have actually been in Chicago before.

  It had been a long time ago, when I was a kid, during the year when my mother and I would follow my father on his business trips, making it a vacation for ourselves. We had gone to New York this way, but Chicago must have been before that. I was about eight. The trip had been two days, if even that. There’s not a lot I remember, except how it had drizzled intermittently the whole time we were there, and between that and the overcast skies, my impression of Chicago was of being inside a perspiring gray cloud. The downtown area, where my mother and I roamed as my father attended his conference, was a tangle of black buildings. We periodically ducked inside restaurants and hotels and stores whenever the storm started up again.

  And it must have been spring. My mother and I had sought shelter in the lobby of a corporate office building, which consisted of all reflective black surfaces, except for the seasonal decorative centerpiece: an enclosed white clapboard hutch, strewn with pastel ribbons. We approached the hutch and looked inside. It held a mass of live white bunnies, squirming in sawdust. A banner above the hutch read HAPPY EASTER!

  The receptionist came over. The rabbits are for Easter, she explained, enunciating loudly. Then, looking at my mother, she asked, Does she know what Easter is?

  My mother stiffened. Yes.

  You can hold one if you want. She picked up a bunny, white, with gray spots, out of the hutch and attempted to place it in my arms.

  No, thank you, my mother politely declined for me, then gripped me by the shoulder and guided me out the revolving doors. Outside, we stood underneath the awning of the building, watching the pedestrians crossing the bridge, shielding themselves from the rain with umbrellas or newspapers over their heads.

  What do you think it would be like if we lived here? she wondered, reverting back to Chinese. I would work, and then what would you do?

  You would work, and I would play, I said.

  I would work and you would cook, she decided. You would cook and clean. Do you know how to cook rice in the rice cooker?

  Yeah. You just put the rice and water in, then hit the button!

  No, you have to wash the rice first. So it doesn’t taste dirty. You wash the rice in cold water for at least a minute. If you could learn how to do that, and also how to steam a fish with ginger and scallions, then I could work.

  What would you work at?

  She was quiet for a moment. Finally, she said, personal wealth management. She said this stiffly in English, as if rehearsed for a job interview. I would manage people’s money, help them afford homes, plan for retirement. I’d work in a building like this one.

  She looked at me, suddenly stern, as if I were holding her back: But if I do that, you’d have to stay home. You’d stay home and I’d go to work. Okay?

  Okay, I had agreed.

  *

  All along the street as I drive, there are stops for the 56 Milwaukee bus. In another life, in my mother’s alternate life, I would take the 56 bus directly downtown, to one of the office buildings, and all of its nearby pleasures: the coffee from Lavazza, the off-street diners with wood-paneled interiors, the shops on State Street. I would sit in the back, wear sunglasses, watch the other passengers. I would go to work in the morning. I would return home in the evening.

  To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.

  To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

  The first toasty cigarette of the day, leaning against the outside of the building, near the entrance of revolving doors, befor
e heading upstairs to the office. The cold of a winter morning, and the smell of exhaust from all the cars and trucks down Lake Shore Drive, and the wind from the lake.

  As I drive farther downtown, Milwaukee Avenue becomes more congested, denser with rusting vehicles, taxis and buses that never reached their destination, until it becomes difficult to go farther. It’s as if they all abandoned their cars during a giant rush hour. I am forced to drive off-road on the sidewalks, bypassing clumps of cars. The pileup stretches for what seems like a mile. The Nissan emits a groan. The fuel light blinks furiously.

  Still, I keep pressing on, at a painful crawl. Up ahead, a tower crane has toppled onto the trisection, smashing all the streetlights and cars, blocking several routes. It is the cause of the frozen traffic. I attempt to maneuver around the fallen crane and turn onto the only street that isn’t blocked off. I’m not on Milwaukee anymore. The car manages another few blocks, until it stops with a lurch. I hit the gas hard, but it only makes a terrible sound in protest, then nothing. The engine stops.

  Silence. It’s dead.

  Up ahead, there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge. Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city.

  I get out and start walking.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Jin Auh, whose conviction changed everything, and to Jessica Friedman at the Wylie Agency.

  Thank you to Jenna Johnson and Sara Birmingham, whose insights surfaced the deeper story. You made this a better novel! Much respect to the hardworking team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, including Rebecca Caine, Jane Elias, Debra Helfand, Peter Richardson, Rob Sternitzky, Stephen Weil, and Chandra Wohleber.