Severance Page 14

  You may not understand everything that’s happening right now, he said, his voice slow and deliberate. You must be, I imagine, extremely sleep-deprived. But I just want to say, I appreciate you telling me what you guys did this morning, and what happened last night. It’s not easy to confess, or to own up to your mistakes.

  You’re wel—

  Candace, Evan interjected, just let him say what he has to say.

  Thank you, Evan. What I was going to say was, don’t think that I’m not sympathetic to what you’re going through. But also—and here, Bob swiveled his head to look at us in the backseat—don’t think that what happened in there, what we were forced to do, wasn’t a direct consequence of what you two did last night.

  But what did you do in there? I asked. As he faced forward, I raised my voice. Bob, what did you do?

  Bob paused, unhooking the keys from his belt. Then he pivoted back and looked at me, tearing the sunglasses off his face. His red-veined gray eyes were a shock to see. You really want to know, Candace?

  They were my friends, I pressed. Our friends.

  Okay, he said blankly. Well, Ashley was fevered. She was that way when we came into the house. You know what we do with the fevered. It’s the merciful thing to do, rather than allow them to loop indefinitely.

  Was Janelle fevered too?

  No. No, she wasn’t, he said.

  So what happened to Janelle? I said, only aware that my voice was rising when Evan put a hand on my arm.

  Evan addressed Bob: Janelle probably tried to stop you from shooting Ashley.

  She threw herself in front of Ashley, Bob confirmed. I had just pulled the trigger. There wasn’t enough time.

  That is crazy. That’s fucking insane! I exploded, as Evan touched my arm again. He was telling me to shut up, just shut up.

  I don’t want to talk about this again, Bob said firmly. He turned around. He began to put the key in the ignition, stopped and looked at us in the rearview mirror. And Candace, Evan. One more thing. Don’t think that there aren’t consequences for your actions, either. Candace, I am especially disappointed in you.

  At least that’s what I thought he said.

  As he had predicted, we arrived at the Facility within days.

  13

  SHEN FEVER FAQ

  What is it?

  Shen Fever is a newly discovered fungal infection. The “fever” is contracted by breathing in microscopic fungal spores. Once inhaled, they spread from the lungs and nasal area to other organs, most commonly to the brain. Although fungal diseases have long existed in the United States, these milder forms are often contained by the immune system. Shen Fever is a particularly aggressive strain, as its fungal spores disseminate through the body quickly.

  The first case of Shen Fever was reported in Shenzhen, China, in May 2011. There are now 174 documented cases in the United States, 41 of which were reported in New York.

  Symptoms

  In its initial stages, Shen Fever is difficult to detect. Early symptoms include memory lapse, headaches, disorientation, shortness of breath, and fatigue. Because these symptoms are often mistaken for the common cold, patients are often unaware they have contracted Shen Fever. They may appear functional and are still able to execute rote, everyday tasks. However, these initial symptoms will worsen.

  Later-stage symptoms include signs of malnourishment, lapse of hygiene, bruising on the skin, and impaired motor coordination. Patients’ physical movements may appear more effortful and clumsy. Eventually, Shen Fever results in a fatal loss of consciousness. From the moment of contraction, symptoms may develop over the course of one to four weeks, based on the strength of the patient’s immune system.

  Transmission

  Shen Fever is contracted by breathing in microscopic spores in the air. Because these spores are undetectable, it is difficult to prevent exposure in areas where it is in the environment. However, the infection is not contagious between people. Transmission through bodily fluids is rare.

  Certain precautions may be taken. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advocate a preventative approach. Avoid dusty areas and breathing in large amounts of dust. Use air filtration measures indoors. An N95 respirator may be worn to reduce the chance of transmission. See cdc.gov for more details.

  14

  Five years pass working for the same company. I worked the same job, albeit under a new title and with an increased salary.

  I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine. I lived in Bushwick, in the same studio. I was still in a relationship with Jonathan, who still lived in the same Greenpoint apartment. We still watched movies together, projected against his wall. We watched Manhattan. That scene when Woody Allen’s character, depressed and lovelorn, lay on the sofa, listing all the things that still made life worth living. Like: Louis Armstrong. Cézanne pears and apples. Swedish cinema.

  A morning cup of coffee, bought at the street cart outside the Spectra building. The feeling of walking outside in the summer with just-washed hair. Bodega snacks, like those Sponch marshmallow cookies, with their tiny white and pink marshmallows clustered atop a biscuit. Watching movies with Jonathan and talking late into the night.

  He led me down the basement steps to the place where he lived. It was a room with a mattress on the floor. There was a drain in the middle of it. I stayed for years. Coming and going. We watched Antonioni, Hitchcock, Almodóvar movies, footsteps on the sidewalk above us. We emerged at night, wandering through convenience stores, drifting past Fujianese food factories whose loading docks were in perpetual states of shipping and receiving, whose chimneys unfurled smoke in the service of dumplings and wontons. When I was at my poorest, when I first moved to New York, that’s what I ate almost every night, sipping the water they were boiled in for added nutritive value, like soup, like my Chinese mother used to.

  New York has a way of forgetting you.

  Listen to me, Jonathan had said. Look at me. I have something to tell you.

  I had stopped seeing him after that night. I stopped talking to him, stopped taking his calls or responding to his texts. I wasn’t going to move with him. I wanted to quit him cold turkey. I emptied myself, lost myself in the work. I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.

  Things at the office proceeded along the same path. Through some finagling, the Hong Kong office found an alternate, smaller gemstone supplier for the Gemstone Bible. The printed Bibles were shrink-wrapped with teardrop-shaped amethysts, opals, and rose quartz on silver chains. Prepped for Christmas season, they were then packed into boxes, the boxes were palleted, and the whole shipment was loaded onto a boat in the Hong Kong port, along with other export commodities. Once the shipment hit the water, the gemstone supplier folded, due to the workers’ health issues with pneumoconiosis.

  I was just doing my job.

  I got up. I went to work in the morning. The first thing I did at my desk was surf the news. A flock of dead seagulls was found washed up on Brighton Beach, dredged up with seaweed. Various sources reported an unexplained aroma, sweet and warm like chocolate-chip cookies, that inundated the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights. The best soup dumplings in New York were located in a tiny restaurant in Flushing, according to a prominent restaurant critic. Controversy ensued when kitchen photos emerged showing the dumplings being folded in unsanitary conditions. The number of Shen Fever victims was on the uptick. A baby was left on the front steps of an American Apparel in Williamsburg and found by an employee in the morning. It was quickly dubbed Hipster Baby by a neighborhood blog and became an internet meme.

  It was still summer. I wanted to party.

  With the Art Girls, we went barhopping after work and nibbled at small plates at tapas lounges. One night, I ended up at Lane’s SoHo loft. I was standing at the window, wineglass in hand, feeling the cool pane of glass at my forehead. I had directed strangers to this forehead all night. Feel this, I slurred, lea
ning against the bar. Am I sick? Do I have a fever? I wanted them to be complicit in agreeing that I was indeed sick, that I should have stayed home that day. Because I felt unhealthy, not myself, nauseated. But they had all laughed. You’re fine, one guy assured me. A million palms had touched my forehead, now the dirtiest, most bacterial part of me.

  Now, at Lane’s loft, some people were coming over; “party favors” had been procured and I guess we were going to do things. Behind me, Lane and Blythe donned their respirator masks, making jokes about “epidemic fashion.” Whatever that meant, they were giggling hysterically. It was only a few drinks into the night, but sounds had started blurring together. The sound of obscure hip-hop from the stereo system, the sound of water falling from the Zen serenity fountain in the corner, the sound of keys jangling somewhere far off.

  On the street below, a lone taxicab found its way down the cobblestone street, its headlights on full beam.

  I had never been to Lane’s apartment before, on the fifth floor of a loft building. We consoled ourselves with the fact that Lane came from wealth—her father dealt high-end Miami real estate or something—and thus augmented her Spectra salary with her trust fund. We had gone from room to room, Lane flipping on the lights to expose an explosion of exposed brick and midcentury furnishings, beautiful in an obvious way, tits and ass, marble countertops and chrome fixtures. The loft was only a few blocks away, she pointed out, not with insignificant pride, from the building where Heath Ledger had died. The living room, with its high ceilings, was furnished with Eames chairs and a white shag rug, dirtied with kitty litter tracked around by a cat that was nowhere to be seen.

  Suki! Lane called out periodically. Suki! Then she would turn to one of us. Suki’s shy, she’d say. So I call her Sulky.

  Suki! I called, breaking into bouquets of giggles. I thought I could hear her cat, or at least a metallic sound, a kitty tag tinkling.

  I had to be somewhere. I couldn’t be alone. All day, my cell had filled with texts from Jonathan, messages that he’d spent forever typing out on his flip phone. I hadn’t read them, but if I went home, I would open them, pace, overthink, and call him back. He would come over maybe or, worst-case scenario, I would go over to his place, descending those basement steps once again, on some endless loop. This wasn’t the first time we’d broken up, but it was the first time that it felt irrevocable.

  Lane and Blythe took off their face masks. Blythe said, Should we just tell her?

  I turned around. Tell me what?

  It’s good news, don’t worry, Lane said.

  Blythe opened up another bottle of wine, averted her eyes. There’s a new position opening up. This one’s in Art.

  Okay. I nodded and obediently took a sip of my wine.

  Senior Product Coordinator, Lane added. They’re posting it next week. Just thought you’d like to know.

  Blythe chimed in. It’s kind of like what you’re doing now, but in Art. And we know you want to get out of Bibles. She caught herself. I mean, who wouldn’t?

  Wow, I said, swallowing. Exciting.

  So you should put your name in, Blythe prodded.

  Lane smiled at me meaningfully. At least you get to work on challenging projects in Art. It’s not like Bibles, where you work on the exact same thing over and over again. Her phone pinged with a text. Delilah’s on her way, she announced.

  Suddenly, I understood why Blythe had invited me. They were trying me out, auditioning me, as a possible addition to their clique. I looked at myself. In my office outfit, I felt wilted in comparison to their glossy day-to-night sheath dresses.

  If you did get it, Blythe started, we’d start you off with the reprints first, just until you get the hang of things. I mean, you’d probably be perfect for this.

  Yes. I took a sip from the wineglass. It tasted bloody. I wanted to tell them that they had made a mistake. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t want the same things that they wanted, and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths. All of these distinctions, of course, belied the fact that I very much wanted to work in Art. I wanted to be an Art Girl.

  Or, at least, I couldn’t work in Bibles forever. I’d go crazy. I couldn’t keep having nightmares of thin Bible paper ripping on web presses, I couldn’t keep explaining to clients the working conditions of Chinese laborers, things that I didn’t understand myself, I couldn’t keep converting yuan to dollars, the exchange rates wildly fluctuating, flailing like a drowning swimmer.

  Things were different in Art. The clients weren’t so fixated on the bottom line. They wanted the product to be beautiful. They cared about the printing, color reproduction, the durability of a good sewn binding, and they were willing to pay more for it, alter their publication schedule for it. They donated to nonprofits that advocated against low-wage factories in South Asian countries, even as they made use of them, a move that showed a sophisticated grasp of global economics.

  Who should I talk to? I asked, smoothing out my skirt.

  They looked at each other before Blythe spoke. You should see HR first thing on Monday. I think Michael is doing the hiring, but it’s taken up through HR.

  We’ll put in a good word for you, Lane added.

  Thanks, I said, wondering whether to be more effusive in my gratitude.

  Lane patted the seat next to her. Sit down!

  I obeyed, my skirt riding up my stomach. The music had stopped some time ago, I realized. No one replaced it with anything new. They were both checking their phones as they coordinated the get-together, pings and vibrations filling up the silence. Someone’s keys jangled.

  Where’s this sound coming from? I asked. Someone’s keys?

  That’s my neighbor, Lane said. She’s this old woman who always has trouble getting her keys in the doorknob. I used to offer to help, but she never let me.

  I opened the front door. Across the hall was a petite middle-aged lady. She was dressed strangely, in a buttoned-up wool cardigan and linen pants, as if her torso and her legs experienced two different seasons. And she kept doing the same thing over and over. She would try to place the key into the knob, and, fumbling at the knob, she would drop the keys on the floor. She’d pick them up and would try again. There was something mechanical, jerky, in her movements.

  I walked across the hall and took the keys out of her hands. Here, let me help you, I said, gently. There were at least a dozen keys on her chain. I tried most of them. The last key looked similar to Lane’s apartment key, and it didn’t take much jingling before the door finally opened.

  There you go, I said, holding the door for her to pass through. Then I saw her face. It was so ancient it was cadaverous. Her lipstick was all over her chin, her eye shadow was in her eyebrows. It was marked with bruises and scratches, the thin, delicate neck too. Dried flecks of product in her congealed hair, as if she hadn’t bothered to rinse out the shampoo. The cardigan she wore was buttoned up wrong, in a mismatched fashion. Her linen pants had been put on inside out. Without looking at me, she walked straight inside, where she plunked down on the sofa, in front of the blaring television.

  And me, I was inside her apartment. Blythe was calling after me. It was so bright, noisy. Every single light was on, every appliance. From the sour, acidic smell, I could tell the coffee had been burning in the pot for days. Alongside the window were placed a row of plants, so overwatered they had drowned, stains in rings around the pots. It took me a while to understand that the floor in the doorway was wet, that water was seeping into my office flats, that water had soaked into the darkened rugs and the doormats, water was pooling in around the electrical wires. I walked over to the kitchen sink, filled with dirtied, broken dishes and decaying food, and turned the faucet off.

  From the sofa, the woman issued a laugh, like the laugh track from a sitcom. She was watching, I saw as I walked over, the ten o’clock news, which was running a segment on the widening income gap. She laughed. Remote in hand, she changed the channels periodic
ally. T-Mobile was offering a new no-strings-attached carrier plan. She laughed. Neutrogena Blackhead Eliminating Cleanser, blasting blackheads all over your face. She laughed. The new Lincoln Town Car. French’s mustard. The latest MacBook. She laughed. The channel switched to another news broadcast. They were interviewing the head of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center. He was talking about the virus. He said that the cases of Shen Fever must be underreported because there were many who lived alone. She laughed.

  I edged back toward the door, my body aflame with goose bumps. I opened it and stepped back out into the hallway.

  After the ambulance arrived, Lane tried to answer questions as Blythe and I stood by helplessly.

  How long has she been fevered? the paramedic asked.

  I don’t know, Lane responded. We were only neighbors.

  Did you notice any odd behavior? he pressed. Or anything off about her appearance that suggested diminishing cognizance? Like if she wore winter coats in the middle of summer, that kind of thing?

  If I detected anything earlier, I would have called.

  Do you know how we may reach her family or next of kin?

  Lane shook her head. Again, I didn’t know her that well. She kept to herself.

  *

  All throughout Monday, I was distracted and unproductive, and so I stayed late at the office. I couldn’t go to Jonathan’s anymore, and I didn’t want to be greeted by my own sad, foodless empty apartment.

  Nights like this, I only noticed that I needed to leave when the cleaning ladies came in. They emptied our wastebaskets, replenished the paper towels and toilet paper rolls. They smiled at me amiably; if they were irritated by my presence, they didn’t show it. Then they began to vacuum, wielding high-energy, heavy industrial cleaners that rang through the halls like drills. It was my cue to go.

  Before I left, I printed out and filled out the request form for my transfer to Art, slid it underneath the door of Carole’s empty office, too tired to fully grasp how myopic and ridiculous and low-priority the request now seemed, after the Shen Fever–related incident. I collected my things and took the elevator downstairs.