Severance

Back in the early days of the pandemic, Candace spent five years working at Spectra. Her life tunneled into routine: working, living in Bushwick, watching movies in Jonathan’s basement apartment, and eating cheap dumpling soup. In this way she became forgotten in New York. Candace stops seeing Jonathan after he tells her he is moving. She isn’t going to go with him. She tries to disappear into routine further to forget it. Surfing the news at work, updates on the spread of Shen mingle and disappear among innocuous headlines. It’s summer now, and Candace wants to party. She goes out with Lane and Blythe and makes jokes to strangers about feeling sick.

Lane, Blythe, and Candace head back to Lane’s loft in Soho, which extremely nice due to her higher salary, but more so the support from her trust fund. They are rather drunk, and stumble around looking for Lane’s cat Suki. Candace is ignoring texts from Jonathan. Meanwhile, she keeps hearing an incessant jingling sound. Lane and Blythe tell her a position will soon be available on the Art books team, and Candace realizes the whole evening has been an audition. Candace feels so different from them, and she’s almost outraged that they would assume she would want to belong to their group—and yet she does want to belong. The jingling continues, and Candace asks after it. Lane explains her neighbor is old and constantly struggles with her keys, but she refuses Lane’s help.

Candace goes out into the hallway and sees the neighbor, an ancient woman trying to get into her apartment, picking up and dropping her keys over and over. Her face is so old she almost looks like a corpse, and Candace notices bruises and cuts all over her. Candace helps the woman with her keys and lets her into her apartment. Inside the apartment is a sensory overload. The TV and every light is on, the sink has flooded the floor, and coffee has been burning in the pot for days. The woman sits and flips the channels aimlessly, laughing each time. Someone calls an ambulance, and it is confirmed that she has Shen Fever. The paramedics question Lane, who can provide no further details since the woman “kept to herself.”

Back at work, Candace can hardly focus. Her thoughts flit between Jonathan and the traumatic Shen experience with the elderly neighbor. Still, she dutifully she submits her transfer request to the Art book department. Candace leaves and wanders through time square, recalling movies of single women in New York she used to watch with Jonathan. Many pharmacies are closed, but Candace eventually finds an off-brand pregnancy test at a random store in Koreatown. She buys two, and when she gets home and takes the tests, both come up positive. She breaks down into tears but sees no difference in herself. Feeling so lost, Candace dissociates completely. She does not tell Jonathan. She defaults into her routine and loses herself in it.