Like our virus’ origins in a market of the massive, newly hatched Chinese city of Wuhan, Shen Fever emerges from a production facility in Shenzhen, China. Now, mid- (or perhaps early or late, it’s impossible to tell) COVID-19, Severance is turning into an uncanny parallel of our current state of the world. It’s a slow roll of disaster, like an IV bag full of diluted poison that metes out its contents drip by drip. But in Severance, the destruction of society isn’t wrought over the course of a few days or in the instant of a nuclear event. Though events in Camus’s The Plague or Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera take place over longer stretches of time, in neither novel do the victims cleanly see the disease coming over the horizon. The never-described event (some speculate it’s a meteor strike) that decimates America in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road happens in the blink of an eye. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, the Georgia flu takes out 99 percent of the world in a matter of days.
She’s working, she says, “as if it were obvious.” The operator tiredly asks, “What are you still doing in there?” Candace doesn’t understand the question. A few minutes later, the elevator inexplicably lurches to life and delivers her to her colleague-free floor, where she calls 911. When she presses the Emergency Call button, it goes straight to City Services’ voice-mail. She’s one of the last humans left in the city. New York is essentially empty after a strange fungal infection called Shen Fever has slithered its way through the population Candace remains, fulfilling a contract that promises her huge bonuses so long as she stays at work. Ordinarily, this would be an inconvenience, a story to tell her friends later, but now it’s a potentially deadly tragedy. She’s on her way up to Spectra, the New York publishing house where she facilitates printings of new versions of the Bible.
Toward the end of Ling Ma’s Severance, Candace Chen gets stuck in an elevator.
0 kommentar(er)
