In 2018, Ling Ma published a semi-prophetic book called Severance about a woman who survives a pandemic that kills almost everyone on Earth.

Candace Chan is working in publishing when a virus, which originates in China, starts biting into New York. Everything is novel, uncomfortable and gradual: concerning news stories, travel bans, a few cheap work-issued face masks. Candace just carries on with her work. Her job revolves around publishing Bibles, repackaging the same text in different ways each year. Thin paper, small print, she does her work meticulously. The virus is much less exacting and completely fatal — soon, there is a death count in bold on the homepage of a major news outlet’s website. We saw the same thing happen in 2020 on The Times’ front page when the UK reached 100,000 deaths in 10 months of Covid. Back then, everything was novel, uncomfortable and gradual in the real world’s new surrealism. One walk a day. Staring at the ceiling. Waiting for the end to come. I wonder if I could have suffered 2020 any easier if I had read Severance in time — in preparation.

Before things ramp up in the book’s pandemic (or ramp down, sloping into a bleak vanishing point), Candace’s colleagues are asked to work from home but the bosses offer a huge sum of money for Candace to carry on coming in. They say, ‘We’d prefer to keep our main office open. This is partly an optics issue. It gives our clients confidence that we’re still open when our competitors have closed their offices.’ She is fine with that. She’d prefer to keep her routine. She prefers it even when the death count ticks up and the office empties around her. She keeps coming in even when New York empties too; even when she has to call 911 because she gets stuck in the lift up to the thirty-first floor on the way to work and there are no repair services left alive to rescue her. When Candace comes back the next day and walks the thirty-one flights instead, despite the broken lift and the full-scale societal collapse and the ridiculous physical sacrifice, I began to feel a lot of second-hand shame holding this book in my hands. It’s still heating my cheeks a few weeks after reading.

I felt shame watching Candace climb and dig and burrow all alone, the only worker left in the ant farm; Ma’s writing like glass flat against one side of all this dirt so that we can examine our bizarre animal behaviour. I felt shame when Candace tried to get an estimate request on a Bible reissue from the factory that prints them in China and they replied telling her 71% of their workforce was dead, the place was closing, and that she should leave work and spend time with her family; shame in knowing she was spending all of this time on books that would never be made, and that no one could read anyway because they would all soon be dead. Shame in her still going to the office for the optics, when there were no eyes left to look. Shame in Candace automatically being issued that huge sum of money into her bank account for the sake of those optics at a time when there are no other people left to exchange goods with and money has very much become meaningless. Shame in redundancy pay that is totally redundant. Shame in working for nothing. Heavy, hot, lonely, bleeding shame in knowing I would probably have done the exact same thing as Candace.

Even though there was a life-threatening virus in the air, and I couldn’t see the love of my life, and I had to dress like a spaceman to visit the supermarket, I worked more than I’ve ever worked in 2020. If you had 24 hours left to live, what would you do? My answer is terrible, it turns out. I earned £34,000 that year — the most I’ve ever made — because in the uninterrupted privacy (or loneliness) of successive lockdowns, I just indulged my want to work and work, and to always be working. I was not just picking at the continental edges of a scab, but carrying on until the jagged blood-crisp was lifted clear off. I worked constantly because I needed the money, I thought I was enjoying myself, and also because I lacked the imagination to do literally anything cooler. I think that work has long been this deflecting thing positioned in front of me, over and before any other identity; the man who stops his ice cream van on my road on Thursday evenings during the summer refers to me only as ‘the writer.’ At no point in the past four years have I thought it important enough to tell him my name, or to talk about anything other than the book I’m writing. And I hate that as much as I hate Candace heaving herself up all of those stairs for nothing.

The fungal virus that kills people in Severance doesn’t always kill them in the way we recognise. It normally does, but occasionally people lose consciousness, they half-rot, and like domesticated zombies animated by the fungus, they continue performing a clumsy semblance of their daily routines from back when they were truly alive. There is one scene in the book when Candace passes the flagship Juicy Couture shop on Fifth Avenue. By that point, all shops had been looted and wrecked so she notices this one because it is pristine, like a ‘glass time capsule.’ On closer inspection she finds somebody inside who is folding and refolding polo shirts. They aren’t alive. They are fevered. Some of their jaw is missing. It is shit that in suspended death, this particular body only recalls work. It doesn’t keep the imprint of fun, or other people, or art. The body probably belonged to somebody who had to work shifts all the time to be able to afford to live in New York. But under these terms, Candace might as well be fevered too, because she is also stuck in her own looping performance, achieving nothing. It is these two images — of Candace walking up the stairs and the Juicy Couture employee rearranging velour — that really got to me when I was reading Severance. When Candace climbed thirty-one floors I felt like I understood that particular kind of possession, like an internal duty not coming from any outsider, whip in hand, but more like an invisible rig that has already decided what I’m going to do.

Ling Ma has written this book from the grooves our zombie-working bodies have worn into the earth. Reading felt like slipping down those grooves, bumbling down inverted desire paths, losing my grip in the mechanical oil spill and, actually, feeling more horror in the book’s characterisation of work than in its history-ending pandemic. I’ve been watching Twin Peaks for the first time lately and the 2 and a half minute uncut shot of somebody sweeping the floor in The Return did the same thing — there is all this horror in the air but look at what we’re doing instead.

In 2020, I worked. On January 2nd 2021, I got a Covid infection that disabled me, changed my life, shrunk my entire world, obliterated my future. I was left with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, Vasovagal Syndrome, chronic fatigue, grief and huge frustration — and I am ashamed that I have carried on working this entire time. I had just signed with a literary agent the month before my chronic illness began, and when I was lying prone in bed in those first few weeks, I read a book about crafting narrative. Light research, lightheadedness, light breaths that made me feel lifeless. I was changing, but in many respects, I was exactly the fucking same.

While my body went through that nightmare change, I played a game on my Switch that I wanted to review, stopping now and then to take my temperature. I answered emails from my phone. I was due to run a workshop with an artist and a group of art students and instead of calling in sick, or asking them to record it, I let the artist to take the lead and kept my camera off because I insisted on working, and also I was still in bed. I was keen for a career change at the time (I wanted to produce writing that wasn’t just a reaction to someone else’s art, but art in and of itself) and so I decided not to postpone my place on a game writing course. I had never felt so sick in all my life, or so bored, or scared, or dependent, but I did my homework every week and by the end of the course, I had written a treatment for a video game about a firefighter and domestic abuse. That was on top of weekly reviews, which I also recorded, whispering into the microphone because I had lost the force behind my voice.

It’s been three and a half years since then. I hate admitting this shit because it is not resilience but pure stupidity. Or it’s sad, really. I did all of these things so that I would carry on feeling like myself in my head — the writer the ice cream man knows — while my body became something else entirely. When I read Severance, I kept going back to this time in my head. That’s where my shame radiates out from, because I still wonder if I would have gotten so ill and stayed this ill if I had stopped working completely and just let myself rest instead. Not that I could have afforded to, but also, maybe I could have? I could have asked friends and family to take me in for as long as I needed to recover, but I never asked and I never recovered. I’ll never know, of course. I also know I shouldn’t mark it down as a personal fault when we live in a world that prioritises the exploitation of the working class for profit, and I’m not sure my friends and family could have afforded to take me in so that I could exist outside of that system for a while. I was too busy clawing my way back to independence anyway, and still falling short.

Yesterday, I had a call with the person who is reviewing the disability benefit I now receive and he stopped me after a minute to say, ‘Sorry, are you not well? Do you have a cold right now?’ I had to tell him this is just what it sounds like when you have a chronic illness (but I also thought, well, at least he knows I’m telling the truth). The benefit is Access To Work. I am given a grant to pay a support worker to help me carry on earning money despite the fraying state my body is in; I might have earned 34K in 2020 but it was only about 11 the following year. I’m glad to have that help but god, to think of the grant as a working lift back to the office so that I don’t have to walk the stairs — I’m still fevered. In my body, definitely. In my class, possibly forever. But in my head, I’m not so sure anymore. I think a new change might have begun.

A few years ago, if I was the only person left in the book’s city after a pandemic had wiped everyone out, I would have acted like Candace. If I had died, I would have come back to life mashing my fungus-possessed hands along a keyboard, typing nonsense, or nothing, on a blacked out, offline screen. But I don’t push through anymore. Working used to energise me but now it directly punishes my health. Makes it a lot easier to turn around and walk down the stairs instead of up. To leave out the front door, remember the sky, and do things that have nothing to do with work. So, this review is late because I live with sickness, this text is short because it has to be. Ling Ma wrote this book after she was laid off from her job as a fact checker at a magazine. She used the money from her severance pay to get it started. Next time a pandemic makes the world novel, uncomfortable and open again, like a huge bleeding wound, I’ll know not to waste my time with work anymore. I’ll just take my money and run.

-> Please comment a money emoji on this week’s Instagram post so that I know readers are out there 💰💵💸

-> hope you can rest today