Severance: A Novel

Manny looked up in surprise when I exited the elevator in the lobby. They let you leave! He said.
Yeah. They chain me to my desk all day.
He smiled. Any exciting plans tonight?
You know it, I said, as I walked through the revolving doors.
The crush of Times Square greeted me. The city was so big. It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to do with buying things: dinner entrees, cocktails, the cover charge at a nightclub. Then there was the shopping, big chain stores open late, up and down the streets, throbbing with bass-heavy music and lighting. In the Garment District, diminished to a limited span of blocks after apparel manufacture moved overseas, wholesale shops sold fabrics and trinkets imported from China, India, Pakistan.
In Jonathan’s apartment, we used to watch single-woman-in-Manhattan movies, a subgenre of New York movies. There was Picture Perfect, An Unmarried Woman, Sex and the City. The single heroine, usually white, romantic in her solitude. In those movies, there is almost always this power-walk shot, in which she is shown striding down some Manhattan street, possibly leaving work during rush hour at dusk, the traffic blaring all around and the buildings rising around her. The city was empowering. Even if a woman doesn’t have anything, the movies seemed to say, at least there is the city. The city was posited as the ultimate consolation.

[...]

I don’t understand this festive mood, Jonathan said, indicating outside the window.
Well, they won’t have to work tomorrow, I explained.
So? he asked, cutting a plantain with a plastic knife.
I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage would be bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.
Brunch? He echoed skeptically.
Okay, maybe not brunch, I conceded. If not brunch, then something else.
A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like do to the Botanical Garden, the
Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learning to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough to just feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.
I don’t know if you get that though, I said.
Of course I get that. I worked in an office. He took a bite of plantain.

[...]

I’m not like you.
What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I see the bare, painstaking cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs – I called it integrity – but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.