Sublimation(104)

In the elevator, she presses her hand against her pocket, to make sure the keycards are still there. They are.





YUJIN


Soyoung gave you the address, the time, the place. You had googled how to get to Manhattan from John F. Kennedy Airport and given up and decided that you would call a rideshare. Or maybe you’d take a cab. You liked the idea of taking a yellow cab in New York—it was silly. A hint of novelty on your mission. Mission. That sounded so serious. You didn’t know what else to call it. Your little errand.

Going through the airport had been garbage—you hadn’t expected the airport to be such garbage. You had expected New York airports to be better. You had read all the signs okay, at least. You hadn’t expected some of the signs to have Korean subtitles—along with Chinese, Spanish, a bunch of other languages. And there were so many white people. And black people. And brown people. It was the people more than the buildings that got to you. You haven’t seen this many non-Asian people in one place since your semester at NYU. But everything in the city was slightly askew. A little off, from what you knew. You didn’t dislike it. In another life, you would have enjoyed the opportunity to explore.

Now you’re standing in YJ’s apartment lobby, waiting for the elevator. He lives in an okay building, you guess. You didn’t get any looks coming in from the doorman. Why would you? He probably just thinks you’re YJ, coming home from something.

The elevator comes. You get in. Elevators in the United States are subtly different than most of the elevators in Korea—you can’t quite articulate what the difference is, but there’s a palpable strangeness, the same way that everything here has felt like the world tilted to the left.

You want YJ’s familiarity with the country. You want his easy understanding of how to call a cab, how the streets are set up. Your anger had cooled to a low simmer on the plane ride. But you still want your revenge. You want to fold him into yourself and have him understand how he has wronged you. You want his life. You’ll settle for taking him back into yours.

You get out of the elevator. You know he keeps his spare key underneath a doormat. You’re going to let yourself in. You had told Soyoung that you’re going to distract him—you were lying. No, not lying—what you’re going to do is going to be very distracting. You don’t plan on giving him time to talk. You’re going to walk up to his sleeping self and push your body onto his. And then you’ll be him. You’ll know everything, if you reintegrate. And if you change your mind—if your future, reintegrated self changes his mind—then he knows how to separate himself. But you—you know how you feel. You didn’t instance when you crossed the border, anyway.



* * *



Imagine that Adam gets to walk back into paradise. Imagine him looking at his nude self. That motherfucker who has never known anything but paradise. Of course, that naked asshole got his own punishment: He can never leave.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


Soyoung walks out of the subway. It feels like she’s awake after a long time being asleep. Adrenaline. She’s shrugged off the last of the warmth from YJ’s apartment, and the temperature has dropped since night fell. When she went in, it was still light out. Now, the streetlamps are on, the world’s all fluorescent and shadow, LED billboards. A sinister sort of half-light. No, don’t pathologize anything. Her ruse hinges on her seeming as unsuspicious as possible for as long as possible. Part of that requires pretending everything is normal, down in her subconscious.

This is the last easy moment for her to back out. She could go home. She could go back to Korea. But it feels like it had felt for Soyoung, when she had decided to reintegrate with Rose. The certainty. How she reached for her other self’s hand and it was like her body was moving before her mind could tell her what to do. She was wrong, then. She doesn’t think she’s wrong now.



* * *



It’s easier, if Odysseus gives up on going home. If he accepts the gods’ punishment. But there’s no world in which Odysseus doesn’t try and go home, now that he’s failed to die in a war.





YJ


You wake up from a dead sleep. For a single second, you’re confused. Some animal sense in your body jolts you to awareness, and in a series of staccato realizations, you see that there’s someone in the room with you, standing over your bed.

“Soyoung?” you say, blearily.

“Shh,” the shadow says.

He has your voice. Adrenaline shoots through your system. You throw the blankets up, scramble across the sheets.

“Shit!” the shadow says again louder, stumbling back, blanket in his face.

You scramble to your feet, tumble off the other side of the bed, try to get a good look at him as he pulls the blanket off. In the slim line of light from between your curtains you see him, in features more than in his totality. Here is his nose, the shape of his skull, here is the gleam of his eye, his jawline, here is your face in kaleidoscopic totality and you have the completely inane thought: Yujin can’t be in the States, Yujin is in Korea.

Yujin lunges toward you.



* * *



The fisherman in his house, with his knife outstretched.



* * *



You throw a pillow at him. You throw your watch at him. You throw Petra’s alarm clock at him. You run around the bed. Yujin stumbles into your closet. You don’t want to hurt him. You run jaggedly around the bed, swerving past his outstretched hand. Your heart beats with the compulsion that you can’t let him touch you. You’re naked. You’re not wearing a MERGEBREAK. He’s not wearing one, either, you bet.