Sublimation(108)

There’s a crash from somewhere outside. She freezes. Breathes in sharply. Nothing. That was nothing. Just the building settling. Or a night janitor. No one else would be here, this late. She bites her lip. Keeps calibrating the machine. Pulls a slider slightly closer. Changes the frequency a few levels down. About three-quarters done, she thinks. She had assumed this would take less time, but she supposes Gerry was a professional who built parts of the interface, and this is Soyoung’s first time using it.

The sound of the number pad clicking. Fuck. Yujin didn’t do his job. He didn’t intercept YJ fast enough. YJ must have noticed his cards were gone, and extrapolated who had stolen them and for what purpose.

Nearly there. Two more dials to turn, a few more keystrokes. She goes quickly, one hand on the dial while the other bangs at the keyboard. She needs time. She needs to stall him. She needs to stop him. She has one tool. The machine in front of her.

She bites her lip. She makes three decisive keystrokes.

The door opens.





YJ-YUJIN


Yujin walks into the room and is thrown into the diffuse emotion of nostalgia, punching him in the chest. Remember being a kid, playing in the sandbox with Soyoung. Remember walking to school and sitting in class. Remember leaving Korea, getting on the plane and thinking that it’s an adventure. The feeling suffuses the air. It makes him stop; it makes his knees weak.

“Mitosis does that to everyone, the first time,” Soyoung says.

Yujin pushes past the feeling in his chest. He takes a step forward.

“Soyoung—”

“Don’t step closer. If you take three more steps you’re going to be in for a really weird, bad time.”

He stops.

“I’ve set the radius of the field to its maximum,” Soyoung says. “I don’t want to hurt you. But I will, if I have to.”

“Soyoung,” Yujin says. “What are you doing?”

She doesn’t answer his question. She keeps typing at the keyboard while watching him.

“The more you know about what I’m doing, the more implicated you become. You said you didn’t want this to be your problem, so just turn around. Walk away.”

“You used my ID, I’m already implicated. You told Yujin how YJ felt to make him come here; you slept with YJ to get my keycard; you lied to Yujin for months, and—”

She looks at him, no longer typing. Wide eyes. She’s staring as if she can read his mind, understand what’s happened to him. As if to see something is to understand it.

“You reintegrated with yourself,” Soyoung says. “That was what Yujin meant by ‘a distraction,’ wasn’t it? Am I right? Who am I talking to right now?”

“Yujin,” he says, because that’s his name, that’s YJ’s name, that’s every version of his name, and he starts laughing, because the absurdity of the last few weeks is finally getting to his head. Oh, how knowing changes things. Oh, how lying when you have a secret is different than lying by accident, how having two histories in your head is different than being singular.

“Please leave,” Soyoung says. “I know you don’t want to be involved.”

Yujin shakes his head.

“I said it before, I’m already implicated. You stole my cards. I’m the first suspect.”

“Tell them I seduced you,” she says.

“Did you?”

“No,” she says. “But I don’t know if I could make you believe that.”

How have he and Soyoung come to this? They used to play together. Their biggest problems used to be begging money off their mothers for chips after school. He can’t know her heart now. He can’t know why she does anything at all.

YJ could stand here all night. Soyoung could stand here all night. He thinks about what he knows about Soyoung. Soyoung, once she has direction, chases that desire to the end of the earth. She has no compunctions about asking the world to bend toward her favor. Soyoung was trying to live in a way that was temporary, and it made her careless. There is no way he’s going to convince her to stand down. He knows her, he thinks. He hopes. He and she, they could stand at an impasse forever. But that leads to both of them being caught in the morning. If he just got to her, physically, he could overpower her. And he wants to do that: He wants to catch her wrists in a hold and pull her out of this room. He wants to take her back home with him.

“Soyoung, I think the only person you’re ever interested in is yourself, and all the rest of us are collateral,” YJ says. “But I really don’t think you’d hurt me on purpose.”



* * *



Odysseus blithely leaving Ithaca, assuming his wife, his son, his other self, will welcome his return.



* * *



YJ steps forward.



* * *



Adam taking the apple, assuming that Eve will never hurt him.



* * *



Nostalgia crashes over him like a wave, sweeps him apart into his component parts, the punch of powerful feeling hitting somewhere behind his heart and lungs, and it makes him choke, it’s such a surprise, it makes him want to vomit, and he’s still moving toward the gate, body in motion as if propelled by the yearning, the desire to rewind time, it’s been so few hours since he’s been reintegrated, and he tries to stop but he falls over his own feet, and he’s crashing forward, and then he’s gone, and then he feels something around him, and god, he feels so—