Sublimation(110)

“So,” a voice behind you says. Your voice. “I didn’t have that one on the bingo board.”

You turn around. Rose is sitting at the kitchen table. You remember sitting at the table, how Rose is sitting the same way you sat there as a teenager. You did a lot of homework at that table.

“YJ stepping in.”

“Yeah.”

You probe your memory. You remember Gerry telling you, at the beginning of the trials, that after being unspooled the memories of the last few months would become washed out, apportioned between you and your instance based on some sort of weighted internal valence. The last few months feel clear in your head. You remember being Soyoung-Rose. You remember the series of decisions that led to this outcome. Beyond that, in the current moment, you have only your own memories of the past, not Rose’s. It’s a strange segmentation.

Rose gets up. She inspects the kitchen. You follow her.

“How do you think we come out?”

“I think it just ends. Same as every other time.”

“No, I mean—how do we come out? How do—separate, or together?”

“I don’t know,” you say, and you realize that you’re not speaking any particular language with Rose. You think a thought. It verbalizes. She understands. You’re inhabiting the space between thinking and speaking. There are no languages here.

“Fair,” Rose says.

You step out of the kitchen. You inspect the living room. You’re sure if you went upstairs, you would find your old bedroom.

“Hey, I want to check out the upstairs,” Rose says, and then she starts walking that way, so you follow her.





ROSE


You head for the stairs. You thought that being separate would make you feel clearer in the head. You had thought it would be more of a relief. But it just feels like—there’s no difference. It just feels like you. You’re worried about the same things you were worried about before the laboratory: what to do with YJ, what you are going to tell your mothers, how you are going to get Soyoung to the airport.

And you’re worried about the files, the copies of the archive, the fact that when you leave the dream, you’re going to be a trespasser in an office building, and there’s going to be two of you, and YJ will be there, and you don’t know what condition he’s going to be in. You remember thinking that you’d figure all of this out after. That you’d buy a plane ticket, and upload the files from Korea. She had left the details for you and your other self.

You’re surprised that, even with the manifold problems she’s left behind, you like the memories of your conglomerate self. She didn’t ruminate. She acted, rather than thought. She saw a problem and followed the clean bright line to its conclusion. She wasn’t kind, but in the end, she had prioritized what she felt was good for society over her own personal gain. She might have been selfish, but at least she had been selfish in motion. She was better than you had been.



* * *



The world where the fisherman sits at his own bedside and asks his instance how his life had gone is a quieter one. There’s no bloodshed, in that world. Maybe there’s some conversation. Maybe he runs back for the undersea court. But there’s no bone-deep knowing. No two worlds in his chest. No knife, either.



* * *



You walk across the living room. Everything in the room seems so much smaller than it did when you were younger.

“I’m sorry,” your other self says. “For reintegrating us.”

You stop halfway up the staircase. You look down. Soyoung’s looking back at you, clear-eyed, the set of her mouth serious. You remember reintegration: the immediate feeling of regret, of remorse, of sadness, of furious anger. She had never apologized—she had never been able to. An apology to the self would have meant nothing.

“I didn’t expect you to feel that way.”

“Well. I just want you to know. I’m sorry,” Soyoung says. “You don’t have to forgive me or anything, but I just wanted to say it.”

You look away from her. You keep walking up. You are thinking about the last few months. You are thinking about all the hurt, the confusion, how the mélange of her life and your life felt, and how it felt to be someone who was able to ask your questions and finally get your questions answered. Someone capable of going into this house without fear.

“It’s okay,” you say.





SOYOUNG


You walk behind Rose as she opens the door to your old room. This is probably pulled from your memories, not hers. You remember it better than she does, you had lived here until you went to college. But it looks like your room from when you were eleven. Cartoon posters on the walls. The pink bedspread you got rid of when you were fifteen.

Rose falls onto the bed. It’s the sort of comfortable, pleased motion you remember being able to make with your body that you’ve never seen from the outside. You lie down next to her, slowly, giving her time to get up if she wants to. She doesn’t. You look up at the ceiling. The fluorescent lights, the water stains. It’s an old house. You don’t miss being a kid.

“Why the house, do you think?” she says.

“I mean—I guess we’ve been thinking about it a lot. Or trying not to think about it.”