Sublimation(111)

“I don’t like what it says about us, that stealing Mitosis was easier than deciding what to do with the house,” When you don’t respond, she says, “I remember there being glow-in-the-dark stars.”

You finally respond.

“We took them down when we were ten, remember? I wanted to have a grown-up room, going into middle school.”

Silence again. It’s nice, in a way. The quiet clicking of the alarm clock that you kept on your nightstand. The sound of wind in the trees outside.

“What do you think happened to Yujin?”

“I don’t know,” you say again. “I didn’t think he’d walk in.”

You’re worried about him. You’re really worried.

The clock ticks. You close your eyes and open them. Still no stars. Just your memory of them.

“What do we do with the house?” she says.



* * *



Why the house? Why situate this trip through the unconscious here? What does it represent? The house is your childhood. The house is your grandfather’s postwar consolation prize. The house is a gift. The house is a trap. The house is the world as it used to be, as it could be, as it could have been.



* * *



It’s your turn to be silent. You want to give her the answer she wants, this time. You feel like you’ve made enough misery for her. But you don’t know what she wants.

“I want to hear what you want to do with the house.”

“I want to sell it,” she says, and it sounds like a confession. “Or, no. I want to want to sell it. Or I want to want to give it to Minsoo, or something. Or to you. But, no. I don’t really want—”

“You actually want to keep it.”

“I want to be the sort of person who wants everything that comes with keeping his house,” Rose says. “Or the sort of person who truly doesn’t care. Like, how I wish I missed him. I want to miss him, more than I miss him. I miss—”

She rubs her eyes.

“I don’t think you get to choose who you miss,” you say. “I thought you could, but—”

“—yeah,” Rose says. “But if I don’t miss him, why the fuck am I so attached to the house?”

You don’t have an answer for her, there. She doesn’t seem to mind, she just dries her eyes on her sleeve and then you’re both getting up, because there’s the sound of someone calling from downstairs.





YJ-YUJIN


The first thing Yujin thinks when he opens his eyes is: This is it. I died. The Mitosis gate tore me apart and I died and this is heaven. He’s staring at a patch of pale blue sky ringed with a halo of treetops. He turns his head. Trees, a brick wall behind them, little pieces of shrubbery in front. He gets up, the world tilting around him, and he realizes he’s in the backyard of a house. Yujin remembers this house. It’s where Soyoung used to live, as a kid, where they kicked around a kiddie soccer ball together. Where they played with toy lightsabers.

Yujin walks forward through the scrubby grass. It’s quiet here. There’s none of the ambient Seoul city noise that he remembers. He wants to talk his problems over with someone. The person he would talk his problems over with was himself.

“This is probably a dream,” he says to himself. “Or some sort of psychological phenomenon. Representative. I hope my brain isn’t getting fried.”

There’s nothing that he can do if his brain is getting fried.

“I’m in the Mitosis field, most likely. This is all happening in my mind.”

Yujin gets to the back door of the house. He opens it.

It’s an old house. Old leather sofa, really old television. Smells a little like incense. It hadn’t seemed so old when he had last been here, but the last time he was here, he was a child, a single memory that both Yujin and YJ had shared.

“Hello?”

He calls out into the room. He’s not expecting any answer, but he hears someone upstairs.





SOYOUNG


You look down at Yujin. You think this is the combined version. Not just his Korean self, or the American YJ. When you saw him earlier, running into the room, it was something in the set of his shoulders that made you think it was both of him, together, and he looks the same as then. He looks up at you.

“Why are there two of you here?”

“Why aren’t there two of you?” Rose says, leaning on the railing. She’s watching him with bright eyes. She came to the same conclusion you did.

“You programmed the machine,” Yujin says. “You tell me why this is happening.”

“I didn’t think you’d step in,” you say.

“Well, I did,” he says.

“You shouldn’t have—”

“You shouldn’t have,” he says. “What the hell were you thinking? Let me guess. You’re here to rip the files off the server. You’re here because you want to separate before uploading everything.”

“So what if I am? What are you here for, then? Are you here to stop me?”

“Yes,” Yujin says. “This is crazy. You can’t just do this kind of thing—steal my IDs, break into my office, spread corporate secrets across the internet. You can’t just do that.”