Sublimation(16)

“YJ and I are basically the same person, developmentally. And we’re planning on reintegrating before we’re thirty, so it’s not like your scenario. I don’t think it’s weird that you’re having a hard time talking with Rose. Have you asked her about reintegrating, yet?”

“No. That’s the problem. I don’t know how to bring it up. And—get this, my grandfather, god knows what he was thinking, left her the family home.”

“Like, property?”

“Yes, like property. Like my grandfather’s house. House-house.”

“Wait—your house?”

“Yeah,” you say. You had always thought of it as your grandfather’s house. It had belonged to him for so much longer than you had lived there. It had felt like a fact of the universe, that he had lived there. That was a lie, though. He had grown up outside Pyongyang, when that was something still possible.

“And she got all weird about it. So I got all weird about it. And now I can’t bring up the reintegration thing without it seeming … all predatory. I was a jackass to her last night, too.”

“When’s she leaving?”

“I don’t know. Soon after the burial. I don’t know why she came, anyway. You get why I want to talk with her without things being weird, right? But whenever we’re in the same room it’s like … I’m thinking about all the things I would say, if I were her. And then I don’t say anything.”

“There’s your problem. Have you tried saying something?”

You kick him in the shin. He kicks you back.

“You haven’t talked with her since you were a kid, right?”

“We’ve never talked before.”

“Never-never? Really?”

“Why’s that so weird! It’s not like we had our own phones. And if she wanted to talk to me when we were kids, she could have always asked for Harabeoji to hand me the phone.”

“Maybe she didn’t know you were there.”

“Well she could have asked!”

He drinks more of the horrible drink. He drums his fingers against the table.

“Sorry, Soyoung. I don’t know if I have any good advice for you. You’re not the easiest person to get to know. I think either she or you probably needs to man the fuck up and talk about your feelings.”

“Ow. I thought we were friends.”

“We are. That’s why I can say those things.”

He smiles at you, the bastard. You kick him in the shin again. You’re always strangely pleased by how childish the two of you act around each other. It’s a different sort of friendship than your girlfriends, or your cousins. It’s friendship, like, when you look at him, mostly what you see is the seven-year-old missing a tooth, daring you to pick up the worm in his palm. Sometimes you think that’s what keeps the two of you friends, more than the instancing-related reconnection. That you’re friends because both of you like peeking back into the portal to your childhood.

“Come hang out with me and her, before your date,” you demand. “Please.”

“Sure,” he says, easily. Ah. Things in your life can still be easy.





ROSE


You get out of the subway and don’t know where you are. The stairs have spit you out between a busy road and a warren of storefronts that have colorful displays of immensely touristy-looking hanboks, pretty hair pins, and cheap jewelry, the roads thronged with strangers, girls with dyed hair, and boys with artfully tousled perms, wearing twenty different kinds of streetwear. If you were sixteen you would have been delighted. You would walk right into the streets and start buying cat-shaped earrings and twinkly headbands and chunky knockoff heels.

Your instance is somewhere in the middle of all of this, hanging out with a friend. She hadn’t apologized for last night.

You plunge into the crowd, your phone clutched in your hand like a shield. It feels a little wrong to be walking here. Everyone is a little too alive. It’s too much fun. It’s a street made for a vacation, not your grim familial duty. In this crowd, death is an abstract concept. Responsibility was left by the subway station. Yet your instance came here the day before your grandfather’s funeral, to meet a friend. You wonder how she feels.

You navigate past stalls selling honeycomb soft serve and stores that only sell rhinestone hair clips and finally you find a staircase with an arrow that points up. You walk up the stairs and a sliding paper door automatically opens to a dimly lit bar. It’s all dark wood and paper lanterns, with slick lacquer-like floors. It’s practically empty—too early. The sound of the street below is muffled, like the dull roar of an audience somewhere far away.

It’s exactly like something you’d find in New York. Except that when the man at the far end of the bar waves at you, there’s your other self, sitting next to him, getting elbowed in the arm, turning and smiling. You’re very pretty when you smile. Soyoung gestures for you to come over. You walk over. You don’t sit down.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” she says. “I thought it might be nice to do something not-family, since tomorrow is going to be the whole family again.”

“This feels vaguely sacrilegious,” you say. Soyoung looks fresh, smiley, no hard edges. You can’t tell what she’s thinking. “Nothing to do funeral-wise today?”