Sublimation(17)

She shrugs, nods. “Umma and the aunts are doing most of the prep. I offered to help, and they said it would be good if I helped with post-funeral stuff.”

You take a deep breath.

“I don’t want the house. I’ll figure out a way to give it to you, or your mom, or whoever. Okay?”

You don’t mention that you had gone to see the house earlier. You don’t mention running into her mother earlier. You don’t mention the reintegration request. She doesn’t know that you know. She hasn’t brought it up yet, and you’re hoping that it can lie like a corpse, dead and buried under more pressing material concerns. If you turn this into a conversation about property it doesn’t have to turn into a conversation about feelings.

She blinks.

“Okay. That makes sense. Thanks. I don’t care about who owns the house. You just surprised me last night.”

“Okay,” you say, unmoored. You hadn’t expected such a complete acquiescence. Wasn’t she going to bring up the reintegration thing?

“Okay,” she repeats, and smiles a little.

“No, please,” the guy says. “This is like a K-drama. Have you seen Image, yet? This is just like that.”

Soyoung elbows him and then gestures at an empty seat. You notice that she’s wearing the MERGEBREAK camouflaged under a stack of bracelets and her filmy black sleeve. Yours is just plainly tied on your wrist. You sit down.

“So. Something fun,” you say. “Who is this?”

“You don’t recognize me?” The man clutches at his heart theatrically. “Ah, here, maybe if I fix this.”

He smooths his hair down ineffectually. He sticks his tongue out. You frown. Something in his face is very familiar, but you can’t place it. He looks like someone you might know, but what you’ve come to realize is that once you get old enough, everyone in the world looks like someone you’ve met before. He’s an attractive stranger with a fancy haircut, who your instance is friends with. He looks like the sort of guy you’d write off as an asshole in a bar where all the drinks cost twenty dollars. You shake your head.

“Stop playing around,” your instance says. “That’s Yujin.”

The axis tilts. Your brain rearranges his features, imagines them two decades younger and half-formed. Yujin was a neighborhood kid, one of your classmates. Yujin was a kid you were friends with when you were like, five. He once made you pick up a worm with your bare hands.

“Holy shit, you grew up hot,” you say before your brain can catch up with you.

Yujin cracks up.

“I like her better than you,” he says to your instance. She elbows him a second time.

“We reconnected after college. He called me crying because he had instanced.”

A flash of something dark across his face, like a brief sun-shower. Your instance doesn’t notice, looking toward you.

“Hey,” Yujin says mildly. “We don’t have to go down my personal history.”

“I don’t know, I’m kind of sick of dealing with my own,” you say. “Might be a nice change of pace.”

A smile that doesn’t reach Yujin’s eyes. “My instance is in New York. You should look him up.”



* * *



You’re offered the choice between staying at the bar and ordering something, or doing some exploring. Soyoung says that these streets are a good place to buy souvenirs. She says that she really liked coming here as a teenager. The red pill or the blue pill. Do you want to talk, or do you want to act?

You pick the blue pill. You thread back down the narrow staircase and into the press of people, following Soyoung and Yujin. You stay in a loose triad through the crowd. Strains of random pop music from stores, snatches of other people’s conversation. You could get swept up in it. You feel like you’re reliving an adolescence that doesn’t belong to you.

You peruse through racks of sunglasses. You buy a touristy magnet for a work friend, a new hair clip for yourself. Something in you relaxes to see your instance in a context that isn’t funeral-adjacent. Like she’s just a person and not some sort of malevolent specter. Strangers give you the occasional double-take, but there’s not any judgment. Unless they look carefully at your wrists, you could just be identical twins. Everything has felt so heavy, the last thirty-or-so hours. Like every conversation you have, every interaction you’ve had, has some psychic weight. Like you’ve been standing in front of the Egyptian god of the dead and he’s weighing your heart against a feather. Weighing your life against hers. The metaphor is a little inexact. Maybe you just feel better now that you’ve cleared things up about the house. But the question of the reintegration knocks about in your mind like a stone in your boot. It’s on the tip of your tongue.

“Are you going to buy that?”

You turn to see Yujin standing next to you. He gestures at the bracelet you’re holding.

“Not sure.”

“Mm. The ahjumma is starting to look annoyed, that’s all.”

“Ah,” you say, and put the bracelet down and put your hands in your pockets. You glance at your instance, who’s trying on hair bands. You walk out of the store and lean against the decorative railing. You read somewhere in an internet forum that leaning against things is a particularly American affectation that has to be trained out of spies and undercover operatives. Yujin follows you. You’re a little annoyed.