Sublimation(20)

“He was eighty-seven,” your instance says. “Isn’t everything old age at that point?”

“Sure.” It always surprises you when your instance says things you wouldn’t. It surprises you more when she says things you would.

“We kind of saw it coming,” she says, looking straight at the road. “I mean. Eighty-seven, right?”

“Right,” you say, daring a glance at her. She looks perfectly calm. She glances at you before looking back at the road.

“I’m sorry I was so rude to you, the other night. I didn’t apologize. I’m sorry I’m kind of having a weird week. I thought you had enough to be dealing with, without my problems.”

“No, it’s okay,” you lie. “It’s really all okay.”

“I hope it’s been okay, other than … the funeral stuff. I wanted you to have a nice time, if you could. I promise my life usually isn’t like this. But I wanted to ask—why did you come back?”

“I hadn’t had any reason to, before,” you admit. “I wanted an excuse. I guess this was an excuse.”

“You were never curious before?”

“I was busy,” you say. “And plane tickets are expensive, and before that, my mom would have had a lot of opinions about my leaving. But I was curious. Harabeoji never told me anything about you.”

“He used to call you when I was around,” Soyoung says.

“I didn’t know that. He never said anything about you, no matter how much I asked.”

“Well, here’s how you should picture it,” she says, rolling to a stop at a red light. “He’s on the phone, sitting on the sofa, half-watching me and half-watching baseball. And I’m sitting at the kitchen table doing some homework I didn’t finish at hagwon. And he’s talking to you, and you’re talking to him, and I’m doing my best to be really quiet with my pencil so I can hear what you’re saying.”

You can picture the house with the clarity of a reconstructed childhood memory. The smooth glass tabletop. The creased leather couch. The way it smelled a little like smoke, even though Harabeoji only ever smoked outside. You can imagine Harabeoji holding the old landline against his ear. You can imagine yourself sitting at the kitchen table doing homework. Listening.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” you say after a long pause.

“Well. I didn’t, either.”

You drive in silence for a while.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say all of that,” she says. She smiles a little, and it’s the same smile that you do when you’re feeling a little awkward, a little sad, when you’re not exactly sure which public sentiment is the correct one to be displaying.



* * *



In many ways, it’s easy for the man in the folktale. He never had to speak with his other self. And besides, what’s three days compared to thirty years? One beautiful, strange night in a foreign country subsumed under thirty years of eating dinner with his wife, raising his children, taking his boat across the glittering shore and casting his nets. Time polished the memory of the undersea court to a pearl, something carefully tucked away under the rough cloth of his weekday worries.

Or he dies, bleeding out through the self-inflicted wound.





SOYOUNG


You used to dream of being the one to leave. Not like, metaphorical “god-I-wish-I-had-left” dreams, but literal dreams. Dreams where you stepped through the immigration checkpoint and walked through the airport, dreams where you landed in fictional American airports that were cobbled together, kaleidoscopic dreamscapes stitched from magazine articles and your memories of Narita and Hong Kong and Incheon. You’d wake up from these dreams sweating, and would walk around your grandfather’s house, inspecting every corner to make sure this was the true reality and that you were still in Seoul.

The truth of it was that you had felt some secret relief, leaving the airport and getting back in the car with Harabeoji and your aunts and your mother, even though you threw the mother of all tantrums. Even with the disappointment of not getting to go on an adventure, part of you was relieved you’d be going back to the rest of your life, to elementary school and the playground, to after-school ice cream bars and hagwon and flute lessons. The things you loved would continue to be the things you loved. You would continue to be the thing that was loved.

Your true and bloody desire for your instance’s life was a thing that grew like moss on a still rock, or a fungus threading its way through rotten wood. It grew from the tinny conversations you overheard as a child. Nine at night while you worked on homework and she chattered about her day. She always sounded happy. Distracted. When you were older, you peered at her Facebook photos and imagined yourself in her place. You saw her name in the graduation announcements posted online, briefly in the newspaper once for a community service award. It was mostly curiosity, a little bit of longing. Easily quashed.

Once, in middle school, you asked Harabeoji about why he called her. You remember watching him hang up the old phone with the bouncy cord and the clear plastic numbers. You remember watching him turn to you and smile wryly, his cheek creasing up with wrinkles.

“Don’t be jealous, Soyoung-ah,” he said.

“You always call her,” you had whined. “How come I can’t talk to her?”