Sublimation(26)

You didn’t look at Petra.

“We had fun, right?” you had asked.

“It was fun,” she said.

On the screen, Michael smiled.

That night, you had both gone to sleep in the same bed (you had thought about taking the couch, but your couch had a weird bump in the middle, and anyway, Petra was breaking up with you, you weren’t breaking up with her), and in the morning you both went to work, and you kept not talking about the looming specter of your breakup at all until Petra offhandedly mentioned that you could keep the furniture, because it was too expensive to hire cross-country movers, but it might be nice if you could compensate her for it, because, well, the couch had been rather expensive.

And you said yeah, and tried to fold up the part of you that had wondered when everything had gone wrong.

“Work,” Yujin had said. “You work way too much. Petra’s checked out because you’re never around.”

Sour anger in the back of your throat. Did Yujin think you liked being a workaholic? Did Yujin assume that the year before college entrance exams was the true shape of your soul? You worked for him. You were working so that you wouldn’t just be entered into the green card lottery, but guaranteed dual citizenship. So that you alone wouldn’t just get American citizenship, but your recombined instance could get dual American-Korean citizenship. So that you could have his memories and his life. So he could have yours.

“What do you think is paying for the couch! Christ,” you had said to Yujin, laying your head against the cool glass of your apartment window. By then, the living room had begun its transformation into the rathole. You much preferred to look out onto the street.

“Okay, if you’re going to be like that, I’m hanging up,” Yujin said, and hung up before you could say anything else. Like all the pain in the ass H-1B1, green card stuff, was nothing to him.

Then it had just been you, the window, the rest of Manhattan. Just the faint sound of sirens. Of someone’s fading laughter outside. Music from somewhere. A television laugh track from your neighbor’s living room.

You had wondered whether there was some other version of the world where you and Petra had stayed together. You had tried to squash that thought. But so little time had passed since you had driven her to the airport and hugged her goodbye. You knew you would get over it. You had watched Yujin get over a breakup two years ago, so you knew the stages of your sadness. He had gone cold, and then sad, and then he found equilibrium. At the time you had felt a little superior to him, and a little relieved, since that meant that you were allowed to get serious with Petra.

The subway station smells like the inside of your apartment looks. You walk past a Hispanic woman in a full pastel Lolita outfit, a black man in a jumpsuit. A couple of Asian women in pretty matching suit sets. And white people, so many white people. The thing you miss most about Seoul was the way you could dissolve into the population. The anonymity. Ethnically homogenous populations have a dissipative effect that you don’t get in America. But the New York subway system during rush hour is its own dissolution.



* * *



There’s a horror story that they tell the new hires in the glitzy sweatshop client-services industries—Biglaw, IB, consulting, Big 4 accounting. It’s one of those stupid urban legends touted out every year like a particularly pathetic scarecrow.

It will be inevitably told during busy season, during the night before a closing, during the three hours before the slide deck is due and everyone’s on their seventh straight day of sleep deprivation, when it’s all bad temper papered over with polite emails, eye drops blooming over burst blood vessels. There’ll be one tiny pool of fluorescents still lit and a single team huddled over their laptops and one of the associates will turn to one of the first-years and say: “Did anyone ever tell you about Doug?”

“Who’s Doug?” the first-year will say.

“Doug’s a VP,” the associate will say. “You know, Doug that sends the four AM emails. Doug’s always working.”

“Yeah, I know Doug.”

“No, you don’t get it. Doug’s always working.”

The first-year will squint. “Is this the setup to a joke?”

“Nah. Doug’s always online ’cause he can’t leave the building. Ten years ago, Doug was really grinding at it, twenty-four seven real sigma male shit, coming in early, leaving late, and then one night, he swiped his ID card and stepped through the gate and…”

The associate will make a gesture like he’s slicing something invisible in half.

“Doug instances. And the version of himself that got out the gate fucking books it. Because he hates his job. And the version of Doug that was inside the building tries to run after his instance but he can’t leave. And his outside instance never comes back after him. Just keeps collecting the paycheck. Never shows up again. And Doug on the inside, well, he can’t leave. He could kill himself, but he can’t get out.”

The first-year will scowl. “You’re fucking with me. That’s not how instancing works.”

The associate will shrug.

“Just be careful swiping out tonight.”



* * *



You’ve folded yourself back up by the time you’re walking out of the BDFM station next to Bryant Park. You’ve accepted failure into your heart. You even looked at the meeting invite on your calendar to make sure you remembered which conference room you’d be meeting Drew in.