Sublimation(29)

“Baby, what are you thinking?” Soyoung says. Or not exactly. She says “oppa,” not “baby,” because Soyoung and Taehyung had been the sort of gross couple where Soyoung called Taehyung “oppa.” Sometimes serious, mostly half-joking—cosplaying a sort of couple that they once had been. Rose would have gagged. But from the inside Soyoung understood the shape of it. They had met in college. They had grown up together and around each other. They had been puppy love left to simmer too long. Past Soyoung is sort of horrified that she now has to ask Taehyung anything about his thoughts. But the part of her that is Rose is horrified that she has a fiancé. The part of her that is the whole, now, the part that is all of her recombined self, the chrysalis of sludge that the caterpillar has spun itself into, mostly feels nothing. None of the underpinning warmth of good feeling that had lit her neurons up previously, when she saw Taehyung, none of the bodily warmth, the desire to curl up next to him.

Do you understand now, Soyoung thinks savagely at herself. It’s losing, not gaining. But just like every time before, her nonexistent instance, the tulpa of her other self (which other self?) doesn’t say anything back.

Taehyung’s jaw twists. Clenches.

“You can’t just make these decisions without me,” he says.

“I’m not deciding anything,” Soyoung says. “I’m stating a fact. This isn’t working.”

“What isn’t working? What are you referring to?”

This was the problem between Taehyung and Soyoung, which Rose knew not at all and then all at once. They had a shared vocabulary of ambiguity that only made sense because they both shared the same referent of the specific. They spoke in generalities. But Rose had knocked their private language out of alignment.

It doesn’t help that they’re whispering. There’s the kid in the back of the car, asleep. Not their kid. But the horrified part of Rose, the eager part of Soyoung, both of them know now that taking care of Jangmi had always been practice for her future.

“This,” Soyoung said, gesturing between her and Taehyung. Between her and the rest of Seoul outside the car window. The black, useless MERGEBREAK she still wears on her wrist is stark against the pale skin.

“Soyoung,” Taehyung says, and maybe Soyoung in the singular, Soyoung before her recombination, would have perfectly understood the emotion reflected in his speech. But Soyoung who had stood on a mountain and grabbed her other self, the Soyoung who was the other self being grabbed, reads anger and not sadness.

Or maybe Taehyung’s anger was his sadness. Maybe these were the same emotion viewed through a different lens. Or maybe Soyoung was interpreting Taehyung as a reflection of her own frustration at herself. She almost wishes that there was something actually wrong: that Tae had a mistress, that the instance of Rose had a boyfriend, that one of them had said something despicable to the other. Anything but the simmer. They’re supposed to be getting married. She thinks they might be breaking up.

The light turns green. Taehyung inches the silver Hyundai forward. Soyoung thinks about getting out of the car and marching through the lanes. She imagines walking down into the subway station and making the trip on the airport line all the way back to Incheon. She imagines smiling through immigration and showing Soyoung’s American passport, landing in JFK and calling an Uber back home to her apartment. Her plants are all probably dead. Clarissa still has Dr. Crouton.

It’s a nice dream. It would last until someone realized that Kang Soyoung, Korean citizen, had disappeared, and her recombined self had illegally flown back to America without declaring her reintegration and sorting out her citizenship. That’s the sort of thing that gets you placed on No-Fly lists.

“Soyoung,” Taehyung says again, almost a sigh. “I don’t know what to do. To help.”

The niece makes a soft sound in the back of the car. Soyoung glances in the rearview mirror.

“Oh, Jangmi-ya, are you up?” she says.

Jangmi nods sleepily and smiles. At least one of them had a nice day.

“Are we there yet?”

“Not yet, Jangmi-ya,” Taehyung says.

The car stops and starts as it winds through the city. They’re on the road next to the river, which glitters in the late afternoon sunlight. They have to drop Jangmi off at her parents’ place. They have dinner plans with Taehyung’s coworkers.

“You should go back, if you’re unhappy.”

Taehyung keeps his eyes on the road. He merges onto the exit. The river slips away.

This life in Seoul is everything the previous version of Soyoung wanted. This is everything Rose hadn’t longed for. An imminent marriage. A singular future. It was everything Soyoung had assumed she would always have. In America, Rose has a job and a cat and a constellation of acquaintances and she never calls her mother.

The funny thing is, despite her perfect life, Soyoung had still kind of hated being herself. Rose hadn’t realized that until she was Soyoung, and then she knew it all at once.

“I’m not unhappy,” Soyoung lies. “I’ll tell you if I’m unhappy.”

In the world where Soyoung gets out of the car and walks to the nearest subway station to Incheon Airport and calls the embassy from the airport lounge, in the world where a sympathetic government official buys her case for sole American citizenship, in the world where she flies back to JFK, nothing changes. She misses Korea the moment she touches ground. And then there’s Soyoung’s mother, Taehyung and the broken engagement, her job, her family, and in this world her Korean life becomes a memory, and all of it just seems so present, so real and current, that losing it seems—she knows what it feels like to lose it, once.