Sublimation(30)

“Okay,” Taehyung says, and she doesn’t know what that means, either. She can’t stand to be in the car any longer.

“We’re like ten minutes from the train station, right? Drop me and Jangmi off there. I’ll take her home and meet you at the restaurant. We’re probably going to be late if we take the car all the way to Minsoo’s and back.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says, and glances back at her niece. “Jangmi-ya, do you want to take the subway with Gomo?”

Jangmi makes a cheerful noise of assent. She’s the sort of little kid that likes crowds and bright noises and adventures. She’s mildly baffling to Soyoung.

They drive to the train station without any further conversation. Taehyung drops them off next to the nearest subway stop. Soyoung helps Jangmi out and straightens the kid’s coat and kisses Taehyung on the corner of his mouth out of habit and then she’s slamming the door and disappearing down the subway steps, Jangmi’s tiny little hand warm in her own.

The billboards flash with advertisements for probiotic yogurt hawked by Korean singers, for American superheroes and CGI lasers, for kids’ cartoons bouncing jauntily across the big-screen displays. Newscasters talk about the storm hitting Jeju this week, about monsoon season.

“Will you buy me a grape drink?” Jangmi asks, like they didn’t just spend the entire morning and most of the afternoon at an amusement park.

“Sure,” Soyoung says, because she’s the fun aunt and not a mother.

They get the grape drink from a vending machine. Soyoung gets a bottle of barley tea. And then they get on the subway.

On the subway there’s an advertisement for MERGEBREAK slotted in between the yogurt and the kids’ shows. A cartoon man shaking his own hand and smiling.

Soyoung looks down at her hands. The interesting thing is that Soyoung’s middle finger callus still exists. But so does the scar on Rose’s left palm from when she cut herself while slicing an apple. Soyoung had read about a case where a person merged with their instance, who was an amputee, and the amputated limb had stayed missing. And other reintegrations, where blindness was miraculously healed, or appendixes grew back. Soyoung and Rose aren’t such special cases, though. Soyoung and Rose were ordinary. There’s no world where they don’t have to choose between Korea and America. Oh sure, vacations exist. Visiting exists. But she’ll have to decide: Where’s home? What language does she speak in, dream in? She doesn’t really get to choose.

Soyoung cracks open her barley tea. She’ll call the embassy tomorrow. No, tomorrow is the weekend. On Monday. She’ll call Monday.

God. She misses her cat.



* * *



It’s not so much that Soyoung’s and Rose’s perspectives are separate or like there’s a clean divide between the two of them. She had tried to explain that to Taehyung, to Minsoo, to her Korean mother, but none of them understood.

There is no split point of view, no dual vision, just that on the inside it feels almost like there is a lens that dials in. It’s subtle, sometimes. A shade toward one life or another.

The uncanny thing is when her thoughts feel normal. Regular. It feels like her decisions are organic and clean, the perfect route from thought to action, that this is who she is and these are the choices she’s making. And then hours later, when she looks back at her thoughts, they’ve become alien. This is the part that scares her.

That, and the way that she no longer knows what she wants. Soyoung and Rose had both known. They had known so hard they have, functionally, died for it, but that’s an uncharitable thought, toward people who no longer exist. There is no point hating the past self. Selves.



* * *



Jangmi demands that Soyoung let her press the buttons on the elevator, and they end up stopping at the second, the ninth, and the fifteenth floors of Minsoo’s building before getting to his apartment. Then, Jangmi insists on ringing the doorbell, even though Soyoung knows the door code. A dog barks. The door opens.

“Daddy!” Jangmi cheers, running forward.

“Jangmi!” Minsoo cheers, picking her up and twirling her around.

“Hey,” Soyoung says. “Did you get the rental truck booked?”

“Yeah. Thanks for taking her out, she would have hated coming.”

“Oh, I’m always happy to take her,” Soyoung says. “We had fun. Didn’t we have fun?”

“Mm!”

Jangmi smiles and nods emphatically. Minsoo gives his kid a kiss on the cheek. Soyoung’s own smile crystallizes on her face. The thing that always gets to Soyoung is the intense fucking normality. The way she unconsciously takes her place in all the existing dynamics of her instance’s self. She’s dropped Jangmi off a hundred times. This is the first time Rose is experiencing it. It feels like everyone acts like she’s Soyoung from before, that the continuity of her existence is unbroken, that Rose is a novelty, that the entirety of Rose’s life is her perfect American accent and nothing else.

The square of tile outside of Minsoo’s apartment suddenly feels like the same sort of trap that Taehyung’s car feels like, that her own bedroom feels like, the same sort of trap that dinner with Taehyung’s coworkers (who have met his fiancé, who like his fiancé, who are invited to their wedding) will be, and it makes Soyoung want to scream, that the grooves of Soyoung’s mannerisms are so etched into her gestalt self that the only thing left of Rose is her dissatisfaction.