Sublimation(34)

In those circumstances, you send money home to your instance, and you live with their resentment, or their relief.



* * *



It’s hard not to feel trapped by Yujin sometimes. Without Yujin, Petra wouldn’t have broken up with you because of your bad work-life balance. You would have applied for regular American citizenship without Yujin—the standards for that were far lower. You wouldn’t be standing here reading this contract had Yujin not existed. You wonder if you should talk to Yujin before signing it. Except that would take too much time. And Yujin isn’t you—sharing it would count as sharing sensitive employee data. No, you have to make the decision now. Sometimes it’s exhausting trying to think of a future for two versions of yourself.

“Here’s the card,” Stacey says. “All look okay? You can take the paperwork up with you, if you want.”

“No, I’m good,” you say, and sign on the dotted line. You take the card from her hand. It’s faintly warm from the machine.

You hand her your signed paperwork. She smiles at you.

“Congratulations, YJ. Again.”

“Thanks,” you say, and make your escape. You go to the elevator. You hesitate. A part of you wants to swipe your card and go down to twenty-six. A much larger part of you wants to get out of here for a minute. Get to somewhere you can breathe. You acquiesce to your nerves and push the down button.

Your phone starts ringing. You check the caller ID. It’s your instance. It’s one in the morning in Seoul. You glance up. You can’t tell if there are any cameras or microphones embedded in the elevator. Legally, Yujin isn’t you. Yet.

You cancel the call. You get in the elevator. You’ll talk to Yujin later.



* * *



The Odyssey is mostly concerned with Odysseus’s seafaring instance. The one who is brave. The one who wants to return home. Scholars have written long papers regarding his instancing—if Odysseus left Ithaca with the intention of always returning, then he shouldn’t have any instance. Something changes in him, during the war, to make him desire a homecoming. Something changes in him, to have his desires send him back across the sea.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


Soyoung slides into the passenger seat of the rental truck. Minsoo’s sitting in the driver’s seat, wearing cloth-and-red-rubber gloves and a ratty T-shirt.

“You look like a construction ahjusshi,” she says.

“You look like a cleaning ahjumma,” he says. “Ready?”

“I guess,” Soyoung says, and then her cousin reverses the rental truck and they get on the road to their late grandfather’s house.

Professional movers are coming next week. But Soyoung owns the house now, and her mom says that she’s done her part already, cleaning up, and the aunts have all agreed that the moving part is the responsibility of someone young and strong, and also, they’re bitterly jealous of her getting the house. And so Soyoung’s guilt-tripped Minsoo into helping her tag and sort all the furniture, and into helping her cart away all the small precious things the aunts have asked for. They had discussed this before the funeral. Rose is a passenger in these plans, but Soyoung thinks that the Rose-version of herself still would have agreed to help, since her memories are filled with moving vans—two houses with her American mom, college, graduate school, three moves around the NYC greater metropolitan area.

“I almost went to the airport yesterday,” Soyoung says as Minsoo backs out of the parking space.

Soyoung remembers watching her instance walk across the immigration checkpoint, the feeling of being stuck to the cold tile, of wanting to take another step forward and being unable to do so, watching her other self run blithely away, with a single wide-eyed glance back. The memory is in double vision. She doesn’t begrudge her other self her adventure. But the envy. God, the envy. Soyoung cried in the car in her mom’s lap while Harabeoji and her mom had a long, adult conversation, and Minsoo tried to distract her with his toys. She remembers this because she threw his Squirtle figurine out the window of the moving car on the freeway, and then everyone in the car had more pressing problems to contend with.

She examines the memory with the clinical detachment, the deep surprise of an adult learning the contours of a child’s sadness. Every hurt is the worst hurt when you haven’t been hurt before. For Soyoung, her childhood tantrum had been sanded down into a background anecdote. And I was the remaining instance, and I was so mad about it! For Rose, the childhood tantrum is a little sunburst of profane emotion, belonging to a child she doesn’t feel any connection to.

This is the worst part of it: Every bit of the past feels fake from the dissonance, the sheer divorce of her past selves from her present decisions coloring even the combined memories. Her prior emotions are dead things in her chest. Like the stickers she saved as a kid, pretty little scraps of paper that meant something a long time ago, but have no meaning now.



* * *



Odysseus instances a single time, between The Iliad and The Odyssey. Throughout The Odyssey, he is always leaving. He leaves Polyphemus’s island uneaten. He leaves Circe’s island cleanly. He leaves Tiresias’s island unscathed. He leaves Calypso’s island unharmed. He never instances again. His goal, over years, never faltering. He stays singular. He knows what he wants, showing the same clarity of vision as his son.