Sublimation(35)

Papers have been written about the fact that Odysseus does not instance leaving Troy, though he instanced when leaving Ithaca. He should have instanced: He was at war in Troy for ten years, he instanced to reach it.



* * *



Minsoo pulls the rental truck into the street. “Well, your mom would be pissed you didn’t tell her. Have you made up your mind to stay, then?”

“Do you think I’d instance again, if I tried to leave?”

Minsoo makes a noise like he’s not sure. She guesses it’s not a fair question to ask him. They’re close. Or one version of her was close with him. And he named his daughter after her foreign self—Jangmi is the Korean word for “rose.” Which is a thing that Soyoung and Minsoo never talked about. And Rose hadn’t brought it up when she came back for the funeral. It had seemed inappropriate. And it felt like to ask now would be to open up a whole can of other familial issues.

Rose had done her undergrad thesis on optimizing search engines. This later led to a boring job helping build software that sorts through aggregate data. But the interesting thing, to her, had always been that more information was not necessarily better. More information often meant more junk—more noise, less signal. With twice the data, it became orders of magnitude more difficult to answer any question.

“Never mind,” she says. And she turns on the radio in the rental truck, and they drive the rest of the way not talking, listening to old, swoopy Korean music from the predawn of the K-pop era.

Minsoo parks in front of the house. It was weird that their grandfather had a house. There isn’t much single-use housing in Seoul. He had never sold it to a developer. It was postwar property. He used to talk about how most of his friends had sold their land.

Soyoung and Minsoo carry flat cardboard boxes and rolls of tape into the entryway. Minsoo fumbles with the keys. He opens the door. Soyoung tries not to think about how she was here before, as Rose, standing at the entrance and unable to go inside. And then they go in.

The interior of the house is like a time capsule that smells like barley tea and dust. It doesn’t smell like death at all. It smells like Harabeoji stepped out for an hour while the ahjumma who used to come by every week has come by and cleaned everything. The glass tops on the kitchen table and the low living room table are spotless. The blankets that usually live crumpled across the couch have been folded. Nobody has taken any of the pictures down yet. There’re filmy black-and-white photos of her grandfather and grandmother, family members Soyoung never knew well, and formal wedding pictures. Soyoung’s mom and late father. Minsoo’s parents. All the other aunts and uncles. People smiling in hanboks and in western suits and frothy white dresses. Scrawled crayon drawings labeled neatly in the corners in pencil: Soyoung, age 3; Minsoo, age 6; Jiya, age 8, and so on and so forth, a parade of kiddie ephemera from children who had been subsumed into adulthood. God. The whole concept makes Soyoung so fucking sad, all of a sudden.

Part of her wants to walk right back out the door. Leave the house forever in a time capsule from her childhood, and pretend that the next time she comes back it will look the same for the rest of her life, that she can preserve the lost little-kid version of herself if she just never comes in here again.

“Soyoung, can you help me tape these boxes?”

“Yeah,” she says, and looks away from the picture wall. “What are we going to do with the photos?”

“I don’t know,” Minsoo admits. “I didn’t want to ask who wanted which ones.”

“Right.” Soyoung remembers making the scribbly bunny that’s taped up next to a scrunchy-looking photo of her and Minsoo, age seven. She can’t imagine anyone wanting it.

“I guess we’ll just box them up and let everyone figure it out later.”

“Mm.”

Soyoung folds cardboard. Minsoo starts taking down photos and delicately removing Scotch tape from the walls. Ghostly rectangular patches emerge where the photographs have been removed. The photographs go into the boxes, followed by the blankets, and the smaller tchotchkes that litter the living area. Soyoung picks up a clunky little statue of the Empire State Building that Rose had sent when she had just moved to the States. She had forgotten about it. She remembers sending it. She picks it up and puts it into a box. She wipes her eyes, but they’re not moist enough to make that satisfying, and anyway, she feels like the worst sort of cliché for being moved by this.

“This sucks,” she says.

“Yeah,” Minsoo says.

“I have to stay, don’t I?”

“I mean. I’d be happy if you stayed. Though you should do what you want.”

“What sort of psychopath reintegrates against their instance’s desires?” she says, and sighs. “Don’t answer that. How come our moms can’t do the packing? We’re his grandkids.”

“’Cause they’d start crying about it,” Minsoo says, and takes a cuckoo clock off the wall.

“I’m going to stay,” Soyoung says. “I hated that clock.”

“Yeah, we all know you hated that clock.”

Soyoung wraps the hateful clock in a towel and puts it in a cardboard box. She feels lighter now that she’s made her decision. None of the back-and-forth of yesterday. This time her decision feels real. Her mom in the States will be disappointed. But Taehyung will be happy to have been chosen, and her mom here will be pleased. And maybe she’ll feel good in her heart, eventually. Maybe she can fit herself back into the contours of Soyoung’s life and snip out all the excess, and maybe eventually all the meaning will come back, form before function, water filling the shape that has been presented to it.