Sublimation(37)

“… We’re very excited about the product, and our new leadership team in New York. Please reach out to our leadership team with any questions.”

And on the screen behind him, between all the other smiling faces, is Yujin. Not Yujin like Rose remembers him (at the playground, sitting in front of her in class), or Yujin like Soyoung knows (with his floppy hair, leaning over his coffee), but a grown-up-adult Yujin. American Yujin in a nice suit, smiling with the fakest smile she’s ever seen.

Soyoung feels the same hunger she felt when staring at Rose, ten feet from their grandfather’s grave.



* * *



Odysseus, staring down the barrel of his past life, across the wine-dark sea. Nothing stops him, no gods, no monsters, no lovers, no ghosts of dead heroes or relatives, no enchanted feasts, no sirens, no sorceresses, no wayward crew. He is going to get his life back. He is going to go back home.



* * *



“Soyoung,” Minsoo calls. “Can you help me clear the kitchen table?”

“Sure,” Soyoung says. She turns away from the television. She still hasn’t called the embassy. She still has an American passport. One month since her reintegration. Five months until her reintegration is permanent, according to the newscast. The technology to separate her exists. The American instance of Yujin is the face of the project. He has access to it. And she has Yujin’s number, and Yujin is best-fucking-friends with his American instance.

She’s ready to eat.





PART III


Arirang, arirang, arariyo …



[You are][Your instance is]* going over Arirang hill.

—“Arirang,” standard translation




*Subject is not specified in Korean.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


Soyoung wakes when the captain speaks: Please put on your seat belts and bring your chairs into the upright position to prepare for landing.

She rubs her eyes. In the dream she had been sitting somewhere very clear and beautiful and it’s gone now, washing away the memory of her plans. She looks around the cabin: the half-sleeping strangers in the half-light. Businessmen closing laptops. Businesswomen putting tablets away. Mothers and fathers cleaning up their children. Other young women dabbing at their faces with oil-absorbent papers, leaning into the lurch of the plane’s stuttering descent.

When she lands, Soyoung has a thousand tasks to complete. Calling both versions of her mother and letting them both know she’s alright. Scheduling lunch with her American mom, as a pretense to give her the envelope from her grandfather and letting the house become someone else’s problem. Calling Soyoung’s fiancé and telling him that she landed safely. Finishing the emails to Rose’s work letting them know she’s back from Korea. Finding Clarissa, who’s picking her up from the airport.

But first, Soyoung has to get through security.

The plane tilts downward, landing turbulence shuddering through the seat. Soyoung grips the armrest on reflex, then consciously relaxes. It’s strange. Rose had no fear of flying. Rose flew without care, only complained about turbulence in how it kept her from sleeping. But flying had made past-Soyoung want to scream. Every little bump of the plane hit some animal hindbrain part of her, some little terrified piece that has dwindled into nothing ever since reintegration. Soyoung, as she is now, had gotten on the plane and marveled at how it felt like nothing. How something that had filled her with terror no longer existed. Where in the body did fear live?

The swooping sensation of a turn. The plane continues to lower. Out of the window, the landscape looks like a miniature toy set, and it sets something like relief in her chest, to see the little ticky-tacky boxes making up the New York metropolitan area.

Rose had always been glad to come home, but Soyoung’s delight at the scene feels almost like greed. The landscape grows. Here, the individual cars. Here, the looping highways, the little pockets of green space, the buildings, all the buildings. When flying into Incheon, mostly what you see is sparkling water.

Soyoung looks away. She goes through her purse reflexively. Phone, wallet, keys. American passport, boarding pass. Soyoung’s Korean passport is safely tucked away in her carry-on, sandwiched in a paperback that she jammed in between her socks and underwear. Bringing the passport felt like too much of a risk, but a crucial one. Without her Korean passport, Soyoung couldn’t return to Korea after being separated from her other self.

Soyoung wasn’t committing any sort of obvious crime. Just one that ICE could deport her for, were it discovered. But it wouldn’t be discovered, and she wouldn’t be in New York long enough for it to become a problem. She had Rose’s whole life here that she could slip into. Nobody will ask, she tells herself. Nobody will know. Rose and Soyoung were, individually and collectively, a five-foot-two East Asian woman wearing a cardigan, neither strikingly pretty nor shockingly ugly. In high school, teachers had regularly called Rose by her friends’ names, even though they looked nothing alike, just by virtue of their ethnicity. In high school, Soyoung had sat in the back of the class and hadn’t spoken much.

The plane lands in a single, bone-jolting bounce. Soyoung half expects to see a newly instantiated version of herself falling onto the floor on the first thump. But no second body appears. It was unlikely to begin with—instances usually appear at immigration checkpoints. That was part of the point of an immigration checkpoint at an airport or railway, it was a controlled space for an instancing. It was a type of social technology. A solidified border, so that instances didn’t appear spontaneously in the air or so they didn’t pop into existence upon reaching the second landmass.