Sublimation(4)

Normally, American instances travel outbound on their original’s passport and are required to log themselves at the nearest American embassy. America considers an instance as a whole and complete person, as mandated in the nation’s founding documents. But if a person’s instance wants to stay in the new country, that’s a different question. The human heart wants what it wants. But a government is made of many human hearts.



* * *



You catch sight of your instance sitting alone at a table, typing on her phone. For a moment, it’s like looking at a stranger, just the slick black hair and pale hands of any East Asian woman. Then she looks up and you know the shape of her naked surprise, the curve of her lip and the arch of her eyebrows. Here is your sister-self, your shadow-could-have-been, the woman you are in another country. Here she is, looking you over with your eyes in her face, though the lines in her face are not the lines in your face, yet you could have been her: Twenty years wind back to when one of you stepped onto the plane and the other stayed.

She smiles at you. She stands up and waves. You hurry over. You don’t shake hands. You don’t bow. She has a black band on her right wrist, like a broad watch strap with no watch.

“Did you get here okay?” your instance asks in Korean.

“Pretty well,” you respond in kind. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Of course. We’re family.”

“Are we?” you ask, and she laughs, and you laugh. It feels something like release.

“Let me get you a coffee or something,” you say. “What do you want?”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I’m putting you through enough trouble,” you say. Your instance’s face twitches a bit at that, the same way you smile when something is funny but not happy. You can read her thoughts in that instant: It’ll make her feel better to buy me a coffee, I want a coffee and she wants to buy me a coffee, let’s skip the posturing, I know that she knows that I know.

“Black Americano, if you don’t mind,” she says. You nod to hide your surprise. You’re a caramel macchiato–type girl. You’ve always taken your coffee sweetened, with cream.



* * *



Here is the second half of the sailor’s folktale:

The sailor returns home and finds his instance asleep in bed with his wife. He looks down at their bodies. The slow rise and fall of his instance’s chest. The way his instance’s arm curls sweetly around his wife’s waist. He forgets the endless beautiful night he spent in the underwater court and remembers only that thirty years of his life have been erased.

A great and terrible anger rises in him. How dare his other self be content. How dare his other self have three decades with his wife.

He picks up his instance’s knife from where it hangs on the wall. He kneels above his other self.

He plunges the knife into his other self’s breast.

His instance wakes in a great gasp. He claws at the air. He screams. His wife, waking, beats at the sailor’s chest. Husband! she shouts. The sailor’s instance grasps at his jacket, at his sleeves. The sailor holds the knife down.

His instance tears the wet fabric. He manages to grab the sailor’s bare wrist.

And suddenly there is a single man lying there, bleeding from his breast wound, his own hand holding the knife in place. The sailor and his instance having merged, falling into a single self like a collapsing waveform.

In some versions of the story, the sailor survives his self-inflicted wounds. In others, he doesn’t.

The message remains the same in either version of the story: Intention does not matter in homecoming. There is no requirement of desire to return for reintegration. What matters is the physical action, the touch of skin against skin.





SOYOUNG


You watch your instance leave all her luggage behind and go to the counter. You don’t really want another coffee, but you do want the opportunity to observe. You drink in the sight of her. You had wanted to reach over and touch her hand, to examine the calluses and see whether there were similarities. Did she have the bump on her right middle finger? Did she pick at her cuticles? The thought of it gives you a shiver of illicit delight. There is an enormous taboo around instances touching without intent. If you had grabbed her hand right there and then, you would have merged back into a singular person. You haven’t given her the MERGEBREAK paired to your own, yet.

You should have. But you hadn’t known what to say to your instance. It’s been two decades. You didn’t know what to ask.

“So, I’m surprised you never even tried to stalk me on social media,” you could have said. “I looked you up all the time, or at least I used to, until I started to feel a little bit creepy. Now I just look you up once a year. There’s a girl named Rose Kang who goes to Oberlin, did you know that? And a doctor in San Francisco.”

“So, how much of our childhood do you remember? I don’t remember a ton of it, but sometimes I walk past our old elementary school in the spring and I remember being a kid and walking past the yellow flowers with Umma, and it’s like I’m there again.”

“So, how much Korean do you speak? Do you think in English? Do you think in pictures, or words? For me, it’s all image and emotion.”

“So, what’s the States like?”