Sublimation(41)

“Sure yeah, I can talk with her. She’s back in the States? American Soyoung?”

“It’s kind of more complicated than that. But—you’re at work, right?”

“Yeah. I’m calling you from the bathroom.”

“You’re in the bathroom.”

“Nobody’s in here.”

“Sure,” he says, and his statement speaks volumes. He’s judging you. He’s imagining you in the bathroom with your phone jammed against your ear by your shoulder, the same way you’re imagining him stepping out of some nightclub, his phone held languidly in his hand.

“Shut up, man. I’ve been followed around by this reporter all day. I needed a break.”

“A reporter?”

“For the Mitosis stuff.”

“So you’re hiding in the bathroom.”

“Hey, don’t be—”

“I didn’t say anything. Okay. I’m going back inside. Get out of the bathroom.”

“Yeah, bye,” you say, and then you’re hanging up, and you’re laughing, because you’re in an office bathroom and you’ve been followed around by a reporter all day and you’re supposed to be someone important and sometimes you have to wonder, when exactly your life went weird.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


She goes over the plan in her head for the seventh time while brushing her hair, picking out her clothes. It’s not a good plan. She’s just going to ask. She’s going to say hi to Yujin’s instance and talk a little bit about things that are inconsequential, maybe talk about Yujin a bit, and then she’s just going to ask, blunt like a hammer to a head. Will you let me into the clinical trials for Mitosis?

She had discussed the ask with Yujin. It had been the first thing she did, after seeing YJ on television, walking out into the garden of her grandfather’s empty house and punching his name into her phone and calling him on speaker.

“Your instance was on TV,” she had said.

“What?”

“Turn on a replay of this morning’s SBS,” she had said. “Or google your name or something.” She had heard some noise, as if he was getting up and getting to a device.

“Huh,” Yujin had said.

“Could you get me a meeting with him?” she had said, no preamble. “If I was in the States?”

“Why?”

“Mitosis.”

A long silence. The wind rustling through the leaves and late-summer grass. Soyoung wondered who would live here, next. Whether it would still be a family home. Whether it would get razed to make way for a larger building.

“Yeah, I can ask. He’ll do it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. He trusts me and I trust you. He’ll do it.”

She hadn’t understood the conviction. She couldn’t imagine being so sure of her instance’s actions, even though she now had the mélange in her head. But she trusted Yujin. And he trusted his instance.

Now her grandfather’s garden feels like a dream as she stands in the wet tile of Rose’s bathroom, blow-drying her hair. Now it feels less like Yujin’s instance will say yes. He’s a stranger, after all. He has no reason to help her other than his connection to his instance. It’s a big favor that she’s asking.

Soyoung tousles her hair. She makes a face at herself in the mirror. Soyoung and Rose weren’t so interchangeable, though it’s difficult to remember the shape of their bodies from inside. Both Soyoung and Rose had viewed their own flesh with a sort of brusque self-consciousness. Sometimes they thought they were beautiful. Sometimes they thought they were a monster. They had both considered plastic surgery when they were younger.

Soyoung rubs her eyes, remembers the action will make them bloodshot, and pushes her hair out of her face instead. She sort of wants to talk to Taehyung about all of this, because Soyoung had been accustomed to talking her plans through with him. She kind of wants to call her mom—which version of her mom? She’s not sure. She wishes she could have told Clarissa about what’s going on. She just—she hates feeling bad at things. Rose and Soyoung, both of them, they weren’t good at people in either version of her lives. She had fallen into all of her friendships, her relationships. She was always better at telling people “no” than asking for help. How to convince someone to help her? She had failed so hard with her instance. Her instance had failed so badly with her.

She guesses she’ll just go in and ask.



* * *



The legend associated with “Arirang” starts like many other stories. A man and a woman, meeting on the banks of a river.





YJ


You walk into the bar, which has a soft velvety interior done in dark blue paint and dark wood, with a constellation of little glass lights hanging from the ceiling. It feels nostalgic. You and Petra had spent a lot of time inhabiting the “fancy cocktail place” stage of dating. You walk over to the podium where a hostess is standing decoratively.

“Hi. I think my friend is inside, actually? Do you mind if I just—”

“Go ahead,” the hostess says, waving you in. You walk past finance bros in their vests, women in fashionable clothing who work in marketing, and a group of tech guys in T-shirts crowding the space all the way to the back.