Sublimation(43)

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to laugh at you, when I said no. I don’t think I ever apologized. I was just really surprised. I mean, I wasn’t interested, but I was just surprised. It probably came across kind of mean.”

“It’s fine,” you say. You find yourself surprised to mean it. Nostalgia aside, the boy you were back then and the man you are now are so divorced as to be different people. His hurts are no longer your hurts.

Wait. How does Soyoung remember rejecting you?

The memory should be inhabited by Korean Soyoung. Not the version of her that went to America.

You frown.

“Did your instance tell you about this?”

Either she’s heard about this from her Korean version or from Yujin, which, you could see him thinking that was funny, or she is her Korean version, which, why would she be in New York? And what had Yujin said? It’s kind of more complicated than that? But what would that mean?

Soyoung’s smile goes plastic.

“Did Yujin not tell you?”

“Just that you needed a favor.”

She stares at you. Her eyes like dark pools of water, a liquid sort of emptiness. It’s racist to say that Asians are inscrutable. You took one Asian American studies course, in college, and you didn’t really relate to any of it. The only point being: You’ve always found Korean women really hard to read.

“Can you get me into a trial for Mitosis? One that ends with separating the reintegrated instances,” she says, the words a blur of too-fast English.

“What?”

“The clinical trials that your company is doing,” she repeats again. “The ones you’ve talked about happening, on TV. Can you get me into the right side of the control group? The side of the control group that isn’t the control group, I mean. The non-control group. The side that gets their memories and selves split apart.”

She’s still talking too fast, all her words are just strings of syllables in your brain before the meaning coalesces. And you still don’t understand, even after the words make sense.

“What?”

“Can. You. Put. Me. In. The. Mitosis. Trials?” she repeats, slower. “In the non-control group. Please.”

She says “please” in Korean. There’s no word for “please” in Korean, but she uses the closest analogue. The word you use during desperation.

“Why?”

“Yujin,” she says, slowly, like she thinks you’re stupid. “Why do you think?”

You squint. You imagine being Kang Soyoung. You imagine going to your childhood friend you haven’t seen in years and asking for something insane. You imagine stepping into the laboratory on the twenty-sixth floor not as an observer, but as a participant.

“This isn’t American Soyoung or Korean Soyoung I’m talking to, is it? It’s both. You’ve reintegrated.”

Soyoung-Rose nods. Single dip of her head. A wave of dark hair.



* * *



Most governments force instanced returnees to reintegrate if they don’t obtain citizenship in the country that they migrate to, barring exceptional circumstance. It’s framed as administrative necessity. Most governments will refuse to grant instances citizenship if there are no grounds under ethnicity, heritage, blunt biology. The law doesn’t care about the heart.

In the United States of America, instancing-related issues are handled by the USCIS underneath the DHS after 9/11, prior to that having been folded into INS, in a department called IIS—Instancing Immigration Services. Historically, instancing policy was set by states, and it was only in the 1900s that SCOTUS ruled that federal jurisdiction over instancing was appropriate. In the current day, IIS is a well-established agency, working with other departments in DHS to control the border. Nearly all forms of migration and human movement, legal and illegal—immigration, refugee, and asylum claims—are touched by the IIS.



* * *



You stare at Soyoung-Rose. Her present could be your future. Reintegration. You and Yujin. You-as-Yujin. The version of your self that is amalgamate, the one who remembers the last decade in Korea, who remembers your family.

There’s a tightness to the way Soyoung-Rose holds her mouth. The points of her nails dig into her flesh where she’s holding her elbow. These are the sorts of things you wouldn’t have noticed until things started going south with Petra, but now you know a lot about the way women express tension without saying anything. You really fucking hated that with Petra, the way she wouldn’t just say things, the way that it was all—just silences. Body language. Why can’t people just say what they feel? But you didn’t want to ask, you didn’t know how to ask, you hadn’t—you don’t have the vocabulary for that, emotionally, and this isn’t Petra, you tell yourself. This is not about Petra, this is not about you. You are being an asshole. A childhood friend is coming to you for help and you are being an asshole.

You should say, “What happened?”

You should say, “Why do you want to separate?”

You should say, “Seriously, you didn’t know Yujin didn’t tell me anything? This wasn’t planned? You’re not playing a weird elaborate social experiment on me? Is there a camera?”

Instead, you say: “How did it feel?”