Sublimation(45)

No. You remember walking through the terminal, and then there’s just a long blank space in your mind that ended with your waking up on the plane. You hadn’t even realized anything had happened, you hadn’t thought anything was wrong until you touched down at JFK and turned your phone from airplane mode and swapped out the SIM cards and you had voicemails from your mother’s phone, your father’s phone, from your mother (shouting, hysterical), from your father (stern, exasperated, paternal), and from your other self, on your mother’s phone.

Your instance had sounded superficially calm. It was unsettling how you were instantly able to tell he was freaking out. That shouldn’t have been apparent from his tone, the timbre of his speech and the steadiness of his language. But he was you. You knew how you felt when you sounded like that.

So you called yourself back. Or rather, you called your mother’s phone, and your mom picked up, and she was hysterical at you, and you asked her to please put your instance on the phone. You remember that your voice was still very calm.

She put him—you, at the time, you had thought of him only as you, as there was only seventeen hours’ difference between you and your other self, and his thoughts were your thoughts, and it was so strange that you suddenly, intrinsically understood why some cultures thought that instances were of the devil and should be killed on sight—back on the phone.

“I didn’t think—”

“—not consciously—”

“We’re back home now, did you—”

“On the airplane, I didn’t realize what had happened.”

“I keep telling Mom that but she keeps yelling about it. I’m putting her back on, you deal with—”

“I have to get my luggage—”

“Did you know you wanted to leave? Did you plan this?” your mother’s voice cut in. You supposed she had taken the phone from your instance.

“No,” you said. It wasn’t a lie.

Instancing was want turned so deep that it manifested in reality. Instancing was pure white-hot desire. Did you consciously know you were leaving forever? No. You didn’t know what part of your self wanted to leave. Except—the way it had felt like freedom, this past semester, to be so far from home.

It wasn’t even about New York. It could have been anywhere. You could have been in the middle of Kansas, London, Sydney, Beijing, Hong Kong, it was about how you had learned you wanted more. You had lived in the same city all your life. And then suddenly, you didn’t. You hadn’t known that you liked feeling like an alien, that you enjoyed the unmooring from your family, your friends. You liked that you could be someone else, you could absorb new ideas and new languages, you could think about the world outside the box of your life.

A surprise instancing wasn’t uncommon. This was a situation that they warned international students about, that schools factored into their study-abroad programs. It was one of the hazards of foreign travel, and one of the reasons that it was so difficult to get a student visa, why there was an extensive interview process before an international student was accepted, even for just a summer program between sister schools. There was also a specialized sort of insurance and waiver that you had to sign, in order to not hold the school liable in the future.

“We’ll pay for your flight back,” your mother had said. “Come home.”

And. Well. God, for a moment it was tempting. For a moment you imagined getting back on the plane, not even going through customs. You imagined smashing back against your other self and regaining the memories of the two days you spent apart. Canceling the rest of your study-abroad program, apologizing to the directors and your professors, who you were sure would be understanding. This happened a few times a year, you had heard. The division between the head and the heart. The dreams and the reality, meeting the cold truth of debt, plans, life.

But there is no world where you said yes. The version of yourself that could have said yes was not the version that instanced.

You couldn’t go home again; you didn’t want to.

“No, Mom,” you had said. And you had collected your luggage. You had gone to your dorm room. You had filled out the student visa paperwork, noting that you were an instance and your continued presence in the country had been approved. You had gone to potluck friendsgivings. You had applied for jobs and taken driving lessons in Queens. You got your first job, and then your second. You became an adult in America.

In your head, you still think of yourself as “Yujin.” You were Yujin (Yujin-ah, Lee Yujin) for twenty years of your life. And you have, in your head, always used the plural “we” to refer to yourself. Even before instancing. You don’t know why. Just an artifact of your self-perception.

So, maybe your instancing was fate. Or just something strange in your brain chemistry.



* * *



Soyoung looks away. She grimaces.

“Sorry. That was an insane thing to say. I shouldn’t have said that. You wanted like, a technical description, right?”

“No, it was fine,” you lie.

“No, it wasn’t. I meant to be—I wanted you to help me, I shouldn’t be saying ominous shit.”

“I want to help you,” you say. And then you hesitate.

Wanting something doesn’t mean you can actually acquire it. You feel bad for her position. You don’t want her to be unhappy. You want to help her. Yet—you don’t know that you can help her. There are two reasons: the first, that you don’t know the extent of the clinical trials that are still in place. The product is near market. It works. All the testing for human viability is complete. The second is that you don’t think that allowing Soyoung-Rose into a clinical trial is technically within the bounds of your job. Technically, allowing a friend into a closed clinical trial, if one were to exist, would be corruption. Would be the sort of thing that a reporter—like the guy whose name began with W—would be excited to report on. Would be the sort of thing that would get you unceremoniously fired. And you need your job for your visa. For any pathway to citizenship, dual or not.