Sublimation(51)
He puts the ball on the floor. Kicks it, catches it with his foot on the rebound.
“Do you think it’ll work? Mitosis?”
“Yeah,” you say. As long as your other self helps. You had been so sure, until you had talked with him.
Tae scratches his head.
“It had seemed all on track. Before—I just—” he says, and then sighs. Raises the ball in his hands, slams it into the net like he’s trying to destroy the wall behind it. “If she says anything to you, could you tell me?”
“Sure,” you say. The storm surges. Your voice is drowned by the rain.
SOYOUNG-ROSE
Soyoung wishes that the public transit in New York didn’t smell the way it did. Other than that, the subway is fine. A couple of confused-looking tourists. A few artsy-looking kids laughing about something, and then two guys in sweatshirts who look like they’re headed grimly, sleepily toward their jobs.
The subway runs down parallel tracks in Soyoung’s head. Her Korean self is fascinated by how each stranger is a different sort of stranger—the way they dress, the slant of their features. There’s a different quality of light in these subways. The thought collapses into the feedback loop of schizophrenic memory–not memory, because Rose hadn’t thought about the NYC subway in years, but the Korean subway had been a totally foreign experience for Rose, so the memory divots itself, crumples inward, foreign delight at clean subways, the doors that slide open separating the platform from the train car, the clear white fluorescents, the burst of sky and sunlight when the orange line came out of the tunnel and over the Han River, and this is so strange, no it’s utterly familiar, no, it’s not anything that ever—
The train car rattles, and Soyoung unconsciously counterbalances against the force, doubled muscle memory because at the end of the day, standing on a train is standing on a train, the gravitational pull of the earth is 9.8 m/s2 no matter where you are on the planet. Synchronization. She takes a deep breath of bad-smelling air.
Think about the near-past. Think about the past so close to the present as to become the future. The last seventy-six hours from touching down in the plane. Getting picked up, getting to Rose’s apartment, small talk with Clarissa, Dr. Crouton purring and winding around her ankles, unpacking, texting her mother in Korea, texting her mother in America, texting Taehyung, texting the girls and pretending that she’s just on an offsite, taking an anti-emetic, checking her work emails, collapsing on the couch, falling asleep dreamless, waking in the middle of the night and not knowing where she was, wishing that she had someone to talk to about all of this, falling asleep again, waking up and showering the night sweat off, logging into work remotely, dressing all nice and then—drinks with YJ, French fries, being given a non-answer about whether he would help her or not.
And now: waking up, dressing, the A train, which will connect to the laminate-and-tile hellscape of Port Authority, where she’ll board the bus to Fort Lee, where she and her mom will have lunch.
Soyoung pats her tote bag. She can feel the envelope against the fabric. She was worried she would forget. She’s recently been very paranoid about forgetting things.
At the top of the A train, the advertisement reads GOING TO THE AIRPORT? AREN’T YOU FORGETTING SOMETHING? And behind the text, there’s a pretty white woman with a MERGEBREAK that looks more like a fancy knotted scarf around her wrist, and behind her, a handsome Black man with a MERGEBREAK that looks like a futuristic watchband. Premium options, expensive options. Soyoung looks back down and across the subway car.
If YJ doesn’t agree to help her, then she guesses she’ll go back to Korea. Or would she instance when she hit the immigration terminal at the airport, going back? She hadn’t thought about what would happen if YJ didn’t help her. She made the same mistake that Soyoung made with Rose—assuming that knowing a version of someone means that she knows every version of them. That Yujin’s help would translate into YJ’s. Why would he help her? There’s no red string of fate between him and her. He cares about Yujin. He doesn’t care about her.
She hugs her tote bag to her chest.
* * *
The MERGEBREAK’s basic model comes in six different colors, though black is the most common. Victorians used to wear black for mourning. Rose learned that in school: all-black clothing, and then gradually the black was lifted away, inch by inch, seam by seam, until it was just the barest trim. In Korea, in China, in Japan, they wear white. White chrysanthemums on graves. There had been heaps of them in floral arrangements at her grandfather’s funeral. They had been kind of beautiful. Like the white spaces on the wall, in her grandfather’s house. Her house, now, unless things change.
* * *
Soyoung had been careful to dress like Rose. Rose had been East Coast practical, more Asian American than American: no flourishes, dark colors, muted-to-no makeup. Soyoung had dressed in beiges and the occasional pastel, with a full face of CC cream, eyeliner, blush, eye shadow, lip gloss.
Today she’s wearing black pants and a dark blue button-down, a staple of Rose’s wardrobe. She doesn’t stand out among the other people on the bus. Two-thirds of the people taking it are Korean. Rose’s mom had moved closer to the part of the suburb that was very Korean, after Rose had moved out.
Soyoung wonders how many people on this bus are instances. This isn’t a new thought; she had been curious about it, as a kid, in the way kids are. There had been a kid from Japan, when she was in elementary school, who everyone called an instance, though he claimed otherwise. When Rose had moved to the United States, it had surprised her, how many of her classmates mentioned that they were instances, or their parents were instances, or one of their aunts or uncles was an instance.