Sublimation(6)

ROSE


Your instance takes you to the parking garage where her small silver car is parked. She opens the trunk for you, but doesn’t help with your suitcase. You struggle to lift it.

“Sorry,” she says. “I know we’re both wearing the MERGEBREAK. But—”

“Yeah, I get it,” you tell her, and grunt as you push the suitcase in. The taboo between instances and physical contact runs deep. It leaves an icky feeling in your chest to think about touching her. A 5 percent failure rate. The suitcase isn’t that heavy. You manage alone; you’re used to that.

You get in the car and she turns on the engine.

“Where are we going?” you ask, pretending not to glance around the car. It reminds you of your mother’s old car, not so much in appearance but in the smell of it.

Your instance drums her fingers on the steering wheel.

“The plan is for you to stay with me tonight, unless you want to stay with Keunimo, but I think she’s busy with arranging everything, and Minsoo’s got a futon but also like, the wife, the kid. And you missed the funeral home bits. But Harabeoji’s being buried the day after tomorrow. So, we’re just going home tonight, unless there’s anything you want to do. Do you want to get dinner? I was going to take you to dinner. You can meet my fiancé. And Minsoo and his wife and kid will be there—our cousin, I mean. If you remember him.”

You don’t know if there’s anything you want to do. You want to tell her you know who Minsoo is, and that you’re sorry you missed the funeral home parts but this was the earliest flight you could get that didn’t cost four thousand dollars. You want to tell her it freaks you out, how matter-of-fact she is. Shouldn’t she be the sad one? Why is she talking about dinner? You don’t know anyone who’s died.

You want to go to the kalguksu place near Harabeoji’s house where they would bring out huge pots of simmering clam broth and noodles. You want to go to a 7-Eleven and get a banana milk. You want to go back inside the Shinsegae basement and buy yourself ice cream, fried mandu, the little glazed sweet potato things, and eat all of them at the food court in a feat of decadence your mother never would have allowed.

You wish you were home in your apartment in downtown Brooklyn, heating up a single serving of rice and leftovers, your cat purring by your side. You wish your grandfather wasn’t dead and that you were not here in this country.

“I’m hungry,” you say. “Let’s get dinner.”



* * *



Your grandfather isn’t from Seoul. Your grandfather is from a town outside Pyongyang, which is the capital city of North Korea. You don’t know the name of his hometown. You just know that he left, when he was young. Not that young. Maybe your age. You’re more from Seoul than he is, though he lived there for longer than you’ve been alive.

You don’t tell people that you’re from Seoul, though you lived there for a third of your life. But the parts of your life that you feel matter, the parts of your life you feel that people can relate to, are the parts where you grew up in a suburb on the East Coast of the United States, the parts where you went to public school and played after-school sports and took the SATs and briefly joined a sorority. The parts of your life where you bought K-drama boy band merch from third-party resellers and went to karaoke in K-Town and only sang the American songs. You aren’t your childhood.



* * *



Your instance drives you to a local Korean barbecue place (or, just a barbecue place, you suppose), where you meet up with your cousin who you haven’t talked to in two decades, his kid (your niece, your instance’s niece), and your instance’s fiancé. You don’t ask about the rest of your family. You’ll see most of them at the funeral, you guess. You wonder if you should call the version of your mom in Korea and meet up beforehand. Or if you should call your mom back home, but you hadn’t told her you were here. She’s more estranged from your family than you were.

“Are we drinking?” Minsoo asks. He’s sitting next to you, and had given you a big hug when he walked into the restaurant. He used to be your favorite cousin. He’s not the kid you remember. He’s an adult, with an adult’s face. You don’t know why this surprises you.

“Please, yes,” you say, and Minsoo orders a few green bottles of soju for the table.

“Really?” your instance’s fiancé—Taehyung, but call me Tae, haha, yeah, like the band member—says, with amusement in his voice. You’ve been trying not to think about how he’s handsome. How he has nice hands.

“It’s what Harabeoji would have wanted,” Minsoo says. “Just a few toasts. We gotta honor his memory.”

“You’re just saying that, you drunk,” your instance says with a smile on her face that mirrors your own.

Minsoo gasps in mock offense.

“What’s a drunk?” the niece says, and everyone laughs. “It’s not funny!”

“Just grown-up teasing,” your instance says, giving the kid a kiss on the cheek that the kid squirms away from halfheartedly. You can’t stop staring at the way the kid fits in your instance’s lap like she belongs there. You wonder if she wants kids. You never wanted kids.

“Why’d Harabeoji want me to come, do you know?” you say, tamping down the discomfort bubbling in your chest. “We haven’t talked in years.”