Sublimation(66)

He turns back to the computer, clicks a few more buttons. She should be paying closer attention, but she’s starting to get nervous, a jittery sort of energy keeping her looking away from the gate. She’ll look around more carefully in future sessions, she tells herself.

“Okay, you’re all set. Please go stand by the Mitosis gate.”

“Which side?”

“It doesn’t matter. It just matters that you’re in the field.”

Soyoung walks over to the side farthest away from the console.

“Okay. I’m turning it on.”

Soyoung feels a sharp sudden sensation that can only be described as the feeling of when there is a stranger with you in a dark room but you cannot see them. It is not a sound or a scent. It raises the hairs on her neck. She breathes in sharply, involuntarily.

“Yeah,” Gerry says, softly. “It hits everyone like this the first time.”

There’s no physical effect. There’s only the sense that there is something very wrong with the world behind the Mitosis gate, something immutably strange, a different, foreign plane of existence that exists on the other side. It repulses her. It feels like if she walks through the gate, she will end up in—

Her grandfather’s house. Her childhood bedroom in Korea—in America. The corner of the library that felt like home, in high school. Her mother’s arms when she was five years old. Drinking hot chocolate while watching the snow. A deeply seductive feeling of content, of returning, knifing its way through the strangeness.

“That’s how it works, isn’t it,” she says, keeping care to keep her voice steady. “By creating a psychological effect?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “But that’s materially part of it. Please walk through.”

She does not want to walk through this gate. This feeling originates from her hindbrain. There is nothing logical about it. There is something very wrong with the machine, something that should not exist, something wrong and bad and in complete opposition to the world on the other side. This is a truth that she knows in the deepest recesses of her brain: There is no good future on the other side of the gate.

“Is it supposed to feel this way?”

Soyoung can’t keep her voice from wavering.

Gerry looks up from the console. He pulls a piece of paper out of the drawer and unfolds a list. He reads it. Quickly.

“We understand that you may be experiencing a sensation that is foreign to you, which you were not expecting. You may be feeling displacement. Alienation. Longing. Please walk through the gate anyway.”

Soyoung takes a deep breath. She is thinking about how Soyoung felt in the moment before she reached for Rose’s hand. Gerry continues to read.

“We understand that there may be a feeling of tension in the base of your skull. This is normal. We assure you that the gate is safe. Please walk through.”

She’s thinking about the split second during which Rose was able to perceive the way Soyoung moved toward her with such smooth and organic motion. She summons the feeling right after their combination. The vertigo. The sharp betrayal like a knife in her stomach. The anger.

She walks forward, and—

—So-Ro-Soyoung collapses through the other side of the Mitosis gate and falls to her knees. Her hands spasm. Her face involuntarily twitches, she nearly blacks out. It feels like she is melting. It feels like she is—I am—you are—I—is, she is, she is, she is going to hurl.

“Trash ca—” Soyoung gasps. A small recycling bin is thrust into her hands. She throws up messily in it. Sour bile. Her breakfast.

“Are you okay? Do you want a seltzer? Or water?”

So-Rose-Young feels like there are strings inside of her unraveling. Like the component memories that make her conglomerate self are pulling apart. It’s not a bad feeling as much as it is a strange one, like a foot has fallen asleep but the foot is her memories, and there’s a sense of pervasive lightness. Like there’s nothing in her head.

“I’m fine,” Soyoung says. “I’m—”

She heaves into the bucket again. Nothing comes up.

“Here,” Gerry says. He holds out a paper cup of water. Soyoung takes it.



* * *



Instancing is not a physical phenomenon. It is not a cleft of meat and bone, there is no physical severance. It is the cleave of one future from another. It is psychological change as denoted through physical reality; it is metaphor made flesh. The physical effects are downstream from the higher-order changes taking place.



* * *



So-Ro-Soyoung drinks the water. She goes down the elevator. She exits the building like she is a foreign object being expelled from a cellular body. She takes slow, deep breaths. She walks down the street. The sky’s dark now, and everything feels like it’s lit up differently, like the world she has walked down into is a different world than she had walked up into, or that she is subtly a different person, as if the perspective of her vision is coming from a few inches to the right of her eyes.

She catches sight of YJ, waiting, haloed underneath a McDonald’s sign. For a moment, she’s thrown by how this is familiar, how this maps so neatly to her memories of Yujin waiting for her in the streets of Seoul, how he would look up at her from his phone and smile in the same way. She walks up to him.