Sublimation(67)

“How did it go?”

She thinks about the way it felt to be unraveled by the Mitosis gate. The psychological assault, the unraveling. The way she wishes she was somewhere else now. How she feels ephemeral now, temporary, ungrounded. How—she is going to exist for such a short amount of time. She’s going to become different people. It feels like something she knows in her bones, now, rather than something she knows with her head. Life—the continuous conscious singular experience of existence—is so impermanent.

“It went great. Do you want to hang out this weekend?”



* * *



In Eden there were infinite trees, and all of them were permitted to be eaten from, except for two. First, the tree of eternal life. Second, the tree of good and evil. For a long and endless moment (because this was before time had any meaning, because life was eternal, and time therefore did not exist), Adam and Eve lived in paradise. Then the snake who was the devil came to Eve and whispered curiosity into her ear, and so she bit the apple, and learned delineation.

I am nineteen years old and I am going for a run on the riverbank, and the sky is hazily smeared with the dead yellow pollution-and-dust that streams over from China in the spring.

I am nineteen years old and I am sitting in a dorm room crying. I am crying because I am lonely. I don’t know why I’m lonely. I broke up with my boyfriend two weeks ago. I didn’t cry then.



My secret is that I think it’s beautiful, sometimes, the way it paints the sky in antique colors, but it is objectively bad and my mother tells me to wear a mask on the days that the dust load is particularly high. But I’m not wearing a mask.

I am away from home for the third time in my life. The first time was when we moved to America. The second time was when I went to summer camp. The third time is now.



I’m going for a run, and right now I feel like the early morning belongs to me, and I am the only person in existence.

I know I need to fold this feeling away. I do not want to be the sort of girl who cries. That’s not a sort of girl I can be, and survive here. Here being the world. Here being college. Here being the entirety of my life. I don’t know why I feel this way. But I feel it. Perfectly. Sincerely.



And suddenly the sky feels like a great bowl, and I feel a fleeting sense of vertigo. I laugh. The whole world is something I can understand.

The dorm room feels too small around me and I feel like I am trapped.



This is the one tru—

This is the one tru—





YUJIN


You’re awake at obscene hours again. For you, nights are for watching video game streamers and talking with YJ and going for long dark walks because when it’s late enough for long enough, you become tired enough not to care about death.

Tonight, you’re awake for different reasons. Two hours ago, you finally finished combing through the files on the USB that Megan gave you, and then you had written up all the contents that you understood in your crabbed handwriting.

You had tried to ignore the USB. You have your own problems and life—you have a third date with Youngmi, you have your own job, you can’t be keeping perfect tabs on YJ’s life. It would have been nice if you could have just shipped the USB in the next package that your mother would be sending to him around Christmas, along with a slip of paper containing the password to decrypt it. That would be months, though. And YJ probably needed the information now, whatever it was that his previous boss had thought was so important for him to know.

You had looked Megan up. You hadn’t known her last name, but YJ was friends with a “Megan Taylor” on three different social media sites, who mostly posted photos of herself in pretty locations, interspersed with photos of her at conferences. Your instance was in some of those photos, along with a constellation of other Mergebreak employees. The other things you learned about Megan: She seemed successful (but everyone seemed successful on social media), she seemed to be actual friends with YJ (again, not hard to do on social media), and she seemed to really enjoy traveling (the places, at least, were real). You envied that. It was harder to get a tourist visa sometimes, if you had an instance, and you didn’t have the money for international travel, so you didn’t really get out of Korea.

After that, you had failed to ignore the USB. You knew a little, but you wanted to know a lot. You had plugged the USB into an old computer with the Wi-Fi switched off. You wondered if Megan had known this would happen, if she knew your other self well enough that she thought you would go looking, even if you were told not to.



* * *



The various versions of the Bible offer a woeful amount of detail with regards to Eve’s decision to take the apple. The conversation between Eve and the serpent only lasts a few lines. There are no long paragraphs describing Eve’s inner thoughts, like why she thinks the serpent might be trustworthy. Why she wants wisdom, or knowledge, or why it takes so little urging for her to question God.



* * *



You had only meant to skim, but the more you looked, the more curious you became. Technical diagrams, white papers, summaries, saved email chains. A good portion of those alluded to existing relationships or ongoing conversations, and some of the business jargon eluded you. You didn’t speak business English beyond formalities. But the science you understood, and you knew that YJ wouldn’t be able to easily parse it. Or—he could have figured it out, eventually. But only one of you had majored in a technical field, and the other had majored in finance.