Sublimation(71)

“Hi. Ready to go?”

“Let’s go,” she says. “How’ve you been?”

“Not too bad.”

He leads her down to floor twenty-six. She’s hoping that she can stall him for a little, take a surreptitious walk around the lab. Look for whatever could be useful to YJ. But as soon as Gerry gets there, he turns the Mitosis machine on, and the world goes strange. The space between the gate turns qualitatively familiar and foreign.

She wants to walk through the gate. She cannot bear to walk through the gate. The metaphorical taste of the gate screams against the interior of her brain.

“Please, whenever you’re ready,” Gerry says.

She closes her eyes. She’s thinking about all the things she used to want. She’s thinking about what information is shelved in this lab, where she can’t read it. Soyoung walks through, and—

I am seventeen and I am studying. It feels like I am always studying. My life feels like it is an endless wheel of routine. I wake up and go to school. I go to cram school afterward. I go do my homework. I fall asleep. I don’t dream. I wake up again. I am counting down the days until I take the CSAT.

I am seventeen and I am studying. I feel like I am always studying. Studying for school or studying for the SATs or going to extracurriculars or working on my college application essays and I am always trying to find some way of being extraordinary.



I punch numbers on my calculator and I write paragraphs and I memorize science facts and I think about my instance and how she must not have to do all of this studying. I looked up how the American school system works and my first emotion was anger, that she could have access to the whole apparatus of higher education without the same ladder that I had to climb. If I did badly on the exam, I would have to take it again the next year.

I have been told that I am not competing with the other students at my school, or the national pool of talented teenagers. I am competing with every other Asian girl my age who has the same set of skills that I do. I am competing with every other Asian girl who’s good at math and sometimes I wish that I was white (to be the default) or brown or black (for the diversity scholarship).



I complained to my grandfather about this. He is the only person who regularly talks to my instance. He laughed when I complained.

I have not been told, but I know implicitly that to be competitive against the other Asian girls, I need to get perfect grades and perfect SAT scores and a double handful of SAT 2s and even then this is the floor, not the ceiling. I have been told that there is an unspoken quota of how many Asian girls will be admitted into any good college.



I asked him, do you think my life is easy?

I do more math problems. I feel very much like nobody in the world has ever had the same problems I have had, and I have suffered more than any person on earth.



He changed the channel on the television. He didn’t look at me.

I know this is temporary. I dream of being a grown-up. I think it will feel different from being seventeen in a qualitative way, and one day I won’t have to think about this stuff anymore.



I do, he said.



Harabeoji, I said. He laughed at me. Next time I am going to complain to Minsoo-oppa instead.



—she falls out the other side of the gate reeling, her knees hitting the ground, the echo of two lives reverberating in her singular head.





YJ


You’re in FiDi. You never come down here anymore—you had a job here once, and you remember walking back to the subway late at night, trying not to slip on the cobblestones. You had thought more than once that New York was a small city compared to where you grew up, but the block-by-block changes were more expansive. And it was only small if you didn’t count all the boroughs, but it wasn’t like you were going out to Ridgewood or Flushing every weekend.

Megan’s new office is here, in the old brick building across the street. In the IIS office. You stare at the front. It’s a completely different genre of building from the Mergebreak offices, which are wholly encased in glass. The occasional person walks in—government workers in business-casual, and people who clearly need to talk about some sort of instancing or immigration issue. Tired-looking parents towing a couple of kids. Men with brown, deeply lined faces. Then again—you don’t know that the people in business-casual aren’t also there for some sort of immigration issue. You’ve been here before. When you were a student, and again, when you were dealing with an issue with the H-1B1 you had at your previous employer. You had worn a button-down. You had also looked like you worked here.

Why would Megan quit to work at IIS? Megan had been on the up-and-up. You knew things about Megan: how she had a genuine belief in Mergebreak’s stated mission, how she believed in technology for social change. And it was a good job. She was high up. Did Megan want to run for office someday? You would vote for her. Not just because you had thought she and you were friends. She had been the best manager you’d had.



* * *



The knowledge that was hidden from Adam and Eve was also that of delineation. “Delineation” is an imperfect translation of the original Hebrew, from a word that is hard to define other than to say that it is “the difference between the self and the other self.” Which is to say, instantiation.