Sublimation(75)

The train arrives in a screech, cutting off anything that you were going to say. You wince at the sound. You both turn to the opening doors.

“I miss Seoul the most when I’m taking public transit,” she says. She sounds so wistful. You’ve forgotten how the public transit was, in Seoul.



* * *



There are sects of Christianity that argue for Adam’s innocence. Adam, seduced by his wife. Adam, trusting his only human companion. Adam, being given a little treat by his own flesh. How can you not trust someone like that? Something like that? How can you not be curious, of what they have, and you don’t?

But that severs Adam’s agency. That makes him a dumb animal, unthinking, accepting anything handed to him. And Adam is made in God’s image, just like Eve, just like the serpent.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


“Why upstate?” YJ asks, inspecting the sign for the trailhead.

“I wanted to get out of the city,” Soyoung says. “Rose’s and Soyoung’s memories mesh worst in places that either of them remembers well. But we haven’t been here before.”

“So that’s why the hike.”

“Yeah,” she says, and starts down the trail. Google maps had said that this was a short, very scenic hike with a beautiful view of a river, that it was out of the way and fairly secluded, and only for moderate to experienced hikers. The mountains make her think of Korea, when she was a kid, and she and her cousins were dragged on hiking trips. The memories are monophonic, singular. She remembers getting sunblock smeared on her face and being forced to wear a hat. She remembers playing on the public playgrounds at the foot of the mountain, stepping from one swinging log to the next, reaching for Minsoo. She remembers floating a paper boat down a stream overflowing with rainwater. The water—she blinks. She turns.

“You pushed me into the water!”

They had been in elementary school, on a field trip. They had been going to some important mountain temple that Soyoung remembered the name of and Rose didn’t. They had stopped for lunch on the banks of a river, and the kids had played in the shallows. Yujin had pushed her into the shallows, and she remembered yelling about getting her clothes wet.

“What are you talking—”

“Second grade! You pushed me!”

“What in second gra—oh. Wow. I had totally forgotten about that. I didn’t know you would actually fall,” he says. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”

“Neither have I,” she says. She had tried to push Yujin back in retaliation, but had only managed to splash water at him. But Yujin had been such a baby at seven, he had started crying. Later the teachers had forced them to apologize to each other: hug and make up. They had, but she remembers not forgiving him in her head, yet later forgetting, the way that children forget.

“I won’t push you into any streams,” YJ says.

“I asked you to come out here because Yujin sent me some weird stuff related to the Mitosis project. It’s for you. It seemed pretty sensitive. I think it might be the things that you wanted me to look for, in the lab.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about it where people might overhear.”

Soyoung starts walking down the path. YJ follows her.



* * *



Seoul and New York are on roughly the same latitude. The climate is nearly identical, in many respects. Four seasons. Greenery. Seoul is wetter, with great damp rainy seasons when the rain pours. The pine trees are gnarled and twisted and eccentric. But if you go a few hours outside New York at the right time of year, the mountains look almost the same, until you look closely at the trees.



* * *



They’re a little farther up the path now, the trail having narrowed to a single person’s width. It’s lovely in here. The light filters through the leaves, dappling the floor with flecks of green light. It reminds her of the forest around her grandfather’s gravesite. How there was the well-kept clearing and the soft mounds demarking each grave, but if you walked a few meters into the woods, the paths would narrow, the light would dim, and the undergrowth would brush against your ankles.

“I had a weird conversation with Yujin the other day,” YJ says.

“Weird how? Weirder than the conversation that you had with your old boss?”

“No. Less weird. But he mentioned that I should hang out with you.”

“How long ago?”

“Not long. Earlier this week, maybe? It takes a couple of weeks for mail, so—”

“—he probably sent this before that. What else did he say to you?”

“It was more like what he didn’t say. He didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, mostly. He was really paranoid about it.”

“You’re kind of a paranoid person, though.”

“I am not!”

“YJ, you are,” Soyoung says.

“It really does kind of upset me when you make statements like that about me and him,” YJ says.

You glance back. He looks like he’s trying to keep his face neutral. You shrug.

“Sorry.”

“The things you know about him aren’t the same as things you know about me.”

Soyoung looks forward. She climbs over a few roots. What had been the same about Rose and Soyoung? Enough that she was able to move through the world as she is now, not enough that it felt comfortable. They thought in different languages. They had studied different things in school. They ordered different things at restaurants. They had the foundation of the shared childhood. They had both been the sort of person who had felt things deeply and buried those feelings in the dark sand of her soul. With the clarity of the bright shock of reintegration, she had understood that. She was melodramatic. She had a hard time talking about anything meaningful.