Sublimation(81)

The man looks tired. This is the only word to describe him. There is a slouch to his appearance. His eyes aren’t focused, or rather, when he glances in Soyoung’s direction, they aren’t focused on her, as if he is seeing something beyond her presence, as if he is looking toward some sort of nonexistent horizon. He looks like he’s seeing something that does not exist. Beyond that, he’s some sort of brown, though Soyoung can’t tell where he’s from, exactly. His clothes aren’t particularly interesting. He’s short.

Soyoung hasn’t met anyone else who is in the trial, yet, and hadn’t expected to. But of course, regardless of which trial she was doing, there were going to be other people enrolled, who didn’t know what they were signing up for. She wonders what she looks like, when she comes out of the other side of the machine. Whether she has the same hazy focus, the wandering gaze. Who is she, when she walks out?

“Gross outside, huh? Thanks for not rescheduling.”

Gerry’s mundane observation shakes her out of her thoughts. She smiles at him.

“Oh, you know. Happy to help advance the cause of science. Was that another person doing the test?”

“Yes,” Gerry says. “I can’t tell you more. On account of, well, privacy.”

“Totally,” Soyoung says. I know something you don’t know, she thinks to herself. She wants to ask him what trial she’s in. But she isn’t supposed to know about any of that. She only has two options: go forward, or leave.

Gerry punches them in to the testing room. He sets up things at the terminal. Soyoung asks about his weekend. He tells her about going upstate with his girlfriend and their dog. They talk about the dog, whose name is Calpico, and who is a Labrador mix with too much energy. Gerry clearly loves his girlfriend. She bets the girlfriend is Asian—no way is a white guy naming his dog Calpico without her. They met in college. Gerry seems like a genuinely nice guy. Soyoung can’t help but wonder: How much does he know about the technology? He knows enough that he’s lying to her about the test she’s in—unless he’s truly just a technician, and has only been instructed about the sequence for programming the Mitosis machine.

“How does this work, practically?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Gerry says. “Not until we start selling commercially.”

He presses the button. The gate becomes a void, and there is no world on the other side. Soyoung does not want to walk through. Artificial emotion induced by the machine. She wants to know. She closes her eyes. She steps forward, and—

I am twenty-five years old and I am hungry. I skipped lunch, a work meeting ran late, and I’m trying to lose a few kilograms so I don’t mind, really. But I’m still hungry. My body hasn’t gotten the signal that my brain has given it, which is that we are trying to lose weight.

I am twenty-five years old and I am making kimchi with my mother. She’s telling me I need to learn how to cook. We’ve never done this before. We buy kimchi from the store and she tells me to wrap it in two layers of plastic wrap and don’t eat it forty-eight hours before a date or important interview because it will make my breath smell weird to Americans. I have a vague memory of doing this as a child, with my grandmother, before she died.



I’m daydreaming about food. I want pizza. I want crisp French fries. I want tteokbokki and twigim. I tell myself I can have this in the future, when I’m skinny. I’ve lost weight before—everyone loses weight before they start college, it’s important to look good for college, even if you looked terrible in high school—but I gained it back by drinking and eating out. So I have to go on a diet. Because I want a new job, and if I’m not pretty then it will be harder for me to get a new job, and even more than that I like people not judging me and sometimes I think I should have gotten a nose job and eyelid surgery. Sometimes I think society should be different.

People in my family were always dying or leaving. I don’t think about these things anymore.



But I live in the world as it is. And I can bear any suffering for my own bright future.

It’s less that I like Korean food and more that it’s the default food I eat when I cook. But I don’t cook for myself. I never really think about where my food comes from. I eat a lot of Trader Joe’s prepackaged meals and dinners with my friends in cheap restaurants and I also eat a lot of sandwiches. I don’t mind this.



I wonder if my mother is trying to connect with me. I think that this is a really stereotypical attempt to connect with me, if it is. I have read a lot of diaspora novels.



I want to ask her about Korea but it feels like the wrong moment. I don’t know what the right moment would be. My childhood feels like a different country. I don’t think of it often. It feels like it exists behind a door that often stays shut.



The fresh kimchi smells really good. It smells like spice and garlic and green growing things. I eat a piece.



My mother asks how I like it.



I tell her it’s good. She smiles. I smile back. It’s a good moment. I don’t want to complicate it. So I don’t ask any more questions.



—she kaleidoscopes through, falling to the floor.



* * *



When she gets home, she examines every inch of her skin in the mirror. She wants to see if there are any scars, any acne pockmarks, any moles that can confirm whether she’s proportionally more Soyoung, or more Rose. But it’s impossible to tell. She hadn’t memorized her skin—neither version of her skin. She thinks that she’s the same as when she went in. But it would feel that way, wouldn’t it? What if they put her back together wrong? But it had felt so different, to become Soyoung-Rose, not just Soyoung, not just Rose.