Sublimation(85)

You wonder what they talk about. Whether she’s telling him all about you-and-her. Whether he’s telling her things about you. You feel like you’re in a bad K-drama. Maybe you should tell Tae. Why didn’t your other self tell you about this, when you called last week?

You finish the too-sweet drink. You decide that, much like the USB drive, there’s nothing you can do about this. You feel like there’s never anything you can do about anything.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


“You don’t have an instance, do you?” Soyoung asks Gerry, while he sits at the terminal and pokes at the keys. She’s leaning against the wall in a way where she can surreptitiously watch the screen. She’s mentally reciting the steps from the files on the USB. First, Gerry drags a digital slider on the left, which looks like an approximation of the diagrams that she’s seen. Second, he’s going to—yes, there he goes, setting a dial between ranges epsilon and zeta, next he’ll put the calibration numbers into—yes. He’s doing everything she expects. This is the calibration for the study she found on the USB drive. The one that’s testing simultaneous separation and reintegration. That knowledge doesn’t change anything, though.

“No,” Gerry says. “I get asked about it a lot, when I tell people where I work.”

“I bet,” Soyoung says.

“It’s interesting. I don’t mind it. Alright, I think we’re ready. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” Soyoung says, and Gerry hits the digital switch and the space between the Mitosis gate goes strange and Soyoung’s used to it now, so she closes her eyes and walks forward.

I am twenty-seven and I am going on a hike with my boyfriend, up the old city walls. It’s late at night. The spray of lights in the city below is like stars or a movie set. It is beautiful, from above. The path is illuminated by low, golden lights. Sometimes I feel lucky to be living my life. It is sometimes very good and easy.



We’re holding hands. It makes us go slower than we would, individually, but his hand is warm and pleasantly envelopes mine and it feels safe and good. I look at him out of the corners of my eyes. He’s handsome. I like the thoughts that exist in his head. I think I love him.



We walk and pass other people. It’s mostly couples. This is a date spot, I realize. It’s romantic. It’s velvet sky and soft lighting and sweet isolation and the warm summer night breeze. It’s meant to foster good feelings.



We reach the top of the path. This is the highest point of the old city walls. I look over. From here, the entire north side of Seoul is visible. In my mind, Seoul is the only city in Korea worth anything. But I was born here and I’ve lived my entire life here. I’m biased. I wonder if I would feel differently if I were someone else.



Kang Soyoung, he says. I turn.



My boyfriend sinks down to one knee. He pulls out a ring.



He tells me he loves me. He asks me to marry him.



For a moment, the sky above me feels like a great black bowl and I feel like I am a rat in a trap. But the feeling passes as quickly as it came, replaced with an ecstatic happiness bubbling up in my chest. I am thinking about the future as a good place to go to. I am thinking about doorways being opened. I am thinking, underneath all of this, that I am going to have a good life.



I say yes.

I am twenty-seven and I am sitting alone at a bar, reading a really good book. I am very content. This is not always true. But right now, I cannot imagine anywhere or time in the world where I would rather exist.



—she falls through the gate.



* * *



After Soyoung goes down to the lobby, she calls Tae. She does it before she can think about it too hard, with the memory of his proposal sitting sweetly in the meat of her temporal lobe.

Tae picks up on the second ring.

“Ah, Soyoung,” he says, and then there’s a cut-off portion of breath. She knows that he wants to say something but is stopping himself.

“How have you been?” she says. She doesn’t feel the bright bloom of affection she had thought she might. This is a strange relief. She does feel the guilt, the vague and shapeless desire to be better to him in a thousand ways. To stop forgetting about him. To be faithful. To consider him hers and not an artifact of her prior self’s life.

“I’m doing okay,” he says. “Are you out?”

“I’m walking home.”

“Are you—” he says, and then cuts himself off again. And she knows that he wants to talk to her, but he doesn’t want to talk to her like she is, and that he misses her, but she, as he knows her, doesn’t exist. But she could just be extrapolating incorrectly. Soyoung’s memories filtered through Rose’s logic aren’t necessarily truth. She shouldn’t have called him. She had wanted to test who she was but—this is cruel.

“I miss you,” she lies. She doesn’t miss Tae. She misses being the person who would have missed him. She misses being the person who didn’t know he existed.



* * *



It occurs to her later, when she’s about to fall asleep. She could use the Mitosis machine without a technician, as long as she had access to it.