Sublimation(9)

“She’s not what you expected,” Tae says. You look away from your cousin and your instance.

“No.” You wrinkle your nose. “I don’t know what I was expecting. But she’s—I don’t know! I guess I expected her to be less Korean? But other than the accent she’s … Maybe she’s funnier? Do you think she’s funnier?”

“I can’t legally answer that,” Tae says.

“She tells jokes. I wish I was good at telling jokes.”

If Rose agrees to be you, then maybe you’ll be good at telling jokes. Reintegration is a plot point in at least seven of the webnovels that you keep up with. The main character’s instance has some incredible power, or some plot-relevant weird skill (deep-sea fishing, in the last one you read), and so the main character has to somehow find his instance, convince him to return, and then reintegrate. Then there’s usually a huge flashback sequence, a training montage, and then they’re one person for a while before they separate again, because the instance had some sort of meaningful reason to want to leave afterward, now having both sets of memories, and a whole lot of character development. It’s one of your favorite tropes.

“Tell me a joke right now,” Tae says.

You stuff some rice in your mouth to keep from answering. Tae just keeps watching you with a patient, amused smile. You chew even slower. He grins. You have to keep yourself from smiling with a mouth full of half-chewed rice.

You swallow.

“No.”

“I’ll tell you a joke!” Jangmi says.

“Jangmi-ya, go get your daddy,” you say, pushing her gently off your lap. She goes readily.

You and Tae watch her run across the restaurant, out the door, adding her own little shadow to the two standing there.

“So,” Tae says.

You pour him a shot, because he’s taking the subway, and you don’t pour yourself one, because you’re going to be driving.

“I think I like her,” you say.

Tae takes the shot.

“I know you’re not okay, but are you okay?” he asks.

You haven’t told Tae about your grandfather’s last request. This is another thing you feel bad about. A good fiancée would have told him about major life decisions like: My grandfather told me as his dying wish that he wanted me to reintegrate, which makes me wonder whether he told my mom the same thing, but I haven’t asked my mom, because asking my mom would be a cruel thing to do right now, and I don’t have time to have a breakdown in front of my mother and we’ve already cried all over each other. Right now, I’m trying to figure out whether my American instance would want to know what I know. Would want to feel what I feel. So I need to feel like a person who is worth inhabiting.

You would like to pour yourself a shot. You don’t. You pour Tae another instead. He frowns at you. You shrug.

Normally you’re a good fiancée. Normally, you tell Tae all the things he needs to know and he tells you the things you need to know, sleepily under the covers late at night, over coffee and toast, in the soft odd hours when you’re both supposed to be doing other things but are choosing to spend time together instead. You’ve talked about your future together. You’re getting married next year. You both want kids. You’re grateful for him. Based on what your girlfriends have said, sometimes it feels like you’ve found the one good man in all of Korea. He knows how you feel about Rose. He doesn’t know what you’re hoping for.

Outside the restaurant, you can see Jangmi’s small shadow, next to your instance’s shadow, identical to your own.

“I’m okay,” you say. “I’ll be okay.”



* * *



What can you offer your instance? You have the following: a fiancé whom you’ve been with since college. You have a rented apartment that is anemically furnished. You have your mother, who is equivalent to her mother, except for all the ways they are different. You have friends and KakaoTalk group chats and a favorite cafe you like to read in. You have a stable career working as a business analyst at a chaebol group. You have a family. You have two decades of memories with your cousins and your grandfather and your aunts and uncles and you dream in Korean and speak in Korean but you don’t know how much that matters to her, anymore.

You can offer her information. Emotional richness. Grief.

Maybe you don’t say the last bit.



* * *



When Rose walks back inside, she’s holding a large yellow envelope.

“What’s that?” you ask.

Rose looks at Minsoo. He shrugs. You frown at him. He shrugs again.

“I don’t know. I haven’t looked inside yet,” Rose says.





ROSE


You want to open the envelope in the car, but the light’s fading. You let the papers rest in your lap as you look out the windows. Seoul at night is lit in cooler tones than New York. More fluorescents, more LED billboards, and brightly lit 7-Elevens next to corner stores with their closed metal shutters. Soyoung veers you off the side roads and onto a larger throughway.

You don’t know where exactly she’s taking you. You know in the abstract: her apartment. Where she lives alone, without her fiancé, because it would probably be a whole thing if she lived with him before marriage. But you don’t know where it is, what neighborhood. You wouldn’t recognize any of them anyway. You’re very tired. You’ve eaten too much grilled meat and you’ve slept too little. Without the dazzle of the restaurant, your eyelids are drifting closed. It’s not a bad feeling. When you’re this tired, all your emotions feel very far away. So what if you’re in Korea for the first time in twenty years? So what if you had to meet your relatives? So what if you were given a mysterious package you don’t want to deal with? So what if you had expected an uncomplicated visit, that you would do your filial duty and get out without any emotions? It’s hard to be nervous now. You let gravity win, and close your eyes. Just one moment.