Sublimation(91)

YJ’s quiet for a moment.

“That would ruin my life,” he finally says.

“Well, I guess some things are worth that,” Soyoung says, feeling like she’s ripping words out of a TV drama. Three months ago, her biggest problem was what she was going to do for brunch.

“Is that how you felt, after reintegrating?”

“Oh, shut up,” she says.



* * *



Studies have shown that people are able to wholly hold two contradictory ideas in their head without any cognitive dissonance. An idea, a desire, none of it needs to be grounded in reality. It just needs to be something the holder believes is true. A buried understanding. An unconscious bias. Soyoung doesn’t know how to convince YJ of anything. YJ is the sort of man who can work toward a single goal for years. He’s the sort of man who can lie to himself for years about what he wants. He’s selfish and self-interested and she’s seen that there’s no version of him that has had a successful long-term relationship. And he’s the sort of man who, when he hears that an old friend who he parted with on bad terms needs help, will eventually say yes.



* * *



Soyoung and YJ leave the hall full of birds, walking through exhibits that display the various historical world cultures, through the hall of Asian mammals and then back through the entrance, which is still lit in neon. They blend in with the other people leaving the museum—couples, groups of friends, all the people who thought that going here on a weekend night would be fun.

“I want to talk to Drew, once more,” YJ says. “Before saying yes to Megan.”

Soyoung doesn’t say anything about Rose and Soyoung meeting for a funeral and the way that their talking didn’t actually mean any sort of communication occurred.

“Good luck,” she says.

They walk down the street. They’re going to the same subway terminal.

“Should I not have pretended to be your girlfriend?” Soyoung says.

YJ rubs the back of his neck with his hand. “I really enjoyed that part,” he admits.





YJ


You check Drew’s calendar for when he is next going to be in the country. It’s within the month. You have your secretary make an appointment with him. You want to talk with him in person, rather than over the phone. It’s easier to understand a person when you can see their face. You think that many of the issues between you and Yujin are because you can’t see him in person. You don’t tell your instance about what you learned.

In the meantime, you do your laundry. You clean your apartment. You try not to daydream about Soyoung being your girlfriend. You try not to run through hypothetical arguments in your mind with Soyoung about Mitosis. You sometimes succeed. Other nights you think about her when you can’t sleep. The concept of her takes on various roles: impassioned anti-government activist who has a fundamental issue with the American federal government using Mitosis as an arm of American foreign policy; anti-monopoly economist who thinks that giving a single company the ability to maneuver global migration in such capacity would have incredible negative externalities; emotional bleeding heart who thinks that it’s just cruel to dictate the world in such grand strokes for people; compassionate pragmatist who says that even if some governments will act in the best interests of their people, there is no guarantee that all regimes would.

You build arguments against your fiction of her, but all of them come down to the same points. There is no suppressing the knowledge of Mitosis indefinitely. The world will change, regardless of how the information is disseminated, and it is impossible to know the optimal path forward. And to do anything other than following Mergebreak or the IIS’s directions would ruin your life. You would be fired. You would lose your visa. You would go back home. Would that be so bad? It would be a life you could fit into. But you don’t want to go back home.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


Soyoung wakes up to her phone ringing. She blearily punches the button to answer the call.

“Hi, can you talk?” Rose’s mom says.

“Yeah,” Soyoung says. Sleep gives way to simmering guilt in her stomach: She had meant to call, before. She’s been busy, since the night at the museum. Soyoung hasn’t seen YJ since. She’s been going to the research studies. She’s been doing Soyoung’s job, Rose’s job. She called Soyoung’s mother in Korea, who asked when she’s coming home. She didn’t have a good answer for her.

“Were you asleep?”

“I’m awake.”

Her mom sighs like she doesn’t believe her, like how she sighed when Rose lied about whether she had done her homework.

“Really,” Soyoung says.

“Sure. Okay,” Rose’s mom says. There’s a pause in her speech. Soyoung can hear her breathing. Then Rose’s mom takes a long breath. “Okay, so when you were a kid, your grandfather had an opportunity to go back to North Korea. Not a DMZ tour. Korea-Korea. To go back to his hometown. You know—he grew up outside of Pyongyang. He left behind his parents—your great-grandparents—and his brothers. I don’t really know more than that. He didn’t talk about it much. But when he was older, he had the opportunity to go back for business reasons. A business trip that would include going back to his hometown.”