Sublimation(96)

Fuck your own self’s happiness. He’s never been in this chair, sitting on the cold rooftop of this building, staring down a man who doesn’t care about anyone else. But. Do you care about Kang Soyoung? Do you care about her enough to keep her out of the telescopic lens of your conglomerate? Maybe you’re not a good person. Maybe you’re just selfish. Do you care about that?



* * *



“YJ?”



* * *



What does Soyoung care most about? Would she put her personal desires above her political beliefs? She’s the sort of woman who forced her instance to reintegrate with herself.

You know what she wants. She wants freedom, same as you. She wants to be separate. She wants her world to feel familiar again. This is what she wants, as she is now. But what will she want, when she’s separate? You imagine being Rose. You imagine having never gone back to Korea in two decades—it’s easy, just double the length you’ve been gone. You imagine being Soyoung—you imagine being Yujin. And his wants are easy to imagine. He’s you.

You want to give her everything she could want.



* * *



Drew is still smiling. Like he knows your thoughts. Like he knows you’re going to fold. Asshole. He doesn’t know what you’re thinking. You’re going to ruin him. He’d lost you with his first few sentences. You’re going to say yes to Megan. You’re going to take his job. But first, he’s going to do something for you.



* * *



You take a breath. You smile at Drew.

“I want you—Mergebreak, Condensco, IIS, whatever—to sponsor Soyoung-Rose’s dual citizenship. Both halves of her—the same type of citizenship that I’m going to get. I want you to prevent anyone from figuring out what she did, that she’s here illegally, after she’s separate, and for her instance to get a first-class plane ticket back to Korea. And I want access to all of the information I was being kept from. All the documents. Everything. I need that for my job. And then I don’t go and talk to the news. I don’t quit. I keep everything running to the party line. Your line.”

“Done,” Drew says.



* * *



After catching Adam and Eve, God delineates the world between the garden and the wasteland and casts them out. There had never been any boundaries before. Adam and Eve did not know what would happen when they left. But they step over the border of Eden and walk forward into the wasteland. When Eve turns back, she sees their instances. This is God’s final punishment: to know that a version of them will be in paradise forever.





PART V


Han (n.)

1. Resentment.

2. A culture-bound emotion embodying specific grief, sadness, resentment, a dense knotted string of feeling of all the bitter sorry sadness, processed into a singular compact word.

Jeong (n.)

1. Attachment.

2. The opposite of han—no, not the opposite, the opposite the same way that chocolate is the opposite of vanilla, the way the sun is the opposite of the moon, i.e., two unrelated concepts that are nevertheless spoken of together—is jeong. Jeong is connection. It’s that you and I are tied by some strange little string of fate. It’s that I love you. It’s that you and me, we grew up together. I know you down to your bones. We are going to find each other again.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


Her doorbell rings and Dr. Crouton starts meowing. Soyoung looks out the peephole. It’s YJ. She opens the door.

“Hi. I brought dinner. I’m sorry to just show up. Can I come in?” YJ says, holding a bag of takeout as if an apology. It smells like—Korean food. Chinese-Korean food. Like a strange mirror of the last time Soyoung had Korean-Chinese, which was when she was cleaning up her grandfather’s house with her cousin. There’s no good place for this outside of Flushing.

“Where did you get this?”

“New restaurant opened near the Jay Street–MetroTech stop,” he says. “Is that your cat?”

“Don’t let him get at the food,” Soyoung says, and opens her door a little wider. Soyoung wrinkles her nose. “Why are you here?”

“I talked to Drew,” YJ says. “Can I come in?”

Dr. Crouton meows again. Winds around her ankles.

“Yeah,” Soyoung says, and lets him in.



* * *



Odysseus is given hospitality throughout the duration of The Odyssey, by strangers and by friends. The ancient laws of hospitality dictated kindness when you met a stranger who was a long way from home. It was likely they were an instance, and one who had no one else to turn to other than the kindness of strangers. They needed to be welcomed. Their home belonged to their other self.



* * *



YJ puts the food on the counter. He looks around the room as if the concept of a living room is foreign to him. Rose doesn’t live anywhere exciting—it’s blue walls and an Ikea couch and posters that have been upgraded from bare thumbtacks to frames.

“You have a nice apartment,” he says.

Soyoung is thrust into a memory—Yujin in Soyoung’s college dorm room, telling her that her room, with the single bed and messy desk, looked nice.