Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta

      Entangled Objects

      A Novel in Quantum Parts

      Copyright © 2020 Susanne Paola Antonetta. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Slant

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-5202-8

      paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-5203-5

      ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-5204-2

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Paola Antonetta, Susanne.

      Title: Entangled objects : a novel in quantum parts / Susanne Paola Antonetta.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Slant, 2020

      Identifiers: isbn 978-1-7252-5202-8 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-7252-5203-5 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-7252-5204-2 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Fiction -- literary. | Korea -- Fiction. | Man-woman relationships -- Fiction. | Reality television programs -- Fiction. | Cloning -- Fiction.

      Classification: call PS508.I73 E58 2020 (print) | PS508.I73(ebook)

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. August 17, 2020

      For Bruce and Jin, my dearest entanglements

      Part I

      Fan: Spooky Action at a Distance

      Paul traveled to Korea in order to make a woman.

      Or at least that’s how Fan put it to people who’d asked her. Sometimes, to punctuate the joke, she called him “Dr. Frankenstein” or “Victor.” Or “Pygmalion,” after the Greek sculptor who fell in love with his statue, then petitioned Aphrodite to bring her to life. Paul’s new partner, In-Su, had successfully cloned a human female for the stem cells and planned to do it again. South Korea was particularly interested in therapeutic cloning, cloning humans for stem cells which, ideally, could be made pluripotent, or able to form duplicates of any cell in the body. There were good research funds.

      The female would just be an embryo, but the cells came from women, so it would be, technically, a woman. A lame joke, really, but Fan kept making it.

      Now she sat in her apartment in Hongdae, a few weeks after their return to Korea. It was a two-bedroom, a large apartment in cramped Seoul, in a kind of building Koreans called officetels—skyscraper-y office-like buildings that had short- and long-term housing, gyms, and some businesses. It was an unusually large apartment for an officetel, and one the university kept for special visitors. Like most Korean homes, hers had heat that came up through the floors, beds low to the ground, an impossible washing machine the landlord recommended she watch a YouTube video to figure out, and no oven.

      Paul thought she would hate all these aspects of their place. In fact, she only hated the impossible washing machine. She loved the ondol, the heated floors, the way her body warmed from the soles up; she could swear she’d never been truly warm before. She loved the steel-and-glass seriousness of her building. And she loved having no oven the way she loved many of the people she saw every day having no English—it took something she realized she’d never really wanted out of the daily equation.

      Publicly as well as privately, she called Paul Victor rather than calling him by his name. Or she called him Pygmalion, though her tone was something neither of them fully understood. He simply called her Babe.

      Yoon, the wife of her husband’s new colleague In-Su, had given her brochures, things to do to entertain herself. She sat in the living room of her apartment and leafed through them, wondering.

      “I want you to get out,” Paul said every night after the lab. “Go to that spa, maybe. If you’re intimidated by the subway, cab it.” By spa he meant bathhouse, a place recommended by Yoon. Paul had trouble getting through his days without feeling Fan’s days satisfied her. Fan sometimes pulled a certain facial expression when Paul fretted: mouth curved up a little, eyebrows raised a little, quietly optimistic. She started to pull it now but stopped.

      “The one time I went to a spa in the U.S. I wanted to kill myself.” Not that Paul didn’t know. “All these people telling me I could’ve been a hand model.” She picked up her left hand with her right and swung the fingers through the air. “‘Those fingers! Sooo elegant!’ I really just wanted to shoo them out and clean the tables. Clorox, Victor, Clorox.”

      “You feel like you don’t deserve it,” said Paul.

      “That’s not it. Who feels better about life because of their fingers?” Fan looked at her fingers, nails still a little mooned with garden grime. “They just need to flatter you. It feels so fake.”

      “You miss teaching?”

      “The classroom has gotten boring. I appreciate the time off. I can refresh a little.”

      “Ah,” said Paul. “You can do some reading, go over your syllabuses here, jazz things up.”

      “I guess.” Had she given him what he needed to end this conversation?

      “I’m happy, Victor,” she said, knowing that he wouldn’t understand the appeal of this stillness.

      No matter what Fan said, Paul wanted to think she loved her job. Fan taught as adjunct faculty, a second-tier worker, not expected to publish, underpaid. She taught mostly Shakespeare courses and sometimes fiction. She was paid $3,900 per course and got health insurance if she taught four or more courses per year, but she had Paul’s insurance, so it didn’t matter. She earned little most years—well under $25,000—and if she had ever been competitive for a tenure-track teaching job, she was not any longer. She had published two stories in a decent but not highly selective literary journal, and never published any criticism, not even parts of her dissertation.

      Her adviser in her doctoral program talked her out of writing a dissertation on Shakespeare, her great literary love, on the grounds that so many Shakespeare scholars existed the move was career suicide. So she wrote a dissertation on doubling motifs in the work of Thomas Kyd, a Renaissance playwright she got heartily sick of by the time she finished her PhD (it didn’t help that he only wrote one identified play, The Spanish Tragedy).

      She had not got much out of the process but an inner voice that boomed out Kyd lines like farewell, good ha ha ha at random moments. And, in an irony Shakespeare himself would have appreciated, she failed to find a tenure-track job, and wound up teaching Shakespeare, for a handful of coin, anyway.

      The only way in which her education gave her a certain standard of living was, sadly, that it enabled her to marry Paul. He loved her but would not have fallen in love with a woman who had no standing within the academic world. Or one whose standing was equal to his, though he observed careful civilities about her work. She knew this about him, as she knew that a part of her love attached to the comfort that came with his money.

      She wondered: if she had pursued Shakespeare, which she really loved, or gone after fiction, getting a degree in that and trying harder to publish, would things have worked out differently? She met her husband at the university, and he had tenure, plus a lab for his work.

      Perhaps she had given Paul enough. Own your authority, he often told her about her teaching. Perhaps he’d imagined he heard something he could call owning.

      Paul had grown up with money, and now had more. As a cloner, he did