Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta
makes gu’ money,” as Fan’s father put it, meaning good money. Her dad said gu’ money about a lot of people’s earnings. Once as a little girl she asked him what that meant. He said, Gu’ money is what anybody makes who makes more than me.
Fan grew up in the Appalachian part of Pennsylvania. Her family mined coal. Neither of her parents finished middle school. Her father went from the mines to work as a machinist. Early in her life, there were times when they had cereal for dinner, always the sweet kind with pastel bits.
Fan would arrange the colors in her bowl: baby blue in the center, a circle of pink around it, then the boring tan ones. Sometimes they had odd combinations of food from the Food Bank—once a block of American cheese, canned beef stew, canned corn. Fan’s mother, in what Fan took as a sort of protest, mixed these things into one dish. The cheese, probably more of a Velveeta than a real cheese, formed a molten blob in the center of the stew, and the corn floated. Once again Fan became obsessed with the aesthetics of her plate, swirling the stew around the cheese, the corn kernels moving fast and on top, like the bodies of Olympic swimmers. Both of her parents understood this stirring-staring as another form of protest. It was not.
Fan got ahead in life, went to school, working as a maid at a hotel. And she’d come to like that work in many ways, a fact that bothered Paul. He wanted her to hire a cleaning lady. She secretly loved cleaning the house, if she was in the mood, especially white surfaces like tubs. The sprays that made them shimmer. She might at times need to vee-fold the ends of a newly unwrapped roll of toilet paper. And then she’d hate to use it to wipe herself, so she’d hold in her pee for a while.
Unlike her, Paul loved his work. He loved to talk about it, not just the hope but the grotesqueries of animal cloning: the gigantism so extreme host mothers could die giving birth, the hundreds of deformations and deaths among the clones that preceded success, the aging that made Dolly the cloned sheep like a twelve-year-old at the age of three. She understood the basics, like how most of the quirks in cloning came from gene expression, not just what genes were present in the clone but whether they got turned on or turned off, so, for instance, the first cloned cat, named CC for Copy Cat or Carbon Copy, turned out a striped tabby, though her genes came from a cat that was calico.
Paul brought home photos to show her: a cloned calf with an enlarged heart that looked like a catcher’s mitt; newborn creatures otherwise normal but with massive heads, so a newborn calf body sprawled under a head almost the size of a grown cow’s; pig livers huge and bulbous with fat; swollen tongues jutting from tiny heads, as if the creatures had been hung.
Fan loved animals and wondered why Paul’s work did not bother her more. Most of the photos were from other cloners’ projects. They did not trouble her, though, even if Paul had a hand in the process, and her feeling was that in making a thing you got a free pass: it could be botched, like the play within a play in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, a silly scene with a drama performed at court in which every character theoretically spoke a foreign language, though the characters just spoke English and pretended not to understand each other. The botch of the making showed the maker’s hand.
“It’s the newest medieval thing going,” she said to Paul about cloning, and it became a joke for them. “Want to hear the newest medieval, Babe?” he said when he came home from work. Until Seoul: here when she asked him what the Middle Ages had produced that day, he shrugged.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s people, isn’t it. I guess that’s different.” He didn’t answer, merely watched her.
Fan for now just concerned herself with loving her freedom and with physics. Introduced to physics by Paul, she had come to understand it far better than he did. The concepts at least, not the math. She joined the British Institute of Physics one day, kind of a gag, but also serious. She selected her membership title from a very British pull-down menu: Professor Dame.
The truth was that physics formed part of her attraction to Paul. It seemed to have answers, if puzzling ones, to questions she found hard to articulate. Fan had always felt as if she were part of a world other people seemed unerringly tuned into, but that she herself perceived dimly. She felt like one of the mice Paul once told her about, who had human brain cells injected into their brains and grew neural nets rich with human cells, Frankenstein mice called chimeras. “They do seem smarter after,” Paul said noncommittally, “for mice,” but the mice stuck with her—knowing enough to consider their caged scrabbling lives with a sense of pointlessness, she guessed, but at the same time, knowing too little to make sense of it. Condemned just to watch.
Now she read her physics obsessively, her favorite magazines, New Scientist and Physics World. What intrigued her mostly involved quanta, bits like electrons that don’t seem to exist in any specific space or state, strangely, until they’re measured. They’re in superposition, a word she loved, which meant they’re blurs of possibilities, both waves and particles at once. Outside of any understandable time. Possibly entangled, so that changes in one entangled particle would cause an instantaneous but opposite change in the other, no matter how far apart. Quantum particles make up all atoms, so they’re what humans are at the deepest level, but they exist according to a different set of rules. The science spoke to Fan, as her voice spoke to her spouse, in a way she couldn’t put her quantum finger on.
“I want to be everything at once,” she told Paul, and he replied, borrowing her unreadable tone,
“You can’t. You’re too complicated.”
Fan realized, when she put her hand to her head, that her hair had been scraped into a bun. It was one of those perfectly round buns Korean women seemed to do with a flick of the wrist. She had felt the pull but had no idea the woman, middle-aged and standing before her in a black bikini that could have been a bathing suit but was probably underwear, edged with a little lace, had accomplished in a second this perfect globe of hair. Fan patted it in delight, like a child.
Fan lay naked on a narrow plastic table. The woman in the bikini pulled Fan’s hand off her hair and placed it at her side, not gently. She had the exact look, Fan thought, of an old aunt eyeing a messy little girl, an aunt who didn’t know you or care about you but somehow got stuck getting you ready for an event like a wedding.
The woman was a ddemiri, a masseuse whose job was to take salt and a special cloth and scrub the dead skin off Fan’s body. Then the woman would massage her. Fan had not meant to sign up for a massage but the ddemiri said “Massage!” in a half shout, pointing to the word massage on a list of services, and there seemed no way to contradict her. None of the four ddemiri working away on nude women, all of them Korean, spoke to their clients, or smiled. When they wanted to move the women onto their backs or sides, they grabbed their limbs and flopped them.
Fan had been soaking in a warm mugwort pool waiting for her masseuse to finish with a previous client. She watched the ddemiri pound the women’s bodies with their forearms; they cupped their hands and smacked the flesh, mostly around the butt, with a cracking sound like a bone breaking.
Fan, for the first time since arriving in Korea, felt anxiety welling up into her stomach. She cast her eyes around for an exit. But that was impossible; she had no clothes on, only a dim idea of how to find the locker that held her clothes, and the masseuse leveled her vexed gaze at her every few seconds. The woman had cropped hair and a physique that offered the bikini little contour.
The masseuses, most between fifty and sixty years old, had the same look, stern and unbending, as if they couldn’t stop totting up the vast capacity for error found in human flesh. Yoon was right. Fan had come to the jjimjilbang, the bathhouse, only after Yoon warned her it would not be like an American spa.
The women are not “friendly like your American massage people,” Yoon said, but “very professional, very trained.” Fan understood this to mean they didn’t flatter you, or introduce themselves, or offer you cups of cucumber water. Or rhapsodize about your fingers. Yoon had visited the U.S., and she knew.
“In your country they want to make you feel special,” she said, “here it is just the body.”
The jjimjilbang was indeed like no spa in the United States—cheap, utilitarian,