Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta
with Paul on top—his choice, she was finished—and her legs wound round his shoulders. Before Paul would enter her, he asked her twice if she was sure she’d put in her diaphragm. He often did this. She wondered what had come first in Paul, the interest in cloning, or the fear of birth.
Whatever Paul might be dealing with at the lab, Fan would never agree to leave. It surprised her how much she had fallen in love with Korea, as much as it would have surprised her to fall in love with a man other than Paul. In fact, she fell in love, with Seoul in particular, the way people fall in love with other people: a visceral, even hormonal, giddy love, deep down in her body. She and Paul visited the city in the fall of the year before the move, maple leaves colored and swirling through the air like rose petals, Seoul calm and shut down for a harvest holiday.
Then the holiday ended and people thronged the streets as if they’d been poured up from the center of the earth, shopping, eating. They stayed then in Insadong. Vendors lined the streets, selling cheap clothes with delicate touches like openwork on the sleeves, dozens of kinds of foods: lollipops of scorched sugar, edible horns of soft ice cream, nuts, fruits. Yesterday’s dumpling stand became today’s pancakes bristling with scallion. She could hardly take it in. She reached an equilibrium she’d never felt before, so much to see and describe to herself her inner voice couldn’t go beyond description and have reactions beyond an open receptive joy.
Everyone smiled at her and said what they could in English, even if it were just OK or hello, and they seemed both happy to see her and unable to see the person talking made her, whom they couldn’t access. She had that feeling of teenage infatuation: as if someone has carbonated your blood.
The red of the maples was even a bit richer than a rose. She and Paul walked along a river at the edge of Insadong, a paved walkway by a channel of water. Paul saw her admiring the trees and picked up a handful of leaves, handing her a bunch by the stem. They crossed the street and he bought her a bag of walnut-shaped candy, dough molded around a nut and sweet bean paste.
“Paul! Candy and flowers!” she said, and she saw herself suddenly through his eyes: she was never so uncomplicatedly happy. He smiled, and looked nervous at the same time, rattled with wonder. She had used his name.
Fan was unsure how Paul had met In-Su (at a conference, had Paul said?), or why he’d been invited to take part in this work, given that most of his research was in agriculture. Any way of phrasing the question to him seemed to question his skills, however, and their relationship had always had that certain delicacy in regard to their work.
Paul never used the word adjunct. Rarely did anyone in her life: her father had no idea what it meant. He called his daughter “Professor” and could break down in tears talking about how far she’d gotten in life, all on her own, I couldn’t help her, he’d say. Her mother had Alzheimer’s; that stress and age had made him maudlin.
She would touch his shoulder. “You help me every day, Pop.” And she meant what she said, though not quite in the meaning he took: his strong but bent body, knobby with old breaks, his hands dark even years removed from the machine grease and black oils of his job, reminded her she could be doing worse things than what she was doing. It was more complicated than that he had been impoverished by his lack of education, while she had been near-impoverished by its access.
Grease-monkey hands, he said of himself. And she was proud of his pride. But when she saw the course of her life, she saw a Ferris wheel that had peaked when she got her BA. She perched at the top of things staring off into the educational future, seeing a vision like a tourist brochure of a beach, a paradise—a job that couldn’t be taken away from her because of tenure and that paid well, and gave her summers off. But the wheel kept turning and landed her in the same place she’d begun. She x’ed up papers instead of bathroom mirrors (with Windex; spraying in an x shape gave you the best clean); each month she paid money she didn’t have to companies she didn’t recognize that had bought her loans. Before her marriage she taught a full course load in the summer to keep up. All for the privilege of having a job for which she did not have to wear knee pads.
And she missed the society of her old job. Among the chambermaids, as the hotel where she worked called its maids, the position gave the women workers an equality; her smoke breaks with the other women, the times they stood rinsing out their mops together, seemed like some of the purest moments of communion she’d ever known. They had many religions and origins and ethnicities but ultimately, they were maids, the ones who put sponge and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to the grime left by others, those other people with no sense and no shame. They laughed about the guests: who had a quickie in the afternoon; what love affairs they’d interrupted, sometimes the chambermaids in their maid outfits surprising women—now and then a man—in their own versions of maid’s outfits.
This surprising of maid-dressers—sometimes just a glance through a door left a little open—happened often enough that they had a code for it: We got company, they said, or We got company in 432. Ultimately the maids as a group approved of guests for their lovemaking. They watched these guests in the hallways, reported back on their public demeanors, stacked against their private ones.
Once a week or so Fan and Yoon met to shop or have lunch. Yoon and In-Su had two little boys—five and seven, adorable—but like many Seoul-ites they had household help. She called Fan, saying simply You want lunch? You want to shop? either picking Fan up or telling her where to meet. For lunch Yoon nearly always insisted on a Paris Café, one of a chain of patisseries in Seoul, and Fan could never decide if this was because Yoon felt Fan would be more comfortable with European food, or if Yoon loved the chance to eat the rich pastries—chocolate tarts, Napoleons, tiramisus: she picked them up with silver tongs and heaped them on her tray. Over time Fan suspected the latter; Yoon chose her sweets while giving Fan a bright and secret smile. Fan could imagine In-Su looking down on Yoon for her love of fat and chocolate and sugar, a man who thought so necessarily about women as devices that made babies, and the stuff of babies.
Yoon tended to linger on her consonants and she had a particular and lovely way of saying the letter s, with almost a sh sound. When she and Yoon talked, Yoon often looked at her and let out a slow yessss, eyes meeting hers, a word that felt full of thought and empathy.
In their first physics conversation, Paul talked to Fan about observation. They were driving, dating. Paul wheeled this way and that to avoid bicyclists, she pretended the white line was a food the car was eating.
“It’s weird,” Paul said, “but it seems like until quantum things are observed they’re in every possible state at once. Outside of any physical place or physical time.” He told her one of the proofs of this came from an experiment known as the double-slit. In it, quantum bits like photons get shot through parallel slits. The photons remain in superposition until they hit a detector. Then the wave-function collapses and they become particles only. They’re not in any definite state until they’re measured.
“It makes no sense,” Paul said, “but there it is. The results have been replicated thousands of times with all kinds of projectiles and quantum particles. Grad students can do the double slit. It’s that clear.”
“What’s happening, then, when we’re not measuring?”
“We’ll never know. Physicists say it’s like looking in the refrigerator to see if the light is on when the door’s closed.”
“But we kind of do know what the fridge light’s doing.”
“There’s that.”
Fan looked over at Paul, neutral as usual, jittering the wheel with one hand on top of it, one in his lap. “Why are you all there, then,” she asked, “stable like that in your body? Why am I? I want to be a wave. I want to hit at things in a big messy way and be everywhere.”
“Your body is complicated. And warm. Quantum effects are stronger at low temperatures.” Paul’s spare hand stroked his chin, as if confirming its warmth.
“You wouldn’t think so.”
“But within you your quanta must be all kinds of coherent.”
Fan loved the language of physics: how objects in a