They leave with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a bank envelope filled with cash from their emptied checking and savings accounts. Lisa puts the rental car on their credit card, but every transaction going forward will be cash only to make them harder to track.
By midafternoon, they are cruising through Wonju.
Rolling pasture
Minor hills.
Red barns.
Silos form a rustic skyline.
Smoke trickles out of farmhouse chimneys.
Everything sparkling under a fresh blanket of snow and the sky a brilliant blue.
It's slow-going, but Jennie keep off the highways.
Stick to the country roads.
Take random, unplanned turns with no destination in mind.
When they stop for gas, Lisa shows her phone. There's a stream of missed calls and new texts, all from 773, 847, and 312 Seoul-area phone numbers.
They open the messaging app.
Lisa—It's Jennie, pls call me back at this number immediately.
Lisa, this is Jennie. First of all, I love you. There's so much I have to tell you. Pls call me as soon as you get this.
Lisa, you're going to be hearing from a bunch of other Jennies if you haven't already. Your head must be spinning. I am yours. You are mine. I love you forever. Call me the moment you get this.
Lisa, the Jennie you're with is an imposter. Call me.
Lisa you are not safe. The Jennje you're with isn't who you think she is. Call me right away.
None of them love you like I do. Call me, Lisa. Pls. Begging you. Love you.
I will kill them all for you and fix this. Say the word. I will do anything for you.
They both stopped reading, put a block on each number, and delete the messages.
But one text in particular calls out to Jennie.
It's not from an unknown number.
It's from Jennie.
Her cell number. She's had her phone all this time. Since the night she grabbed Jennie off the street.
You're not home, not answering your cell. You must know. All I can say is that I love you. That's why. My time with you has been the best of my life. Pls call me. Hear me out.
Jennie turns off both her and Lisa's phone.. "We have to leave them off," She say. "From here on out. Any one of them could track us if they're transmitting."
As the afternoon turns toward evening and the sun begins to slip, they drive into their destination.
The road is empty.
They are alone in there.
They have taken numerous summer vacations near that place but never ventured that far north. And never in winter. Jennie and Lisa go miles without seeing any signs of civilization, and each town they pass through seems smaller than the one before — crossroads in the middle of nowhere.
A hard silence has taken hold inside the Jeep Cherokee, and Jennie is not sure how to break it.
Or rather, that she have the courage to.
All your life you're told you're unique. An individual. That no one on the planet is just like you.
It's humanity's anthem.
But that isn't true for Jennie anymore.
How can Lisa love me more than the other Jennies?
Jennie look at her in the front passenger seat, wondering what Lisa thinks of her now, what Lisa feels toward her.
Hell, what I think of me is up for debate.
Lisa sits quietly beside her, just watching the forest rushing by outside the window.
Jennie reach across the console and hold her hand.
She looks over at Jennie, and then back out the window.
-
At dusk, Jennie drives into a town called Ice River, which feels appropriately remote.
They grab some fast food and then stop at a grocery store to stock up on food and basic necessities.
South Korea goes on forever.
There's no breathing space even in the suburbs.
But Ice River just ends.
One second they're in town, passing an abandoned strip mall with boarded up storefronts. The next, the buildings and the lights are dwindling away in the side mirror, and they're cruising through forest and darkness, the headlights firing a cone of brilliance through a narrow corridor of tall pines that edge up close on either side of the road.
Pavement streams under the lights.
They pass no cars.
They take the third turnoff, 1.2 miles north of town, down a one-lane, snowy drive that winds through spruce and birch trees to the end of a small peninsula.
After several hundred yards, the headlights strike the front of a log house that seems to be exactly what Jennie is looking for.
Like most lakefront residences in this part of the state, it's dark and appears uninhabited.
Shuttered for the season.
Jennie pull the Cherokee to a stop in the circular drive and kill the engine.
It's very dark, very quiet.
She look over at Lisa.
Jennie say, "I know you don't love the idea, but breaking in is less risky than actually creating a paper trail by renting some place."
The whole way up from Seoul—six hours—she's barely spoken.
As if in shock.
Lisa says, "I get it. We're way past breaking-and-entering at this point anyway, right?"
Opening the door, Jennie step down into a foot of fresh snow.
The cold is sharp.
The air is still.
One of the bedroom windows isn't latched, so Jennie don't even have to break glass.
-
Both of them carry the plastic grocery bags up onto the covered porch.
It's freezing inside.
Jennie hit the lights.
Straight ahead, a staircase ascends into the darkness of the second floor.
"This place is gross." Jennie whispers at herself but it isn't gross so much as redolent of must and neglect.
A vacation home in the off-season.
They carry their bags into the kitchen and drop them on the counter and wander through the house.
The interior décor straddles the line of cozy and dated.
The appliances are old and white.
The linoleum floor in the kitchen is cracking, and the hardwood floors are scuffed and creaky.
In the living room, a large mouth bass is mounted over the brick hearth, and the walls are covered with fishing lures in frames—at least a hundred of them.
There's a master bedroom downstairs and two bedrooms on the second floor, one of them crammed tight with triple bunk beds.
Lisa and Jennie eat Dairy Queen out of greasy paper bags.
The light above them throws a harsh, naked glare on the surface of the kitchen table, but the rest of the house stands dark.
The central heating struggles to warm the interior to a livable temperature.
Lisa looks cold.
She is quiet, distant.
Like she's caught in a slow free fall into some dark place.
She barely touches her food.
After dinner, Jennie and Lisa brought in armloads of wood from the front porch, and Lisa uses the fast-food bags and an old newspaper to get the fire going.
The wood is dry and gray, several seasons old, and it quickly takes the flame.
Soon the walls of the living room are aglow.
Shadows flickering across the ceiling.
Lisa goes to prepare their room.
Jennie sits on to the floor to rest. Letting the heat from the fire wash over her.
She mutters to herself, "If I wake up in the night, I can throw an extra log on the fire. Maybe then, I can keep it going until morning, warm this place up."
She continued spacing out. It's been years since Lisa and Jennie is under the same roof again, and Jennie tries to savor the moment, to slow it down. But like all good things, it goes by so fast.
"I'm with Lisa now. That's all that matters." Jennie whispers to herself like a mantra. Her breathing going unsteady out of many things that she feels as of the moment. Feelings like, insecurity, intimidation, absence.
Rising from the floor, Jennie toss another log on the fire and trudge back through the kitchen toward the other end of the house, the hardwood floor cracking under her weight.
It's almost too cold to be sleeping in the room, but Lisa has stripped the beds upstairs and raided the closets for extra blankets.
The walls are wood-paneled.
A space heater glows in the corner, filling the air with the smell of scorched dust.
A sound is coming from inside the bathroom.
Sobbing.
Jennie knocks on the hollow-core door.
"Lisa?"
Jennie hear her catch her breath.
"What?"
"Can I come in?"
She's quiet for a moment.
Then the lock punches out.
Jennie found her wife huddled in the corner against an old clawfoot tub, her knees drawn into her chest, eyes red and swollen.
She have never seen her like this—physically shaking, breaking right in front of her.
Lisa says, "I can't. I just...I can't."
"Can't what?"
"You're right here in front of me, and I love you so much, but then I think about all those other versions of you, and—"
"They aren't here, Lisa."
"They want to be."
"But they're not."
"I don't know how to think or feel about this. And then I wonder..."
Lisa loses what little composure she had left.
It's like watching ice crack.
"What do you wonder?" Jennie ask.
"I mean...are you even you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"How do I know you're my Jennie? You say you stepped out our door in early October, and that you didn't see me again until this morning in the police station. But how do I know you're the woman I love?"
Jennie move down onto the floor.
"Look in my eyes, Lisa."
She does.
Through tears.
"Can't you see it's me? Can't you tell?"
Lisa whispers with her tone breaking, "I can't stop thinking about the last month with her. It makes me sick."
"What was it like?"
"Jennie, don't do that to me. Don't do it to you."
"Every day I was in that corridor, in the box, trying to find my way home— I thought about the two of you. I tried not to, but put yourself in my place."
Lisa opens her knees, and as Jennie crawl between them, Lisa pulls her in close against her chest and runs her fingers through her hair.
Lisa asks, "Do you really want to know?"
No.
But I have to.
Jennie say, "I'll always wonder."
She rest her head against Lisa.
Feel the rise and fall of her chest.
Lisa says, "To be honest, it was amazing at first. The reason I remember that night you went to Rosé's party so vividly is because of how you—she— acted when you got home. At first, I thought you were drunk, but it wasn't that. It was like...like you were looking at me in this new way.
"I still remember, all those years ago, the first time we made love in my loft. I was lying in bed, naked, waiting for you. And you just stood at the end of the bed for a minute and stared at me. It felt like it was the first time you had really seen me. Maybe the first time anyone had ever really seen me. It was the hottest thing."
"This other Jennie looked at me like that, and there was this new energy between us. Kind of like how it feels when you come home after a weekend at one of your conferences, but way more intense."
Jennie ask, "So with her, it must've been like the first time we were together?"
Lisa doesn't answer right away.
Just breathes for a while.
Then says finally, "I'm so sorry."
"It's not your fault."
"After a couple weeks, it hit me that this wasn't a one-night, or even one weekend, kind of thing. I realized that something in you had changed."
"What was different?"
"A million little things. The way you dressed. The way you got ready in the morning. The things you talked about at dinner."
"The way I fucked you?"
"Jennie."
"Please don't lie to me. That, I can't take."
"Yes. It was different."
"Better."
"Like it was the first time again. You did things you never did. Or hadn't in a long time. It was like I was something, not that you wanted, but that you needed. Like I was your oxygen."
"Do you want this other Jennie?"
"No. I want the woman I've made a life with. The woman I married. But I need to know you're that woman."
Jennie sit up and look at her in those cramped, windowless bathroom in the middle of nowhere that smells faintly of mildew.
Lisa looks at her.
So tired.
Struggling onto her feet, Jennie gives her a hand up.
They move into the bedroom.
Lisa climbs into bed, and Jennie hit the lights and crawl in beside her under the freezing sheets.
The frame is creaky, and the slightest movement bangs the headboard against the wall, which rattles the picture frames.
Lisa's wearing underwear and a white T-shirt, and she smells like she's been riding in the car all day without a shower—fading deodorant tinged with funk.
Jennie loves it.
Lisa whispers in the dark, "How do we fix this, Jennie?"
"I'm working on it."
"What does that mean?"
"It means ask me again in the morning."
Her breath in Jennie's face is sweet and warm.
The essence of everything Jennie associate with home.
Lisa's asleep within a moment, breathing deeply in and out.
Jennie think she's right behind the love of her life, but when she close her eyes, her thoughts run rampant. She sees versions of Jennies stepping out of elevators. In parked cars. Sitting on the bench across the street from their brownstone.
Jennie sees herself everywhere.
The room is dark except for the coils of the space heater glowing in the corner.
The house lies silent.
Jennie can't sleep.
Jennie need to fix this.
Quietly, Jennie slide out from under the covers. At the door, she stop and glance back at Lisa, safe under a mountain of blankets.
Jennie head down the noisy hardwood floor of the hallway, the house getting warmer the closer she get to the living room.
The fire is already low.
Jennie add several logs.
For a long time, she sit just staring into the flames, watching the wood slowly crumble into the radiant bed of embers.
The idea first occurred to her on the drive north today, and she have been mulling it over ever since.
It seemed insane at first.
But the more Jennie pressure-check it, the more it seems like her only option.
In the living room beside the entertainment center, there's a desk with a ten-year-old Mac and a dinosaur printer. Jennie powers the computer on. If there's a password required or no Internet connection, this will have to wait until tomorrow, when she can find an Internet café or coffee shop in town.
She's in luck. There's a guest login option.
Jennie opens the web browser.
The hyperlink still works.
Welcome to UberChat!
There are currently seventy-two active participants.
Are you a new user?
Jennie click No and log in with her username and password.
Welcome back Jennie9!
Logging you into UberChat now!
The conversation is much longer, with so many participants Jennie break out in a cold sweat.
She scan everything, down through the most recent message, which is less than a minute old.
Jennie42: The house has been empty since at least mid afternoon.
Jennie28: So which of you did this?
Jennie4: I followed Lisa from to the police station.
Jennie14: What was she doing there?
Jennie25: What was she doing there?
Jennie10: What was she doing there?
Jennie4: No idea. She went inside, never came out. Her Honda is still there.
Jennie66: Does this mean she knows? Is she still in the police station?
Jennie4: I don't know. Something is up
Jennie49: I was nearly killed last night by one of us. She got a key to my hotel room and came in with a knife in the middle of the night.
Jennie start typing...
Jennie9: LISA IS WITH ME
Jennie92: Safe?
Jennie42: Safe?
Jennie14: How?
Jennie28: Prove it.
Jennie4: Safe?
Jennie25: How?
Jennie10: You fucker.
Jennie9: How doesn't matter, but yes, they're safe. They're also very scared. I've been giving this a lot of thought. I assume we all share the same basic desire, that no matter what, Lisa can't be harmed?
Jennie92: Yes.
Jennie49: Yes.
Jennie66: Yes.
Jennie10: Yes.
Jennie25: Yes.
Jennie4: Yes.
Jennie28: Yes.
Jennie14: Yes.
Jennie103: Yes.
Jennie5: Yes.
Jennie16: Yes.
Jennie82: Yes.
Jennie9: I would rather die than see anything happen to her. So here's what I'm proposing. Two days from now, at midnight, we all meet up at the power plant and conduct a peaceful lottery. The winner gets to live in this world with Lisa. Also, we destroy the box, so no other Jennies find their way here.
Jennie8: No.
Jennie100: No way.
Jennie21: How would this work?
Jennie38: Never.
Jennie28: Prove you have her or fuck off.
Jennie8: Why chance? Why not fight it out? Let merit decide.
Jennie109: And what happens to the losers? Suicide?
JennieADMIN: For the sake of this conversation not becoming incomprehensible, I've temporarily frozen all accounts from participating except me and Jennie9. Everyone else can still watch this conversation. Jennie9, continue please.
Jennie9: I realize there are many ways this could all go wrong. I could decide to not show up. You'd never know. Any number of Jennies could choose not to participate, to essentially wait in the wings for the smoke to clear and then do to one of us what Jennie2 did. Except that I know I'll keep my word, and maybe this is naïve on my part, but I think that means all of you will too. Because you wouldn't be keeping your word for us. You'd be keeping it for Lisa. The other alternative is for me to take her and disappear forever. New identities. A life always on the run. Always looking over our shoulder. As much as I want to be with her, I don't want that life for my wife.. And I don't have the right to keep her for myself. I feel so strongly about it, I'm willing to submit myself to this lottery, where, judging by the sheer number of us involved, I'm almost certain to lose. I have to talk to Lisa first, but in the meantime, spread the word. I'll be back online tomorrow night with more details, including proof, Jennie28.
JennieADMIN: I think someone already asked, but what happens to the losers?
Jennie9: I don't know yet. All that matters is Lisa living out the rest of her life in peace and safety. If you feel otherwise, you don't deserve her.