Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

You are American, Japanese, Korean, and by being all of those things, you are not truly any of those things. You consider yourself a citizen of the world.

“Do you make games, too?” “No, but I play them.” “How will I ever know you, then?”

“Sadie doesn’t belong to you.” “She does,” Sam says. “She’s mine. And you knew that, and you pursued her anyway.”

“Don’t tell Sadie about any of this.” “Brother, I think she’ll notice.” You take his head in your hands and you kiss him on the crown.

“Our theoretical baby can’t be called Spreadsheet1.xls,” she commented. She retitled the spreadsheet “Green Watanabe Summer 2006 Game.”

I can work on the expansion pack through the spring, and the baby will drop in the summer.

It’s a Japanese custom called senbazuru. If you make one thousand paper cranes, you can restore someone to good health. Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them.

When you figured out Sam’s dead mother’s name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.

“You’re almost out of cranes,” he says. “If you teach me how to make one, I can help.”

Love you madly, my sweet friend.”

How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky?

As the brain is detaching from the body, you think, How I will miss the horses.

“Do I dare?” she asks. “You dare.”

“Is he Fleance because he flees?” “Am I Banquo because I die on the way to a banquet? These are solid questions, Sam.”

It’s not Macbeth. It’s not ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’ But it has its moments. I have a name! I get to die! I have a ghost!

There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”

Marx was Marx, so that Sam and Sadie could be Sam and Sadie.

“If I’ve done the work in the scenes before I die, if I’ve made a real impression, they’ll feel me in the scenes I’m not in anyway.”

To an outsider, it didn’t obviously signify the death of his partner. It was just a hole.

What would Marx say?

Do you think you’re some goddamned pioneer when it comes to grief?”

The party ended around 2:30 a.m., late for a party in L.A., the city that sleeps.

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

panem et caseum morsu.

We must fill our infinite days with something.”

Alabaster Brown,

Her curly hair was the indigo black of comic book characters, and her round eyes, beneath her round glasses, were emerald and large. To depict her, Emily thought, I would require a great many circles.

Do you think the promise of a glass object is motivation enough for a person to be charitable year-round?”

DO NOT SHOOT THE BISON.

“I’ve made something for you, Em,” Daedalus said. “I call it the Xyzzy portal. It’s to help you travel through Friendship.”

As a wedding gift to Ms. Marks, Dr. Daedalus created a topiary hedge maze in the garden by her house.

“The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”

a horse breaker,

Each afternoon, Emily would move the Go board a little farther from Daedalus’s bed. In this way, Daedalus joined the world again, though she would not concede to leave the house or return to her optometry practice.

“I love you,” Daedalus said. “It is hard for me to say, because sometimes it doesn’t seem like it is enough.”

And you have to try to get from Massachusetts to California.

Find you? I built this place for you. Pioneers is a period extension of Mapleworld. I made it look like Oregon Trail because I knew you would like it.

A mistake I have made in the past. There is no purity to bearing pain alone.

“So, Sam builds an MMORPG to lure one gamer? Brilliant. Crazy, but brilliant.”

You may as well let go of the garbage—” “It’s not just garbage, Dov.” “You may as well let go of your perfectly legitimate grievances, then.

“Because teaching’s fucking great.” “It is?” “Sure. Who doesn’t love puppies?

To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.” Dov shook his head. “Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.”

“But yeah, you will definitely fail. It’s okay. I absolve you in advance. This class is graded pass/fail, so you only have to succeed slightly more than you fail.”

How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

On the day she found Daedalus blowing the glass heart, she had suspected Sam, but she had also allowed herself not to know. She wanted to play more than she wanted to know. Sadie told Sam he had tricked her, but the truth was, she had tricked herself. It was embarrassing how much that silly, exquisite world had meant to her.

“That’s the gamer in you, trying to figure out how you might have beat the level. My brain is treacherous like that, too. But there was nothing you could have done, Ant. The game wasn’t winnable.”

“You have had tragedy, yes, but you have had many good friends as well.”

“It takes about six hours by plane. Same amount of time as it’s always taken.” “Faster than getting from Venice to Echo Park in traffic,” Dong Hyun said. “That’s not true.” “I’m making a classic L.A. traffic joke.”

Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”

‘Mine Sadie, bad things happen to everyone. Enough already.’