More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They hadn’t even exchanged phone numbers, he thought desperately. His mind cycled through the ways a person could find a person in 1995. In the old days, when Sam was a child, people could be lost forever, but people were not as easily lost as they once were.
Even more so now.
Sam’s mazes were always for Sadie. He would slip one into her pocket before she left. “I made this for you,” he’d say. “It’s nothing much. Bring it back next time so I can see the solution.”
Solution? Name of Sadie's first game.
Sadie’s instinct had been to tell Sam, but they weren’t speaking at the time.
Fighting again?
The decision to style the world after the Hokusai pushed everything in a Japanese direction, though. And as they were coming up with the character design for their “child,” they found themselves drawn to Japanese references over and over: the deceptively innocent paintings of Yoshitomo Nara; Miyazaki anime like Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke; other, more adult anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, both of which Sam had loved; and of course, Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, the first of which is The Great Wave.
Really cool.
Sam was struggling to lower himself to sit down next to her. Sadie gave him her hand, but even with her assistance, he still landed a bit hard. He put his head in the crook of her shoulder; the freight was in proportion to the groove. “I’ll do whatever you want,” he said. “Okay, Sam,” she said. “Opus it is.”
When she looked at him, she saw Sam, but she also saw Ichigo and Alice and Freda and Marx and Dov and all the mistakes she had made, and all her secret shames and fears, and all the best things she had done, too. Sometimes, she didn’t even like him, but the truth was, she didn’t know if an idea was worth pursuing until it had made its way through Sam’s brain, too.
“I thought you were worried I was going to die,” Sam said. “No. You’ll never die. And if you ever died, I’d just start the game again,” Sadie said.
“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.
Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
