Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.

“Guys,” Dov said. “You know I’ve served in the army, right? Guns are so fucking romantic to you Americans, because you don’t know what it is to be at war and to be constantly under siege. It’s truly pathetic.”

The idea of Solution was that if you asked questions and didn’t keep mindlessly building widgets, your score would be lower, but you would find out you were working in a factory that supplied machine parts to the Third Reich. Once you had this information, you could potentially slow your output. You could make the bare number of parts required not to be detected by the Reich, or you could stop producing parts entirely.

The idea of Solution was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally.

“Maybe you’ll see him again.” “I don’t think so. He hates me now, Bubbe.” “Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.” Sadie knew this to be a tautology, but it also happened to be true.

When Sam had described the relationship between Marx and his father, he had said it was fraught, that Watanabe-san was demanding and sometimes even demeaning to Marx. Sadie saw no evidence of that. She found Marx’s father to be bright, interesting, and engaged. Other people’s parents are often a delight.

Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.

On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

He loved the West Coast. He had wanted to go to Stanford, but he hadn’t gotten in. He appreciated Los Angeles, its skinny palm trees and its decaying Spanish-style homes and its occasional flocks of parrots and its smiling people who always wanted something from you.

Sam did not believe his body could feel anything but pain, and so he did not desire pleasure in the same way that other people seemed to. Sam was happiest when his body was feeling nothing. He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body—when he could forget that he had a body at all.

we finally see Alice playing Myre Landing on her laptop (for the first time, Myre Landing is rendered as a screen within a screen), Alice loses the game. She dies in battle, as Rose the Mighty. The restart prompt of Myre Landing comes up: Ready for a new tomorrow, Paladin? Alice returns to the save point, and the second time she plays, she dies again. The restart prompt of Myre Landing comes up for the second time: Ready for a new tomorrow, Paladin? Alice returns to the save point, and she tries one more time. This time, she wins, and the final scene of the game is launched. It was Sam’s idea that Alice should die twice in the game within a game before she could win the game properly.

How do I go on when the person I love most in the world is in love with someone else? Someone tell me the solution, he thought, so I don’t have to play this losing game all the way through.

Your mother is in the bedside chair. She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds. Using a long needle, she is stringing brightly colored origami cranes into garlands. You know what she’s doing: 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. This is marriage.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

“Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”

Onstage, in the middle of white Elizabethan England, improbably stands a handsome Asian man as Macbeth. Macbeth has just heard the news that his wife had died, and he is giving the most famous soliloquy from the play, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech. When they had been deciding what to call their company all those years ago, Marx had argued for calling it Tomorrow Games, a name Sam and Sadie instantly rejected as “too soft.” Marx explained that the name referenced his favorite speech in Shakespeare, and that it wasn’t soft at all.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

“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.”

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

Since she’d started teaching and become a mother, she’d felt old, but that night, she realized she wasn’t old at all. You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.

The book about consciousness that Sadie mentions when she is talking about the brain having an AI version of deceased loved ones is I Am a Strange Loop, by Doug Hofstadter, a source suggested to me by Hans Canosa.