Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

She started walking toward the train, and Sam tried to figure out a way to make her stop. If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.

This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

He was like a bright, warm light over everything in her life. She felt lit up, turned on. There was no one better to talk to about games. There was no one better to run ideas by. Yes, she loved him, but she also liked him. She liked herself when she was with him. Recently, she had suspected he was losing interest in her. So, she had attempted to make herself more interesting. She had tried to dress better, and she’d gotten a haircut and she bought lacy underwear. She had read a book about wine, so she could be knowledgeable at dinner, the way she imagined an older lover would be. He once said, in passing, that it was amazing how little American Jews knew about Israel, and she read a book about the founding of Israel, so she’d be conversant. But it didn’t seem to matter. She sometimes felt as if he was trying to find fault with her. If Sadie spent the day reading a novel, he’d say, “When I was your age, I was constantly programming.” Or if Sadie was too slow to complete a task Dov had assigned to her, he would say, “You’re brilliant, but you’re lazy.” In addition to working on Dov’s games, Sadie had a full course load. If Sadie mentioned this to Dov, he would say, “Never ever ever complain.” Or he’d say, “This is why I don’t work with students.” If she told him about a game she admired that he didn’t think much of, he would tell her the reasons the game was terrible. And that didn’t just go for games—it was movies, books, and art, too. It got to the point where she would ne...

Dov did not call when he returned to Cambridge. The day of his scheduled arrival had come and gone, and it was almost the middle of January, and classes were about to begin. She hadn’t wanted to call him, and she thought it would be rude to go over to his apartment. She decided to send him an email, which she revised extensively. In the end, the revisions did not lead to a sparkling result: Hi Dov, Started playing Chrono Trigger. Some interesting elements there. He didn’t reply for an entire day: I’ve already played it. We should talk, though. Do you want to come over tonight? Sadie knew she was dressing for her funeral, so she wore black: dress, tights, Doc Martens. She wanted to look sexy. She wanted him to feel bad about what he would be missing, but she didn’t want to be obvious about it.

Why did Marx do this for this strange boy, who most people found vaguely unpleasant? He liked Sam. He had spent his childhood among rich and supposedly interesting people, and he knew that truly unusual minds were rare. He felt that when Harvard had assigned them to be roommates, Sam had become his responsibility. So, he protected Sam, and he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so. Marx’s life had been filled with such abundance that he was one of those people who found it natural to care for those around him. In this case, what Marx received in return was the pleasure of Sam’s company.

“Let her know you’re there. And if you can manage it, bring her a cookie, a book, a movie to watch. Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.” Tamagotchis, the digital pet keychains, were everywhere that year. Marx had recently killed one that he had received as a holiday gift from a girlfriend. The girlfriend had taken it to be a sign of deeper flaws in Marx’s character. “Get her to take a shower, talk a little, go for a walk. Open the windows, if you can. And if things don’t improve, see if you can get her to see a professional. And if things still don’t improve, then you do have to call her parents.”

“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

Sadie offered Sam her hand to shake. Sadie’s voice was strong, but Sam thought her eyes looked vulnerable and tired. He took her hand, which was freezing and sweaty at the same time. Whatever her sickness had been, Sam could tell it had not entirely passed. “You kept my maze,” he said. “I did. Now, let’s hear what you thought of Solution,” Sadie said. She stood up and opened the window of her room, and the fresh air that came in was so crisp and cool, it almost felt like a drug. “Go easy on me, Sammy. You may have noticed that I’ve been a little depressed.”

They stood in front of the whiteboard, which was covered with their rainbow of brainstorms. “There’s something here, I know it,” Sam said. “What if there’s not?” Sadie said. “Then we’ll come up with something else,” Sam said. He grinned at Sadie. “You have no right to be this happy,” Sadie said. While Sadie experienced this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.

Without knowing why, Sam had tried to keep Sadie and Marx apart. It wasn’t about either of them as individuals. But Sam could be private, verging on paranoid, and he liked to control the flow of information. He feared them comparing notes and somehow ganging up on him. There was another secret part of him that feared they would prefer each other to him—everyone, in Sam’s estimation, loved Sadie and Marx. No one, Sam felt, had ever loved him except those who had been obligated to love him: his mother (before she had died), his grandparents, Sadie (disputed hospital volunteer), Marx (his assigned roommate).

The next day, Sam helped Sadie pack. To save money, Sadie would live in Marx’s room and sublet her apartment. “Are you going to put the art in storage?” Sam asked. Whenever he was in her room, he found Sadie’s art comforting, an extension of Sadie herself: the Hokusai wave, the Duane Hanson “Tourists,” the Sam Masur maze. Sadie stopped packing and stood in front of the Hokusai wave, hands on her hips. In the three hours since they’d been at it, Sam had come to realize that, while she was a wonderful person, she was a terrible packer. Each decision required extensive deliberation—which clothes? Which cords? Which computer hardware? It had taken ninety minutes to go through her relatively small bookshelf: Did Sam think she would finally have time to read Chaos this summer? Did Sam want to read it? Oh, he had already read it. Well then, she should probably take it, unless he had a copy, in which case she could read his and store hers. And then she would pick up A Brief History of Time, and fondly pat its cover. Maybe I’ll read it again this summer? And then, Hackers. Have you read this, Sam? It’s so good. Hackers has a whole section on the Williamses. You know, Sierra games? King’s Quest. Leisure Suit Larry. We used to love those games. Sam was beginning to think it would have been easier if she’d taken everything.

At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices. “She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.” Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right. “Hmm.” Anna sipped at her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”

When she arrived at Dov’s studio, she held out her hand for him to shake, and he pulled her into an embrace. “I’m so glad you emailed me, Sadie Green! I was planning to email you, but things got too crazy. I’m almost done with Dead Sea II. Last time I ever do a sequel. How are you?” he said. She told him about Ichigo. “Good title. This is what you should be doing,” he said, maybe a dash of condescension in his voice. “You should be making your own games.” Sadie took some of Sam’s concept art out of her messenger bag and she showed it to him. “Whoa, trippy,” Dov said. Then she took out her laptop so that he could play the first level. “This is fucking fantastic work,” Dov said. He never gave compliments that he didn’t mean, and Sadie almost felt like crying. It was frankly embarrassing how much his approval still meant to her. “I like this.” Dov looked at Sadie. He set the concept art on the desk. He looked in her eyes, and then he nodded. “You’re here for Ulysses, aren’t you?” At first, Sadie was going to deny it, claim she wanted some tips about building her own engine. “Yes,” she said. “I want Ulysses.” “You know what I always say about making your own engines.” She nodded. “But I can see how Ulysses would be a perfect fit for what you and your colleague—what’s his name?” “Sam Masur.” “What you and Mr. Masur are trying to accomplish. And how can I deny my Sadie when she comes to me in need?” It was that simple. Dov gave her the engine, and in exchange, he became a produc...

Marx poked his head out of the room, so he could continue to spy on Sadie and Dov. Dov was doing most of the talking. “If I were you,” Dov said, “I would take the next semester off.” Sadie was listening, nodding. “You and your crew. You’ve got something here,” Dov said. “I really believe that.” “But school…” Sadie’s voice was barely audible. “My parents…” “Who cares about any of that? No one cares if you’re a good girl anymore, Sadie. I want to empower you to shed your conventional notions, once and for all. The point of your education has been to do exactly the thing that you’re currently doing. Get the bulk of the programming done while you’re in the flow, and then you can finish school in the spring and the summer, while you finish the sound and debug.” More listening, more nodding. “Do you need me, your former professor, to order you?” “Maybe,” she said. “I’ll help you,” Dov said. “Thank you, Dov.” “I’m always here for you, brilliant one.” He took her in his hirsute arms and he pressed her face deep into his chest. Marx wondered how she could bear the stench.

A week before Thanksgiving, Sam had passed out while walking to the Coop to buy a new power six-pack. Usually, Marx did their purchasing, but Marx was in class, and Sam could not wait. He literally passed out on the street, in front of the gourmet shop. With his big coat, people must have assumed he was homeless, and so he was barely noticed. When he awoke, his former adviser, Anders Larsson, was standing over him, looking like a blond Jesus in North Face. It made sense that Anders should find him. Anders, born in Sweden, was exactly the kind of decent, guileless person who did not look away when presented with the scourge of homelessness. “Samson Masur, are you all right?”

Marx usually enjoyed the experience of making love to an ex, and this evening was no exception. It was interesting to note the way your body had changed and how their body had changed in the time since you’d last been intimate. There was a pleasant Weltschmerz that came over him. It was the nostalgia one experienced when visiting an old school and finding that the desks were so much smaller than in one’s memory.

No one was on the streets, and it was so quiet they could hear the snow as it hit the ground. The shortest way to Dov’s apartment was through Harvard Yard, so they cut through it—the term was almost over, and the freshmen were sleeping. The combination of the predawn light and the snow was magical, like being inside a snow globe, a discrete world of their own. Sadie put her arm through Sam’s, and he leaned into her a little. They were tired, but it was an honest tiredness, the kind that comes when you know you have put everything you have into a project. Of course, they would finish other games together, and the offices and the staffs on those games would be unimaginably larger. But Sam and Sadie would always remember this morning.

“Sam,” she said, “tell me something and be honest.” He felt a bit panicked by her tone of voice. “Of course.” “Did you truly see the Magic Eye last December?” “Sadie, how dare you!” he exclaimed with mock outrage. “Well, if you saw it, tell me what it was.” “No,” Sam said. “I won’t dignify that.” Sadie nodded. They had reached the exterior door to Dov’s apartment. She put her key in the lock, and then she turned. “No matter what happens, thank you for making me do this. I love you, Sam. You don’t have to say you love me, too. I know that kind of thing makes you terribly uncomfortable.” “Terribly,” he said. “Terribly.” Sam smiled, too wide, showing the huge mouth of crooked teeth that he was so self-conscious about, and he bowed awkwardly. Before he could tell her that he loved her, she was already inside. But he didn’t feel bad that he hadn’t said it. Sam knew that Sadie knew that he loved her. Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye.

The sun was coming up, and the snowfall had mostly stopped, and Sam walked home, feeling warm, despite the cold, and filled with gratitude that he was alive, and that Sadie Green had come into that game room that day. The universe, he felt, was just—or if not just, fair enough. It might take your mother, but it might give you someone else in return. As he rounded Kennedy Street, he began to chant to himself a poem that he had heard once, he wasn’t sure where. “That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.” What is the “freight”? he wondered. What is the “groove”? The mysteries of the poem entertained him, and the poem was so jaunty in its meter (almost, he thought, like the sound of a train barreling down the tracks), and he felt so uncharacteristically light and happy that he found himself skipping a little—Sam Masur! skipping!—which is why he took a less than careful step off the curb. His foot slipped out from under him. Sam was so used to pain. He barely felt it, really. He passed out, for the second time that winter. “We should stop running into each other like this,” he said to no one. As he lay on the st...

She felt plagued by bourgeois fantasies of a cheaper, cleaner, healthier, happier life for them in an unnamed, distant city. She imagined a backyard for Sam, and a yellow dog of indeterminate lineage from the shelter, and walk-in closets, and laundry done sans quarters and in the privacy of her own home, and no one living above them or below them. She imagined palm trees and warm weather and the scent of plumeria, and their ill-fitting, puffy coats unceremoniously tossed in garbage bags for donation to the Salvation Army. With equal intensity, she feared her New York life was the best of all possible worlds, and that once she left New York, the gates would come down and lock, and she’d be too feeble and parochial to ever be allowed to return.

The obvious place for them to go was Los Angeles, the city of her birth. She had resisted returning there because to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.

She went into Sam’s room, and then she got into Sam’s bed. She called Dov to let him know she wasn’t coming back that night. “Why?” Dov said. “You have no information. There’s nothing you can do. The worry is pointless. Come home.” “I’m going to wait here in case he calls,” she said. Dov laughed. “I forget how young you are. You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.” “Yes, Dov,” she said, trying to hide her irritation. “When you have children, you’ll never be able to worry about a friend as much again,” Dov said.

In yet another hospital bed (but his first with a view of the Charles River), Sam felt incredibly lonely and slightly sorry for himself. He had nausea from the anesthesia and from not having eaten enough in the last two days. Although he’d been given a goodly amount of drugs, he could still feel his foot enough to know that when he fully felt it, the pain was going to be terrifying. He was worried about what this latest mishap would end up costing (his bank account was near zero) and feared sorting out the related health insurance issues. The specialist had said that the condition of his foot was so poor it was now compromising his ankle. “There are only so many times a foot can be put back together before you have to start considering other options,” the doctor said. The other options were medieval. At the very least, he knew he’d be on crutches for a couple of months, and he was dreading the rest of the winter and having to rely on Marx and Sadie more than he already did. The reason he hadn’t called them when he’d first woken up in the hospital was because he was embarrassed. He had hoped the fall wouldn’t have been as bad as it had ended up being. He had hoped he would be patched up and easily sent home, with an overpriced bottle of aspirin, and that neither of them would have had to be involved at all. He didn’t want them to see him as weak, even though that was how he felt. Weak, frail, alone, exhausted. He was tired of his body, of his unreliable foot, which couldn’t...

Just when Sam had made himself feel as wretched as possible, he saw Sadie and Marx through the glass panel in the door. It was almost like they were a mirage. They were goddamn gorgeous, those two. Even though they would only get fifteen minutes with him, Sadie and Marx had decided to take a cab down to the hospital anyway. “How many times do you get to toast your first game?” Marx had said. They had stopped at a liquor store to buy champagne and plastic flutes. Sam was both embarrassed and pleased to see them. He knew he looked awful. His foot and ankle were in a bulky cast, about the hundredth cast of his life. And there was a multicolor bruise on his cheek and forehead. His friends were beautiful and strong, with their rosy outdoor cheeks, their cashmere coats, their shiny hair. If anyone saw them together, he was sure they would think he belonged to a different and feebler species. But then he reminded himself: They are not only my friends. They are my colleagues. He had turned them into his colleagues, and in a strange way, that was comforting to Sam. Ichigo bonded them to him for life.

The attending nurse, who was in her sixties and approaching retirement, let them stay until midnight. She was enjoying the sound of their laughter, their banter, and their gentle teasing. A game she often played with herself to pass the time was to try to figure out the relationships between patients and visitors. She liked to name the people, as she imagined what their lives and connections were. The hurt boy, she called Tiny Tim. The Asian boy, who looked like a fashion model or a soap opera heartthrob, was Keanu. The petite, pretty brunette with the thick eyebrows and the whimsically crooked nose, was Audrey. Tiny Tim looked slightly younger than the other two. Audrey and Keanu didn’t seem to be a couple, though it seemed like Keanu wouldn’t have minded if they were. In a strange way, Tiny Tim looked as if he could have been their son, though the ages didn’t make sense for that. Maybe Tiny Tim was one of their little brothers? Maybe Audrey and Tiny Tim were a couple? Or maybe the two boys were the couple? Keanu had been so gentle when the boy had asked for water. And yet, the sense of ease between Audrey and Tiny Tim was palpable. While Keanu sat in the chair, Audrey lay in the bed next to Tiny Tim, their fingertips casually touching, in the way of people who were entirely comfortable around each other. She almost seemed to be an extension of him, and he, of her. There is love here, she thought. In the end, she decided, with some amount of disappointment, that none of t...

When Dov finally came back into the bedroom after his first play of Ichigo, there were tears in his eyes. “It’s fucking beautiful, Sadie.” “It’s good?” she said. She wanted to hear him say it. “Good?” he said. “You crazy brilliant kid. You astonish me. You amaze me. To think, this little, tiny person can make something like this.” Dov let tears run down his face and he made no attempt to wipe them away. Seeing Dov cry made Sadie cry, too. She felt different than she had when she’d heard Marx’s reaction—Marx was a fan. With Dov, she felt nothing short of relief. She felt as if the tension she had been holding in her body for ten months, since last March, when Sam had asked her to make the game, was suddenly gone. She didn’t know what would happen with the game—if it would be a quiet shareware release, if it would get a big publishing deal. She almost didn’t care. She had made something that Dov Mizrah admired, and for now, that was enough. She wanted to go to Dov, but she was still handcuffed to his bed. She got on her knees, still naked, and she held out her free hand to him and he squeezed it. “I love you,” he said.

Sam, for his part, was certain that he had named Unfair Games: when he had woken up in the hospital with that broken ankle, he could remember thinking that the best thing about games is that they could be fairer than life. A good game, like Ichigo, was hard, but fair. The “unfair game” was life itself. He swore he’d written the name on a sheet of paper by his bedside, but no one would ever locate this sheet of paper. And where credit was concerned, Sam’s stories were often apocryphal, or at the very least, reverse engineered.

When he’d gone to speak to Unfair about his grand plan for selling Ichigo, Dov had one question: “So, Ichigo’s a boy, right?” “We didn’t see them that way,” Sam said. “Them?” Dov said. “What Sam thought, and I agree, is that gender doesn’t matter at that age. So, we never identify Ichigo’s gender,” Sadie explained. “That’s clever,” Dov said, “and it absolutely will not work. You want to sell this game in Walmart, right? You want to sell this game to people in the heartland. Marx, you’re practical, what do you think?” “I’m completely down with what Sadie and Sam are doing,” Marx said carefully, loyally. “And it didn’t affect my play at all. I’m a guy and I saw Ichigo as a boy.” “There!” Dov said. “That’s exactly it. That’s exactly my point. Ichigo should be a boy. Guys, I admire your creativity, but why put yourselves at a disadvantage for some bullshit Harvard thesis idea that no one will ever notice anyway?” “Dov, why is Ichigo definitely a boy? Why can’t Ichigo be a girl?” Sadie said. “You know perfectly well that games with female main characters sell fewer copies,” Dov said. “But Dead Sea has a girl MC,” Sadie protested. “And it’s sold, what? A million copies?” “Worldwide, yes, more than that even. But in the States, only about 750K.” “That’s an enormous hit,” Sadie said. “It would have sold twice that if I hadn’t made the Wraith a girl. But I didn’t have me as an adviser.” Sadie was shredding a piece of notebook paper into a tidy pile. Dov put his hand over her hand t...

Sam asked Sadie to go out onto the balcony, so they could collogue. He was still in a cast and he couldn’t get around very well; otherwise, he would have preferred to go on a walk with her. He felt like he thought better and was more persuasive when he was in motion. Sadie spoke first. “The Cellar Door advance is fine, and they truly understand the game we’re trying to make,” she reasoned. “And we’ll be able to spend next year making something new, something better. And how can you be so quick to sell out the thing we were trying to do with Ichigo’s gender? I thought that was important to you.” “It is, but it’s so much money,” Sam said. “Why do you suddenly care about money? You’re twenty-two, how much money do you need? If you wanted to make money, you never should have made the game. You could have done Harvard recruiting, and ended up with a six-figure job at Bear Stearns, like everyone else in your class.” “You’ve never been poor,” Sam said, “so you don’t understand.” Sam paused. He hated admitting vulnerabilities, even to Sadie. “I’ve got student loans. I owe a ton of money for the emergency room visit and the surgery on my ankle and foot, and if I don’t start paying it back, the bills will go to my grandparents. At the moment, I’ve got negative dollars in my bank account. Marx is paying the rent, and I’m eating off the butt ends of credit cards. If we take the Cellar Door offer, I won’t have anything to live on while we make the next game. I need this, Sadie, but hon...

Once Ichigo had become a real boy, his identity and Sam’s identity became more and more inseparable. People beyond Aaron Opus started to say Sam looked like Ichigo—he did, somewhat. They ate up Sam’s colorful and tragic biography: the childhood injury and playing video games as a way to be invincible, the Korean grandfather with the pizza parlor and the Donkey Kong machine. They tried to find ways in which Sam’s biography and Ichigo’s overlapped. Both had been separated from their parents at young ages. Sam was Asian, and Ichigo was Asian—in 1997, no one made the distinction between Japanese and half-Korean; that Sam was Asian was good enough. Because people—critics, gamers, the Opus marketing department—could more easily find Sam in the game, Ichigo became Sam’s creation, not Sadie’s, and as such, he became the game’s auteur. (As for his relationship to Sadie, they were neither siblings nor married/divorced people nor dating nor had they ever dated, and thus, people found their relationship too mystifying and non-relatable to be worth exploring.)

Still, Sadie had to concede, if only to herself: it wasn’t only that Sam liked promotion; he was better at it than she was. Before the game’s launch, they had done a joint appearance at a sales conference in Boca Raton. It had been the biggest crowd they had ever spoken to, around five hundred people. Sam had been nervous, but Sadie hadn’t been nervous at all. He had paced around the makeshift greenroom up until the moment they were called on stage. “I think I’m going to throw up,” Sam had said. “You’ll be fine.” Sadie had squeezed his hand and poured him a glass of water. “It’s a hotel ballroom and a couple of hundred nerds.” “I don’t like so many eyes on me,” Sam had said. He raked his fingers through his hair, which had become a Jewfro in the Florida humidity. But as soon as they got on the dais, Sam’s nerves disappeared, and he transformed into the world’s most entertaining talk-show guest. When Sadie was asked a question—something like “How did you two meet?”—she gave a specific answer, usually no more than two sentences. “Well, we’re both from Los Angeles,” Sadie said. “And we both liked to game.” When Sam was asked a question, he turned it into a novella. The story could go on for fifteen minutes and take an extended detour into childhood without anyone ever seeming the slightest bit bored. “On the day I met Sadie, I hadn’t spoken to anyone for six weeks, literally six weeks. But that’s a whole other story. I’ll tell you some other time when we’re better friends. Bu...

“What do you want?” she said. “I want to know your ideas,” Sam said. “I really want to know them. I love hearing your ideas. That’s my favorite thing in the world. “And I don’t want to force you to make a sequel you don’t want to make. You’re my partner, and I haven’t forgotten what you did for me when you agreed to the deal at Opus. But I love Ichigo. I love what we made, and lots of other people love Ichigo, too. I think we should, at some point, send him out on a high note. But I can understand why you’d be tired of him for the moment.” “Ichigo III: Sayonara, Ichigo-San,” Sadie said. Sam laughed. “It’s not that bad.” Sam was leaning on his good foot, in the increasingly lopsided way he had to stand, and Sadie felt a swelling of love and of worry for him—what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry. “Did you at least take a cab here?”

Sam sat down next to Sadie. She turned on the TV, and they watched Letterman for a while. When stupid pet tricks came on, Sadie pressed mute, and Sam turned to her, waiting for her to speak. She studied Sam’s moon face, which was so familiar to her. It was almost like looking at herself, but through a magical mirror that allowed her to see her whole life. 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. It was only when Sam said her own idea back to her—slightly modified, improved, synthesized, rearranged—that she could tell if it was good. She knew if she told him her new idea, it would instantly become his, too. They’d be walking down the aisle all over again, blithely stamping on another glass, come what may. She took a deep breath. “The game I want to make is called Both Sides.”

Sadie came up with the idea for Both Sides on the night Sam went missing, and she’d been turning it over in her head ever since. It wasn’t much then. A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea. When she’d been retracing the walk she’d taken with him on that promise-filled dawn, she had been struck by how the exact same route could look and feel so different. One minute, Sam was there, the game was completed, and the world was filled with potential. Twelve hours later, Sam was gone, the game was far from her thoughts, and the world was grim and murderous. It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same? For a moment, she felt dangerously untethered from her body and from reality, and she had to sit down to feel the ground beneath her, before she could continue searching for Sam.

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. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.

“I’m not sure I’m going to California yet,” Marx said. “Oh, you are,” Zoe said. “I know it. Marx, look at you. You were meant for California. Unfair is between games, and Sam needs time off, so it’s the perfect time to move your office to California, which you’ve told me for years is what you want to do. Sam will have plenty of time to have the surgery and recover, while you and Sadie set up the office and start hiring.” Zoe clapped her hands together. “Done.” “Sadie might not want to go,” Marx said. “Dov is here.” Zoe rolled her eyes. “Marx, Sadie is dying to have an excuse to leave Dov.” “She loves Dov,” Marx said. “She hates Dov. He will never get divorced. We all know this,” Zoe said. Marx laughed at Zoe’s certainty—he had known Sadie for three years, half as long as he’d known Sam, and he still found her to be a mystery. “So how do I convince Sam?” Marx asked. “Marx, my love, you are so innocent. You don’t have to convince anyone. You tell Sadie that Sam needs to go to California—his foot is rotting; he needs to have the surgery and he won’t do it in Massachusetts. You tell Sam that Sadie needs to go—she needs to find a way to break with Dov. Those two are thick as thieves; they’ll do anything for each other.”

She spent the next day packing up her life and intermittently arguing with Dov, going over the same ground. He told her she was nothing; she, in turn, said nothing. He apologized; she packed. He insulted her; she packed. He apologized again; she packed. The last thing she packed were the handcuffs. She slipped them into the zippered pocket of the large duffel she was planning to check. She didn’t want Dov to use them on some other girl. She wasn’t sure if this impulse came from a sense of sorority or sentimentality.

Dov drove Sadie to the airport even though she said she could call a car. In the best of moods, Dov was an unpleasant, belligerent driver—he gestured, cursed, honked excessively, cut people off, passed on the right, rarely signaled—and Sadie avoided car rides with him as much as she could. On this morning, Dov’s driving was subdued, but he decided to pass the time lecturing Sadie about the folly of her exodus from Boston. He expressed his concerns through a series of histrionic rhetorical questions concerning L.A.’s shortcomings, all of which Sadie, a native Angeleno, already knew: Did she know about the earthquakes? The fires? The floods? The drought? The smog? The homeless? The coyotes? The general sense of looming apocalypse? Did she know that drugstores closed at ten? What would happen if she needed cough syrup or batteries or legal pads after ten? Did she know there weren’t any all-night diners or bodegas or takeout? Where would she eat? Where would she get decent bagels or pizza? Did she know that the only things people in L.A. ate were avocados and sprouts? Was she ready to be into juicing? Was she aware that the tap water caused cancer? Sadie! Whatever you do, do NOT drink the tap water! Did she know how dry the air was, and was she prepared for the constant allergies? Did she know that cell phone coverage was terrible? Did she know that no one in L.A. read books or went to the theater or followed current events? That their brains were pulp because they all worked ...

Sadie was tired from the flight, so Zoe did most of the talking. Zoe was the anti-Dov, eager to tell Sadie about her California discoveries: Had Sadie gone to the Griffith Observatory? Had she been to movie night at Hollywood Forever Cemetery? The Cinerama Dome? The Greek? The Hollywood Bowl? The Getty pavilions? LACMA? The Theatricum Botanicum? The Bob Baker Marionette Theater? The Watts Towers? The Museum of Jurassic Technology? Did Sadie have magic friends and had she been to the Magic Castle? Had she tried green juice? Had she ever gone to the donut place that looked like a donut? Hot dogs were gross, but had she been to Pink’s? Had she taken one of those tours of celebrity homes on the double-decker buses? Had she been to the restaurant that was built around a tree? What was her favorite place to hear live music? The Whisky a Go Go? The Palladium? The Troubadour? What was her favorite part of town? Which canyon was her favorite for hiking? The sun was always out and it never rained, wasn’t that so great? “They say there’s no culture here, but I’m finding plenty of things to do,” Zoe said. “She loves it.” Marx was appreciative of his partner’s exuberance. It was a tourist’s list, but Sadie liked Zoe anyway. She was intelligent, but her intelligence didn’t get in the way of her enthusiasm.

“You’re sentimental tonight,” Sam said. “Back in L.A. Back at the hospital with you. Starting all over again. No Dov. New game. New office. I guess I am.” “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.

He wasn’t a fool; he knew what Marx had been doing when he’d insisted they move their business here. Marx had let him think that they were moving for Both Sides, for Sadie, for himself, and for Zoe even. But the truth was, they had done it for Sam, because Sam had been afraid of facing the winter, because Sam had constantly been in pain, because Sam had been afraid of the surgery and it was obvious to everyone that the surgery could not be put off. They had been worried about him, and they had wanted to make his life easier. And so they invented reasons—some of them even compelling and real. And they had not done this for the game or the company, but because they loved him, and they were his friends. And he felt grateful.

A few days after Sam’s tenth birthday, she did get a callback for a Saturday-morning cartoon show about tiny singing blue trolls, but in the end, they decided that they wanted someone whose voice was less ethnic. Briefly, Anna wondered what was “ethnic” about her voice: she was a native Angeleno. It was never any use to dig down on rejection feedback, though. Maybe they didn’t like her because she was no good, not talented, too short. Maybe they didn’t like her because they were racist or sexist or harboring some other secret prejudice. In the end, they didn’t like her because they didn’t like her. She wasn’t going to reason them out of their dislike. She wasn’t going to teach anyone anything.

Then, the high-pitched squeal of tires, the metal crumpling, the glass shattering like a scream. It will turn out that the driver had been speeding, but the accident won’t have been his fault. The streets were narrow—barely room enough for two cars to pass. He took the turn a bit wide and crashed his heavy sedan directly into the hood of Anna’s lightweight sports car, most of the impact on the driver’s side and on Sam’s left foot. How could that driver have been expected to know that a car was there? Why would a car be stopped just below Mulholland, without any lights on? How could he know a boy and his mother would be in that car? From the passenger seat, Sam could see his mother’s face, illuminated by the other car’s headlights. Her skin had particles of glass on it, and she looked as if she were sparkling. He tried to reach for his mother to clear the glass from her face, but he found that his left leg was pinned against the dashboard. He felt no pain—that would come later—but he couldn’t get free enough to reach her face, and the constriction panicked him. He could smell her blood, mingling with her tuberose perfume, and he could see that her chest and abdomen were crushed by the caved-in dashboard. But it was the glass. It was the glass on his mother’s pretty face that disturbed him the most in that moment, and he tried again to reach for her to brush it off. He felt a strange shifting in the bones of his foot as he pulled for her. And with that last unsuccessful reac...

He represented the spirit of California to her—and for the first time in her life, she fully embraced her native city. She donated her winter coats to Goodwill, and she started wearing floppy hats and maxi dresses. She went to flea markets with Zoe, and they shopped for vintage vinyl and long necklaces and artisanal pottery. She burned incense and gave up caffeine. She grew her hair long, down to her waist, and parted it in the middle. She started doing Pilates, and she threw Dov’s handcuffs into the sea. She dated—a scruffily handsome guy in an indie rock band, a scruffily handsome actor who was mainly known for indie films, a scruffily handsome tech guy who had sold his dot-com to a bigger dot-com. She threw elaborate dinner parties and prided herself on knowing the new bands before anyone else did. She bought a used VW bug the color of the California sky. She had brunch with her family every Sunday. She woke early, slept very little, and routinely worked eighteen-hour days. If California was a costume that could be worn, Sadie wore it as easily as Clownerina wore his tutu and derby hat.

Mapletown General Hospital was based on every hospital he’d ever stayed in, and Alice’s illness and treatment, which comprised many of the Mapletown side quests and levels, was given the kind of corpuscular detail that could only have come from someone who had been chronically ill and understood the indignities of hospital life. In the fourth level, for example, Alice, after a major operation, becomes separated from her body, and she has to chase through the hospital to catch it, like Peter Pan and his shadow. This dissociation was something Sam had experienced many times—the feeling that your body, when it was sick, was no longer your own. Within Mapletown, Sam created two distinct worlds: there was the hospital, but there was also everything outside of it, Mapletown itself. Sam directed his team to make Mapletown time and seasonally responsive—it was dark if you played at night, and light if you played in the morning. There would be leaves in the fall, and snow in the winter, and cherry blossoms in the spring. The world had always looked painfully beautiful to him when he was sick. It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was. It was his friends through a glass window in a hospital door; it was Sadie’s sweet twelve-year-old face, handing him a maze she’d completed; it was the nostalgia he felt when he watched the healthy and the able-bodied leave a world that they had only been vis...

Marx ran the race, hitting the jump button every time Alice encountered a hurdle. He lost once, and then he lost again, and then he lost a third time. He turned to Sam. “Am I doing something wrong?” No matter how well the gamer runs the race, Alice will lose every time. The tumor that is growing in her lungs is slowing her down, but she doesn’t know that yet. Each time Alice loses, the gamer is given the option to restart the game. But the gamer will never “win” the first level. Winning is accepting that there are some races a person cannot win. Throughout his life, Sam had hated being told to “fight,” as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational. Mapletown was, for Sam, the story of his pain, in the present and in the past.

He woke up in the middle of the night screaming, drenched in sweat and urine, frantically kicking the foot that was no longer there. Sam was scared and ashamed, because he felt as if he had no control over his body, no understanding of what was causing the pain and thus, no means to ameliorate it. He kept reaching for the foot with his hand. The pain was so intense that he could not speak or explain when his terrified grandparents came into his room to ask him what was wrong. He tried to get out of bed so that he could throw up in the toilet, but he forgot that he didn’t have the foot, and he fell hard onto the floor, chipping one of his canines, bloodying his lip. He got up on his knees so that he could vomit. He felt helpless and like a child again. At the same time, he felt savage, less than human. His grandmother cradled him in her arms until Sam was able to fall into a fitful sleep.

Thinking, for Sam, was necessary, and the pain made him feel stupid, an entirely new phenomenon for him. Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought. Sam knew the foot was gone. He could see it was gone. He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

Abe’s house was tidy and smelled like sandalwood, and he had around a thousand vinyl records, neatly organized into white lacquer Ikea shelves. Abe’s collection included LPs, but Abe’s passion was 45s. He loved B-sides, and the history of A-sides and B-sides, which Sadie knew nothing about. Originally, Abe explained, the record companies had put the “hit” on the A-side and the lesser track on the B-side. At some point, the record companies started calling 45s double A-sides so that there’d be less conflict in bands. According to Abe, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been at each other’s throats over which of their songs would be called the A-side. McCartney’s “Hello Goodbye” (A) versus Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” (B), for example. “But there is no double A-side. The A-side is still the A-side,” Abe said. “Doesn’t matter what some evil record company tries to pretend.”