Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

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...