Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

“Can you believe that?” Abe said. “Who would ever think ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ was better than ‘God Only Knows’?” “I get it, though. ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ is definitely more upbeat,” Sadie said. “You sort of want to kill yourself when you hear ‘God Only Knows.’ ” “That’s my favorite kind of music,” Abe said. “I call it afternoon music. You don’t want to listen to it too early in the day, or the day’ll be lost to you.” Abe put his arms around Sadie. “You’re an afternoon woman, sexy Sadie. You don’t want to meet someone like you too early in your life, or you won’t ever like anyone else.” “I bet you’ve said that before,” Sadie said.

It was pleasant to be near Lola. It was pleasant to feel her warmth against his warmth. He had been profoundly lonely since he’d come to Los Angeles, though he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. After the surgery, he hadn’t wanted to be with other people. He had wanted to be alone with his pain. But then as the months passed and he began to feel somewhat better, he wondered where Sadie had gone. At first, he had assumed Sadie was respecting his need for privacy, but as time went on, he felt something off between them. She had not visited him in the hospital or come to see his new place. He wondered if she was repulsed by his amputation, though that didn’t seem like Sadie.

“You don’t mind if I smoke in here?” Sam said. “Do what you want,” Sadie said. She stood up to open the gauzy cotton curtains and the window behind them. The sun was setting over Clownerina. “Since when do you smoke pot?” Sam inhaled and then he shrugged. She returned to the couch, positioning herself as far away from him as she could. The tendrils of smoke reached across the sofa to her, like sepulchral fingers beckoning, and a pleasant haze began to fill the room, turning everything that had been sharp, soft-focused. The pot’s miasma was strong and spicy, and despite herself, Sadie could feel herself mellowing.

Sam called a company meeting to brainstorm new titles. He rolled out the trusty whiteboard that had traveled with them from Cambridge to Los Angeles. At this point, the whiteboard was no longer white, and its permanent palimpsest was an archive of Unfair’s last five years. Marx said to Sam, “We can afford a new whiteboard, you know.” But Sam resisted throwing the whiteboard out. He felt it possessed a talismanic power. “Not one that says ‘Property of the Harvard Science Center’ on the side.” “Well, right,” Marx said. “Even better, then, because it won’t be a monument to your moral turpitude.”

“I think we should break up,” she said. Once she had said this, he recognized that the strange feeling in the air between them for the last several months was denouement. After Both Sides had come out, there had been a series of mundane skirmishes. She had accused him of spending too much time at the office, something that she had never cared about before. She accused him of loving Sam more than he did her. (She did not mention Sadie.) She had yelled at him for being bourgeois—for caring too much about Danish furniture and wine ratings. (He had spent some time shopping for a dining room table, but the wine struck him as unfair—he preferred beer.) Suddenly, she seemed to loathe California, complaining about allergies and vapid people and bad theater. And then the arguments had ceased as abruptly as they had begun. A month later, she informed him about the opera fellowship in Italy. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. “You don’t love me,” she said. “Zoe, of course I love you.” “But you don’t love me enough,” she said. “What’s enough?” Marx asked. “Enough is…Maybe this is selfish, but I don’t want to love more than I am loved. And I don’t want to be with someone who loves something or someone more than me.”

The drive ended up taking four times as long as it usually did, but Zoe did make her flight. It was the first time Marx had ever truly been broken up with. He knew he should be devastated, but what he felt was relief. The relationship, without him noticing, had been the longest one he had ever had. He had seen no reason to end it. He had never tired of coming home to their place and finding her naked, playing some new instrument. Why end something that worked over the vague notion that he could love someone more deeply than he loved Zoe, who was by every measure fantastic? It was a strange moment in Marx’s personal development. He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet, and he considered it a sign of his own maturity that he had not thought to end things with Zoe. But his disdain for his former itinerancy had made it so he could not recognize the reasons a person should stay. —

Midori went outside to have a smoke, and Sadie went with her. “I was so in love with him, you know,” Midori said. Sadie nodded, because she didn’t know what to say. “Never ever ever sleep with Marx. Whatever you do, don’t do it,” Midori warned. “At some point, he’ll look at you with those eyes and that hair, and you’ll think he’s harmless. He’s hot. I should sleep with him.” “I’ve known him for six years,” Sadie said. “I doubt that’s going to happen.” Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.

Sam headed toward the stairway. He could see Sadie and Marx at the top of the stairs. Sadie appeared to be removing a runaway eyelash from his cheek; Marx was looking at her and laughing. Sadie’s gesture was not especially intimate. Sam had not caught them making love, or kissing, or with their clothes in disarray. And yet, there was a tenderness to Sadie’s gesture that almost made Sam have to sit down, right where he was, at the base of the stairs. He could feel the distant throb of his foot, which he had not felt for over a year. Sadie and Marx were in love.

If it hadn’t been serious, they would have already told him. “I’m thinking about asking Sadie out,” Marx would have said. “What do you think?” Or Sadie might have said, “Funny thing. I’m seeing Marx. Don’t know what will happen.” The omission let him know it was fatally serious. Sadie and Marx’s whole future was revealed to him. Sadie would probably marry Marx, and the wedding would be in Northern California, Carmel-by-the-Sea or Monterey. And at the wedding, Sadie’s grandmother would shoot sympathetic looks at Sam, because she had always been nice to him, and she would know he was brokenhearted. Freda would grab his hand with her soft, old hand, and pat it gently, and say, “Life is long” or some other unhelpful, old-lady wisdom. Sadie and Marx would buy a house together, somewhere in Laurel Canyon or maybe Palisades. And they’d get a dog—a big, rangy, mixed-breed thing, or if not that, a Borzoi called Zelda or Rosella. They’d throw big dinner parties. The house would be the kind of place where everyone wanted to congregate because Sadie and Marx had great taste. They were both great. And at some point, there would be children, and Sam would become sad bachelor uncle Sam, expected to give presents for birthdays and holidays. And every day, he’d have to see Marx and Sadie at work. He would watch them arrive together, and leave together, and he could imagine the drive, and the jokes, and the references that you only had with the person you shared your life with. And eventual...

“Maybe you need to let more people know you.” “Maybe.” “Sam, when your grandmother and I first opened the restaurant, did you know it was a Korean place?” Sam shook his head. “But there were too many Korean places in K-town, so we had to come up with something else. And that’s why we decided to make pizza. There weren’t any other pizza places in that part of K-town. It was scary, at first, because we didn’t know anything about pizza, but then we set ourselves to learning about pizza. We didn’t have any choice. We had two babies and bills to pay. “Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets. You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”

She unlocked the door, and they walked through to the small backyard. It was fall, and two of their three fruit trees were in season: a Fuyu persimmon tree and a guava tree. “Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit.” Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. “Can you believe our luck?” Marx said. “We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit.” Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love.

“Do you think we should go, though?” Simon asked. It was four in the morning, and Ant was driving them back to their apartment to shower, change clothes, and perhaps, even sleep for an hour or two. “Go where?” Ant said, yawning. “To San Francisco,” Simon said. “For what purpose?” “To get hitched,” Simon said. “I didn’t know you wanted to get married.” “Well, it wasn’t an option before,” Simon said. “You can’t know you want something until it’s an option.” “I think we have to finish the game before we can even think of doing anything else,” Ant said. “You’re right. Of course you’re right.” By 8 a.m., they were on the congested road back to Unfair. “I’m feeling Torschlusspanik,” Simon said. He was the one driving, while Ant tried to catch some extra sleep. “Nope,” Ant said, without opening his eyes. “You can’t throw German at me when I’ve only slept two hours.” “Who knows how long before they stop giving out marriage licenses?” Simon said. “While we’re busy making a wormhole prom fantasy, we could have completely squandered our chance to get married in the real world.”

‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to look in his husband’s eyes. “Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.” Simon’s eyes were moist. “I know I’m impossible, and I know you don’t care about German words or marriage. All I can say is, I love you and thank you for marrying me anyway.”

Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember? So, where were you when this began?

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.

When you were a boy, you never thought you would be a producer of video games. You must admit there were times when you wondered if it was a mortifying passivity that had led you to this employment. Had you become a video game producer because Sam and Sadie had wanted to make video games, and you had nothing else you were doing at the time? Had you become a video game producer because you loved people who wanted to make games? How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?

A prompt comes up on the screen: Start game from the beginning? Yes, you think. Why not? If you play again, you might win. Suddenly, there you are, brand-new, feathers restored, bones unbroken, sanguine with fresh blood. You are flying more slowly than last time, because you don’t want to miss any of it. The cows. The lavender. The woman humming Beethoven. The distant bees. The sad-faced man and the couple in the pond. The beat of your heart before you go onstage. The feel of a lace sleeve against your skin. Your mother singing Beatles songs to you, trying to sound like she’s from Liverpool. The first playthrough of Ichigo. The rooftop on Abbot Kinney. The taste of Sadie mixed with Hefeweizen beer. Sam’s round head in your hands. A thousand paper cranes. Yellow-tinted sunglasses. A perfect peach. This world, you think.

“Sometimes, I spoke to Anna anyway, and this helped a little.” “Do you mean like a ghost?” His grandmother was the least likely person in the world to see ghosts. “Sam, don’t be ridiculous. There are no ghosts.” “Okay, so you spoke to her. She was definitely not a ghost. Did she ever reply?” Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. “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.”

“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?”

At a certain age—in Sadie’s case, thirty-four—there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town. Dov and Sadie were having brunch at Cliff’s Edge, in Silver Lake. The restaurant looked like a tree house—an enormous, Ent-like, Ficus sprung from the middle of it, and the tables were on tiered wooden platforms that surrounded the tree. The waiters who worked at the restaurant were known for their epic calf strength and their feats of balance. Sadie had often thought that working as a waiter at Cliff’s Edge must have been like being a video game character in a dull level of a platformer.

“Mazer and I were best friends growing up, and we loved playing games together. We were obsessed with the idea of the perfect play. The idea that there was a way to play any game that had the minimal number of errors, the least moral compromises, the quickest pace, the highest number of points. The idea that you could play a game without ever dying or restarting. We’d be playing Super Mario, and if we missed even one gold coin, or got hit by one Koopa, we’d begin again. Yes, we were probably disturbingly obsessive and yes, we had a lot of time on our hands. Anyway, for a long time, I took this idea into the work I did as a designer, and it was absolutely paralyzing. “You will inevitably bring games into this class that you aren’t one-hundred-percent happy with, and that’s okay. I want you to blow my mind. I want you to do great work, but I also just want you to work.”

“I guess the question I had was, how did you get from making something like Solution to making something like Ichigo not that much later? How do you get from there to here? That’s what I don’t know how to do.” “It’s a long story.” Sadie recognized the look in Destiny’s eyes. She knew what it was to be ravenous with ambition but to have your reach exceed your grasp. “I’m not sure I have a simple answer,” Sadie admitted. “May I think about it and get back to you?” That night, Sadie tried to remember herself back in 1996. There were three things that had driven her, and none of them reflected a particular generosity of spirit on Sadie’s part: (1) wanting to distinguish herself enough professionally so that everyone at MIT would know that Sadie Green had not been admitted to the college on a girl curve, (2) wanting Dov to know that he shouldn’t have dumped her, and (3) wanting Sam to know that he was lucky to be working with her, that she was the great programmer in their team, that she was the one with the big ideas. But how to explain this to Destiny? 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.

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive. She could feel herself forgetting all the details of Marx—the sound of his voice, the feeling of his fingers and the way they gestured, his precise temperature, his scent on clothing, the way he looked walking away, or running up a flight of stairs. Eventually, Sadie imagined that Marx would be reduced to a single image: just a man standing under a distant torii gate, holding his hat in his hands, waiting for her.

Sam went back and forth. The fact that Dong Hyun had not died a video game death meant that Sam had been able to spend time with him before the end. The length of time it had taken Dong Hyun to die also meant he had said everything he wanted to say to Sam, his cousins, and his grandmother. Was this trade worth his suffering? Sam didn’t know.

“Love you, Sammy,” Dong Hyun said. “I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, 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.

“I’ve been blue, lately,” Sam admitted. “And I wondered, how do you get over that sort of thing?” “Work helps,” Sadie said. “Games help. But sometimes, when I’m really low, I keep a particular image in my mind.” “What is it?” “I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it’s one of our games, but sometimes, it’s any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.” As Sadie spoke, Sam was reminded of a winter afternoon, many years ago, and of commuters clogging up the train station, blocking his path. At the time, they’d seemed like impediments to him, but maybe he’d been thinking of them the wrong way. What makes a person want to shiver in a train station for nothing more than the promise of a secret image? But then, what makes a person drive down an unmarked road in the middle of the night? Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.

“Why do you think we never got together?” Sadie sat next to Sam on the bed. “Sammy,” she said. “We were together. You must know that. When I’m honest with myself, the most important parts of me were yours.” “But together together? The way you were with Marx or Dov.” “How can you not know this? Lovers are…common.” She studied Sam’s face. “Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”

But if Sam hadn’t been as traumatized as Sadie now realized he had been, would he have pushed them so hard? Would Sadie have been the designer she became without Sam’s ambitions for them? And would Sam have had those ambitions without the childhood trauma? She didn’t know. The work had been hers, yes, but it had equally been his. It had been theirs, and it wouldn’t have existed without the both of them. This was a tautology that had only taken her the better part of two decades to understand. 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.

“I agree. Still, I’d like to make a game with you again, if you ever find the time.” “Is that a good idea?” “Probably not,” Sam said, laughing. “But I want to do it anyway. I don’t know how to stop myself from wanting to do it. Every time I run into you for the rest of our lives, I’ll ask you to make a game with me. There’s some groove in my brain that insists it is a good idea.” “Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.” “That’s a game character’s life, too,” Sam said. “The world of infinite restarts. Start again at the beginning, this time you might win. And it’s not as if all our results were bad. I love the things we made. We were a great team.”