It was startling how fast a person could go dark in 1996.
Sadie got to Marx’s a little after ten and she found the apartment empty and, aside from the occasional chirp of a hard drive, silent. Maybe Sam and Marx were together, having breakfast? Since they were both gone, she didn’t feel worried—Marx always took care of Sam. She didn’t feel worried until Marx got home around one and reported he hadn’t seen Sam all day. “I thought he was with you,” Marx said. “He’s always with you.”
Sam didn’t have a cell phone, but no one did then. (The only people Sadie knew with cell phones were Dov and her grandmother.) The best they could do was check to see the last time he’d logged in to his Harvard email, and from where: 3:03 this morning, from the apartment’s IP address.
Sadie and Marx sat in the living room of the apartment, calmly suggesting places Sam might have gone. Maybe he went to the library and fell asleep? Maybe shopping for the new drive they had discussed needing? Maybe a pilgrimage to see the Glass Flowers? Maybe lunch with Anders? Maybe he’d finally been arrested for shoplifting?
They’d been at this for a while when Marx noticed the whiteboard. “There’s nothing on it,” he remarked.
“We’re done,” Sadie said. “We thought we were, at least.” “Congratulations,” Marx said. He paused before he said, “Should I play
it? We can’t do anything about Sam yet. He’s an adult, and it hasn’t been that long.”
Sadie considered this. “Yes, you should play it. Why not? I’m going to go look for him.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. You should stay here in case he calls.”
She went to all of their usual Harvard Square haunts: the movie theater, the library, the Coop, the Mexican place, the video store in the Garage, the bookstore, the other bookstore, the other other bookstore, the bagel store. And when she didn’t find him in those places, she did the Central Square ones: the comic book store, the computer store, her old apartment, the Indian place. She went back to Harvard Square, walking up toward the Radcliffe Quad, to the university police station, and finally, defeated, she went to University Health. She didn’t even have a photograph of Sam to show, so she kept having to describe him. Enormous coat, badly cut curly hair, glasses, limp. A collection of flaws and infirmities. She was glad Sam didn’t have to hear her. No one had been seen who matched that description anyway. She walked back through Harvard Yard, calling out his name until her voice was ragged. A woman stopped her, and asked, “What does the dog look like? I’ll keep an eye out.” She retraced the same route she and Sam had taken just that morning when the world seemed soft-focused and filled with possibility. The path now seemed dismal and dangerous to her. And she thought to herself that it was strange how quickly the world could shift. She let her mind go to the dark place. What if Sam had been kidnapped or beaten? He was small and slow, and he would be easy to overpower. What if Sam were dead? She didn’t truly believe that he was dead, but what if he was? She couldn’t entirely articulate who he was to her. He was not Alice or Freda or Dov. Those relationships had easy names: sister, grandmother, boyfriend. Sam was her friend, but “friend” was a broad category, wasn’t it? “Friend” was a word that was overused to the point that it had no meaning at all.
She came back to the apartment around midnight. Marx was about halfway through his first official play of Ichigo: A Child of the Sea.
“Any luck?” Marx asked, without looking away from the screen.
“No,” Sadie said glumly. She flopped onto the sofa. “I feel like something terrible has happened to him.”
Marx got up and put his arm around her. “He’ll come back. It hasn’t been that long yet.”
“But it’s not like him. Where could he have gone? They say I can’t file a missing person report for another day, but it isn’t right. We’ve spent almost every hour of the last six months together. I’ve barely gone ten minutes without speaking to him. Why would he disappear on the morning we finish the game?”
Marx shook his head. “I honestly don’t know. But I’ve lived with Sam for three and a half years now, and I know that he’s both private and tough as hell. We lived together for two years before I knew he’d been in a car accident. For years, I had no idea what was wrong with him. It could have been anything. I’d hint around it, and I’d notice him struggling and I’d do what I could to help, not that he’d ever ask for any. But I was curious, so I’d give him openings to talk. A normal person would probably have some desire to, like, explain to the person they lived with what was going on with them, but not Sam. Sam loves his secrets. My point is, I’m worried, but I’m not that worried.”
“What made him finally tell you about the car accident?” Sadie asked. “He never told me. Bong Cha did.”
Sadie laughed. “He once went six years without speaking to me,” she said.
“What did you do?” Marx said.
“I mean, it was bad, but it was basically a misunderstanding. It’s so boring and nerdy I can’t even explain it. And I was twelve!”
“He can hold a grudge like no one’s business.”
Sadie shook her head. “I shouldn’t have let him walk me up to Dov’s.” “Sadie, listen to me. Sam is going to be fine. There’s going to be a
story, and we’re all going to laugh, I promise you.” Marx stood up. “I’m in the middle of this very exciting game, and I’d like to finish it now if that’s acceptable to you.”
Sadie nodded. 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.
“I’m tired,” Sadie said. “I should go.”
Sadie hung up the phone. She pulled Sam’s blanket over her head, and then she went to sleep.
By the time Sadie woke up, it was eight o’clock the next night, and she’d slept so long that Marx had finished the first playthrough of Ichigo. She went out to the living room to ask if Sam had called yet, and she found Marx gazing at the dark monitor and gently smiling to himself, as if in possession of a great secret.
“Marx?”
When he saw Sadie, he ran over to her, and he lifted her up in his arms, and he spun her around the room.
“Marx!” Sadie protested.
“I love it,” Marx said. “There’s nothing more to say.” And then in a booming actor voice, “I LOVE THIS WOMAN AND I LOVE THIS GAME! WHERE THE HELL IS SAM?”
As if in direct response to Marx’s appeal to the universe, the phone rang. Sadie and Marx both jumped for it, but Sadie was closer, and she got to it first.
“It’s him,” Sadie reported to Marx. “Where the hell have you been?”
Sam had broken his ankle, the one above his damaged foot, and because of the poor condition of that entire extremity, he’d had to have emergency surgery on it. He was at Mass General in Boston, and he had to stay in the hospital for another night, but could they come and get him in the morning?
“Why didn’t you call?” Sadie asked.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” Sam said.
“We worried because you didn’t call.” Sadie began to cry from the release of built-up tension. “I thought you were dead, Sam. Dead. That
we’d finished the game and…I don’t know what.”
“Sadie, Sadie, it’s all right.” Sam said. “I’m fine. You’ll see.”
“If you ever do that again, I’m going to murder you,” Sadie said. “I know now. I should call. Sadie? Are you there?”
Sadie was blowing her nose, so Marx took the phone from her.
“For the record, I knew you were okay. I played the game,” Marx said. “You’re both geniuses. And I love you both so much. And that’s it.”
Sadie reclaimed the phone from Marx.
“Our first playthrough,” Sam said. “So, we’re done?”
“I think we are,” Sadie said. “Mostly. I have a few things.” “I have a few things, too.”
“I want to see you,” Sadie said.
“I think visiting hours end at nine,” Sam said. It was already 8:15. “I doubt that leaves you enough time to get here and get a community service timesheet together.”
“Very funny.”
“Seriously, there probably isn’t enough time for you to get here.” “Okay, Sammy,” she said. “I love you.”
“Terribly,” he said.
“We’ll see you first thing in the morning.” Sadie hung up the phone.
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 even handle the slightest expression of joy. He was tired of having to move so carefully, of having to be so careful. He wanted to be able to skip, for God’s sake. He wanted to be Ichigo. He wanted to surf, and ski, and parasail, and fly, and scale mountains and buildings. He wanted to die a million deaths like Ichigo, and no matter what damage was inflicted on his body during the day, he’d wake up tomorrow, new and whole. He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived. Or if he couldn’t be Ichigo, at least he could be back at the apartment, with Sadie and Marx, making Ichigo.
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.
Marx poured Sam a small glass of champagne. “Hope this doesn’t interfere with whatever else they’ve given you.”
“What happened anyway?” Sadie asked.
Sam tried to make an amusing anecdote of it. He talked about the skipping and the poem and the general happiness and well-being he had felt upon completing the game. He omitted the hallucination he’d had of his mother. “Do you know this poem? Something about love being all there is.”
“That’s the Beatles,” Marx said. “All you need is love, love…”
“No, there was another part. Something about ‘a freight and a groove’?”
“That’s Emily Dickinson,” Sadie said. “The freight must be proportioned to the groove. I used it in EmilyBlaster.”
Sam laughed. “EmilyBlaster! Of course!”
“Yes, I was thinking of how strange those lines were when I must have tripped over the curb.”
“So, what you’re saying is that you were Emily Blasted?” Marx said. “You know, my whole class hated that game,” Sadie said.
“Marx, what was the thing you said when you played EmilyBlaster?” Sam said.
“I said it was the most violent poetry game I’d ever played, and the person who made it must be incredibly peculiar,” Marx said.
“I accept that compliment,” Sadie said.
“So, what’s next for Ichigo now that we’re done?” Marx said.
“We show it to Dov, and we wait to hear what he thinks,” Sam said.
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 them were involved romantically.
—
Despite Sam’s injuries, Sam and Sadie continued to tweak the game through the rest of the month, and by the end of January, they were ready to show the game to Dov. He had seen and advised a significant amount of the work in progress, but he hadn’t experienced it from front to back, and he didn’t know how it would all come together. Sadie brought the drive with the finished game to his apartment. As he began his first playthrough, she hovered around him, enthusiastically offering him tips and insights into every moment of the game. She was nervous about Dov’s reaction, but she was also incredibly proud of her work. She didn’t want him to miss a single detail of their labors.
“Sadie, back off. I can’t concentrate with you all over me. I want to play this,” Dov said.
“Okay,” Sadie said. “I’ll be quiet.”
Dov had reached level seven, the world of ice and snow, where Ichigo first encounters Gomibako, the ghost-monster who enslaves lost children. “I can feel you watching me. I can hear you breathing.” He took her hand and he escorted her into his bedroom.
“Now be a good girl,” he said. “But…”
“You aren’t disobeying me, are you?” “No, Dov.”
“I didn’t think so.” He looked at her. “Take off your clothes.” “I don’t want to,” she said. “Dov, it’s freezing in here.”
“Take. Off. Your. Clothes. You know what happens when you disobey.” Sadie took off her clothes.
The first time they’d been together, he had never expressed any interest in S&M. The S&M had only started when they’d reunited in the fall. Sadie had been turned on, at first at least, and then slightly disturbed, unsure of the game they were playing and why they were playing it. Dov wasn’t abusive. He always sought consent. But he liked handcuffs and other more complicated props and ordering her around. He liked making her strip and tying her up and gagging her on occasion; he liked to slap her and spank her and pull her hair. He liked shaving off her pubic hair, which he did with the care and consideration of an artist. He had peed on her once, but when she told him to stop, he had, and he’d never done it again. When he hurt her— and he never hurt her much—he was always tender and sorry after.
Dov also liked to be hit, which was not something she was at all into doing. On the night of his thirtieth birthday, he had asked her to slap him across the face. “Harder,” he said.
She obeyed. “Harder.” She obeyed.
Once she’d hit him hard enough, his eyes would tear and then, russet- faced, he would phone his son, back in Israel. She could hear him speaking tenderly to the boy, in lilting Hebrew that reminded her of birdsong. Sadie’s Hebrew was at a Bat Mitzvah prep, High Holy Days level, so the only word she could understand wasn’t even Hebrew. It was his son’s name: Telemachus, who Dov mainly called Telly. Telly was three.
On the night he asked her to start seeing him again, he’d poured her a glass of wine and told her that his wife had finally agreed to a divorce.
“That’s good,” Sadie had said carefully. “If you’ve been unhappy.”
“I have been unhappy,” Dov said. “It will be difficult and costly for me, but it will be worth it in the end.”
They spoke at the same time.
“I don’t think we should see each other,” Sadie said. “I’d like to keep it professional.”
“I’d like to see you again,” Dov said.
“You weren’t here last year,” Sadie said. “I don’t think I can go through another breakup with you.”
“You won’t have to,” Dov said. “I promise.” But, back to the night Dov first played Ichigo.
After they’d had what Sadie considered to be quick, enjoyable, prop- free sex, Dov opened his nightstand drawer, and snapped a handcuff around her wrist and another to the bed frame. It happened so quickly; she didn’t even have time to protest.
“I don’t want you to leave this bed until I’m done with Ichigo,” he said. “But Dov,” Sadie called. “You’ve still got, like, thirteen hours left.” Dov ignored her and closed the door to the bedroom.
Even handcuffed to the bed, Sadie could reach the landline on the nightstand. She called Sam.
“Is he done yet?” Sam asked eagerly. “He’s reached Gomibako,” Sadie said.
A great deal depended on Dov’s reaction. Dov had connections and influence in the industry—if he liked it, he could take it to his or a different publisher. He could bring attention to Ichigo in a way and with a speed that Sadie, Sam, and Marx, on their own, couldn’t.
“Why don’t you come back here?” Sam said. “We can go to the movies. Marx says Mars Attacks! is playing at Sony Fresh Pond tonight.”
“You’re good to go out?”
“I have to go out sometime, Sadie. We’ll take a cab. We’ll go slow.” “No skipping?”
“No skipping, no reciting of poetry. I promise.”
Sadie looked at her shackled wrist. “I should stay here,” she said. “In case he needs me,” she added.
She didn’t have a book to read, and while she had recently urinated, she was already starting to be thirsty. She pulled the sheets up over herself, as best she could, and she tried to go to sleep, but she wasn’t tired, and it was awkward to sleep with her arm over her head.
There was no question that they had needed Ulysses, but it still bothered Sadie that she had had to use it. Dov was a producer on Ichigo, and he was so well known that she worried that people would think her work was his work. That they wouldn’t know where her work began and his work ended.
On this point, Sadie wouldn’t end up being entirely wrong. Consider Dov, in an interview on the Gamedepot blog for the release of Dead Sea II.
GAMEDEPOT: Another game that’s been making a big splash this year is Ichigo, which employs your Ulysses engine to great effect. Tell us the story of how you became involved with Ichigo.
D.M.: Well, Sadie [Green, programmer and designer, Ichigo] was my student. She’s brilliant—always has been. I’m, like, not in the engine-selling business. I don’t have a great interest in selling my tools to other so-called designers. Personally, I think the sharing of engines has had a chilling effect on creativity across all games. It’s lazy. The games start to look the same, have the same mechanics and the same presumptive physics, etc. But I saw what she and Sammy [Masur, programmer and designer, Ichigo] were trying to do, and it seemed really special to me, and like something I wanted to be involved with. I thought that Ulysses could help them. Listen, Ulysses shouldn’t take away from anything Sadie and Sammy did. The amount of work those two kids did was astounding. I cite them as an example to my students of how much two kids and a couple of computers can get done on their own. Game companies have gotten too big and impersonal. You have ten guys doing texture layers, and ten
guys doing modeling and ten guys doing backgrounds, and someone else is writing the story, and someone else is writing the dialogue, and literally, no one ever talks to each other. They’re like zombies, with their heads in their cubicles. It’s a [expletive] nightmare.
GAMEDEPOT: But you can see your influence. In the opening storm sequence, for example.
D.M.: Meh. Maybe it’s there, maybe not. It’s there if you know to look for it.
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.
“I love you,” she said.
“And I love Ichigo. I want to talk to Sammy and Marx first thing tomorrow. We’re all gonna make so much money.” He started spinning out his plans for Ichigo, speaking as quickly as an auctioneer. He was pacing the room, bouncing on one foot, gesturing passionately. She had never seen him so excited about anything.
“Dov,” she said. “Would you mind…?” She shook her chain.
