Almost a year to the day Sam had run into Sadie in the train station, Ichigo was completed. The game took three and a half months longer than Sam had promised it would.
With a major assist from Dov’s Ulysses engine, Sadie and Sam had programmed Ichigo, nonstop, until their fingers bled. Literally, in Sam’s case. His fingertips grew so dry and blistered that he had to put Band-Aids on them to stop blood from getting on his keyboard. But when the Band- Aids slowed down his typing, he removed them. He was accustomed to discomforts far greater.
But those were not the only injuries they sustained. By Halloween, Sadie had stared at her computer screen so long she burst a blood vessel in her right eye. She didn’t even go to the doctor; she just sent Marx to the drugstore for eyedrops and Advil, and soldiered on. 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?”
“Oh God, Anders, why are you here?” “Why are you there?” Anders said.
Despite Sam’s protests, Anders walked him over to University Health Services, where they determined Sam was malnourished. Sam was given an IV.
“So, what have you been up to?” Anders asked. He insisted on keeping Sam company while he received the fluids.
“I’m making a game!” Sam rambled on about Ichigo and Sadie, and Anders, who was not a gamer, looked at him blankly, but kindly. “It seems, my friend, you have found love?”
“Anders, you talk about love more than any mathematician I know.”
In November, Marx hired a composer—Zoe Cadogan, one of Marx’s many spectacular exes—to write a score inspired by the avant-garde composers they had listened to all summer. Zoe was a genius, Marx promised. As Sam would often tease him, “Marx never met a genius he didn’t want to sleep with.” A decade later, Zoe would win a Pulitzer Prize for an operatic adaptation of Antigone she had written using only female voices. But Ichigo would be the first time she was ever paid for her music, and the credit always appeared on her résumé.
They had just finished recording the score, and Marx had gone back to Zoe’s dorm room in Adams House. They ate in the dining hall, and then they had sex. 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.
“Why did we ever break up?” Zoe asked.
“You broke up with me, remember?” Marx said.
“Did I? Well, I must have had a good reason, but I can’t remember it anymore.” Zoe kissed Marx’s chest. “I love your game,” she said. “What I’ve seen and been told of it.”
It was the first time anyone had ever called Ichigo Marx’s game. “It’s not really my game,” Marx demurred. “It’s Sadie’s and Sam’s.”
“The scene at the end,” she said. “It’s very moving. When Ichigo is so much older, and the parents can’t recognize her.” She paused. “Or, I’m sorry, is Ichigo a him?”
“Sam and Sadie say them.”
“Cool. When the parents can’t recognize them. That moment is straight out of The Odyssey.”
One of the most difficult challenges of Ichigo’s design had been Sadie and Sam’s decision to make the Ichigo character age during the course of the story. Typically, a game character stays the same age and has the same basic design for the length of the story, if not the length of the series—think Mario or Lara Croft. The reasons for this are simple: branding, and it is much less work. But Sadie and Sam wanted Ichigo’s journey to be reflected in their character. Ichigo ages and takes the damage inflicted by the narrative and time itself, and by the end of the story, when they finally make it home, after about seven years away, they are unrecognizable to their family. Ichigo returns home an exhausted, weary ten-year-old who has battled the ocean, the city, the tundra, and even the underworld. They stand on the doorstep of their home, and they hold their quivering hand over the door, afraid to knock. Eventually, Ichigo’s mother lets them in, but the mother doesn’t recognize them. But still, she thinks the child looks hungry and in need of love, and because she once lost her own child, she invites them inside. “What’s your name?” she asks.
“Ichigo,” they say.
“That’s a strange name,” she says.
At this point, Ichigo’s father walks into the room. “Fifteen,” he says. “That’s Max Matsumoto. He’s my favorite footballer. I used to have a jersey like that, but I lost it long ago.”
With the score layered in and additional contributions by a sound designer friend of Zoe’s to improve the aural landscape, the feeling at Kennedy Street was that the game had leveled up. “I feel like,” Sadie said to Marx, “this might be something.”
“I know it is,” Marx said, with an evangelical fervor.
Sadie kissed Marx on both his cheeks, in a campy European way. He was such a fan. Every collaboration needs one.
When they finally got to the end of writing the game, the debugging period began. As they found bugs—and there were many—they’d write them on the stolen whiteboard, along with any other improvements they wanted to make. After each task was completed, it was erased. About a week before the winter break—they were still young enough to understand time in semesters—the board was empty aside from a hazy pastel palimpsest to remind them of the work they had done.
“Are we finished?” Sadie asked Sam. She opened the curtains. It was five a.m., and it was lightly snowing.
“I think we are,” Sam said.
“I’m so tired.” Sadie yawned. “For tonight, we’re done. If we look at it tomorrow, and we still think we’re done, then we’ll say we’re done. I’m heading over to Dov’s.”
“I’ll walk you,” Sam said.
“You sure? It’ll be slippery out there.” She worried about his foot, which she knew had been bothering him lately.
“It’s not a very long walk,” he said. “It’ll be good for me.”
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 street, his bruised cheek on an icy cobblestone pillow, he had a vision of his mother, standing over him in the ice, wearing a huge
white parka that went down to her ankles. Anna is the size of Godzilla, and under the tent of her parka, Sam knows he is safe. His Korean American mother is speaking Japanese. “Daijoubu, Samu-chan,” she says.
—
Sam’s mother decided to go west in the winter of 1984. Sam was nine; Anna, thirty-five. Anna had been contemplating leaving New York for twelve years—that is to say, as long as she had lived there. But the longing had only intensified in the years since Sam’s birth. 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. She might have continued in this speculative ouroboros forever, if another Anna Lee had not fallen from the sky.
On the night they encountered the other Anna Lee, Anna and Sam were walking back from the theater to their railroad flat in unstylish Manhattan Valley. An acting class friend, with whom she had had pleasant, perfunctory sex years earlier, was in the ensemble of The Rink, the Chita Rivera/Liza Minelli roller-skating musical, and had comped them two tickets to a preview performance. The friend had said, “I’m almost certain this is going to flop, but it might be perfect for a nine-year-old boy of mildly artistic temperament.” Anna had laughed at this description of her son—it was interesting and occasionally appalling to see how other people viewed your child—but the friend had been right: Sam had loved the musical, and Anna had felt like a good mother for being able to provide Sam with the rich
cultural experiences that only New York City could offer. Like magic, she was in love with New York again and felt certain that she could never leave it. She was having these cozy thoughts as she and Sam made their way down a Stygian stretch of Amsterdam Avenue. Sam tugged at Anna’s coat sleeve. “Hey Mom? What’s that up there?”
In the streetlight, Anna could see a vaguely organic silhouette perched atop the metal railing of a balcony about six stories up. “Maybe a large bird?” she said. “Or…a gargoyle? A statue?”
The statue leaped to the ground, improbably landing faceup, with a percussive splat and an explosion of red blood that suggested a Jackson Pollock painting, in process, more than it did a suicide. The woman’s legs and arms were supernaturally akimbo. Both mother and son screamed, but it was New York City, so no one noticed or cared.
Once the statue had alighted, they could see it was most definitely a woman, and the woman was Asian, maybe even Korean, like Anna. The woman would die that night, but she was not dead yet. Sam laughed, not because he was cruel, but because the woman reminded him of his mother, and he could not figure out what else to do with himself when faced with such a gruesome spectacle less than ten steps in front of him. He had never seen anything die before and so, he could not be certain that she was dying. And yet, somewhere deep inside himself, he felt a recognition and then a reckoning: this was death, and he would die, and his mother would die, and everyone you ever met and ever loved would die, and maybe it would happen when you or they were old, but maybe not. To know this was unbearable: it was a fact too large for a nine-year-old avatar to contain. Anna punched him quite hard on the arm to get him to stop laughing. “I’m sorry,” Sam whimpered. “I don’t even know why I was laughing.”
“It’s okay,” Anna said. She pointed to the bodega across the street. “Go in there and tell them to call 911.”
Sam hesitated. “I don’t want to,” he said. “I can’t move. My feet are stuck. They’re stuck in the ice.”
“They aren’t stuck, Sam. There isn’t any ice, and they aren’t stuck. Go!
Go now!” Anna pushed him toward the store, and Sam began to run.
Anna kneeled down by the woman’s side. “Don’t worry. Help is coming,” Anna tried to reassure her. “I’m Anna, by the way. I’ll stay with you until the ambulance gets here.” Anna took the woman’s hand.
“I’m Anna, too,” the woman said. “I’m Anna Lee,” Anna said.
“I’m Anna Lee, too,” the woman said. The woman inhaled raggedly and coughed in a peculiar, delicate way. Anna was certain the woman’s neck was broken. Copious amounts of blood were flowing from some hole or series of holes in the woman’s body, but Anna could not see an obvious way to stop the bleeding. Anna was getting blood on her white tennis shoes, which she was fastidious about keeping white. And the other Anna Lee was getting blood everywhere, but noticeably, to Anna, on the large, floppy, pink lace bow she wore, Madonna-style, in her shiny black hair.
“Oh, that makes sense,” Anna said lightly. “There’re a lot of us. Isn’t Lee the most popular Asian surname in the world? In my union, I had to change my name to Anna Q. Lee, because you can’t have more than one person with the same name. I’m the seventh Anna Lee in Equity.”
“What’s Equity?”
“It’s the stage actor’s union.”
“You’re an actor?” the woman said. “Would I have seen you in anything?”
“Well,” Anna said. “I’ve played almost every Asian part an actress can play, but my biggest role was Connie Wong in A Chorus Line.”
“I saw that the year it opened,” the woman said. “You were good.”
“I was the third Connie Wong on Broadway, and I was the second Connie Wong in the national touring company, too. So, you didn’t see me. You probably saw Baayork Lee. Another Lee.” Anna laughed. “So many of us.”
“What does the Q. stand for?”
“Nothing,” Anna said. “It was for the union. You probably don’t want to talk about this.” Anna looked in the other Anna Lee’s eyes, which were the same golden brown, heterochromic color as her own. “Why did you… Do you mind my asking? I apologize if this is rude.”
“I didn’t know how else to leave,” the other Anna Lee said. She tried to shrug, but then her body began to spasm, and ninety long seconds later, she died. Anna stood up. She stood over the other Anna Lee’s body and began to feel giddily, vertiginously untethered from her own body. She felt as if she were seeing herself dead on that sidewalk. She knew she should stay with the other Anna’s body until the ambulance got there, but it was frigid, and she feared spending more time with the other Anna would provoke some irreversible existential crisis, and she desperately wanted to be with Sam.
She went into the bodega to find her son. She quickly scanned the aisles, but she couldn’t find him anywhere.
“Did my son come in here?” Anna said. She tried to ignore the paranoid fantasy that was forming in her mind: What if the other Anna Lee’s death had merely been a distraction so that some evil party could kidnap Sam?
“You’re the mother,” the shopkeeper said. “What a world. What a thing for a boy to see.”
“He didn’t leave, did he?”
“No, but he was quite distraught, so I gave him quarters to play the machine in the back of my store. Children love games, though the machine doesn’t make as much money for me as it once did.”
“That was very kind of you,” Anna said. “What do I owe you?”
The man waved his hand. “Please. It is hard enough to be a child in this world without women throwing themselves from buildings. How is she?”
Anna shook her head.
“What a world,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head, too.
She walked to the back of the store, where Sam was concealed by the mammoth, cheerful shell of the Ms. Pac-Man machine. From what Anna could tell, Ms. Pac-Man was no different than Pac-Man, except that she had a bow and was a Ms., which in 1984 was an honorific that usually signified a feminist.
“Hi,” Anna said.
“Hi,” Sam said, without looking at her. “You can watch if you want.
I’m going to play until the end of this life.”
“That’s a good philosophy,” Anna said. She concentrated on the game and tried not to hear the nearby sirens that meant the ambulance had come for the body of the other Anna Lee.
“If you eat the fruit,” Sam said, “you can kill the ghosts, but only for a little while. And if you don’t time it right, the ghosts can turn back and kill you.”
“Amazing,” Anna said. She decided that they couldn’t leave the bodega until the sidewalk had been cleared of the body of the other Anna Lee.
“And sometimes, you get an extra life. But you might kill yourself trying to get the extra life, so it’s not always worth it.”
“You’re good at this,” Anna said. Once they were able to leave the bodega, she’d splurge on a taxi, even though they were only a dozen blocks from home.
“Not yet,” Sam said. “If I had more time to practice, I could be. Darn it!” The descending chromatic wail of Ms. Pac-Man’s death. “That was my last life.” Sam looked at Anna cautiously. “What happened to her?”
“The ambulance is out there right now. They’re taking her to the hospital.”
“Will she be okay?” Sam said.
“I think so,” Anna said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She would be okay.
Dead was okay.
Sam nodded, but he had seen Anna in enough plays to know when she was lying, and he knew her well enough to know why she lied. When he lied, it was for the same reason: to protect her from that which she could not handle. “Why did she do that?” Sam asked.
“I think…” Anna said. “I think she must have been terribly blue. I think she must have had troubles in her life.”
“Do you ever get blue?”
“Yes, everyone gets blue. But I don’t think I could ever get melancholy like that, because I have you.”
Sam nodded. “If the body had landed on us, do you think we could have saved her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think we could have died?” “I don’t know.”
“Because if we had walked a little faster, or if we hadn’t stopped to buy bananas, we could have been directly under her, and we could have died.”
“I don’t think we would have died,” Anna said.
“But if you drop a penny from the Empire State Building and it hits someone, they’ll die, right?”
“I think that’s an old wives’ tale,” Anna said. “Besides, the building she jumped from was only six stories.”
“But a body is much heavier than a penny.”
“Why don’t you play again?” Anna dug through her purse and put a quarter in the machine. For Ms. Pac-Man, Anna thought, life was cheap and filled with second chances.
Sam played, and Anna watched, thinking about her next move.
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. And professionally, Los Angeles had no theater to speak of, which is to say, there would likely be even less work for Anna in L.A. than there had been for her in New York (and work in New York had always been intermittent at best). If she was lucky, she’d end up playing Asian hookers in cop shows and movies. She’d have to polish up her various “Asian” accents, because she’d never play an “American” again. Maybe some commercials or voice-overs or a bit of modeling here or there, though she might already be too old for that. Or maybe she’d stop acting entirely—learn to program computers, or sell real estate, or style hair, or become an interior decorator, or teach aerobics, or write screenplays, or find a rich husband—whatever it was ex-actors in Los Angeles did. But it would be nice to see her parents, and it would be nice for Sam to know his grandparents, and actually, Sam’s father lived out there, too, and it would be nice for Sam to have a relationship with him, though Sam’s father certainly
could not be relied upon, and it would be nice to be in a city where Anna Lees didn’t fall from the sky. Aside from a few scattered blocks, what part of Los Angeles was more than two stories high? And this Anna Lee, Anna
Q. Lee, the seventh Anna Lee in Equity, wouldn’t let herself be like that other Anna Lee. This Anna Lee would know how to leave.
“You’re getting so good at killing ghosts,” Anna said.
“I’m okay,” Sam said. He turned to look at her. “Hey Mom, do you want a turn?”
