“Oh yeah,” Sadie said. “I’m dabbling in that. I ran into one of my classmates from Dov’s seminar, and she was trying to make visual novel games work for the U.S. market and asked me if I wanted to consult. So, I thought, why not? It’s all made very quickly, and you don’t have time to think, and that’s good for me right now. And you?”
“I’ve been trying to do something in AR. It’s hard to make AR work, but someone’s eventually going to do it, and then people won’t want to play anything else.”
“I disagree,” Sadie said. “People play games for the characters, not for the tech. Have you been playing anything great?”
“Bioshock 2,” Sam said. “Great world building. Visuals, fine, that Unreal style. Heavy Rain does amazing things with point of view. Braid is brilliant. I was jealous the whole time I was playing. I kept wishing we’d made it. Have you played it yet?”
“I’m planning on it, but I don’t have as much time to play since I had a kid,” she said. “Naomi loves the Wii. Especially the sports games. So we play some of that.”
“Do you have a picture?”
Sadie took out her phone. Sam nodded at the screen.
“She looks like Marx,” Sam said. “And you.”
“I took her to my seminar, and the kids in the class said she looked like Ichigo.”
“They used to say that about me, too,” Sam said.
“I remember. It used to piss me off.”
“But now I’m old.”
“You’re not that old.”
“Thirty-seven,” Sam said. “Older than anyone at ReveJeux.”
“I thought the same thing,” Sadie said. “About myself, I mean.”
They were walking back to the elevator when Sam said, “It’s not late yet. We could play the sample level of Ichigo III together.”
“Do you think we should?”
“I think we have to play it. We owe it to Ichigo.”
Sadie and Sam went up to Sam’s room. Sam set up the game on his laptop, and they played the level together, companionably passing the computer back and forth, as they had done when Sam was twelve and Sadie was eleven.
They finished the first level, which ended with a crowd scene that included digital avatars of the ReveJeux team and Sam and Sadie.
Sam closed the laptop. “The visuals are tight, considering how unfinished they are. The sound is tight.” Sam shrugged. “These people aren’t messing around. I think it’s probably good. I can’t complain. What do you think?”
“The same.” Sadie paused. “I was a little bored, though. But I know that’s unfair to say. They’re not done yet, and maybe we’re not the audience for it?”
“You’re probably right.” Sam turned to face Sadie. “You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking how easy it was to make that first Ichigo. We were like machines then—this, this, this, this. It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.”
“I think that, too,” Sadie said. “The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.”
“So depressing,” Sam said, laughing. “What’s all of this struggle been for?”
“There must be some other versions of us that don’t make games.”
“What do they do instead?”
“They’re friends. They have a life!” Sadie said.
Sam nodded. “Oh, right. I’ve heard of those. They’re those things where you sleep regular hours and you don’t spend every waking moment tormented by some imaginary world.”
Sadie walked over to the minibar and she poured herself a glass of water. Seeing her back, Sam thought there was no echt Sadie in this view in the way a gamer always knew Lara Croft from her braid.
“Maybe I should try that?” Sam said. “Having a life.”
“I have a life now,” Sadie said. “It’s not so great. Do you want a glass of water?”
Sam nodded. “May I ask you something that I’ve often wondered about?”
“Oh God, this sounds serious.”
“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.”
Sam looked at his hands and at the callus years of gaming had left on his right index finger. “I thought it was because I was poor. And then, when I wasn’t poor, I thought it was because you weren’t attracted to me, because I was half-Asian and because of my disability.”
“How awful do you think I am? Those were your things, not mine.”
“Yes, they probably were.”
“I’m still not tired,” Sadie said. “Probably the excitement of being sans enfant. Do you want to go take a walk?”
“I do,” Sam said.
Their hotel was in Columbus Circle, and they walked uptown, toward the Upper West Side. It was the end of March, and it was still cold, though one could feel the possibility of springtime.
“I used to live here with my mom,” Sam said.
“That was before I knew you.”
Sam nodded. “Yes, if you can believe there was a time when we didn’t know each other. It doesn’t seem possible to me. Did I ever tell you why my mom left New York?”
“I don’t think so.”
“A woman jumped from a building, and landed, splat, at our feet.”
“Did she die?”
“She did. My mom tried to pretend that she didn’t, but it was too late. I had nightmares about this woman for a decade.”
“You never told me that story. I thought I knew all your stories.”
“Not all of them,” Sam said. “I hid so many things from you.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to seem a certain way to you, I guess.”
“It’s so funny you should say this, because if you were one of my students, you’d be wearing your pain like a badge of honor. This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless. I hate people who talk about generational differences like it’s an actual thing, and here I am, doing it. It doesn’t make sense. How alike were you to anyone we grew up with, you know?”
“If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked.