But as much as Sam did not love math, Marx loved college theater. It wasn’t so much being on stage that he loved, but the productions themselves. He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art. He mourned every time a production was over, and he rejoiced when he was cast in a new one. The brief seasons of his college life were marked by the plays in which he performed. Freshman year: Macbeth, The Marriage of Bette and Boo. Sophomore year: The Mikado, Hamlet. Junior year: King Lear, Twelfth Night.
Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, though textually this happens offstage. But the director, who was a professional and not a student, had decided to elaborately stage the shipwreck, using much of the ample budget the college had given her to entice her to work with students in the first place. Undulating layers of programmed laser light and smoke; the sounds of waves crashing, thunder, and rain; and even a gentle misting of cold water that made the audience gasp and applaud like delighted children. The cast had sniped that the only thing Jules cared about was the shipwreck, and that it was clear she wished she was directing The Tempest instead of Twelfth Night.
Sadie, who knew nothing of this scuttlebutt, found the shipwreck mesmerizing. She whispered in Sam’s ear, “Our game should start with a shipwreck. Or maybe, a storm.” Even as she was saying it, she knew that “shipwreck,” and all the elements that a shipwreck could entail, meant that the game might not be finished by September.
“Yes,” Sam whispered back. “A child is lost at sea.”
Sadie nodded and whispered back, “A little girl—she’s maybe two or three years old—is lost at sea and she has to get back to her family, even though she doesn’t even know her last name or her phone number or many words or numbers past ten.”
“Why is it a little girl?” Sam asked. “Why isn’t it a little boy?”
“I don’t know. Because in Twelfth Night it’s a girl?” Sadie said.
Someone sitting nearby shushed them.
“Let’s design the character so they don’t have a gender,” Sam said in a softer whisper. “At that age, gender barely matters. And that way, every gamer will be able to see themselves in him/her.”
Sadie nodded. “Cool,” Sadie said. “I can live with that.”
Marx came onstage as Orsino, to deliver the opening speech of the play: “If music be the food of love, play on.” But, by then, Sadie wasn’t paying attention to Marx, their benefactor, or the play. She was dreaming about the storm she would make.
* * *
—
After the show, they went to dinner with Marx’s father at the restaurant in his hotel. “You already know Sam, and this is Sam’s partner, Sadie Green,” Marx introduced them. “They’re the ones whose video game I’m producing.”
Sam had never mentioned to Sadie that Marx would be a producer on the game, which, of course, didn’t yet have either a title or a single line of code to its credit. Sadie intuited Sam’s reasoning—Marx was giving them the apartment, and the apartment was certainly a kind of equity investment. Still, she felt resentful that she and Sam had never discussed it, and for the next several minutes, she found herself unable to concentrate on the conversation.
Ryu Watanabe would turn out to be far more interested in the nascent game than he was in the play his son had been in. Around the time of Marx’s birth, Watanabe-san, a Princeton-educated economist, had left the academic world to get rich. He had succeeded. His portfolio included a chain of convenience stores, a medium-sized cell phone company, and a variety of other international investments. He told them he regretted that he had missed an early opportunity to invest in Nintendo in the 1970s. “They were just a playing-card company,” Watanabe-san said, with a self-deprecating laugh. “Hanafuda. For aunties and little children, you know?” Nintendo’s most successful product before they made Donkey Kong was, indeed, a deck of hanafuda playing cards.
“What’s hanafuda?” Sam asked.
“Plastic cards. Quite small and thick, with flowers and scenes of nature,” Watanabe-san said.
“Oh!” Sam said. “I know these! I used to play them with my grandmother, but we didn’t call them hanafuda. I think the game we played was called Stop-Go?”
“Yes,” Watanabe-san said. “In Japan, the game most people play with hanafuda is called Koi Koi, which means…”
“Come come,” Marx filled in.
“Good boy,” Watanabe-san said. “You haven’t forgotten all your Japanese.”
“It’s funny,” Sam said. “I always assumed the game was Korean.” He turned to Sadie. “Do you remember those little flower cards Bong Cha used to bring to the hospital?”
“Yes,” she said, distracted. She was still thinking about Marx and the producer credit, so she didn’t even know what she was saying yes to. She decided to change the subject. She turned to Marx’s father. “Mr. Watanabe, what did you think of the play?”
“The storm,” Watanabe-san said, “was terrific.”
“Much better than the duke,” Marx said.
“I loved it, too,” Sadie said.
“It reminded me of my childhood,” Watanabe-san said. “I’m not like Marx here. I’m not a city boy. I was born in a small town on the west coast of Japan, and every year, we waited for the great rains, which always came in the summer. As a child, my greatest fear was that I, or my father, who owned a small fleet of fishing boats, would be washed away to sea.”
Sadie nodded and exchanged a look with Sam.
“What conspiracy is this?” Watanabe-san said, smiling.
“Well,” Sam said. “That’s how our game begins, actually.”
“A child is washed out to sea,” Sadie said. Once she said it, she knew she would have to do it. “And the rest of the game is how the child gets back home.”
“Yes.” Watanabe-san nodded. “This is a classic story.”
When Sam had described the relationship between Marx and his father, he had said it was fraught, that Watanabe-san was demanding and sometimes even demeaning to Marx. Sadie saw no evidence of that. She found Marx’s father to be bright, interesting, and engaged.
Other people’s parents are often a delight.
* * *
—
The next day, Sam helped Sadie pack. To save money, Sadie would live in Marx’s room and sublet her apartment. “Are you going to put the art in storage?” Sam asked. Whenever he was in her room, he found Sadie’s art comforting, an extension of Sadie herself: the Hokusai wave, the Duane Hanson “Tourists,” the Sam Masur maze.
Sadie stopped packing and stood in front of the Hokusai wave, hands on her hips. In the three hours since they’d been at it, Sam had come to realize that, while she was a wonderful person, she was a terrible packer. Each decision required extensive deliberation—which clothes? Which cords? Which computer hardware? It had taken ninety minutes to go through her relatively small bookshelf: Did Sam think she would finally have time to read Chaos this summer? Did Sam want to read it? Oh, he had already read it. Well then, she should probably take it, unless he had a copy, in which case she could read his and store hers. And then she would pick up A Brief History of Time, and fondly pat its cover. Maybe I’ll read it again this summer? And then, Hackers. Have you read this, Sam? It’s so good. Hackers has a whole section on the Williamses. You know, Sierra games? King’s Quest. Leisure Suit Larry. We used to love those games. Sam was beginning to think it would have been easier if she’d taken everything.