—
When Sadie woke up, Marx and Sam were gathered in front of Sam’s computer. “Look at this,” Sam said. “This is sort of what the storm should look like, right?”
Sadie had never spoken to Sam about Dov, and she had never asked him if he had played Dead Sea. She casually sidled up to the PC to look at her ex-lover’s game, as if she hadn’t seen it a hundred times before. “It’s a bit moodier than what I thought we were going for,” Sadie said.
“Of course,” Sam said. “I don’t mean it literally looks like this. But the quality he gives to light. Do you see the refraction through the water? Do you see the airiness? The atmosphere?”
“I do,” Sadie said. She sat down next to Sam. “You’re going to need to pick up that log,” Sadie said to Marx, who was playing the game. “You’re going to need it to brain that zombie.”
“Thanks,” Marx said.
“His engine is called Ulysses, by the way,” Sadie said. “And he designed it himself.”
“Who’s he?” Sam asked.
“The designer and programmer. His name is Dov Mizrah. I used to know him a bit.”
“How?” Sam said.
“He was my professor,” Sadie said.
“Well, why don’t you call him up?” Sam said. “If you’re still struggling with building the engine, I mean…”
“Right,” Sadie said. “I probably should.”
“Maybe he’d have tips?” Sam added. “Or maybe we could even use his graphics engine?”
“I don’t know, Sam.”
“If I can ease your mind. We’re doing so many things with this game already. I don’t think that every last bit of the programming has to be original. You have this purity thing, but seriously, no one will care. There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all. The game is going to be completely original because we made it. If you have access to a tool that will help, there is no reason not to use that tool. Our game isn’t going to be anything like Dead Sea, so what difference does it make in the end?”
In the morning, Sadie emailed Dov, and it turned out he was back in Cambridge, teaching the games seminar in the fall and completing work on Dead Sea II. He invited her to come down to his studio, and so she went.
When she arrived at Dov’s studio, she held out her hand for him to shake, and he pulled her into an embrace. “I’m so glad you emailed me, Sadie Green! I was planning to email you, but things got too crazy. I’m almost done with Dead Sea II. Last time I ever do a sequel. How are you?” he said.
She told him about Ichigo.
“Good title. This is what you should be doing,” he said, maybe a dash of condescension in his voice. “You should be making your own games.”
Sadie took some of Sam’s concept art out of her messenger bag and she showed it to him. “Whoa, trippy,” Dov said. Then she took out her laptop so that he could play the first level. “This is fucking fantastic work,” Dov said. He never gave compliments that he didn’t mean, and Sadie almost felt like crying. It was frankly embarrassing how much his approval still meant to her. “I like this.” Dov looked at Sadie. He set the concept art on the desk. He looked in her eyes, and then he nodded. “You’re here for Ulysses, aren’t you?”
At first, Sadie was going to deny it, claim she wanted some tips about building her own engine. “Yes,” she said. “I want Ulysses.”
“You know what I always say about making your own engines.”
She nodded.
“But I can see how Ulysses would be a perfect fit for what you and your colleague—what’s his name?”
“Sam Masur.”
“What you and Mr. Masur are trying to accomplish. And how can I deny my Sadie when she comes to me in need?”
It was that simple. Dov gave her the engine, and in exchange, he became a producer and equity partner on Ichigo, bonding him to her professional life forever.
When Dov came down to the apartment to help Sadie set up Ulysses, Marx hated him immediately: the leather pants, the tight black T-shirt, the heavy silver jewelry, the immaculate goatee, the eyebrows permanently in the shape of circumflexes, the topknot. “The poor man’s Chris Cornell,” Marx whispered, referencing the lead singer of the grunge band Soundgarden.
“Chris Cornell?” Sam said. “I think he looks like a satyr.”
But it was Dov’s cologne that Marx loathed. It wasn’t a cheap cologne, but as soon as he came into the room, his scent was everywhere, and even after he left, and they opened every window in the apartment, Marx could still smell him. The room felt murky and musky, oppressive with pine, patchouli, and cedar. It was, he felt, an aggressively male cologne, a roofie of a cologne.
Marx also felt that Dov was too physically intimate with Sadie. When Dov had been at Sadie’s workstation, his hand kept drifting over to touch her and invade her space. The hand rested on her shoulder, the hand drifted onto her thigh, the hand on her keyboard, the hand on her mouse. Sadie, laughing with a strange, brittle tone. Dov, brushing strands of hair out of her eyes. Marx recognized it as the intimacy of ex-lovers.
Marx pulled Sam into the bedroom. “You didn’t say that Sadie used to be Dov’s girlfriend,” Marx said to Sam.
Sam shrugged. “I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“We don’t talk about those kinds of things,” Sam said.
“I mean, he was her professor, too, right? That’s an abuse of power. Don’t you think that’s relevant if he’s going to be a producer with us?”
“I don’t actually,” Sam said. “Sadie’s a grown-up.”
“Barely,” Marx said.
Marx poked his head out of the room, so he could continue to spy on Sadie and Dov.
Dov was doing most of the talking. “If I were you,” Dov said, “I would take the next semester off.”
Sadie was listening, nodding.
“You and your crew. You’ve got something here,” Dov said. “I really believe that.”
“But school…” Sadie’s voice was barely audible. “My parents…”
“Who cares about any of that? No one cares if you’re a good girl anymore, Sadie. I want to empower you to shed your conventional notions, once and for all. The point of your education has been to do exactly the thing that you’re currently doing. Get the bulk of the programming done while you’re in the flow, and then you can finish school in the spring and the summer, while you finish the sound and debug.”
More listening, more nodding.
“Do you need me, your former professor, to order you?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“I’ll help you,” Dov said.
“Thank you, Dov.”
“I’m always here for you, brilliant one.”
He took her in his hirsute arms and he pressed her face deep into his chest. Marx wondered how she could bear the stench.
* * *
—
Two weeks later, on the day she finished work on the storm, Sadie informed Marx and Sam that she was taking off the semester to finish the game. Implementing Ulysses meant redoing a significant portion of the work she’d already done, and she didn’t want to lose momentum. “You don’t have to take the semester off,” she said to them, “but I’m going to.”