“I was hoping you’d say that,” Sam said. “Because that’s what I want to do, too. Marx?”
“Sam, are you sure?”
Sam nodded. “I’m sure. But the big question is: Might we keep using the apartment?”
“You can have your room back, of course,” Sadie said to Marx. “I’ll find somewhere else to stay, but it would be great if we could keep working here.”
“Where will you stay?” Sam asked.
“At Dov’s,” she said. There was no drama in her voice. “He’s producing with us now, and he said he had an extra room that I could use.” Everyone knew this was a lie.
That fall, Marx was the only one of them who returned to school. Due to his producing obligations, it was also the lone year that he wasn’t in any plays. In truth, theater, far more than classes, had always taken up the bulk of Marx’s time.
5
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.