“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.”