They hadn’t even exchanged phone numbers, he thought desperately. His mind cycled through the ways a person could find a person in 1995. In the old days, when Sam was a child, people could be lost forever, but people were not as easily lost as they once were. Increasingly, all you needed was the desire to convert a person from a digital conjecture to the unruly flesh. So, he comforted himself that even though the figure of his old friend was growing smaller and smaller in the train station, the world was trending in the same direction—what, with globalization, the information superhighway, and the like. It would be easy to find Sadie Green. He could guess her email—MIT emails followed the same pattern. He could search the MIT directory online. He could call the Computer Science Department—he was assuming computer science. He could call her parents, Steven Green and Sharyn Friedman-Green, in California.
And yet, he knew himself and he knew he was the type of person that never called anyone, unless he was absolutely certain the advance would be welcomed. His brain was treacherously negative. He would invent that she had been cold toward him, that she hadn’t even had a class that day, that she had simply wanted to get away from Sam. His brain would insist that if she’d wanted to see him, she would have given him a way to contact her. He would conclude that, to Sadie, Sam represented a painful period of her life, and so, of course, she didn’t want to see him again. Or, maybe, as he’d often suspected, he meant nothing to her—he had been a rich girl’s good deed. He would dwell on the mention of a boyfriend in Harvard Square. He would track down her number, her email address, her physical address, and he would never use any of them. And so, with a phenomenological heaviness, he realized that this very well could be the last time he ever saw Sadie Green, and he tried to memorize the details of what she looked like, walking away, in a train station, on a bitter cold day in December. Beige cashmere hat, mittens, and scarf. Camel-colored three-quarter-length peacoat, most definitely not from the Army Navy Surplus Store. Blue jeans, quite worn, irregularly fraying bootcut at the bottom. Black sneakers with a white stripe. Cognac leather crossbody messenger bag that was as wide as she was, and overstuffed, the arm of an ecru sweater sticking out the side. Her hair—shiny, lightly damp, just past her shoulder blades. There was no echt Sadie in this view, he decided. She looked indistinguishable from any number of smart, well-maintained college girls in the train station.
On the verge of disappearing, she turned, and she ran back to him. “Sam!” she said. “Do you still game?”
“Yes,” Sam answered with too much enthusiasm. “Definitely. All the time.”
“Here.” She pressed a 3.25-inch disk into his hands. “This is my game. You’re probably super busy but give it a play if you have the time. I’d love to know what you think.”
She ran back into the train, and Sam trailed after her.
“Wait! Sadie! How do I get in touch with you?”
“My email’s on the disk,” Sadie said. “In the Readme.”
The train doors closed, returning Sadie to her square. Sam looked down at the disk: the title of the game was Solution. She had handwritten the label. He would know her handwriting anywhere.
* * *
—
When he got back to the apartment later that night, he didn’t immediately install Solution, though he did set it next to the disk drive of his computer. He found not playing Sadie’s game to be a great motivator, though, and he worked on his junior paper proposal, which was already a month overdue, and which would have, at that point, waited until after the holidays. His topic, after much wringing of hands, was “Alternative Approaches to the Banach-Tarski Paradox in the Absence of the Axiom of Choice,” and as he was quite bored writing the proposal, he actively feared the drudgery that writing the paper would entail. He had begun to suspect that while he had an obvious aptitude for math, he was not particularly inspired by it. His adviser in the Mathematics Department, Anders Larsson, who would go on to win a Fields Medal, had said as much in that afternoon’s meeting. His parting words: “You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”
Sam ate takeout Italian food with Marx—Marx over-ordered so that Sam would have leftovers to eat while Marx was out of town. Marx re-extended an invitation to come skiing with him in Telluride over the holidays: “You really should come, and if it’s the skiing you’re worried about, everyone mostly hangs out in the lodge anyway.” Sam rarely had enough money to go home for the holidays, and so these invitations were extended and rejected at regular intervals. After dinner, Sam started the reading for his Moral Reasoning class （the class was studying the philosophy of the young Wittgenstein, the era before he’d decided he was wrong about everything）， and Marx organized himself to go away for the break. When Marx was finished packing, he wrote out a holiday card to Sam and left it on his desk, along with a fifty-dollar gift certificate to the brew house. That was when Marx came across the disk.
“What’s Solution?” Marx asked. He picked up the green disk and held it out to Sam.
“It’s my friend’s game,” Sam said.
“What friend?” Marx said. They had lived together for going on three years, and Marx had rarely known Sam to mention any friends.
“My friend from California.”
“Are you going to play it?”
“Eventually. It’ll probably suck. I’m only looking at it, as a favor.” Sam felt like he was betraying Sadie saying that, but it probably would suck.
“What’s it about?” Marx said.
“No idea.”
“Cool title, though.” Marx sat down at Sam’s computer. “I’ve got a couple of minutes. Should we boot it up?”
“Why not?” Though Sam had been planning to play alone, Marx and he gamed together with some regularity. They favored martial arts video games: Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Street Fighter. They also had a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that they picked up from time to time. The campaign, for which Sam was dungeon master, had been going on for over two years. Playing Dungeons & Dragons in a group of two people is a peculiar, intimate experience, and the existence of the campaign was kept a secret from everyone they knew.
Marx put the disk in the machine, and Sam installed it on his hard drive.
Several hours later, Sam and Marx were done with their first playthrough of Solution.
“What the hell was that?” Marx said. “I’m so late getting to Ajda’s place. She’s going to kill me.” Ajda was Marx’s latest paramour—a five-eleven squash player and occasional model from Turkey, an average résumé for one of Marx’s love interests. “I honestly thought we’d play for five minutes.”
Marx put on his coat—camel colored, like Sadie’s. “Your friend is sick as hell. And maybe, a genius. How do you know him again?”
2
On the day Sadie first met Sam, she had been banished from her older sister Alice’s hospital room. Alice was moody in the way of thirteen-year-olds, but she was also moody in the way of people who might be dying of cancer. Their mother, Sharyn, said that Alice should be given a great deal of latitude, that the dual storm fronts of puberty and illness were a lot for one body to grapple with. A great deal of latitude meant Sadie should go into the waiting area until Alice was no longer angry with her.