“I adore him. I want to kill him. It’s normal. It’s complicated,” Sadie said. “I don’t want to talk about Dov.” She yawned, and she shifted over on the sofa to make room for Sam. “Well, you’re here now. You may as well stay. Marx’ll kill me if I send you home in this weather.”
Sam sat down next to Sadie. She turned on the TV, and they watched Letterman for a while. When stupid pet tricks came on, Sadie pressed mute, and Sam turned to her, waiting for her to speak. She studied Sam’s moon face, which was so familiar to her. It was almost like looking at herself, but through a magical mirror that allowed her to see her whole life. When she looked at him, she saw Sam, but she also saw Ichigo and Alice and Freda and Marx and Dov and all the mistakes she had made, and all her secret shames and fears, and all the best things she had done, too. Sometimes, she didn’t even like him, but the truth was, she didn’t know if an idea was worth pursuing until it had made its way through Sam’s brain, too. It was only when Sam said her own idea back to her—slightly modified, improved, synthesized, rearranged—that she could tell if it was good. She knew if she told him her new idea, it would instantly become his, too. They’d be walking down the aisle all over again, blithely stamping on another glass, come what may. She took a deep breath. “The game I want to make is called Both Sides.”
4
Sadie came up with the idea for Both Sides on the night Sam went missing, and she’d been turning it over in her head ever since. It wasn’t much then. A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea. When she’d been retracing the walk she’d taken with him on that promise-filled dawn, she had been struck by how the exact same route could look and feel so different. One minute, Sam was there, the game was completed, and the world was filled with potential. Twelve hours later, Sam was gone, the game was far from her thoughts, and the world was grim and murderous. It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same? For a moment, she felt dangerously untethered from her body and from reality, and she had to sit down to feel the ground beneath her, before she could continue searching for Sam.
She had had feelings like this before. During her senior year of high school, a formerly close friend had died from an eating disorder. Long before Sadie knew about the eating disorder, Sadie and the friend had sometimes played what they referred to as eating games. The friend would declare it “lettuce day” or “granola bar day” or “canned soup day” or “matzoh day” and she and the friend would try to eat nothing but that item for twenty-four hours. At fourteen, Sadie had thought it was a joke, and the one-item eating game appealed to her organized and obsessive nature. She had not realized that this game meant something else, something ultimately deadly, to the friend. It was Alice who finally told her, “This is screwed up, Sadie. You can’t go a whole day eating lettuce.” The game ended not long after—Sadie’s participation in it at least—and Sadie and the friend drifted apart.
At the friend’s funeral, there was an open casket. When Sadie looked in the coffin, she almost felt as if she were looking at herself. She felt as if she had died, as if she were the one who was supposed to have died, and that somehow, she and the friend had switched places. She was so disturbed, she ran out of the service, apologizing to the friend’s ruined parents on the way out.
On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.
But Sadie didn’t say these things to Sam.
“Have you ever heard of Colossal Cave Adventure?” Sadie began.
“Sure, but I’ve never played it. It’s old-school, right?”
“It’s ancient school,” she said. “Entirely text, no graphics.”
“You’re not saying you want to make a game like that, are you?”
“No,” Sadie said. “Of course not. But there’s this one part of the game that haunts me. You know how you have to go through all these caves?”
“Right, I assumed.”
“So, it’s a huge pain because you have to go back to the cabin at the beginning to access your inventory. In order to solve the problem of going from the caves to the cabin, the programmers invented this special command, Xyzzy.”
“Zizzy?” Sam repeated.
“Yes. It’s spelled X-Y-Z-Z-Y. When you use the Xyzzy command, you can magically switch between two places.”
“Sounds like a cheat.” Sam hated games that made a physical process too easy.
“No,” Sadie said, “it’s genius, actually. It’s the best part of the game, because it acknowledges that the world you’re playing is not the real world. And since you’re not in the real world, you don’t have to move as if you are in the real world. But that’s what I want our game to be like. I want it to be like Xyzzy. Only instead of toggling between two places like in Adventure, the game should toggle between two worlds. Like, in one world, you’re this ordinary person living an ordinary life, and in the other world, you’re the hero. And the game lets you play both sides. I haven’t worked everything out yet. It’s early.”
Sam took off his glasses and set them on the coffee table. “I get it,” he said. “So, the two worlds should be different stylistically, and have different kinds of game mechanics.”
“Yes,” Sadie said. “Exactly. It’s like Oz and Kansas, if Dorothy could switch between them the whole time.”
“One side is like the new Zelda and the graphics are 3D, first person, high quality, the kind of thing that eats up a hard drive. And the other side is simple. Not eighties arcade simple, but a throwback to Sierra-style Kings Quest IV, or what have you. Third-person perspective. Simple enough so that you could possibly play it online.”
“Right,” Sadie said.
“What’s the story?”
“Maybe it’s about a girl. She has a bad home life. She’s bullied at school. But in the other world, she’s—”
“Hold on,” Sam said, “I’ll take notes.”
* * *
—
The next afternoon, Sam took a cab back to Kennedy Street. He and Sadie had stayed up all night, and he felt tired and content. He’d been away promoting the Ichigo games so much that he hadn’t had time to realize how much he had missed their collaboration. Sadie may have thought Sam had been on a vacation, but promoting their games had been real work. Some of it had been fun—the interviews with the more observant gaming journalists; the Ichigo mascot Opus had made for Game Developers Conference; the children who had begun to dress up like Ichigo and Gomibako; the fans who couldn’t get enough of Sam Masur, the creator who looked just like his creation! Most of promotion had been a grind. It had been telling the same stories over and over again but acting as if he were telling them for the first time. It had been listening to stupid people make stupid observations about Ichigo, their baby, and having to act as if these observations were delightful, trenchant, and original. It had been dragging out his personal traumas for the amusement of the game-buying public. It had been seedy sales conferences. It had been signings in run-down game stores in strip malls. It had been smiling for photographs until he had a headache. It had been endless airplane travel and rental car lines. It had been his foot hurting more and more as the year went on, and Sam trying to ignore it. Sam was practiced at disregarding pain, but two weeks earlier, the foot had begun to bleed. Blood was harder to overlook. He’d been at a promotional event at the FAO Schwarz in New York City. A little kid had tugged at Sam’s sleeve. “Mr. Ichigo, you’re bleeding.” Sam looked down. Indeed, his white tennis shoe had a large bloody spot right in the middle.