It will turn out that the driver had been speeding, but the accident won’t have been his fault. The streets were narrow—barely room enough for two cars to pass. He took the turn a bit wide and crashed his heavy sedan directly into the hood of Anna’s lightweight sports car, most of the impact on the driver’s side and on Sam’s left foot. How could that driver have been expected to know that a car was there? Why would a car be stopped just below Mulholland, without any lights on? How could he know a boy and his mother would be in that car?
From the passenger seat, Sam could see his mother’s face, illuminated by the other car’s headlights. Her skin had particles of glass on it, and she looked as if she were sparkling. He tried to reach for his mother to clear the glass from her face, but he found that his left leg was pinned against the dashboard. He felt no pain—that would come later—but he couldn’t get free enough to reach her face, and the constriction panicked him. He could smell her blood, mingling with her tuberose perfume, and he could see that her chest and abdomen were crushed by the caved-in dashboard. But it was the glass. It was the glass on his mother’s pretty face that disturbed him the most in that moment, and he tried again to reach for her to brush it off. He felt a strange shifting in the bones of his foot as he pulled for her. And with that last unsuccessful reach, he began to feel his body again. He began to shake violently, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. “Mom,” he said to the still-warm body next to him, “it hurts.” He craned his neck so that he could rest his head in the groove of her shoulder, and then he closed his eyes.
The man in the other car walked toward Sam in a daze. He called to them desperately. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there. I didn’t see you. Is everyone okay? Is everyone okay? Is anyone alive? Anyone?”
Sam opened his eyes: “I’m here.” These were the last words he would say until the day he encountered Sadie Green in the game room.
In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game. Sam, in the silent months after Anna’s death, would obsessively replay this scene in his head. If she doesn’t take the job on Press That Button! and if Anna can’t afford to buy the new car. If Anna buys the new car but drives directly home after dinner. If the first Anna Lee doesn’t jump from that building and if Anna never comes to Los Angeles. If Anna doesn’t stop driving after she hits the coyote. If Anna finds the emergency lights. If Anna never sleeps with George. If Sam is never born. There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.
6
The morning of Sam’s surgery, Sadie drove out to Venice to organize her office. Marx had brought in cheap tables and bookshelves, enough furniture so that they could get started working before the space was properly finished. The last box Sadie unpacked contained her collection of PC games, which she always kept on hand for reference. She arranged the games, which were in a combination of jewel cases and book-like cardboard containers, on the shelf: Commander Keen, Myst, Doom, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Leisure Suit Larry, The Colonel’s Bequest, Ultima, Warcraft, Monkey Island, The Oregon Trail, and three dozen others. At the bottom of the box was Dead Sea. She still loved Dead Sea even if her feelings about its creator were more complicated. She took the CD out of the package. Dov had signed it: To Sadie on her 20th, the sexiest, most brilliant girl in Adv. Games—Love, D.M.
Sadie had forgotten Dov had done that, and she wondered when the last time she’d looked at the disk was. Years, probably. The last time she could remember even seeing the disk was the day Marx and Sam had been playing Dead Sea. The day Sam had said, Our game should look like this.
Sadie clearly remembered Sam saying that he hadn’t known Dov was her boyfriend or her teacher. But if he had used this disk to play Dead Sea—and she knew that he had—he would have read this inscription. He wouldn’t have been able to miss it, and Sam never missed anything anyway. And if Sam had known that Dov was her boyfriend, had he turned to Dead Sea, not randomly, but specifically? Had he shown her the game because he’d wanted Sadie to go to Dov, because he knew she would go to Dov? And didn’t it follow that he would have guessed that the bad breakup she had had was with Dov, and that Sam hadn’t paused, even for one moment, to consider what going back to him would mean for her? How different would the last three years have been if Dov hadn’t had so much professional and personal power over her?
If it was true, it was absolutely a betrayal. Sam had wanted what he wanted, and he hadn’t cared what it would mean for Sadie. He had wanted Ulysses, in the same way he had wanted the deal with Opus, in the same way he didn’t truly care if Ichigo was a boy, in the same way he let everyone in the world believe Ichigo was his game, in the same way he had renewed their friendship for the sole purpose of making a game in the first place. She let herself think Sam was her friend, but Sam was no one’s friend. It wasn’t as if he was dishonest about it—when she told him she loved him, he never once said he loved her, too. She had made excuses for him—his absentee father, the death of his mother, his injury, his poverty, and the obvious insecurities these things had caused. But what if her mistake had been in imbuing Sam with emotions and sentiments that he was incapable of feeling?
Sadie sat down at the table in her office. She put the Dead Sea CD in her laptop. She skipped the haunting, opening cutscene—the plane crash inferno, where the Wraith becomes the lone survivor, scored to “Clair de lune.” She felt like killing something, so she went straight to the first level—the entrance to the underwater world, which looks like a Vegas lobby. The zombie in the plaid shirt and leather pants limped to the center of the lobby, and Sadie as the Wraith picked up the log. She walloped the zombie repeatedly in the head. Dov had done amazing things with blood spatter. For example, the Wraith could even see herself reflected in the blood of the zombie she had just killed. A small detail like that is a mind-blowing amount of extra work. Dead Sea is a great game, she thought.
Sadie was still playing Dead Sea when Marx poked his head in the office. “He’s out of surgery,” Marx said. “His grandfather said it went well.”
“Good news,” Sadie said. Her mind was black. The Wraith dropped the log and traded it for the hammer.
“I’m driving over now,” Marx said. “Is that Dead Sea?” The Wraith smashed a pregnant-looking zombie with the hammer. The hammer was so much more effective than the log.
“Yes.” The Wraith tested out the hammer by smashing a window.
Suddenly, the zombie’s baby crawled out of its dead zombie mother’s abdomen. The Wraith paused—for the briefest of moments—before she walloped the baby in the head. Blood and brain flotsam exploded across the screen.
“The first time I played Dead Sea,” Marx said, “this is where I died. I didn’t kill the baby fast enough, and it threw itself at my face.”
“People usually die there, or they die in the scene with the dog. Dov hates sentimentality.”