Sadie’s eyes grew wide. She had never told him about the handcuffs. “How do you know about that?”
“Christ, Sadie, it was obvious. You had welts around your wrists for, like, two years. Marx and I used to—”
“You’re such an incredible asshole. Sometimes, I hate you.”
Sam realized he might have gone too far. “Sadie, I shouldn’t have said that last thing. Please. Do you remember that day in your old apartment at MIT? You said we would forgive each other, no matter what we did or what we said.”
“I didn’t know what I was agreeing to,” Sadie said. “I was young and stupid.”
“You’ve never been stupid.”
Sadie turned away from Sam. “Did you ever ask yourself why I was depressed?”
“I…I thought you’d broken up with your boyfriend. That’s what your roommate said, I think. I didn’t even know it was Dov.”
“Yet,” she said. “You didn’t know yet. But yes, it was Dov. But that’s not the reason I was depressed.” She pulled her head to her knees, her head buried under the habit of her hair. “Everyone thinks Ichigo is about you, but it’s really about me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ichigo is about a boy who has been lost at sea, but it’s also about a mother who has lost her child. I never had a child, but I might have…” She turned away from him. She hadn’t told anyone about the abortion, not Dov, not Alice, not Freda, and even now, she struggled to say the word to Sam.
Sometimes, it seemed as if it had never happened. On a snowy day in January, she had taken the train to a clinic in Back Bay. They had told her to bring a friend, but she went alone. The whole thing had taken an hour; the procedure itself, ten minutes. The nurse had warned her about possible pain, but she had felt nothing. （She wouldn’t even end up bleeding as much as she did for a regular period.） She rode the T back home, and that night, she went out for drinks with her roommate. She had a White Russian, a rum and Coke, and a seven and seven, treacly college-girl drinks, and when she returned to her apartment, she passed out in her bed. At first, the roommate had thought she was hungover, but after Sadie had been in bed a week, the roommate finally demanded, “What’s wrong with you?”
“I broke up with Dov,” Sadie had lied.
“Good riddance.”
Sadie had been in bed for eleven days when Sam showed up in her room, demanding to talk about Solution.
“I felt so ashamed,” Sadie said. “And maybe that’s why I let him do the things he did.”
“Sadie.” Sam’s voice was filled with tenderness and love for her. “Sadie, why didn’t you ever say?”
“Because we never say anything real to each other. We play games, and we talk about games, and we talk about making games, and we don’t know each other at all.”
He was about to tell her that that was bullshit, that no two people had ever shared more of their lives together. That if she didn’t know him, no one knew him, and he might as well not exist. But at that moment, Sam started to feel the phantom pain. He hadn’t had an episode in several months, and he didn’t want to have one right now, in Sadie’s apartment. He didn’t want to be weak and vulnerable when she hated him this much. He had become practiced at sensing the signs of it: the tension in his jaw and his forehead, the hyperawareness of every scent （the ocean, Sadie’s hand cream, rotting fruit in a garbage can outside）， the bile in his throat, the electric pulses up his spine, the throb, the ache, the pulse of the missing limb. He opened his backpack, and he took out a joint. He lit it and then he inhaled deeply.
Sadie observed him, suddenly bemused, as if she were watching an animal do something unexpected: an elephant paint a picture, a pig use a calculator.
“You don’t mind if I smoke in here?” Sam said.
“Do what you want,” Sadie said. She stood up to open the gauzy cotton curtains and the window behind them. The sun was setting over Clownerina. “Since when do you smoke pot?”
Sam inhaled and then he shrugged.
She returned to the couch, positioning herself as far away from him as she could. The tendrils of smoke reached across the sofa to her, like sepulchral fingers beckoning, and a pleasant haze began to fill the room, turning everything that had been sharp, soft-focused. The pot’s miasma was strong and spicy, and despite herself, Sadie could feel herself mellowing.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Some kind of sinsemilla,” he said. “I don’t remember the name.” He did remember the name. It was one of those puerile names that growers gave pot—Bugs Bunny, Magic Kitten, Rollergirl—as if the only reason anyone smoked pot was for childish hijinks. He didn’t want to say the name out loud in that moment.
She shifted closer to him and she reached for the joint, palm up. Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own—the precise pattern of the lines that made up the grid of her palm, the slim fingers with the purplish veins at the knuckles, the particular creamy olive hue of her skin, her delicate wrist, pinkish, with a penumbral callus that must have come from Dov, the white gold bracelet she wore that he knew had been a gift from Freda on her twelfth birthday. How could she honestly think he wouldn’t know about the handcuffs? He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her hands as her fingers flew across a keyboard or jabbed at a controller. Tell me I don’t know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.
“Sam?” she said.
He passed her the joint.
V
PIVOTS
1
Everyone knew Love Doppelg?ngers was a terrible title, but no one knew what to call it instead. They had lived with the title for so long that it had almost become good by sheer virtue of repetition and familiarity. It was not, in fact, good. As Sam said to Marx, “Love Doppelg?ngers is an excellent title if we want twelve people to play this game.” Unfair couldn’t afford that. After the modest performance of Both Sides, Love Doppelg?ngers needed to work commercially.
The one person who didn’t know Love Doppelg?ngers was terrible: Simon Freeman, the person who had come up with it. Simon had studied German in school and had an adolescent obsession with all things Kafka. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” Simon said, feeling offended at Sam’s utter certainty that it was terrible. “Why won’t it work?”
“No one knows what a doppelg?nger is,” Sam said.
“Lots of people know what a doppelg?nger is!” Simon defended his title.
“Maybe not enough people know what a doppelg?nger is,” Marx amended Sam.
Sadie thought she’d quite possibly lose her mind if one more person said doppelg?nger.
“If kids know one German word, it’s ‘doppelg?nger,’？” Simon said.
“What kids are these?” Sam said. “Are they all in AP English?”
“Well, then, they can learn,” Simon said. “We can put a definition on the cover, a footnote—”
“A footnote? Are you kidding? You know what says, Get ready for a great time gaming? A cover with a footnote,” Sam said.