“For the record, I was resentful. I will always regret Space Camp. But Alice? Mapletown was all Sam. I had pretty much nothing to do with it.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Honestly, it was Sam. He made Mapletown; I made Myre Landing.”
“Well, whose idea was it to call the main character Alice?”
“Honestly, I don’t remember, but I think it was Sam’s.”
“I liked the whole game,” Alice said. “Truly.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m so proud of you.” Alice grabbed Sadie’s hand across the table. “But when Alice Ma dreams of her funeral, there’s a tombstone in the graveyard that reads ‘She died of dysentery.’ You must have put that there for me. That’s our joke.”
“Nope. Sam again. He’s kind of coopted that joke to tell you the truth.”
“Well, give Sam my compliments,” Alice said, as she paid the check. Alice always insisted on paying even though Sadie made more money. “Maybe I should invite him to the wedding?”
Alice was not the only person who preferred Mapletown to Myre Landing. Marx, who followed online discussion of all Unfair’s games, had found groups of gamers who avoided playing the Myre Landing side and only played the Mapletown side as much as possible. They called themselves Mapletownies. Although critics had generally preferred Myre Landing, the gamers had embraced Sam’s work. Marx did not discuss any of this with Sadie—Sadie, of course, already knew.
2
When he had booked the tickets to Tokyo, Marx had planned to go with Zoe, but two weeks before they were set to travel, Zoe received a fellowship to study opera in Italy. She claimed that she had not been the fellowship’s first choice, which was why she had been left with almost no time to pack up her California life. It had also derailed their trip to Tokyo.
Marx had left quite early to take her to the airport, considering that their house was only a twenty-minute drive. They were halfway there when traffic came to a complete stop.
“Do you think I should try to get off the freeway?” Marx asked.
“Maybe it’ll clear,” Zoe said. “We have plenty of time.”
“We do,” he agreed. “We have plenty of time.”
For the next five minutes, they volleyed this phrase back and forth to each other.
“We have plenty of time.”
“We have plenty of time.”
After ten minutes of saying it, they became aware of how often they were repeating the phrase, and it became a joke.
“We have so much time.”
“So much time. I won’t even know what to do with this never-ending span of time.”
“You’ll have so much time, you’ll be one of those people getting a massage in the middle of the airport.”
“I’ll be looking at the airport art.”
“You’ll probably have time to visit another terminal.”
“Another? I’ll ride that party bus and I’ll visit every terminal.” Abruptly, Zoe began to cry.
“What is it?” Marx said.
“Tension,” she said, waving her hand. “I’m stressed about leaving, I guess.”
Marx squeezed her hand.
“I’m getting off the freeway,” he said. “We can get back on closer to LAX.” Marx changed lanes.
“I think we should stay where we are,” Zoe said. “It could be worse on the surface roads, and we’re almost there. It can’t take much longer. And don’t they say that changing lanes never makes a difference anyway? It takes the same amount of time whether you change lanes or not.”
“I’m not changing lanes,” he said. “I’m rerouting us. If I’m wrong, we’ll still have plenty of time.” Marx changed lanes again. “You’ll be getting a pedicure in Terminal One before you know it.”
“I’ll be eating a sugar pretzel and waiting in the Starbucks line.”
“You’ll be buying an inflatable pillow and a snow globe.”
“I think we should break up,” she said.
Once she had said this, he recognized that the strange feeling in the air between them for the last several months was denouement. After Both Sides had come out, there had been a series of mundane skirmishes. She had accused him of spending too much time at the office, something that she had never cared about before. She accused him of loving Sam more than he did her. （She did not mention Sadie.） She had yelled at him for being bourgeois—for caring too much about Danish furniture and wine ratings. （He had spent some time shopping for a dining room table, but the wine struck him as unfair—he preferred beer.） Suddenly, she seemed to loathe California, complaining about allergies and vapid people and bad theater. And then the arguments had ceased as abruptly as they had begun. A month later, she informed him about the opera fellowship in Italy. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“You don’t love me,” she said.
“Zoe, of course I love you.”
“But you don’t love me enough,” she said.
“What’s enough?” Marx asked.
“Enough is…Maybe this is selfish, but I don’t want to love more than I am loved. And I don’t want to be with someone who loves something or someone more than me.”
“Why are you speaking in riddles? Say what you mean. If you know something I don’t know, I’d love to be told what it is. And I like our life, Zoe. Why do you want to burn everything to the ground?”
“Like,” she said. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and she pushed her chin out, as if resolving something. “It’s my fault. Let’s not make this some awful thing,” she said. “We’ve had good times, right? My trip to Italy is a natural break, and if at the other end of it, it becomes a permanent one, then…”
The drive ended up taking four times as long as it usually did, but Zoe did make her flight. It was the first time Marx had ever truly been broken up with. He knew he should be devastated, but what he felt was relief. The relationship, without him noticing, had been the longest one he had ever had. He had seen no reason to end it. He had never tired of coming home to their place and finding her naked, playing some new instrument. Why end something that worked over the vague notion that he could love someone more deeply than he loved Zoe, who was by every measure fantastic? It was a strange moment in Marx’s personal development. He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet, and he considered it a sign of his own maturity that he had not thought to end things with Zoe. But his disdain for his former itinerancy had made it so he could not recognize the reasons a person should stay.
* * *
—
Had it only been a visit to his family, Marx might have canceled the trip to Japan, but he had also scheduled business meetings. Marx first asked Sam if he wanted to go to Japan with him. Sam said he didn’t want to travel, which had become Sam’s standard answer since they’d moved to California. And when Sam declined, he asked Sadie. Sadie, too, was going to decline, but then she thought, Why not go? She and Sam weren’t getting anywhere on the new game, and Sadie had never been to Japan before. Marx thought it would be helpful for some of their creative team to be present at the meetings, which were about the possibility of Unfair collaborating with Morikami Publishing to adapt the popular Osaka Ghost School anime series into a game. Morikami was interested in working with an American partner, and they liked Unfair because of the work they had done on Ichigo, which seemed to be agreeably Western and Eastern to them.