When they arrived in Tokyo, both Marx and Sadie were jet-lagged. They slept two or three hours, and then, independently, they both woke up and passed the quiet predawn hours working, which to them often meant gaming.
For the holidays, Simon and Ant had given Sadie a Game Boy. She hadn’t had time to use it until the trip to Tokyo, and the first game she played on it was Harvest Moon. Harvest Moon is a farming, role-playing game: You are a farmer whose job is to raise crops, find a wife, make friends with people in the community. It was one of the first, if not the first, farming games. Sadie found its simplicity reminiscent of what she and Alice had liked about Oregon Trail. The game was gentle, peaceful. It was the opposite of a game like Dead Sea—it was a protected world in which nothing bad would ever happen to you.
Down the hall, on the same floor of the hotel, Marx was playing EverQuest on his PC laptop. EverQuest was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, known by the bulky acronym MMORPG. EverQuest is a riff on Dungeons & Dragons, and like D&D, its emphasis is on building characters. Marx had spent more hours than he cared to admit customizing his avatar, a half-elf bard named Hella Behemoth. It reminded Marx of his days playing D&D with Sam, though nostalgia was not Marx’s primary reason for playing it. Marx was interested in EverQuest because it was the first MMORPG to utilize a 3D graphics engine, and he was hoping the next iteration of Counterpart High would have an online component, too.
Around 5 a.m. （still too early to go to breakfast）， Sadie knocked on Marx’s hotel room door. He had sent a group email about CPH2 around 4:45, so she knew he was awake. “Have you played Harvest Moon? It’s not the kind of thing we make, but I’m finding it pretty addictive.”
Marx and Sadie traded devices. “I’m trusting you with Hella Behemoth,” Marx said. Sadie sat beside Marx on his bed. They gamed companionably for maybe an hour or two, until breakfast opened. It was six in the morning, and the city was still sleeping, the only sound the occasional grumble of one of their stomachs.
At breakfast, they heaped their plates with food, and then they went to a quiet corner of the dining room to eat.
They spoke of whether Tokyo Ghost School was something Sadie and Sam would want to work on, if Morikami made them an offer. “Maybe?” Sadie said. “But wouldn’t it be better for Simon and Ant? High school is their thing.”
“Well,” Marx said gently. “Simon and Ant are busy.”
Sadie laughed ruefully. “Sam doesn’t know we’re the B-team now.”
“Never,” Marx said.
They spoke of Zoe.
“Are you devastated?” Sadie asked.
“Not as much as you’d think,” Marx said.
“I’m devastated,” Sadie said. “She was my best L.A. friend.”
They spoke of Both Sides.
“Are you devastated?” Marx said.
“I want to say, ‘Not as much as you’d think.’ I want to be blasé like you.” Sadie paused. “I am devastated, but more what I feel is ashamed. I got you and Sam and everyone to follow me down the road of making this. And I completely believed. I completely believed it would work. I feel like the guy who built the Titanic.”
“You are not naval architect Thomas Andrews Jr.”
“I am naval architect Thomas Andrews Jr.”
Sadie and Marx laughed.
“Both Sides is not the Titanic,” Marx said. “No one died playing Both Sides.”
“Just my soul. A little,” she said. “Maybe the worst part is, I don’t trust myself anymore. I’m not sure my instincts are good.”
Marx reached across the table and he took her hand in his. “Sadie, I promise you: your instincts are good.”
* * *
—
On the second night of their trip, they went to a Noh theater, with Marx’s father. Noh had been Watanabe-san’s idea—it was the kind of thing Japanese brought their esteemed gaijin visitors to do. The performance had come with a printed English libretto, but Sadie misplaced hers before the play had even begun, and she found herself quite lost. She understood neither the conventions of Noh nor the language. Marx would occasionally whisper poetic, cryptic commentary into her ear: “The fisherman’s ghost was killed for fishing in the wrong river.” Or “The drum is silent, and the gardener is killing himself.”
Once she resigned herself to not understanding anything, she enjoyed Marx’s commentary and the plays themselves. The theater was warm and smelled of lacquered wood and incense, and it felt like a dream to her. As Sadie was still quite jet-lagged and additionally tired from a long day of meetings, it was an effort to stay awake. She felt her eyes begin to close, and then, not wanting to be a rude white person, she would sternly wake herself.
After the show, they had dinner with Marx’s father at a nearby tempura place. Sadie had not seen Watanabe-san since that long-ago dinner to celebrate Marx’s performance in Twelfth Night.
Watanabe-san and Sadie exchanged gifts. She brought him a pair of carved wooden Ichigo chopsticks that their Japanese distributor had had made to celebrate the release of the second Ichigo in Japan.
In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process—its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman’s slate appears to be blank. “I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you,” Watanabe-san said. “This is by Hokusai’s daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survive, but I think she is even better than the father.”
“Thank you,” Sadie said.
Watanabe-san bowed deeply to Sadie when they parted. “Thank you, Sadie. Without you and Sam, Marx might have become an actor.”
“Marx was a fantastic actor,” Sadie defended him.
“He’s better at what he’s doing now,” Watanabe-san insisted.
Sadie and Marx took a cab back to the hotel. “Do you mind what your father said?” she asked him.
“No,” Marx said. “I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
“Are you saying I get to quit making games?”
“No,” Marx said. “You’re stuck. You’re doing this forever.”
* * *
—
On the third morning of their trip, early, before any of their meetings, Marx took Sadie to the Nezu Shrine. The Nezu Shrine has a tunnel of red torii gates for visitors to pass through. Sadie asked what it meant when you passed under the gates, and Marx said in Shinto tradition, a gate represented passing from the mundane to the sacred. But Marx was not Shinto, so he did not entirely know. “I used to come here when I was a teenager and I had a problem I needed to solve.”
“What problems did you ever have?” Sadie said.