“Oh, the usual angst. I didn’t feel like anyone understood me. I wasn’t Japanese enough, but I wasn’t anything else either.”
“Poor Marx.”
“Don’t pass under the gates too quickly,” Marx warned. “It works best for me when I go very slowly.”
Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. （Until, of course, there wasn’t.）
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate anyway?
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.
Marx was waiting for her, and he was smiling. He was standing in the center of the path, his arms held slightly open. How nice it was to have Marx waiting for her. He was a perfect traveling companion.
“Thank you,” she said. She bowed her head to him.
* * *
—
On the fifth night of their trip, they had dinner with Marx’s mother at her apartment. Marx’s parents were not divorced, but they lived separately. Marx’s mother was a textile designer and teacher. She wore stylish, shapeless, boldly patterned garments and had her hair cut in a severe bob. The dress she was wearing on that evening was a cotton polka-dot print that precisely matched the curtains that were behind her.
Mrs. Watanabe had gotten the wrong idea about who Sadie was. She thought Sadie was Marx’s longtime girlfriend, and that Marx and Sadie were on the verge of marriage. “No, Mom, this is Sadie, not Zoe. Sadie is my business partner.”
Marx’s mother took a long look at Sadie, and then she said, “Are you certain?”
Marx said, “I’m too dumb for Sadie, Mom.”
“It’s true,” Sadie said. “Marx is pretty, but shallow.”
Under the table, she squeezed his hand.
But Mrs. Watanabe was relentless. “Do you have a boyfriend, Sadie?”
“I don’t,” Sadie admitted. “At the moment.”
“You should ask Sadie out, Marx. The window of opportunity might close.”
“In America,” Marx said, “it’s frowned upon to date your colleagues, Mom.”
“I’m American. I know that,” Mrs. Watanabe said. “But Sadie is the boss, right? It’s fine if she says it’s fine. You two would make a pretty couple.”
“Mrs. Watanabe,” Sadie pivoted. “Marx says you teach textile design. I’d be interested in hearing about that.”
Mrs. Watanabe loved hand painting, quilting, and the discipline of woven textiles, but she worried these techniques were a dying art. “Computers make everything too easy,” she said with a sigh. “People design very quickly on a monitor, and they print on some enormous industrial printer in a warehouse in a distant country, and the designer hasn’t touched a piece of fabric at any point in the process or gotten her hands dirty with ink. Computers are great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.”
“Mom, you know Sadie and I work in computers, right?”
“A great textile, like the William Morris Strawberry Thief, is a piece of art, but it takes a lot of time to make a piece of art. It isn’t simply design either. You have to understand the fabrics and what they can bear. You have to understand the dyeing process and how to achieve certain colors and what will make the color last through the ages. If you make a mistake, you might have to begin again.”
“I don’t think I know Strawberry Thief,” Sadie said.
“One moment,” Mrs. Watanabe said. Mrs. Watanabe went into her bedroom, and she returned with a little footstool that was upholstered in a reproduction of Strawberry Thief. The pattern depicted birds and strawberries in a garden, and although Sadie hadn’t known the name, she recognized the print when she saw it.
“This was William Morris’s garden. These were his strawberries. These were birds he knew. No designer had ever used red or yellow in an indigo discharge dyeing technique before. He must have had to start over many times to get the colors right. This fabric is not just a fabric. It’s the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist.”
Sadie caressed the thick cotton.
* * *
—
Back at the hotel, early the next morning, Marx knocked on her door. “I have an idea,” he said.
She surprised herself by hoping that the idea would be sex. It turned out to be business.
“I had a dream about Strawberry Thief. It was kind of a nightmare,” Marx began. In the dream, Marx is back at his mother’s apartment. His mother tells him to retrieve the stool, but when he gets it, the Strawberry Thief design is rendered in the graphic style of Mapletown. And when he walks out to the living room, his mother is wearing a Strawberry Thief dress rendered in the graphic style of Mapletown, too. And then Marx notices that the whole apartment has been digitized to look like Mapletown. His mother is an adorable Mapletown sprite. A bubble comes up over her head: Ask me about my Textiles. He dismisses the bubble, but another comes up: Did you know William Morris took one hundred tries to get the dyeing process right for his most famous print textile, Strawberry Thief?
“Is that true?” Sadie asked. “I don’t remember your mother saying that.”
“I have no idea,” Marx said. “That’s what was in the bubble.”
Marx continued describing the dream. “I walk into the kitchen to get some air, and I look out the window. Outside the kitchen window is a man-sized thrush, stealing a strawberry. The scene is quite beautiful, and I’m happy watching the bird. The bird and I make eye contact for a moment, and a text bubble comes up over the bird’s head: Go ask Sadie what it would take to turn Mapletown into an online role-playing game. And here I am. I obey the giant bird of dreams.”
Sadie considered Marx’s question. She could tell where Marx was going without him having to say. Cut out the cancer that was Myre Landing. Give Mapletown away for free, and monetize its maintenance （servers, new quests and levels） through additional purchases—upgrades for the characters, the furnishings, the residences and expansions. If people liked it, the game could be a cash cow. It could be like EverQuest, but without the fantasy story line. It could be like Harvest Moon, but less provincial and not centered on farming—just a pleasant small town in America. Let people build their own characters in the gorgeous, evocative backdrop Sam had created. Sadie could see the merit in this strategy. She knew that people preferred Sam’s world to hers. Seeing Marx in the doorway, it was clear that he knew it, too. “Nothing. Except a ton of work,” Sadie said.