They spent the next several hours brainstorming ideas for a rebooted Mapletown. Around four in the morning, they called Sam back in California. Marx explained to him what they had been discussing.
A long pause, before Sam responded, “I like this idea a lot, but Sadie, you’re cool with this?”
“I am,” she said. “Myre Landing will still exist to those who bought the original game, but I think this is an opportunity to bring Mapletown to a larger audience. If it doesn’t work, all we’ve lost is a lot of time and money.”
Sam laughed. “Let’s do this,” he said.
They spoke with Sam a little longer, and then they hung up. Once again, it was too early to go down to breakfast. “I’m starving,” Sadie said.
He took her to an all-night conbini that was a short walk from their hotel. He bought egg salad, chicken croquette, and strawberry-and-cream sandwiches; inari; two liters of Royal Milk Tea. “These are my favorites,” he said. They took the sandwiches up to Marx’s hotel room and they spread their convenience-store feast on a towel on the bed.
The sun was rising over Tokyo.
“This is the best egg salad sandwich I’ve ever had,” Sadie said.
“You’re easy to please,” Marx said. He wiped a smudge of egg salad from the side of her mouth.
* * *
—
On the seventh night of their trip to Tokyo, Marx went to an izakaya with two of his closest high school friends: Midori, who was half-Japanese, and Swan, who was full Japanese but had been born in England. As was their tradition, they consumed profuse amounts of greasy appetizers, yakitori, and warmed sake. The izakaya was a dive; it was the same place they’d frequented in high school, only the guy running it now was the son instead of the father.
Marx asked Sadie if she wanted to come along. Normally, she would have absented herself from such a meeting of old friends, but since they’d come up with the idea to reboot Mapletown, she felt more relaxed and celebratory.
When they arrived at the izakaya, it became clear to Sadie that the friends, like Marx’s mother, had the impression that Sadie was Marx’s longtime girlfriend, Zoe.
“No,” Sadie said. “Sorry. We just work together.”
“Darn it,” Midori said. “We thought we were finally going to meet the girl who made Marx settle down.”
“What was Marx like in high school?” Sadie asked.
“Well, since you’re supposedly not his girlfriend, we can tell you,” Swan said. “Everyone dated Marx.”
“And Marx dated everyone,” Midori said, laughing. Sadie recognized the vaudevillian rhythm of an oft-repeated joke.
“If he’d been a girl,” Midori said, “everyone would have called him a slut, but he was just a stud.”
“He was like that in college, too,” Sadie said. “Not news to me. Did either of you ever date him?”
“He took me to a school dance once,” Midori said. “He was an excellent date, but it was a friends’ thing.”
“That’s Marx’s redeeming feature,” Swan said. “He is a great friend, and that’s why no one can ever hate him.”
“Did you ever date him?” Midori asked Sadie.
“God, no. He was friends with my friend,” Sadie said.
“She didn’t like me much,” Marx said. “She may still not like me.”
“How can anyone not like Marx?” Swan said.
“What did he do?” Midori asked.
“It’s a long story,” Sadie said. “He said we could use his apartment for the summer and then he ended up staying in it.”
“Is that why you didn’t like me? I think I made up for it in the end,” Marx said.
“Well, I didn’t know that you’d be producing Ichigo until we were at dinner with your dad. Sam never told me.”
“Sam,” Marx said, shaking his head. Marx held up his tumbler of sake. “To Sam! Kanpai!”
“To Sam! Kanpai!” Sadie, Midori, and Swan repeated.
“Who’s Sam?” Midori said, laughing.
They drank several rounds of sake, not enough liquor for Sadie to be drunk, but enough for her to feel pleasantly warm inside.
Midori went outside to have a smoke, and Sadie went with her. “I was so in love with him, you know,” Midori said.
Sadie nodded, because she didn’t know what to say.
“Never ever ever sleep with Marx. Whatever you do, don’t do it,” Midori warned. “At some point, he’ll look at you with those eyes and that hair, and you’ll think he’s harmless. He’s hot. I should sleep with him.”
“I’ve known him for six years,” Sadie said. “I doubt that’s going to happen.”
Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.
Sadie and Marx took a cab back to the hotel. They rode the elevator up to their rooms, which were on the twentieth floor. While walking her to her room, Marx said something about twenty being a significant number and that when a person turned twenty （not eighteen, or twenty-one） in Japan, they were considered an adult. “It’s called hatachi.”
“I was twenty when I met you,” Sadie said.
“Indeed.”
They were standing outside her door, and he turned to go to his room. “Marx?” she called. “I’m not looking to get into a relationship right now.”
“No, me neither,” Marx said.
“But I do think it would be a good idea if we slept together,” she said. “We’re in a different country, and the sex you have when you’re away doesn’t have to count, in my opinion.”
“I’m unfamiliar with that custom.” He walked back to her door.
Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn’t be broken. There was a correct combination of movements—button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands—that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.
Sadie did not remember much about the first time she had sex with Marx, but she remembered afterward how profoundly comfortable she felt, how easy. His body molded naturally against hers; his scent, barely there, just soap and clean skin; the feeling that there was the right amount of companionable space between them. I am here with you, his body seemed to say, but I acknowledge that we are separate beings. But in the end, she did not know if these feelings were attributable to Marx himself, or all the sake and yakitori she had consumed, or the crisp white hotel duvet, or the fact that she was 5,500 miles from home.
She closed her eyes for a second, and she imagined herself back under the red gates of Nezu.
A gate and a gate and a gate.
And at the end of all the gates, Marx. Marx, in a white linen shirt and rolled-up khakis and a silly straw fedora that Zoe had bought him at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. He takes off the hat, and he tips it to her.