“I think,” Sadie said, “Marx was scared that you would take it badly. And we didn’t know if it was serious at first, so we didn’t want to upset you if it wasn’t serious.”
“But now you know it’s serious?”
“The way you say ‘serious,’ it sounds like a disease.”
“？‘Serious’ was your word.”
“Your tone, then.”
“But now you know it’s serious?” Sam repeated.
“Yes, now we know.”
Sadie studied Sam. The sun had changed angles in the time they’d been standing there, and she could see him again. He was twenty-seven and he had a mustache, but whenever she allowed herself to think of him as the kid from the hospital, her heart could not help but soften for him. It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man. Though his voice was cool and disinterested as they spoke, his brow was lightly furrowed. His mouth was set in a determined way, as if he had been asked to take a bitter medicine but was determined not to complain. His expression reminded her of a time when he’d recently had surgery, and he hadn’t realized that she had come into his hospital room yet. He was clearly in a lot of pain—his eyes were unblinking, and his jaw was slack, and he was panting softly, and he looked feral. For a second, she didn’t recognize her friend. The face she knew, the face she thought of as Sam, was nowhere. And then he saw her, and he smiled, and he was Sam again, as if he had put on a mask. “You’re here!” he had said.
“I must say,” Sam said, “I’m not surprised that he would be into you. He’s always had a thing for you. He asked me about it that first summer we were making Ichigo. I told him that you would never be into someone like him. So maybe, if anything, I’m surprised that I was wrong.”
“Why wouldn’t I be into him?” She knew she shouldn’t ask this question.
“Because he’s boring.” Sam shrugged, as if Marx’s banality was an indisputable fact. “That’s why he’s always dating someone new. He gets bored with people, but it’s not about them, it’s because he’s boring.”
“You’re an incredible asshole,” Sadie said. “Marx loves you. Can’t you ever just be nice?”
“It’s not cruel to state a fact.”
“It isn’t a fact. And sometimes, it is cruel to state a fact.”
“When we took Heroes for Zeroes at Harvard, you know what his favorite part of The Iliad was?”
“It’s not something we’ve ever discussed,” Sadie said, trying to contain her rising irritation.
“The end, which is incredibly boring. ‘Thus blah blah blah they buried Hector blah blah blah the tamer of horses blah blah blah.’ Hector is boring. He’s not Achilles. Marx is boring like Hector, so he ate that shit up.”
Marx came onto the patio. “What’s everyone talking about?”
“The end of The Iliad.”
“That’s the best part,” Marx said.
“Why is it the best part?” Sadie asked.
“Because it’s perfect,” Marx said. “？‘Tamer of horses’ is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn’t have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.”
“Hector is us,” Sadie said.
“Hector is us,” Marx repeated.
“Hector is Marx,” Sam said. “Boring,” he coughed. “We should put ‘Tamer of Horses’ on Marx’s business cards.”
They decided to stay the night near San Simeon and drive the rest of the way in the morning. They checked into the first hotel they came across, which was old and un-air-conditioned. The night was uncommonly balmy for the central California coast, and the rooms were airless and stale, even with the windows open.
In the morning, when Sam came down to the car, he had shaved his black curly hair down to a buzz cut. “What happened?” Marx asked. He petted Sam’s shorn head.
“I got hot,” Sam said.
“It looks good,” Marx said. “Right?”
Sadie knew there was probably some message in this for her, but she couldn’t be bothered to decipher it. It made her feel egomaniacal and ungenerous to think this way, but wasn’t there always some game Sam was playing? Wasn’t there always some maze for her to solve? He was an exhausting person. “Sure,” she said. “We should get on the road.”
“It wasn’t an aesthetic choice,” Sam said. He seemed almost embarrassed. “I honestly was hot.”
“Yes,” Sadie said. “Our room was hot as well, though we both woke up with the hair we started with.”
Sadie felt that everything Sam did was an aesthetic choice. Not long after they’d moved to California, he had had his name legally changed from Samson Masur to Sam Mazer. The explanation he gave her: the name Masur had never meant much to him, and Mazer sounded more like the name of a Master Builder of Worlds. In the last year, he had begun asking them to refer to him just by Mazer, like he was Madonna or Prince. “You can still call me Sam in private,” Sam had said to Sadie, “but in public, I’d prefer to go by Mazer. That’s my name now.”
Mazer had extensively promoted the Mapleworld launch. He loved being a showman; he loved declaiming to an audience of rapt fans about the state of games. And, as he was no longer in chronic pain, he was much better at doing these things than when he’d promoted Ichigo. But, as the promotional schedule had stretched on, Sam had started shifting his appearance away from Mayor Mazer’s. He took to wearing denim coveralls with a name pocket patch embroidered mazer and a white undershirt underneath. He often wore an army green Breton hat. For years he’d tried to conceal his disability; now he was never photographed without a cane. The cane was used for pointing at things, clearing crowds, grand gestures as needed. He had recently gotten braces and had started wearing contact lenses. For the first time in his life, he was working out with weights, and he became thick with muscle, like a wrestler. He got a tattoo on his right upper arm: umma （in hangul; Korean for mom）， accompanied by the round yellow head and pink bow of Ms. Pac-Man. The Mazer character that Sam fashioned would become almost as iconic to gamers as Mayor Mazer, his avatar, was. But Mazer, circa 2002, looked nothing like Sam, circa 1997.
And now his hair was gone, too. Sadie was driving, Marx was sleeping in the passenger seat, and Sam was in the back seat. For a second, she looked in the rearview mirror at Sam. The first time she had met him, she had imagined the circles it would take to draw his glasses, his face, his hair. She had to admit it; she would miss the circles of his hair. He caught her eye for a moment, and then he looked away. A second later, he put on his Breton cap.
* * *
—
Once Sadie and Marx’s personal relationship was out in the open, Sadie and Sam’s working relationship further deteriorated. Perhaps this was to be expected. The conflicts were the same as they’d always been, but they became less civil with each other.
Sadie had little interest in working on or promoting Mapleworld. She had absolutely no interest in being the “face” of Unfair, and she was happy to cede those duties to Sam. What she wanted to do was get back to work on a new game, something that would put Both Sides, Mapleworld, and Ichigo solidly in their rearview mirror.