“You two are married, right?” the photographer said.
“She doesn’t believe in marriage,” Sam said.
“It’s true. I don’t,” Sadie said.
“It’ll be different when you have children,” the photographer said.
“People like to say that,” Sadie said.
When they had finished taking the photos, Sadie removed her costume and rushed off to the bathroom.
Sam was taking off his doublet when a text came in on the publicist’s phone. “Unfair’s in Venice, isn’t it?” she said. “My friend says there’s an active shooter at a tech company in Venice. You should tell your people to stay inside.”
“That’s awful. Which one?” Sam asked. Though he was concerned for whichever of his Silicon Beach neighbors had met with misadventure, he did not think this information had much to do with him. Unfair was a game company, not a tech company.
“That’s all I know,” the publicist said.
“I’ll call Marx,” Sam said. “Maybe he’ll know what’s up?”
Sam took out his phone: there were several missed calls from Marx in the last fifteen minutes. He tried calling Marx back, but his phone went to voicemail. He called the landline at the office, but despite it being morning on the West Coast, no one picked up.
He went into the ladies’ room to ask Sadie to call Marx. He could hear her throwing up. He knocked on the door of the stall. “Sadie?”
“Samson, why are you in the ladies’ room?”
Sadie came out of the stall. She was growing so accustomed to throwing up that she could get over it quickly. She was about to tease him for following her into the bathroom, but then she saw Sam’s face.
5
In 2005, people from the U.S. sent, on average, four hundred sixty text messages a year.
Texts were treated and written more like telegrams than like conversations. The brevity lent these early texts an almost poetry.
Sadie and Marx had texted only a couple dozen times during their relationship. They had no need for texting. They were usually together, at work or at home.
After Sadie’s first call to Marx went to voicemail, she tried sending a text: Are you OK?
A minute later, he replied:
I love you. all ok.
Just kids. Talking. TOH.
Sadie’s hands were shaking. She showed Sam her phone. “What’s TOH mean?” Sadie asked. “I don’t know any of the acronyms.”
“Tamer of Horses,” Sam said.
VII
THE NPC
You are flying.
Below, a checkerboard of country life. A pair of Jersey cows graze in a lavender field, tails swatting at imaginary flies. A woman in a chambray dress rides a bicycle over a stone bridge. She hums the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and as she passes, a man in a Breton cap begins whistling the tune. From a hive you cannot see, the susurrus of bees. In the valley below the bridge, an ink-haired boy feeds a sugar cube to a horse with a wild look in her eyes. A grove of apple trees waits patiently for fall. Unobserved, a graying man watches two teenagers swim in a pond. You can smell the man’s longing, stronger than lavender, and you think, Humans want so much. I am glad to be a bird. In a field of strawberry plants, waxy berries companionably mingle among white flowers.
You have never been one to resist a strawberry, so you descend.
As a winged creature, you are occasionally called upon to explain flight to the flightless. Your standard answer is that it’s a combination of Newtonian physics, concerted flapping, weather, anatomy. But honestly, it’s best not to think of the mechanics of flight while you’re doing it. Your philosophy: Surrender to the air, enjoy the view.
You have arrived at your destination. Your small beak surrounds the berry, and you are about to snatch it when you hear the click of a trigger.
“STOP, THIEF!”
You feel the bullet penetrate your hollow bird bones.
An explosion of brown and beige feathers, like dandelion seeds dispersing. Blood on the berries—red on red—but to you, a tetrachromat, the two reds are distinctive.
You land in the dirt: an almost imperceptible thud, an unimpressive dust cloud that only you can see.
Another shot.
Another shot.
Your wing is flapping. You choose to interpret this as an attempt at flight, and not an involuntary death spasm.
Some hours later, you become aware of someone holding your hand, which means you have a hand, which means you are not a bird, which means you must be on some pretty terrific drugs, like LSD, which you have never done even though Zoe always wanted you guys to do LSD together, said she knew the perfect guide. For a second, you experience competing melancholies: sadness that you cannot fly, sadness that you didn’t do LSD with Zoe, sadness that
* * *
—
You are dying.
No, that came out wrong. What you meant to express was the existential grief that comes with the knowledge that all things die. You are not dying, except insofar as you have always been dying.
* * *
—
To repeat: You are not dying.
You are thirty-one years old. You are the only child of Ryu and AeRan Lee Watanabe—respectively, a businessman and a design professor. You were born in New Jersey. You have two passports. You work at Unfair Games on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, in Venice, California. The nameplate on your desk reads:
MARX WATANABE
TAMER OF HORSES
You have had many lives. Before you were a tamer of horses, you were a fencer, a high school chess champion, an actor. You are American, Japanese, Korean, and by being all of those things, you are not truly any of those things. You consider yourself a citizen of the world.
You are currently a citizen of a hospital. A machine is breathing for you. Regularly spaced chirps indicate that you are still alive.
You are not awake, but you are not asleep either.
You can see and hear everything.
You cannot remember everything. You don’t have amnesia, per se, but you don’t immediately recollect how it is you have ended up in a hospital and why it is you cannot wake up.
You pride yourself on your memory. At the office, someone is always saying, “Ask Marx. He’ll know.” Often, you do know. You remember the usual. People’s names and faces, birthdays, song lyrics, phone numbers. You remember the slightly more unusual: entire plays, poems, character actors, the meanings of obscure words, long passages of novels. You remember the names of people’s parents, children, pets. You remember with granularity the geography of cities, hotel room floor plans, video game levels, the scars of ex-lovers, times you’ve said the wrong thing, and the clothes people wore. You remember what Sadie was wearing the first time you met her: a black tank dress, with a white cap-sleeved T-shirt underneath it, a red flannel tied around her waist, burgundy oxfords with lug soles, sheer socks with a rose print on them, those tiny oval-shaped, yellow-tinted sunglasses that everyone was wearing that spring, her hair parted in the middle, in two Brunhilda braids. “You must be Marx,” she said, holding out her hand to you. “I’m Sadie.”
“I know you already,” you replied. “I’ve played two of your games.”
She surveyed you over the top of her yellow sunglasses. “You think you can know a person from playing their games?”
“I do. No better way, in my humble opinion.”