Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them.
This is marriage.
After a while, your father leaves. Your mother continues to string the cranes, but without your father, her supply quickly diminishes. Cranes can be strung faster than they can be constructed.
When Sam arrives, he introduces himself. “You must be Marx’s mother.”
“Anna,” she says.
“That’s my mother’s name,” Sam says. “Marx never mentioned that our mothers had the same first name. I thought you had a different name.”
Your mother explains, “AeRan is my Korean name. When I’m in the U.S., everyone calls me Anna.”
“Anna Watanabe.”
“Watanabe is my husband’s name. I’m Anna Lee.”
“Anna Lee was my mother’s name, too,” Sam says.
“Do I look like your mother?”
“Not at all,” Sam says. “It’s strange that Marx and I never discussed this.”
“Maybe he didn’t think it was notable,” your mother suggests. “Lee is quite a common name, as is Anna.” Your mother is not in the least sentimental about anything but fabric. “Maybe he didn’t know?”
Sam walks over to the bed, and he studies your face. “No, Marx always knew everything about everything.” When you figured out Sam’s dead mother’s name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.
Sam turns back to your mother. “You’re almost out of cranes,” he says. “If you teach me how to make one, I can help.” Your mother demonstrates, and then Sam sits down on the hospital room floor, and he begins folding cranes, as well.
* * *
—
You are still alive.
Sadie is brushing your hair, and she is telling you that Master of the Revels is the best-selling game in America. “I don’t think they even like the game,” Sadie says. “People feel sorry for us, I guess.”
You want to tell her to stop with the false humility, if that’s what it is. No one drops sixty dollars on a game out of pity. Without warning, your mind flies away.
* * *
—
You are still alive.
“Ant’s out of the hospital,” Sam says. “He’s going to be fine.”
Good, you think.
“Gordon was here. He brought you lavender.”
You can’t see the flowers, but you think you can possibly smell them. There is an ungenerous part of you that wishes you had left Gordon in the reception area and gone up to the roof with everyone else.
Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero. Without warning, your mind flies away again.
* * *
—
Still alive.
You wake in the middle of the night. Someone is in the room with you. You see her Titian hair. You hear the scratch of pencil against paper.
It’s Zoe. You wonder what she’s working on.
“It’s a score for a movie,” she answers, as if she’s heard your question. “It’s some dumb horror movie, but it’s so hard to get it right. I had this intellectual idea, but I don’t know if it will work. I want to limit the instrumentation to only percussion and brass, but I’m worried it sounds a bit high school marching band. I might have to throw everything I’ve done out and start again. And they’re paying me about thirty cents. And deferrals, of course, which I’ll never ever see. The movie’s called Bloody Balloons.” Zoe rolls her eyes. “Bloody Balloons is never going to see deferrals.” She smiles at you. “Marx, you had better be all right. I absolutely can’t bear the thought of a world without you.” She squeezes your hand and then she kisses your cheek. “No, I won’t bear it. I refuse to bear it. Love you madly, my sweet friend.”
Love you madly.
The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
* * *
—
You are going to die.
Some hours, days, or weeks later, you are listening to a doctor tell your mother and father, in an outrageously serene voice, that you, Marx Watanabe, citizen of the world, are going to die.
You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that “game over” is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn’t final. You could have taken poison, fallen into a vat of acid, been decapitated, been shot a hundred times, and still, if you clicked restart, you could begin it all over again. Next time, you would get it right. Next time, you might even win.
But it cannot be denied.
You feel the body. The blood is sludgy, moving through the circulatory system at the speed of the I-10 at rush hour. The heart is not beating on its own. The brain is
Slowing.
Down.
Increasingly, the brain is
Flying.
Off.
Soon, you will not be you. You, like all of us, are a deictic case.
* * *
—
You are a Tamer of Horses.
For your thirty-first birthday, Sam makes you a nameplate that reads:
MARX WATANABE
TAMER OF HORSES
You laugh when you see it. “Technically,” you say, “some sources translate it as ‘Breaker of Horses.’？”
“But that’s not what you are,” Sam says.
The first time he had called you that, it was meant to be an insult, but over the years, the name had transformed into something loving, a joke between friends.
And so you accept it. This is what you are.
When you were a boy, you never thought you would be a producer of video games. You must admit there were times when you wondered if it was a mortifying passivity that had led you to this employment. Had you become a video game producer because Sam and Sadie had wanted to make video games, and you had nothing else you were doing at the time? Had you become a video game producer because you loved people who wanted to make games? How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it? And even if you hadn’t exactly chosen video game producer, you were good at it.
You are thinking of Our Infinite Days. How you wish you might play it. You can anticipate problems with the game, and you want to help the Worths solve them. For instance, they will have to choose vampires or zombies. They will have to choose a single mythology, or they will have to make a new one. Or…
But it is not your problem anymore.
Sam is holding one of your hands, and Sadie is holding the other. And your parents are there, but they are standing behind your friends. And this makes sense, because Sadie and Sam have been your family, as much as your family has been your family. Behind them, a thousand paper cranes festoon the room.
“It’s okay, Marx,” Sadie says. “You can let go.”
As the brain is detaching from the body, you think, How I will miss the horses.