* * *
—
You are in a peach orchard.
Here is a perfect day. Your high school classmate, Swan, is in town, and he knows a guy who has adopted a peach tree on Masumoto Family Farm, near Fresno. Swan’s guy says that you and your friends can take all the fruit they want from the tree, but the only day you’re allowed to go is Saturday morning.
“People adopt peach trees?” you ask.
“These aren’t ordinary peaches,” Swan tells you. “The fruit is too delicate to be shipped to grocery stores. The farm has been owned by the family since 1948, since just after internment. My friend had to write an essay and fill out an application to be allowed to adopt the tree.”
You tell Zoe, and she wants to go. And she invites Sadie, who invites Alice. And you invite Sam, who invites Lola, the girl he is seeing. And then you invite Simon and Ant, because they should take a day off from making Love Doppelg?ngers every now and again. The group leaves Los Angeles at 6 a.m. and by 9:30, you’re in Fresno, but it seems like a whole other world.
The peaches are impossibly large and almost fluffy. They aren’t engineered to survive the indignities of shipping, of grocery store shelves. Zoe samples one, and she says it’s like eating a flower. And then she hands it to you, and you take a bite, and you say it’s like drinking a peach. And then you hand the peach to Sam, who bites down and says, it’s like a song about a peach more than it’s like a peach.
And your friends begin to make increasingly absurd similes and metaphors about peaches.
“It’s like finding Jesus.”
“It’s like finding out the things you believed in as a child are actually real.”
“It’s like eating the mushrooms in Super Mario.”
“It’s like recovering from dysentery.”
“It’s like Christmas morning.”
“It’s like all eight nights of Hanukkah.”
“It’s like having an orgasm.”
“It’s like having multiple orgasms.”
“It’s like watching a great movie.”
“Reading a great book.”
“Playing a great game.”
“It’s like finishing debugging on your own game.”
“It’s the taste of youth itself.”
“It’s feeling well after a long sickness.”
“It’s running a marathon.”
“I’ll probably never have to do a single other thing in my life, because I tasted this peach.”
The last one to taste is Sadie. Somehow, the peach—what’s left of it—makes its way back to you, and you hold it up to the tree, where Sadie has been industriously harvesting.
Sadie wears a big straw hat, and she has climbed up the ladder and set a wicker basket on the top step. She looks so fine and wholesome, like a girl in a WPA poster. She is smiling at you, exposing the narrow gap between her teeth. “Do I dare?” she asks.
“You dare.”
* * *
—
You are in the strawberry field.
You are dead.
A prompt comes up on the screen: Start game from the beginning?
Yes, you think. Why not? If you play again, you might win.
Suddenly, there you are, brand-new, feathers restored, bones unbroken, sanguine with fresh blood.
You are flying more slowly than last time, because you don’t want to miss any of it. The cows. The lavender. The woman humming Beethoven. The distant bees. The sad-faced man and the couple in the pond. The beat of your heart before you go onstage. The feel of a lace sleeve against your skin. Your mother singing Beatles songs to you, trying to sound like she’s from Liverpool. The first playthrough of Ichigo. The rooftop on Abbot Kinney. The taste of Sadie mixed with Hefeweizen beer. Sam’s round head in your hands. A thousand paper cranes. Yellow-tinted sunglasses. A perfect peach.
This world, you think.
You are flying over the strawberry field, but you know it’s a trap.
This time, you keep flying.
VIII
OUR INFINITE DAYS
1
The first time Sam saw Marx die was in October of 1993. Marx had been cast as Banquo in a black box production of Macbeth. “So, here’s the setup,” Marx explained. “Fleance and I are on our way to a dinner party at Macbeth’s. We dismount our horses, though I highly doubt there will be horses, this being college theater. I light a torch—how else will the murderers see me? The three murderers approach! They attack. I die spectacularly, cursing all responsible: O treachery! Etcetera, etcetera.” Marx lowered his voice, “I can already tell the director’s an idiot. I’m going to have to work out the blocking entirely on my own, or the whole thing will end up looking shoddy. Sam, you’ll play the murderers, okay? I’ll come in from the bathroom, and then you’ll surprise me.” Marx handed Sam his paperback Macbeth, open to act 3, scene 3.
Sam had only lived with Marx for twenty-three days, and he didn’t feel he knew Marx well enough to pretend to murder him, or even run lines with him. He did not wish to be entangled in someone else’s drama, someone else’s life. The less he knew about his roommate and the less his roommate knew about him, the better.
The main thing Sam did not wish Marx to know about him was that he had a disability, though Sam did not think of it as a disability—other people had disabilities; Sam had “the thing with my foot.” Sam experienced his body as an antiquated joystick that could reliably move only in cardinal directions. The way to avoid appearing disabled was to avoid situations in which one looked disabled: uneven terrain, unfamiliar staircases, and most analog forms of frolic. Sam demurred, “I’m not much of an actor.”
“It’s not acting,” Marx said. “It’s pretend murdering.”
“And I’ve got so much reading to do. And a problem set due on Wednesday.”
Marx rolled his eyes. He picked up a couch cushion. “This pillow will be Fleance.”
“Who’s Fleance?”
“My young son. He escapes.” Marx flung the pillow toward the door. “Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!”
“Never a good idea to let the son of the man you’ve murdered escape,” Sam said. “Is he Fleance because he flees?”
“Am I Banquo because I die on the way to a banquet? These are solid questions, Sam.”
“What am I murdering you with?”
“A knife? A sword? I don’t think it says. He—or they, whatever Shakespeare is—writes vaguely, unhelpfully, ‘They attack.’？”
“Well, I think the weapon makes a difference.”
“I’ll leave the selection of a weapon to you.”
“Why don’t you counterattack? Aren’t you a warrior, or some such?”
“Because I’m not expecting to be attacked. That’s where you come in. Surprise me.” Marx smiled at Sam conspiratorially. “Help me. It’s my big scene, so, you know, I want it to look cool.”
“Your last scene, too, right? You die.”
“No, I come back as a ghost, but I don’t have any lines. I just show up at the banquet,” Marx said. “I’m not even sure if they’ll have me in the scene, or if it’ll be an empty chair. It depends on how much we’re in Macbeth’s point of view.”