“Is Banquo a good role?” Sam asked. “I’m not particularly familiar with Macbeth.”
“It’s the best friend. It’s not Macbeth. It’s not ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’ But it has its moments. I have a name! I get to die! I have a ghost! And I’m only a freshman, so there’s plenty of time for me to be the lead. The shame of it is, I’ve always wanted to play Macbeth, and I doubt anyone’ll stage it again before I graduate.”
For the next hour, Marx died a variety of ways. He fell back on the couch; he dropped to his knees; he staggered around the common room, clutching various parts of his body—his throat, his forearm, his wrist, his magnificent hair. He whispered his lines, and once, he yelled them so loudly, a prefect came by to make sure Marx wasn’t actually being murdered. Sam found that he barely thought about his foot. He enjoyed saying the murderers’ lines; hiding behind the door, then attacking Marx with a pillow from behind; pretending to put his hands around Marx’s neck. If Marx noticed that Sam’s attacks were always weighted toward the right, he did not say.
“You’re not that bad. Have you done any acting before?” Marx asked.
“No,” Sam said. He thought he would leave it at that, but then, scant of breath, flattered, and indiscreet, he found himself continuing, “My mom was a professional actress, so I used to run lines with her sometimes.”
“What does she do now?”
“She…Well, she’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“A long time ago,” Sam said. It was one thing to concede having had a mother, but to tell the story of her death to a fantastic-looking person you barely knew…“By the way,” Sam said, “live animals are a bad idea for theater in general.”
“True.”
“Not just college theater. You mentioned before—”
“I’m right there with you, Sam,” Marx said. “Maybe you should audition next semester?”
Sam shook his head.
“Why not?”
“I’ve got a thing…Maybe you’ve…” Sam began. “In here. This is fine, but I don’t like being onstage. Shall we run it again?”
Sam had never been sure when he had become friends with Marx, but he supposed that night could reasonably be considered the beginning.
He had needed a starting data point in order to calculate the total number of days of their friendship. Once he settled on the night they rehearsed Marx’s death, he determined the number to be 4,873 days, give or take. Sam normally took comfort in numbers, but he was disturbed by how paltry this particular number was, considering the presence Marx had maintained in his life. He performed the calculation twice to confirm. Yes, it was 4,873. This was the kind of baby math Sam did when he couldn’t sleep.
Four thousand eight hundred seventy-three, Sam thought, the dollars in a seventeen-year-old’s bank account when he’s flush, twice the number of passengers on the Titanic, the population of a town where everyone knows each other, the inflation-adjusted cost of a laptop in 1990, the weight of a teenage elephant, six months or so more than the number of days I knew my mother.
Once, when he was fifteen—just old enough to acknowledge the inner lives of others beyond himself; not yet old enough to have a driver’s license—Sam had asked his grandmother how she’d gotten through the time after his mother’s death. She’d had a business to run, a sick grandson to care for, presumably her own grief to work through, though she was deeply unsentimental and never mentioned it. They were in her car on the way back from a math competition in San Diego, and Sam was giddy with the feeling of being better than everyone else at something that he didn’t care about at all.
Despite having almost died in a car accident, Sam relished these car trips. He had his best conversations with his grandmother in the car, at night, and though Bong Cha and Dong Hyun alternated chauffeur duties, he preferred when his grandmother drove. She was fast, and the trips took two-thirds of the time if Bong Cha was behind the wheel.
“How did we get through?” Bong Cha had been baffled by Sam’s question. “We got up in the morning,” she said finally. “We went to work. We went to the hospital. We came home. We went to sleep. We did it again.”
“But it must have been hard,” Sam persisted.
“The beginning was the hardest, but then days passed, and months, and years, and you got better, and it was not quite so hard,” Bong Cha said.
Sam thought she was finished entertaining the subject when she added, “Sometimes, I spoke to Anna anyway, and this helped a little.”
“Do you mean like a ghost?” His grandmother was the least likely person in the world to see ghosts.
“Sam, don’t be ridiculous. There are no ghosts.”
“Okay, so you spoke to her. She was definitely not a ghost. Did she ever reply?”
Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. “Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.” She squeezed Sam’s hand and inelegantly changed the subject. “It’s time you learned how to drive.”
Concealed by darkness, Sam felt comfortable admitting to Bong Cha that he was more than a little scared to begin driving himself.
2
Seventy-two days after the shooting, two days after Marx’s funeral, Simon called Sam. “I know things have been awful,” he began. This is the way everyone started a conversation with Sam that year. “But what are we going to do about the office? Ant’s feeling somewhat better, and we had just started playtesting and debugging CPH4 when everything happened. And if we don’t get back in, we’ll never make our release date in August—are we even still releasing the game in August? And people are wondering if they still have jobs, and I don’t honestly know what to tell them…I don’t want to overstep here, but we need to know what to do.”
It had, of course, usually fallen to Marx to conduct the practical business of running their company. Sam and Sadie were creatives! They were grand schemes and big pictures! Marx kept the bills paid, the lights on, the plants watered. Marx was the one who talked to people. This wasn’t to say that this was all Sam thought Marx did. The arrangement went largely unmentioned: Marx was Marx, so that Sam and Sadie could be Sam and Sadie. But Marx, of course, was no longer here.
Sam tried to imagine what Marx would say to Simon. “I’m glad you called, and you’re completely right. Let me talk to Sadie,” Sam said. “I’ll have an answer for you by the end of today.”
Sam called Sadie. When she did not answer, he texted her, What should we do about the office? Five minutes passed before Sadie replied, Do what you want.
He considered texting her something sharp in return. Because what Sam wanted to do was to stay in bed, like Sadie was probably doing. What Sam wanted to do was get stupendously high—find a great drug that turned his brain off for a year but stopped short of killing him.