His pain, a mortifyingly psychosomatic weathervane, had returned, and none of his usual strategies for tamping it down were working. The pain seemed to come on as he was arriving at the deepest part of sleep, when his foolish human brain was the most vulnerable to dreams. During this time, Sam’s dreams usually featured a mundane task he had neglected: he’d be back in the Kennedy Street apartment, and he would realize that he had forgotten to debug a particular section of Ichigo. Or he’d be driving on the 405, and just as he wanted to brake, he’d become aware that he was missing his foot. Sam would wake up, covered in sweat, ghost foot throbbing, feeling panicked and guilty. He would be in such discomfort that he could not return to sleep. Sam had not slept for more than a two-hour stretch since December.
Still, unlike Sadie, Sam was answering his phone. Sam was replying to emails. Sam was talking to people.
He was about to press send on a strongly worded text to Sadie when he found himself asking for the second time that day, What would Marx say? Marx, Sam decided, would take a second to empathize with Sadie’s situation. Sadie was pregnant. She had not only lost her business partner, she had lost her life partner. Unlike Sam, Sadie had had no significant experience with loss or grief. It was harder for Sadie. Marx, Sam concluded, would simply get whatever needed doing done.
In the three months since Marx had been shot, Sam had not returned to the office on Abbot Kinney, and when he finally did, he decided to go alone. He did not want to subject an assistant, or his grandfather, or Lola, or Simon, or even Tuesday, to whatever horror might be inside. The only person he would have wanted with him was Sadie. Though he told her he was going, he felt it would be cruel to explicitly ask her to come with him. She did not volunteer.
In front of the threshold of their office door, an impromptu shrine had been created: stuffed-animal effigies of Mayor Mazer and Ichigo, dead carnations and roses in plastic sleeves, satin ribbons of support tied wherever they could be tied, weather-beaten cards that seemed like they must have been outside for decades and not weeks, game boxes, votive candles. It was the kind of pointless accumulation one saw whenever a gun crime happened. All of it was meant to say, We stand with you, we love you, we condemn what happened here. In the face of this display, Sam felt nothing, except a passing desire to kick stuffed Mayor Mazer in the face. As he stepped over the shrine, he made a note: （1） remove shrine, and then he slipped his key into the door. Sam almost expected that his key wouldn’t work, but it did not resist. He made notes: （2） locks, （3） new security.
The air inside was a tick colder than usual and had a staleness, though it did not, to Sam’s nose, smell like murder or indeed, like anything. Standing in the lobby, Sam felt as if he had stepped into a little-used room at a museum. He could imagine finding a small, tasteful plaque that read: game company, venice, california, circa 2005. The tree in the lobby was dying: （4） plants.
Sam made his way through the space wearily, warily, like a character in a stealth game. In one of the wooden columns, a bullet hole: （5） fill hole.
The worst of the damage was a series of grisly bloodstains on the floor where Marx had been shot. Marx’s blood had seeped through the polished concrete. The floor had been overdue for a refinishing, and the blood had been allowed to settle for too long. Sam tried cleaning it with a series of increasingly potent cleansers: water, Windex, iodine, Comet, bleach. The stain was too deep; the floor would need to be professionally refinished: （6） floors.
An untethered strip of police tape lent the room a festive feeling. Sam threw it in the trash.
Sam went into Marx’s office. Though he had not run Unfair Games, he had some practical knowledge of business from his grandparents. In Marx’s files, he found the contact information for their insurance company. The agent he spoke to said that their policy did not explicitly cover damage from mass shootings—Did two constitute mass? Sam wondered—and thus, it was unlikely insurance would cover repairs. Do take pictures, Mr. Mazer. You’re welcome to file a claim.
Sam found the name of their cleaning service, and also, the flooring contractor who had done the floors when they first moved in, and then, in order to pay for these things, he located the name of their accountant. The accountant had apparently been their accountant since 1997, since Cambridge, though Sam had never had reason to speak to the man before. “Nice to meet you over the phone. It’s a terrible thing that happened, but it’s good you’re getting back to work,” the accountant said. “Unfair’s a little cash poor right now.”
“We are?” Sam said.
“You tied up a lot of cash purchasing the building on Abbot Kinney last October, and that was a major expense. In the long run, you’ll be glad you did it, though.”
For the first time in his life, Sam did not want to contemplate the long run.
Sam left Marx’s office and went into his own office, where he was confronted by a Guernica-style massacre of Ichigo merchandise: disembodied heads with bowl haircuts, and chubby limbs, and round childish eyes, and waves, and boats, and torsos in football jerseys. Sam picked up a ceramic Ichigo head from the floor. The head had once been attached to a body, and together, they had formed a piggy bank that had been a promotional item for the game’s Danish release. Sam considered the chipped ceramic head, and he shuddered: those men had wanted to kill him. They had wanted to kill him and had settled for destroying Ichigo merch and killing Marx instead.
A memory from Marx’s hospital room: Without preamble, Sadie is screaming at Sam, They wanted you. They wanted you. They wanted you. She beats his chest with her fists, and he doesn’t try to stop her. Harder, he thinks. Please. The next day, or the next week, or the next month, she apologizes, but the apology lacks the conviction of the attack.
Sam threw the Ichigo head in the trash can. He left his office and locked the door behind him. He was in no mood to deal with the dead Ichigo museum, and maybe, he no longer required an office filled with memorabilia. What did the memorabilia prove anyway? They had made games. Some people had promoted those games and tried to monetize them with gimcracks that no one needed.
He made a note: （7） mazer office junk. He returned to Marx’s office. In his pocket, the buzz of his cell phone. It was Sadie, and her voice was tight and small. “Are you there now? Is it awful?”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Describe it,” she said.
“I—there’s not much to say.”
“You have to be honest. I don’t want to be surprised.”
“It’s still the office. They mainly messed up my office. I’ll never be able to put that Ichigo piggy bank back together. There’s some damage to the floor. There’s a hole in a pillar.”
Sadie didn’t say anything for a beat. “？‘Damage’ is obfuscation. What does ‘damage’ mean?”
“It’s blood,” Sam said. “It seeped into the concrete.”
“How big is the stain?”
“I don’t know. The largest section is a couple of feet in circumference.”
“There’s a spot several feet wide where Marx bled to death, you mean.”
“Yes, I guess so.” Sam felt existentially tired. A contrary part of him wanted to insist that Marx hadn’t bled to death on that floor. He had died in a hospital, ten weeks later. But Sam was too tired for semantics. “I spoke to a flooring contractor. It can be refinished.”