“That’s clever.”
“I feel like whoever wins, the position will be largely honorary. Sam’s working on some AR idea, I’m not sure what it is. His father died last week.”
“George the agent?” As far as Sadie knew, Sam never saw him.
“No,” Ant said. “The K-town pizza guy.”
“No! Not Dong Hyun. That’s his grandfather.”
“Yes, I think the grandfather had cancer. I know he’d been sick for a while. Sam’s been gone from work a lot. Funny, I always thought that was his dad.”
Sadie and Ant parted in front of the restaurant. Ant embraced her, and before they parted, he said, “I think of Marx every day.”
“I do, too.”
“No one believed in us as much as Marx did. We were college kids until he thought we had a game.”
“So were we,” Sadie said.
“I wish I could have saved him,” Ant said. “I replay that day over and over again. If I hadn’t gone down the stairs. If I hadn’t let him go into the lobby. If—”
Sadie stopped him. “That’s the gamer in you, trying to figure out how you might have beat the level. My brain is treacherous like that, too. But there was nothing you could have done, Ant. The game wasn’t winnable.”
After five years, she could finally hear Marx’s name and not feel like weeping.
She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.
She could feel herself forgetting all the details of Marx—the sound of his voice, the feeling of his fingers and the way they gestured, his precise temperature, his scent on clothing, the way he looked walking away, or running up a flight of stairs. Eventually, Sadie imagined that Marx would be reduced to a single image: just a man standing under a distant torii gate, holding his hat in his hands, waiting for her.
Sadie got home from dinner around eleven-thirty. She paid the sitter and put her in a cab. Naomi was already in bed, but Sadie still went to look at her, sleeping. Sadie loved watching Naomi sleep.
Sadie was not a natural mother, though this was not a confession one was allowed to make. She craved solitude and personal space too much. But she loved this girl nonetheless. She was trying hard not to romanticize her daughter’s personality. She didn’t want to ascribe characteristics to her that were not truly hers. A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work. Sadie did not feel that Naomi was altogether a person yet, which was another thing that one could not admit. So many of the mothers she knew said that their children were exactly themselves from the moment they appeared in the world. But Sadie disagreed. What person was a person without language? Tastes? Preferences? Experiences? And on the other side of childhood, what grown-up wanted to believe that they had emerged from their parents fully formed? Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently. It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth. Naomi was a pencil sketch of a person who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character.
Sadie had trained herself not to look for Marx in Naomi’s face. Sometimes, unexpectedly, she saw Sam’s there. Naomi was half-Asian and half–Eastern European Jewish, so Naomi was closer in background to Sam than she was to Sadie or to Marx.
Sadie closed Naomi’s bedroom door, and she walked into her own bedroom.
She decided to call Sam. It was only 8:30 p.m. in California. His phone number hadn’t changed. He didn’t pick up—no one answered their phone anymore—and so she left a message. “It’s me,” she said. “Sadie,” she added, in case he didn’t know who “me” was. “I was having dinner with Ant here in Boston. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I live here now. Anyway, I was sorry to hear about Dong Hyun. I know how much he loved you. He was the nicest, gentlest man in the world.”
She did not hear back from Sam.
A day or two later, she called the pizza place to find out if there were plans for a memorial for Dong Hyun. The young man who answered the phone told her that there was a service this weekend. He didn’t bother to ask who Sadie was; Dong Hyun was friends with everyone in K-town.
3
The best you can wish for anyone, Sam decided, is a video game death. Which is to say, spectacular and brief.
When he put his final quarter in the machine, Dong Hyun had been sick for nearly a year. Cancer—at first in the lung and then, fatally, elsewhere, everywhere—had reduced Sam’s strong, marvelous grandfather to a helpless lump of misfiring cells. Sam had decided to step back from Unfair during that time to take care of Dong Hyun. How could he not? Dong Hyun had spent years taking care of him.
Sam watched as Dong Hyun suffered, as parts of him were cut away. And finally, when there wasn’t anything left to take, Dong Hyun was gone.
Sam went back and forth. The fact that Dong Hyun had not died a video game death meant that Sam had been able to spend time with him before the end. The length of time it had taken Dong Hyun to die also meant he had said everything he wanted to say to Sam, his cousins, and his grandmother. Was this trade worth his suffering? Sam didn’t know.
In the last weeks of his life, Dong Hyun barely spoke. He had grown quieter and quieter, and so Sam was surprised when Dong Hyun sat up in bed and grabbed Sam’s hand. “Samson, you are a lucky boy,” Dong Hyun said to Sam in a perfectly clear voice. “You have had tragedy, yes, but you have had many good friends as well.”
Dong Hyun had been released from the hospital to die at home in the sunny Craftsman-style house that he had lived in for the last forty years of his life. It was disturbing to Sam that Dong Hyun’s familiar pizza smell had been replaced by a variety of unpleasant medical ones.
“Have I?”
“Yes, Marx and Sadie. They loved you.”
“Is two considered many?” Sam asked.
“It depends on how good the friendships are,” Dong Hyun said. “And Lola? What happened to her?”
“She got married. She lives in Toronto.” Sam paused. “I wish I had what you and Grandma have.”
“You have different things,” Dong Hyun said. “You were born into a different world than I was. Maybe you don’t need what Grandma and I have.” He patted Sam on the cheek. Dong Hyun began to cough one of his endless coughs.
“Marx is dead,” Sam said.
“I know that,” Dong Hyun said. “My mind is still good.”
“Marx is dead, and Sadie has a kid now, and I don’t know the kid.”
“You could get to know the kid,” Dong Hyun said.
“My point is, it’s hard once people have kids. I don’t understand kids really.”
“You make games for a living,” Dong Hyun pointed out. “You must know something about kids.”
“Yes, but that’s different. I think I don’t like children because I hated being young.”