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Sadie walks into the hospital room like she has a thousand times before. Sam is where he always is, sitting on the bed playing a game. “Hi, Sam,” Sadie says. Sam doesn’t say anything back.
She looks at his laptop screen. It’s all scrambled; she can’t see what he’s playing, or if he’s playing anything at all. “What are you doing?” She asks. Sam doesn’t say anything back. She doesn’t know why he’s not talking to her. He was fine yesterday—then again, was there a yesterday? She suddenly can’t remember if she came yesterday.
“Sam?” She tries again. Silence. It’s like she’s not even in the room with him. She waves her hand in front of his face, and he stares blankly on, like the scrambled computer screen is the most interesting thing in the world. “Sam, please, I’m right here.”
When he turns his head, finally, to look at her, she isn’t gripped with joy and excitement to see her friend like usual. Instead, a sinking feeling envelopes her, settling deep into her stomach, and her throat dries. Sam’s expression can only be described as hateful, and it’s a face she’s never seen him make. In fact, he’s not one to emote much at all, so seeing his features all twisted up, eyebrows furrowed and mouth set into a jagged sort of line is terrifying. “Sam?”
“Just get out!” He yells, and his voice doesn’t even sound like his voice. She stumbles backwards. “I never want to see you again! You did a really bad thing!”
“Wh—Sam, no, I didn’t, I swear—”
“You’re a liar, and you never cared about me anyway!”
Realization creeps up on Sadie, and then hits her with such incredible force she thinks she might fall. “Sam, I never meant to…you know it wasn’t like that…”
“Fuck off!” He spits at her, and all she can do before she collapses into tears is run.
His voice echoes down the hallway, echoing against the walls and making her ears ring. “You lied! You were never my friend! You’re selfish! You’ll never have a friend like me again!” The hall is dark, and she can’t see where she’s going. She just has to get away from the voices, away from Sam, away from her guilt and fear and despair that he’s right, that she really did fuck up.
When she finds a door, she pushes it open, and only sees the huge hole in the ground that leads to when it’s too late to stop herself. She’s falling, falling, and the whole way down his voice is following her.
She wakes up with a violent gasp, shaking in her own bed. Normally she would be comforted that it was all a dream and everything is okay, but as she tries to fall back asleep his voice still follows her.
You’ll never have a friend like me again.
Sadie is playing Super Mario Brothers on the NES. It’s a simple choice, but it’s still fun, and it reminds her of when she was younger and didn’t have to worry about developing her own game. She’s underground, trying to find a pipe that will bring Mario back to the surface. Every pipe is a dead end—Mario just hits his head on it and keeps going forward. She stomps on Koopas and dodges shells like she’s supposed to, but there’s no end in sight, no way to get back to the surface or reach the end of the level.
After a while of playing, her vision blurs, but she feels compelled in some strange way to keep going. It would be pretty stupid to give up; it’s not like it’s difficult.
She’s lost track of how long she’s been stuck in the dark endlessness of underground when the Koopas start coming at an un-stompable pace. Mario takes hits, but does not die. She tries to jump, move forward, do anything, but she cannot. He is quickly being buried by Koopas, piling on top of each other until he isn’t visible anymore under the mountain of them. Sadie’s breath catches in her chest, like she’s the one being buried.
The Koopas form a mountain, breaking through to the surface. Out of the top rises a red flag, and the screen flashes with the words LEVEL COMPLETE just before—
Sadie wakes up. The first brushes of dawn are streaked across the wall. Her arms ache terribly, her fingertips are numb. The handcuffs that Dov left her in are cold against her wrists. She sighs, looking up at the ceiling. She’ll have to get out of these soon.
The weight she felt in her dream lingers.
Sadie falls into the hotel bed after a satisfying dinner and perhaps one too many chu-hais. Tokyo is sparkling outside of her window, and Marx is sleeping solidly next to her. A warmth fills her chest, not only from the meal and the alcohol, but from being so close to him. The things she has seen and experienced feel less like a common memory and more like a fantastic dream, picturesque and vibrant. But it was all real, and just the thought sends another burst of warmth through her. It carries her to sleep.
She dreams of being inside a convenience store, just like the one she visited this morning for coffee and snacks with Marx. She turns down an aisle filled with chips and nuts. Brightly colored packaging with cute characters and appealing pictures jump out at her. She reaches the end of the aisle, which has an assortment of fun-shaped gummies, and comes face to face with Sam.
He doesn’t say anything. He looks—well, like he always looks, but maybe the circles under his eyes, permanently dark since their college days, have deepened a little. She saw him just before they left, but she can’t sense any familiarity in this meeting. Things have been fraught, lately, but…
“Hi,” she attempts, not questioning why or how he got here.
He looks at her for a few more seconds, each one seeming to stretch out to an hour, before turning away. He limps as he does. She hears the chime that plays every time someone opens the store’s door, and sees Sam walking away in the window. She cannot describe what has just happened to as anything other than a rejection.
When she wakes, it’s not with a gasp or a start. It’s the way she wakes up on a normal morning. Marx is already awake, eating a rice ball that he had purchased the day before. “Morning,” he says. “Sleep well?”
She doesn’t return the greeting. “I dreamt about Sam,” she said.
“Oh.” Marx replies. They leave it at that.
Marx comes to Sadie every night, whether she wants him to or not. Sometimes she goes to bed begging whatever force is out there to see his face again, and more often she begs for a dreamless sleep.
The dreams range from being stuck in his hospital room, looking at his mangled and unmoving form, to wandering the streets of Japan with him, to bickering with him in the offices of Unfair with Sam, to laughing with him under a California sun that’s as bright and yellow as an egg yolk. Sometimes she dreams about walking in a crowded street in a nondescript city—New York or San Francisco or Tokyo, it could be anywhere, because everyone has a blurry, undistinguishable face. She’ll spot him in the crowd, the only one she can identify among them all, and he’s always smiling in a way he only smiled at her.
She runs to him, pushing through the crowd, ignoring whatever calls of protest reach her ears. He remains smiling, but she never reaches him. He always disappears. He is there, and then he is not.
There are many dreams of this nature; sometimes she’s not in a city, but in a store, or in a big, open park.
But no matter what, no matter how hard she tries, she can never reach him.
On the mornings after these dreams, she feels sick with the shame when she cannot bear to look their own infant daughter in the eye.
When Sadie gets back home after giving Sam the hard drive at the airport, she stays awake long enough to kiss her daughter and talk to her a little bit. She falls quickly into a deep sleep.
She hasn’t been dreaming about Marx nearly as much as she used to. Part of this wounds her; as painful as her dreams are, the only time she can see him alive and moving is there. Even if she’ll never be able to catch him, touch him, look him in the eyes and feel that warmth and that love that he gave her so uniquely—at least she can see his face. But more and more, these days, she doesn’t dream about anything.
Before her head hits the pillow that night, she feels a pull of something—desire, maybe, to see a face that she loves. It gets buried under blankets and bone-deep fatigue. Slowly, a dream comes to her.
She’s in the hospital again, wandering around the halls. It’s as quiet and as sterile as always. She searches for something, but she doesn’t know exactly what it is. She hears a faint sound down the hallway and follows it. She’s all alone, but she’s not afraid. She just has to get to that sound.
When she enters Sam’s room, she does it with hesitation. She looks behind her and the doorway that once led to the hallway is nothing but darkness now. This room is her world. This room is where she will stay.
Sam is on the bed like she always finds him, playing a game. When she looks at the screen, it’s a game she’d recognize anywhere.
Ichigo.
“Hi, Sam.”
He looks up at her with his face, both boyish and brooding, innocent and mature, soft and hard. She doesn’t understand how he can be so many contradicting things at once, but she can’t imagine him any other way.
“Hi. Do you wanna play with me?”
“Of course,” she replies, and sits next to him.
She doesn’t remember the rest of her dream, if there is one, but when she wakes up, she feels like something has been filled, a hunger satiated. She feels the most at peace she has in months—years.
She calls Sam while Naomi sleeps, careful not to wake her up. She doesn’t expect him to pick up; he’s always kept odd hours. But he does.
“Hello?”
“Sam,” she says, “I--”
She doesn’t know what to say. She just wanted to hear his voice.
“I’ve been up looking at the stuff on the hard drive that you gave me. This is really incredible stuff, Sadie.”
“Really?”
“Come on, would I lie?” He asks, and it makes her laugh.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
There’s a long pause. “I think he would’ve liked it,” Sam says. They both know who he’s talking about.
Sadie swallows a lump in her throat, but it does little to quell the stinging in her eyes. The tears that fall are thin and hot. “I really hope so.”
“I think we should talk again—about this, about the game.”
“I think so, too. But, um, she—Naomi, she’s gonna wake up soon, so I should go. I called because...I had a dream about you last night.”
“That’s nice,” he replies. He doesn’t ask for the details, and she doesn’t know what describing them would change. She just wants him to know that he was there, he’s always been there, in the games she made with both him and by herself, in her dreams, in her heart. She thinks, somehow, by just telling him such a menial thing, he can understand it.
“I’m never gonna have another friend like you.”
“I’d hope not,” he jokes, and it gives them both a short burst of light-hearted reprieve. “I won’t keep you.”
“Alright. Goodb—talk to you later, Sam.”
“Sadie, wait--”
“Yeah?”
“I’m never going to have another friend like you, either.”
The call ends. Sadie draws her knees to her chest and smiles.