Everyone knew Love Doppelgängers was a terrible title, but no one knew what to call it instead. They had lived with the title for so long that it had almost become good by sheer virtue of repetition and familiarity. It was not, in fact, good. As Sam said to Marx, “Love Doppelgängers is an excellent title if we want twelve people to play this game.” Unfair couldn’t afford that. After the modest performance of Both Sides, Love Doppelgängers needed to work commercially.

The one person who didn’t know Love Doppelgängers was terrible: Simon Freeman, the person who had come up with it. Simon had studied German in school and had an adolescent obsession with all things Kafka. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” Simon said, feeling offended at Sam’s utter certainty that it was terrible. “Why won’t it work?”

“No one knows what a doppelgänger is,” Sam said.

“Lots of people know what a doppelgänger is!” Simon defended his title.

“Maybe not enough people know what a doppelgänger is,” Marx amended Sam.
Sadie thought she’d quite possibly lose her mind if one more person said doppelgänger.

“If kids know one German word, it’s ‘doppelgänger,’ ” Simon said.

“What kids are these?” Sam said. “Are they all in AP English?”

“Well, then, they can learn,” Simon said. “We can put a definition on the cover, a footnote—”

“A footnote? Are you kidding? You know what says, Get ready for a great time gaming? A cover with a footnote,” Sam said.

“How do you get over a failure?”

“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.”

“So, what do I do?” she asked.

“You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

“I don’t know if I have a better game in me than Both Sides,” Sadie said. “I don’t know if I can be that vulnerable again.”

The drive ended up taking four times as long as it usually did, but Zoe did make her flight. It was the first time Marx had ever truly been broken up with. He knew he should be devastated, but what he felt was relief. The relationship, without him noticing, had been the longest one he had ever had. He had seen no reason to end it. He had never tired of coming home to their place and finding her naked, playing some new instrument. Why end something that worked over the vague notion that he could love someone more deeply than he loved Zoe, who was by every measure fantastic? It was a strange moment in Marx’s personal development. He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet, and he considered it a sign of his own maturity that he had not thought to end things with Zoe. But his disdain for his former itinerancy had made it so he could not recognize the reasons a person should stay.

“Marx was a fantastic actor,” Sadie defended him.

“He’s better at what he’s doing now,” Watanabe-san insisted.

Sadie and Marx took a cab back to the hotel. “Do you mind what your father said?” she asked him.

“No,” Marx said. “I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.

She walked through another gate.

It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

She walked through another gate.

What was a gate anyway?

A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.