Chapter 7
Chapter 7: What He Carried
Connor had a theory about how people handled loss.
His theory was that some people got angry, some people got quiet, and some people — the ones who were going to give him the most trouble — got productive. They worked. They built things. They channelled everything they didn't know what to do with into an output so relentless that you had to respect it even while you were extremely concerned about it.
Jamie, Connor explained to their third studio member (Marcus, before he pivoted to landscape architecture), was category three.
Jamie came back from Toronto and made Undertow in two years.
He'd had the idea before. A coastal town with shifting tides, a missing brother, a man retracing a trail through a landscape that changed depending on how long you waited. He'd sketched it in his Field Notes notebooks over two previous conferences, had the movement system in his head, had the emotional spine of the thing — the way the ocean giveth and the ocean taketh away; the way grief worked like tides; the way you could lose something and still find traces of it in the places it had been.
He came back from Toronto and the idea acquired a specific quality it hadn't had before.
He didn't examine this. He just worked.
The movement system was the first thing he built — fluid, kinetic, the sensation of running through water even on dry ground. Connor said it felt like the whole game was slightly submerged. Jamie said: yes, exactly. The coastal town shifted depending on the time of day and the progression of the story, objects washed in and out with the tides, the clues your brother left could only be found in specific windows of the tidal cycle. You had to wait. You had to keep coming back to the same places.
Connor played the first act prototype in March and sat in silence for three minutes after finishing it.
"Okay," he said.
"Good?" Jamie said.
"Very good." Connor looked at him. "This is about something."
"It's about looking for someone."
"More than that."
"Connor."
"I'm just—" Connor set down the controller. "Was the girl from Toronto—"
"She wanted one night," Jamie said. "That's fine. That's what it was."
"Right." Connor looked at the screen, which was paused on the coastal town at low tide, the clues visible in the sand. "She never texted."
"No."
"You texted her twice."
"I know."
"And waited at the coffee shop—"
"Connor."
"—for forty minutes."
"I know," Jamie said. "It was what it was."
Connor was quiet for a moment. "I just think you should—"
"I'm fine," Jamie said. "The game's good. That's what matters right now."
Connor had the expression of someone who had known Jamie since they were twenty and had a detailed archive of the things Jamie said versus the things Jamie meant. He kept this expression to himself, mostly. He was a good business partner for exactly that reason — he knew when to push and when to let the thing develop on its own timeline.
"The game is very good," Connor said, and let it drop.
Undertow shipped February of the second year.
The reviews were better than they'd dared project — not just good indie game reviews but this is what the medium can do reviews, the kind that landed in the larger conversation and brought in an audience beyond the games community. The movement system was cited specifically, again and again. The emotional architecture of the final act — which Connor had said was too much, then had watched Jamie refuse to pull back on, then had admitted was exactly right — generated discussion threads that lasted weeks.
The missing brother at the end of the game was not, it turned out, dead. He had left because he'd been afraid, and he'd stayed away because he didn't know how to come back, and the protagonist finding him was not a dramatic confrontation but a quiet coastal morning conversation in which two people tried to say things they'd been carrying for years. The game ended not with a resolution but with the specific tentative beginning of one. Most people found this devastating.
Jamie had written the ending in one sitting at two in the morning in October of the first year. He hadn't changed a word of it.
He did not think about why.
He came back to Toronto four times in five years.
Twice for TIGA, once for a speaker slot at a games education conference, once on a detour during a flight connection he could have skipped. He did not tell Connor about the connection detour. Connor would have said something about it in the tone of a man who was correct and knew it.
Each time, he found himself walking past the Broadview on the walk from the conference hotel to wherever he was going. He told himself this was a reasonable route. He didn't go in.
Each time, he walked past Ancora on King. Once he ate there, at the bar, alone, and had the black cod and a Grüner Veltliner that was exactly what he'd expected and thought about nothing in particular for forty-five minutes.
He thought about it in airport crowds. He was a person who moved through the world easily — good at faces, good at names, the kind of person who remembered the intern from 2019 and the barista who'd worked on the Vancouver studio block for three years. He had a reliable, well-categorised memory, and the memory was very good at producing, without permission, the particular quality of that face in the restaurant light. The dry, specific humour. The way she'd said order the wine as though the rest of the evening was a foregone conclusion she was choosing to find out rather than a thing she already knew.
He thought about the ending of Watershed, which he had finished — alone in his apartment in January of the year after Toronto, on a Sunday, at eleven at night — and had sat with for a long time. The woman in the water at dawn, standing in the place. She stops running. She lets it be the place.
He'd closed the laptop and sat in his dark apartment and thought about Nisha Kapoor, game developer, Still Water Games, who had told him the ending of her own game in the dark at one in the morning and who had never received his texts and had never come to the coffee shop and whom he had been looking for, in the unfocused half-deliberate way of a person not admitting to a search, in airport crowds and conference registrant lists ever since.
He had not found her.
The TIGF shortlist arrived in March of the fifth year.
Connor read him the email. He read it. He read it again.
"Signal," Connor said. "Still Water Games." He looked at Jamie. "Is that—"
"Yes," Jamie said.
Connor put his phone down with the careful movement of someone setting down a thing that required handling. He looked at Jamie for a long moment.
"Before you say anything," Jamie said.
"I'm not saying anything."
"The expression you're making is saying something."
"The expression is I told you so and I'm choosing not to verbalise it." Connor picked up his coffee. "She's going to be there."
"Yes."
"Four days. Same stage."
"I'm aware of the format."
"Jamie." Connor looked at him. "It's been five years."
"I know."
"You've been back to Toronto four times."
"Connor."
"You made an entire game about a man who can't stop going back to a place where someone used to be."
"That's not—" Jamie stopped. He looked at his coffee. "That's not what the game is about."
Connor said nothing. His expression said: we can call it whatever you need to call it.
"She wanted one night," Jamie said. "She never texted. She never came to the coffee shop. That's—" He stopped. "That's the whole story."
"Or," Connor said, "there's a piece missing."
"There isn't a piece missing."
"Or there is and you've been telling yourself the clean version for five years because the alternative — that it was a mistake, a miscommunication, a thing that could have been fixed — is harder to carry than the version where she made a choice." Connor picked up his phone again, as if the conversation were concluding. "I'm not saying that. I'm just noting that it's a possibility."
Jamie looked at the window. Outside the Vancouver studio it was raining in the specific persistent way it always rained in March, and the street was glossy and dark, and he thought about a hotel window in Toronto and a bridge lit up against an October sky.
He thought about this was something.
He thought about the coffee shop, the forty minutes, the two texts that had gone to someone who wasn't her.
He thought: what if it wasn't the whole story.
He didn't say this. He picked up his own phone and opened the TIGF email and read the logistics of the convention, the dates, the schedule, the venue on the waterfront that he'd been past before on the Toronto visits.
"We'll need to book flights," he said.
"Already on it," Connor said, in the tone of a man who had been ready for this for five years.