The Measure(3)

It must be a safety precaution, he realized. Whenever something cataclysmic might be striking the city, nervous New Yorkers avoided the underground. Few places seemed worse to potentially be trapped in than a small, airless train car below the earth.

The other commuters were quiet, on edge, sitting far apart from each other and consumed by their phones.

“They’re just little boxes,” said a man slumped in a corner. He looked, to Ben, like he was high on something. “People don’t need to be freaking out!”

The person nearest to the man shifted away.

Then the man started singing deliriously, conducting an invisible orchestra with his hands.

“Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes made of ticky tacky . . .”



It was only then, listening to the man’s raspy voice, the eerie tune, that Ben truly started to worry.

Suddenly distressed, he rushed off at the next stop, Grand Central Station, and raced up the steps, grateful to be back on street level among the comfort of the crowds. The terminal was much more populated than the subway, with dozens of people boarding trains to the suburbs. Where were they all going? Ben wondered. Did they really believe that the answer to these mysterious boxes resided outside the city?

Perhaps they were simply running toward family.

Ben paused by an entrance to a vacant track, trying to orient his thoughts. About a quarter of the people around him were carrying brown boxes under their arms, and he realized that even more might be hiding in backpacks and purses. Ben felt surprisingly relieved that he hadn’t been home when it arrived, snoring obliviously in bed, separated from the invading box by only a shamefully thin wall. It felt like a lesser violation, somehow, when he was gone.

On a typical day at the station there would be plenty of tourists milling about, listening to audio guides, staring upward at the famous celestial ceiling. But today nobody stopped, and no one looked up.

Ben’s mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, the faded gold constellations above, explaining each zodiac in turn. Was she also the one who had told him that the stars were painted backward on purpose? That it was meant to be seen from the perspective of the divine, rather than humanity. Ben always figured it was just an excuse concocted afterward, a pretty story covering someone’s mistake.

“The measure of your life lies within,” a man was enunciating into his headset, visibly frustrated. “Nobody knows what it means! How the hell should I?”

The measure of your life lies within. Ben had picked up enough information by now, from the strangers at the airport and his phone on the subway, to recognize that was the inscription on the boxes. The mystery was only a few hours old, but some people were already interpreting the message to mean that the string inside your box foretold the ultimate length of your life.

But how could that possibly be true? Ben thought. That would mean the world had flipped around, like the ceiling above him, the humans now seeing from God’s perspective.

Ben leaned against the cool wall behind him, faintly light-headed. That’s when he remembered the bout of turbulence in the middle of his flight that had jostled him awake, the plane shuddering up and down, nearly spilling his seatmate’s drink. Like something had briefly rocked the atmosphere.

Ben would realize, later, that the boxes hadn’t appeared all at once, that they came during the night, whenever night happened to fall in a particular place. But there, standing in Grand Central, when the details of the prior evening still remained hazy, Ben couldn’t help but wonder if that shift in the air marked the moment the boxes had arrived down below.





Nina




Nina did not want to open the box.

She read the news every day, as she always had. She pored through Twitter for updates. She told herself it was work as usual. But she wasn’t just looking for stories.

She was looking for answers.

Online, competing theories seeking to explain the strings’ inexplicable origins ranged from a messenger of God to a clandestine government agency to an alien invasion. Some of the most avowed skeptics found themselves turning to the spiritual or the supernatural to justify the sudden arrival of these tiny boxes, just six inches wide and three inches deep, on every doorstep around the world. Even those currently houseless, erecting their dwellings in the streets, even the nomads and the hitchhikers, all had awoken, that morning, to chests of their own, waiting wherever they had laid their heads the night before.

But very few people, at first, would admit to believing that the strings could actually represent the length of one’s life. It was too frightening to imagine any external entity with such unnatural omniscience, and even those who professed faith in an all-knowing God had difficulty understanding why His behavior, after thousands of years, would suddenly alter so radically.

But the boxes kept coming.

After the first wave covered every living adult twenty-two years and older, each new sunrise brought a box and a string for anyone who turned twenty-two that day, marking a new entrance into adulthood.

And then, near the end of March, stories started to spread. News circulated whenever the prediction of a string came true, particularly when people with shorter strings died unexpectedly. Talk shows featured the grieving families of perfectly healthy twenty-somethings with short strings who had passed away in freak accidents, and radio programs ran interviews with hospital patients who had abandoned all hope, before receiving their long strings and suddenly finding themselves candidates for new trials and treatments.