The Measure(6)

The man lowered his voice when he asked it.

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean I believe it.” The woman leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms defensively.

The man hesitated. “Can I ask what it was?”

Too forward for a first date, Ben thought. Perhaps a fourth or fifth, then.

“It was pretty long, I think. But again, it means nothing.”

“I haven’t looked at mine yet. My brother’s still deciding if he wants to, and I’d rather we look together,” the man said. “He’s the only family I’ve got, so I don’t know what I’d do if our strings were different lengths.”

His vulnerability seemed to shift something in the woman, and her expression softened. She reached out and touched his arm tenderly. “They aren’t real,” she said. “Give it a little more time, and you’ll see.”

Ben tried to concentrate on the floor plans in front of him, but instead he thought only of his own opened box, and the short string inside that had been lying in wait.

Maybe this woman was right, Ben thought, and his short string didn’t mean a short life. He prayed that she was right.

But his gut said she was wrong.





Nina




In April, Deborah Caine was the first in Nina’s office to receive official confirmation. She called a small group of editors into a conference room and told them what her source at the Department of Health and Human Services had just divulged to her.

“They’re real,” she said slowly. “We don’t know how, and we don’t know why, but it would appear that the length of your string does, in fact, correlate with the expected length of your life.”

Everyone in the room sat silently paralyzed, until one of the men stood and began to pace across the floor. “That’s fucking impossible,” he said, turning away from Deborah so he couldn’t see her response.

Nina’s mind and body both went numb, but she could somehow hear herself speaking, and her voice sounded surprisingly relaxed. “And they’re sure about this?” she asked.

“Several international task forces have all come to the same conclusion,” Deborah said. “I know this is . . . calling it a ‘bombshell’ sounds almost too normal. I know this information may be life-changing, for many of us. The president is expected to make an announcement tomorrow, and I believe the UN Security Council is also planning something, but I wanted to let you all know as soon as I heard.”

Gradually, Nina’s emotions seemed to return. She began to scratch at her left thumbnail, chipping off the pale pink polish, and she could feel that she was about to cry. She hoped that she could run to the bathroom before it started.

The man behind Nina stopped pacing and looked directly at their boss. “What do we do now?”

“About this month’s issue?” Deborah asked.

“About everything.”



After Deborah dismissed the group from the room, Nina locked herself in a bathroom stall and began to sob, leaning against the tiled wall to keep herself steady. There were simply too many feelings to process at once.

She could still see it vividly. The moment, just one week earlier, when she and Maura had finally opened their boxes together.

Despite Nina’s insistence on keeping them closed, in the end Maura couldn’t help herself. She had come to Nina one evening with remarkable sangfroid. “I want to open my box,” she said calmly.

Nina knew that Maura was determined. They could both be stubborn like that. But this wasn’t something simple, like picking out a couch, and there was no such thing as a compromise. They either looked or they didn’t. There was nothing in between.

Nina was afraid to open her box, but she was also aware of something even more frightening, and that was the prospect of opening one’s box all alone. Nina was the eldest child, the big sister with a tendency toward overprotection. And now that same feeling, the urge to shelter and care for everyone around her, encompassed Maura, too. Nina couldn’t let Maura look by herself.

“We’ll do it together,” Nina said.

“No, that’s not what I’m asking.” Maura shook her head. “You don’t need to do that for me.”

“I know,” Nina said. “But I can’t fight the fact that the world seems to be hurtling toward the point where everybody looks. And I’d much rather look with you by my side.”

So the two women sat cross-legged on the rug in their living room and gingerly opened the lids of their boxes, peeling back the paper-thin piece of shimmering cloth inside.

At the time, they weren’t able to interpret the exact meaning of the lengths of their strings, but they placed them between their fingertips and held them out next to each other. One thing was instantly, sickeningly clear: Maura’s string was barely half the length of Nina’s.

They had only just celebrated two years together, only recently begun to share a home. Though they hadn’t explicitly spoken about marriage, Nina had seen Maura steal a peek in her dresser drawers right before their anniversary dinner. They both knew well enough that Nina hated surprises and thrived on planning, so perhaps they each assumed, subconsciously, that Nina would be the one to propose.

As with most people in love, Nina felt like she had known Maura for much longer than two years, but their life together was really just beginning.