The Measure(9)

The final arrival was Ben’s fellow newcomer, a woman named Maura, who sat down next to Ben and offered a half smile and a half nod that Ben received as a silent summation of the entire group’s unspoken sentiments: It sucks to be us.

But at least there is an us.





Maura




Maura hadn’t wanted to join the support group. Joining felt like admitting defeat, and Maura was no defeatist. She only agreed in order to placate her girlfriend.

Nina hadn’t even wanted to look at their strings when they first arrived, which wasn’t very surprising. Nina was always the cautious one.

But when they finally opened their boxes at Maura’s urging, she instantly wished they hadn’t.

Nina had tried her best to allay Maura’s fears, to convince her that the strings weren’t real. But Maura had been fighting a queasiness, a lack of appetite, and a general sense of dread ever since the day they’d looked.

And then, about a week later, Nina returned home from her office and told Maura to sit down, that she had something she needed to tell her.

“Deborah got a call today,” Nina said slowly. “From someone at the Health Department.” Her eyes had already turned glassy, and she was struggling to find the next words.

But Maura understood.

“Just say it, Nina. Just fucking say it!”

Nina swallowed. “They’re real.”

Maura jumped off the couch and sprinted to the bathroom, crumpling onto the cold tiles. When she vomited into the toilet, Maura could feel Nina holding back her dark curls, and she knew Nina was holding back tears.

“It’s going to be okay,” Nina kept saying, gently rubbing her hand up and down Maura’s back. “We’ll get through this.”

But for the first time in their two years together, Maura couldn’t find comfort in Nina’s words.

They sat in front of the television the following night, their hands clutched together, as the president made a speech urging citizens to stay calm, and the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services made a speech outlining the researchers’ findings, and the director of the World Health Organization and the UN secretary general both made speeches calling for global solidarity and compassion during this moment of uncharted crisis.

The Pope even emerged on his balcony in Vatican City to address the millions of frightened souls who were no doubt waiting for his guidance.

“I would like to remind everyone of the words we repeat at each Mass: ‘The mystery of faith.’ We know that faith, true faith, calls upon us to accept that some mysteries will always lie beyond our comprehension while here on earth,” the Pope declared, his words translated for all. “Our knowledge of our Creator will always be imperfect. As we read in Romans 11:33, ‘Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways!’ Today, we are faced with the incomprehensible, the inscrutable. We are asked to believe that these boxes contain knowledge that has, until now, been reserved for God alone. But this is not the first time that we have been called upon to believe in what was once unbelievable. Even the Apostles did not believe, at first, that Jesus Christ had risen from the grave, but we know it to be true. And just as I have no doubt in the resurrection, I have no doubt that these boxes are a gift from God to His children, for there is no one else more powerful, more knowing, and more giving than the Lord our God.”

But Maura did not see her box as a gift.



Every day, as hundreds of thousands of people celebrated their twenty-second birthdays by awakening to a new wave of boxes, the situation grew increasingly urgent. They couldn’t just keep guessing at what their strings foretold.

A team of analysts collaborating between the U.S. and Japan was the first to offer a solution: a government-sponsored website that would enable at-home users to interpret the length of their strings.

The researchers had amassed the measurements of thousands of different strings, down to mere fragments of millimeters. They had concluded, based on the earliest data, that the length of one’s string did not, in fact, equate with the time left to live, as some had initially posited. The measure of the string held instead the full measure of one’s life. From the beginning until the end.

Presuming the longest possible string accounted for the rare life span of approximately 110 years, the researchers had gradually worked their way backward to establish an estimated guide to string length and its corresponding life span. They couldn’t offer an exact date; the science wasn’t quite that precise. But users could visit the website, enter the length of their string, and—after clicking past three more screens designed to make absolutely certain that they wished to proceed, and agreed not to sue over any bad news—they would finally see the result, printed all too clearly in black Times New Roman. The time in which their life would end, narrowed to a window of barely two years.

What was, at first, a vague awareness that Maura’s string was not nearly as long as Nina’s soon crystallized into something crushingly concrete.

Maura’s string ended in her late thirties.

She had fewer than ten years remaining.



Through the early days of April, Nina wanted to talk with Maura about what was happening, and she often did talk with Maura, but she worried that she couldn’t offer the same type of support that a fellow short-stringer could.