“Well, here, you have my desk.”
“You ever study here?”
Was it hot in here? Was Sophie comfortable?
“No, ma’am.”
Ma’am? Was he that nervous? He knocked on the hard wooden seat. He glanced at the slice of common room beyond his door, highlighting everything his room wasn’t—carpeted, visited, rich with things. He’d never had a girl in here before. Sophie looked beautiful. It had always been so easy to talk to her—to leak his mind into the air between them—but now he was consumed with inhibiting himself. He’d never had sex, not even close, but now that he was an arm’s length from her, one shut door away from complete privacy, it was all he could imagine. A slideshow played in his mind, each frame a different possibility.
“Is it loud out in the hall?” Sophie asked.
It was silent.
“Maybe I should shut the door,” she said as she pulled it closed. “There we go. Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. So loud.”
He laughed, relieved she’d only been kidding to bring them closer and hadn’t somehow heard his thoughts. And as if she’d just leaned perilously toward him, as if she needed him to restore her balance, he walked toward her and kissed her. Sophie blinked out his two windows of starry sky. With their lips locked, their minds fixated on the short seam connecting them, he reached for her waist. Under her shirt, her skin felt warm, buttery. He pressed his hips into her. She was kissing him as much as he was kissing her, a Möbius strip of an embrace.
Sophie wiped her mouth, eyes rapt.
“Is that what you’ve been studying in Bass?” she asked.
He laughed.
She kissed his cheek.
“I interrupted you,” she said.
“Hm?”
“The tour.”
“Oh. Right.”
“May I?” She gestured to his bed.
He nodded eagerly. She sat.
“What else is there to know here?” she asked.
Her smile was infectious.
“Well.” He sat next to her, obedient. “I guess there’s the thinking behind all of it. It’s not a lot of stuff, but I don’t want to decorate until I’m where I’m supposed to be.” He’d never said that out loud. “Does that make sense?”
Sophie shook her head no.
“You mean…?” she probed.
“I don’t know. When there’s enough.”
“And when will that be?”
“I don’t know. I figure I’ll know when I’m there.”
Sophie yawned—and covered her mouth fast, embarrassed by the reflex.
“It’s just my heart, don’t worry about it,” he teased.
She laughed. “Sorry. I usually just go to bed after we study.”
“Same,” he admitted. “Do you want to stay here?”
She bit her lip. “Here here?”
He laughed. “You don’t—”
“Yes,” she said.
Jake walked to the bureau and removed his most expensive gym shirt—PUMA, the animal leaping over the A—and smallest joggers. Their hands brushed as he gave them to her. She changed in the bathroom while he slipped into gray sweats. They reunited to brush their teeth. She used the pair to his brush, which he found still in its plastic package.
While she used the bathroom a final time, Jake folded her shirt and jeans in a pile on his desk as carefully as he made his bed. He sat on his quilt, calm, happy. When she returned, she turned off the light, but they stayed lit dark blue by starlight as they slid into bed. His body curled into an S shape behind hers. He listened for her to say something. She only squeezed his arm. He kissed the back of her head and felt his first urge to say I love you, holding his tongue and savoring her until the moment they fell asleep.
* * *
Jake’s phone alarm rang at 6 a.m., shattering the early morning with its repetitive hacking. He reached past Sophie, pressed stop, and resumed his position of a second before. Sophie lay in his arms: soft, small-boned. He kissed the nape of her neck where her hair was thin and private under all the wild yellow waves. He wondered if she were still on the hazy edge of her own dreams, feeling his kiss across consciousnesses, until she turned around. Faint freckles spread across her nose like beige Milky Way dust. Natural blush pinked her cheeks. He slid his hands up her shirt, where he could feel her ribs. Sophie gazed at him, so at ease that he knew she would let him do anything.
* * *
“You’re distracted,” Professor Malchik announced.
Sophie’s mind had been in Jake’s room, remembering the coziest she’d ever been, skin-to-skin with the softest furnace, her back arched under the thinnest sheets. Now, she returned to Professor Malchik’s office. He sat at the round table, legs crossed in bland khakis. The line of buttons up his white oxford was stiff as a spine up the front of his body.
Sophie pretzeled her legs in stretchy jeans. Her two French braids looked neat in front, but had the appearance of self-tying in the back, twisting up her scalp. Her problem set lay between them filled with her notes. Some of her letters curled like vines at the ends—floral, feminine writing with an aura of far, far away. They’d been going through her work as usual, but Sophie’s eyes had been wandering all afternoon.
He checked his watch: only half an hour into their two, but almost through the whole problem set. He’d kept turning the pages, hoping one would ignite her. Was she bored? Why? Today’s lesson was exceptional. He’d asked Sophie to read about how people perceived time passing faster or slower depending on their emotions. They’d discussed time in states of: awe, flow, boredom, desire, grief, and, most recently, surprise. When people were stunned, the brain’s amygdala worked overtime to record more memories than usual from the unfolding scene. This more detailed reel of life made people feel as if time slowed down. He’d listed a dozen articles on the subject—all in 8-point type, because smaller fonts made people concentrate more, and he wanted Sophie to engage with this as much as possible.
Professor Malchik flipped the page to the last one—dead blank. Below the title “Fear and Time Perception,” he’d listed six articles to read and left inches of white space for her thoughts. The page was still white.
“Did you see this question?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Do you want to come over?” Sophie remembered his voice. She’d looked down at this page and thought she’d finish it later. She remembered the tour. “It’s just my heart, don’t worry about it.” She grinned at the memory—
“Is this funny to you?” Professor Malchik asked.
“No, sir.”
She hadn’t called him that before and touched her throat, sensing Jake. The silence dragged on, empty as the page.
“Did you have any other thoughts?” he asked. He prepared to end early.
“What about love?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not in the emotions you listed.” She flipped back through the pages. “How does love alter the way people feel time?”
He leaned forward. “Well, love’s a bit like desire.” He turned back to that page, blue with her scribbles.
“No, not desire. Real love. How does that affect the way we perceive time?”
“Real love?”
She nodded.
“You’re right, maybe that’s closer to awe.”
He turned to that page. Like surprise and desire, awe slowed people’s sense of time. In one study listed there, people who were shown pictures of epic mountains or other panoramic landscapes—snow-covered conifers, see-through blue waters off the coast of Thailand, glaciers sparkling at sunrise—remembered more details from those images than people shown banal photographs. They also estimated more time had passed per viewing than those looking at everyday things. They perceived more time in the same duration.
Sophie shook her head.
“No, awe happens when you encounter something so big, beautiful, or complex.” She pictured the Maroon Bells. “You’re tempted to worship it. But real love’s…”
between equals. It was when you recognized someone you’d never met, because somehow you knew they were the same. Awe was submission, and love was connection. And there was more to it than that, but Sophie didn’t know quite how to dignify its depth and power. She didn’t want to blunder in front of Professor Malchik, so she only said, “It’s different.”
“All right. I suppose love’s unique.”
She nodded.
“I was thinking, as I was reading,” she said. “Do these emotions affect our perception of time or time itself? What if being awestruck doesn’t just feel slow, but what if the world for you actually does slow down?”
The radical thought reminded Professor Malchik of Einstein’s time dilation. Einstein was the first to posit that time doesn’t pass at the same rate everywhere in the universe. The force of gravity affects time in a phenomenon known as gravitational time dilation: the farther a clock is from a source of gravity, the faster it ticks. The closer a clock is to a source of gravity, the slower it ticks. Speed can also affect time in velocity time dilation: the faster an object travels, the slower its internal clock ticks. An astronaut orbiting Earth in the International Space Station for one year—at seventeen thousand miles per hour relative to the planet—will age nine milliseconds slower than he would have on Earth. Both forms of time dilation have been proven.
But emotional time dilation?
Professor Malchik made a note.
“Our emotions’ effects on time,” he repeated as he wrote. It was an intriguing idea, that time might actually pass slower when we were in love.
“Yes.”
“That our emotions don’t just reflect our world, but could change our world. That might be worth thinking about.”
CHAPTER 5
Leaves turned pumpkin-colored, brightening paths on campus. Fleeces covered polos, and parkas followed close behind. Jake and Sophie got used to darker mornings, warmer socks, and each other. They spent more and more time together, becoming roommates in their minds. As snow started to blunt the spires of Sterling Library, like crossing a subtle border—the same terrain, now called something new—Jake’s bed became “theirs.”
They fell into a routine.
Their habits were their bones, structuring a shared life.
Every morning, Jake woke up at six to work out. He brought his Moleskine to Berkeley’s gym to keep meticulous track of his exercises: reps and weight. He cycled through upper body, lower body, core, long run, and then intervals day, sweating through his shirt each time. He kept a close eye on his heart rate displayed on his watch and spent at least two hundred minutes a week at 140 bpm or above. His resting heart rate was 51.
After his shower, Jake woke Sophie by touching her shoulder. They got dressed every morning to “The Classics,” one of Jake’s playlists, filled with old soul tunes: Ray Charles’s “You Won’t Let Me Go,” Etta James’s “At Last,” and others like Sam Cooke’s slow and steady “Bring It On Home to Me.” Sometimes Jake sang along, his voice low and impassioned as he slid his arms through flannel sleeves. Sophie chose from her clothes filling the bottom half of the bureau. Jake made the bed. Sophie arranged the three pillows she’d moved in from her room: each two feet across, faux fur. She kept them in front of Jake’s stiff, plain ones.
Sometimes they parted for morning classes. Otherwise, Sophie joined him in Cold War, a large and anonymous lecture where Jake would covertly massage her back. In the curve where her neck became shoulders, he’d melt any stiffness to threads.
They ate lunch side by side.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, in Psych 101, Jake and Sophie sat in the front row. They felt a sense of loyalty to the spot. Sophie knew the material already, so she usually let her mind wander with her head tilted to the side. She noticed she was changing. She could walk around campus undaunted by other people on the paths. She ate in dining halls at peak times without nerves forcing her to leave. She called her mom less often. She didn’t feel alone.
Sophie did perk up for the psych lecture devoted to love. She uncapped her gel pen when the professor promised a definition. Love, according to the famous Dr. Robert Sternberg, had three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Only a couple with all three had love. But “Sternberg’s Theory of Love” struck her as a party trick rather than a breakthrough. Didn’t this theory just replace one ambiguous word with three? Besides, it rooted love in behavior, and wasn’t love beyond bodies? Stronger than arms and legs, vaster, and longer lasting? What was its connection to space and time? Had anyone ever studied love as a force?
She left the lecture more curious than she’d come.
Even with love unmapped, Sophie knew she was in love with Jake. The word had crept into their vernacular starting days after they’d met. “I love the way you… say that.” And “… look at me.” And “…touch me.” Whole-person “love you” took just a couple of months. Jake said it first one night in their bed. He’d been holding her waist, his thumbs touching, lost in an overwhelming rhythm, when he said, “I love you so much,” so unselfconsciously that Sophie didn’t react. The words had come unintentionally from so deep inside of him that even acknowledging them felt intrusive. Still, she knew what they had.
In the afternoons, Jake and Sophie studied. She read poetry that understood real love, respecting its magic and connection to something more mind-blowing and perspective-shifting than “intimacy, passion, and commitment.” She liked Rumi, who wrote: “Love is the bridge between you and everything”; “Love rests on no foundation… with no beginning or end”; and “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” There was truth there. She didn’t understand it exactly, but the poems felt closer to wisdom than physics and psychology. She wanted to figure it out: what was this thing happening between her and Jake? He joined her every time she visited Sterling for more books. He followed her up the main tower—seven stories tall, with eight mezzanines—into the stacks, where eighty miles of shelving were crammed into 6.5 miles of aisle space. He kissed her when they were alone and hidden in the labyrinth. He helped carry books back to their place.
Sophie’s sessions with Professor Malchik were virtually the only time they spent apart. She listened to “The Classics” on walks up and down Science Hill, the steep street lined with science buildings and Sloane Physics Laboratory on top. Those songs had Jake in their pulsing beats. Sophie had never sought music out before—had never been to a concert, didn’t prefer one genre to another—but she loved their morning playlist, where Jake was in every note.
Meanwhile, as the temperature dropped, Professor Malchik sensed distance grow between him and Sophie. She seemed preoccupied—even though she submitted all of her homework on time and answered every question he asked. It was as if her heart and soul were in another room. If he swung at her, he had the thought that his hand might pass through her image, because this Sophie was an illusion and the real her was somewhere else. He made small changes to the syllabus, but nothing grabbed her.
After library closing, Jake and Sophie walked home to Berkeley under constellations Sophie named. One night, she outlined Pisces—two fish linked by a V-shaped trail of stars—and explained the myth: a monster was about to eat Aphrodite and her son when they turned into fish and jumped into a river to escape. They tied themselves together with a cord so they wouldn’t lose each other in the water. Then she pointed out Omega Piscium in Pisces, the biggest white dot above, and explained it was actually a binary star system: two stars orbiting each other. They had the same center of mass, so they’d gotten locked in each other’s gravity.
Sometimes they’d detour to Durfee’s, the snack spot wedged between the Yale Women’s Center and the post office. Its gas station amenities didn’t appeal to Jake—rotating slices of pizza, deep-fried chicken tenders, puffed bags of chips, and refrigerators full of Starbucks drinks in glass bottles—but Sophie loved the sweets. He bought them armfuls at a time: Grandma’s Mini Sandwich Cremes, Little Debbie Powdered Donuts in packages of six
for seventy-five cents, and Fun Dip. They’d carry the snacks home and eat them in bed over a laptop movie.
Finally, they got under the covers facing each other. She’d burrow her nose into his chest and breathe his shower-gel scent. He smelled aggressively clean, hard-scrubbed. As they paid attention to each other’s bodies in the dark, Jake came to expect the exact curve of her waist, which dipped at a fingerprint-specific slope between her ribs and hipbone. She learned his chest hair spread like wings. She’d touch his chest with such attention that she learned the different patches of hard and soft between the bones, quilting over his skeleton.
As they lay in bed, releasing the day, Sophie sometimes felt Jake tense. One moment, he’d be there, alive in all ten fingers on her, and the next moment, gone. His hands would stop on her hips, stiff. She’d open her eyes and see his brow knotted and body locked, as if all his energy were being sucked up through his limbs and into his mind. It was familiar. She knew what it was like to think that intently, that fast. In those moments, she’d stroke the back of his head and teach him something about the universe. It was usually just a quick fact, but that was all it took to put the world back into perspective. She taught him that the tallest mountain in the solar system was Olympus on Mars, five times as tall as Mount Everest and over 350 miles across, the width of Arizona. Slowly, Jake would relax again and fade into sleep. Sophie followed close behind.
Overall, it was a decadent, transformative amount of time together. Sophie became convinced that there was something massive and unstudied happening between them, something more powerful than the brain, even more important than time.
* * *
One December afternoon, Jake and Sophie lay on the hammock in Berkeley’s quad, enjoying a lift in the weather and the last few minutes before her session with Professor Malchik. Both looked up at white trails left by jets across the blue sky—condensed water vapor, as she’d taught him. It was the same process that cooled their breaths into small mists in front of them. Both wore zip-ups under a thick fire blanket from their room.
The Love Proof Page 6