Professor Malchik stopped in front of his house.
“Would you like to come in?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Please, I insist.”
“Sorry, I shouldn’t impose. More than I already have.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“All right. Well, I’d love to know more. I’ll rustle up my old work.”
* * *
Sophie slipped into bed that night wearing the same clothes she’d worn all day. Summer still stuck to the leaves and roasted the pavement outside, but she pulled the covers up to her chin. Lying down made her notice how tense she was. Her back released its web of fists. She turned onto her side and faced the wall. The width of her studio only just exceeded the width of her bed, but she liked that. It felt cozy, like sleeping in someone else’s arms. She held her phone and put in earbuds. Nothing new on “The Classics” today. She shuffled her own library, which queued John Mayer’s “You’re Gonna Live Forever in Me.”
Then, Kygo’s “Fragile.”
Then, The Weepies’ “The World Spins Madly On.”
The songs washed over her, watering her sadness. Her work had comforted her during the day—she’d felt more energized with every step toward the truth—but now she missed Jake acutely. She could’ve called her mom for company, but lately, those conversations felt stilted. Sophie didn’t have the energy to connect. She resigned herself to falling asleep to songs that understood her, but where was the one person who had?
* * *
The next day, in Peter’s office, Sophie wore the same hoodie as before. She faced him from the same chair she’d sat in years ago—except this time, she clearly wanted to be here. He’d never seen anyone so determined inside a body so frail. Her hoodie’s wide shoulders wilted over her own. But her expression was intent, strong.
Are you okay?
He wanted to ask about her personal life. Then again, her new research was so deeply intimate, by addressing it, he was probing the issues closest to her heart.
Peter cleared his throat.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about your idea linking love and time. If you’re correct, then you might’ve answered your own thesis question. This doesn’t sound at all scientific yet, but it gets us started: the way you see time is to fall in love?” Sophie nodded. “Then, your connection allows you to see beyond your one point in the block.”
“Yes.”
“Which would explain why you see the past.”
She nodded.
“And these aren’t memories,” she emphasized. “I know I’m in another time. The visions are”—she pinched the air—“thicker. They have smells, temperatures.” Jake’s warm arm, the snug blanket as they lay in Berkeley’s hammock. “Memories have never made me feel hot or cold the way these do. And these are intricate. When you remember a staircase, you can’t count the number of stairs in it. Memories are wispy. But when I see the past, I can count everything. I can read the title on every book. The details are there. I’m there—and here.”
“Have you read…” He broached An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne, a man who claimed to have had prescient dreams about the future. In this book, published in 1927, Dunne listed his dreams and then the subsequent events that they predicted. He proposed the idea that when people were fully conscious, they could only see the here and now. Attention was narrow. It could handle precious little information at once. But when people fell asleep, they slipped into a state that allowed them to see beyond the present. “Dunne never proved anything. My point is, the book has elements of your idea. What if love radically alters perception, the way he suggested sleep did? What if love changes your view as much as dreaming?”
Sophie took notes. As Peter kept indulging his curiosities, she chimed in more and more, thrilling him. After an hour of spirited back-and-forth, they moved to walk around the top of Science Hill, wondering how they might prove something so massive.
* * *
New Haven cooled. Blue State Coffee boasted #PUMPKINSZN on its chalkboard in script flecked with orange leaves. Sophie and Professor Malchik talked every day. She stayed late after every Time Theory and walked him home, eliciting dozens of invitations inside: “Maggie always makes more food than we can eat,” “A cup of tea?” and “Hot cocoa, maybe?”
Finally, on the edge of November, she agreed. Professor Malchik led her into the kitchen, where Maggie was stirring a pot of beef stew on the stove. Her kind smile creased every wrinkle. She wore her life happily on her face under a gray-blond bob. Her handshake was eagerly maternal as she wrapped her second hand around Sophie’s.
“Welcome, child,” she said.
Finally, in person.
Maggie had lived through Peter’s high expectations for Sophie almost a decade ago. Then, she’d endured months of his frustration. He’d ask Maggie as much as himself over uneaten dinners, Why was Sophie so distracted? What had he done wrong? Maggie had gone to bed alone for weeks. On her way to their room, she would pass Peter in his study hunched over a problem set he was revising. Now, Sophie was back with passion—and pain.
That night, Maggie watched Sophie, swamped in her clothes, push a chunk of beef around the edge of her bowl. She and Peter speculated about block theory. The discussion was seamless, sharp, but none of the questions Peter asked were the ones Maggie wanted to know. Everything skirted the most glaring topic of all: Sophie’s darkness.
Maggie taught special ed in New Haven. Some of her students were brilliant children struggling with emotional issues. Years ago, she had wondered if Sophie was on the spectrum. Did that explain her gifts? Did she have deficiencies that balanced her strengths? Sophie had drifted out of their lives before Maggie had found her answer. Now, Maggie didn’t think there was anything deficient about Sophie’s ability to feel. This young woman was thoughtful. She listened wholeheartedly and never interrupted Peter. If anything, Sophie was as gifted with empathy as she was with intellect. She was extraordinarily kind—and sad.
“She’s grieving,” Peter explained that night over the dishes.
“For who?”
Peter shrugged.
“You don’t know?”
“Someone she still loves.”
“You don’t ask her about it?”
“No.”
They cleaned in silence.
But if Peter wasn’t asking, was anyone?
* * *
Sophie became a regular at their dinner table after Time Theory. Their first couple of conversations orbited block theory. Then, Maggie began to interject. She asked Sophie where was she living (“Right by the 24-hour deli”) and with whom (“By myself”). Maggie backed into information about Sophie’s health, family, and the state of her apartment. She cooked heartier foods on the nights Sophie came over: pumpkins stuffed with cheese, pecans, and kale; beef stroganoff with extra-heavy cream; and multilayered cakes with frosting. She hugged Sophie after every evening. She insisted Sophie hang her jacket on the family’s rack.
Over time, Maggie learned that Sophie was blindsided by the mention of news events—midterm elections, wildfires in California displacing thousands, and the #MeToo movement—as if she didn’t read anything about today. When Sophie asked Maggie questions about herself, she focused oddly on youth. “Did you have any pets growing up?” Maggie had to volunteer facts about their lives now. She told Sophie all about Zack and Benji leading up to their first night home from the University of Connecticut. That fall, they filled the now five seats around the dining room table. Peter had placed a fifth chair next to his, identical to the other four.
Zack and Benji visited a few more times that year. The dynamic they created—talking over each other, erupting into belly laughs, slapping the table—could feel so overwhelming that Sophie escaped to the bathroom during dinner for some peace. There, alone with her phone, she would self-soothe by listening to old voice mails from Jake.
* * *
February hung white coats on skeleton trees. S
ophie sat across from Peter in his living room while Maggie set the table. Sophie gripped the notebook on her lap. Numbers covered the page so densely, it could have as easily started out black or white.
“Did they help?” Peter asked.
He’d given Sophie her old problem sets to read for inspiration. She’d spent the past few days going through them while logging her thoughts in this journal, her primary companion. She wrote in it during conversations with Professor Malchik; during dinner with his family; and sometimes, she’d stop mid-path on campus in freezing cold to scribble an idea as students parted around her. It was a journalistic approach to her own life. She didn’t want to lose any of the precious wisps in her mind, so delicate and quick to decay that they required immediate recording. They were her key to proving block theory, to showing that time didn’t pass the way people experienced it doing so. The past was as real and contemporary as this pen in her hand.
“Sort of,” she admitted.
The most interesting part had been a tangent on color. Color, of course, was light, which could be broken down into wavelength and frequency, the number of waves per second. Sophie had written in one page’s margin: Color is a function of frequency. Frequency is a function of time. On rereading, that note had caught her eye. Since color was visible, and just a mathematical string away from time, she’d thought that the secret to seeing time could be in that relationship. The idea intrigued her again.
The front door swung open to reveal Zack and Benji. Their shaggy hair had snow dandruff. Maggie ran in with oven mitts for hands and hugged them, squeezing the puff out of their parkas. Sophie closed her notebook and waved with her free arm. Peter noted that her grip on the journal stayed tight as everyone said hello. She clung to it like a map she needed to find her way home. Maggie ushered everyone in to dinner: spaghetti and meatballs to power the boys ahead of their ski weekend with friends in Killington, Vermont. Sophie kept the notebook open beside her plate. She poked her plain pasta. She even spun some around her fork at one point, but the spiral failed to hypnotize her. She wasn’t interested in food. She mulled over the link between color and time. It connected the visible and the unseen. She jotted a note every few minutes. The intervals got shorter. She started to write the words between her thoughts—pause, thinking—afraid of putting her pen down and missing something vital. She strung whole sentences together with a single line of ink until—
“Sophie, dear,” Maggie said.
She twitched and came back to her senses at the table across from Zack and Benji. Both had stalled over their empty plates. Marinara rouged their lips. Behind them, frosted windows blurred the storm outside. Sophie felt Maggie’s fingertips on her shoulder and looked down at the pen in her hand, disassociated from own her body. The page was covered in illegible equations. Sophie closed the notebook.
“I’m sorry,” she stuttered.
“Are you finished, dear?”
“Yes. I’ll get it.”
“I have it.”
Maggie scooped up the plate, then Peter’s, then Benji’s. Zack followed her into the kitchen with his own. Sophie looked around for a clue as to what they’d been talking about. Peter excused himself to the restroom. Sophie faced Benji, alone.
“B-r-b,” he spelled, getting up.
The kitchen door swung closed behind him.
“What’s her deal?” Benji whisper-asked.
Sophie’s ears pricked up.
“Shh!” Maggie ordered.
“Cut her a break,” Zack said.
“It’s fucking weird,” Benji whispered.
“She was dumped,” Zack said.
“What?” Benji asked.
“Shh, I mean it.”
“I thought they were just on the rocks or something,” Zack murmured. Sophie’s stomach cinched. “I heard him on the phone with her sometimes. Like, in the bathroom. She’d come out and look like she’d been crying. Then I realized they weren’t on the phone. I saw her screen. She was listening to old voice mails. From him.”
“What a psycho,” Benji said.
Sophie stood up and took quick, feather-light footsteps to the front door. She couldn’t have made less noise crossing the carpet if she were gliding an inch above the faded pattern. She kept her head bowed as she dressed in her parka, gloves, and boots.
Outside, Hillhouse was dark except for streetlamps. Sophie pulled her iPhone out of her parka pocket and went to her voice mail tab, where his name—Jake :) Kristopher—was stacked in rows. She didn’t want to delete them. She didn’t want to move on. How could she? Her flashbacks were as vivid as ever. She couldn’t get through a day without being thrown into the past for one more ecstatic breath beside him. She kept appearing in moments she’d forgotten, seeing details beyond her ability to recall. They were together—now. As she walked home, her tears froze in wave-shaped tracks down her face. She unlocked the door to her building, where her studio waited on the second floor. She called her mom.
“Sophie? What is it?”
It had been a week since they had spoken.
“Am I crazy?” Sophie asked.
“What do you mean?”
Sophie locked her door. She sat on her bed in the dark.
“Am I crazy to go on like this?” Sophie hinged forward at the waist and cried through the words. “Everyone else moves on—”
“Sophie, dear, breathe.”
“—but I can’t. Why am I so different?” Sophie asked.
“Darling, please.”
“I always have been.”
“No,” Isabel insisted. “You’re more aware than other people, but what you’re feeling is the same. That’s the way you’ve always been. Other people feel what you’re going through; you just experience it… more.” Of course, no one ever wanted to move on. No one ever wanted to fall in love again after they gave their heart away to someone who didn’t come back. Isabel hadn’t wanted to date anyone after Aidan. But few people actually did swear off others the way Sophie staunchly had.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I love you.” Isabel hadn’t been able to say that in a while, and she missed her girl. Behind her, water cascaded down a stack of dinner dishes in the sink, tier by tier by tier. “You’re not crazy. Not even a little bit, I’m afraid.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
Sophie eyed her journal.
“I should go,” she added. “Work.”
Sophie would’ve liked to keep talking, but if they did, her mom would start asking the wrong questions. If she were spending time outside, if she were making friends. They said good night. After Sophie hung up, she pulled the pen from her pocket, played the latest song on “The Classics,” and felt his old soul in the room like a change in temperature.
* * *
A little later that night, as she lay in bed, a flashback overtook her. She was suddenly with Jake as he nuzzled into her belly freshman year.
“Another one?” he asked in the dark.
“All right,” she said. “Today, I read about how different animals feel time pass at different rates.” She kept stroking his head. “The smaller an animal is, the slower time passes for them.” He moaned once, happy. “It helps to think about it in terms of flickering light. When a light flashes on and off quickly enough, an animal sees it as a steady stream without pauses in between. Smaller animals have faster visual systems. So, they’re able to see light flashing on and off where we would just see a blur of light, which means they effectively see in slow motion. Flies see the world happen seven times more slowly than we do.”
Their chests rose and fell in synch.
“Are you asleep?” she asked.
“I’m listening.” He kissed her belly.
“Okay,” she went on. “People, too. We feel time pass at different rates depending on what’s happening around us. When something unusual happens, we feel time slow down. The brain shifts into overdrive. We analyze every detail. Our visual systems work faster. So we see the world in slow motion, just like the
fly.”
“So, people can feel time stop?”
When it ended, Sophie was alone in her room—in a different moment, but one as real, as current. She just had to keep working to prove it.
* * *
Sophie was gripping both sides of the Malchiks’ kitchen sink while Peter and Maggie watched her from the doorway. The running faucet misted her hoodie as she stood immobilized in thought. A bottle of Dial soap lay sideways dripping bright orange goo.
Peter felt like this was his fault. Now in the second year of her PhD, she still hadn’t set any boundaries. Whenever he emailed her at 1 or 2 a.m. with readings, she’d reply with her thoughts by morning. When an idea came to him in the middle of the day, and he asked her to drop by his office, she’d appear within an hour without fail. She’d been obsessed with the link between color and time for over a year now. It was an inexplicable hunch, she said, that this related to block theory. However, she hadn’t made progress in months.
He’d tried to expand her focus. That afternoon, he’d emailed her a new article on black holes, the phenomena created when a star collapsed at the end of its life. Inside, gravity was so strong, nothing to cross its borders escaped. It was well known that increasing gravity slowed time down, and decreasing gravity sped time up. Next to a black hole, the infinite gravity inside slowed time to the point of standing still. Even though objects were destroyed inside, it took an infinite amount of time for that to occur. So planets and stars appeared to stay on the surface of black holes despite plummeting to the center. In that, Peter saw a connection to their work. Here was an instance where time flowed but had the appearance of standing still. It was the reverse of block theory. Could he and Sophie use the math in that paper for their purposes?
The Love Proof Page 12