The Love Proof

by Madeleine Henry

“I’ll think about it,” Jake lied.

  He checked his watch.

  “Would you like to see—” Stacy began.

  “Sorry, I have to get on a call. Great to meet you, Stacy.”

  “Tracy.”

  “What?”

  “My name.”

  “Oh.” He’d imagined the S? “Sorry. Thank you again.”

  On the street, the city was dark and bright at once. Light was confined to windows, headlights, and traffic lanterns. Their auras were stark, and beyond them, shadow. Jake headed for the subway home. He’d lived in the same studio since graduating and renewed the lease every May. After all, he didn’t spend much time there. He didn’t have people over. Did he really need more space? But here he was, “enjoying” himself. He made a mental note to email Tracy no and take the next apartment without a tour. His only request: no skylights.

  He stopped at the station, looked up at the sky. Where was she right now? He knew she was getting her PhD at Yale because he googled her every few weeks. He’d been thrilled to see that change to her LinkedIn two years ago. He had made the right decision. Her profile picture was still the same thumbnail she’d had when they graduated. Did she look different? What was she working on? Was she seeing anyone?

  He imagined what they’d do if they passed each other tonight. It was a fantasy he usually indulged in the mornings on his way to work. Now, he pictured her walking toward him. Her hair was still long, her eyes still hot blue. She held a library book in plastic casing. Then what? In one scenario, they both kept walking to steer clear of the wound. In another, they stopped and stumbled through inadequate conversation, listing basic facts about their lives. Butterflies lifted not just his stomach but his arms, throat, and chest. That would precede the agony of remaking his decision to pull away. In another daydream, they continued unquestioningly into each other’s arms. He apologized with his first breath and never let her go.

  But those were fantasies.

  He checked the time on his watch, a Roxster prototype he’d put on for the first time this morning. Its sleek black bangle combined his phone, computer, credit card, health records, doctor—everything—and would be on the market next year.

  He hadn’t told Lionel the whole truth about Roxster. The truth was he’d been reading about the company weeks ago when he’d spotted an unusual footer in its investor presentation. The company had disclosed that it funded academic research on time. Jake had requested a meeting with the company’s CEO, Steve Traffy. Steve turned out to be a short man with a tall personality: hyperverbal, quick to laugh. After some get-to-know-yous, Jake had asked Steve about the unusual disclosure. Apparently, Roxster co-funded programs at a few Ivy League schools studying the nature of time itself. Jake realized that by investing in Roxster, he was investing in Sophie’s field. He could help her. So he made Roxster his flagship name.

  Jake stepped onto the subway with Sophie in his heart. Of course, he’d never stop trying to help her. But some things, she had to give herself.

  CHAPTER 11

  After years of failing to prove block theory, Sophie changed her focus in order to graduate. She wrote her dissertation on chromesthesia, a type of synesthesia. For people with this condition, sounds had color. Hearing music made them see vibrant, dynamic abstractions. It reminded Sophie of her flashbacks. When she had to justify the topic to the chair, she framed it as research on converting one kind of sensory input to another: sound to sight. Similar studies had laid the groundwork for infrared imaging, which converted heat to sight.

  As part of Sophie’s work, she explored the onset of chromesthesia. Most people with the ability to “see” music were born with it. However, it was possible to develop the sense. She interviewed a hundred adults who had. In her long list of questions, at the bottom—belying its importance to her—she included Do you believe in soul mates? A staggering 90 percent of the chromesthetes did. Sophie always posed the natural follow-up: Have you met yours? If so, when? Everyone she asked had developed chromesthesia after meeting their soul mate.

  Sophie did not mention that in her dissertation. She only showed Peter what she found. It spoke to their hunch: something about falling in love radically altered perception.

  * * *

  “Zack!” Sophie called confidently. He stood a head taller than most of the runners by the start line. He jogged toward her with Benji.

  “You ready?” Zack asked.

  “As ready as you two,” she quipped.

  Zack smirked.

  She’d agreed months ago to race with them in the New Haven Half Marathon. Now, in the final weeks of her PhD, days before her thirty-second birthday, it was here. She hadn’t run more than three miles at a time in years. She’d spent most of her life sitting down, and this semester, thinking had confined her even more than usual as she finished her dissertation. She lost her breath sometimes on the walk up Science Hill, but she’d finally agreed to the race. It was a “Malchik tradition,” according to Zack, “for the kids.”

  Her high ponytail was secured with a rubber band she’d taken from her desk half an hour ago. Zack and Benji wore matching sweatbands from their fraternity. Peter and Maggie stood nearby, ready with camera phones. Sophie was swinging her arms back and forth when a loudspeaker ordered their heat to take their marks. Benji touched his toes over bent knees, looking like the leftmost primate in an evolutionary time lapse. The race gun fired. Benji sprinted ahead. Zack disappeared after into the fray of billowing apparel as Sophie leaned into a jog. More and more people passed until she found herself in step with an older crowd.

  The route was shaped like a figure eight. She walked miles three, five, and six but never stopped. Leafy trees cast jagged shadows on the asphalt. She drank Dixie cups of water from folding tables. The spectating mob thickened and thinned. As she jogged back through the heart of campus, right at the junction of the 8, setting a new personal record with each step, she ran by the psychology building where she and Jake had met. They stood three steps apart, their bodies connected by light. The flashback energized her. Her cadence picked up again when she passed Silliman’s dining hall where they first ate together. They froze in a wishbone angle joined at the mouth.

  Sophie ran beyond the invisible edge of campus. Panting dried the back of her throat. Midday sun bore down on her red face. A sign informed her that she had 3.1 miles to go. She reminded herself that the Malchiks were at the finish line. She pictured them hugging Zack and Benji congratulations. Maybe Maggie was tearing up between her sons in a group photo. Or maybe Benji was bent over heaving. The boys had never been very athletic aside from this race, which they ran every year to raise money for the school where Maggie worked.

  Sophie wished her parents were standing at the finish line, too. Neither of them knew she was running today. She didn’t answer their calls often. When she did, she found it hard to talk about herself. She resorted to one-word responses and didn’t volunteer any news because she didn’t feel like she was making them proud. “I just want to make sure you aren’t taking school too seriously.” And here she was, a PhD, obsessed with a theory. She’d written a different dissertation, but her fixation remained. She’d never let it go.

  Now, she imagined her parents waiting for her. Her mom was wearing hoop earrings with dreamcatcher webbing. Her dad had his arm around her. They were accepting half-pints of Poland Spring from the Malchiks in the crowd full of families.

  And Jake.

  She pictured him off to the side. He kept his MacBook tucked under his arm, looking exactly like he did in college. A Nike tee clung to his chest. She sprinted ahead, passing a couple of runners. Her head felt light. Her feet felt lighter. Jake needed her to finish so they could go home. They didn’t have anything in particular to do. Maybe they’d have dinner in Berkeley and talk on the sofa in their double until Sophie couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. He’d help her up. They’d fall asleep in a narrow lane on one side of their bed. Sophie’s last feeling would be home. When the finish line finall
y came into view, Sophie didn’t stop imagining him. He gazed back with soulful eyes. Peter was pointing her out to the rest of his family as she sprinted under the enormous digital clock marking the end of the race. She skidded to a stop and hinged forward until her head was in line with her waist.

  “Well done!” Peter congratulated.

  She stood up.

  Zack’s and Benji’s medals dangled around their necks.

  “Wow,” Benji admitted.

  Maggie offered Sophie a water. She gulped it down.

  “What was her time?” Benji asked.

  “A few minutes after you,” Zack said.

  “Wow,” Benji repeated. “Your last mile was like Transformers.”

  “What’d you say?” Sophie snapped.

  “Benji,” Maggie chided.

  Transformation—that was it. She didn’t know why she’d never considered it before.

  “I have to go,” Sophie said.

  “Will you be back for dinner?” Maggie asked.

  Sophie walked, ran, and then sprinted, moving faster than everyone else past the finish line until she reached her building. Inside, she jumped up the stairs two at a time. She’d lived in the same studio since she moved back to New Haven. The small box was too sparse to be messy. A gray futon faced her desk between a kitchenette and her bed. Her cupboards stored just two boxes of saltines and a full jar of peanut butter. Her desk was the focal point. She sat down facing a bulletin board covered with Post-it notes and scribbled equations. Stacks of books and journals fanned out in a semicircle behind her.

  She reached for a pen.

  She opened a fresh notebook.

  In one of her thousands of attempts to prove block theory, she’d tried in vain to remove time as a variable from a dozen equations of motion. That would prove it didn’t matter when events occurred. There was no absolute flow of time. All moments were now—the Fourier transformation. Sophie remembered it from her final problem set freshman year. This operation took equations from the time domain and mapped them onto the frequency domain. It changed the unit from time in seconds to, for example, hertz. Even when she’d reread the problem set years ago, she hadn’t understood what it could be. But this technique was the one. This was the piece she’d hunted for almost a decade. The Fourier transformation would convert all of her functions of time into frequencies and thereby remove the time variable completely.

  This was it.

  This was proof.

  Equation by equation, Sophie transformed everything into Fourier space. She filled page after page, front and back. She didn’t feel like she was doing math. She was telling the world what it had felt like to be her. This was where her intuition had led.

  Sophie tugged the dangling string of her desk lamp when daylight faded. She kept working until, finally, deep in the black belly of night, she succeeded in converting every description of motion into one independent of time. She reclined against the straight back of her chair. She’d felt Jake with her for years. She’d seen them together every day. But right then, as she stared at the last page forming incontrovertible proof of block theory, Sophie saw all of him. She saw not just one moment, but all of their time together suspended around her because all of it was happening now. She cried, shaking with tears that wet her fingertips, cheeks, and chin. Jake had been the only one she ever wanted because they had always been and always would be together. Her notebook didn’t just prove block theory.

  To Sophie, it proved love.

  * * *

  Jake was sitting in his office on the Fourth of July weekend when breaking news dominated his Bloomberg terminal. “Yale PhD Solves Space-Time Mystery.” “Yalie Answers: What Is Reality?” “The Discovery of the Century: Block Theory.” Jake clicked on an article hoping to see the name Sophie Jones in the lede. And there she was.

  Apparently, she’d just spent the past six hours in Cambridge. In its biggest lecture hall, across twenty whiteboards, she’d written every line in her proof of block theory. Jake read a second article, then a third. By all accounts, there hadn’t been a doodling hand, bouncing knee, or vacant stare in the room. Sophie had single-handedly riveted the hundreds of physicists, math legends, thought leaders, and spiritual icons in attendance for the entire afternoon. Her proof had ended with a heated Q&A, and then, finally, thunderous applause.

  Jake stood to shut the door to his office before he remembered everyone else had fled for the holiday weekend. Every monitor was dark. His Roxster read 10:02 a.m. in lightsaber blue. Back at his desk, he read every new story. The comments section after every article was flooded with opinions. People grappled with how this bore on the big questions in life. If all moments existed at once, did free will exist? Talking heads debated on live-streaming panels about it. A couple of celebrity contrarians denied block theory, but the quants did not. This was the biggest advance in understanding space and time since Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1905. Sophie Jones would be written into every high school textbook.

  Jake’s heart beat faster.

  He was ecstatic, proud, victorious.

  She’d done it.

  A brand new Daily Mirror article included a photo of Sophie from that afternoon. He leaned back in his chair as fast as if he’d been shot through the heart. In the picture, Sophie cowered from a flash while walking by smart cars on a cobblestone street. He could only see her profile. Her hair was as bright and as long as he remembered, but thinner and sleek down her back. Was she happy? As happy as she deserved to be?

  He spun around to face a view of Madison Square Park. Between trees, he saw where it had happened. The last time he’d spoken to her. He’d been a millimeter from texting her hundreds of times, but it had never felt right. His thumb always hovered over the send arrow for just long enough that he came to his senses. They needed to be apart. Why make that more difficult than it had to be?

  But now—she’d done it.

  She’d made it.

  He started planning what to say, how. Texting would be too casual. Calling would be too invasive. He’d email her. For the rest of the afternoon, he picked words from the opening—Dear Sophie was too presumptive, just Sophie was better—to his signature.

  He kept refining it. For the next week, his email was an intensely pleasurable obsession. Even after the news cycle moved away from Sophie, Jake stayed. He wanted his message to be just right. He was combing back through the media storm, searching for last-minute inspiration, when he came across an interview with her taped by the Yale Daily News. Its thumbnail showed a triangular play button over her profile. Click. She looked thinner, but stronger. She didn’t shy from her interviewer the way he would’ve expected her to. She looked right at the camera a few times, with her spirit shining through her eyes. Jake decided to send his email as soon as the video ended. He didn’t want to waste more time.

  The one-minute clip ended with two startling lines:

  “So, what’s next for you?” the student reporter asked.

  “I have some ideas,” Sophie said.

  Jake blinked.

  He watched it again.

  “I have some ideas.”

  Jake pinched his eyebrows together. When he lifted his head again, he studied the draft on his computer.

  Sophie,

  Congratulations! I am in awe of your proof.

  I could be witty—I hope—but I’d rather be straightforward. The truth is I would love to talk to you again. Not about anything in particular. It’s just been too long. I can come to New Haven at any time. If I understand block theory correctly, we are already there now (or not, as you wish), which is a nice thought in the meantime.

  Sincerely,

  Jake

  “I have some ideas.”

  Letter by letter, he erased his email.

  Sophie had taught him in college about the greatest breakthrough of the 1800s: James Maxwell’s discovery of electromagnetism. He connected electricity, magnetism, and light in revolutionary equations that enabled some of the most impac
tful inventions of all time—including Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Sophie had told Jake that Maxwell made his biggest intellectual leaps in his thirties, all in a single year.

  Sophie was barely thirty-two.

  “I have some ideas.”

  PART TWO Twenty-Five Years Later

  CHAPTER 12

  Sophie followed her last two students out of the lecture. Despite her silver hair—barely in its braid, a wild vine down her side—at fifty-six years old, she looked younger than most of her peers teaching at Yale. Her tee had a ring of ladybugs around each sleeve. Fine lines touched her eyes and mouth, especially when she smiled, but her clear skin dazzled.

  She walked down Hillhouse enjoying the February afternoon. In her twenty years teaching physics, this street had barely changed. Temperatures had risen, stretching springs and summers, but these were the same evergreens she’d grown up with: white firs and blue Atlas cedars covered with green needles. Yale was still uncannily like her college memories. Classes were still taught as lectures. The school had only grown by three hundred students. Most buildings had been exactly maintained. She was passing the Malchiks’ house as usual after Time Theory when a young man crossed the street in front of her. He turned onto Sophie’s path a few steps ahead. She stopped short—that profile. The narrow face, sharp chin, dark hair—all suggesting focus. Sophie felt an acidic explosion in her gut. She squinted at the receding back of his head. Those shoulders, right here, were the same ones she’d known in college.

  “Do a moon one.”

  The young man walked beside a lithe Indian woman with long black hair. They held hands loosely. Sophie followed. The couple pushed open the gate toward Silliman. She trailed them into the courtyard, inside Silliman, and then up marble stairs where they disappeared into the dining hall ahead of her. Sophie stood on the threshold. The roaring room verged on capacity. Kids swerved around each other with teetering trays full of food. A bulky man in a Yale Football sweatshirt brushed her shoulder as he passed.