The Measure

Nina wakes up before her partner Maura, as usual, and sits down with her tea to scroll through her phone. Seeing a flood of missed calls and text messages, she immediately knows that something is wrong. When she goes online, she sees photos of small brown boxes with engraved lids on doorsteps around the world. Although no one is sure, the consensus online is that whatever is inside the box indicates the length of your life. Nina opens the apartment door and finds two boxes, one for herself and one for Maura.

Ben is on an overnight flight home to New York when his box arrives. No one on the plane knows what is happening until they land and turn on their phones. In the airport terminal, they see news coverage, and one woman reports that only adults are getting boxes. Ben calls his girlfriend, Claire, who doesn’t answer her phone, and then his parents, who haven’t opened their boxes. The subway is deserted. He remembers turbulence during his flight and wonders if it is connected to the boxes.

Nina doesn’t want to open her box. Theories have arisen, but everyone is reluctant to believe that the strings correspond to their own lives. The first wave of boxes came to everyone over 22, and every day after that, everyone who turns 22 gets a box. At the same time, people begin to die in correspondence with their string lengths. Nina is still against opening the boxes, and Maura agrees to put them away until more information is known. At work, Nina and the editors on her team realize that the news that had recently seemed so important has become meaningless in the face of the strings. They discuss how to cover the strings responsibly, considering that they know no more than anyone else right now. They finally decide that their readers have a right to know how leaders are responding. Scientists are analyzing the string and box, but the materials are not identifiable, and the string is impossible to cut. Their research leaks to the public, and everyone begins to believe in the strings.

In a coffee shop, Ben, an architect, overhears a woman who is skeptical of the strings’ validity, but as time goes on, fewer and fewer people can deny the strings. Ben understands why people might want to deny the strings. He wonders if the woman and her male companion are on a first date and thinks about how complicated that would now be. Ben hears the man say that he hasn’t opened his box because he and his brother only have each other, and the woman comforts him with her skepticism. Ben thinks about his own short string and hopes she is right.

In April, a month after the boxes arrived, the government confirms that the strings correspond to length of life. Nina finds out first and is upset. By this point, she and Maura have opened their boxes, and Maura’s string is half the length of Nina’s. They have been together for two years and were thinking about getting married. Since they opened the boxes, they have been tiptoeing around the issue, but Nina realizes that she will have to tell her parents and her sister, Amie, who hasn’t opened her box. She wonders if Amie will change her mind now that the reality of the strings has been confirmed.

In Grand Central Station, Ben sees people preaching about the strings. He finds it ironic, as he is on his way to a support group for people with short strings. The evening meeting is at the local high school, and aside from the facilitator, he is the first to arrive. However, he is not the only new person attending that night—Maura is attending for the first time as well.

Maura regrets having pushed to open their boxes. After the revelation that the strings are real, scientists discovered that the length of a string represents the entire span of a person’s life. They have also determined an approximate scale for the strings, and Maura, in her late thirties, knows that she has less than ten years to live. To make Nina happy, she joins a support group that meets at the school where Nina’s sister, Amie, teaches.

Amie hasn’t opened her box yet and has no intention of doing so. However, she struggles with the school’s mandate that teachers not address the strings, despite their momentous relevance. Because she hasn’t opened her box, she is still able to see the wonder and magic of the event in a way that most people can’t, and she sees, for the first time, that reality is more fantastic than fiction.

At work, Nina watches a news report about a couple that opened their boxes on their wedding night to find that the bride had a short string. They jumped off a bridge in Verona, Italy, despite the fact that the groom, with a long string, knew that it wouldn’t kill him. Although no one else seems to understand the groom’s actions, Nina does—he was heartbroken, as she is. She realizes that the long-stringers have no more control than the short-stringers—they cannot die before their time is up. The staff has told each other about their own strings, although about a third of them haven’t opened their boxes. Nina is the only person involved with a “short-stringer,” and she is struggling with feeling powerless. She spends hours on the internet, looking for answers in Reddit threads. While she doesn’t believe the theories, she finds comfort in the search.

Maura enjoys the support group, and the freedom of talking openly about the strings. People are beginning to gossip about string length, guessing at the psychological connections between people’s actions and their string lengths. In another time, Maura thinks, one’s string length would have been private, but in the age of social media, everyone’s life is public. At the meeting, the group facilitator suggests that they write letters to whomever they choose. Maura tries to write to Nina, but cannot.

Hank is a doctor at New York Memorial hospital, and lately has seen an influx of people with short strings looking for answers and comfort. At first, they ran tests. If they found something, at least they could give people an answer. However, the hospital decides that they cannot treat people based on their string length alone—they can only treat people who exhibit symptoms. Hank realizes that everyone is in one of the stages of grief, whether it be denial, bargaining, or depression. When a short-stringer is turned away and calls them heartless, Hank gets angry as well, and he resigns.

Amie’s class is reading The Giver, and one of her students shows insight that makes her feel hopeful. She is trying to address the topic of the strings without violating school policy by doing so directly. On the way home, she calls Nina, who asks if she has opened her box. She says no, and affirms that their parents haven’t done so, either. After the call, she stops at a bookstore and decides to have her students read Tuck Everlasting—a classic young adult novel whose central characters, the Tuck family, never age and can never die. She notices that the Greek mythology section has expanded as people search for answers. When she returns to school the next Monday, the custodian gives her a letter he found on her classroom floor. The writer describes a letter he saw in a World War II museum, in which a soldier had asked his mother to convey a message to someone named Gertrude—presumably his girlfriend or fiancée: “No matter what happens, I still feel the same” (57). Moved by the story, Amie realizes that the letter she’s reading must have been written by a member of the short-stringer support group that meets in her classroom on Sunday nights.

At the next support group meeting, Maura points out a letter to Ben that has been left, folded, on the floor. The letter is his, from their previous meeting, and when he opens it, he realizes that whoever found it has written a reply. Thus begins an anonymous correspondence between Amie and Ben.

One day at the hospital, Hank hears gunshots in the building. After evacuating patients, he runs toward the sound, which is coming from the emergency room. By the time he gets there, however, the shooter has been killed by the security guard, and several others are dead or wounded.

Two days after the hospital shooting, Nina and her coworkers are discussing North Korea’s new mandate that people turn over their boxes unopened. They are the first government to fear that short-stringers might band together in insurrection, and the idea of short-stringers as a threat is suddenly a possibility. Nina also realizes that politicians are going to use the hospital shooting to blame violence on the strings. If Maura needed hospital treatment, she wonders whether doctors would ask about her string length or change their treatment because of it. While at work, Nina receives a donor solicitation email from presidential candidate Anthony Rollins, whom she doesn’t like or support. She goes online and discovers that short-stringers are experiencing changes to their health insurance, loan qualifications, and even employment. She realizes that it doesn’t matter where the strings are from, only what people choose to do with them.

As the strings begin to settle into humanity’s collective consciousness, many people drastically change their lives. The common element in these changes is people seeking to spend their time well. Some people, however, become angry and violent. A week after the hospital shooting, another short-stringer shoots people at a mall, and the media latches onto it, stoking fear of short-stringers. A small faction of short-stringers becomes focused on revenge and, because they cannot kill the long-stringers who wronged them, focus on causing them maximum pain. People with long strings behave much as some short-stringers do—released from worry about their own mortality, they take risks and danger lightly, forgetting that being alive doesn’t mean being healthy or uninjured. However, everyone still focuses on short-stringers as a threat, and eventually, politicians decide that they need to address it.

Since announcing his candidacy in February, Anthony Rollins has been embroiled in scandal. Members of the opposition and the media have tried to connect him to the death of a boy in his college fraternity and accused him of sexism during his college years. He is grateful for the boxes, which have made all such concerns seem irrelevant. When Anthony and his wife, Katherine, open their boxes, they discover long strings, which they interpret as evidence that they have been chosen by God and will be successful in their presidential run. However, people are preoccupied by the boxes and uninterested in the election. During his campaign, Anthony often refers to Katherine’s prestigious family in his speeches, especially to her nephew, Jack, a cadet in military academy. Near the end of March, Anthony and Katherine discover that his opponent, Senator Wes Johnson, has a short string. Taking this news as another affirmation that they have been chosen by God to lead the United States, they decide to reveal it to the public.

With the support group’s help, Ben learns to continue living. Although he is heartbroken after his breakup with Claire, he is enjoying his work as an architect again. In his reply to his anonymous pen pal, he raises a new question about the strings: Why now? Ben has kept his short-string status a secret from everyone except the support group, but he implies it in his letter. He visits his parents and realizes that the last time he was there was with Claire before their breakup. His parents haven’t looked at their strings, but are both excited about a young boy they know, with a rare blood disorder, who opened his box to find a long string. His mother says she believes in miracles, and Ben decides not to tell her about his string.

Maura and Nina have never wanted children, but since she opened her box, Maura finds herself longing for them. She doesn’t tell Nina, deciding that the impulse is selfish amidst so much uncertainty. The next day, she goes on Nina’s laptop and finds that Nina has been looking into short-stringer issues online, including a Reddit page called String Theory. Maura angrily confronts her about her secrecy.

Amie responds to Ben’s letter, wondering whether knowing your string length is a good thing. She confesses that she hasn’t opened her box. She says she is tired of always thinking about life and death issues and misses the times when she could focus on the little things. In his reply, Ben tells her about seeing a man riding a bicycle down the street, his radio playing “Que Sera, Sera,” and how it lifted his spirits.

When Jack’s aunt Katherine asks him to attend his uncle Anthony’s campaign events, he agrees, even though he finds it embarrassing and hates the attention. Jack is in his final year of military academy, the latest in a long line of military men in his family, stretching back to the Revolutionary War. The more famous Anthony gets, the more insufferable Jack finds him, but he believes his uncle’s campaign will peter out, and he looks forward to leaving the spotlight.

Javier is Jack’s roommate, and when they first started together at the academy, Jack showed Javier the ropes. Javier understands the family pressures that Jack is under, but treats him normally. As one of the few Latino men on campus, he is under a lot of pressure as well. When their boxes arrive, Jack and Javier decide not to look.

At the end of May, Hank officially leaves the hospital. He hasn’t told anyone about his short-string status, but Annika, a colleague with whom he has a relationship, sees his string. He is upset, but then realizes that life is too short to be angry with her, and even feels relief that she knows. She gives him the address of a support group for those who only have weeks left, but when he goes, they are all crying. Down the hall, the group for those with slightly longer strings are laughing. He decides to go to that group instead, but doesn’t tell them about his shorter string.

Maura and Ben sit together in their support group. One man reports that a Broadway show is being put on with an exclusively short-string cast and crew. Another member, Lea, tells them that she is pregnant, and Maura is shocked and envious. Lea is acting as a surrogate for her brother and his husband, and the revelation makes Maura realize that she should feel gratitude for her life. She resolves to tell Nina about her desire for children. When she does so, later that night, Nina responds with compassion, and together they realize that her longing might not be about children, but about narrowing of options. With their secrets now out in the open, Nina and Maura become closer than ever.

In a new letter to Ben, Amie suggests that, because their origins are unknowable, the boxes mean whatever people want them to mean. Every morning, she wonders if this will be the day she opens her box, and she asks him how he feels about having looked.

Ben isn’t ready to think, or talk, about the night he opened his box. He tells Amie that most days he regrets it, but cannot really remember what it was like not to know. He doesn’t want their correspondence, or the friendship, to end. After the group meeting one night, Ben stays behind to leave his letter, and Hank sees him doing it. They have an intimate conversation about what they are experiencing, and Hank shares that it has changed how he sees his career. He tells Ben that he has less than a year left.

Amie replies to Ben, telling him that she will continue to trade letters with him for as long as he wants.

Hank is curious about the upcoming presidential debates, although he doesn’t think much of Anthony Rollins. During the debate, Anthony opens his box and reveals his long string. When the other candidates are reluctant to reveal theirs, he presents it as an issue of transparency. Another candidate, Wes Johnson, sees this as discrimination, and gives a stirring speech that sways the audience. Online, however, people begin pushing for the candidates to reveal their strings. The day after the debate, a short-stringer sets off a bomb outside the Capitol, killing several people, and Hank thinks of Anthony Rollins, and how thrilled he will be by this turn of events.