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.
“You know that I will always be here for you,” Nina said, “but maybe there are others who can be there for you in a different way? My sister said that her school has even started to host some string support groups.”
“I appreciate that you’re trying to help,” Maura replied, “but I’m not sure I want to be surrounded by a bunch of people weeping about their unfinished business.”
“Well, apparently they have different types of sessions based on how, um, how much time is remaining on your string. So there are groups for people who have less than a year left, and groups for people with maybe twenty years left, and then a group for those in between, like . . .” Nina looked unsure if she should continue.
“Like me,” Maura finished for her.
“Obviously you should only do what you feel comfortable doing, and I’ll support you no matter what.”
Maura looked at Nina, whose slight frame appeared even more fragile in the dim light of their third-floor walk-up, and she agreed to try the support group, if only to wipe away the watery mixture of guilt and grief that had pooled in Nina’s eyes as she spoke.
Less than a week later, Maura found herself walking toward the school that would house her group therapy session.
The streets had become a familiar scene; at least one business per block was boarded up by now. Often the owners placed signs on the locked doors and metal gates of their shuttered stores and restaurants with scribbled sentiments like “Gone to live my life,” “Spending more time with family,” or “Off to make some memories.” Maura passed by a piece of paper taped onto a former jewelry store: “Closed. Looking for closure.”
More disturbing than the signs, though, was another encounter—rarer, but not entirely uncommon—of stumbling upon a stranger’s discarded box peering devilishly above the rim of a garbage bin or from within a curbside pile of broken furniture.
In the days and weeks following the revelations of the strings, those reeling from the truth had found different methods of handling the unwelcome chests that had intruded upon their lives. Some, choosing willful ignorance in the hope of attaining its promised bliss, threw away their boxes to avoid temptation. The melodramatic hurled them into rivers and lakes or locked them away in a remote crevice of their house. The more cavalier just tossed them in the trash.
Still others attempted to obliterate the boxes in fits of rage, but these powerful chests, like the black box of an airplane, simply could not be destroyed, no matter how many times they were burned or smashed or violently trampled upon.
Pedestrians who came across an opened box that had been left on the side of the road, or perhaps flung out of a nearby window, tended to avert their eyes and quicken their steps, as if passing by a panhandler whose gaze they wished to avoid.