On the subway ride to the library, Ben thought about his support group, smaller now after Hank passed away, Chelsea joined the short-stringer home exchange network, currently living in a beach house in Mexico, and Terrell moved to San Francisco. He had woken up one morning overcome with the desire for a clean start, and within a week he had moved across the country, spearheading the upcoming national tour of his entirely short-string musical.
Ben glanced at the scroll of advertisements running across the top of the subway: a diet company, a pill for erectile dysfunction, and a rose-covered promo for the dual premieres of The Bachelor: Long Strings and The Bachelor: Short Strings. （Chelsea’s casting application had sadly gone unanswered.）
“I can’t wait for the new seasons,” gushed a teenage girl near Ben.
“I know. I’m definitely watching both,” her friend agreed. “I’m worried the short-stringer version might be too sad for me, but it’ll probably be more dramatic, if I’m being honest.”
A conversation that nine months ago might have once filled Ben with a sense of dread, or loneliness, or anger, but now it merely blended into the background of his life, their words absorbed by the din of the car.
It wasn’t that Ben had gone numb to it all. It still pained him deeply that most pundits were predicting Anthony Rollins would win the nomination in July, followed by the White House that November. It had certainly helped his campaign that, just prior to the first state primaries, the woman who shot Hank, Anthony’s almost-assassin, had been sentenced to life in prison. She was the only assailant in the spate of short-stringer attacks to have survived and gone to trial, so perhaps her punishment served as symbolic justice for all those who had preceded her. （And the Rollins campaign had spared no dollar in depicting the defendant as a short-string terrorist, keeping the shooting top-of-mind and voters on edge.）
Anthony would claim victory—for now. Ben was disappointed, but he refused to despair. Real and lasting change would take time, Ben understood, demanding more than just flashy moments. But the path of Strung Together was evolving each day, learning from the movements that came before. After the event in January, people continued to share the contributions of short-stringers in their own lives under #StrungTogether. There were TED Talks and fundraisers and discussion panels. There were profiles of short-stringers and Strung Together activists in nearly every magazine. Short-string characters were even starting to appear on television and in films. The South African girl from the viral video turned twenty-two that spring and decided not to open her box. Many were expected to follow her lead.
And at least Ben’s own future felt suddenly full. In a few months he would cut the ribbon at the sparkling science center upstate, the culmination of nearly two years’ work. He had proposed to the woman who inspired him, and miraculously she felt the same. His parents were thrilled. Perhaps he had truly become better at living with his short string, like the support group’s flyer had promised him once.
As Ben stood to exit the subway, he couldn’t help but think how an entire year had passed since the boxes’ arrival. Three hundred and sixty-five days. How so much of his world looked different now; so many of the people he cared about most he had met in that single orbit around the sun.
Inside the large marble library, Ben stood next to Maura. The two of them stared at the sculpture of a tree, nearly ten feet tall, whose branches sprouted strings in place of leaves. On the platform beneath the tree, five hundred names were inscribed.
“Nina’s magazine did a profile on the artist,” Maura said. “Apparently he made this whole project using people’s strings, but he’s still never looked at his own. He said that if he had a short string, he’d feel too rushed to produce good work, and if he had a long string, he might not feel rushed enough.”
In another corner of the gallery, Lea and Nihal watched as a video played on loop, showing an interview with the artist, a man in his early forties wearing a shirt with a stenciled design and a heavy gold pendant swinging from his neck. Ben walked over to join them, just as the video started again.
“The idea for the project came when I was traveling in Japan,” the sculptor recounted, “and I visited Teshima Island, where a fellow artist named Christian Boltanski created a piece in 2010 called Les Archives du Coeur, or The Archives of the Heart, a collection of the sound recordings of people’s heartbeats from around the world. I wanted to do something similar with the strings. For many people, our strings, like our heartbeats, are something very private, that only ourselves and perhaps a small number of loved ones are ever going to see. So I wanted to create a very public record of these five hundred strings, these five hundred souls, born in different cities and different countries, with strings of all different lengths. But it was important to me that all the names, and all the strings, were treated equally. The viewers will never know which string belongs to which name.