The Love Proof

by Madeleine Henry

  “From Padington Associates.”

  “Right.” Lionel had started one of the biggest investment funds in the world, the global Padington Associates, now managing over $50 billion. Lionel himself was worth $4 billion. “I’d like to do something similar.”

  “Hm.” She pushed a square of waffle left, right. “Why?”

  Jake had never articulated why out loud. No one had asked, and he’d never volunteered that he wanted to be rich. At best, “I want to be rich” sounded sterile or selfish, and at worst, evil. “There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story,” Jake’s senior-year English teacher had said once. If people knew his, they’d understand.

  “Well, what about you?” he dodged. “What do you want to do?”

  She took a slow breath.

  “I’d like to figure out how the world works. There’s so much more here than we know.” She pointed in a circle around the room at unnamed, magical invisibilities. Jake pretended to complete her circle and pointed to himself. She laughed. “A lot of people think science is sterile”—Jake’s ears pricked up—“and heartless and boring, but not me. I’ve always had this feeling that there are eyes in everything, that the world is alive down to the atom. But we grow up and start to see things the way we expect. We stop questioning, listening, but I think the universe is always talking to us: through symbols, our guts, or feelings we can’t explain. I want to know as much as I can, especially about the big building blocks of reality.” Jake pushed his food forward an inch and thoughtfully clasped his hands. “So I study time. I’m sorry. I’m not usually so…” She gestured at her mouth.

  “I love it,” he said, earnest.

  She smiled.

  “If you could have any dream come true, what would it be?” he asked.

  “I’d want to know everything. You?”

  “I’d want to have everything.”

  “What?” she asked as he shrugged.

  “There’s just a lot of shame around wanting to have.”

  “I’ve thought about that, something like that. Whenever I feel weird. When I see there’s no one else doing what I’m doing, or making the choices I’m making, I tell myself people are hive creatures, if that makes any sense.” Jake shook his head. “So, in a hive, everyone has a role, even if we don’t understand it. They all serve a greater purpose. It’s not about any bee in particular, even the queen bee. When a queen dies, the hive replaces her. It’s all about the hive.” Dishes crashed suddenly in the kitchen. Sophie looked up at the wall clock behind Jake: 2:55 p.m. Professor Malchik’s office was a ten-minute walk away.

  “So—” he began.

  “I have to go,” she interrupted.

  Jake noticed they were the last two in the dining hall. He nodded, stood up. They stacked their trays on metal racks, left, and walked down four flights of stairs to pause at the door leading outside. Their hearts beat faster as each placed a palm flat on the stained-glass pane. Around their hands, silhouettes shifted across burgundy and green. Sophie glanced at the shadows suggesting Frisbee on the quad, but Jake looked singularly at Sophie, his chin angled down, close enough that his breaths warmed her nose.

  “What’s your phone number?” he asked.

  Sophie kissed him. They froze in a wishbone angle joined at the mouth. Jake was following her lead, mirroring her touch and pressure. He waited—interest piqued, hair rising on the back of his neck—for her to budge so he could too. Their lips stayed barely interlocked, exasperatingly surface-deep. Sophie lifted her hand and held one side of his face. His neck was warm, his jawline smooth. She licked his top lip. Jake carefully followed suit. She leaned in to him, and he pulled her body closer, slowly, until she pulled away.

  “Can I have your phone?” she asked.

  He fished it out of his pocket. She entered her number, handed it back. When they locked eyes, she felt his gaze on her as if she were the only other person alive.

  “It was nice to meet you, Jake,” she said.

  “Sophie.”

  Jake became so absorbed wording his first text to her—How soon could he see her again? Did she want to study together? Walk anywhere? Get dinner?—that he strayed blocks beyond his dorm, past the Popeyes that cut a soft line between the students and the locals, and into a part of New Haven he’d never seen before.

  * * *

  Peter was sitting alone in his office at 3:29 p.m.

  Where was she?

  “How can we see time?” the syllabus asked, first page unturned. His composition book underneath was filled with notes from his own reading on prodigies. He flipped through it idly—three thirty now—and happened on the phrase “intellectual companionship.” He’d underlined it, figuring Sophie would be starved for it. People her age didn’t talk to each other. In one study, nearly 100 percent of millennials said they were better able to express themselves by text than in person. Peter felt like a sociologist reading through research on the “devoicing” epidemic. For Sophie, he’d wondered, who’d been there just to sit and talk? Beyond that, who’d had the intellectual capacity to engage with the full breadth of her mind? To ask about her morning, what she ate for lunch, and then, just as seamlessly, what she thought of the fact that when you line up the angular velocities of planets in their orbits and put them into a ratio, we find what is considered our major and minor musical scales today? Is there a rhythm to the universe? Peter wondered if anyone had ever spoken to her for hours. He flipped the page. Of course, no matter how acquainted he felt with Sophie, they still hadn’t met. 3:31 p.m. Had something happened to her? Right as he stood, a knock sounded on his open door.

  “Hi, Professor Malchik,” Sophie said.

  He put his hands in his pockets.

  He removed them.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late.”

  She presented as even younger than she already was. The line of midriff between her red tee and shorts was unprecedented in the physics building. He gestured for her to sit and then did the same. Her apology lingered. It’s all right, Peter wanted to say, but he found himself unable to lie. He flipped almost to the end of his notebook and stopped on the first blank page. He realized he had not shaken her hand. When he’d pictured their meeting, he’d always imagined shaking her hand and saying something prescient, optimistic.

  “I expected to start earlier.”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  Peter waited for more. She did not speak.

  “I was prepared to start at 3 p.m.”

  “I understand.”

  “In a course devoted to time, a difference of time is in fact the most important kind of difference of all.”

  “I know.”

  He glanced at the syllabus, listing topics for their session. When he looked up again at Sophie, her head was tilted to the side, a half smile on her lips. In a flash, her smile vanished. She righted her head. Was she distracted? In all his dreams of right now, in all the research he’d done for their semester, he had never imagined delinquency.

  “There was a man, Claude Shannon,” Peter said suddenly. He massaged his temples. “In 1948, his paper on information theory—it was pivotal, enormous. It outlined the system for what became today’s telephones, radio, TV… Do you know when he first had that idea?” He looked into Sophie’s light blue eyes.

  “No.”

  “Nineteen thirty-nine. Ten years before.” Peter tapped the table ten times for emphasis. “Shannon’s work during that time wasn’t linear, either. The ideas came and went for him throughout those ten years. Progress, then none. Again and again. He had to obsess for a decade.” Peter paused to recharge. “I am telling you this, Sophie, to say that genius work takes time. To excel in any one domain, you need to stay committed for years. Years.” He paused again. “Today, you were half an hour late. That means your insight will come half an hour later, if at all. I’m sorry to say this, but you are thirty minutes less than what you might have been.”

  She nodded faintly.

&nb
sp; “I won’t be late again,” she promised.

  Peter recognized the fear in her voice. He had a habit of scaring people out of conversations as he focused too much on the meaning of what someone said and not enough on the person speaking. Over the years, Maggie had pointed that out.

  Last week, Maggie had invited another couple over for dinner. The woman was an anthropology professor at Yale, though Peter did not catch her name or how Maggie knew them. This professor and her husband—whose name also eluded him—had just returned from a cross-country road trip. She had only just started to describe the vistas of the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon when Peter interrupted to ask how many miles they’d driven in total—5,360—and in how much time—two weeks—so that was four hundred miles a day, he deduced, and going at sixty miles an hour, almost eight hours a day on the road. Peter fixated on whether they developed backaches from the sedentary position. When the woman showed a video of the gorge, Peter fixated on the telephoto abilities of her iPhone and asked what magnification could she zoom to exactly? How many frames per second? Pixels? His interrogations reached a dead end when one of the couple clammed up, too afraid to invite further scrutiny. At that point, Peter pivoted to extremely literal, mundane lines of discussion, such as, What time did you get up today?

  Peter knew he was difficult. His manner could make people feel as though they had drifted empty-headed through life, from one accepted uncertainty to the next. His obsession with the crux of things could be terrifying, but he attributed his faults to caring about the truth. It wasn’t that he was insensitive, he thought, it was the opposite. No one else cared as much as he did. Other people seemed content to glide unconsciously through life, happily unsure why the stars were the way they were, driven by immediate gratification and five trivial senses. Sophie, he’d hoped, was like him. She wanted to get at the heart of the matter.

  He looked at his wall clock, ticking.

  “All right,” he said. “To the start of time.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Five-year-old Sophie sat on the floor of her family’s library and pulled a book off the bottom shelf. The enormous room evoked Beauty and the Beast, like a castle corner enchanted into silence and stacked floor-to-ceiling with books. Ladders on metal tracks around the room led up to the top shelves.

  Sophie opened the book to a full-page, black-and-white picture of a human skull impaled by a metal rod. The iron pole entered under one cheekbone and exited through the top of the skull. Sophie stared at the details: lipless mouth, long teeth, its empty eye sockets looking back at her. The caption: Phineas Gage. Sophie read that, in 1848, a man named Phineas Gage had been working on the railroad when an explosion rocketed a stake through his head. Phineas didn’t die immediately. Neither did he suffer debilitating pain, shrinking into more dependent, tortured versions of himself until the end. Instead, right after the accident, Phineas rode by horse to the doctor and lived for another eleven years. The accident didn’t affect him physically so much as it changed his personality. Phineas became profane, impulsive, rude, even cruel.

  Sophie considered this and, in doing so, gracefully surpassed all expectations for someone so young. Sun warmed tall windows beside her.

  “What’re you thinking?” her mom, Isabel, asked from the doorway.

  “I thought I controlled myself.”

  Sophie held up the book.

  “I see,” Isabel said. She walked toward Sophie with dancer-like ease, so fluid, she seemed boneless. When Sophie got older, she’d learn to see her mom’s smooth physical style as a special kind of intelligence, as if Isabel’s brain filled her whole body and not just the space behind the eyes. Isabel had been a top quant at NASA before she had Sophie in her mid-thirties, left the field, and devoted herself to her family: Ronald, her husband, and Sophie. They had tried to have more children, turning to nonsurgical methods and supplements to help them conceive, but nothing had worked, so Sophie had gotten all of her love.

  Isabel sat next to Sophie on the floor and looked tenderly at her daughter. “Your children are not your children.” The phrase drifted into Isabel’s mind from a poem by Kahlil Gibran she’d read while pregnant with Sophie.

  Your children are not your children.

  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

  They come through you but not from you,

  And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

  Isabel had read that on the chaise in this library. One of the book-stuffed walls curved into a nook for a red corduroy chaise lounge and leather-top vintage desk with hanging iron handles. Back then, Isabel had thought of course she’d let her daughter go her own way, make her own mistakes—so personal and unique she could copyright them—and learn firsthand the formula for her own happiness. “Your children are not your children.” It seemed simple. But, sitting next to her, at that moment, she thought Sophie looked just the way she used to—white skin, bright hair, blue fire of curiosity inside, and this deeply harmless kindness, a soft presence that was almost painfully tender. Sophie had never been able to lie. Both Isabel and her daughter were drawn to information, to numbers. As oak tree branches bounced outside the window, equations mapping their curves would have slipped into Isabel’s mind with a bit more attention.

  “Do you want to go outside?” Isabel asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  Sophie flipped a page. The arched window behind her framed their backyard: meadow-like and colored by small pink flowers, lawn chamomile like dime-size daisies, and wild thyme. Isabel kissed Sophie’s head, eyeing the natural playground.

  “Do want to go outside later?” Isabel asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  Sophie’s sweet voice was polite and soft, unintrusive. She flipped another page. Isabel thought her daughter looked so comfortable, so peacefully absorbed in her book, that it would be cruel to tear her away—even though it was a shining April day, and Sophie had been in this library for hours already, picking books off the shelf, reading, and then replacing them precisely. Could Isabel force her daughter to be someone she wasn’t?

  Sophie finished reading but did not turn the page. She was trying to wrap her head around the fact that people could act so differently after a physical change in the brain. The story had cracked her worldview, sending a fracture through her sense of willing things and feeling an individual essence in herself and others. Didn’t she have a soul that glided through everything she did, imbuing it all with Sophieness? Isabel spoke the word soul into existence every day. “Sun is good for your soul.” “You have such a beautiful soul, Sophie.” Sophie stared at her own two thumbs on the pages and rubbed them up and down, over the ridgeless edges of words, wondering now how much of the movement she controlled. Meanwhile, Isabel sat beside her, unable to see her daughter’s inner world, watching Sophie compute.

  * * *

  On the bus home from kindergarten the next day, Sophie sat in the front row—always counterintuitively the most anonymous one, with plenty of seats—and stared out the window, scanning for home. She didn’t talk to anyone as the bus bumped over potholes and made long, theatrical stops. In fact, Sophie hadn’t spoken at all that day.

  Mom. Isabel waited for Sophie as usual by their mailbox under a jungle of green oaks. Sophie smiled wide, sunnier than the afternoon, itching to stand until the bus stopped and set her free. She darted across the street to hug Isabel hard around the hips. On impact, she forgot all about the loneliness that had plagued her at school. They walked down the driveway until their house came into view: white-shingled, two-story, the windows pure sparkle.

  That afternoon, in the library, Sophie read about the brain. Isabel had arranged their two thousand books according to the Dewey decimal system—numbers were an innate preference of hers. Sophie drifted back and forth from Class 100, philosophy and psychology, to Class 500, science, cherry-picking her way through chapters about the mind. It took Sophie a couple of weeks to get through them all, before she turned to the l
aptop on the desk. Sophie liked that computer: a shining silver compression of infinite books. After school, she started to use it for hours at a time, surfing for answers to her questions. Sometimes Isabel would come in and stand by the nook, watching her daughter scroll down scanned book pages by whipping her fingers up the trackpad. In those moments, when she said, “Sophie,” she never got a response. Sophie was absorbed. Isabel would leave unnoticed.

  For weeks, Sophie was fascinated by brain tumors: contained areas of brain damage that resulted in predictable personality changes. There was a part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus in the back of the head that was responsible for recognizing faces. If that was harmed, people became unable to identify anyone, even family members. All faces became indistinguishable in a frightening kind of 20/20 blindness. A lump in the frontal lobe, depending on where it grew, could make someone shameless, pedophilic, a compulsive gambler, or unable to make basic choices—like what to wear in the morning, preventing them from getting to work.

  Sophie learned her brain created her world. She didn’t see what she saw. Her eyes sent incomplete images to her brain, and then her brain filled in the blanks with educated guesses. When her eyes sent disorder, her brain imposed structure. Movies were a prime example of this. Every film was hundreds of thousands of frames in rapid sequence, which the brain blended to suggest movement. Reading about that—the phi phenomenon—prompted Sophie to inform her parents that TV was an illusion. At dinner, over bowls of meaty red spaghetti, Sophie explained the phi phenomenon with surgical exactness. She detailed other illusions, such as pareidolia, the tendency to see meaning where there was only chaos, like faces in a cloud.

  Most of people’s behavior was automatic. Habit accounted for up to 40 percent of people’s choices every day, and those reflexes were stored in the brain. Everything Sophie read was delicious, electric mental sugar, feeding a high. She felt as if she were learning a new language: the wordless way that the world communicated. All she had to do was pay attention. “The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper,” her mom had often quoted the author Eden Phillpotts. Now, Sophie was grasping what that meant. Nature was strange, but knowable. Sophie had always wanted to understand the world, and it appeared the answers were in her brain.