String Theory by Dara Horn

Author:Dara Horn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

TWO WEEKS LATER, NEAR dawn, he surprised her by braiding her hair.

“I like the idea that the universe is made out of string,” he said. His fingers flowed into her hair as he lay curved behind her on his narrow bed, stroking her head as though his fingers were gliding downstream. “Do you mind?” he asked. “I don’t have many opportunities to try this.”

“Try what?” she asked.

Before she knew what he was doing, she felt him tugging at her hair, separating it, twisting it. The pull was so familiar, so familial, from her family full of sisters, that the idea that he wasn’t related to her seemed like a silly mistake. Soon his hands had poured down to her neck, but still he was working, tugging, tightening, until she suddenly heard the snap of an elastic band that had been around his wrist, trapping her hair in its grip. The sensation was electrifying.

“I didn’t know men could braid hair,” she said. “Do you have sisters?”

“No,” Roger answered, “just a thorough knowledge of topology.”

She turned around to see him squinting at the window, where darkness had given way to a faint pale gray.

“Daylight,” he muttered, with what sounded like regret. “I guess it’s already tomorrow.”

Jacqueline tugged the end of her new braid. “It isn’t really tomorrow if you haven’t fallen asleep,” she said.

“If only that were true,” Roger sighed. He reached over and switched off the lamp, returning his arms to her shoulders, to her back, to her breasts. Dawn flowed through the window, covering them in a mist made of pure new light. Jacqueline watched the light, contemplated it as it changed and brightened. Is light a particle or a wave? her high school physics textbook had asked. It was a question that had long since become a part of her, like the question of free will and fate. She looked at Roger in the untouched light and saw that it was neither: that it was a blanket, a skin, his lips against her hair.

“When I was a little girl, I used to say a blessing every day when I woke up,” she said. “That’s how I would know it was a new day.”

“A blessing?”

“My parents were very traditional,” she said. It was like an apology.

But Roger was curious. “What kind of blessing? Good luck for the new day or something?”

“No, not luck. Judaism has absolutely nothing to do with luck. It is a very, very rational religion.”

“That sounds like an oxymoron to me. How can a religion be rational?”

Jacqueline breathed, watching the light out the window as it sullied itself on a streetlamp. “When it acknowledges what people can actually know,” she said. “Religions always insist that there are boundaries to what we can know, but this one leaves infinite room for those boundaries to move. Moving the boundaries is even part of the religion, in a way.”

Roger smiled. “Maybe I should look into it.”

“The blessing was, ‘I am grateful before you, living and sustaining king, for returning my soul to me, compassionately, in your great faithfulness.

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