The Thread in the Thimble

The kite string had knotted itself into a fist the size of a grapefruit, and Soren had been picking at it for eleven minutes.

"Give it here," said Maya.

"You'll make it worse."

"It's already worse." She took the tangle and turned it in the light from the garage window. "How long is this whole spool, do you think?"

"Says two hundred meters on the label."

Maya looked at the little wooden spool. It was smaller than her fist. "Two hundred meters," she said. "On that."

"When it's wound right, yeah."

She pulled a loop free. "So the trick isn't how long it is. The trick is how you fold it."

"That's just winding."

"It's not just anything. Watch." She teased a strand out and it came, and another came with it, and the fist loosened by a knuckle. "If you wind it wrong once, the whole thing fights you forever."

Soren pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and wrote two hundred m on spool smaller than a lemon. Then he sat down on the overturned bucket.

"My mom told me something last night," he said. "She does the science at the hospital, the gene stuff. She said if you took all the DNA out of one single cell and stretched it in a line, it'd be about two meters long."

Maya stopped picking. "Two meters. Out of one cell."

"One cell. You can't even see a cell."

"You can't see it."

"You need a microscope for the cell. And the part the DNA folds up inside, the nucleus, that's smaller again. Six millionths of a meter across."

Maya set the tangle down in her lap. She was doing the math with her mouth slightly open. "Two meters. Into six millionths of a meter."

"That's what she said."

"That's like." Maya looked around the garage. "That's like taking this whole spool, all two hundred meters, and folding it into something you couldn't find with a magnifying glass."

"Smaller than that."

"Soren. That's impossible. String this long, if you just shoved it in a box, it'd knot up like this thing." She held up the fist. "Instantly. It'd be a solid lump you could never open again."

"But your cells open it all the time," said Soren. "That's the part I don't get. My mom says the cell has to read it. Reach in, find the exact spot, copy it, close it back up. All day. Millions of times."

"So it can't just be shoved in." Maya was up now, pacing the two steps the garage allowed. "If it were shoved in, it'd be my knot. You can't read my knot. You can barely find the end."

"Right."

"So it's wound." She pointed at the spool. "Like that. On purpose."

Soren wrote wound on purpose and underlined it. "But a spool's just one axis. Round and round. Two meters into six millionths, one axis wouldn't do it. The spool would have to be way smaller than the string is thick."

Maya picked the spool up and looked at the string on it, then unwound a hand's length and looked at that. "So you wind it," she said slowly, "and then you wind the winding."

"What?"

"Here." She grabbed a rubber band off the workbench and pulled it straight between two fingers. "Straight. Now." She twisted one end. The rubber band spun, and then, when it couldn't spin flat anymore, it did something else. It doubled back on itself and coiled up into a tight little snarl, coils on top of coils. "See? It runs out of room to spin, so it stacks the spin. Coils of coils."

Soren took the rubber band and did it himself. Twisted. Watched it buck and gather into a knot that wasn't a knot, that was every part touching but nothing tangled. He undid the twist and it opened smooth. Twisted again. It gathered again, the same way, in the same order.

"It goes back," he said. "That's the thing. My knot doesn't go back. This goes back."

"Because it's not random. A random tangle doesn't have an order to undo. This one folds the same way every time, so it unfolds the same way every time." Maya took it back and coiled and uncoiled it, coiled and uncoiled. "That's how you read it. You only open the little bit you need. The rest stays coiled."

Soren was writing fast now. Coils of coils. Opens the way it closed. He stopped. "Two meters," he said again, quieter. "Every cell."

"How many cells," said Maya.

"Trillions. Tens of trillions. She said thirty-something."

Maya sat back down on the concrete floor. "So inside me," she said, "right now, there's more than sixty billion kilometers of it. Folded up. Coiled and coiled and coiled so it never once knots wrong."

"To the sun and back," said Soren. "Hundreds of times. Inside one person."

"And nobody wound it." Maya's voice had gone strange. "Nobody sat there like us fixing a spool. It just does it. It's doing it right now, in my thumb, while I'm holding a rubber band and can't even do the string."

Soren looked down at the kite tangle, still knotted in his lap. Then at the rubber band, coiled perfect in his palm. He held them side by side, the mess and the fold.

"Ours knots," he said.

"Ours knots," Maya agreed.

She reached over and twisted the rubber band in his hand one more turn. It gathered itself, coil onto coil, and lay still. Neither of them moved to open it.