Two Meters of You

The gym was empty except for the two of them and a mess of leftover string.

"The winning project used all of it," Soren said, coiling the ball back up. "Look. There's a piece of tape on the floor every meter."

"For what?"

"A model of DNA. Somebody stretched it out and labeled it. It ran the whole length of the gym." He held up a limp card. "This says the string is one human cell's worth."

Maya walked the tape line, heel to toe, counting. "That's two meters."

"Two meters. From one cell."

She stopped. "That can't be right."

"It's right. I checked it three times on the card while you were getting your bag."

Maya crouched and pressed her finger against her own forearm. "So there's two meters of this stuff in there. In one dot too small to see."

"In every one," Soren said. "Every cell. Trillions of them."

She was quiet, then she said, "That doesn't work. Show me how that fits."

Soren looked at the ball of string in his hands. It was already a tangle. "Okay. Pretend this whole ball is the two meters. How small is the thing it goes into?"

"The card doesn't say?"

"The nucleus." He turned the card over. "Six micrometers. Six millionths of a meter."

Maya took the string ball from him and held it up next to her eye. "So we have to fit this," she shook it, "into something you couldn't see if it was sitting on your eyeball."

"Basically."

"Basically nothing." She started walking to the middle of the gym, unspooling as she went. "Help me. I want to see it get impossible."

They stretched the whole two meters between them, one at each end, the string sagging in the middle.

"Now," Maya said, "I stuff this into a nucleus. Watch me try."

She walked toward Soren, gathering the slack, and immediately it knotted. She yanked. It knotted worse.

"Stop pulling," Soren said. "You're making it random. If you just cram it, it tangles and locks. You'd never get it out again."

"So how does a cell do it? It has to get it out. It has to read it." She dropped the mess. "You can't read a knot."

Soren sat down on the gym floor with the string in his lap. He wasn't cramming. He was doing something slow with his hands.

"What are you doing."

"Winding it around my fingers." He held up two fingers with string wrapped neatly around them, turn after turn, tight. "You don't cram it. You wind it. Around something."

Maya sat down fast, across from him. "Around what, though. What's inside the nucleus to wind around?"

"I don't know. Little spools?"

"Little spools," Maya repeated. "How many."

Soren counted the string still loose on the floor, then looked at the tidy coil on his fingers. "A lot. If one wind saves you this much," he lifted his fingers, "and then you take all the little wound-up spools and coil them around each other, and coil that."

"Coils of coils," Maya said.

"Coils of coils of coils."

She grabbed his wrist. "Do it again but this time wind the spool you already made."

Soren slid the little coil off his fingers, held it like a bead, and started wrapping the next length of string around the bead itself. The bead grew. Then he had two beads and he twisted them together into a thicker rope.

"Every time you coil, it gets shorter," Maya said. She was talking fast now. "But nothing goes away. It's all still there. It's just folded."

"Folded so tight you can't see there's two meters in it."

"And," Maya said, and stopped, and looked at the thick twisted rope in his hands. "And you could unwind exactly the part you need. Find the right spool. Unwrap just that one. Read it. Wind it back up."

Soren looked at the twist of string. "That's why it doesn't have to be a knot. A knot you can't undo. This you can. Every fold has an order."

They both stared at the little wound-up thing in his palm. It was maybe as big as a grape now, and inside it, invisibly, was the full two meters that had crossed the whole gym.

"Soren." Maya's voice had gone careful. "There's one of these in every cell."

"Every one."

"Wound the same way. All two meters. All folded down to nothing." She held her own two hands up and looked at them, front and back. "In here. Right now. Millions of little ropes, all coiled up, all in order, all ready to be read."

"And every single one is the same instructions," Soren said. "The whole thing. Your whole self, written out twice a meter long, packed into every dot you're made of."

Maya lay back flat on the gym floor and spread her arms out along the tape line, one hand near the meter mark, one hand past it.

"This much," she said to the ceiling. "This much is in the tip of my finger. And I can't feel it. And it's folding and unfolding right now to keep me being me."

"It never stops," Soren said. "It's doing it while we're lying here."

Maya turned her head. "How does it know which spool to open."

"I don't know."

"Does anybody know?"

Soren was quiet. "Some of it. Not all of it. Not even close, I think."

Maya smiled at the ceiling, the enormous empty ceiling of the gym that had just gotten smaller than the tip of her own finger.

Soren took his notebook out of his bag. He set the wound-up grape of string beside the page and drew it, then drew an arrow, then wrote something and pressed the pen hard on the last word.

Maya rolled over and pinched the little coil off his palm, held it up to the light, and turned it slowly, looking for the end of the string.