Zig Zag by José Carlos Somoza

through her. Sometimes she could spot them
from a long way off. But she understood that, subconsciously, her
brain searched them out. None of them seemed to be spying on her or
following her, and by the time the weekend rolled around again she'd
even forgotten about them. Or at least stopped thinking they were
somehow meaningful.
    She
had other things on her mind.

    ON Friday,
she decided it was time to take a different tack in Blanes's class.
    "How
do you think we might solve this?"
    Blanes
pointed to one of his equations, scribbled on the board in his tiny
chicken scrawl. Elisa and the rest of the class were more than used
to his writing, though, and they could read those symbols as easily
as if they'd been written as words and not numbers. They expressed
the fundamental question of the theory: How can we identify and
isolate finite time strings if they have only one end?
    It
was a mind-blowing concept. Mathematically, it could be proven that
time strings only came to an end on one side. To use a simile, Blanes
drew a line on the blackboard and asked them to imagine that it was a
loose thread on a table: one end would be the "future" and
the other the "past." The thread would move in the
direction of the future, which he indicated with an arrow. He
couldn't do it any other way, since according to the equations, the
"end" of the past, that is, the left-hand end of the
thread, simply didn't exist (this was the famous proof of why time
moved only in one direction, which had brought Blanes so much fame).
He represented this fact by drawing a question mark. There was no
loose end that could be identified as "past."

    The
most incredible thing about it, however, the thing that defied logic,
was that despite the fact that the string had only one end, it
was not infinite.
    The
"past" side ended, but that end wasn't an end.
    That
paradox made Elisa's head spin. She loved it. She always got that
feeling when she had insights into how weird and wonderful the world
was. How was it possible that all of reality, the most personal
things in our lives, could be made up of something as crazy as tiny
little strings whose ends weren't
ends?
    At
any rate, she was convinced she knew the answer to the question
Blanes was asking. She didn't even have to write it down. She'd
worked it out at home, and she had the answer in her head.
    Swallowing
hard, yet sure of herself, she decided to take a chance.
    Twenty
pairs of eyes were glued to the board, but only one hand shot up.
    Valente
Sharpe's.
    "Tell
us, Valente," Blanes smiled.
    "If
there were curls in the middle of each string, we could identify
them, even isolate them using discrete quantities of energy, if that
energy were enough to separate the curls. What I mean is..."
There followed a torrent of mathematical language.
    No
one said a word. The whole class, including Blanes, was left
speechless.
    Valente,
however, wasn't the one who had answered. As if he were a
ventriloquist's dummy, he'd opened his mouth, but another voice two
seats to his left had interrupted him and stolen the show.
    Everyone
stared at Elisa. She looked only at Blanes. She could hear her heart
beating and feel her cheeks burning, as if she'd whispered sweet
nothings rather than math equations. She awaited the consequences of
her actions, feeling his half-closed eyes on her (it was a typical
Blanes look that reminded her of Robert Mitchum) and yet managing to
remain unbelievably calm all the same. Her hotheadedness, which under
normal circumstances she thought of as her number one defect, now
worked to her advantage: she was sure she was right and was prepared
to fight for it, regardless of who her opponent was.
    "I
don't recall having called on you, Miss...," Blanes said in a
tone as inexpressive as his face, though she felt a hard edge to his
comment. The silence grew thick.
    "Robledo,"
Elisa replied. "And you didn't see me raise my hand because I
didn't. I've been trying every day for over a week and you never seem
to see