The Unseen World Read online

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked Giordi, as she had been taught, and then she led him down the hallway toward the kitchen, where David greeted him. Giordi took the gin rickey in his hands, putting his lips to the rim of the glass, ignoring the straw.

  “Did you made these?” he asked Ada, about the drink, and she told him that she did, fixating on the grammatical mix-up he had let slip, pondering its structure.

  “Delicious,” he said. “Wherever did you learn.”

  “From my father,” she told him.

  She had learned everything from her father.

  Ada was twelve years old. She would have been in seventh grade that year, if she had been enrolled in a school. She had never kissed a boy, never held hands with a boy. Had never, in fact, intentionally been within the vicinity of a boy her own age for more than a few minutes. Nor a girl. Her only interaction with boys and girls her own age had been with the children of her father’s colleagues, who in general led more normal lives than she did—normalcy being a condition that her father disdained and she revered. And even these interactions had been cursory. Ada’s behavior around these children was absurd. When she got near them she drank them up. She took them in. She was silent. She watched them like a television show. She took note of every turn of phrase they used. Like, they said. Rad. Prolly. No way. As if. Freaky. Whatsername. Hang out. What’s up? Duh. Creep. Freaked out. They were freaked out by her, probably. She didn’t blame them.

  Ada was much more accustomed to spending time with adults, and tonight she would have been very much at ease except that she could sense her father’s tension and it made her tense. He had always been a perfectionist when it came to his dinners, but tonight was extreme: he had been preparing for days, writing down lists, stopping at the store each evening for things he had forgotten. She could not articulate what was different in his demeanor, but it triggered a deep-seated uneasiness in her. It was a hair in her mouth or sand in her shoe. She looked at her father now: he was lifting up the mixing bowls to show Giordi the cooked lobsters on the countertops.

  “Aragosta, sì?” asked her father, who prided himself on speaking enough of every language to get by in restaurants at the conferences he went to in Europe, in Asia.

  But Giordi shook his head. “Those are astici,” he said. “Aragoste have the little things like . . .” he said, and he mimed spikes. “And they don’t have the big . . .” and he mimed claws, pinching his thumbs and his tightened fingers together.

  “Astici,” said David, and Ada knew from his expression that he was attempting to file the word in a deep recess of his mind.

  The other members of the lab arrived next, Hayato and Frank, and then Joonseong—whom she quickly realized was neither Southern nor female—and Edith—whom she quickly realized was not prim, but young and pretty. The only missing member of the lab was Charles-Robert, whose daughter had a soccer game. Ada gave each of them drinks in the living room and watched everyone as they fell into patterns of conversation: Liston and Hayato, the fun ones, were huddled in a corner, laughing about something or someone at work; they’d continue to huddle until one or the other realized that they were hovering on the verge of rudeness, and then they would break into conversation with someone else. Edith and Joonseong were speaking with Frank, who was much more polite than the rest of the group, engaging them in various lines of inquiry about their background and their families and their home countries and their accommodations in Boston.

  Ada hovered in the background until Liston noticed her and waved her over, and she put a strong and steady arm around her, brought her in close to her side, and squeezed.

  “Good drinks, kiddo,” said Liston. Ada sank into her side, grateful for something she couldn’t articulate.

  At 8:00, Ada’s job was to ask all the guests, politely, to be seated for the meal.

  The night before, David had made place cards: before she’d gone to bed she’d seen him fashioning them with index cards and a ballpoint pen, sitting at the kitchen table, the tip of his tongue just visible between his lips. Now they were assembled on the rectangular table. Ada, sitting between Edith and Joonseong, wished that she had been seated next to Liston, her favorite, or Giordi, whom she had decided was quite handsome—but she knew that one of the things that David expected of her was that she would help him to entertain his guests. She took this role seriously, and, in preparation for the night, had dreamed up several topics of conversation that she felt ready to introduce if necessary, culled from the newspaper and from the books she was reading.

  David was passionate about cooking—to him it was a cousin of chemistry—and the first course was chilled cucumber soup, made in a blender, thickened with cream, which she helped him to transport from the kitchen, careful not to spill. “A regular Julia Child,” said Liston. Ada brought cold white wine to the table and poured it neatly into every glass, including a splash into her own: since she turned twelve, David had been allowing her a quarter of a glass on special occasions. The several sips of wine she was allotted made her feel warm and capable, made her feel as if there were real possibilities before her in the universe, that they were hers for the taking.

  Next were the lobsters, but before they were brought out David smacked his head and returned to the kitchen.

  “I almost forgot,” he said, and reemerged with a bundle of plastic in his hands. On his face was a look of almost exquisite lack of self-awareness—he was so pleased with himself, so pleased with life in that moment. He raised his eyebrows in glee.

  “Oh, here they come,” Liston said. They were the lobster bibs that David had gotten from Legal Sea Foods, years ago, at a dinner out with his colleagues. Putting them on was the traditional rite of passage for all the new grad students at David’s annual feast: he delighted in these sorts of place-specific rituals, reveled in the New England-ness of it all, took pleasure in his longtime residency in the region (and in seditiously dismissing his own past as a New Yorker), wished to bestow this piece of local color on every visitor who passed over his threshold. The bibs were five years old by then and badly tattered, but over and over again David trotted them out for dinners with new friends, because they said LOBSTAH on them in a Gothic script, and he thought this was a funny joke, and was quite proud of them.

  He passed them out one at a time to every guest.

  “And you wear this for all dinner?” asked Giordi, incredulously, and David nodded.

  “It gets quite messy,” he told Giordi. “You’ll be grateful later on.”

  Now David brought the lobsters out, two at a time, carrying them in his hands, and he examined every one, looked it in its lobster face and declared which guest would consume it. “You look like a lobster for Frank,” he said to the largest, “and you for Ada,” he said to the smallest. There was cold potato salad on the table, and cold asparagus, and little pots of drawn butter and lemon that David had positioned precisely in front of every guest, and three ramekins of cream sauce that were meant to be shared. There were tomatoes that David had picked from his garden, festooned with mozzarella and basil.

  David raised his glass once the lobsters were distributed. “To our new graduate students,” he said. “Welcome to Boston.”

  “The home of the bean and the cod,” said Edith.

  “And the lobster,” said Hayato.

  Sufficient alcohol had been consumed; there were no uneasy pauses, no long breaks in conversation that required Ada to bring forth one of her prepared talking points. Instead, she sat next to Edith and took in her outfit. She was even more beautiful than Ada had initially realized, and a sort of smooth-skinned glowing ease emanated from her person, into the thrall of which Ada imagined men fell powerfully. Edith was fashionable and reserved: Ada noticed with some jealousy that one of the banana clips she coveted pulled Edith’s hair away from her face loosely, giving her a look of orchestrated carelessness. She wore a sleeveless, collared floral dress with a knee-length hemline and buttons done up to her neck. She did not carry a purs
e but there were large pockets on the dress, and Ada wondered what she kept in them: A pen, maybe. Lipstick, maybe: her lips were a light unnatural pink, a radioactive color that David probably did not like. A lighter, Ada thought. She could have been a smoker; many of David’s European colleagues were. She was remarkably pretty.

  Edith turned, caught Ada observing her, smiled.

  “How old are you, Ada?” she asked: the first question new adults usually asked.

  “Twelve,” Ada said, and Edith nodded sagely.

  “And what are your favorite books?”

  “The Lord of the Rings books,” Ada said, “are my favorite books of all time.”

  In fact they were her father’s favorite books of all time, but she had adopted them as her own so fully that she was no longer certain what the truth was.

  Edith studied her for a moment. “Twelve,” she said. “A difficult age for me. Better for you, I’m sure.”

  Was it? Ada looked around the table at her father and her friends. They were her constant source of companionship, of knowledge, of camaraderie; each one offered to her some necessary part of her existence: Frank for kindness, and Liston for protection and love and common sense, and Hayato for artistry and humor. And the others, who could not make it: Charles-Robert for confidence and a sort of half-serious disdain for outsiders; Martha, the young secretary of the division, for knowledge of popular culture and fashion. And, above all others, David, for devotion and knowledge and loyalty and trust, David as the protector and guide of them all. But despite the completeness of what the adults around her offered to Ada, the sense of reassurance and comfort they extended, something was missing from her brief existence, and she knew, though she could not bring herself to fully form the thought, that it was friends her own age.

  The dinner moved through salad and into dessert—Giordi had playfully kept his bib on well beyond the lobster course, insisting that he could not be trusted without one and that he would wear one regularly now—and Ada leapt up several times to refill the wine glasses of the guests. A fast-moving storm had swept through the neighborhood, and the house was finally cooling off. A damp breeze came in through the windows. They were near enough to the ocean to smell it, on nights like these. David invited everyone into the living room, and Ada stayed behind to clear the table.

  When she had finished, she joined the group, and found that the guests had arranged themselves into little clusters. She hesitated for a while on the threshold of the living room, wiping her hands on the back of her shirt, and then joined Frank and Joonseong. In moments when it seemed appropriate, she produced some of the topics she had earlier bookmarked for discussion—a recent shooting in Mattapan; a French film from the 1950s that David had taken her to see at the Brattle; the restaurants surrounding the Bit, and their strengths and weaknesses—but she found herself increasingly distracted by David, who was standing slightly apart from any group, gazing at the floor. He had his hands clasped behind his back; he looked vaguely, unsettlingly lost. Ada nodded and feigned attentiveness as Joonseong told her about his new apartment, but in her peripheral vision she saw David walking slowly toward the window, as if lured there by a spell: he stood still then, and she saw his lips moving quickly, his hands hanging stiffly by his sides.

  “David,” said Liston, who was closest to him. “Are you all right?” Ada saw her say it. And at this he lifted his head quickly, and smiled, and turned and clapped his hands once. Everyone looked at him.

  “A riddle,” David announced, “for the newest members of the lab. And the first to solve it gets a prize.”

  Ada heard a thickness in his voice that she didn’t recognize. She would have thought he was drunk, except that he rarely drank: a glass or two of wine was all he ever took, and tonight he’d barely had any at all. Together, everyone watched him.

  This was his ritual: to each new crop of grad students, he delivered the same riddle, one he adored for its simplicity and the justice of its logic. All the permanent members of the lab could recite it and its answer in unison: they had all heard it so many times. Still, it comforted Ada somehow to hear him deliver it each year, as if it were scripture—to watch the same looks of thoughtfulness pass over the faces of the grad students, and then a lighting-up when one of them came upon the answer.

  Everyone watched David expectantly: classmates observing a teacher. He cleared his throat and began. “You are a traveler who has come to a fork in the road between two villages,” he said. “The village of West is full of only murderous men incapable of telling the truth; visiting it will bring about your death. The village of East is full of benevolent men incapable of lying; visiting it will bring to you a cache of gold. Two men stand in the fork in the road—one from West and one from East. But you don’t know which is which. In order to determine how to reach the village full of gold, and avoid your certain doom, you may ask only one question of only one man. What should your question be?”

  The grad students paused. One of them would ask David to repeat the problem: it happened every year. This year was Joonseong, and most likely it was due to his English, not to his logical abilities. David incanted the riddle once again, repeating it word for word. Edith was smiling about something Ada couldn’t determine, and at the end of David’s second recitation she put a hand out before her to signal that she had an announcement.

  “I’m recusing myself. I know the answer because I’ve heard the puzzle before. I cannot tell a lie,” she said.

  “I suppose that makes me an Easterner,” she added, and Giordi laughed too eagerly, or perhaps he was simply grateful to have understood her joke.

  David then turned to Giordi and Joonseong, with some seriousness, and informed them that it was between the two of them, and reminded them of the prize. Both of them looked down at the floor contemplatively. Ada’s money was on Joonseong, from the way her father had described both men. But there was a silence over the room that went on for quite some time, and eventually both of them looked at one another and then at David. Joonseong raised his hands in surrender.

  David looked pleased.

  “Giving up, are you?” he asked them, giddily. “Even you, Giordi?” If David’s first love was being stumped, his second was stumping others.

  David opened his mouth. Then he closed it.

  “Your question must be,” David said. “Your question,” he said again.

  He folded one arm about himself and put the other hand to his cheek. Everyone watched him. A slow unfurling sense of panic filled the room.

  “My word,” said David, slowly. “I seem to have forgotten the answer.”

  This was a moment that became sealed forever in Ada’s memory, encased in glass, a display in the museum of David’s decline. She never forgot the brief silence that followed, during which everyone looked down at the floor and then up again, or the way that Giordi loudly cleared his throat. Or the way that David looked at her, almost in horror: the look of a pilot who has just discovered that the engines of his plane have failed. The humiliation Ada felt on his behalf was almost too much to bear. At last, she let herself articulate in her mind the thought that she had been repressing for a year or more: that something was wrong with David.

  “Oh, you know it, David,” Liston finally said. “My God, of course you do.” She looked around at the rest of the group entreatingly. “The traveler would point to either of the villagers and ask the other one, ‘Which way would he tell me to go to get to the cache of gold?’ And either man would say, ‘East.’ ”

  David nodded. “Yes.”

  “The liar would say that the truth-teller would say East, because he only lies. The truth-teller would say that the liar would say East, because he knows that the liar always lies. East either way,” said Liston.

  “And so you would go to the village of West,” said Liston. “And find the cache of gold. And then you’d take your friend Liston out for a nice steak dinner.”

  “Yes,” said David. “Quite right. You’re quite right, Liston.”<
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  There was still too much silence in the room. David looked lost, the smile gone from his face, staring at the wall opposite him as if looking into the future.

  Ada wondered if this was a moment that she should fill with conversation.

  “Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the disastrous eruption of the volcano Krakatoa,” she said. It was one of the news items that she had culled from the paper.

  “Oh, really?” said Edith. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Of course,” David said. “What would he say?”

  “You knew it,” said Liston.

  “I knew it,” said David, pensively.

  “I suppose this means you win the prize, Liston,” he added, and then he walked out of the room.

  Frank murmured something about it being late. Hayato announced that he’d give the grad students a ride home.

  And Ada stood frozen in the living room, not knowing what to say.

  Liston squeezed her shoulders and went to the kitchen to say goodbye to David and then, from the front hallway, called out, “Good night, Ada, see you on Monday!”

  “Good night,” Ada said quietly. She did not know whether Liston heard her.

  She heard the sound of the front door opening and closing, and then the thunder of six pairs of feet going down the old wooden stairs of the porch, punctuated by a quick, indecipherable interjection from a male voice.

  For a moment the house was quiet. And then she heard the front door open once more. David cried out, “Liston! Your prize!”