The Unseen World Read online

  From the living room, Ada peered out into the hallway to see the back of her father. He was standing with a hand on the open door, his head bowed. In the other hand he held a little golden bag of chocolates he had bought the day before at Phillips’s. Liston was out of earshot, probably already walking up the steps to her porch. The taillights of Hayato’s car went past the house and were gone. After a few moments David closed the door, and Ada disappeared before he could turn and see her.

  She washed the dishes. For twenty minutes, she let the warm water run over her hands.

  Finally, she went to the dining room to retrieve the tablecloth and there was David, sitting at the long dining room table, turning over and over in his hands a sort of worry stone, a lucky charm in the shape of a clover. He kept it in his pocket wherever he went. He said it helped him to think. He looked vague and puzzled.

  He shifted his gaze toward her. She was angry with him for reasons she knew were unjust. She had never before seen his mind fail him so resoundingly. It threatened to rattle her long-standing impression of him as someone stately, noble, just.

  “Sit down,” he told her.

  She paused.

  “Just for a moment,” he said. “Please.”

  She complied, and he rose and walked into his office, which opened off the dining room. It was one of the only places in the house that Ada avoided: the desk was mired completely in piles of papers; the built-in bookshelves were filled entirely, and stacks of books had begun to take over the floor. She saw the back of him as he bent to open one of the drawers of the desk, and from it he produced what he was looking for, and turned and carried it back with him. He sat down across from her once more.

  “Here,” he said. Ada looked at it. It was a floppy disk, and on the hard cover of it, a white plastic clamshell, he had written, For Ada. She opened it. On the label affixed to the disk itself, there was a message: Dear Ada, it said. A puzzle for you. With my love, your father, David Sibelius.

  “It’s a present,” he said. “Something I’ve been working on.”

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see when you open it.”

  Ada was born in 1971 to a woman whom David had hired as a surrogate. At the time this was nearly unheard-of, but—as David described it—when the opportunity arose, he took it. The surrogate was a hippie-ish woman named Birdie Auerbach, and Ada had had no contact with her since, though at the time of her birth Birdie had made it clear to David, and David had subsequently made it clear to Ada, that she could if she wanted to. But throughout Ada’s childhood she had felt she really didn’t need to; she felt that somehow it would be a betrayal to David if she did.

  Ada never questioned his decision to bring a child into the world; her connection to him was so complete that it felt entirely natural to her. She imagined that he simply decided he wanted a child and then had one. David had never had a romance in Ada’s lifetime, not that she was aware of. He was devoted to his friends and colleagues and to various people whom he occasionally mentored: there had been a number of grad students over the years, and the piano tuner, and the landscaper who mowed the lawn, whom he often invited inside for lemonade and quizzed about his business plans. There was a young girl who lived down the street who showed promise as a ballet dancer, and he encouraged her mother, with whom he had developed a friendship, to bring her to audition at the School of American Ballet in New York City—the only place, he assured her, that one could really get a proper education in dance in the United States. He spent long hours talking with Anna Holmes, the librarian at the nearest branch of the Boston Public Library, about her life and her hobbies and her interests. She was pretty, unmarried at fifty, and could possibly, Ada thought, be in love with David. He had taken an interest in her, and in all of these acquaintances, but though he discussed them with Ada frequently and exhaustively—speculating about their friendships, their home lives, their careers—it seemed clear to her that his interest in Miss Holmes was platonic, though Ada would not even have thought to articulate it as such. He never discussed his romantic history overtly with anyone, as far as she knew. It would have seemed to him undignified. Ada had heard only vaguely about former girlfriends, young debutantes he had known when he was growing up as part of New York’s upper class. She had always slept soundly, but she had some vague memories of hearing a female voice in the living room, though she also could have been dreaming. Ada supposed it was possible that on those occasions her father could have been entertaining a guest. He would never, ever have talked to her about it. The idea would have been repugnant to him: he had always been private about his personal life to an extreme, even with Ada, despite the fact that he regularly assured her of her great importance to him and of the fact that he thought of her as his closest companion.

  David was forty-six when Ada was born and had already been head of his own lab for sixteen years. For the first years of her life—when she was too young to entertain herself for long days at work—Ada had a nanny, Luda, a tall, soft-spoken Russian woman with one long braid down her back, whom David hired to watch her while he was out. But at night and on the weekends it was David and Ada alone. The fact that she survived her infancy astounded her sometimes. She couldn’t imagine it, though she often tried: David, waking up in the night to attend to her, warming bottles, boiling them; or preventing her from falling off of anything high or running into anything low or being bitten by anything mean; or taking her to the park in a stroller; or folding her snugly into a blanket; or gazing down at her while she ate from a bottle; or letting her fall asleep on his fatherly chest: these actions seemed so incongruous with Ada’s idea of David as to be impossible. And yet he must have done these things: she was alive as the proof.

  Ada’s memories of David began later, with their conversations. She could not remember not talking to David. Every waking hour was, in his mind, an opportunity for interesting conversation, a chance to analyze their lives and the lives of all humans. “Are we very happy, Ada?” he often asked her, and she always said yes, though sometimes with hesitation—as if she knew that the question itself implied the opposite. But for the most part, she was utterly content with her strange, satisfying existence: Ada and David together, always.

  He had small rituals: he made tea in an elaborate old-fashioned way that, he said, his mother taught him; and he watched a certain police drama religiously, the only television show he enjoyed, often shouting out the perpetrator’s name halfway through the episode, crowing each time he was correct; and when Ada was small, before bedtime he would read to her from books that he loved, never children’s books; and on Sunday afternoons he liked to go to a particular café in Dorchester to organize his brain. Ada did whatever homework he had assigned her while he wrote out formulas and drew diagrams, in his cramped particular handwriting, on stacks of napkins provided to him by Tran, the eponymous owner of the café, who was himself an amateur scientist, well versed in Feynman and Planck. Her father, though a computer scientist by profession, had a strong background in pure mathematics. He was interested in all the sciences, and in the humanities as well: he had learned French as a boy and still spoke it fairly well, and from time to time would attempt to teach himself something like Mandarin or Portuguese. “A well-rounded thinker should be able to puzzle out from scratch any proof that has ever been proven,” he said to Ada, and so sometimes to keep sharp he would work out some problem of physics or mathematics, although it had nothing to do with his research. When he was working on these, or on any puzzle, he would fall into a trance familiar to his closest associates—in which his body seemed utterly, utterly at the will of his mind—in which his hands, writing furiously, seemed overtaken by a ghost. He was expressionless, an automaton, and could not be spoken to until he returned. On the occasions when, in one of these trances, he worked himself to sleep, Ada put a hand on his shoulder—one of the few times she ever touched her father—and he sat up and blinked, disoriented, until he realized where h
e was.

  Her father spoke of his past only rarely, but occasionally he would agree to tell Ada the tale of his life as a story before bed. She begged him to: it was a way of expanding her family, a way to counteract the feeling she sometimes had that the two of them were stranded on an island. To comfort herself, Ada sometimes narrated his life in her head, using the wording he would have used.

  David was born in New York City, he told her, the only child of wealthy parents to whom he would eventually stop speaking. They died before Ada was born. He described them with bitterness and scorn, ridiculing their conventionality, their closed-mindedness, their snobbery. (Ada did not point out to her father, though it occurred to her, that many of his opinions could be labeled snobbery as well; and that his last name, well known in the Northeast, had opened various doors for him that he seemed not to notice.) The rift between David and his parents, which led at last to a complete estrangement by his late twenties, was caused by differences of opinion regarding how he should live his life—the phrase he always used. He hinted vaguely at their displeasure at his choice of career, his refusal to accept their introductions to the various young ladies they would have liked to see him marry, his refusal to obey the conventions and codes that accompanied the family’s status. “Debutantes and that sort of thing,” said David. “Charity balls. Teas.” At the mention of these terms he would shudder, which signified an end to the story. Ada rarely pressed him beyond this point.

  The derisive, sardonic tone he used when speaking of his past implied he had long ago moved on, had long ago dismissed those families and their ilk as fraudulent and obsolete. From his scraps of description Ada gathered that his mother and father were stern and impersonal. Worse than that, she categorized them as uncreative—David’s term, one he used only for those he held in complete disdain. His father had been a sort of gentleman attorney, one who only took on clients who were personal friends, and only then if he could be sure the work would end amicably. His mother had no career aside from identifying and articulating the flaws of her husband and son. Every conversation with her, he told Ada, was like a game of chess: one had to remain several steps ahead of her to ward off whatever criticism would be imparted if one’s guard was let down.

  In these moments Ada was jolted by a sudden vision of David as a child, subservient to his parents, not the master and commander of everything around him, as she’d thought of him for most of her childhood. It was difficult to picture.

  This much she knew: David was raised on Gramercy Park in a grand and beautiful row home, up which ivy spread densely and then in rivulets, like fingers from a palm. She saw it once a year, in winter, when David took her for a weekend trip to New York City for Calvary Episcopal’s annual Christmas concert. It was his childhood church—the only site from his childhood that he ever wished to revisit—and it was his favorite sort of music: early choral composition by Tallis and Purcell. He was not churchgoing, but it was liturgical music that moved him the most, and he sat very still and upright in the old wooden pew for the duration of every song, his head bowed as if in prayer. Only his fingers moved from time to time, playing his knees like an organ.

  Afterward David would walk swiftly out the door, and Ada would run to keep pace with him—difficult to do, for he walked as if he were skating, with a lengthy, forceful stride—and turn left toward Gramercy Park, and then stand silently with Ada outside of the house for several seconds. They never spoke. Usually the heavy drapes inside the house were drawn by the time the concert let out, but once Ada saw a young girl, about her age, sitting with her mother at a dining room table. “I wonder if those are Ellises,” said David idly, naming the family who purchased the home after the death of his parents. “I read about them in the paper. I’ve never met them.

  “I would have been the only heir,” he told Ada. “I wouldn’t have taken it anyway,” he added, and then he walked quickly down the street, without warning her, so that she had to run for several steps to catch him.

  Despite his complete dismissal of his past, he kept one black-and-white portrait of himself with his parents in the dresser in his bedroom. Ada had discovered it when she was quite young and often returned to it whenever he was out. There he was, young David, perhaps eleven years old. In the picture he was wearing a bow tie, a tweed jacket with a high waist, short pants, knee socks. A very slight smile played upon his mouth—same mouth, same lively light eyes. His parents looked predictably dour and serious: mother in a black scoop-necked satin dress that ended just above her ankles, black stockings and black shoes, a long black beaded necklace. Father in a dark suit and tie, one leg crossed over the other. All three of them were positioned slightly apart from one another. In the background was a funny scene: draperies, slightly askew, framed a fuzzy, impressionist backdrop of trees and mountains.

  Their next-door neighbor on Shawmut Way was an old woman named Mrs. O’Keeffe, who had come over from Ireland at ten years old, in 1910. She had worked as a maid in the same neighborhood David had grown up in, and then she met her husband and moved to Boston. This coincidence came up early in their acquaintance, and Ada watched David as he physically cringed. Discussions about his past were always an encumbrance to him, but from then on he had difficulty dodging Mrs. O’Keeffe, who wished frequently to reminisce with him about the other families who had occupied those homes. She had not known him but she had known his people. She would name the families of Gramercy Park as if counting her treasures. “And the Cromwells,” she would say, “what a beauty their daughter was. And those Byrons, and those Harts, and those Carringtons . . .”

  “Yes,” David would say, “I knew all of them, once.”

  He graduated high school in 1943, right in the middle of the Second World War, which normally would have guaranteed a period of service. But David was, even at that age, nearsighted to the point of legal blindness without his glasses. Instead, therefore, he went to college. He chose Caltech—which further horrified his father, who had gone to Harvard, and his mother, who saw it as a vocational school, a school for the working class. There he majored in mathematics. He then found his way to the Bit, where he received a doctorate in applied mathematics, and where his work on GOPAC, an early computer system spearheaded by Maurice Steiner, earned him such quick fame in his field that he was given his own lab at the Bit by President Pearse at the age of thirty. It was named for Steiner, after his death, and with David at the helm, it quickly became known in the field. It was here in 1970 that he met Liston, then a young postdoc straight from her doctoral work at Brown, and here that they became friends. They were an odd pair: he was sixteen years her senior, but she was an old soul—both of them said it—with two children already and two more to follow. They spent a great deal of time together both in the lab and outside it. He fostered her already considerable talent, and spoke of her proudly as her role at the lab expanded. “The best pure thinker in the group,” he said of her often, including himself in the tally. At this time, Charles-Robert and Hayato had already been hired, and Frank came shortly thereafter. A rotating cast of postdocs, grad students, and short-lived hires came and went, but the five of them, plus Ada, were the core.

  Ada loved the lab: it was a dark and cozy complex of offices housed within the Applied Mathematics Division of the Bit, which itself was housed within one of the Bit’s many Gothic buildings, and it felt more like a home than a workplace. For most of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, a mainframe computer dominated the largest room, toward the rear; by the late eighties it had become obsolete, but it remained in the lab as a sort of relic, a hulking, friendly dragon lying dormant in the back. The front of the lab was composed, with the exception of a larger conference room, of a warren of small rooms and offices, scattered with machines, some of which were perpetually stripped of their front panels, their innards revealed. Each office had been personalized over the years to reflect its owner. Hayato kept an easel in his, on which he sketched out problems and occasionally landscapes; and Charles-Robert had covered
his walls entirely in maps; and Frank, the youngest, used to keep an elaborate network of hot plates and crock pots and electric kettles, on which he cooked surprisingly competent and complete meals for the whole department, until one day the building manager found him out and stopped him, citing fire department regulations. Liston’s office was sparse but for a record player on which she played albums by ABBA and U2 and the Police, and a beanbag chair in which Ada sometimes napped when she was smaller. David’s office consisted mainly of a collection of filing boxes that he added to yearly, too busy to go through them, too paranoid to dispose of their contents unexamined. The grad students worked part of the time across town at the Bit’s smaller campus in the Medical Area, and the other half in cubicles in the main room. Anyone else who came through the lab as a temporary or permanent hire was placed into one of the three empty offices that were otherwise used by David as schoolrooms for Ada.

  Many of her early memories involved the floor of the lab, the feet and ankles of scientists all around her. When she was very young she was given antique models of elements to play with. She was given a kit of wooden parts to make up atoms. Hayato blew up latex gloves, stolen from the biology department, and made turkeys of them with a felt-tipped pen. She was not taught nursery rhymes about geese and kings but about molecules: Here lies dear old Harry, dead upon the floor. What he thought was H2O was H2SO4. She was named the mascot of the Steiner Lab, and there was a photograph of her dressed as a punch card to prove it.

  She attended most formal meetings that the Steiner Lab conducted and she attended informal meetings, too, ducking in and out of offices at will, sitting still at the round brown table in the main room when the lab had lunch all together. And listening—always listening.

  The theory of language immersion posits that a language is best learned by placing the learner into what is in effect a natural habitat, or a simulated habitat that strives for authenticity. Thus a student of Spanish will learn best not when she is taught to conjugate verbs but when she is surrounded by useful Spanish—not when she is taught Spanish for its own sake, but when she is taught every other subject in Spanish, too. More by default than intent, Ada was thus immersed in mathematics, neurology, physics, philosophy, computer science. She did not begin with Lisp, but with compiler design. In her physics lessons at home with David, she did not begin with s = d/t, but with the Grand Unified Theory. For the first years of her life, she did not know what she was hearing. Listening to David and his colleagues was like listening to radio chatter in a different language. And then, without knowing it or taking note of it, she began to be able to follow their conversations. By ten she was able to be a sounding board for her father as he worked out his ideas—not resolving them or bettering them, necessarily, but posing questions to him that were reasonable, and occasionally jarring something loose in him. When this happened, he reported Ada’s concern or comment to the rest of the lab with some seriousness at the next lab meeting, and a slow glowing warmth spread throughout her, because she had made herself useful to the group, whom she thought of, always, as her peers.