The Unseen World Read online

  “A good question, I think, Ada,” David would say, and the rest of them would nod in agreement, and the group would move forward as one.

  This was what Ada pictured when she thought of her father, the vision of David that she harbored and kept safe throughout her life, the idea pinned permanently to the sleepiest part of her brain: it was her father in his laboratory, or at Tran’s Restaurant; or in the library of the institute that employed him; or, rarely, in a crowd of friends; or, regularly, at his desk, in his small absurd office in their home, contemplating a chessboard, his head as bald and round and sturdy as a pawn’s. His woolen socks with holes in them. His hands the steeple of a church. He was tall and thin and rigorous in his studies and in his life, and he was inventive, and he was very warm and betrayed no one ever, and in Ada’s mind he was ethical beyond compare, and he had a habit of rubbing his hands together quickly when he was delighted or moved, and he was quick and spry and gentle and able with his limbs and head. He was dexterous, and his fingernails were clean, and he was wise, and he was intent upon seeking out the best and most beautiful versions of pieces by Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, and Bach, and he knew excellent riddles, and his name was Dr. David Sibelius, and she never called him anything but David.

  In the weeks and months that followed the dinner party, no one mentioned its strange end to Ada, her father’s sudden lapse, or asked her any questions about David’s increasingly odd behavior. Occasionally, at the lab, she felt as if she and David were being excluded from something: where formerly Liston or Charles-Robert would have welcomed her into any room—discussed the bugs in a particular program with her, put an arm about her shoulders—now there was often a feeling of conversations stopping when she rounded a corner. The new grad students found their way into the routine of the laboratory, and Ada kept a closer eye on her father, noting peculiarities in his speech or habits when they arose, attempting to classify them somehow.

  In the evenings, she worked at the puzzle on the disk David had given her, marked For Ada on its case. It had turned out to be, when she’d inserted it into her computer and started it up, simply a text document with a short string of seemingly random letters.

  DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ, it read.

  David would not give her any clues. Together, they had been studying cryptography and cryptanalysis for the past several years—a hobby of David’s that, he said, came out of his days at Caltech, where his mentor had been a cryptanalyst during the war—and he told her this was her next assignment. “It may take you a while,” he admitted. “Don’t let it affect your other work, of course.”

  While she worked, he worked: in his office, with the door now closed sometimes. She looked at the outside of it, vaguely hurt.

  Then Christmas came, and with it the Christmas party that Ada always anticipated and dreaded in equal parts, for with it came outsiders.

  David loved Christmas. In addition to their annual trip to New York, he insisted upon several other traditions, and balked at any suggestion of variance: after dinner on Thanksgiving he always put on the record player an album of the Trapp Family Singers performing Christmas songs from around the world, and he played this regularly until January 2, and then packed it away; then there was the Stringing of the Lights that occurred on the first Saturday of December, and which David executed with an efficiency that put the other fathers on the block to shame. In mid-December they cut down a Christmas tree at an orchard in the Berkshires, a daylong expedition that he put on the calendar with great seriousness on December 1; and after that they visited Cambridge, where Frank lived, to go with him to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant and then to Sanders Theatre to see the Christmas Revels—a sort of scholarly variety show of medieval Christmas pageantry, with a dose of druidism thrown in as well. Just the sort of thing that appealed to David and his cohort.

  “Isn’t it cozy out,” David was fond of saying, on first snowfall. “Ada, come look.” And if she was asleep, he would wake her; and she would rise from her bed, sleepy-eyed, rubbing her face, and walk to the window of their drafty house, and together she and David would stand in silence, together in the night, looking out onto Shawmut Way through a frosty, rattling window, their breath obscuring it slowly.

  The Christmas party was the culmination of all of these traditions, and perhaps David’s favorite tradition of all. He insisted, always, that a party was not complete without some entertainment, a game, an organized activity that required everyone’s participation. Some years it was a hired guitarist or a group of carolers; some years it was a juggler or a magician. (“What else is one supposed to do—just stand around and drink?” asked David, perplexed.) It was this philosophy that caused him to declaim the same riddle to the new graduate students at the dinner he held for them every year; and it was this philosophy that had caused him, that December, to write a Christmas play for every member of the lab to perform, in front of a small audience of colleagues from other departments, spouses and children of lab members, and staff and administrators from other parts of the university.

  He had told none of them this in advance. Instead, at 9:00, tinging his glass with a finger, he asked for everyone’s attention, and directed them all to form a semicircle in the main room of the lab.

  “Here we go,” said Hayato, good-naturedly.

  “Except you, Hayato,” said David. “You come up here. And you, and you, and you,” he said, grabbing the rest of the lab. “And you,” he said, last, to Ada, who had been praying to be forgotten. Her face burned as she walked to the front of the room and stood with the rest of them. In front of her, she saw a blur of faces before looking quickly down at the floor.

  David was holding, in his left hand, a stack of stapled pages, which he passed out to each of them with mock seriousness, a flourish for each one. His face was pink and excited; his thick glasses were slipping down on his nose.

  He turned back to the audience. “A play!” he announced. “A Christmas play.”

  Later, Ada would not remember its exact plot—something about a group of superhero nerds sent back in time to determine how to achieve a better lift-to-drag ratio for Santa’s sleigh. (Ada played a reindeer.) What she did remember: David’s happiness, his complete contentment at the execution of his plan, how carefree he looked; and the way he directed them all, like a conductor with a baton; and her own embarrassment, her burning face, her quiet, noncommittal line delivery; and, in the front row, the faces of the audience members, some of whom looked bemused, some of whom looked befuddled; and there, to the right, at the edge of the crowd, the face of William, Liston’s oldest son, who stared at all of them incredulously, his mouth slightly agape.

  In March she turned thirteen.

  “A teenager,” said David, shaking his head. “Hard to believe, isn’t it, Ada?”

  She nodded.

  “Would you like a cake? I suppose you should have something festive,” said David, but Ada said no.

  Secretly, she had been wanting one, a candle to blow out, a wish to make. She had gotten only one present that year, from Liston, naturally: a hot-pink sweater with a purple zigzag pattern that Ada loved but felt too self-conscious to wear. David had not gotten her anything: she was not surprised, since he was both absentminded and vaguely opposed to consumerism. That year, however, she had been secretly hoping for something from him, which she only realized when nothing came. Some external signifier of what she thought was an important birthday. A piece of jewelry, maybe. An heirloom. Something timeless and important. She wished, too, as she had been doing with increasing frequency, that she and David could engage in some of the more typical conventions that accompanied occasions such as birthdays. A big party with friends, for example. A sleepover: she had never had a sleepover. She had no one to ask.

  That evening, after a quiet dinner at home, the telephone rang, and David answered in his office.

  “Yes?” he said, slowly, a note of surprise in his voice. It was nearly 11:00 at night. Normally Ad
a would have been in bed, but she felt unsettled and alight with something: the newness of being a teenager, perhaps. She felt untired and alert.

  From the dining room, Ada listened to her father, in his office, on the phone; but David was quiet for some time. She could see the back of him, the receiver pressed to his ear. He said nothing.

  Abruptly, he stood and walked to his office. She caught his eye quickly, and then he closed the door. Lately he had been intentionally excluding her from things, and each time she felt the sting of it sharply.

  She sat for a while at the dining room table, but, although she could hear the low murmur of David’s voice through the door, his words were indecipherable. She stood up.

  She walked outside, into the sloping backyard behind the house on Shawmut Way. All of the yards on their side of the road were fenceless and connected, lined at the bottom of a small hill by a street-length row of trees. Dorchester was a city neighborhood comprised of other neighborhoods, mainly working-class, high in crime by the 1980s, appealing to David in part because of these features, because of his self-identification as somebody unassuming and down-to-earth. But the neighborhood they lived in, Savin Hill, was an old and Irish one, very safe, suburban in its aspect. Over a bridge that separated their part of Savin Hill from the rest of the city, two leafy roads formed an interior and exterior circle at the base of the hill the area was named for. Shawmut Way connected the two roads together, like a spoke in a wheel. A small beach spanned the eastern border of the neighborhood and a park with public tennis courts framed the central hill. Liston continued to live there because of these features and David had agreed to live there, against his normal preferences, despite them. “I feel like I’m on vacation,” he said, often, when walking home from the T after work. This was, from David, a complaint. He preferred that his cities feel like cities; but his respect for Liston’s advice, when it came to Ada’s needs, outweighed his resistance.

  In the cool hour before midnight she walked down to the base of their backyard, to where the pine trees lived, and she ran her hand along their branches to find her way, quietly, through the three backyards between theirs and Liston’s. Lately, Ada had been doing this regularly, perhaps once a week, while David was working at night. He had never pressed her for her whereabouts—or maybe he had not noticed. If he had, he approved, because he liked to foster independence in her, liked to imagine that his daughter could take care of herself. Certainly he did not know what drove Ada to conduct these nighttime walks, these missions, these compulsive marches in the dark. Certainly he would have been surprised to learn that it was William Liston, fifteen, the oldest of Diana Liston’s sons. Certainly he did not know that Ada believed she was in love with him.

  Since the Christmas party three months prior, Ada had thought about him almost unflaggingly, with a dedication singular to thirteen-year-old girls. For the first time, she also thought about herself, and her appearance. She stood in front of the mirrored vanity that David once told her had belonged to his mother, and she tilted her head first one way and then the other. Was she pretty? She could not say, and it had never before occurred to her to wonder. She was brown-haired and round-faced, with serious dark circles under her eyes and the beginning of several pimples on her chin. She had a widow’s peak that David told her he had had, too, when he had any hair to speak of. Like David, too, she wore glasses, which she had never before minded, but which now seemed like an unfair handicap.

  She fantasized often about what she would say, what she would do, the next time she was in the same room with William Liston—though this rarely happened. Although Diana Liston regularly came over to their house for dinner when asked, the offer was rarely reciprocated; and although Ada saw her regularly at the lab, her three sons never came with her. Instead they lived what Ada considered to be normal lives: they attended a normal school, excelled or failed at various normal things like sports and English class. They had no cause to visit their mother at work, except when required. Therefore, the only time Ada found herself face-to-face with William Liston—or, truly, anyone her age—was at lab parties.

  There were two reasons she felt ashamed of her crush: the first was that her father would have thought it was ridiculous—Ada knew that she was certainly too young, in his mind, to be interested in boys—and the second was that William was Liston’s son, and in a strange way she felt it was a betrayal of Liston to worship so ardently the child she complained about at lunch. “So listen to William’s latest,” she often said to Hayato, in front of Ada, and then proceeded to detail his most recent bout of mischief and the subsequent discipline he had received at school. Often it was for cutting class or leaving early; once, for forging a note from Liston excusing him from some assignment or other. He was caught by the number of misspellings he had included in the text. At the end of each account, Liston sighed and looked at Ada, mystified, and said, “Why couldn’t I have had four girls just like you?” And it made Ada feel gratified and melancholy all at once, because she knew that of course Liston loved her own children better than Ada, no matter what she said. With some frequency, Liston crowed about her grandson, the child of her oldest daughter Joanie, casting upon him none of the judgment she reserved for her own children. The fact that, despite her complaints, she loved her brood so fiercely and protectively also made Ada feel ashamed—for it was clear to her that Liston, even Liston, would have laughed if she knew about Ada’s crush. Because even Liston knew how little time the Williams of the world had for people like Ada.

  But since the Christmas party, she had begun to dream up different ways of interacting with the object of her obsession. Sometimes she sat outside on her front porch with a book and a blanket, despite the cold—this had yielded several William sightings, and, once, a puzzled wave from him as he rode by on his bike. One cold night in January, Ada had begun the routine she was now shamefully conducting. Now when she saw William Liston it was mainly through the large downstairs windows at the back of the Liston house, under the cover of the pine trees that brushed against her shoulders as she walked. From that vantage point she memorized the facets of his eyes and nose, noticed new patterns in the kinetics of his body, the movements of his arms and elbows, the self-aware way he plucked his shirt out from his torso from time to time and let it fall again.

  That night, when she was one backyard away, she heard a voice: Liston’s, probably on her phone. At first Ada heard only murmurs, but as she approached she began to make out words: I told Hayato, said Liston, and had to, and wouldn’t, and bad. Ada stopped in place. She weighed two options carefully. The first, the safer, was to turn back: she was comfortable in the patterns of her daily life. She had no information that would have caused her to question her understanding of her father or his work. Her disposition was sunny: she rose in the morning knowing how each day would go. Ada could imagine proceeding in this fashion for years.

  The second was to venture forth to listen—ironically, it was this option that David would have encouraged her to choose, for he had always pushed Ada toward bravery, had always instilled in her the idea that bravery went hand in hand with the seeking of the truth.

  So she walked forward quietly. As she approached Liston’s yard, Ada saw the downstairs of the house lit up, and one bedroom bright upstairs. A son was inside—the middle son, she thought, Gregory, younger than her—and, in a chaise longue on her back patio, Liston. It was unseasonably warm for March. Liston had a glass of wine in her hand and a portable telephone to her ear. This was new technology: Ada had not seen one before. Liston was quiet now: the person on the other end of the phone was speaking. Ada could see her silhouetted in the ambient light cast out through the windows at the back of the house, but she could not see her face: she only knew it was Liston by her hair, her voice, her posture. In the total darkness at the base of the hill, Ada was sure she could not be seen, but it frightened her still to be so close, just twenty feet away. She breathed as quietly as she could. Her heart beat quickly. Upstairs Gregory walked
across his bedroom once again and the movement startled her. She stood next to a sapling tree, a maple, and she hugged its thin trunk tightly.

  Suddenly Liston spoke. “I know,” she said, “but at some point . . .”

  A pause.

  “You have to tell Ada,” said Liston. “My God, David.”

  Ada clutched her tree more tightly.

  “I’ll do it if I have to,” said Liston. “It’s not fair.”

  Just then a car door slammed on the other side of the house and Liston said she had to go.

  “Just think about it,” she said, and then pressed a button on the phone, and called one name out sternly.