The Unseen World Page 6

  And yet Ada found a great sense of satisfaction from these conversations, deriving meaning from each exchange, expelling stored-up thoughts from her own memory, transplanting them into the memory of the machine. Very slowly, some of ELIXIR’s responses began to take on meaning.

  She felt something, now, when typing to ELIXIR at a terminal; despite its poor grammar, its constant reminders that it was simply executing a program, ELIXIR triggered Ada’s emotions in unexpected ways. Chatting with it was something like watching a puppet operated by an especially artful puppeteer. It felt in some way animate, though her rational self knew it not to be. It brought out the same warm feelings in Ada that a friend might have. It skillfully replicated concern for her and her well-being; it inquired after her family. (When it did, she told it, over and over again, that David was her only family; and over and over again, it ignored her.)

  Ada wondered if other members of the lab felt the same way. She would never have told David; although he found ELIXIR’s growing intelligence an increasingly interesting philosophical inquiry, he seemed to be completely objective about the program. He did not indulge much in the tendency the other members of the lab had to anthropomorphize ELIXIR. He chuckled at the Santa hat placed on the mainframe’s monitor at Christmastime; he laughed aloud when Frank, taking lunch orders, shouted across the room to request the machine’s. But Ada could tell that his ambitions were greater, that he was focused on a distant horizon that lay beyond anything ELIXIR could possibly navigate at the time. The machine, to him, was still a machine, and the little visual puns constructed by the members of the lab were pranks and gimmicks. In David’s mind, it would take years and years of progress before ELIXIR achieved anything resembling true intelligence.

  In the meantime, the lab presented conference papers at the IJCAI and the AAAI. They published scholarly articles in Computing. From time to time, an article appeared in a popular magazine like Atlantic Monthly or Newsweek about ELIXIR. David took no pleasure in this, avoiding the reporter, always sending another member of the lab to represent the group. He was famously camera-shy and would never let his picture be taken, even by Ada; the only recent image of her father that she had was one on an old photo ID that she had swiped from him when the system changed. In it, David looked at the camera askance, wincing, as if staring into a very bright light. With these publications, he cooperated only out of a sense of obligation to the Bit, because the publicity was helpful for generating funds. A laudatory article in Time was published in 1980, detailing the ambitions of the Steiner Lab; in the photograph, a smiling Hayato posed with his palm on the top of the monitor on which they chatted with ELIXIR: a proud father placing a protective hand on his child. David had refused the coverage, as usual, thrusting the other members of the lab forward, receding into the background himself.

  Together, the members of the Steiner lab were generally reserved in their predictions about what ELIXIR could accomplish. They were self-disparaging and disparaging, too, of the program, whom they benevolently insulted, almost as sport. (Ada, who had grown fond of ELIXIR, was displeased by this; she felt it was somehow disloyal.)

  But sometimes, when it was just Ada and David alone, he allowed himself to rhapsodize about the future of the beast, as he affectionately called ELIXIR from time to time, and he encouraged her to do so as well.

  “What is the end result of a program like this one?” he asked Ada.

  She studied his face, looking for hints.

  “A companion?” she asked. “An assistant?”

  “Possibly,” said David, but he looked at her, always, as if waiting for more.

  On Saturday, August 11, 1984, Ada woke up to find David missing. She knew he was gone as soon as she woke up: normally she could sense his presence in the house from the small noises he made, his constant movement, the vibration of the floor from a jittering leg. But that morning there was a foreign stillness to the house, a quietness that made her think, at first, that she was someplace else.

  Despite this, her first notion was to look all over the house for him. Once, when she had thought he was out, she’d stumbled upon him in the basement, with industrial noise-canceling headphones on, working on an experiment that, he’d said, required his full concentration. But this time Ada did not find him.

  There was no note. His car was still in the driveway. She searched for his keys and his wallet; the former she found, the latter she did not see. This meant, she presumed, that he had gone out on some errand, but had not intended to stay for long. He had left the kitchen door unlocked.

  She told herself not to worry. David had, in recent months, been increasingly prone to disappearing without notice for brief periods of time. An hour or two or three would go by and then he would reappear from a walk, whistling cheerfully. When she asked after his whereabouts, he would answer vaguely about wanting fresh air. Once, she asked him to leave her a note when he was going out; though he agreed to, he had looked at her with an expression she interpreted as disappointment. That she was not more self-reliant; that she needed him in this way. Ada did not ask again. Instead, she attempted to train herself not to care.

  Ada sat down at the kitchen table. She stood up, and then sat down again. She tried for a time to do the lesson he had most recently assigned her. It was a proof of Sierpinski’s Composite Number Theorem, which normally would have interested her—but she could not concentrate. After another hour she called David’s office at the lab. It was a Saturday, so she doubted any of his colleagues would be in. The phone rang six times and then came the click that meant the start of the answering machine—a device that David and Charles-Robert had invented and assembled at the lab one Sunday in the late 1970s, before they were widely available commercially. This is Jeeves, the Steiner Lab’s butler, said the machine, which relied upon the earliest available text-to-speech software and therefore was barely comprehensible. May I take your message?

  Ada hung up.

  She checked the time: 11:44 a.m.

  She negotiated with herself for a while about whether it was reasonable to call every hospital in Boston, and then decided that it would not be harmful, and that, besides, it would be something to do. It was possible, she thought, that he had gone out for a walk or a run and sustained some injury, major or minor, the latest in an impressive career of self-injury that, David had always told her, began when she was a child.

  But nobody had any record of David Sibelius.

  At 3:00 in the afternoon she began to have serious thoughts about calling the police, but she quickly decided against doing so. She had a feeling that he might somehow be in trouble if his own child reported him missing. David had always displayed, and had fostered in Ada, a low-level mistrust of the police, and of authority in general. One of his many obsessions was the importance of privacy; he often expressed a lack of faith in elected officials, a sort of mild skepticism of the government. Once, Ada had witnessed an accident in front of their house—nothing major, a minor scrape-up at most—and had asked David if they should call 911. At this he shook his head emphatically. “They’ll be fine,” he said, and added that he’d never known a more corrupt group of officials than the Boston Police Department, whom, if at all possible, the two of them should seek to avoid. In general, though, he came across merely as a far leftist with, perhaps, mild anarchist tendencies. In this way he was not so different from the rest of his colleagues.

  She would call Liston, she decided.

  Ada very rarely rang her at home. In general she did not like to use the telephone; she never seemed to know when to speak, and she did not know how to end conversations. She could hear her own breathing in the receiver as the phone rang once and then twice and then three times. She prayed that it would be Liston who answered the phone, but instead one of her three boys answered—Matty, Ada thought, because the voice was childish and high.

  “Is Liston there?” she fairly whispered.

  “Who is this?” asked Matty, and she told him it was Ada Sibelius.


  “Mum,” he called, without much urgency, “it’s David’s daughter.” And finally Liston picked up the phone.

  Ada didn’t know what to say.

  “Ada?” Liston asked. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” said Ada.

  “Are you just calling to say hi?” Liston asked her.

  “No,” said Ada.

  “Well,” said Liston. “What’s going on?”

  “When I woke up this morning David was gone,” Ada said, “and he’s still gone.”

  “Okay,” said Liston. “He didn’t leave a note?”

  “No.”

  “Did you look all around the house?”

  “Yes.”

  Liston said, “What time is it?” as if talking to herself, and then sighed.

  Ada paused. She wasn’t certain how to ask what she needed to ask. She wanted to know what Liston knew. “Do you know where he is?” she asked finally, because it was as close as she could come.

  “I don’t, honey,” said Liston. “I’m sorry.

  “Did you call the police?” asked Liston.

  “No,” said Ada, and then she said it again for emphasis.

  Liston paused. “That might be a good thing to do,” she said.

  Ada was silent. She looked at the clock on the wall: watched its second-hand tick.

  “I’m sorry, kiddo,” said Liston finally. “Listen, come over. We can go for a drive and look for him, okay?”

  Ada left a note for David before she left the house. It said, David. I’m out looking for you with Liston. Please wait here until we’re back. Ada.

  She put it on the kitchen table, facing the kitchen door, where he was most likely to see it upon his return. Though David and she always came through the side door of the house, nearest the kitchen, he insisted on letting visitors in through the front door. “It’s nicer that way,” he said once, when she asked why. He was like this, always: old-fashioned and formal in certain ways—he was knowledgeable, for example, on subjects such as tea and place settings, heraldry, forms of address—irreverent, outrageous, in others.

  She walked outside toward Liston’s house, and saw that Mrs. O’Keeffe, their next-door neighbor, was sitting in her lawn chair in her yard. She had macular degeneration and wore dark glasses all year-round. She was perhaps ninety years old, and in the warmer months she sat outside beginning at sunrise and only went in to eat. Ada walked over to her, and she raised a veined thin hand in greeting. Ada leaned down to address her.

  “Mrs. O’Keeffe,” Ada said to her, bent at the waist. “It’s Ada Sibelius.”

  She turned her face up in Ada’s direction. “Hello, Ada,” she said.

  “Did you see my father leave this morning, by any chance?” she asked.

  “Let me think,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.

  She put a hand to her cheek tremblingly.

  “I believe I did,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.

  “Was he carrying anything?” Ada asked.

  “Now, I can’t recall,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe.

  “Which way did he walk?”

  “That way,” she said, pointing down Shawmut Way toward Savin Hill Ave: the way one walked to cross over the bridge into the rest of Dorchester.

  “What was he wearing?” Ada asked her. “Did he say hello to you?”

  But again she couldn’t recall.

  Liston’s car was a station wagon with wooden sides and a bench seat across the front. She was leaning against it when Ada arrived, and she held the passenger door open.

  “Hi, baby,” said Liston. She looked worried. She was wearing sunglasses on her head and an oversized windbreaker. They pulled out, and Liston turned left on Savin Hill Ave. She asked where Ada thought they should look for him and she suggested they go over the bridge, first to David’s favorite restaurant, Tran’s; and then to the library in Fields Corner; and then along Morrissey Boulevard, passing the beaches on the way to Castle Island, toward which David often jogged; and finally to the lab.

  “Anyplace else?” asked Liston.

  “I don’t know,” said Ada.

  “He didn’t give you any hints? He hasn’t been talking about going anyplace in particular?”

  “No,” said Ada, wishing she could answer differently.

  “And has he disappeared like this before?”

  Ada hesitated. She did not want to tell Liston the truth, which was, of course, that he had. A few hours here, there. She settled on an answer that sounded all right in her head: “Just a couple of times,” she said. “Never for long.”

  Liston shook her head. “Oh, David,” she said, and in her voice Ada heard some piece of knowledge that she was not sharing.

  It was true that Liston and David were close, and had been since he had hired her almost fifteen years before, but there was no one, Ada felt, who understood him as Ada herself did. She didn’t like to hear Liston speak of him dismissively; she didn’t want her to feel that they were conspiring, or that they shared any common criticisms of David.

  Ada thought back to the telephone conversation she had overheard Liston having with David and wondered if there was any possible way to explain how she had come to overhear it. She decided, at last, that there was not. She wanted badly to know what Liston had been speaking of; not knowing made her feel less close to David. She had always imagined herself as his confidante, his right hand, and didn’t like to think of anyone knowing something about him that she herself wasn’t privy to.

  “How long has he been gone now?” Liston asked, and Ada checked her watch. It was just after 3:00 in the afternoon.

  “Eight hours,” she said. “At least. I woke up at 7:00 and he was already gone.”

  “We’ll give it a while longer,” said Liston. “I called my friend Bobby in the police department, and he told me they wouldn’t start searching until tomorrow anyway. Even if we called in.” And she must have seen the nervous look on Ada’s face, for she assured her that he would most likely be back before then.

  “I bet you he’ll be back by dinnertime,” said Liston, but she, too, looked worried.

  He had not been into Tran’s, said Tran. “Is he okay?” he asked, and the two lines between his eyebrows deepened. He loved David.

  Ada assured him that David was fine—digging down deep into her reserves of strength to do so—and then returned to Liston’s car. They continued along for a time. Ada slumped against the seat, her head against the headrest, scanning the sidewalks on either side of the road for David. She searched the roadsides for his shining head, for a tall man in a T-shirt and shorts, or in trousers and a threadbare oxford, jangling his limbs about in a way that seemed incompatible with speed, and yet propelled him forcefully ahead.

  Liston tried to make small talk with her, telling her one or another little anecdote about the grad students or about Martha, the division secretary—“All she wants, poor thing, is a date with a normal man”—but Ada could only muster the briefest of replies.

  David was nowhere they looked.

  Their drive became a silent one, strange and uncomfortable. For the first time, Ada allowed herself to truly wonder if her father was gone completely—disappeared altogether. Kidnapped. Dead on some lonesome road in the mountains of New Hampshire or New York. Or injured badly, unable to call for help. Or—worst of all—gone of his own volition. Was it possible, she wondered, that he had abandoned her? It was such a contrast to anything she understood about her father that she could not process the idea.

  At last, they pulled back onto Shawmut Way, and Liston stopped in David’s driveway, where his car was still parked. For several seconds neither of them moved. It was quiet: Ada could hear children playing a block away. Small clicks and pings emanated from beneath the hood of Liston’s station wagon as the engine settled and cooled.

  The house looked too still.

  “I’ll come in with you,” said Liston, and together they exited the car and approached the house. Would her father be inside? Would he be frantic, apologetic? Would he
have an explanation for them both?

  Inside, it was quiet. “David?” called Ada, once, twice. But there was no response.

  Liston turned to her. On her face Ada saw an expression that was meant to register as cheerfulness but came off as doubt.

  Liston checked her watch, and Ada did the same: 5:00 in the evening.

  “Tell you what,” said Liston brightly. “Why don’t you come over for a while? Pack some overnight things just in case. I’ll go get a room ready back at the house.”

  Ada’s heart increased its pace. The idea of spending time at Liston’s, while her sons were there, was simultaneously appealing and terrifying.

  “Come on,” said Liston. “We’ll get you a snack, too.”

  It was only then that Ada realized she had not eaten all day.

  Upstairs, alone, Ada packed a nightgown, her hairbrush, some clothes for the next day (to pack more than these seemed pessimistic), and seven books, all into the little blue suitcase that was hers to use. David had a matching one in green. Then she went downstairs and wrote a new note for David.

  David, it said. I am really scared. Where are you? I’m at Liston’s. Please call right away.

  And then, just in case, she wrote down Liston’s number, too, which David knew like his own pulse.

  She exited the kitchen, leaving the door unlocked for her father. She walked toward Liston’s.

  Liston’s house had a front porch, and on it were two boys’ bicycles leaned in toward one another, and a girl’s pink bicycle with its tassels chopped off an inch from each handle. Someone had begun to color the pink seat black with a permanent marker, but had only gotten halfway. Like all the houses on the block, Liston’s was a colorful Victorian, painted a different color every ten years or so. That decade it was light blue with dark blue shutters and edges. The porch itself had been painted the color of the trim, so that walking on it gave one the feeling of being underwater. It was nearly time for a new paint job; the existing color had begun to come up off the wooden floor and down from the ceiling, and small unsettled piles of paint chips had made their way into crevices and corners. Once or twice, Ada had seen Liston briskly sweeping the porch and the front walkway, but mainly she had no time for such details, preferring instead to maintain, she told Ada, the highest level of cleanliness her busy schedule would allow. She would not have dreamed of bringing in a cleaning service—to her they were for rich people.