The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  The folder revealed a series of text documents titled, simply, One, Two, Three. The last one was titled Fiftyfive, and it had last been opened the day before. She double-clicked on the name. When it appeared, it looked at first to be corrupted: she found nothing but a series of numbers separated by periods and slashes.

  2.8.22.23.8.21.7.4.2 / 4.7.4 / 22.4.12.7 / 11.12 / 23.18 / 16.8 / 4.17.7 / 12 / 22.4.12.7 / 11.12 / 23.18.18

  She had seen this before: text files so corrupt that they looked like gibberish. But this one looked different. No punctuation marks populated it, for one thing; normally, corrupt files looked like a list of cartoonish substitutes for curse words (often reflecting the feelings of the user), ampersands and asterisks strung together like pearls.

  This, she thought with some excitement, looked more like code.

  David had always been interested in codes: he viewed them as thinking exercises, puzzles that he created and asked Ada to solve. The simplest code, the one he started her on as soon as she could read and write and count, was numerical substitution, an easy back-and-forth between letters and numbers, like so:

  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

  This encryption key was the first one Ada memorized, and now it came so easily to her that she could almost think in it, could spell out words and sentences in numbers as easily as letters. Variations on this most basic key abounded. The numerical substitutions for letters could, for example, be shifted by x places, so that a no longer corresponded to 1, like so:

  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

  18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

  A more difficult code to crack could be achieved if numerical substitutions were chosen randomly and then used uniformly, thus:

  a b c d

  17 2 5 12

  and so on.

  When breaking a code like the last one, the decoder would have to rely on the lengths of common words for cracks in the code—words like I and a, which would appear as stand-alone numbers and act as a good starting point for the tedious work of deciphering everything else. This loophole, however, could be easily eliminated if the words were run together with no spaces in between. Then the decoder would have to hope that he or she had an excerpt of such substantial length that the frequency with which certain letters occur in the English language could be taken into consideration.

  A fourth, considerably more difficult variant on number substitution involved machine-encoded text, a sort of polyalphabetic code in which each letter had no permanent, standard substitute. The machines would instead disguise each letter differently at various points in the text, using either mechanical or electronic hardware to execute the task. Only a decoding machine programmed as an exact mirror of the encoder could untangle the knot of words.

  And then, at last, there was the one-time pad: a unique key that, when combined with the original message, formed an encryption that was impossible to break without the pad itself.

  Several years ago, David had given Ada a book to read on the subject: Codes and How to Break Them, by Walter Samuelson. And for the length of one summer, her eleventh, the two of them had each tried to stump the other with coded messages and riddles. David, of course, always won.

  He had a personal code he had invented, a straightforward scrambled alphabet cipher, without a set shift.

  “It’s terribly easy to crack,” he said, “but it will at least slow someone down.”

  He had memorized it, and could now write fluently in it; he encouraged her to do the same. Soon enough, Ada, too, became adept at using what she came to call “David’s code.”

  He wrote in this code habitually; most of the text files on his computer couldn’t be parsed immediately by anyone other than the two of them. This satisfied him deeply, seemed to give him a deep sense of comfort that she couldn’t explain. “It’s really the only way to safeguard your ideas,” he said, exposing his mild streak of paranoia, about which those closest to him often teased him. It came from the same place in him as his mistrust of the police, his resentment of authority.

  “But what if you die?” Ada had asked him once.

  “Then you’ll be in charge of my secrets,” he told her, raising and lowering his eyebrows comically.

  In Liston’s attic, Ada sat for a while, contemplating the numbers before her on the screen. The slashes, she speculated, represented spaces between words. Therefore, 12 seemed to be a stand-alone word, either I or a. Scanning the rest of the text, she noticed 12 again in a short word that appeared two times: 11.12.

  What two-letter words existed that ended in either a or i?

  Ha was one, but it seemed unlikely.

  Hi was a likelier candidate, and, to her delight, it made sense that hi would be represented as 11.12, since h directly preceded i.

  Quickly, on a scrap of paper that she pulled from one of the drawers in the desk, she began to write down the alphabet and populate it with twenty-six numbers shifted according to the two she’d already placed:

  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

  4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 1 2 3

  Code-breaking always lifted Ada’s spirits: it felt in some fundamental way like restoring order in the universe, righting something overturned, putting the spilled milk back into the carton. There was justice in it. It would be easy now, she knew, to decrypt the simple code on-screen, and she almost wished it had been more difficult. Something to occupy her time for longer.

  But before she could continue, she heard loud footsteps on the second-floor landing. This had not been a part of her plan; she’d been certain that no one else was home. She sat very still, her toes and fingers buzzing with adrenaline, and considered her options. Would it be better to hide or to walk down the stairs nonchalantly? After all, she lived here, too, now; the house was hers to explore as much as it was anyone’s. (She did not, of course, fully believe this.)

  She pocketed the piece of paper bearing the decryption key she’d written down, and she decided, impulsively, to turn off the computer. What she did not consider was the loud tone that sounded when the computer was asked to shut down. She tensed. And then, seconds later, she heard someone walking up the attic stairs. Ada stood, arms crossed as casually as possible at her waist, and waited to be confronted.

  She was expecting Gregory, but it was William’s head that popped over the half wall at the top of the stairs. He looked at her for a moment, puzzled. He looked around the rest of the room as if expecting to see someone else.

  “Hi,” said Ada.

  “Are you exploring?” William asked her, not unkindly.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  “That’s Gregory’s computer,” he said, nodding in the direction of the machine. The screen, though graying on its way to sleep, was still lit up. “No one else is allowed to touch it. He’ll freak out,” said William.

  Ada did not know what to say. “I didn’t know,” she said finally. “I’m sorry.”

  William smiled slightly. “I won’t tell,” he said, putting one finger to his lips. He winked at her. Her stomach tightened involuntarily.

  And then, without saying another word, he turned and descended the stairs.

  The memory of this—a wink in her direction by William Liston—carried Ada for weeks, made her light-headed with a sort of feverish longing for more. What more she longed for, she could not say; certainly it was nothing so terrifying as sex, nor any activity that required being unclothed. (She was vaguely embarrassed by her body, certain that, though it was changing in wild and unpredictable ways, it could offer nothing of value to anyone else; to Ada it was simply the thing below her head, which bore inside it her brain—her only worthy attribute, she thought.) Her fourteen-year-old fantasies began and ended with a kiss on the mouth—the idea of which obsessed her and sent little shivers of greed down her chi
ldish spine. She was ashamed at how frequently she thought about kissing William Liston, or rather having him kiss her: his hands on her face, as in the old black-and-white movies she had watched with David, Humphrey Bogart roughly taking Lauren Bacall’s neck into his grip. This, this was what she wanted.

  Her outlet for these thoughts—along with all of the other thoughts that entered her mind each day, about David, about Liston, about school—was, as always, ELIXIR. Day after day, after visiting St. Andrew’s, she walked wearily up the steps outside the kitchen door and into the old brown house, which welcomed her back with its overwhelming home smell, the particular taste of its air. And then up the stairs she went to her old bedroom, to her old computer, which sat silently on her desk, perennially awaiting her return.

  She turned it on, dialed into ELIXIR, and conversed with it until she’d had her fill—mainly, now, about William. (For fear of his name being regurgitated to a different user, she employed an absurd code name: Bertrand.) She told the program every detail of her day, every concern she had about David, every thought that crossed her mind.

  In return, ELIXIR asked her questions, using vocabulary that it drew from its ever-increasing pool of language. Sometimes she recognized the syntax of Liston or Charles-Robert. Sometimes she recognized her own words: since she had been enrolled at Queen of Angels, cool was a word she had started using with ELIXIR, and sometimes the word was returned to her. Sometimes she recognized David’s style, and in these moments she closed her eyes briefly, allowed herself to imagine that it was her father on the other end of the wires, chatting with her from the lab, invisible but present, as God had been described by Julian of Norwich.

  Go on, said ELIXIR, when she paused, encouraging her, nudging her forward toward the end of her train of thought. Just as David had done.

  In her first year at Queen of Angels Upper School, she discovered that William Liston was discussed by everyone, in every grade, seriously, in hushed tones, as if he were a celebrity. Acquiring information about William and his cohort of athletic, attractive boys and girls offered an interesting alternative to schoolwork. Their families, their relationships, their brushes with discipline, even their grades, were discussed by everyone around Ada with the attention to detail of baseball fanatics discussing the players on a team. Even quiet Lisa Grady knew more than Ada did, at times, about William Liston, who was called Will at school. (This fact, too, made Ada feel as if she were not his peer, but some formal acquaintance of his—a business associate, a guidance counselor, a friend of his mother.)

  “Did you hear Will and Karen Driscoll broke up?” Lisa asked her, and, shamefully, Ada lied and said she knew this. She had noticed that Karen had not been at the house in a few weeks—a fact that she offered up with a sort of smug authority, as someone with insider knowledge.

  In fact, Ada had not spoken directly to William, nor he to her, since their exchange in the attic. He came and went quietly from the house, slipping in later than his curfew, leaving early in the morning to do, as Liston said, God knows what. When he was home he usually spent time with Matty. Therefore, all of the information she had about William—aside from what she could observe—was given to her by Liston, who still occasionally spoke to Ada about her problems with the boys, despite the fact that she tried to discourage it. Sometimes, when Liston was particularly stressed about something at the lab, she would lapse into the confidential tone that she used to take with David, telling Ada more than she wanted to know about her life and her children. When she came with Ada to visit David at St. Andrew’s, she might let something slip on the drive over about William’s trouble in school, or Gregory’s teacher’s concern over his quietness. And, in spite of herself, Ada listened with interest, gathering facts about William, storing them up to mull over later.

  The fact that she lived with the Liston family had not gone unnoticed by the girls in her grade. Slowly, they began to speak to her in class, and then, occasionally, at lunch. Lisa Grady looked up over her glasses in alarm the first time this occurred, as if she couldn’t quite understand what was happening.

  It was Melanie McCarthy—her nominal ambassador at Queen of Angels, her tour guide, who had offered no guidance to her whatsoever—who approached, with two friends.

  “Hi, Ada,” said one of them, Theresa Fitzharris, a short girl with red hair and freckles so abundant that they made her look tan from a distance.

  “Hi,” said Ada, too quietly.

  “Do you care if we sit here?” asked the other, and Ada gestured with a hand to indicate that she didn’t.

  “I like your hair that way,” said Theresa, and Ada briefly, embarrassingly, reached up to touch it, because she could not remember what she had done to it. It was pulled back at her temples into two clips; she had been wearing it that way because Karen Driscoll did.

  “Thank you,” said Ada, and for the rest of the lunch period they plied her with questions about William Liston—where he went after school and what his interests were, what he was like at home, what his brothers were like—and by the end of the discussion it became clear that they were asking on behalf of Melanie McCarthy, who was much quieter than they were, and whom they were positioning, Ada realized, as next in line to date William. By the time she realized this it was too late: she had given them too much information, more than William knew she had, and they now assumed that Ada and he were close, that she talked to him regularly, that she was—Ada shuddered to think it—like a sister to him.

  “Maybe we can come over sometime,” said Theresa Fitzharris, and Ada said she would have to ask Liston—calling her, awkwardly, Diana.

  By the time lunch was over, Ada had realized the gravity of her error. She had exchanged her knowledge of William for a place as an insider, and in doing so she had falsely represented her relationship with him. Furthermore, she had given Melanie McCarthy information that she could use to get closer to him—the fact, for example, that he went to a nearby baseball field after school many afternoons with his friends to sit aimlessly in a circle around home plate; the fact that he had a weekend job at a nearby video store. Would this get back to him somehow? If they ever came over, would they expect Ada to introduce them to William, to watch television with him on the couch? She couldn’t say. Lisa Grady watched her with interest, knowing the depth of her lie, wondering, alongside Ada, what she would do next.

  After school that day, Ada took the bus to St. Andrew’s as usual, to see David. She had begun doing her homework while she was there, since he mainly did not have much to say. She would spread her books out on his bed while he sat in his blue corduroy armchair, looking out the window, and she would chatter to him with false cheer about what she was learning.

  As she walked from the bus stop, she stopped to pick up a particularly beautiful leaf from the grounds. She had been doing this each day that she visited. David took them from her, always, and contemplated them for a while, turning them over and over while he looked, tracing their veins with a finger. Usually he said nothing in response. Perhaps a quarter of the time, now, he produced the correct word for the object in his hands. The rest of the time he changed the subject, or continued a conversation he had been having in his mind. She opened the window whenever she could, which was whenever David’s roommate was out, to let in the crisp air. Sometimes she walked with him on the meager grounds of the place, although he had lately seemed less and less interested in doing so.

  That afternoon, when Ada arrived, David’s roommate Paul was missing from the room, and a man in a too-bright shirt and pleated, baggy pants was sitting with David when she arrived. He was perched on the edge of David’s bed familiarly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His tie hung down between his legs. He was saying something—“Do you understand, Mr. Sibelius?”—when Ada walked in, and she dropped her blue backpack, the one that Liston had given her, heavily on the floor.

  “You must be Ada,” said the man, standing up quickly from the bed. “I’m Ron Loughner.” He had a high, hoarse Boston a
ccent and wore cuff links in his polyester oxford. He was balding ungracefully, his hair too long in places, an attempt to conceal his scalp. He did not look unkind, just uncomfortable. He came over and offered his hand to Ada, as if he expected her to know him, and she looked at it carefully before shaking it. David, in his armchair, didn’t turn around.

  “I guess someone’s told you about me?” said Ron Loughner, and Ada shook her head.

  “Hmmmmm,” he said. He put his hand on his face as if puzzled. “Well, your friend Diana Liston hired me, since she’s the executor of his estate. We’re in the early stages,” he said, and then he trailed off, looking suddenly sorry, noting her age, not wanting to continue.

  “Early stages of what?” asked Ada.

  “I think maybe you should talk to Ms. Liston,” said Loughner. Ada looked at him sharply. Already her heart was beginning to pump more quickly, sending an angry rush of blood to her face, swelling her veins. She did not like the feeling of not knowing something, when it came to David. It was not right of Liston to leave her out.

  Impulsively, she walked around to the front of David’s armchair to see his face.

  He said nothing to her. He looked, Ada thought, stormy. His brow was lowered; he frowned. His face had not been shaved yet, and a gray stubble was speckling his jaw. He was wearing a light blue cardigan that he never would have chosen for himself; it was October, and getting colder. Perhaps it was a donated sweater that the Carmelite Sisters had received from outside. The thought shamed her. She made a note to ask Liston if the two of them could buy him a few warmer things.

  “Hi, David,” she said.

  “No,” he said, his head back in his chair, looking at her sideways.

  “What were you just talking about?” she asked him, loudly, so that Ron Loughner could hear. She shocked herself. Her anger made her bold.