by Liz Moore
Perhaps her favorite memories of him, the ones that now drifted toward her from the other side of sleep, were of their trips to the mountains. David had rented the same cabin in the Adirondacks every July since he was in his thirties, and each summer the two of them went there all four weekends, and sometimes he brought his colleagues, too, for work retreats. It was a simple wooden cottage with very tall pine trees all around it and a set of wooden stairs leading down to a little lake, ten miles up the Northway from Lake George. David always got off the highway early to drive through Lake George Village, which had a main street lined with kitsch of various kinds: giant, friendly lumberjack statues made out of something like papier-mâché; outsized teepees with arrow-signs pointing inward, advertising AUTHENTIC INDIAN APPAREL; Viking-themed miniature golf courses; a wax museum with a window display featuring Frankenstein playing the organ. David was delighted by it all, and often insisted on stopping in to one or another of these local attractions. Together they saw the diving horse at Storytown when Ada was too old for such things, simply because they had never before seen it and David had decided it was time; dutifully she wandered into and out of souvenir shops that, by the 1980s, sold mainly T-shirts with terrible jokes on them. Often they stopped for dinner on the way at one of a handful of restaurants that David enjoyed, with names like the Log Cabin or Babe’s Blue Ox Tavern, or giant triangular signs out front advertising SURF’N’TURF SPECIALS ON TUESDAYS. Inside David would order them both banana pie and Coca-Cola—a combination that always made the waitress laugh—and then inquire after her name and then woo her, asking her what they should see and do that weekend, leaving an outstanding tip.
The cabin itself had ceilings of light unfinished pine and old oak furniture, and it smelled dusty and warm inside, like an attic or a library. There she would read, and swim, and play card games for hours, and breathe in the sharp earthen smell of the forest that surrounded her, and in the evening there was cocktail hour on the porch (lemonade for Ada, in a funny glass with a trout on it), and in the nighttime there was a chorus of bullfrogs that David would imitate while he turned off every light in the house one after another. Good night, good night, he would croak along with them. Good night to you all. Over the water, from Ada’s snug bedroom, from her tightly made twin bed, she could see the moon reflected on the water, a glimmering pathway from the shoreline into the distant sky.
The next morning was a Saturday, and Ada woke with a resolution. It was time, she thought, to confront David. Or, at the very least, to try. She looked out the window. The day was gray; it looked as if a cold front had moved through. Outside, a neighbor girl was raking her front yard in a snowsuit.
Ada got dressed as quickly as she could. She put on two sweaters. Then she left—it was her good luck that nobody was downstairs—and walked down the street to her old house. She had an idea: A prop she could use to assist her in her inquisition. Something that might jog his memory.
She unlocked the kitchen door. Inside, it was chilly and damp-feeling, the heat at fifty degrees only to prevent the pipes from freezing in the night. She’d been visiting less because of this; her regular diary entries into the ELIXIR program had slowed to one or two a week. She scanned the kitchen, as she always did, looking for anything out of place, for leaks or infestations. We must be constant and vigilant in our war against entropy, David used to say frequently. Entropy always has the upper hand. She still felt fiercely protective of this house; she was still happy it had not sold.
The door to David’s office was open, as it usually was. She had just walked past it on her way to the staircase when a shape inside it registered, and she realized someone had been sitting at his desk. She stood in place, not turning back. A chill ran up her spine. Was it David himself? Was it his ghost? An intruder?
Quietly, she turned around, and saw the narrow back of someone hunched over at David’s computer, wearing a heavy jacket. The computer that she’d thought broken was on, glowing greenly inside the office, a bright spot that silhouetted whoever was facing it.
“Who are you?” she asked bravely. She had become more courageous, if nothing else, in David’s absence; she felt she had no one to protect her, and so she began to act in ways she never had before.
The figure stood up out of his chair swiftly, sort of defiantly, and turned to face her. It was Gregory Liston, and he stood with his hands hanging down at his sides, saying nothing.
“What are you doing,” Ada said quietly.
Gregory said nothing.
She walked toward him, first slowly and then swiftly, feeling a rage inside her that she had rarely felt before. She wanted to drag him by his ears out of the office, but he exited before she could, walking around to the opposite side of the dining room table, so that she could not get to him. She started one way and he went the other, and the two of them stood like that, facing each other, for several beats.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked again, and he slowly raised his shoulders to his ears, a gesture that infuriated her further.
She looked toward the computer and then walked into the office. On the screen, a window was open: it was a text file. Nothing she had ever seen.
It was written in David’s personal code, which Ada had long ago memorized. The Unseen World, it said, across the top; she read it easily. To Gregory it must have looked like gibberish.
Below it was a paragraph of text, followed by phrases that she didn’t understand: cryptic, broken phrases, nothing that at first made sense. Her heart sped up.
“What were you looking at?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” said Gregory. For the first time she heard a note of fear in his voice.
“How did you turn it on? It’s broken,” she said.
“I fixed it,” he said, simply. He turned his palms upward toward the sky, as if to say, Easy. It infuriated Ada further.
On the desk was a pad of white stationery from the lab, with someone else’s handwriting on it. Gregory’s. A pen lay cast off to the side. On the notepad, he had written down half of the string of letters before him on the screen.
“You’re an idiot,” Ada said cruelly, finally turning to look at him.
“Were you trying to decrypt that? You never will,” she said. “What an idiot,” she said again, for good measure. To make sure that he knew.
Gregory was wearing a puffy brown parka that was built for a teenager, salt-stained from the previous winter, probably a hand-me-down from William. Only the tips of his fingers stuck out of the openings at the wrist. His skinny neck jutted up from a too-large collar. His lips were painfully chapped, and he licked them, as if about to respond.
“He’s smarter than you,” said Ada. “I’m smarter than you. I broke the code that you keep on your computer.”
Gregory looked at her, the color draining from his face.
“Next time try something more complicated than alphanumeric substitution,” Ada told him, feeling powerful and vengeful and unkind. “I solved it in five seconds. I read it all.” A lie.
Gregory winced. The image of him being collared by a big kid in the hallway at Queen of Angels presented itself to her suddenly. He always sat alone at lunch, his face buried in a science fiction novel or a comic book. She had never once seen him walking side by side with anyone else at school.
He turned abruptly and walked toward the kitchen, leaving behind the scrap of paper he had begun to write on.
“Stay out of this house,” Ada shouted after him with finality. “It’s not your house. It’s David’s house and mine.”
“I was trying to help,” he said on his way out. He stammered as he said it. He was in the kitchen, on the other side of the wall, and he sounded uncertain, as if he were asking himself a question. As if he were on the verge of tears.
It was only after he left that she allowed herself, momentarily, to be impressed that he had gotten into the computer at all. She had thought it irreparable, without David’s guidance. She had never been able to fix it herself.
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She sat down in David’s chair. For a long while after Gregory left, she stared at the computer screen.
At the top of the document Gregory had left open was a paragraph, disguised in David’s code:
We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness—the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols. Are not these too of significance? We can only answer according to our conviction, for here reasoning fails us altogether. —A. S. Eddington
Below it were three more phrases.
Ivan Sutherland,
Sword of Damocles.
Elixir’s house.
She wrote down the paragraph, and the three phrases that followed, on the scrap of paper that Gregory had left behind. Then she folded the page in quarters and put it into her right pocket.
This text; the For Ada disk; the train ticket to Washington. These items now constituted what she considered to be her only clues. She would protect them carefully. She would keep them all together on the top shelf of her closet at Liston’s house, tucked inside the pages of the dictionary.
Finally, she went upstairs to David’s room, to retrieve what she had originally come for: it was the family portrait in David’s dresser, the one she had gazed upon so many times, searching for answers about her own past. It was the David she knew in that picture, almost without question—same posture, same nose, same half-bemused expression as he stared into the lens. But if Ellen Palmer had been telling the truth, the people behind him were not, apparently, Sibeliuses. Who they were remained to be seen.
For the first time in a month, Ada walked over the bridge to the bus stop and waited for the bus that would take her to Quincy. In her mittened hand she carried the portrait. Several other people joined her. It was a gray, blustery day, almost unbearable when the wind blew. Ada turned up the collar of her coat and sank her chin down into it.
On the bus, she wondered what David would look like. Would he remember her? Or, in her absence, would he have forgotten her completely, erased her from his mind, overwritten her with something entirely different?
At St. Andrew’s, after signing in, she walked down the two long hallways toward her father’s room and then knocked lightly at the door, slightly ajar, before entering. When she did, she saw only the crown of his head over the top of his armchair. Just as he had been the last time she’d seen David, he was turned toward the window that faced the harbor, and he was motionless. His roommate, Paul, was lying on his bed, asleep. It was late morning.
Ada walked toward her father, afraid to startle him, afraid of whom she would find.
“Hello,” she said, but there was no response.
She circled around to the front, holding her breath. There in the armchair was David. She was relieved to find that he did not look so different after all. Thinner, yes; smaller in general; but David nonetheless. The staff at St. Andrew’s took good care of him. Somebody shaved his thin cheeks; somebody combed what little hair he had. He had one hand on each arm of the chair, and he lifted the right one, as if in greeting.
“Hi, David,” she said again. “It’s me. It’s Ada.”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said David, unexpectedly. His eyes were rheumier than they had been the last time she’d visited. They seemed to her to be a lighter blue.
“I know,” said Ada, with a certain amount of relief. “I’m sorry.”
David raised and lowered his eyebrows, sort of skeptically. Then he shifted his gaze once more to the window.
“How have you been?” asked Ada.
“Oh, my. Oh, here and there,” said David. “For heaven’s sake.”
“Have you been eating?”
“Oh, yes,” said David.
Ada sat down on the bed across from him. She was still chilled from the air outside. She did not take her jacket off. David raised a hand to his head, touched it with an open palm, patted his brow lightly.
How much she longed for his old self, in that moment: she could feel the wish inside her, a hummingbird. If he would stand up from his chair—if he would simply stand up and walk with her, out of that place, and back to their old life in Boston. Instead, she produced the portrait she had been keeping tucked inside her pocket. She looked at it herself for a moment, studying the boy in the picture, then looking up at her father. There was no doubt, she thought, that this was David.
“I want to ask you something,” said Ada.
She stood up, knelt down in front of his chair, held the picture out so he could see it. He shifted his cloudy eyes downward without moving his head.
“Who are they?” asked Ada, pointing to the adults in the picture.
“Well, that’s Mother and Dad,” said David.
“But what are their names?” asked Ada.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said David. “Mother and Dad.”
He studied the picture again, and then reached toward it, tracing the faces with one finger. There was that accent again, the one she could not place: it was not David’s accent. Not his voice.
“Where’s Susan?” David asked suddenly.
“Susan?” asked Ada.
“Susan,” he said, looking up at her suddenly, as if addressing her directly. “Susan, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“What’s your name?” asked Ada, and he held her gaze for what seemed like quite a while.
“Come on, you know it, Suze,” he said at last.
“What’s your name?”
“Harold Canady,” said David. And he held one finger to his chest. Then he pointed one finger at her slowly. “And you’re Susan Canady.”
“I missed you,” David said, his light eyes filling completely with tears.
Gently, surely, he bent back the brown weathered mat that surrounded the portrait, and from it removed the photograph itself, as if to inspect it more closely. And for the first time she saw what had been beneath it: there, in the bottom right corner, in a curling, hand-drawn white script, five words: The Strauss Studio. Olathe, Kansas.
2009
San Francisco
Ada had slept for an hour, maybe less, when she woke up panicked, thinking she had missed her alarm.
She grabbed for the phone on her nightstand: 5:59 a.m. The alarm would sound in a minute. Briefly, she lay her head back on her pillow. Her neighbors had played beer pong until 4:00 in the morning. How, she wondered, did they get up for work in the morning?
She showered and dressed. She chose her outfit carefully: something that read as simultaneously young and powerful. A blazer and close-fitting dress pants. She would get to work a little early, go through the presentation one last time with Tom Tsien. She ran through the people who would be at the table with them: three members of the board; the CEO, Bill Bijlhoff; about a dozen potential investors who had been courted for months; and the VP of marketing, Meredith Kranz. Like many of Tri-Tech’s newer employees, Meredith was improbably young for her title—twenty-nine, perhaps, or thirty at most—and impeccably dressed. She wore brands with names that baffled Ada. “This is Acne,” Ada had heard Meredith saying once to a colleague, about a jacket she was wearing. And Ada Googled the brand name to make sure she had heard it correctly.
It had been Meredith Kranz’s idea for the investors to interact, at the meeting, with the new product’s male and female avatars. This was the idea that had kept Tom and Ada up late the night before, troubleshooting, fixing glitches. Meredith had written the script for the reps herself. She had insisted on letting them pitch the product. “It’s more dynamic,” she had said, when Ada raised concerns. “And afterward, we can let the investors interact with the reps themselves,” she continued. An even worse idea, thought Ada. But Bijlhoff
had sided with Meredith, and Ada had done as he wished.
The pitch felt, to Ada, like a joke; she had trouble not laughing herself when she saw the reps earnestly moving their computer-rendered limbs about in clumsy, cardboard arcs. Computer-animated people, in 2009, still looked stilted and bizarre. These avatars were not close to passably human. The way they used their arms was incorrect—they hovered in the air unrealistically, never dropping to meet their flanks. When reps moved forward, their gait was outlandishly wrong. For decades, computer animators struggled to replicate the motions of walking and running, without much success; the particular rhythm of the human stride eluded them all, the rhythm of bone and muscle and fat and nerve impulse. Worse than that: these particular reps kept freezing. At the end of last night, Tom claimed to have everything running smoothly, but Ada was still nervous. To her, having reps pitch the product only served to reinforce how far away Tri-Tech was from being able to actually bring it to market. Five years, ten years until the hardware was available; maybe more. They would all have to hope for very patient—and reasonably young—investors.
In the car, at 6:45 a.m., her phone rang. It was a 617 number. She rarely got calls from Boston anymore.
She remembered, abruptly, the conversation she had had with Connor and Caleb the night before: someone had been by to see her. They had given this person her number, whoever it was. A man, they’d said. Could it be him?
She contemplated answering for too long: normally she didn’t answer calls from unknown numbers, but she thought perhaps she should pick this one up.
By the time she had decided to, it was too late; the call had gone to voice mail. She waited for thirty seconds, then a minute. But no message had been left.
When she arrived in the office, it was both unusually full and unusually quiet. Bill Bijlhoff, the CEO, had tried hard to keep the investment meeting under wraps, especially around the more junior programmers; they knew the company was imperiled, surely, and it wasn’t good for morale to raise and lower their hopes too much.
