The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  “When did David give it to you?” asked Hayato.

  “Over two years ago,” said Ada. “The night after the last grad-student dinner he hosted.”

  She held it out, and Hayato accepted it. If anyone could decrypt it, it was Hayato: he and David had shared a love of puzzles and codes, had tried, over the years, to stump each other dozens of times. Neither had ever been successful. Often a triumphant shout would come from one or the other of their offices, toward the end of a workday, and the other would rush in to inspect the solution. “Eureka!” Liston would say sarcastically. “Do they ever work?”

  The four of them migrated to the computer in the corner, which started up with a speed that surprised Ada. It was Apple’s latest model: in the time since David’s retirement, the world of technology had already, she thought, left her behind.

  She double-clicked the icon of the text file and it opened to display its contents, the single string of letters:

  DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ.

  Silence.

  “That’s it?” said Charles-Robert. “Just that text file?”

  “That’s it,” said Ada.

  “What did he say when he gave it to you?” asked Frank.

  “He said it was a puzzle,” said Ada. “He said it was solvable, but it might take some time to figure out. And that I shouldn’t let it get in the way of my other work.”

  “Hmmm,” said Hayato. All three of them were leaning down behind her, reading over her shoulders. Ada could feel their interest: already their eyes were scanning it, looking for patterns, for inconsistencies, for the frequency of each letter.

  “Why didn’t he just write it down on a piece of paper?” asked Charles-Robert. “Why put something so short on a disk?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ada. “To protect it?” But it was a good question: one she had wondered about as well.

  Ada got up from her chair and moved to the table. She let them sit, three together in front of the screen. Frank wrote the letters down on a piece of paper and went to his office. Hayato sat where he was, gazing at the screen. Charles-Robert got a pad of lab stationery and scratched away at it for a while.

  Half an hour went by. Ada worked, too, at a piece of paper, on which she wrote the string of letters from memory.

  Hayato was the first to speak. “Is it possible,” he said, hesitantly, “that he was already . . . experiencing symptoms? When he made this?”

  “It’s possible,” Ada admitted. She was hovering on the verge of disappointment. She had hoped, she realized, that she would be leaving the lab that day with an answer.

  “I’m not saying it’s not solvable,” said Hayato. “But on first glance it looks incredibly difficult. The fact that it’s so short, for one thing, means that patterns will be difficult to discern. We can probably create a program that might give it a go. But I think there’s a distinct possibility that this was made with the equivalent of a one-time pad,” he said. “Which means that a program won’t be able to solve it. Not this century, anyway.”

  “Okay,” said Ada quietly. She looked back and forth from Frank to Charles-Robert. But they looked similarly confounded. “Okay,” she said again. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Did he give you anything that could have functioned as a one-time pad?” asked Charles-Robert. “A different string of numbers or letters?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ada. She felt despair coming over her. The truth was that David had given her any number of such things: he had constantly given her codes and puzzles, little bits of tangled language that, formerly, it had been her great joy to figure out. Any one of them, she thought, might be the one-time pad that would solve David’s last puzzle.

  “We’ll all keep working on it,” said Hayato.

  “Are you sure we can’t tell Liston?” said Frank. “She’s good at this stuff.”

  “Not yet,” said Ada quickly. She tried to think of an explanation she could offer, but she came up with none. She was angry: that was all. She couldn’t tell them this. “I’ll tell her soon,” she added.

  She realized, as she was leaving, that she did not want to leave. She breathed in, deeply, before she walked through the door; and had a sharp and sudden memory of the last time she left, the night of the retirement party. Only that time, it had been with David. And that time, David had still been himself.

  To Ada’s surprise, when she walked back into the house that evening, Melanie, Janice, and Theresa were standing in the kitchen with Liston and William and some of his friends. The girls were wearing bright, absurd dresses: pinks and yellows and greens, quite different from the muted colors of the Queen of Angels uniform that she saw them in daily. The boys were wearing tight jeans and fat high-top sneakers and oversized white button-downs. Liston had a camera out, a clunky Polaroid that she had had since the sixties, and was flapping a newly printed photograph in front of her face.

  “We were wondering where you were!” Liston said to her, and it occurred to Ada suddenly that it was the night of the dance the school called Jamboree. It drew from Catholic high schools all over the city, and it was the first year that her group of friends, as ninth-graders, were eligible to go. The girls at Queen of Angels had been discussing their outfits for weeks.

  “I was visiting David,” Ada said, lying, and Liston opened and closed her mouth, as if deciding against a reply.

  “Run and get changed,” she said instead. “It’s 8:00 already.”

  The teenagers in the room looked at her blankly. Ada had the uneasy feeling that they had been relieved she wasn’t home; that they had been hoping to make an escape before she walked in. She had not been spending much time with them in recent weeks; her trips to the library with Gregory had occupied her afternoons and weekends.

  “You could even wear that, if you wanted,” said William unexpectedly. “You look nice.”

  Ada looked down at herself. She was still wearing her blue ski parka and, under that, a pair of new jeans that Liston had bought her. Ordinarily, she would have floated on this praise for weeks. But her mind was hazy with thoughts of David.

  “I don’t feel well,” said Ada. “I think I’ll stay home.”

  Liston looked pained.

  “Are you sure, baby?” she asked. “You sure you don’t want to go out and have fun with your friends?”

  Ada nodded. The boys looked indifferent; the girls looked relieved. Now that Melanie and her friends had achieved their aim—now that Melanie was safely on the arm of William, her rightful partner—their use for Ada had lessened. She still sat with them at lunch, but her role was secondary. She mainly stayed quiet around them, and she had a vague idea that she was specifically not invited to go into town with them on the occasions that they went, or to hang out with them in the Woods, several small groves of trees that provided meager cover for the hill the neighborhood was named for, and for the drinking and carousing that went on at the flat top of it.

  Quickly, the group put on their jackets and said goodbye. Then they filed out the front door, laughing, giddy, leaving Ada and Liston alone in the kitchen.

  Liston looked at her brightly, held her hands out, palms up.

  “Well!” she said. “Looks like it’s just us chickens for the evening.”

  Ada nodded.

  “Can I get you anything, honey?” Liston asked. “What kind of sick are you feeling?”

  “Just a headache,” she mumbled, and told Liston that she would get herself a glass of water and go to bed.

  “How’s David doing?” she asked.

  “Okay,” said Ada.

  On her way out of the room she looked once, over her shoulder, at Liston, who was looking through the windows in the kitchen door at the group of teenagers as they disappeared down the street. She was holding in her hand a tall glass of the Crystal Light she drank compulsively, trying to lose weight for indeterminate reasons. She was only the slightest bit plump. Did Liston want a boyfriend? Ada wondered suddenly. She had never b
efore considered the question. Standing at the door, holding her glass to her chest, she looked lonely. Ada felt a flutter of remorse. She could go back to her; they could watch a movie together, make the low-fat popcorn that Liston loved. But there were too many secrets between them, now; Ada’s reticence about her father made conversations with Liston difficult. Later she would attribute her hesitancy to embrace Liston completely to superstition: she thought somehow, irrationally, that David would sense it. She imagined that, in order to accept Liston’s outstretched hand, she would have to first release David’s. And that doing so would send him plummeting downward into whatever maw was opening beneath him.

  Upstairs, Ada knocked softly at Gregory’s door, listening first to make sure that Liston hadn’t followed her. Matty was at a friend’s house for a sleepover.

  Gregory opened it. He was in need of a haircut, as Liston often reminded him, and his brown hair was matted wildly on one side of his head, as if he had been lying on it.

  “Did they leave you behind?” he whispered, and Ada told him that it had been her choice to stay home.

  “I’m sick,” she said. “I don’t feel well.”

  “Oh,” he whispered. “Okay.” He still lacked any sense of tact, and he continued to be persecuted for this at school—recently she had seen him being pursued hotly down a sidewalk by two seventh-­graders, the laces of his shoes flapping wildly—but she had grown to like him, or at least tolerate him. In certain ways he even reminded her of David, in his bluntness, his matter-of-factness. Perhaps he was what David had been like as a child. Things will be better for you later, she often wanted to tell him. When you’re an adult. (Ada hoped she could apply this logic to herself as well, but she was less certain; she often felt as if there was something fundamentally incorrect about her, as if she were caught between two worlds, a citizen of neither.)

  Gregory retreated to his bed, where he lay down and crossed one knee over the other in the air. “Are you gonna come in?” he asked her.

  She was going to tell him about her day at the lab. The one-time pad theory proposed by Hayato. But she changed her mind. It all felt ridiculous to her, suddenly: the code and the research that they had been doing and the many, many lies her father had told. For the first time, she allowed herself to articulate a terrible thought: What if David, simply, was a fraud? What if he was just a con man, a huckster, a liar? What if he had deceived all of them, everyone he was ever close to, even Ada, without compunction?

  She felt abruptly tired.

  “I think I’ll read in my room,” she said, and left.

  Instead, in her room, she lay awake, staring into the dark, listening to the sounds from the street outside. From Liston’s house she could often hear the voices of local teenagers drifting back to her from the Woods or the tennis courts nearby. When they got loud enough she went to her window and looked out.

  It was 11:00 at night. On the street below the house, streams of teenagers were walking back from the dance. She recognized some of them; others she thought she had never seen. All of them were headed eastward, toward the Woods.

  “Shhhhhhhh,” said one to her friends, holding a gloved finger to her lips. They were carrying in their arms the jackets that their parents had made them bring. They should have been wearing them. In the light from the streetlamps on the block, their neon dresses looked incandescent. One of the girls tripped over the curb and caught herself with the gracefulness of an athlete. She doubled over, her hands covering her mouth, laughing. It was cold outside, and the old windows in Liston’s house let in the chill air through their seams. She held a hand up to the draft. She had the sudden urge to walk outside.

  Everyone in Liston’s household was asleep by then: she could tell by the stillness. The television was still on, which meant that Liston had probably fallen asleep in front of it while waiting for William to return—a problem she often had. And William was very good at sneaking in unnoticed and then claiming he had simply forgotten to wake her up.

  Quietly, Ada opened the closet in the hallway and pulled a knit black hat down over her ears, and then put on her parka. David had bought it for her, for skiing, two years ago. She had grown taller recently, she realized, and her wrists now stuck out of it. She zipped it up and held her hands out from her sides to prevent the material from swishing as she walked.

  She crept past the TV room, catching a glimpse of Liston in profile. There she was, in her armchair, angled toward the door so as to see her oldest son come home. She was tipped back in it, her tired feet in the air, her mouth open slightly, her face turned to the side.

  The back door made the least noise—Ada had caught William coming in and out of it, late, at least twice—so she exited that way, onto the patio. It was here that, hidden among the trees at the base of the yard, she had seen Liston as she spoke on the phone to David. She remembered Gregory, moving through the lit upstairs of the house; she remembered William coming home, after curfew as usual, from wherever he had been. How little she had known of any of them. How little, then, she had known of David.

  She paused for a moment in Liston’s backyard, listening, and then walked resolutely eastward toward the hill, through the backyards of her neighbors. Her classmates’ voices echoed back to her. Across the quiet neighborhood, they sounded ghostly and strange. Once or twice she thought she heard William’s voice, but she was not certain.

  At the edge of the last backyard was a fence that shielded it from Grampian Way, the road that bordered the park, and she slipped around it, avoiding the streetlamps to the extent that she could. The lights of the tennis courts across from her had been turned off for the night, and teenagers slipped up the hill behind them like shades, toward the top of the rock.

  Ada had been to its peak only once or twice, during daylight hours, with David, who liked the view of the Boston skyline. She mainly avoided it now, knowing that it was the territory of the teenagers who populated the neighborhood, afraid to intrude. She had not known any better when she was younger. She and David had been wrong, she realized, about so many things; and she experienced a retroactive embarrassment for them both. She walked quickly, with her head down, hoping that her dark hat and parka would adequately conceal her identity from the little groups across the street.

  She found a point of entry into the Woods that deviated from the paths that most of the rest of them used. It was steep and rocky, and she had not realized how dark it would be under the cover of the trees. She could not see the branches before her. She held her hands ahead of her, pushing brush out of the way. Every now and then, through the foliage above her, she caught a glimpse of the moon, still and round and white.

  At times she heard a shout or a peal of laughter, and she made her way toward these sounds, breathing more heavily now, stumbling once or twice. When the clearing at the top of the little hill came into view, she stayed behind a nearby tree, hugging it. She peered out from behind it.

  A small fire had been lit, and teenagers stood around it with cans of beer and bottles of vodka or gin in their hands. Many of them held lit cigarettes. As they gestured, small red trails of light arced through the night air. Ada was far afield from them; she both did and did not wish to be a part of the little circles she beheld.

  She looked at every face in turn until she spied first Janice, and then Melanie, and then William, who had his arms raised in a kind of victorious stance, the front of him lit up orange by the flames. He stood there for longer than she imagined he would, his face turned upward toward the sky, and Melanie reached her arms around him and hugged him sideways. He stumbled slightly, held the bottle in his hands to his mouth, tipped it up for several beats. There was something very beautiful about the tableau and something very feral: it occurred to Ada suddenly that this—this—had been happening for centuries, millennia, the fire and the wide-open sky and the liquid that dropped with a burn down the throat of William and his companions. It was so human, so alive; she was touched by it all in a way she could not explain. She had ne
ver been so close to this sort of wildness. It frightened her and drew her in all at once.

  I know them, thought Ada. I could go to them.

  But she was not like them, did not understand their hearts and minds, the compasses inside them that governed what they said and did.

  She held her breath.

  Footsteps marched across the dead dry leaves, and a senior boy came into sight, paused, stared at her for a moment.

  She could not tell if he recognized her. Her hat and parka made her genderless and strange. She was facing away from the only source of light. She looked down at the ground.

  “What are you doing?” he asked her. His name was Bob Conley. He was a good student. He played on the basketball team and dated a girl named Heather. He had a brother named Chuck and a sister named Patty. He was a friend of William’s; he had been at Liston’s house once or twice before. That she had learned all of these things about him, about all of these people, in less than two years—that they knew nothing about her—pained her suddenly. The amount of space this knowledge occupied in her brain. She missed the knowledge that David had given her: facts that were concrete, substantial, productive.

  Ada looked back at Bob Conley, blinking. For a moment she hesitated, said nothing. And then she turned and ran.

  At the base of the hill, she saw two police cars slinking quietly toward the Woods, up Grampian, their lights and sirens off. She paused, staying still, hoping that her dark clothing would disguise her. It worked. But soon, she knew, teenagers on top of the hill would come streaming downward as quickly as they had run to the top. Soon William Liston would come in from his long night out, tiptoeing, as Ada had done earlier, past his mother, and then falling into a long and heavy sleep, dreaming of Melanie, or of the fire at the top of the hill.

  When Ada reached Liston’s house, she stopped outside it for a moment and then, impulsively, turned back and went to David’s house. She wanted to be inside her old bedroom, inside her old twin bed, just for an hour or two; she wanted to make it up with sheets that had belonged to David before she was born. She wanted to fall asleep fast and hard inside it.