The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  There he was: thin, very thin, very pale. His cheeks had collapsed in on themselves; the bones of them were showing sharply now. He was lying on his back in his bed. He wasn’t in his blue armchair. His roommate was not in the room. His cheeks were hollow. He had aged ten years in one. He shifted his eyes toward them without moving any other part of himself in their direction. His eyes, at least, were the same: light and forceful.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!” said Liston, leaning over him. She was wearing her overcoat and hat. She took her hat off, quickly, as if to help David recognize her. She combed her hair with her fingers. “It’s me. It’s Liston.”

  Ada stood behind her, frozen. This was not her father: not her tall, strong, agile father, not David, who once moved as if he had springs in his joints, a hummingbird’s heart.

  David’s hands were folded on his stomach. He lifted one of them to his face and touched it, once, twice, with a finger. Then he lowered it again.

  “Do you want to sit up, honey?” asked Liston. “Ada’s here, too. Your daughter Ada.”

  She put an arm under his shoulders and helped him to maneuver upright to a seated position. With effort, she swiveled his legs off the bed and onto the floor. “That’s better,” she said. “Now you can chat with Ada.”

  But Ada did not know what to say. She and David regarded one another, and Liston looked back and forth between them for several beats.

  “I’m going to get some tea,” she announced finally. “Do you want anything?”

  Liston was gone. The room was quiet. Ada worried, for several moments, that David was going to fall back on the bed: he wavered slightly, as if the muscles of his abdomen might not hold him adequately upright. But at last he put a hand down beside him on the bed, and he crossed one leg over the other. Ada saw that in his other hand he was clutching his lucky-clover charm: the same one he’d been carrying about with him in his pocket for years. And then he looked, for the first time, more like himself.

  “Hi, David,” she said. He didn’t reply.

  She eyed the blue armchair, but it was too far away. She pushed it toward him. She sat down in it, facing him, and then they were at eye level. Tell me a story, she wanted to say to him. Teach me something. They remained for a while like that, each looking into the eyes of the other. And Ada imagined, beyond his eyes, his skull; and beyond his skull, his brain: the beating, pulsing organ that had once been his most powerful tool, now slowing, slowing. Synapses firing at random, or incorrectly. Memories receding, language receding. Sleep overtaking wakefulness. She looked for her father but she could not find him: someone else was there in David’s place. A ghost. Again he put a hand to his face: as if in surprise, as if in lamentation over the loss of all his words. Where had they gone?

  He closed his eyes slowly, and kept them closed.

  This was not David.

  “Hi, Harold,” Ada said finally.

  And he opened his eyes.

  “Hello,” he said, his voice thick with disuse. He cleared his throat, as if to make himself better understood. Again he said it.

  Hello.

  She waited until he fell asleep before leaving St. Andrew’s that day. When he did, she took out of his right hand the lucky-clover charm he had been clutching tightly, wanting somehow to release the tension in his knuckles. And as she took it, she noticed a rattling sound to it that she had never before registered. She held it, looked at it. It was a green metal clover, its paint worn away by David’s constant grip. It had four bifurcated leaves and a stem of a different, muted green.

  She shook it. Again, the rattle.

  There was a seam between the stem and the body. She pulled downward at the stem; nothing happened. She pushed the stem inward, and after a little click something released. The stem slid smoothly outward, a tiny drawer, and inside it was a miniature key. Something that would fit inside the lock on a filing cabinet, she thought.

  2009

  San Francisco

  Boston

  “Are you busy? I hope I’m not disturbing you at work,” said Gregory Liston, on the phone.

  His voice was warm and familiar; it brought to her, sharply, a memory of Liston’s house. He sounded older, somehow tired, but his voice still had a catch in it that he had never quite lost.

  “It’s okay,” said Ada. “No, I’m not busy.” She pressed her fingers to her forehead. Squeezed.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, finally, when he didn’t continue.

  “Listen, I have a question for you,” said Gregory. It had been five years since the last time they’d spoken.

  He was in San Francisco, he said. He was there on a work trip. Gregory had studied mechanical engineering in grad school; now he, too, worked in tech, for a robotics firm based in Houston. But he lived in Boston still, with his wife Kathryn, working remotely from an office space downtown, commuting twice a month to be on site. He was rich now; his sister Joanie, who kept Ada apprised of the family’s comings and goings, had said so. Ada tried to picture him as he spoke.

  There was something strange in his voice: something he wanted to share with her. She could read him, still, despite how fully they had fallen out of touch; she recognized from their youth the quality in his voice that indicated he was nervous and excited.

  “This will sound strange,” said Gregory. “But were you ever able to decrypt the letters on the disk David left you? All those letters in a row,” he said.

  She paused, took a breath. Always, the sound of her father’s name produced a response in her that was nearly physical: she heard it, she spoke it, so rarely now. There were so few people in the world who would understand him, what he had meant to her, what he had left her with.

  “No,” she said, “I never have.”

  In fact, she had stopped trying to break it several years before. She still had in her possession, someplace in the supply closet in her apartment in San Francisco, two of the copies of it that she had created along the way; but the original had been lost, years ago, when Ada was in college. One winter break, she had reached up to the top shelf in her closet at Liston’s house to take down the dictionary in which she kept the several documents she had that related to David, including the For Ada floppy disk he had given her. But her hands had come away empty. Liston, when asked, speculated that she must have donated it during one of her rare organizational frenzies, mistaking it for something commonplace, not bothering to flip through the pages to verify its emptiness.

  “God, I’m so sorry, baby,” Liston had said—though of course it wasn’t her fault—and Ada had told her not to worry, feigning nonchalance, smiling brightly to show her that it was only an object. The truth was, though, that it had acquired a significance in Ada’s mind that was larger than she admitted. As the last thing that David ever gave her—even if she never solved the puzzle on it—the disk itself had become a totem, a talisman, proof of her father’s good intentions.

  Ada had continued, after that, to work on the copies of the disk that she had made, and from the text of the code itself, which she had long ago memorized. But the code, as far as she could tell, was unbreakable. After years and years of concentrated work, she had still not been able to decrypt it—nor had anyone. She had repeated the string of letters to anyone she thought might have an idea. The former members of the Steiner Lab—Liston, Charles-Robert, Hayato, and Frank—had all worked steadily at it throughout the last twenty years, to no avail. She had even posted it in online forums, anonymously, once offering a reward for anyone who could offer a persuasive decryption. At last, one day, Ada had decided sadly that Hayato’s initial question, when she first showed the Steiner Lab the string of letters David had left for her to decode, had been the correct one to ask: Was it possible that David’s thoughts were already addled when he created the disk? And in that moment, she decided that she would try to put the disk out of her mind.

  On the other end of the telephone, Gregory was quiet. Her heart quickened.

  Before she could reply,
Meredith Kranz appeared, hovering, uncertain, in the open doorway to her office. She made small movements with her hands; she was mouthing something to Ada.

  “Hang on,” Ada said into the phone, and she tilted it downward, away from her mouth.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Meredith. “I was just wondering if I could borrow you for two seconds before the meeting? I have some questions.” She crossed one leg in front of the other. She looked hesitant and small.

  Ada paused. She understood, abruptly, that it had not been Meredith’s idea to do the pitch; that this was another of Bijlhoff’s foolhardy, impulsive decisions. She breathed in and out, once, deeply.

  “Sure,” she said to Meredith. “Five minutes.” Holding her right hand up, fingers spread.

  “Thank you,” whispered Meredith, her face awash in relief, and she continued to say thank you as she backed out of the door.

  Ada returned to the call.

  “I’ve never solved it,” she said again.

  “It’s been about five years since I tried,” she added.

  Gregory was silent.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I was thinking I might have an idea,” he said.

  They would meet, they decided, that morning. There was nothing keeping Ada at the office; she would give Meredith a brief and inadequate tutorial, answer her questions as simply as she could, and send her off. Then she would leave for the day. Maybe, thought Ada, she would leave for good.

  The last time she had seen Gregory Liston was in 2004. It was also the last time she had been to Boston.

  It was for Diana Liston’s funeral. Ada had known it was coming—for much of the nineties, Liston had fought against recurrence after recurrence of breast cancer, which culminated in a terminal diagnosis in 2003—but it did not lessen the blow of the words as they had been spoken to her by Joanie Liston over the phone.

  “She’s gone,” Joanie had said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ada had replied, and it was only after hanging up that she had allowed herself to collapse into violent, convulsive sobs, the kind of weeping in which she had only ever let herself indulge, truthfully, in the presence of Liston herself. She retched. She cried so much in those first days, and so often, that she had to remind herself to drink water, to stay hydrated. She wished for a friend, a companion, someone she could share her grief with. She wished for Liston, whom she had called frequently throughout her adult life to seek advice or comfort. She had been casually dating someone in those days, meeting up once or twice a week with a kind but noncommittal programmer named Gabe; but Gabe did not seem to her to be the person with whom to share this kind of sorrow. Her other friends in San Francisco both did and did not understand; they couldn’t place Liston in Ada’s life in terms that they could relate to. She fit no category neatly. Liston was not Ada’s mother; she was not even Ada’s relative. “A close family friend,” was how Ada referred to Liston, still, though it never felt right. Or, sometimes, “I lived with her in high school.” Only Liston’s children might truly understand, but they themselves were busy, and it felt wrong to Ada to seek comfort from them. Joanie had taken the lead on the funeral arrangements, and she was keeping Ada informed, but separate. “Don’t be silly,” she said to Ada, trying to be kind, when Ada asked what she could do to help. But I want to, Ada had thought. I want to help.

  That whole week, she had tiptoed around the edges of the Liston clan, seeking a place for herself, finding it difficult. She was thirty-three that year, and had left Boston at eighteen. She had come home only for some summers and holidays until she was twenty-two, and then rarely after that.

  At the wake, she had stood to the side in Liston’s living room on Shawmut Way, fighting back tears. The house was packed, absurd, hot. There was Matty, holding court in the middle of a group of childhood friends, now tall men, some of whom Ada vaguely remembered; there was William, who had expanded over the years into a benevolent, sleepy thirty-five-year-old, already twice married and twice divorced. His daughter Abigail, six or seven, stood next to him, as golden and gorgeous as he had been as a child. There was Joanie with her own brood. There was Gregory, then an engineer in Boston, who had, despite all odds, become a reasonable, functional adult—he could even have been called well-adjusted. He had lost the shyness he had had as a child, when his expression typically vacillated between embarrassment and devastation; it had been replaced instead by a quiet seriousness that made room frequently for flashes of wit. He had surprised Ada on several occasions in her adulthood by producing, as if from nowhere, the exact brand of humor that reduced her to helpless, silly laughter: the absurd humor that David, in fact, had favored. In these moments she looked at Gregory in surprise: Where was this when you were a child? It would have helped him, she thought.

  In the crowded living room that day, he stood next to his wife, Kathryn. Ada had been invited to their wedding four years prior, and had gone, bringing her grad-school boyfriend, Jim. Kathryn was tall, taller than Gregory, and WASPy in some unquantifiable way: forthright and assured of her own correctness, maybe. She was beautiful—Ada had done a double-take the first time they had met—and manifested both intelligence and kindness, but she had spent her wedding weekend ordering Gregory around in a way that was so obvious as to be uncomfortable. Ada had one picture of herself and Jim from that weekend—it was shortly before the total collapse of their relationship—and in it, Kathryn’s long arm could be seen outstretched in the background, presumably pointing Gregory toward something that needed to be done. Now, at Liston’s wake, Kathryn was silent while, next to her, Gregory spoke with guests and received their condolences. From time to time she checked her phone subtly.

  The rest of the house was filled with Liston’s girlfriends from high school, who knew how to help Joanie without being asked, and with Liston’s relatives, cousins and aunts and uncles whom Ada had met several times a year in high school. All of them looked at her with vague recognition and then surprise. Ada! they said. So good to see you. But it was Gregory and Matty and William whom they embraced firmly, whom they collared and held tight. It was Joanie to whom they said, She was incredible.

  The Steiner Lab had come, of course, and Ada stood and talked for a time to Hayato, who himself was holding back tears. After David, out of all the members of the lab, he and Liston had been closest. But all of them left early, much earlier than Liston’s extended family, raucous Irish Bostonians who would stay, Ada knew, until the early hours of the morning, singing Liston’s favorite song (“The Parting Glass,” the Clancy Brothers’ version), encouraging everyone to join in. Ada, too, stayed; she felt she should be there. It felt like asserting something about her life and the importance of Liston in it. But she found that, in Liston’s absence, there was no one there to bring her into the center of things—no one to proudly introduce her to the room.

  Toward the end, Gregory, with Kathryn on the opposite side of the room, had approached Ada. He was drunk, maybe; his face was slightly pink; his gaze was sentimental.

  “Mom loved you so much,” he said to her. “Sometimes I thought she loved you better than she loved us.”

  Ada laughed. She shook her head.

  “You were better-behaved than we were,” said Gregory. “That’s for sure.”

  “She just didn’t catch me,” said Ada. But of course he was right.

  “And David,” said Gregory. He hung his head. “I think she was in love with David for half her life.”

  Ada tensed.

  “No,” said Ada. “No, they were friends.”

  “You didn’t see what we saw,” said Gregory. “Before he got sick. She mooned over him. She confessed it to Joanie when Joanie got older. If he’d liked women I think they could have had a great love story. They made sense together.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said, vaguely. “I don’t think she was.”

  She searched the room for an escape. David had been gone for twenty years now, and still his name now produced in he
r something akin to pain. She loved her father, still loved him, but it elicited a deep, dull ache in her to think of him, to speak of him—there were too many unresolved questions about him. Over the years, Ada’s vision of David had become something delicate and tense, a raveled knot of emotion that twisted tighter at any mention of him.

  “I do,” said Gregory. “My brothers and sister and I talked about it all the time. We teased her about it.”

  She smiled ruefully. “Well,” she said. She could think of nothing more to say.

  But Gregory was not finished.

  “You were both like that,” he said. “You Sibeliuses.” His voice had taken on an edge, and Ada could not identify its source. She searched his face. He looked away. Like what? she wanted to ask, but she felt it was a door that should not be opened.

  “I’d better get going,” she said. She lifted her purse onto her shoulder.

  Awkwardly, she had hugged Gregory, Matty, Kathryn, the rest of them—even William.

  She had said goodbye to Shawmut Way, to the houses on it. First Liston’s house—into which Gregory and his new wife Kathryn would move that same year—and then David’s, which had recently been acquired by its third set of owners since she and Liston had sold it, at last, in 1987. Liston had kept her apprised of its state from across the country whenever they spoke. “The Burkes have it planted nicely,” she told Ada; or, “This new family needs to get someone to mow the lawn.” Ada would miss those reports.

  Finally, she had gone back to her hotel. She hadn’t slept. She had lain awake until the sun rose, and then boarded the plane that took her back to San Francisco.

  That was five years ago. Since then, she had exchanged sporadic, halfhearted e-mails with Matty, now Matt (a serial dater, a perennial youngest child, who hopped between jobs and girlfriends with equal enthusiasm); had exchanged Facebook likes and messages with Joanie, who texted her photographs of her children (Kenny, the oldest, would be a father himself soon) and complaints about what terrible things Kathryn was doing to Liston’s house. You’d hate it, Joanie had written confidentially. It looks like a beach house or something. White wicker everywhere. Though she had settled into an amicable relationship with William, she still kept her distance from him; they had nothing in common, Ada realized, and they never had. Every so often she sent a line to Gregory, to whom she had been closest as a child; but his replies to her were typically brief, and so after a while she ceased to.