The Unseen World

1940s–1950s

Harold had a head for numbers, everyone said, and it was true. He could see connections that others could not see. He could perform calculations quickly and impeccably in his head. His teacher asked him to do so in front of other adults, other teachers in the school, as if it were a party trick — as if to take credit. Harold didn’t mind. In the wake of his sister Susan’s death, he had taken on a steady and resolute silence at home; he only spoke when spoken to. But at school, he spoke a great deal. To his teacher, he spoke often, in unstoppable waves of words that sometimes made his classmates look at him askance. And he spoke to Mr. Macklin, who had by then stopped going to his father’s church — thus confirming Harold’s belief that Mr. Macklin was both Good and Reasonable, characteristics that he had long ago ceased to ascribe to his father. They had standing meetings on Saturdays, now, to go to the library; and now that Harold was a teenager, Mr. Macklin had more to say to him.

“What are your hopes for the future?” he asked Harold one day, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. The road ahead of them was straight and flat and dusty. It was summer.

For several years, secret and dark-seeming thoughts and urges had been brewing inside of Harold: the sort of thoughts that had no way of being set down, left alone. The sort of thoughts that were dangerous for him, in Kansas, at that time. Once, his father had found a drawing he had made about these thoughts and had punched him hard, one time, in the face. Harold’s glasses had broken; he had had to earn the money himself to repair them. He had walked around mostly blind for two months. For your own good, said his father. Harold briefly considered consulting Mr. Macklin, asking for his opinion; he decided against it.

Instead, he thought of a hope that seemed more feasible.

“To leave Kansas,” Harold said. What he really meant was, to leave his family. And Mr. Macklin nodded firmly. He had a friend from the Navy who worked for the California Institute of Technology, he said. He said he thought it might be worthwhile for Harold to apply.

“What’s the California Institute of Technology?” asked Harold. (Later he would remember this and shudder.)

It was the first time he’d heard Mr. Macklin laugh.

“I think you’d be suited to it,” said Mr. Macklin.

“I don’t have any money,” said Harold.

“We’ll talk about that if you get in,” said Mr. Macklin.

He got in. He held the acceptance letter before him as if it were a religious artifact, the Shroud of Turin. He told Mr. Macklin before he told his parents.

Caltech gave him a scholarship, but there were other questions that presented themselves to him, one after another: About where he would live. About how he would eat. This was the Depression; hunger was something to be concerned about.

“I’ve spoken to Arnold already,” said Mr. Macklin. Arnold was his friend from the Navy, who now worked as a lecturer at Caltech, and who was in need of help at the boardinghouse his family ran in Pasadena. Harold could live there and eat there, said Mr. Macklin’s friend, in exchange for honest work.

“You know you’re not getting any money out of us,” said his father, and that was all he said.

“Goodbye,” said his mother — his mother, in whom he could sometimes see reflections of Susan, when she turned her head a certain way, or on the rare occasions when she smiled. When he saw them, he looked away. They glinted too forcefully, like sun in his eyes.

I’ll never be back, he wanted to say, but he felt it was better to say nothing.

He hitchhiked to California. In 1936, Kansans were heading there anyway, in droves. He was eighteen years old. He had one parcel with him, a sort of bag he had made himself from bolts of oilcloth they had in the shed.

He spent four years living and working at the boardinghouse run by Mr. Macklin’s friend. Harold’s coursework was in mathematics. He fell asleep on his books; he had never been happier.

The thoughts he had suppressed for his whole life came bounding forth again, forcefully, joyfully, as if they could sense that, for the first time, they might be welcomed.

He met a graduate student named Ernest Clemson.

Ernest, too, was studying mathematics. He was six years older, slight and serious, ponderous and still. He was brilliant: everyone said it. He would go far in the field, they said. As an undergraduate, he had studied with Einstein. It was said, too, that Ernest was a natural teacher; that he would get the appointment of his choice. He had a beautiful well-formed face and neat small hands with which he gestured gracefully while speaking.

One night, taking a late solitary walk together on the outskirts of Old Town, Ernest fell toward him almost with a cry of pain, and kissed him. He said aloud what each one of them had been thinking for some time. “I’m sorry,” Ernest said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

It was the opening of a world.

Harold was set to graduate in 1940, when the rest of the world was at war. Pearl Harbor was one year away. In the States, the draft had already begun. So, like all young men, like Ernest, he went that spring to his local recruitment office and registered. But the vision that had impaired him since he was young had worsened to the point of severe impairment when he was not wearing his glasses. He took them off and blinked into what had become an abstraction, a blur of middle distance. “You’re blind,” said the officer. “And you can’t tell your colors apart, either.”

For the first time, then, Harold wondered what he would do when he graduated. He spoke to Ernest, who said, a bit mysteriously, “Why don’t you wait before making any decisions?” Ernest, unlike Harold, was in perfect health. He was drafted.

Shortly before he graduated, Harold received a letter. He would wonder, later, whether it was Ernest’s doing; he would wish to believe it was.

The letter asked him two things: First, what languages he knew. Second, whether he would be interested in working for the United States government in Washington, D.C.

If so, said the letter, please reply.

Yes, said Harold. I am immediately available for employment and relocation if necessary.

It was necessary. In 1940, shortly after graduating at the age of twenty-two, Harold packed up and moved across the country, from California to Arlington, Virginia. He said goodbye to Ernest, who, one year later, would be sent to fight in the Pacific theater.

For the next ten years, Harold worked in intelligence for the United States government. First, for the Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall; next, for the Signal Security Agency, which swallowed the SIS; next, for the U.S. Army Security Agency, which swallowed the SSA; finally, for the Armed Forces Security Agency, comprised of all intelligence units for every branch of the military. He broke codes: Japanese, mainly, but also German, and also, eventually, Russian. He was good at his work.

With William Friedman, he worked on the Venona Project that broke Soviet codes emanating from New York. He was integral to the building of the PURPLE machine that was a replica of a Japanese encryption device; with this duplicate, the United States was able to decrypt information that contributed directly to American success in the Pacific theater. He imagined, as he was working, that he was protecting Ernest. He worked harder.

For the first years of the war, he and Ernest wrote long and complicated letters to one another. Both of them, in person, had been happily loquacious, talking to each other for hours in a tumbling, almost psychic way. This tendency carried over into their letters.

Let me tell you about my day, Ernest might begin, and what followed was vivid, lucid writing, a detailed account of his every thought.

They employed a code the two of them had invented years earlier; relying on words, not numbers, it went undetected by the censors who scanned the mail. Brother, they called one other. Friend.

In these letters they made plans: following the war, Ernest would get a job at George Washington University, or Georgetown, or American. Harold would go to graduate school after the war. Washington, at that time, was flourishing with men like them. Lafayette Square, Dupont Circle, Logan Circle. Many of the public parks in the city. A community was forming. You’ll see when you get here, wrote Harold, in code.

In 1944, the letters stopped.

It took another six months for Harold to learn, definitively, that Ernest was gone. Killed in action. Harold had no one, after all, to ask: certainly not Ernest’s family, whom he had never met, who did not know of his existence. At last, a friend of theirs was able to confirm it. Harold took two days off from work, citing a stomach illness. He stayed home. He thought of Ernest. He thought of Susan.

When he returned, he threw himself into his work. Arlington Hall was brimming, then, with talented people, and in them Harold found friends. He sorted them out, assessing them carefully, wondering who might be an ally, deciding at last that there were several.

It was at Arlington Hall that he first knew what it was to be in a lab. It felt like a team. At times it felt like a family.

There were several people there who were like him: men who loved men, women who loved women. Temperamental, they called themselves, or homophile, or gay. The last was the first word Harold learned that felt correct to him. It was a nice word, he thought, appropriate in many ways. He liked the carelessness of it, the implication that they had their heads somehow above the fray. That they did not care what others thought of them. Outsiders referred to them differently: the lavender set, or sex perverts, or queers.

In 1946, he went with a colleague to the Mayflower Hotel, and he met George. George was sitting on a tall stool, wearing his hat indoors, grinning. He was younger, fashionable. He was, Harold thought, powerfully attractive. His gaze was steady and secure. The word beatnik hadn’t been invented yet; if it had been, he’d have been one. Where Harold was conservative in dress, George was unsubtle. He wore mainly black. The length of his hair raised eyebrows. He wrote poetry. He was a talented artist: he made paintings on large canvases that it took two people to lift.

Harold, at first, was skeptical of him. He seemed frivolous, cocky, too overt. He went with frequency to the Chicken Hut, a hangout so obvious that Harold avoided it.

“Why?” George said, wrinkling his brow. “Who cares?”

By that time, George had already cut off all contact with his family, wealthy New Yorkers from a dynastic family who disapproved of him deeply. They had caught him with a boy, said George. They humiliated him. There had been a scandal, already, in the family — something about the father and a girl — and they were wary of another. They threatened to institutionalize him. Instead they sent him off to preparatory school in New Hampshire, from which he ran away when he was seventeen. They reported him missing; they could not find him. It was only when he became a legal adult, at eighteen, that he reemerged. He told them he had no interest in ever speaking to them again. In turn, they disowned him.

This was the subject of one of the first conversations Harold ever had with him. Telling his story, George looked simultaneously amused and distressed. Emotions passed across his face like scudding clouds.

George lived at the Hamilton Arms, a strange housing complex in Georgetown, a sort of commune populated by artists and scholars. The buildings were a collection of alpine-style cottages centered by a café called the Hamilton Arms Coffee House, where George also worked. There were murals on the walls, a pool, perpetually drained, in the middle of the courtyard. He brought Harold back with him, that first night.

Inside the gate, which locked behind them, were two women sitting in lawn chairs on the edge of the empty pool. One was smoking a pipe. Harold had never seen a woman smoke a pipe before.

“Helen,” said George, nodding in her direction, and Helen — lanky, languorous, older than both of them, said, “Who’s the catch?”

Harold had never been referred to as a catch before. He reddened.

George held the door to the coffee shop open for him. He ordered banana pie and Coca-Cola: a strange combination that remained in Harold’s memory for years. He listened over a cup of coffee while Harold talked, clumsily, at length, about his own family. About Ernest.

“You must miss him,” said George.

“How old are you?” asked Harold, warily.

“How old are you?” asked George.

“Twenty-eight,” said Harold.

“Twenty-one,” said George.

“A kid,” said Harold, but in fact — when he looked back on that time later — they both were.

They fell in love. George, as it turned out, was kind: endlessly kind, and endlessly willing to do what was just in the face of oppression. He was radical, carefree. Braver than Harold was. He was exciting. Once — Harold smiled, remembering it — George kissed him full on the mouth, outdoors, on the street. He did not believe in or bend to formalities or social niceties, and therefore he was sometimes perceived as rude, but really he was just honest. He worked for equality in every pocket of the world. He lived as best he could, he told Harold, outside the confines of an oppressive, warmongering America. He joined the Communist Party, attended meetings in the back room of a local bar — a fact that was first whispered about him, and then spoken of overtly, when it became clear that George did not care to keep it a secret.

As much as he scoffed at tradition, though, George still bore the hallmarks of his upbringing, and though he was quite a bit younger than Harold, he taught him a great deal. It was George who taught him to make tea the way he would for the rest of his life, for example. It was George who taught him about classical music — one of their first outings together was to the National Symphony Orchestra, to see them perform Beethoven’s Fifth. George who got Harold listening to the police dramas that he would enjoy for the rest of his life.

Harold felt safe, at first, in Washington. There was a community, a movement — the fellowship that Harold had mentioned in his letters to Ernest. The city felt modern. The war had ended: it was a new era.

This sense of safety extended even to his work. There were several other men and women like him. He had even seen his boss, Conrad Lewey, at the Horseshoe one night — although Harold normally avoided places as indiscreet as that one, he had been dragged there with George, tipsy, after a long night — and Lewey had nodded to him from across the room. Harold did not approach him in person; there was no need to press the matter further. Lewey had looked stricken, anyway, as if he didn’t want to be recognized. Still, Harold took this exchange as a positive sign: a sign of an ally within the department.

The rest of his colleagues, too, were intellectuals, progressive, subversive in their way. It was true: they worked for the government, but it was with a sort of tacit agreement that they were doing it only to protect their peers. If they could prevent an attack on American soldiers, well, that was good and valuable work. When it came to the government officials to whom they reported, there was a collective eye roll, a kind of benevolent dismissiveness.

Harold did not speak of George at work, except as a friend; but he felt there was an understanding, with his closest colleagues, that they were attached. Once or twice they were invited, together, to some social event. At night they went to films, to concerts, to coffee shops or bars. They walked through the gates of the Hamilton Arms and felt as if they had entered an embrace: no one inside of it minded who they were, what they did. They had friends there. Compatriots. They stayed up late in George’s apartment, in great numbers, talking, debating.

Many of them, including George, were anarchists, revolutionaries. George had never paid taxes, on the premise that taxes funded wars. All the money he made was under the table; he operated entirely in cash. He would, he maintained, for the rest of his life. He did not begrudge Harold’s tendency toward conformity, he insisted. “To each his own,” said George.

“But if you get sick,” said Harold. “If you get caught?”

“I won’t,” said George simply. Or, sometimes, “I’ll go to Mexico. I’ll go to Canada. I’ll hide.”

Harold laughed at him, his impracticality, his idealism, his bravado. But there was a part of him that admired George; that wished to be like him. George laughed loudly in public; he tossed his head back with a pride that simultaneously alarmed and attracted Harold.

Each morning, Harold left early from Hamilton Arms, trudging back to his place, feeling like he was waking from a dream. He smiled at the memory of the previous night, took a quick shower (cold as often as hot: the building was old, the systems inside it unreliable), and then left again for work. And he felt, for the first time in his life, content. Long days of work ended in long and satisfying conversations, emotional and physical fulfillment, acceptance. They ate well. They slept well. They left the bedroom window open well into November, and opened it again in March.

In the late 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee turned its focus from rooting out Nazi sympathizers to rooting out Communists. And in February of 1950, a senator from Wisconsin made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he declared that he held in his hand a list containing the names of 205 Communists currently working in the State Department.

At that time there was an overlap, in the mind of the public, between Communists and homosexuals — the term then used by politicians to signify deviance, perversion. Both categories triggered some deep-seated unease in the minds of both politicians and the public, some fear of the unknown. The Second World War had just ended; the Cold War had just begun.

A specific campaign was begun to eradicate homosexuals from the State Department — especially those who dealt with high-level information. The stated reason: homosexuals were said to be weak, incapable of keeping secrets; or able to be extorted, out of a fear of their personal secrets being revealed to friends and family; or, simply, immoral. Corrupt. In some way evil. “Loyalty risks,” they were called.

A newspaper headline read “Pervert Elimination Campaign Begins.” And Harold thought, abruptly, of his father — of people like his father — throughout the country, sitting by their radios, reading their newspapers. Nodding, approving. Urging McCarthy on.

All around Harold, his friends in government, both gay and straight, began to make plans. The talk was low and furtive: in bars, at home. He began to feel paranoid, nervous that he was being watched, being tailed. For several weeks he stopped going to George’s, until his loneliness overwhelmed him; then he only went after dark, and left before the sun rose.

What would he do, he wondered. What would he do if he was a part of the great felling then taking place all around him?

George didn’t have to worry. He was an artist, a bohemian; he worked for no organization that could fire him, aside from the coffee shop — which itself was owned by two radicals. He was lackadaisical, unafraid. Harold wondered if these qualities came out of growing up rich.

“Just drop out of the system,” said George one night, placing a gentle hand on Harold’s head. “Just stop caring. Make a different living.”

“Maybe I will,” said Harold, but in fact the thought made him miserable. There was only one kind of work that satisfied him, and it was the work of the mind: the sort that required the support of an institution. Without this kind of work, he sometimes thought, he would go insane.

If he were simply fired — that would be one thing. But the problem was not the firing; it was the blacklist. They kept you on it, Harold knew, for your whole life. It was a risk-mitigation strategy: they didn’t want their decryption techniques getting out. The high-level information they all had access to. They wanted to stifle you, discredit you. Make you look crazy. They made sure you never worked again.

The first wave of firings in the Signal Corps took place in the summer of 1950, and it quickly became a plague. John and Larry. Eddie Townes. Margaret Graves, who was married, for heaven’s sake, but said to be masculine in some unquantifiable way.

Eddie Townes came to George’s apartment for dinner after he was fired, and he wept. “What will I do now?” he said.

In the end he moved back to North Dakota to help at his father’s gas station. This was a cryptanalyst, like Harold.

“I’m next,” Harold said, after Townes had left, still bleary, mildly drunk, giving them a brave salute from just outside the door. There was no question, he thought, that they would come for him next. He imagined a life without work: bleak and uninteresting and endless. A return to his dusty, blighted childhood.

George contemplated him for a while. “What if,” he said, and took a breath.

On October 9, 1950, Harold arrived at work to find that two men in suits were waiting for him. The man on the left was wearing a toupee; Harold was almost sure of it. His hair sat on his head too heavily; he moved his head slowly, carefully. The other was handsome, impeccably dressed.

“Mr. Canady,” said the first man. “I’m Ted Doherty, and this is Art Tillman. We’d like to have a word.”

Moments later, a third person entered the room.

It was Conrad Lewey, Harold’s boss — the same man Harold had seen at the Horseshoe. Briefly, he caught Lewey’s eye.

That night he went to George’s house and told him what had happened.

We know what you know, they had said. We know whom you’ve shared it with.

They were referring to the high-level information he had been intercepting for a decade. It was a lie: he had shared his findings, of course, with nobody — not even George. He never would.

Tillman was holding a file stuffed full of papers, which he shook at Harold as if to indicate that it was full of evidence that could be used against him.

It was a bluff: presumably it was a bluff.

Still, it shook him.

“A full investigation into these matters will be conducted in the coming weeks,” said Tillman. “In the meantime, your job will be suspended.”

“I’ve done nothing,” said Harold, holding open his hands, turning up the tender white palms, as if to display their emptiness.

“Then you have nothing to worry about,” said Doherty. Lewey, in the background, shifted slowly back and forth.

On the way out, Harold tried to catch his eye. He knew what was happening: Lewey, alarmed, was framing him, pointing a finger preemptively, assuming that Harold would otherwise have thrown the book at him.

I would have said nothing, he wanted to tell Lewey. But Lewey avoided his gaze.

All of this Harold told to George.

“So it’s time?” George asked.

“Yes,” said Harold. “I think so.”

They had put their plan into place several months before.

There had been suicides already since the HUAC was formed. (Among themselves, they never called it the House Un-American Activities Committee; they called it the Inquisition.) Five, ten, fifteen suicides within the State Department alone. They were men and women fired from their lifelong work — men and women who could not fathom another life. Some of the deaths were labeled accidental. Everyone knew the truth.

“They wouldn’t notice another,” said George. And at first Harold was confused. He did not understand.

“Are you suggesting,” he said, wounded, and George shook his head emphatically.

“No, no,” he said. “I don’t think you should actually do it. Only that you might be able to make it seem as if it had been done.”

Harold gazed at him.

“It would blend in,” George said. “They wouldn’t investigate it further. It wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. It would make sense to them.”

He was right, Harold thought. They would think, Of course. They’d think, What else did he have to live for? No family, no job. A sex pervert. A freak. They would be relieved. It would solve problems for the State Department, in fact — one fewer to worry about. One fewer to keep track of. An item crossed off a list.

“But then what,” said Harold. “What would I do next?”

“You’d become someone else,” said George.

“Who?” said Harold.

There was a family friend of George’s whom George knew to be like them — a comrade. “Don’t say comrade,” Harold had said.

“An ally, then,” said George. “Someone built like us.”

His name was Robert Pearse. George had known him since he was a child. He was powerful, said George, but secretive: not even George’s estranged parents knew the truth about him. But he and George were still in touch: Pearse had reached out to George when his parents first sent him away, offering him guidance, help, friendship. He had invited George to his town home on Beacon Hill for a weekend: he had introduced him to his partner, Jack Greer; he showed him an alternate way to exist. Since then, they had had a correspondence. “If there’s anything I can do,” Pearse had always said.

“He can help you,” George told Harold.

One weekend, in August of 1950—two months before Tillman and Doherty arrived in his office — George and Harold had gone to New York City.

It was an act of love, on George’s part — he had avoided the city for years, dreading an encounter with his parents, with any friend of the family.

“Well, here we are,” he said, with something like disdain, as they got off the bus.

He took Harold to all the places he had frequented as a child.

“Write this down,” he said. “Memorize it until it’s yours. Then burn it.”

All weekend, George narrated to Harold the story of his life. And Harold took notes, as avidly as a reporter. The name of every school companion; the name of every relative. The family tree. A chronological order of trips that he had taken, places he had been. The places in New York that a family like George’s might frequent.

There was a conflicted pride in George as he showed Harold his old haunts. “Here’s where I went to church,” he said, outside Calvary Episcopal.

“Here’s where I went to school,” he said, outside Trinity.

“Until they packed me off to St. Paul’s,” he said.

“Are you writing this down?” he asked, and Harold assured him that he was.

George had saved his house for last, wanting to wait until it was dark outside to venture there.

Before they walked to Gramercy Park, they had a good dinner together near Union Square, in a sort of little bustling cafeteria, noisy enough to prevent their being heard.

Later in life, he would stop into it, anytime he had an opportunity to go to New York City. He would take his daughter there: he would tell her it had been his favorite place. And from that moment on, it was.

Around them were young men and women who looked like George.

When they finished, George stood up abruptly from his chair and nodded toward the door.

“Are you ready?” he asked Harold.

The house was grander than anything Harold could have imagined.

“There it is,” said George unhappily. “The Sibelius homestead.”

It was dark outside, but the little lamps from Gramercy Park illuminated the area just enough for him to be nervous. He glanced over both shoulders repeatedly.

“Now you know what it looks like,” he said. “It’s even more horrible inside.”

After a pause, they walked away together, the two of them, until they were certain they were out of sight. Then they paused, and George took Harold by the shoulders.

“Do you have any questions?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Harold. “Nothing I can think of right now.”

“It’s yours,” said George. “It’s all yours. I don’t want it anymore.”

He looked tired. He looked like a man who’d been carrying a burden.

Robert Pearse, George’s family friend, was the president of the Boston Institute of Technology.

When they returned from New York, George called him on the phone. Harold, in the background, listened anxiously as he explained their situation.

George fell silent for a long time. When he hung up, he turned to Harold.

“Yes,” he said. “He’ll help.”

For some time they had a plan in place. It remained a hypothetical, an unhatched parachute, for some time after that. It was something, at least: it gave Harold some measure of comfort and control. Some assurance that his professional life would not be over if he was fired.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Harold asked for the thousandth time, and George nodded emphatically.

Every dollar George earned was off the record; his politics demanded it. Already he had invented a way to live outside society, in plain sight, in the middle of Washington, D.C. He intended to keep it that way, he said, for the rest of his life.

“You’re young,” said Harold. “Suppose you change your mind.”

“Oh, Harold,” said George, “don’t patronize me.” But he said it kindly, and Harold saw that he was serious.

“I can find other work,” said Harold. “I can keep my name.”

“Who’ll hire you?” said George. “Without credentials, blacklisted by the United States government. They’ll make sure you don’t get hired anyplace.”

“Then I’ll become a hermit,” said Harold. “A mountain man. I’ll solve math problems in my head from my perch in the woods.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said George.

“A chef,” Harold continued, enjoying himself now. But he knew that he would not be happy. His work made him happy; it was the only thing that ever had.

“You need my name more than I do,” said George.

“Besides,” he added, “I hate it. I can’t wait to be rid of it. And that’s the truth.”

His name was David George Sibelius. He had always gone by his middle name; it was what his parents had called him, for reasons he wasn’t sure of.

Professionally, he was already going by a different name. A brush name, he called it — since pen name didn’t work for a painter.

“I’ll go by David, I think,” said Harold. “As added protection.”

George shrugged. “Whatever you like,” he said.

This, anyway, was what Harold told him. The truth was that George’s first name appealed to him: containing, as it did, an allusion to someone facing odds that seemed unbeatable.

The day after Tillman, Doherty, and Lewey interviewed Harold, he and George put their plan into action.

In the morning, Harold left his apartment. He took a circuitous, rambling walk all around Washington, hoping to lose anyone trailing him. And then he found his way, finally, to the Hamilton Arms. To George’s apartment.

He did not take any of his possessions. This, too, was part of the plan. He left everything intact; months ago he had transferred a little suitcase to George’s apartment, the essentials he would need to start a life in Boston.

“Are you going to call your mother?” asked George, the night before they enacted their plan. Harold had calculated everything: The weight of the car. The acceleration it would take to create tire tracks. He had practiced in a parking lot, in rural Virginia, under cover of night.

“No,” said Harold.

But in the end, he did: he called the house in Kansas. He had not called home in over a year. He closed his eyes. He imagined Susan answering.

It was not his mother, but his father, who answered in the end.

“Hello?” said his father. “Hello? Hello?”

Harold listened to him breathing. He said nothing.

That night, they flipped Harold’s car into the Shenandoah River.

A suicide, the State Department would think. An accident, the paper would report.

Everyone would be satisfied.

George followed Harold in a different car.

After it was done, George was the one who drove him to Boston. They arrived there at 6:00 in the morning. From the glove compartment, George extracted a folder: inside it was his birth certificate, his Social Security card, a long list of biographical facts.

Harold looked at it. “When did you write this?” he asked.

“Never mind,” said George.

He handed it all to Harold.

“Whew,” George said, and he mimed the removal of sweat from his brow.

“Happy birthday, David Sibelius. Glad I’m not you anymore,” said George. He looked unburdened. “Happy birthday to me, too, I guess,” he said.

As a parting gift, he gave Harold the key chain from his house keys, the ones that opened the gate to Hamilton Arms: it was a clover, a charm for luck. Its stem was a little drawer, into which, Harold later found, George had put a love note. Harold kept the clover for the rest of his life. He kept the note in his wallet until it disintegrated with age. But by then he had memorized it completely anyway.

He had new paperwork; a new tax code; a new identity. A new age.

He was David Sibelius. He was twenty-five years old. The world opened before him.

Robert Pearse had arranged for David to enroll in the applied mathematics graduate program at the Bit. He personally recommended David to Maurice Steiner. What deal they made, David could not say; but Steiner never asked him much about his past, nor did he require paperwork from Caltech. It existed, of course; but on it was a different name.

His experience as a graduate student was idyllic. Steiner, he learned, was an outstanding person, an outstanding scholar. For the first several years, David worried constantly about being caught. He waited to cross paths with a person who would know his name. The Sibeliuses themselves had long ago disowned George; they, at least, he thought, would not come looking for him. With the exception of President Pearse, who sheltered him, he avoided the rich as well as he could. Occasionally someone would utter Sibelius, and scrutinize him, the way one might utter Carnegie, or Ford. In these moments, he would tense, waiting for the blow; but his use of David instead of George typically prevented further conversation. Still, he always half expected the ringing telephone, the knock at the door, that would signify an end to everything.

It never came.

When Maurice Steiner died, when President Pearse bestowed upon him his own laboratory, when he began to achieve increased fame in his field, he once again expected to be discovered. He avoided photographs. He avoided interviews. He thrust the other members of his lab into the spotlight, feigning camera-shyness.

Nothing happened.

The adoption of George’s identity had subtracted seven years from David’s age, and so he tried to live his life as a younger man; he convinced himself to act more carefree, have more fun. He did well at work; he made money. He had, once more, a set of friends.

Most importantly of all, he had satisfying work — the kind he lived in fear of ever losing again. And so he was taciturn, private. As he acquired colleagues at the lab, he was careful of what he said, and to whom. It took him many years to feel at ease with anyone. Only one — Diana Liston — knew he was gay. He said nothing to the others.

This was not out of shame but self-protection; he wished to distance himself, as much as possible, from Harold Canady. To keep at bay any characteristics that might link him, in the event of an interrogation, to his former self.

He had already looked into the consequences of his actions, and of George’s: for David, ten years, minimum, in prison, for fraud — more if the State Department accused him of espionage or treason. (He had done nothing of the sort; but he imagined that there was a real possibility of their falsifying evidence.) Even worse, at least five for George, who had not only been an accessory to fraud, but had been cheerfully shirking his taxes for a decade. Longer.

He feared putting anyone else at risk: to tell his tale to others meant to make them, too, accessories — unwilling custodians of a story that, legally, they had an obligation to report.

Therefore, he vowed to be careful. To be private. This was his secret, he told himself; he alone would bear the weight of it.

At first, he and George continued to see one another. For a decade, David avoided Washington, fearing that he would be recognized by a former colleague; during this time, George came frequently to visit him in Boston. But eventually the distance became too much. George found another partner, one who lived nearby, and broke the news to David as gently as he could, in a letter that David opened apprehensively, predicting its contents.

I hope we can continue to be friends, said George in the letter, and David decided to take him at his word. But that night, in the dark of his apartment, he felt alone and tired and terrified of perennial solitude, and he allowed himself, uncharacteristically, to weep.

For a time David resigned himself to being alone.

Some years, he was certain he would be caught. 1960, for example, was the year of the Martin and Mitchell case, in which two American intelligence officers defected to the Soviet Union and were subsequently accused of being gay. That year, the paranoia that McCarthy had sparked more than a decade before resurged, and David spent each day terrified of a knock on the door, some reopening of his case, a reinvestigation of the suicide of Harold Canady.

That same year, Robert Pearse received a visit from four federal agents who wished to speak with him about a rumor: someone had reported to them that Pearse was both gay and affiliated with the Communist Party. These dueling rumors, which he denied, in combination with his position as the head of a university that turned out State Department employees in great numbers, had put him on their watch list.

He came to warn David. “You may be next,” he said.

But nothing happened.

For a decade, nothing happened; and David was, at last, lulled into the belief that he was safe.

Only then did he allow himself to acknowledge, to tend to, a kind of yearning that had arisen in him over the years. It surprised him, at first. The idea that he might want a child. In his own childhood, he had sometimes fantasized about one day becoming a father: he imagined creating a different, better version of what he experienced. The idea of building an idyllic childhood for someone else one day had given him a measure of comfort in the middle of his own terrifying younger years. He would create for his child, he imagined, a life full of books and learning and conversation. A life of the mind.

For years, he thought that this would be impossible. He found friendship and solace, once more, at work, and in the evening he returned to his studio in the Theater District and continued to work.

In the late 1960s, he began to plan for ELIXIR — the project he would come to see as his most important work. He wondered, at times, whether the project was his attempt to fill the longing that had arisen within him for an heir, for a successor, someone he could invest with the accumulation of his knowledge. He did not examine the question too deeply.

One day in early 1970, when he was speaking to the young woman who regularly cut his hair, she mentioned a new project she had taken on.

“I’m surrogating myself,” she had said, using the word inventively, placing one small hand proudly on an abdomen that had already begun to protrude.

Her name was Birdie Auerbach. She was twenty-five then, or twenty-six; newly returned to Boston from San Francisco, where she had moved in 1966 just before the peak of the hippie movement. A few years later, she had found everything changed, and so she packed up her things and came back to her birthplace, and was now making ends meet in a variety of ways. At every one of David’s monthly appointments, she had invented a new scheme to supplement her income with other work: once, she decided to make pressed-flower stationery; once, she had decided to become a private investigator.

Now, she said, she had gone into business as a surrogate, for people who couldn’t conceive on their own.

“When there’s something wrong with the mom, I mean,” she added, clarifying.

It was simple, as she described it. A procedure that a friend of hers helped with. “Worked perfectly,” she said.

“Expensive, though,” she added, catching David’s eye in the mirror.

A deal was made.

At the hospital, David was announced as the father. The doctors congratulated him. They called Birdie his wife. She kept the child against her chest for thirty minutes, and then handed her to David.

“Don’t let me hold her again,” she whispered, and for a moment he wondered if he had done the right thing.

But then there she was, tiny thing, against him: a small and perfect specimen, a new addition to the world. He had read, once, that five babies were born every second, and he imagined the other hypothetical four, all taking their first breaths in turn. He imagined her life as it stretched out ahead of her. Of them. He imagined their lives together. For the first time in years, he was happy and still.

He named her after Lady Lovelace: one of his favorite entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica he had almost memorized as a child. A mathematician, like him.

At the hospital, he had one visitor, and only one: it was Diana Liston, his best friend, his colleague, the only person he had told so far about the child.

“She’s incredible, David,” said Liston, expertly cradling the baby in her arms. She was still, then, married to her unpleasant, antisocial husband. She looked up at David somewhat wistfully. “I want another one,” she said. A year later, Gregory would be born; four years later, Matty. Only then would she get a divorce.

To her father, Ada presented a series of problems that he addressed as if they were puzzles. How many hours and minutes between feedings for optimal calmness? How long to let her cry in the night? (Though usually he could not let her cry at all.) On quiet mornings he held her to his chest and breathed with her and called her perfect and a joy. He took a month off work, citing an unspecified medical need, and when he returned he announced to the rest of the lab that he had unexpectedly learned he was a father. He did not elaborate. And they took it in stride: used, perhaps, to thinking of David as eccentric and somewhat secretive. They, too, loved the child.

Ada grew. She was a delight: even in the low and lonely hours of the night, when it was only the two of them; even as he waged a solitary war against first colic and then night terrors and then, briefly, bed-wetting; he was happier, more content, than he had ever been. He contemplated her: her hands, her face. Did she look like him? As she grew, the two of them would hear, frequently, that she did. He contemplated the physical manifestation of the genetic code that had produced her: half his, half Birdie Auerbach’s. (The unlikeliness of the combination made him smile, sometimes.) He sang to her: Christmas carols, hymns from his youth that he hummed, leaving out the words. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”: his favorite. He felt called to some greater purpose. He felt a kind of familial love he had not felt since Susan had died. He imagined Ada, sometimes, as Susan — in the delirium of another 3:00 a.m. wake-up, the baby mewling, he imagined that it was Susan he was cradling, that it was Susan he was giving a better life. Another chance.

He wrote to George to let him know what he had done.

A wonderful idea, said George. I’d like to meet her.

And so three times he had taken Ada to meet the original David George Sibelius, who was going by George Wright exclusively, the name under which he’d always made art.

The first time he went to Washington with Ada, after more than two decades of being away, he glanced over his shoulder, nervous about being recognized; but he had gone completely bald, for one thing, and he had gotten thinner from adopting a running habit when he got to Boston.

He introduced George to Ada as a friend he’d grown up with. It satisfied some deep and resonant part of him to know that they knew one another — even if Ada was not aware of the whole truth.

He thought, always, that he would tell Ada his story as soon as he felt she could understand it. When she was born, he imagined telling her when she was thirteen; and the age registered itself to him as a reasonable, concrete number. And he thought the world, too, might have changed by then.

He followed the news carefully, gauging the climate of the country, trying to judge when it might be safe to reveal his story. In his lifetime, surely, he thought. Still, he remained silent.

The fear, of course, was that he would not be believed. He did not want to risk going to jail; more than that, he did not want to risk putting his daughter in danger, making her the bearer of a secret that she could not tell.

He monitored government activity. How interested was the State Department, these days, in rooting out spies? He clipped articles out of the Times and the Globe. He stored them in a filing cabinet that he took with him from his studio apartment to the house he bought in Dorchester. For a time, in the seventies, anti-espionage activity seemed to diminish, and the gay rights movement picked up traction. He thought, several times, of explaining himself to his daughter.

But in the 1980s, a series of events made David reconsider. First, in 1981, President Pearse himself was finally forced out by the board of the Boston Institute of Technology, who had gotten word of his being investigated by the federal government years before. An anonymous source had reported it. Some said it was his successor, McCarren, who had been provost while Pearse was being investigated. This was never more than hearsay: but David could believe it.

Next, anti-espionage activity in the United States became frenzied, frantic. In 1984 alone, eleven Americans were arrested for espionage or treason. Thomas Patrick Cavanagh, Robert Cordrey, Ernst Forbrich, Bruce Kearn, Karl Koecher, Alice Michelson, Richard Miller, Samuel Loring Morison, Charles Slatten, Richard Smith, and Jay Wolff. He pored over the facts of their cases obsessively. He looked for patterns.

Had any of them, he wondered, been framed? Were any of them like him?

The thought prevented him from saying a word.

His brain, meanwhile, began to fail him, and Liston noticed. For a year she badgered him to see a doctor, but he avoided it, knowing what they would say. When he returned from his first appointment, he fell into a deep and abiding despair.

The correct thing to do, he thought, would be to tell Ada everything. But she was still only twelve: perhaps too young to bear such a weight. Too young to be burdened with a story that she could not tell.

This, at least, was what he told himself. The truth was more complex: mixed up with his wish to protect Ada was something less noble, a wish to protect himself, to shield himself from her wide inquisitive eyes, from the questions that were certain to come tumbling out of her. The look of betrayal that would pass across her face and perhaps stay there, a long shadow.

One day, working with ELIXIR, a solution presented itself to him cleanly and precisely, as all correct solutions do.

ELIXIR, he realized, could function as a sort of time capsule: a bundle of information that would be released to Ada later, ideally much later, when the world had changed. And he felt increasingly that it would change: he felt the ground shifting beneath him in surprising directions. He felt a movement gathering strength.

He wrote out his story; he told it to ELIXIR over a series of conversations that occupied him for two months.

He programmed it to respond to a specific command. Who is Harold?

It was the only direct intervention ever given to the program. He tested it out.

Who is Harold? he asked it, and his own story was presented to him, line by line, as he had typed it.

He created a puzzle for his daughter — one he thought might take her several years to figure out. Solving the puzzle would yield the command.

He spoke to Liston. “Make sure to keep it running,” he said, about ELIXIR. “For as long as you live. That’s my only wish.”

Liston had looked at him, hard. She was smarter than he was, he thought often; she knew things he did not know. He waited.

“All right,” she said, “I will.” She asked nothing. He knew that she would do it.

He had come to think of ELIXIR, by that time, in a somewhat familial way. At times the machine seemed like his child, like Ada’s sibling. Other times the machine seemed like a manifestation of himself; it had acquired many of his speech patterns, his verbal tics and irregularities. Beyond all rationality, he trusted the machine as much as — more than — he had ever trusted a human.

Still, he was also deeply aware that this mechanism was a risk. And so, a good scientist, he conceived of two alternatives, two backup plans in case his original idea failed. The first was President Pearse, whom he instructed to tell Ada the truth when she reached eighteen, by which time he imagined that he, David, would be gone — or at least so incapacitated mentally that he would be unable to convey his story.

As for the second: after much consideration, David decided to contact George. It had been several years since they had spoken, and when he tried the telephone number he had for him, he found that it no longer worked. He tried the coffee shop, too, at the Hamilton Arms; but that number was answered by somebody else, a certain Rhoda, who told him he was confused.

He could have been, he thought. It was possible.

So, one Saturday in August, 1984, he took the train to Washington, D.C. He was fading fast by then; the name of the community in which George once lived was entering and exiting his mind with a stuttering frequency. Hamilton Arms, it was called; but sometimes it occurred to him as Mantle Arms, or Armilton Place, or sometimes it would not come to him at all.

For this reason, before he left, he had written the name of the place, and the address, on his train ticket. He had also written down George’s name, what George always called his brush name, the one he went by exclusively now: George Wright.

David, upon arriving at Union Station, found a taxi and displayed his ticket stub to the driver. He had been clutching it in his right hand for hours, making himself focus on its contents, so that it was slightly softened, slightly damp. The address was vaguely smudged.

“Georgetown,” said the driver, and off they went.

Although David’s appearance had changed almost completely since he had worked in Washington, the vague fear of being recognized returned to him, and he reclined his head against the backseat of the cab. He drifted off for a moment.

“Hey, buddy,” the driver was saying, as he awoke. For several moments he was completely disoriented. He shook his head slowly. Was he in Boston? In New York?

He was clutching a piece of paper in his hand. Washington, D.C., it said, under an address. George Wright.

His feeling of disorientation increased when he exited the cab. He did not recognize the block, nor the buildings on it. He wondered if the driver had taken him to the wrong place. Though at home he had had difficulty picturing the buildings of Hamilton Arms, he had hoped that being physically on Thirty-first Street would awaken some collapsed memory. Instead, it did the opposite. He turned in a slow circle. The neighborhood had brightened, improved; the buildings looked newly painted. The last time he had been there, with Ada, it had been alarmingly run-down. He had steered her quickly through the gate.

“Can I help you find something?” asked a young woman. She was pushing a baby stroller.

“Hamilton Arms,” said David, looking down at his ticket, and the woman shook her head.

“Haven’t heard of it,” she said. “Is it a restaurant?”

He turned in another circle. And then he noticed that there was a gate still, yes — perhaps the gate that once let him into the courtyard that led to George’s house.

“Never mind,” he said. He walked toward the gate. New metalwork displayed the words HAMILTON COURT. And the buildings beyond were all different: gone were the Swiss-style cottages, gone the empty swimming pool, the murals. The buildings were more upscale now. Totally nondescript. David wondered for a moment if he had made some mistake. He had been making them frequently.

An old man, a vagrant, was seated on the sidewalk, his back against the building that David remembered, suddenly, as what had once been the coffee shop. It, too, was different: the red brick had been painted a light gray; the sign was gone.

David approached him.

“Do you know—” he began, but the old man cut him off.

“Everyone’s gone,” he said. He looked away.

David almost gave up. He walked around the block several times — right and then right and then right and then right; that was a block, he reminded himself — to try to decide what to do. It was only on his third pass that he noticed an art gallery displaying paintings of the sort George used to make: large-scale abstract expressionist pieces in muted browns and blues.

They weren’t George’s, said the gallerist, when David went inside, but yes, he knew George Wright.

He looked at him strangely as he said it.

“Do you?” he asked David.

“Very well,” said David. “We’re old friends. Do you happen to have his new number?”

The gallerist, not wanting to give him the number directly, called George for him, and then proffered the telephone to David, and then stood to one side, an arm crossed about his torso, waiting.

George answered after six rings.

His voice, for several syllables, sounded rattling, disused. He cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said, when David asked if they could meet.

He was not far away. He no longer liked cafés, he said, so they met instead on a bench that overlooked the Potomac from a park that spanned the waterfront. It was the same one they always used to sit on together, said George by way of instruction, and David had to confess that he could not remember.

“Hang on,” he said, and he wrote down the directions messily on a slip of paper that the gallerist handed him.

When David arrived, George was waiting for him already. From the back, he looked hollow: as changed as the buildings he used to inhabit. His shoulders were sharp. David could see the bones of them through the light shirt he wore.

He paused for a moment, and George turned around. His face made it plainer. It was a skeleton’s face: it was painful to look at.

“I’ve got it,” said George, waving a languid hand before his body, as if to indicate, all of it.

It was then being called GRID, but George didn’t use the term. It, he said, and David understood.

They sat together for an hour. There was no use in explaining to George the favor for which he had sought him out: he would outlive George, David knew, even with the onset of his own disease. Instead, they both fell silent.

One memory, intact, occurred to David: It was of seeing George, for the first time, in the Mayflower Hotel, his hat rakishly askew, his clothing dark and warm-looking. He had looked strong; he had looked fearless. David, then, had imagined touching him. He touched him now: put an arm around George’s shoulders, felt the bones in them loosen slightly, felt the insubstantial weight of him shift almost imperceptibly toward David.

I’m sick, too, David could say, but what use would that be? It was different. He closed his eyes. The sun was going down; he could sense it through the skin of his eyelids, the gathering dusk, a familiar dimming of the sky.

He would count on Pearse, then, and ELIXIR, to deliver his story. He would count on the hope that he had taught his daughter well enough for her to one day solve the puzzle he had laid before her: an offering.

David returned to Boston on an overnight train. He had reserved a bed in a sleeper car, remembering his fascination with the idea of them as a boy; but he found he was too tall for them now, and he slept first fitfully, and then not at all.

He returned to the house in the morning and found that Ada wasn’t home.

He would wait, he thought; he would make her a nice lunch later. He was looking forward to seeing her. His daughter. His best and most valuable creation.