The Unseen World

2009, Boston

When Ada emerged from Frank’s office, it was 5:00 in the evening and dark outside already. She had read for seven hours straight. She had gone back over several passages twice. She had not eaten since breakfast. At first she could not find Gregory and Frank; she wondered if they’d left. But finally she wandered around a corner and found them sitting on chairs in a sort of slapdash waiting room.

Frank was laughing, nearly shouting, at what seemed to be Gregory’s recitation of some shared memory. How nice it was, thought Ada, to be in the presence of people who knew her father and Liston.

“I’d imagine,” began Gregory, and then he saw her, and paused.

“I’m finished,” said Ada.

She felt pale and unsteady.

They stared at her for a moment. Then Frank rose to his feet, brushing off the legs of his pants. “Right!” he said. “Is there anything else you need?”

They did not ask anything further of her. It was not their story to ask for.

As they were leaving, Frank put both of his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. His face looked like family. In his embrace, for the first time in years, she felt young, childlike. She felt he could see into her past. He had known her since she was small: there were only a handful of people in the world who could say that.

“David was a good person,” he said. “We all knew that.”

Together, in silence, she and Gregory walked back to where he had parked. Their breath came out before them in long clouds. A cold frozen rain had begun.

“I’ll bring you to your hotel,” Gregory said, and he said nothing after that.

They pulled onto Mass Ave. The windshield wipers beat slowly. Gregory had his hands on the wheel at ten and two. He looked tense, expectant. She kept her head straight forward, but in her peripheral vision she could see him glance at her every so often.

She wondered what his life was like now: alone in Liston’s old house without Kathryn. She would share David’s story with him later — she owed it to him — but for the moment it was too large, too recent. There were too many more questions to ask.

Who is Harold? she had asked ELIXIR, and a document had presented itself to her containing transcript after transcript, the first dated June 20, 1983.

Nearly eighty thousand words. It was David, in conversation with ELIXIR. It was Harold Canady. It was the story of his life.

Suddenly Ada had the urge to see Shawmut Way again, one last time, before Gregory left.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Gregory said, looking straight ahead.

An alarming amount about the street had changed, even in the last five years. One of the more decrepit Victorians, and one of the nicest, had been knocked down and replaced by modern houses with modern conveniences that looked anachronistic to Ada: Driveways paved in stone. Energy-efficient windows that looked somehow as if they lacked both age and wisdom. Low shrubs in place of a beautiful old oak that had been the best climbing tree in Savin Hill. One front lawn had been replaced by a rock garden.

It was January 8, and most of the houses still had their holiday decorations up. Shawmut Way had always looked beautiful at Christmas, when Ada was a child; and David and Liston had always led the charge in decorating it. Both had preferred fat old-fashioned Christmas lights in bright colors, the tacky ones that most of the other residents of Shawmut Way had traded in over the years for small and classy white ones. Now both houses were dark.

Gregory pulled into Liston’s driveway — his driveway, Ada reminded herself; and Kathryn’s driveway, soon — and they both got out.

“I’ll be right back,” said Ada, and she walked four houses down and stood for a while in front of David’s house. Joanie had updated her on its most recent sale. These days it belonged to a family called the Johnson-Akimoyes, both parents doctors at MGH. They had two children, probably teenagers by then. The curtains on the windows at the front were open, and Ada stood for a while, looking into the lit house, considering how long ago it was that she and David had lived inside that house together. She was reminded, suddenly, of their annual pilgrimage to Gramercy Park: the two of them straining to see inside the windows of the house that had never been David’s. He had been pretending, then, to look into his past, when really he was looking into some alternate reality, some different version of his own history, some unseen world.

A quick motion at the living room window, a face. The Christmas lights outside went on, and then the curtain dropped. Perhaps she had been noticed.

Liston’s house was the only undecorated one on the block.

“Never got around to it,” said Gregory, forlornly. He’d let himself in already, was turning lights on here and there. He’d left the door unlocked behind him for Ada.

She had not been to the house since Liston’s wake. Approaching it from the outside, Ada had seen immediately what Joanie had been complaining about, since Kathryn’s reign had begun: she had gentrified the house completely. Gone was the bright pink trim — the last color Liston had chosen — and gone the lone flamingo in the front garden, which Liston had decorated seasonally with a pilgrim’s hat or a Santa hat or a cape in the pattern of the American flag.

The interior was sterile and calm. A sort of beach theme pervaded it, strange for a Victorian in Dorchester: white walls, wicker furniture, starfish in a glass hurricane vase on an end table. Pictures in driftwood frames on the mantel — two of them, still displayed, were of Gregory and Kathryn at their wedding.

Ada wandered toward it, curious, before catching herself. Gregory looked down.

Ten square feet of sealed boxes occupied the living room: Gregory’s things, packed and waiting. She gestured toward that instead.

“Has it been hard packing up?” she asked him.

He considered. “Sort of,” he said. “But nice in other ways. Nice to go through Mom’s things. We still had so many of them in the house.”

Ada’s stomach rumbled then, loudly, and she folded her arms about her middle, protecting it. It had been hours and hours since she had eaten anything. She was always coming to this house, she thought, needing something: as a child, she had come needing comfort, needing protection, needing food. Needing Liston. Now Liston was gone, and David was gone, and she was thirty-seven years old and still forgetting to feed herself.

“Do you want dinner?” asked Gregory. He looked doubtful. “I’m not sure what we have in the house. What I have in the house,” he said.

So they went and looked, in a kitchen that had been painted as white as the rest of the house. In the cupboards were stale-looking things: ancient spices, boxes of dried beans and dried pasta, tomato paste, chicken broth. Gregory opened the refrigerator. There was butter inside, and a bottle of white wine that someone, maybe Kathryn, had opened. Gregory took the stopper out and sniffed it. He sniffed it again. Then he turned to Ada and held it out to her questioningly.

“Okay,” said Ada. He poured them each a glass.

For dinner, they made pasta with butter and salt.

“What about tomato paste?” asked Gregory. “Do we think tomato paste would help or harm?”

“Liston probably would have thrown it in,” said Ada, laughing, and Gregory agreed. “In Mom’s honor, then,” he said, and he placed a dollop of tomato paste in the middle of the bowl, and gave it all a stir.

It was surprisingly good, rich with butter and salt, steaming from the pot. “Good for a cold day, at least,” said Gregory.

After dinner, Ada thanked him. She shouldered her bag. Gregory said he would take her to her hotel.

Ada walked once more around the first floor of the house. She felt a deep, abiding sorrow at seeing it go: it was difficult to imagine Shawmut Way without the Listons on it.

“Can I look on the second floor?” she asked, impulsively.

“Sure,” said Gregory. And he followed her up the stairs. She was more aware of him, his presence, than she had ever been before; she heard each of his footsteps behind her and felt a sudden gratefulness for them.

In the second-floor hallway, she let her hand hover for a moment over a doorknob.

“You don’t mind?” she said. He shook his head. So she opened the door to every room. In some ways, she thought, it had been her house, too. There was Liston’s room; there, Matty and Gregory’s room; there, William’s; there, Ada’s. She had spent over four years in that room. She thought of taking a picture, decided against it. It had been redone completely according to Kathryn’s taste. It was better as a memory, she thought.

“Want to see something else?” said Gregory. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

He opened the door in the hallway that led to the attic, flicked a switch at the bottom of the stairs that sent bright light down toward them from the ceiling under the roof. Ada followed him up the stairs and looked over the half wall at the top.

The attic was a time machine: not a thing had changed.

The posters on the walls, the orange shag carpeting, the tattered couches, the boxes in the corner: all of it was there.

“It was the deal I made with Kathryn,” said Gregory, ruefully. “I told her she could do whatever she wanted with the rest of the house.”

There, on the desk, was the same computer that had been there since their childhood: the 128K Macintosh. Ada walked toward it.

“Does it still work?” she asked.

“I haven’t tried it in years,” said Gregory. “But let’s see.” And he waved her toward it with a nod of his head.

She put a hand on it. The top of it was a beige square of hard plastic with an indentation, like a fontanelle, along the back. The smallness of the screen surprised her: she had remembered it being larger. There, in the front, was a built-in disk drive; and attached by cords were an external disk drive, a stout keyboard with fat little keys and a number pad, and a boxy mouse. The wires themselves were thick and gray. One was corkscrewed, like an old-fashioned telephone cord.

She had forgotten how shaky these computers felt, how much they rattled, like brains in skulls. The keyboard, when she touched it, sent a shock of nostalgia through her. She was thrilled by the familiarity of it, the feel of it when she touched any letter. Ada Sibelius, she typed, and the keyboard clacked like teeth. It sounded as if it were loaded with springs. She missed buttons like these, fat hearty ones, buttons it took real intention to depress.

She turned on the power switch and held her breath for a moment. Nothing happened. And then a tone sounded, and it whirred satisfyingly to life. A little floppy disk icon with a question mark appeared in the center of the gray screen. Its mind was missing from its body, as David used to say.

“Here,” Gregory said, reaching into the case next to the computer, pulling out for her the floppy that contained the operating system.

She fed the disk into its mouth as if it were a child, and reflexively it swallowed, and she paused to register a sound she had not heard in decades: the loud shuddering scratch of a thinking machine. Machines thought so quietly now.

The question mark turned into a smiling computer. Slowly it woke from its long dreamless sleep. And in its waking Ada, too, was roused by memories: of Liston, of David, of Hayato and Charles-Robert and Frank Halbert. Only the latter three were still alive; the machine had outlived the rest.

The funny thing about early home computers, she thought, was that they really did nothing. The main disk contained a calculator, a notepad, some other silly small applications that took up little memory. The only icon on the desktop she didn’t recognize belonged to whatever disk was in the external hard drive, which someone had titled Dontlook12.

Gregory began to laugh. He put a hand over his eyes. “Oh, God,” he said.

“What?” asked Ada.

He waved a finger toward the icon. “Just reliving my most humiliating childhood memory,” he said. “Of many,” he added.

Ada raised her eyebrows, shook her head.

“You don’t remember?” said Gregory. “Really?”

She looked back at the desktop, and then finally a vague memory came back to her: something about a long string of encrypted text, most likely created by Gregory.

“Oh,” said Ada. “The encryption you made when we were kids?”

Gregory was still shaking his head, laughing. “I don’t know how you ever looked at me again,” he said, “after you read that. I wanted to die. You were nice not to tease me about it.”

And then it all came back: she had told him once she’d decrypted it, she realized.

“I never read it!” she said. “I saw it, but William interrupted me before I’d finished.”

“You’re kidding,” said Gregory. “Are you kidding?”

“No,” said Ada. “I promise. I think I was just trying to make you feel bad when I found you in David’s house later.”

Gregory dropped his hands to his sides. “I spent years and years being embarrassed about that. I can’t believe it.”

“What did it say?” said Ada.

Gregory paused. He turned toward her. His face was kind, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, uncanny, a time traveler’s face. It tugged at her. It rang a bell someplace deep in her abdomen.

“Never mind,” said Gregory.

“I have to tell you something now,” he said.

“What?”

“Two things, actually.”

“What are they?”

“You’ll hate me for them.”

“No, I won’t,” said Ada, and she meant it; in that moment it didn’t seem possible.

“I took the disk,” said Gregory. “I took David’s disk, the original copy. I was seventeen. You had just left for college.”

She paused, regarded him. He looked solemn, his head lowered, as if waiting for a blow.

“Why?” she asked him.

“I wanted to solve it. I wanted to be the one to solve it for you,” said Gregory.

“I could have solved it myself,” said Ada. “I think I would have, eventually.”

“I know you would have,” said Gregory. “It made no sense. It was wrong. When I was a kid,” he began, but then he shook his head. “I meant to put it back before you noticed it was gone, but I forgot to. And then my mother told you she must have thrown it out, and then I was too embarrassed to confess.”

Gregory darted a glance at her. Looked down again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It was incredibly wrong of me. I’ve thought for years about returning it to you, but instead I’ve just been avoiding the issue altogether.”

“Well,” said Ada. “Thank you for returning it now.”

She thought for a moment. She remembered the other times that Gregory had apologized to her, as a boy, in this attic: for the mistakes he had made. Once, for using a terrible word about her father.

“What was the other thing?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I didn’t really have a meeting in San Francisco,” he said.

She smiled, finally. “I probably could have guessed that one.”

“I really did find the disk when I was going through my things to move out,” said Gregory. “I hadn’t looked at it in years. I was afraid to. I even forgot where it was. And as soon as I came across it and saw the inscription on it — I knew.”

“I can’t believe I gave everyone copies to work from,” said Ada. “Of course we needed the original. I should have known better, even as a kid. David would have been so disappointed.”

“It didn’t occur to me, either, back then,” said Gregory.

She tried to recall him: Gregory as a teenager. He was still painfully shy at that age. In the Queen of Angels Upper School, he had transitioned from being outspoken and therefore the target of every bully, to being silent and therefore largely invisible. By his junior year he was listening to punk rock and New Wave, drawing on the sneakers he wore on weekends, sitting sullenly in class. He was part of a larger group of boys like him. Nobody paid them any attention, which was exactly what they wished for. He had also, around that time, stopped speaking almost entirely to Ada, who until that point had been his only friend. She had been hurt; she had tried to engage him, the way she had done previously, with lessons, or with games. By the late eighties there were decent ones to play on the computer, and Ada had mastered some of them. But suddenly Gregory preferred to be by himself. He had taken William’s room when William left home — enrolling at Roger Williams after Liston’s absolute insistence that he get a college education, and then just barely scraping by for a year before dropping out to work construction — and Gregory proceeded to split all of his time between his new bedroom and the attic. Ada, sensing that she would be unwelcome, at a certain point stopped venturing up to the third floor altogether. Through college and graduate school, they were cordial but never close.

Gregory walked to the window of the attic. She watched him as he went.

“How did you find it in the first place?” she asked. “Back when we were kids. It was hidden in a dictionary.”

“I was. . going through your stuff. After you left for college.”

“Why?”

“Will you make me say it now?” said Gregory.

“No,” said Ada, though she realized as soon as the words left her that she wanted him to. She wanted to hear his voice as he said it.

She looked down at herself with something like curiosity. She rarely considered her own physical presence on the earth; for much of her life, and increasingly in recent years, she had felt like a brain in a vessel meant only to sustain its function. Only Jim, in graduate school, had ever made her feel anything different. Only Jim had looked at her body with open want, had touched it, the first time, as if it were something fragile and substantial at once; something capable; something meant to be tested and revered. Those years were a spell under which she had fallen. Since then she had told herself they were anomalous, a coincidence, a lightning strike of taste and place and timing. No one, since Jim, had turned a gaze upon her like the one that Gregory now bore.

She watched him as he looked at her. And she felt something ancient and abandoned awakening in her, bottomless and strange, like the revelation of a new dimension she had not known existed.

“You can say it if you want to,” said Ada. But suddenly she felt there was no power in language, and then they were not speaking, or thinking. He was near her.

“Can I?” he said, and she nodded. He put a hand to her face first, as if testing for fever.

When she breathed, she felt she was taking something into her lungs alongside the air: the molecules of Gregory, the ether of him, the atmosphere. His world. Something difficult to describe in words alone.