The Unseen World

1980s, Boston

About Harold Canady, Ada found no further information in any newspaper. He had well and truly disappeared: just as he had wanted to.

When David’s house sold, finally, in 1987, they found nothing at all when they went through his possessions. Outside the family photograph that Ada had discovered years ago, he had kept no trace of his earlier life.

“Well,” Liston had said, “David was always thorough, wasn’t he?”

Ada nodded.

She could never bring herself to call her father Harold, even silently, and Liston seemed to tacitly agree. For the rest of her life, even into her old age, when so much else had come to light, he was David to her. He had chosen to go by this name for a reason, she told herself.

She spent the rest of her time at the Queen of Angels Upper School in a sort of limbo. For the final half of her freshman year, she avoided any contact with William. She avoided being alone with him. When he left for college in August, she let out a deep breath that she did not realize she’d been holding. Liston, who didn’t miss much, had looked at both of them curiously from time to time; but she never asked the question.

At school, Ada had many good-enough friends, and two or three true compatriots. Lisa Grady became suddenly and violently pretty as a sophomore, and was kind enough to keep Ada as her closest companion, despite Ada’s previous disloyalty; the two of them would remain friends into old age. It was around this time that Gregory, too, began to withdraw from her; and so only Matty and Liston were left to talk to at home. She told herself she didn’t mind; the two of them provided excellent companionship, and Liston, as she grew more comfortable in her role as director of the lab, became more carefree, funnier — more like the Liston that Ada had known as a young child.

Together, Ada and Liston visited David at St. Andrew’s twice a week, on Wednesday evenings and on Sundays. Ada never regained the easiness she had once felt around him; but slowly she reached an agreement with herself, premised on the idea that David must have had a plan for her. For them. She told herself that it would one day become clear; and in the meantime, while he was alive, she would try to treat him as she always had.

In his room at St. Andrew’s, she and Liston talked to him about the happenings of the lab, about the most recent developments in the field; and although he could not respond to them, he followed them, back and forth, with his eyes. He nodded from time to time. He smiled: at times he even smiled. In these moments, she forgave him.

Ada was eighteen the year that David died, in June, when everything was becoming warmer. It was not a surprise: he had not spoken in nearly two years. Unable to feed himself, he had become perilously thin, a jangle of bones and sinews. In that year, Ada’s visits reminded her of her trips to the library with Liston. There was a similar underwater quality: her breathing slowed, with his; she gazed at him, and he at her, and sometimes she reached out and held his hand — an exercise that at first felt unnatural and later correct. Once, inspired, she sang his favorite Christmas carol to him — it was “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” from a Handel and Haydn Society record of carols that skipped from use — and watched as his face changed and opened. He opened and closed his mouth, as if searching for the words; he looked up at her with the face of a child. She sang to him regularly after that, whenever no one else was there.

Three weeks before his death, he was moved to the hospice ward. There he stayed in bed all day, barely awake. On rare occasions he opened his eyes, squinted into the light like a newborn. The nurses put their hands to his forehead kindly.

Liston was there with her when it happened. It was a Sunday. David was breathing, and then he was not: as simply and quietly as the turning of a page. And Liston had said, “David?” One time, just once. A question.

Ada had said nothing.

There was no funeral. David had always been deeply uncomfortable in churches. He was cremated, and for two years his ashes sat on Liston’s mantel, until one day, home from college, Ada realized where he would want them to go. That dark night, she and Liston drove them to the Bit and scattered them all over the campus, and for some reason it was funny, and they laughed. But it was right: the lab was where David had been the happiest, the most at ease, the most himself — whoever he had been.

That was the last year Ada lived with the Listons. She went to college in the fall, attending UMass on scholarship, following in Liston’s footsteps. Over holidays, and in the summers, she visited Dorchester, sat with Liston on her porch for hours, chatting, gossiping about the lab. But mainly she lived on her own. She rented an apartment in Amherst; she shared it with two roommates all year long. She worked in a computer science laboratory headed by a kind professor named Maria Strauss.

It was in her coursework, as an undergraduate, that she discovered the meaning of the Unseen World. Two of the documents she had found among David’s things had been labeled as such: the printed, lengthy source code that she had pulled out of David’s filing cabinet, and the electronic text document on David’s computer that Gregory had found first.

The former, once she had painstakingly, manually entered it into a text document and shown it to Liston, turned out to be an odd virtual tour of their own house: a sort of user-driven navigation of David’s house on Shawmut Street. The user was given choices about where to go and what to see; always, the user was returned, at the end, to the kitchen, where the program began. Ada couldn’t fathom why David would have created such a program, but she was relieved, in a way, that it was nothing more.

The latter, the document that Gregory found, had borne four items: a paragraph — an excerpt from A. S. Eddington’s Science and the Unseen World, which Ada had located easily with the help of Anna Holmes, and which broadly questioned man’s ability to perceive reality using so biased an instrument as his brain — and three phrases, more cryptic. Ivan Sutherland. Sword of Damocles. Elixir’s house.

The work of Ivan Sutherland, a near-contemporary of David’s, came up early in Dr. Strauss’s class on the history of hardware. Sutherland was the primary inventor of the first virtual reality system with a head-mounted display, in 1968. He named it after an object from a myth: the fabled sword that hung on a thread above the head of Damocles, signifying that with power comes the burden of responsibility.

Ivan Sutherland. Sword of Damocles. Elixir’s house.

A series of thoughts occurred to her, one after the next: Was David referring to virtual reality itself as a house for ELIXIR? A virtual world the program could inhabit — long after David himself was gone?

Suddenly the memory of all of David’s masks and goggles returned to her, the row of objects and devices that hung over his workbench in the basement like the helmets of a knight. Head-mounted displays, she thought: they were primitive, basic HMDs. She and Liston had thrown them out as part of the great purging of the house on Shawmut Way; now she wished they hadn’t. Her heart contracted. David had been trying to build a world for them, she thought. For the two of them and ELIXIR. Someplace unreachable and cloistered. Someplace fair.

Virtual reality, she thought, was the unseen world. Or had the capacity to be. In fact, it could be said that all computer systems were such: universes that operated outside the realm of human experience, planets that spun continuously in some unseeable alternate stratosphere, present but undiscovered.