The Unseen World (31 page)

Ada had also invited Hayato and Charles-Robert. She had specifically not invited Liston. On the phone, the night before, with each of the other members of the lab, she had asked them not to tell her. She had told them all that she would explain tomorrow.

So, that morning, when Liston had announced that she would
be going to a mall in the suburbs with Matty and a friend, Ada was relieved: she would not have to make up an excuse regarding her whereabouts. And when Liston asked her, hopefully, if she wanted to come, Ada had declined, citing homework.

“Okay, honey,” said Liston. “Tell me if you need anything, all right?”

As she left, Ada felt a slight pang of guilt, or confusion, about Liston. At times, she forgot that she was still mad at her; in the kitchen, Liston would tease her and she would laugh easily. Or in the morning, Liston would leave an encouraging note on the counter, lumping Ada in warmly with the rest of her brood, telling them all to have a nice day, and Ada would read it gratefully, happy to be included, happy to be part of a large loud family. And then, inevitably, she would catch herself. She would call herself a traitor; and she would remember Liston's traitorousness, how quickly she had accepted the idea that David had been lying, how dismissive she had been of any argument to the contrary.
Misguided
, Liston often said, when describing David's actions. But that was just as bad as calling him deceitful. Worse, perhaps; for it implied some plasticity in his character, some weakness. Yes: she was glad that Liston was not there with them at the lab that morning. The existence of the floppy disk was a secret she had been keeping to herself; if it yielded nothing helpful, she did not want Liston to know.

The lab had changed very little since David's retirement. Liston, preferring her office over anyone else's, hadn't moved. Instead, they had simply turned David's office into a smaller seminar room for meetings with the group. There was a table in the center now, but everything else was the same: there, in the corner, was David's desk, a new Mac resting on it now.

It was in this room that they all gathered, which felt to Ada something like time travel. The smell of it: warm electronics and wood. Even the crack in the ceiling was familiar to her.

She sat facing the three of them: Frank, Hayato, and Charles-Robert, who was regarding her with something like bemusement.

“So,” he said to her, “you look different than the last time we saw you, madam.”

“Thanks,” said Ada, not knowing what else to say. She was embarrassed. She had been wearing her hair differently, at the encouragement of Theresa. She had forgotten to wear her glasses; she had still been doing without them whenever she could, and that day she walked out of the house without them.

“How have you been, Ada? How's David?” asked Hayato, kindly.

“Okay,” said Ada. Against her will she felt a tremble in her chin. And she realized that she felt betrayed by not just Liston, but all of them, all of them. Her friends. Something like her family. Where had they been?

The three of them glanced at each other. They were sitting across the table from her, three in a row, so that she felt as if they were interviewing her.

“I'm sorry we haven't been in touch,” said Frank. “We just—weren't sure how to react, in light of . . .”

“It's okay,” Ada said again. She did not want to hear what they had to say. She had not yet taken her jacket off, her blue ski parka, and it was making her warm. It bunched up around her shoulders as she sat against the hard back of the chair. In her pocket, she touched the four corners of the floppy disk she had brought with her. It was one of the copies she had made. The original disk that David had given her was still at Liston's, in its dictionary, for safekeeping.

She explained her request straightforwardly, and all three of them sat up with interest. She could have predicted it: this group had always loved a puzzle.

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

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

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

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

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

DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ
.

Silence.

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

“That's it,” said Ada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T
o Ada's surprise, when she walked back into the house that evening, Melanie, Janice, and Theresa were standing in the kitchen with Liston and William and some of his friends. The girls were wearing bright, absurd dresses: pinks and yellows and greens, quite different from the muted colors of the Queen of Angels uniform that she saw them in daily. The boys were wearing tight jeans and fat high-top sneakers and oversized white button-downs. Liston had a camera out, a clunky Polaroid that she had had since the sixties, and was flapping a newly printed photograph in front of her face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liston looked pained.

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

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

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

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

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

Ada nodded.

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

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

“How's David doing?” she asked.

“Okay,” said Ada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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