The Unseen World (44 page)

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.