The Unseen World (3 page)

Sufficient alcohol had been consumed; there were no uneasy pauses, no long breaks in conversation that required Ada to bring forth one of her prepared talking points. Instead, she sat next to Edith and took in her outfit. She was even more beautiful than Ada had initially realized, and a sort of smooth-skinned glowing ease emanated from her person, into the thrall of which Ada imagined men fell powerfully. Edith was fashionable and reserved: Ada noticed with some jealousy that one of the banana clips she coveted pulled Edith's hair away from her face loosely, giving her a look of orchestrated carelessness. She wore a sleeveless, collared floral dress with a knee-length hemline and buttons done up to her neck. She did not carry a purse but there were large pockets on the dress, and Ada wondered what she kept in them: A pen, maybe. Lipstick, maybe: her lips were a light unnatural pink, a radioactive color that David probably did not like. A lighter, Ada thought. She could have been a smoker; many of David's European colleagues were. She was remarkably pretty.

Edith turned, caught Ada observing her, smiled.

“How old are you, Ada?” she asked: the first question new adults usually asked.

“Twelve,” Ada said, and Edith nodded sagely.

“And what are your favorite books?”

“The Lord of the Rings
books,” Ada said, “are my favorite books of all time.”

In fact they were her father's favorite books of all time, but she had adopted them as her own so fully that she was no longer certain what the truth was.

Edith studied her for a moment. “Twelve,” she said. “A difficult age for me. Better for you, I'm sure.”

Was it? Ada looked around the table at her father and her friends. They were her constant source of companionship, of knowledge, of camaraderie; each one offered to her some necessary part of her existence: Frank for kindness, and Liston for protection and love and common sense, and Hayato for artistry and humor. And the others,
who could not make it: Charles-Robert for confidence and a sort of half-serious disdain for outsiders; Martha, the young secretary of the division, for knowledge of popular culture and fashion. And, above all others, David, for devotion and knowledge and loyalty and trust, David as the protector and guide of them all. But despite the completeness of what the adults around her offered to Ada, the sense of reassurance and comfort they extended, something was missing from her brief existence, and she knew, though she could not bring herself to fully form the thought, that it was friends her own age.

The dinner moved through salad and into dessert—Giordi had playfully kept his bib on well beyond the lobster course, insisting that he could not be trusted without one and that he would wear one regularly now—and Ada leapt up several times to refill the wine glasses of the guests. A fast-moving storm had swept through the neighborhood, and the house was finally cooling off. A damp breeze came in through the windows. They were near enough to the ocean to smell it, on nights like these. David invited everyone into the living room, and Ada stayed behind to clear the table.

When she had finished, she joined the group, and found that the guests had arranged themselves into little clusters. She hesitated for a while on the threshold of the living room, wiping her hands on the back of her shirt, and then joined Frank and Joonseong. In moments when it seemed appropriate, she produced some of the topics she had earlier bookmarked for discussion—a recent shooting in Mattapan; a French film from the 1950s that David had taken her to see at the Brattle; the restaurants surrounding the Bit, and their strengths and weaknesses—but she found herself increasingly distracted by David, who was standing slightly apart from any group, gazing at the floor. He had his hands clasped behind his back; he looked vaguely, unsettlingly lost. Ada nodded and feigned attentiveness as Joonseong told her about his new apartment, but in her peripheral vision she saw
David walking slowly toward the window, as if lured there by a spell: he stood still then, and she saw his lips moving quickly, his hands hanging stiffly by his sides.

“David,” said Liston, who was closest to him. “Are you all right?” Ada saw her say it. And at this he lifted his head quickly, and smiled, and turned and clapped his hands once. Everyone looked at him.

“A riddle,” David announced, “for the newest members of the lab. And the first to solve it gets a prize.”

Ada heard a thickness in his voice that she didn't recognize. She would have thought he was drunk, except that he rarely drank: a glass or two of wine was all he ever took, and tonight he'd barely had any at all. Together, everyone watched him.

This was his ritual: to each new crop of grad students, he delivered the same riddle, one he adored for its simplicity and the justice of its logic. All the permanent members of the lab could recite it and its answer in unison: they had all heard it so many times. Still, it comforted Ada somehow to hear him deliver it each year, as if it were scripture—to watch the same looks of thoughtfulness pass over the faces of the grad students, and then a lighting-up when one of them came upon the answer.

Everyone watched David expectantly: classmates observing a teacher. He cleared his throat and began. “You are a traveler who has come to a fork in the road between two villages,” he said. “The village of West is full of only murderous men incapable of telling the truth; visiting it will bring about your death. The village of East is full of benevolent men incapable of lying; visiting it will bring to you a cache of gold. Two men stand in the fork in the road—one from West and one from East. But you don't know which is which. In order to determine how to reach the village full of gold, and avoid your certain doom, you may ask only one question of only one man. What should your question be?”

The grad students paused. One of them would ask David to repeat the problem: it happened every year. This year was Joonseong, and
most likely it was due to his English, not to his logical abilities. David incanted the riddle once again, repeating it word for word. Edith was smiling about something Ada couldn't determine, and at the end of David's second recitation she put a hand out before her to signal that she had an announcement.

“I'm recusing myself. I know the answer because I've heard the puzzle before. I cannot tell a lie,” she said.

“I suppose that makes me an Easterner,” she added, and Giordi laughed too eagerly, or perhaps he was simply grateful to have understood her joke.

David then turned to Giordi and Joonseong, with some seriousness, and informed them that it was between the two of them, and reminded them of the prize. Both of them looked down at the floor contemplatively. Ada's money was on Joonseong, from the way her father had described both men. But there was a silence over the room that went on for quite some time, and eventually both of them looked at one another and then at David. Joonseong raised his hands in surrender.

David looked pleased.

“Giving up, are you?” he asked them, giddily. “Even you, Giordi?” If David's first love was being stumped, his second was stumping others.

David opened his mouth. Then he closed it.

“Your question must be,” David said. “Your question,” he said again.

He folded one arm about himself and put the other hand to his cheek. Everyone watched him. A slow unfurling sense of panic filled the room.

“My word,” said David, slowly. “I seem to have forgotten the answer.”

This was a moment that became sealed forever in Ada's memory, encased in glass, a display in the museum of David's decline. She
never forgot the brief silence that followed, during which everyone looked down at the floor and then up again, or the way that Giordi loudly cleared his throat. Or the way that David looked at her, almost in horror: the look of a pilot who has just discovered that the engines of his plane have failed. The humiliation Ada felt on his behalf was almost too much to bear. At last, she let herself articulate in her mind the thought that she had been repressing for a year or more: that something was wrong with David.

“Oh, you know it, David,” Liston finally said. “My God, of course you do.” She looked around at the rest of the group entreatingly. “The traveler would point to either of the villagers and ask the other one, ‘Which way would
he
tell me to go to get to the cache of gold?' And either man would say, ‘East.' ”

David nodded. “Yes.”

“The liar would say that the truth-teller would say East, because he only lies. The truth-teller would say that the liar would say East, because he knows that the liar always lies. East either way,” said Liston.

“And so
you
would go to the village of West,” said Liston. “And find the cache of gold. And then you'd take your friend Liston out for a nice steak dinner.”

“Yes,” said David. “Quite right. You're quite right, Liston.”

There was still too much silence in the room. David looked lost, the smile gone from his face, staring at the wall opposite him as if looking into the future.

Ada wondered if this was a moment that she should fill with conversation.

“Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the disastrous eruption of the volcano Krakatoa,” she said. It was one of the news items that she had culled from the paper.

“Oh, really?” said Edith. “I hadn't heard.”

“Of course,” David said. “What would
he
say?”

“You knew it,” said Liston.

“I knew it,” said David, pensively.

“I suppose this means you win the prize, Liston,” he added, and then he walked out of the room.

Frank murmured something about it being late. Hayato announced that he'd give the grad students a ride home.

And Ada stood frozen in the living room, not knowing what to say.

Liston squeezed her shoulders and went to the kitchen to say goodbye to David and then, from the front hallway, called out, “Good night, Ada, see you on Monday!”

“Good night,” Ada said quietly. She did not know whether Liston heard her.

She heard the sound of the front door opening and closing, and then the thunder of six pairs of feet going down the old wooden stairs of the porch, punctuated by a quick, indecipherable interjection from a male voice.

For a moment the house was quiet. And then she heard the front door open once more. David cried out, “Liston! Your prize!”

From the living room, Ada peered out into the hallway to see the back of her father. He was standing with a hand on the open door, his head bowed. In the other hand he held a little golden bag of chocolates he had bought the day before at Phillips's. Liston was out of earshot, probably already walking up the steps to her porch. The taillights of Hayato's car went past the house and were gone. After a few moments David closed the door, and Ada disappeared before he could turn and see her.

She washed the dishes. For twenty minutes, she let the warm water run over her hands.

Finally, she went to the dining room to retrieve the tablecloth and there was David, sitting at the long dining room table, turning over and over in his hands a sort of worry stone, a lucky charm in the
shape of a clover. He kept it in his pocket wherever he went. He said it helped him to think. He looked vague and puzzled.

He shifted his gaze toward her. She was angry with him for reasons she knew were unjust. She had never before seen his mind fail him so resoundingly. It threatened to rattle her long-standing impression of him as someone stately, noble, just.

“Sit down,” he told her.

She paused.

“Just for a moment,” he said. “Please.”

She complied, and he rose and walked into his office, which opened off the dining room. It was one of the only places in the house that Ada avoided: the desk was mired completely in piles of papers; the built-in bookshelves were filled entirely, and stacks of books had begun to take over the floor. She saw the back of him as he bent to open one of the drawers of the desk, and from it he produced what he was looking for, and turned and carried it back with him. He sat down across from her once more.

“Here,” he said. Ada looked at it. It was a floppy disk, and on the hard cover of it, a white plastic clamshell, he had written,
For Ada
. She opened it. On the label affixed to the disk itself, there was a message:
Dear Ada
, it said.
A puzzle for you. With my love, your father, David Sibelius
.

“It's a present,” he said. “Something I've been working on.”

“What is it?” she asked him.

“You'll see,” he said. “You'll see when you open it.”

A
da was born in 1971 to a woman whom David had hired as a surrogate. At the time this was nearly unheard-of, but—as David described it—when the opportunity arose, he took it. The surrogate was a hippie-ish woman named Birdie Auerbach, and Ada had had no contact with her since, though at the time of her birth Birdie had made it clear to David, and David had subsequently made it clear to Ada, that she could if she wanted to. But throughout Ada's childhood she had felt she really didn't need to; she felt that somehow it would be a betrayal to David if she did.

Ada never questioned his decision to bring a child into the world; her connection to him was so complete that it felt entirely natural to her. She imagined that he simply decided he wanted a child and then had one. David had never had a romance in Ada's lifetime, not that she was aware of. He was devoted to his friends and colleagues and to various people whom he occasionally mentored: there had been a number of grad students over the years, and the piano tuner, and the landscaper who mowed the lawn, whom he often invited inside for lemonade and quizzed about his business plans. There was a young girl who lived down the street who showed promise as a ballet dancer, and he encouraged her mother, with whom he had developed a friendship, to bring her to audition at the School of American Ballet in New York City—the only place, he assured her, that one could really
get a proper education in dance in the United States. He spent long hours talking with Anna Holmes, the librarian at the nearest branch of the Boston Public Library, about her life and her hobbies and her interests. She was pretty, unmarried at fifty, and could possibly, Ada thought, be in love with David. He had taken an interest in her, and in all of these acquaintances, but though he discussed them with Ada frequently and exhaustively—speculating about their friendships, their home lives, their careers—it seemed clear to her that his interest in Miss Holmes was platonic, though Ada would not even have thought to articulate it as such. He never discussed his romantic history overtly with anyone, as far as she knew. It would have seemed to him undignified. Ada had heard only vaguely about former girlfriends, young debutantes he had known when he was growing up as part of New York's upper class. She had always slept soundly, but she had some vague memories of hearing a female voice in the living room, though she also could have been dreaming. Ada supposed it was possible that on those occasions her father could have been entertaining a guest. He would never, ever have talked to her about it. The idea would have been repugnant to him: he had always been private about his personal life to an extreme, even with Ada, despite the fact that he regularly assured her of her great importance to him and of the fact that he thought of her as his closest companion.