Liz Moore - The Unseen World

When she reached the lab she went straight to Liston’s office.

“Don’t you look pretty!” said Liston, standing up from behind her desk, taking off the reading glasses she needed but professed to hate. She, too, had dressed up for David’s dinner: she was wearing an oversized pink blazer that both clashed with and set off her hair, and she had applied more blush than usual. She was wearing big, dangly earrings in geometrical shapes. She would be the one assuming David’s role as head of the lab. She looked as if she had attempted to dress in a way that reflected her promotion, but even Ada knew she had gotten it slightly wrong.

It was 4:00 in the afternoon: three hours before the dinner was set to begin. Shyly, Ada produced from her pocket the speech she had written, and asked if Liston would mind looking at it. Then she sat down on the beanbag chair that she had slept in, often, as a child, and stared at the floor, and waited anxiously for Liston to respond.

“Oh, Ada,” Liston said, “I think it’s perfect.” When she looked up, Ada saw that little pools of tears were hovering precariously above Liston’s lower lashes, threatening to spill over. Liston smiled briefly and then let her face drop. Ada studied her. She was a pretty woman, forty-three that year, slightly plump, soft-featured. To Ada, she looked perpetually like a teenager; Ada had never been privy to the dressing-table rituals and ministrations of women; she mistook Liston’s fashion sense, her dyed red hair, the mascara she wore, for signifiers of youth.

“I’m sorry,” said Liston, and she let out a sad little laugh. “I’ll just miss having you here, that’s all. Both of you.”

All six colleagues filed out, one at a time, from the main room of the Steiner Lab. Charles-Robert, and then Liston, and then Frank, and then Hayato, and then David. Ada left last; and, placing a hand on the wall behind her, she tapped the light switch down instinctively, without having to search for it. She looked backward, into the darkened office, and it felt, in a way, as if she were leaving her life and her body behind: as if, when she closed the door behind her, she would become a ghost, something spectral and disincarnate, something without a home. She wondered if this was what David felt like all the time. She wondered what would happen next.

The dinner was held in the faculty dining room of the Bit, which had been decorated with linens and flowers.

David had already declined to speak, and so he settled uncomfortably down into his chair at the table that had been reserved for the six of them, along with the provost, President McCarren, and Mrs. McCarren, a tidy woman who tried to make polite small talk with David until, at last, she gave up hope.

David’s posture was slumped; his head hung low; when people spoke to him he did not meet their gaze, but turned his own to hover someplace around their mouths, as if trying to read their lips. He did not eat until he was reminded to by Ada. He smiled politely as, one after another, his colleagues at the Bit, and some from other institutions, spoke about his achievements and intelligence, his wit and generosity; but the naming of these qualities was, to Ada, only a cruel reminder of their recent disappearance. David got tired easily now. Once or twice his eyes closed completely, and Ada jostled him as subtly as she could.

Ada was due to speak last. She felt in the pocket of her coat, which she had insisted on hanging over the back of her chair, for her speech. The paper, by then, was soft with the wear of being handled, being worried over. She produced it and put it in her lap, glanced down at it when she could. But as dessert was being served, and while the provost was speaking, David turned to her and asked, too loudly, if she was ready to leave.

Ada shook her head once, quickly. President McCarren had heard him. Ada was not certain how much the rest of the university knew about the reasons for his retirement — certainly the other members of the lab were protective enough of David not to have said too much to anyone — but in that moment she realized that everyone must have known that something was wrong with her father.

“Come now, Ada,” said David. “Really, let’s go.”

Politely, McCarren averted his gaze.

Ada leaned toward him and whispered to him urgently. “It’s for you,” she said. “The dinner is for you. We can’t leave yet.”

David was shaking his head slowly, as if he had not heard her. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and unsteadily he stood up from his chair. He held a hand up to the rest of the table. “Okay,” he said, “bye to all, now.”

Ada stood up, too. She wanted to reach out to him, to pull him forcibly back by his elbow, but she felt that that would be worse. Her speech fell from her lap onto the floor and she bent to retrieve it. Without meaning to, she caught Liston’s eye as she rose, and on her face Ada saw a look of such sadness, such pity, that she quickly turned away. Together, she and David left through a side door. And behind her, Ada heard the provost stutter and then pause.

“Well,” he said, “I guess our guest of honor is indisposed. .”

Then they were outside, and they stood together for a while on the sidewalk while Ada decided what to do next. The rain had stopped but it was bitterly cold, too cold for April.

“Can we take a cab?” Ada asked — something that David abhorred. To him, taxis were for the lazy, the fiscally irresponsible. But she thought it was worth asking, for she was shivering even in her ski parka, and that night he immediately agreed.

In the taxi, Ada was silent, furious. She said nothing except to give the driver directions, when David failed to. David rested his head against the headrest, closing his eyes for a while. She looked over at him resentfully. In the yellow light from storefronts and streetlamps, he looked sickly and old. She had been noticing lately that his physical size was shrinking: although he had always been thin, he had seemed shorter, recently, more stooped: as if he had aged five years in a week. His eyes had dark circles beneath them. She supposed he had been handsome once; his stature had helped him to be so. He was uncommonly old when she’d been born, yes, but he’d always seemed young for his years. He was tall and well built, at least, with fine features and bright, inquisitive eyes. When he felt like it, he was capable of listening intently for hours on end. Women had always liked him: Ada was not oblivious to this fact. But he was changed now. More like a grandfather than a father. Someone incapable of offering her protection. She felt unsteady and unsafe.

At home, Ada retreated to her room without saying good night. She turned on her computer, pulled ELIXIR up to have a talk. And then she heard the sound of David’s footsteps on the stairs, heard a faint knock on her door.

It was rare for David to come into her room: she had no memories of him sitting on the edge of her bed, reading her a story as she drifted to sleep. Though he read to her, it was always downstairs, in the living room, in a somewhat businesslike manner: she sitting in one chair, he in another; and when she tired, Ada would trot upstairs and put herself to bed. At four years old she knew how to brush her teeth, wash her face, comb her hair so it would not tangle; she knew how to don her nightgown, to tuck her little body into bed.

Now she went to her bedroom door and opened it a crack. She was still wearing her ridiculous outfit, banana-colored dress, heavy black tights.

David looked distressed. The light in the hallway was off. She could see him only in the light cast upon him by her little desk lamp.

“May I come in, Ada?” he said.

She opened the door a bit more. There was only one chair in her room, at her desk; David claimed this, so she sat down on her twin bed, across from him. He looked at her seriously.