Liz Moore: The Unseen World

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.”

Ada 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.