Liz Moore - The Unseen World

In the weeks and months that followed the dinner party, no one mentioned its strange end to Ada, her father’s sudden lapse, or asked her any questions about David’s increasingly odd behavior. Occasionally, at the lab, she felt as if she and David were being excluded from something: where formerly Liston or Charles-Robert would have welcomed her into any room — discussed the bugs in a particular program with her, put an arm about her shoulders — now there was often a feeling of conversations stopping when she rounded a corner. The new grad students found their way into the routine of the laboratory, and Ada kept a closer eye on her father, noting peculiarities in his speech or habits when they arose, attempting to classify them somehow.

In the evenings, she worked at the puzzle on the disk David had given her, marked For Ada on its case. It had turned out to be, when she’d inserted it into her computer and started it up, simply a text document with a short string of seemingly random letters.

DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ , it read.

David would not give her any clues. Together, they had been studying cryptography and cryptanalysis for the past several years — a hobby of David’s that, he said, came out of his days at Caltech, where his mentor had been a cryptanalyst during the war — and he told her this was her next assignment. “It may take you a while,” he admitted. “Don’t let it affect your other work, of course.”

While she worked, he worked: in his office, with the door now closed sometimes. She looked at the outside of it, vaguely hurt.

Then Christmas came, and with it the Christmas party that Ada always anticipated and dreaded in equal parts, for with it came outsiders.

David loved Christmas. In addition to their annual trip to New York, he insisted upon several other traditions, and balked at any suggestion of variance: after dinner on Thanksgiving he always put on the record player an album of the Trapp Family Singers performing Christmas songs from around the world, and he played this regularly until January 2, and then packed it away; then there was the Stringing of the Lights that occurred on the first Saturday of December, and which David executed with an efficiency that put the other fathers on the block to shame. In mid-December they cut down a Christmas tree at an orchard in the Berkshires, a daylong expedition that he put on the calendar with great seriousness on December 1; and after that they visited Cambridge, where Frank lived, to go with him to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant and then to Sanders Theatre to see the Christmas Revels — a sort of scholarly variety show of medieval Christmas pageantry, with a dose of druidism thrown in as well. Just the sort of thing that appealed to David and his cohort.

“Isn’t it cozy out,” David was fond of saying, on first snowfall. “Ada, come look.” And if she was asleep, he would wake her; and she would rise from her bed, sleepy-eyed, rubbing her face, and walk to the window of their drafty house, and together she and David would stand in silence, together in the night, looking out onto Shawmut Way through a frosty, rattling window, their breath obscuring it slowly.

The Christmas party was the culmination of all of these traditions, and perhaps David’s favorite tradition of all. He insisted, always, that a party was not complete without some entertainment, a game, an organized activity that required everyone’s participation. Some years it was a hired guitarist or a group of carolers; some years it was a juggler or a magician. (“What else is one supposed to do — just stand around and drink?” asked David, perplexed.) It was this philosophy that caused him to declaim the same riddle to the new graduate students at the dinner he held for them every year; and it was this philosophy that had caused him, that December, to write a Christmas play for every member of the lab to perform, in front of a small audience of colleagues from other departments, spouses and children of lab members, and staff and administrators from other parts of the university.

He had told none of them this in advance. Instead, at 9:00, tinging his glass with a finger, he asked for everyone’s attention, and directed them all to form a semicircle in the main room of the lab.

“Here we go,” said Hayato, good-naturedly.

“Except you, Hayato,” said David. “You come up here. And you, and you, and you,” he said, grabbing the rest of the lab. “And you,” he said, last, to Ada, who had been praying to be forgotten. Her face burned as she walked to the front of the room and stood with the rest of them. In front of her, she saw a blur of faces before looking quickly down at the floor.

David was holding, in his left hand, a stack of stapled pages, which he passed out to each of them with mock seriousness, a flourish for each one. His face was pink and excited; his thick glasses were slipping down on his nose.

He turned back to the audience. “A play!” he announced. “A Christmas play.”

Later, Ada would not remember its exact plot — something about a group of superhero nerds sent back in time to determine how to achieve a better lift-to-drag ratio for Santa’s sleigh. (Ada played a reindeer.) What she did remember: David’s happiness, his complete contentment at the execution of his plan, how carefree he looked; and the way he directed them all, like a conductor with a baton; and her own embarrassment, her burning face, her quiet, noncommittal line delivery; and, in the front row, the faces of the audience members, some of whom looked bemused, some of whom looked befuddled; and there, to the right, at the edge of the crowd, the face of William, Liston’s oldest son, who stared at all of them incredulously, his mouth slightly agape.

In March she turned thirteen.

“A teenager,” said David, shaking his head. “Hard to believe, isn’t it, Ada?”

She nodded.

“Would you like a cake? I suppose you should have something festive,” said David, but Ada said no.

Secretly, she had been wanting one, a candle to blow out, a wish to make. She had gotten only one present that year, from Liston, naturally: a hot-pink sweater with a purple zigzag pattern that Ada loved but felt too self-conscious to wear. David had not gotten her anything: she was not surprised, since he was both absentminded and vaguely opposed to consumerism. That year, however, she had been secretly hoping for something from him, which she only realized when nothing came. Some external signifier of what she thought was an important birthday. A piece of jewelry, maybe. An heirloom. Something timeless and important. She wished, too, as she had been doing with increasing frequency, that she and David could engage in some of the more typical conventions that accompanied occasions such as birthdays. A big party with friends, for example. A sleepover: she had never had a sleepover. She had no one to ask.

That evening, after a quiet dinner at home, the telephone rang, and David answered in his office.

“Yes?” he said, slowly, a note of surprise in his voice. It was nearly 11:00 at night. Normally Ada would have been in bed, but she felt unsettled and alight with something: the newness of being a teenager, perhaps. She felt untired and alert.

From the dining room, Ada listened to her father, in his office, on the phone; but David was quiet for some time. She could see the back of him, the receiver pressed to his ear. He said nothing.

Abruptly, he stood and walked to his office. She caught his eye quickly, and then he closed the door. Lately he had been intentionally excluding her from things, and each time she felt the sting of it sharply.

She sat for a while at the dining room table, but, although she could hear the low murmur of David’s voice through the door, his words were indecipherable. She stood up.