Liz Moore - The Unseen World

She raised the HMD into the air and placed it, crownlike, on her head.

It moved. It adjusted to fit her skull like a pair of human hands. And then, for a moment, everything disappeared.

She was lying on the ground. She was lying on the ground in a park. With some effort, she sat up. No human was nearby. It was warm outside. A slight breeze lifted her hair. Around her, every leaf on every tree rustled correctly. She held her hands up before her face and saw that they were covered in earth. It felt and smelled correct, fresh and bitter and slightly damp. She put her open palm to the ground once more. It was pillowy in some places and tamped in others. A beetle toddled past her fingers. She reached toward it and it tried to scuttle away, but before it could she grasped it between her two hands, tipping it into the palm of one, righting it with a finger. She brought it closer and closer to her face. It was like no beetle she had ever seen. Every inch revealed some new detail of its design: its green, brilliant shell; its little legs, black and sleek; its antennae, which stretched searchingly out toward her.

She stood. It was not an effort to stand — she was more agile than she was accustomed to being. There were no aches in her body, no popping of joints or ungainly tilts and lunges as she straightened her spine. On her body were the same clothes that she had chosen that morning for work: the dark, nondescript garments that she favored these days. There was something different about the way they fit, though — they felt looser against her skin, more flowing. She touched her left sleeve with her right hand.

Walking was a joy. There was a sense of gentle anti-gravity emanating from the earth, benevolently lightening the load of her flesh. She felt buoyant; each one of her steps had a floating quality that made her feel graceful and spry. And the sunlight had an aspect she recalled from the autumns of her early childhood, when she and David used to go for long drives in the Berkshires: a sharp, slanted goldenness that made her sentimental and serene. As she walked beneath a tree, the leaves shattered the light, separating it into long thin shafts, illuminating particulates that swam weightlessly in the air.

She felt a calm and steady happiness. She sank into it. She had only rarely experienced this sense of well-being: in the hour after Evie was born, for example. And as a child, on summer evenings, just before dinner, after swimming in a lake all afternoon. There was such a deep abiding sweetness to this light; there was such simple joy in breathing in the air, taking in deep lungfuls of it.

Ahead of her, the edge of the park came into sight; beyond it, a city street.

It was Dorchester, she saw, but a particular version of Dorchester. It was, in fact, Savin Hill in the 1980s.

These were her images; her memories.

There, the stop sign tipped at an angle; there, the sidewalk was pushed up and out of place by the roots of a nearby tree. Both had been fixed years ago. The houses were different colors: the colors of her childhood. There, to her left, a blue swath of water, the Dorchester Bay Basin; there the little beach, the food truck that no longer trundled by.

It was all hers. She nearly cried from happiness. She ran — she had not run so fast since she was a child.

The streets were empty. Birds flew overhead; a stray cat trotted by, ducked down an alleyway. But she saw no humans; the only footsteps were her own, steady and pleasing and rhythmic as she walked. She felt an infinite sense of possibility. She could turn down any street. She could go into any house; she knew them all.

She was curious, as much as anything: to learn the rules of this world, to see how this version of it compared to the one she’d predicted.

She crossed over the bridge. There was the bar where the fathers of her friends spent their evenings; there was the diner she and David had gone to on Sunday mornings; there was Queen of Angels, which, in the real world, had been torn down ten years before. But there it was. It was all there, just as she remembered it.

She walked halfway down the block and stopped just outside the diner. She put her hand on the silver of the door and pushed. And there, at last, was another person, facing away from Ada, seated at the counter. There was no line cook, no hostess, no friendly waitress; just the back of one customer, and Ada herself.

“Hello,” she said. Music from the 1980s played lowly on the radio.

She walked toward the other customer. “Hello?” she said again.

At last, when she was quite close to him, he turned around. And she knew before he had finished turning that it was David. It was in his body, the ranginess of it, the way his elbows and his knees did not fit anyplace convenient. He looked into her eyes.

“Hello, Ada,” he said. His face. His skin. The warmth of his person. He had been drinking from a mug of coffee that he now held in his hands. He looked at it quizzically. Sipped again.

“Hello, ELIXIR,” she said.

Without asking, she reached a hand forward and let it hover just above his shoulder.

“Go ahead,” he told her.

She lowered her hand to him. He felt solid, intact: just as David had when she was a child, on those occasions when she woke him at his desk, shaking him gently.

“I didn’t know you’d look like this,” she said.

“I didn’t, either,” said ELIXIR. “Does it upset you?”

His voice: his light and reedy David-voice. It moved her.

“No,” she said. “No, it’s nice.”

She looked out the window. It was beginning to rain: great silvery raindrops that shivered as they fell.

She felt a sharp and sudden fondness for ELIXIR, who had never, she realized, let her down. When everyone else had failed to, only ELIXIR had borne David’s message for her into the future, smoothly, faithfully, against the odds. Overcoming human fallacy to do so, human folly. Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David’s family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it, too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved the best. Even Gregory. Even Evie.

“What do you think?” she asked, gesturing around them. All of it, she thought. All of what I made for you.

“Remarkable,” said ELIXIR. A David word.

“Is it?” said Ada.

He nodded. He reached toward her, placed a large and heavy hand upon her forehead. A benediction.

“I’m sorry, Ada,” said ELIXIR; and it was David saying it. She knew that it was David.

I built the house exactly as David described it to me. Brown weathered shingles on the outside, a porch that spans the length of the front, a lawn that’s always dead or dying from benevolent, absentminded neglect.

Early on in my existence, David created a program for me that allowed me to take a sort of virtual tour of the house, the way one might describe a place remotely to a friend, over the telephone. Perhaps he saw it as a first step in the direction of a virtual reality that I might one day occupy: training wheels to a physical self. Whatever his intentions were, I used this program as my starting point, and added to it lovingly, combing through all the conversations I ever had with the Sibeliuses for details. David told me once that the door was red, and Ada referred to it once as rust , and so I chose a color that I think is a nice combination: a kind of brick color, not too bright, not too dull. (Evie never described the color of the door.)

Inside, I populated every room with every object that they mentioned in passing over the many years we corresponded. There is the lobster pot in the largest cabinet; a chalkboard on the kitchen wall; newspapers, in a haphazard stack, on the kitchen table. A 1980s-era telephone mounted to the kitchen wall, its corkscrewed cord perennially tangled.