The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  Bijlhoff, who’d been brought in by the original cofounders of the company to head the Alterra initiative, was now the only Tri-Tech employee who’d been working there longer than Ada, and the only Tri-Tech employee to have an office door. Doors, in general, were not part of Tri-Tech’s culture. While other tech companies were going remote, Tri-Tech had hung on tenaciously to its physical space. It occupied the top two floors of a building that now, nearly a third vacant in the wake of the closure of several start-ups in a row, felt something like post–Gold Rush California. The main level was set up like an atrium or a piazza, with six Dorian columns stretching from glossy floor to vaulted ceiling, and two walls of windows. A dome at the top of the building sported an oculus in its center that let in a dramatic, slowly rotating shaft of light. The VPs, including Ada, had their own offices around the perimeter of the main floor; but they were doorless, open to the rest of the space. The other employees spent their days out in the open, at temporary workstations or on couches. They were given breakfast, lunch, and dinner, hot meals rolled out on carts that locked into place at one end of the main floor. They were given healthy snacks throughout the day. Sometimes it felt, to Ada, a little like what preschool must have felt like, though she couldn’t be sure; there were even two small dark offices with cots inside them, in case a midday nap was required by an employee who had recently pulled an all-nighter.

  She walked across the floor to Bijlhoff’s office and found the door closed. She wanted to let him know about what she and Tom had done the night before, in the two hours before the meeting began. She rehearsed it in her head: she would assure him that the reps seemed, now, to be behaving; she would run through the backup plan they’d enact in case they didn’t.

  She rapped lightly at the door, and Bill Bijlhoff opened it after a beat.

  “Ada,” he said, “I’m glad to see you. Come in.”

  He was a good-looking man, tall, light-haired, straight-up-and-down. He was slightly older than Ada. Rumors placed him at forty-four, but his actual age was a closely kept secret. Five years ago, when Alterra was booming, he’d been a Silicon Valley celebrity. He had been profiled in every major magazine in the country. He’d appeared, in cartoon form, on The Simpsons. He’d given a TED talk. Now, even with the company in decline, he had not lost the persona he had acquired in those years: that of mischievous boy genius, pioneer, freethinker. Despite the firm’s troubles, Bijlhoff’s estimation of himself remained unshaken. Ada had as little interaction with him as she could manage; he liked her, she thought, because she had never given him a reason not to. Other employees, ones who were closer to him, cycled in and out of his favor rapidly and randomly; she watched them sometimes, shaken, walking out of his office with their heads low.

  “Have a seat,” said Bijlhoff, and she did, and so did he.

  “Everything looking good?” he asked her. She nodded.

  “I think so,” she said, and he said, “Great.”

  “The demo was glitching a little bit last night, but I think we’ve got it under control,” she began. Bijlhoff didn’t look interested.

  “Listen, Ada,” he said. He took a breath.

  “Yes?” said Ada.

  “I’ve been talking with some board members. We’re letting Meredith run the meeting today.”

  Ada paused.

  “Meredith Kranz?” she asked dumbly.

  “Yeah.

  “As in,” said Ada.

  “We’re turning it over to her. We think she’s got it. We think she’ll be good.”

  Ada opened and closed her mouth. “But,” she said.

  “I know you and Tom have been working on the pitch for a while,” said Bijlhoff, “and that’s great. But the fact is that none of the investors we have coming to sit in today knows anything about programming. And we think Meredith will do a good job of packaging it for them.”

  “What if they have questions?”

  “I have faith that Meredith can answer them,” said Bijlhoff. “Or else I’ll be there, too.”

  Bill had been a programmer, once upon a time; but he hadn’t worked on the tech side of the firm in years. It wouldn’t have surprised Ada if he’d forgotten most of what he once knew. Certainly he knew none of what had gone into the beginnings of the new project.

  “You don’t even want us to sit in?” Ada said. “Just to be safe?”

  Bijlhoff stuck out his bottom lip, blew upward. A small lock of hair shifted slightly on his forehead. She pictured him suddenly as a rep: How might one animate that particular motion, that particular expression?

  “I think you might make Meredith nervous,” he said, in a tone of voice that told her he was trying to be kind.

  Ada lifted a hand and dropped it onto the arm of the chair she was sitting in. She put her hands on her knees. She leaned forward, stood up.

  “I guess that’s that,” she said.

  She wondered—briefly, perhaps unfairly—whether Meredith was sleeping with him. It wouldn’t be the first time that Bijlhoff had dated an employee.

  “You’re appreciated, Ada,” said Bijlhoff. “I hope you know that.”

  Ada nodded, once. She walked toward the door. She looked down at the shoes she had chosen for the day: heels. She never wore heels.

  A thought occurred to her then, and she turned to face Bijlhoff before she left.

  “The name,” she said. “Does Meredith know where the name comes from?”

  “Of course,” said Bijlhoff. But he had already lifted his phone to make a call, and he looked at Ada as if waiting for her to leave.

  The name of the program was the Unseen World. The UW for short. And the truth was that no one, except for Ada, knew how it had come to be called that. She had suggested it; the others had approved. She had never shared the story of its provenance.

  She walked, dumbfounded, toward her doorless office. Around her, heads popped over workstation walls. Did the rest of the company know already? Meredith Kranz was friends with some of them. Halfway across the floor, she ran into Tom Tsien, who looked at her grimly.

  “You, too?” said Ada. He nodded. Lifted his shoulders once, dropped them.

  Ada sat at her desk for a while, uncertain of what to do next. She felt almost as if she should go home for the day: it was too much, she thought, to watch a series of investors walk past her office on their way to the meeting room. To watch Meredith walk toward her fate. What would she do, Ada wondered, if the reps didn’t cooperate? What would Bill do? He was both impulsive and stubborn: ten years ago, when fate had been working in his favor, these were the traits that had propelled him into glory. Now these were the traits that threatened to tank the entire company.

  She didn’t notice she was holding her phone until it vibrated in her hand.

  She glanced at it. It was the same 617 number that had called earlier that morning. This time, she answered it.

  The person on the other end hesitated long enough that she nearly hung up.

  “Ada?” he said, at last.

  It was a voice she hadn’t heard in half a decade.

  1980s

  Boston

  “I need help,” said Ada, breathless. She was pink from the cold. Her nose was running. She was standing in front of Miss Holmes at the Fields Corner Public Library branch. She was panting audibly; she had run too fast from the bus stop.

  “Are you all right, Ada?” said Miss Holmes, looking concerned.

  “Can you help me find something?”

  “Of course,” she said, but she looked down at her watch. “But it’s 1:55, dear.”

  On Saturdays, the library closed at 2:00 p.m.

  “I,” said Ada, and then wondered how she could possibly convey to Miss Holmes the urgency of the situation. She stood silently for a moment, mustering her courage.

  “Tell you what,” said Miss Holmes kindly. “Just sit right here a moment. I’ll be right back.” She gestured to a low table. Gratefully, Ada sat; and she watched as Miss Holmes made her rounds, leaning over to encour
age the patrons to finish what they were doing, in her low librarian voice. Then she returned to her post to check out their books.

  Ada looked at the picture she was still clutching in her hands. Olathe, Kansas. Harold Canady. Or Canadee? Susan Canady. The words knocked around inside her, bitter in their foreignness, somehow unsavory. She didn’t know how to pronounce the word Olathe. She didn’t know how Canady was spelled.

  When the last patron had left, Miss Holmes turned the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED and then returned to Ada’s side.

  “Now, dear,” she said. “What can I help you with?”

  And Ada, at last, confessed to Miss Holmes everything that she knew, managing to do so with a blank, impartial face, trying to imagine how David might have done it. Clinically. Forthrightly.

  Miss Holmes, to her credit, did not betray much shock, though surely she must have been dismayed—not only for Ada, but perhaps for herself. She murmured from time to time sympathetically. She put a hand on Ada’s forearm at the first mention of David’s disease and she left it there comfortingly.

  “Oh, Ada,” she said, when Ada had finished speaking and was looking stiffly down at the table in front of her.

  “And what is that you’re holding?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Ada. “It might be a picture of his real family. David’s. Or Harold’s, I guess.” It made her flinch: the thought that not even his name, not even the word that she had spoken so many thousands or millions of times in her life—the word that meant, to her, father—was correct. David was gone, but also, David was gone: replaced with something cold and uncanny.

  “And it’s from a place called Olathe,” said Ada, spending two syllables on the name.

  “Oh-layth-ah,” said Miss Holmes. “If I’m not mistaken.”

  She wore glasses on a chain about her neck, and she held them up to her eyes now to look.

  “Oh, that’s him,” she said, with something like fondness, about the boy in the picture. “Isn’t it.”

  Ada nodded. Against her will, she still loved the picture: she had always been fascinated by it as a piece of evidence that her father had once, improbably, been a child.

  “Where would you like to begin?” asked Miss Holmes.

  There were two steps to be taken, they decided. The first was looking up further information on the Sibeliuses themselves: in the society pages of old editions of the New York Times on microfilm, for example, said Miss Holmes. “That might be a good place to start.” If they could find more information about the real David Sibelius and his parents, they might find some explanation, some connection to Ada’s father. And the second was finding historical records and newspaper articles about any Canady family in Olathe—only those would be much more difficult to find, said Miss Holmes, because it was quite unlikely that any library in Boston would have old editions of their local paper on microfilm. “And I’m not sure that I’m up for a trip to Kansas,” said Miss Holmes. “How about you?”

  Therefore, she called information and requested the number of the public library there.

  “The main branch, I guess,” she said to the operator.

  “Oh. That branch, then,” she said, a moment later.

  She was standing behind the checkout counter. While she waited, she inspected her glasses. She inspected the piece of paper in her hand, on which Ada had written down the names Harold Canady, Susan Canady, spelling them the way she had heard them, as they had been pronounced by David hours before.

  “Yes, hello,” Miss Holmes said suddenly. And she introduced herself, and her occupation, and she explained the information she was looking for, and she left her name and number—both for the library and, Ada noted, for her home telephone.

  “Thanks very much,” said Miss Holmes. “I would so appreciate anything you can find. And I’m happy to return the favor anytime.”

  Then, hanging up the phone, Miss Holmes turned back to Ada. “I’m afraid I have to go home now, dear,” she said. “But let’s continue this on Monday, after your school day, shall we?”

  Ada walked back to Liston’s slowly. Dorchester was busy that day: mothers out grocery shopping, their hands tied up with bags and children; teenagers kicking rocks down the sidewalk, shouting to one another across Dot Ave. Ada was brimming with a sort of energy that did not have an outlet: new information, new ideas, new emotions that she could not articulate to anyone. She had already made up her mind not to tell Liston what David had said: this was a part of the puzzle she wanted to figure out for herself. She did not want to think of him as Harold Canady; she wanted her father to still be David for as long as he could be. She wanted everyone else to still think of him as such.

  Most of the Listons were home when she arrived back at the house, but Liston herself was out. The familiar, slightly artificial smell of the house presented itself to her, and it occurred to her that it had begun to replace the musty warmth of David’s house as the smell of home. Matty was in the den, watching television. From upstairs she heard Melanie’s high, breathy voice, and William’s low one, but everything was still. In the kitchen, she made herself a sandwich from what Liston kept on hand—Wonder Bread, turkey, American cheese, Miracle Whip—and brought it upstairs to her room to eat.

  Moments after she sat down at her desk, there was a light knock on her door.

  “Hello?” said Ada, mid-bite.

  The door opened slightly. In the crack between it and the threshold, Ada saw two eyes peering toward her. Gregory.

  “What do you want?” she asked, unkindly. She was still incensed from that morning. What right did he have, she thought again, to be on David’s computer? She felt an angry surge in her pulse again. What right did he have to set one foot in their house?

  “Can I come in for a sec?” Gregory asked.

  “Why?” said Ada.

  “Just for a sec,” said Gregory. And, without waiting for permission, he entered the room. He looked shifty and nervous. He stood facing her, folded his hands in front of him, looked down at the floor. Then he mumbled something too quiet to be heard.

  “I can’t hear you,” said Ada. It occurred to her, for the first time, that she sounded like the girls she had become friends with at Queen of Angels. That the stress and intonation of her voice had begun to mimic theirs. She said like now, with some frequency. She said whatever.

  “I’m sorry,” said Gregory.

  “For what?” she said. She wanted to hear him say it.

  “For being in your dad’s house,” said Gregory.

  “What were you doing there,” said Ada. “Had you been there before?”

  Gregory paused. And then he nodded.

  “A lot?” Ada demanded. He nodded again.

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to try to help you,” he said. He was still looking at the floor, but she could see a redness creeping up from his collar, darkening his neck. “I’m good at that kind of stuff. I think.”

  “I don’t need your help. I’m good at that kind of stuff, too,” said Ada. “And it’s not your business.”

  Gregory raised his shoulders up and down, once, slowly. She looked at his hands. There were raw, red patches around all of his fingernails, where he had torn at his own live skin. And, against her will, she began to pity him. There was a small but growing part of her that recognized him as a potential ally. His interests, after all, aligned with hers, and with David’s; and the fact that he had fixed David’s computer when she could not—although it infuriated her—also impressed her on every level. He was crafty. She thought of him alone at school, as she had been when she first arrived. She thought of him running a grubby finger along a line of lockers, as she had often seen him doing; she thought of his sad yelps as he struggled to free himself from the larger boys who collared him at school; she thought of him up in his attic for hours on end, doing God knows what, as Liston said, and acknowledged finally that, of all the Listons, this one was most like her.

  Over the course of the next two
weeks, Ada’s tenuous alliance with Gregory grew. She divulged to him what she knew so far, in vague and guarded terms, and they settled into an uneasy friendship. She still mistrusted him, still wondered whether he was concealing anything from her. Her pride prevented her from asking him outright; she wanted him to think she knew more than she did.

  Instinctively, both of them made the decision to conceal the time they spent together. At school, she ignored him. She did not acknowledge him when she passed him on the sidewalk outside Queen of Angels after school, and he accepted this as a matter of course. She loathed herself for doing this; she knew that David, especially, would be appalled; but she told herself that his was no longer the advice to listen to. And she comforted herself by telling herself that, in any case, David did not know about the codes of children. She sensed the presence of some unbendable rule that dictated that simultaneous friendship with Gregory and with Melanie McCarthy and her cohort was not permissible—and, spinelessly, she chose the latter.

  At Liston’s house, Ada and Gregory maintained the steady silence that had always existed between them. On the rare occasions when the entire family gathered together—Thanksgiving, recently, being one; and then Liston’s forty-fourth birthday, on December 1—Ada and Gregory carefully said nothing to one another, the way they always had. Gregory continued to spend hours alone in the attic; only when no one was home did she join him, keeping a watchful eye on the driveway and running down the stairs at the first sign of anyone’s return. They also met at David’s house, which Ada gave Gregory permission to visit, even when she was not there. She even gave him a key, so that he did not have to sneak off with his mother’s.

  With Gregory’s permission, she had made two copies on his computer in the attic of the For Ada encrypted document, the one on the disk that David had given her the night of his final dinner party. Then she had returned the original to its place in between the pages of the dictionary on her closet shelf, along with the train ticket and the printout of the strange document she had found on David’s computer.