The Unseen World Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    David was forty-six when Ada was born and had already been head of his own lab for sixteen years. For the first years of her life—when she was too young to entertain herself for long days at work—Ada had a nanny, Luda, a tall, soft-spoken Russian woman with one long braid down her back, whom David hired to watch her while he was out. But at night and on the weekends it was David and Ada alone. The fact that she survived her infancy astounded her sometimes. She couldn’t imagine it, though she often tried: David, waking up in the night to attend to her, warming bottles, boiling them; or preventing her from falling off of anything high or running into anything low orbeing bitten by anything mean; or taking her to the park in a stroller; or folding her snugly into a blanket; or gazing down at her while she ate from a bottle; or letting her fall asleep on his fatherly chest: these actions seemed so incongruous with Ada’s idea of David as to be impossible. And yet he must have done these things: she was alive as the proof.
    Ada’s memories of David began later, with their conversations. She could not remember not talking to David. Every waking hour was, in his mind, an opportunity for interesting conversation, a chance to analyze their lives and the lives of all humans. “Are we very happy, Ada?” he often asked her, and she always said yes, though sometimes with hesitation—as if she knew that the question itself implied the opposite. But for the most part, she was utterly content with her strange, satisfying existence: Ada and David together, always.
    He had small rituals: he made tea in an elaborate old-fashioned way that, he said, his mother taught him; and he watched a certain police drama religiously, the only television show he enjoyed, often shouting out the perpetrator’s name halfway through the episode, crowing each time he was correct; and when Ada was small, before bedtime he would read to her from books that he loved, never children’s books; and on Sunday afternoons he liked to go to a particular café in Dorchester to organize his brain. Ada did whatever homework he had assigned her while he wrote out formulas and drew diagrams, in his cramped particular handwriting, on stacks of napkins provided to him by Tran, the eponymous owner of the café, who was himself an amateur scientist, well versed in Feynman and Planck. Her father, though a computer scientist by profession, had a strong background in pure mathematics. He was interested in all the sciences, and in the humanities as well: he had learned French as a boy and still spoke it fairly well, and from time to time would attempt to teach himself something like Mandarin or