The first time he went to Washington with Ada, after more than two decades of being away, he glanced over his shoulder, nervous about being recognized; but he had gone completely bald, for one thing, and he had gotten thinner from adopting a running habit when he got to Boston.
He introduced George to Ada as a friend he’d grown up with. It satisfied some deep and resonant part of him to know that they knew one another—even if Ada was not aware of the whole truth.
He thought, always, that he would tell Ada his story as soon as he felt she could understand it. When she was born, he imagined telling her when she was thirteen; and the age registered itself to him as a reasonable, concrete number. And he thought the world, too, might have changed by then.
He followed the news carefully, gauging the climate of the country, trying to judge when it might be safe to reveal his story. In his lifetime, surely, he thought. Still, he remained silent.
The fear, of course, was that he would not be believed. He did not want to risk going to jail; more than that, he did not want to risk putting his daughter in danger, making her the bearer of a secret that she could not tell.
He monitored government activity. How interested was the State Department, these days, in rooting out spies? He clipped articles out of the Times and the Globe. He stored them in a filing cabinet that he took with him from his studio apartment to the house he bought in Dorchester. For a time, in the seventies, anti-espionage activity seemed to diminish, and the gay rights movement picked up traction. He thought, several times, of explaining himself to his daughter.
But in the 1980s, a series of events made David reconsider. First, in 1981, President Pearse himself was finally forced out by the board of the Boston Institute of Technology, who had gotten word of his being investigated by the federal government years before. An anonymous source had reported it. Some said it was his successor, McCarren, who had been provost while Pearse was being investigated. This was never more than hearsay: but David could believe it.
Next, anti-espionage activity in the United States became frenzied, frantic. In 1984 alone, eleven Americans were arrested for espionage or treason. Thomas Patrick Cavanagh, Robert Cordrey, Ernst Forbrich, Bruce Kearn, Karl Koecher, Alice Michelson, Richard Miller, Samuel Loring Morison, Charles Slatten, Richard Smith, and Jay Wolff. He pored over the facts of their cases obsessively. He looked for patterns.
Had any of them, he wondered, been framed? Were any of them like him?
The thought prevented him from saying a word.
His brain, meanwhile, began to fail him, and Liston noticed. For a year she badgered him to see a doctor, but he avoided it, knowing what they would say. When he returned from his first appointment, he fell into a deep and abiding despair.
The correct thing to do, he thought, would be to tell Ada everything. But she was still only twelve: perhaps too young to bear such a weight. Too young to be burdened with a story that she could not tell.
This, at least, was what he told himself. The truth was more complex: mixed up with his wish to protect Ada was something less noble, a wish to protect himself, to shield himself from her wide inquisitive eyes, from the questions that were certain to come tumbling out of her. The look of betrayal that would pass across her face and perhaps stay there, a long shadow.
One day, working with ELIXIR, a solution presented itself to him cleanly and precisely, as all correct solutions do.
ELIXIR, he realized, could function as a sort of time capsule: a bundle of information that would be released to Ada later, ideally much later, when the world had changed. And he felt increasingly that it would change: he felt the ground shifting beneath him in surprising directions. He felt a movement gathering strength.
He wrote out his story; he told it to ELIXIR over a series of conversations that occupied him for two months.
He programmed it to respond to a specific command. Who is Harold?
It was the only direct intervention ever given to the program. He tested it out.
Who is Harold? he asked it, and his own story was presented to him, line by line, as he had typed it.
He created a puzzle for his daughter—one he thought might take her several years to figure out. Solving the puzzle would yield the command.
He spoke to Liston. “Make sure to keep it running,” he said, about ELIXIR. “For as long as you live. That’s my only wish.”
Liston had looked at him, hard. She was smarter than he was, he thought often; she knew things he did not know. He waited.
“All right,” she said, “I will.” She asked nothing. He knew that she would do it.
He had come to think of ELIXIR, by that time, in a somewhat familial way. At times the machine seemed like his child, like Ada’s sibling. Other times the machine seemed like a manifestation of himself; it had acquired many of his speech patterns, his verbal tics and irregularities. Beyond all rationality, he trusted the machine as much as—more than—he had ever trusted a human.
Still, he was also deeply aware that this mechanism was a risk. And so, a good scientist, he conceived of two alternatives, two backup plans in case his original idea failed. The first was President Pearse, whom he instructed to tell Ada the truth when she reached eighteen, by which time he imagined that he, David, would be gone—or at least so incapacitated mentally that he would be unable to convey his story.
As for the second: after much consideration, David decided to contact George. It had been several years since they had spoken, and when he tried the telephone number he had for him, he found that it no longer worked. He tried the coffee shop, too, at the Hamilton Arms; but that number was answered by somebody else, a certain Rhoda, who told him he was confused.
He could have been, he thought. It was possible.
So, one Saturday in August, 1984, he took the train to Washington, D.C. He was fading fast by then; the name of the community in which George once lived was entering and exiting his mind with a stuttering frequency. Hamilton Arms, it was called; but sometimes it occurred to him as Mantle Arms, or Armilton Place, or sometimes it would not come to him at all.
For this reason, before he left, he had written the name of the place, and the address, on his train ticket. He had also written down George’s name, what George always called his brush name, the one he went by exclusively now: George Wright.
David, upon arriving at Union Station, found a taxi and displayed his ticket stub to the driver. He had been clutching it in his right hand for hours, making himself focus on its contents, so that it was slightly softened, slightly damp. The address was vaguely smudged.
“Georgetown,” said the driver, and off they went.
Although David’s appearance had changed almost completely since he had worked in Washington, the vague fear of being recognized returned to him, and he reclined his head against the backseat of the cab. He drifted off for a moment.