Atmospheric Disturbances

Atmospheric Disturbances Rivka Galchen Already much praised and described as ‘playful yet profound, Murakami-esque yet original…heartbreaking…stunning…an unforgettable debut’ (Vendela Vida), Atmospheric Disturbances is one of the most widely anticipated fiction debuts of 2008.‘Last December, a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife…’ Dr Leo Liebenstein is convinced that his wife has disappeared and that she has been replaced by a double.While everyone else may be fooled, Leo knows she cannot be his real wife, and sets off on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love. With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey – who believes himself to be a secret agent who can control the weather – Leo attempts to unravel this mystery. Why has his wife been replaced? What do the secret workings of The Royal Society of Meteorology have to do with it? Who is the enigmatic Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, and is he, or maybe his wife, or perhaps even Harvey, at the center of it all? From the streets of New York to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, Leo's erratic quest ultimately becomes a test of how far he is willing to take his struggle against the uncontested truth he knows to be false.Atmospheric Disturbances is at once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind. In this highly inventive debut, with tremendous compassion and dazzling literary sophistication, Rivka Galchen explores the mysterious nature of human relationships, and how we spend our lives trying to weather the storms of our own making. ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES RIVKA GALCHEN Atmospheric Disturbances For Aaron Since the first numerical prediction model we have witnessed a steady improvement in forecasting large scale flows. Yet on the human scale (i. e., the mesoscale) little to no improvement has been reported. Several reasons have been cited … yet the most obvious reason (to me at least) is: we cannot tell what the weather will be tomorrow (or the next hour) because we do not know accurately enough what the weather is right now. Tzvi Gal-Chen, “Initialization of Mesoscale Models: The Possible Impact of Remotely Sensed Data” It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation … The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us … that must be deciphered. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs Since the first numerical prediction model we have witnessed a steady improvement in forecasting large scale flows. Yet on the human scale (i.e., the mesoscale) little to no improvement has been reported. Several reasons have been cited … yet the most obvious reason (to me at least) is: we cannot tell what the weather will be tomorrow (or the next hour) because we do not know accurately enough what the weather is right now. —Tzvi Gal-Chen, “Initialization of Mesoscale Models: The Possible Impact of Remotely Sensed Data” It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation … The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us … that must be deciphered. —Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs Part I 1. On a temperate stormy night Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife. This woman casually closed the door behind her. In an oversized pale blue purse—Rema’s purse—she was carrying a russet puppy. I did not know the puppy. And the real Rema, she doesn’t greet dogs on the sidewalk, she doesn’t like dogs at all. The hayfeverishly fresh scent of Rema’s shampoo was filling the air and through that brashness I squinted at this woman, and at that small dog, acknowledging to myself only that something was extraordinarily wrong. She, the woman, the possible dog lover, leaned down to de-shoe. Her hair obscured her face somewhat, and my migraine occluded the edges of my vision, but still, I could see: same unzipping of wrinkly boots, same taking off of same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed cornsilk blonde hair. Same bangs cut straight across like on those dolls done up in native costumes that live their whole lives in plastic cases held up by a metal wire around the waist. Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema. It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew. Like the moment near the end of a dream when I am sometimes able to whisper to myself, “I am dreaming.” I remember once waking up from a dream in which my mother, dead now for thirty-three years, was sipping tea at my kitchen table, reading a newspaper on the back of which there was the headline “Wrong Man, Right Name, Convicted in Murder Trial.” I was trying to read the smaller print of the article, but my mother kept moving the paper, readjusting, turning pages, a sound like a mess of pigeons taking sudden flight. When I woke up I searched all through the house for that newspaper, and through the trash outside as well, but I never found it. “Oh!” the simulacrum said quietly, seeming to notice the dimmed lights. “I’m so sorry.” She imitated Rema’s Argentine accent perfectly, the halos around the vowels. “You are having your migraine?” She pressed that lean russet puppy against her chest; the puppy trembled. I held a hushing finger to my lips, maybe hamming up my physical suffering, but also signing truly, because I was terrified, though of precisely what I could not yet say. “You,” the simulacrum whispered seemingly to herself, or maybe to the dog, or maybe to me, “can meet your gentle new friend later.” She then began a remarkable imitation of Rema’s slightly irregularly rhythmed walk across the room, past me, into the kitchen. I heard her set the teakettle to boil. “You look odd,” I found myself calling out to the woman I could no longer see. “Yes, a dog,” she singsonged from the kitchen, still flawlessly reproducing Rema’s foreign intonations. And, as if already forgetting about my migraine, she trounced on, speaking at length, maybe about the dog, maybe not, I couldn’t quite concentrate. She said something about Chinatown. And a dying man. Not seeing her, just hearing her voice, and the rhythm of Rema’s customary evasions, made me feel that she really was my wife. But this strange impostress, emerging from the kitchen moments later, when she kissed my forehead, I blushed. This young woman, leaning over me intimately—would the real Rema walk in at any moment and find us like this? “Rema should have been home an hour ago,” I said. “Yes,” she said inscrutably. “You brought home a dog,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory. “I want you to love her, you’ll meet her when you feel better, I put her away—” “I don’t think,” I said suddenly, surprised by my own words, “you’re Rema.” “You’re still mad with me, Leo?” she said. “No,” I said and turned to hide my face in the sofa’s cushions. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled to the tight wool weave of the cushion’s covering. She left my side. As the water neared its boil—the ascending pitches of our teakettle’s tremble are so familiar to me—I reached for the telephone and dialed Rema’s cell. A muffled ring then, from the purse, a ring decidedly not in stereo with the sound from the receiver in my hand, and the ersatz Rema thus hearkened back out to the living room, now holding the dog, and then the teakettle whistling, and, literally, sirens wailing outside. She laughed at me. I was then a fifty-one-year-old male psychiatrist with no previous hospitalizations and no relevant past medical, social, or family history. After the impostress fell asleep (the dog in her arms, their breathing synchronous) I found myself searching through Rema’s pale blue purse that smelled only very faintly of dog. But when I noticed what I was doing—unfolding credit card receipts, breathing in the scent of her change purse, licking the powder off a half stick of cinnamon gum—I felt like a cuckolded husband in an old movie. Why did I seem to think this simulacrum’s appearance meant that Rema was deceiving me? It was as if I was expecting to find theater tickets, or a monogrammed cigarette case, or a bottle of arsenic. Just because Rema is so much younger than me, just because I didn’t necessarily know at every moment exactly where she was or what, precisely, in Spanish, she said over the phone to people who might very well have been perfect strangers to me and whom I was respectful enough to never ask about—just because of these very normal facets of our relationship, it still was not necessarily likely—not at all—that she was, or is, in love with some, or many, other people. And isn’t this all irrelevant anyway? Why would infidelities lead to disappearances? Or false appearances? Or dog appearances? 2. Around 2 a.m. Amidst the continued nonarrival of the real Rema, I received a page. An unidentified patient—but possibly one of my patients—had turned up in the Psychiatric ER. Instead of phoning in I decided to head over immediately, without further contemplation, or further gathering of information. It seemed so clearly like a clue. I left a note for the sleeping woman, though I wasn’t quite sure to whom I was really addressing it, so it was sort of addressed to Rema and sort of addressed to a false Rema; I simply let her know that I had been called to the hospital for an emergency. And even though this was slightly less than true, still, leaving a note at all, regardless of what it said, was clearly the right and considerate and caring thing to do—even for a stranger. I took Rema’s purse—the comfort of an everyday thought of her—and left to find out about this unidentified someone. A patient of mine, a certain Harvey, had recently gone missing; Rema had accused me of not doing enough to locate him; maybe now I would find him. When I arrived at the Psychiatric ER, it was quiet and a night nurse was dejectedly resting his face in his hand and playing hearts on the computer. He, the night nurse, was boyishly handsome, very thin, his skin almost translucent, and the vein that showed at his forehead reminded me, inexplicably, of a vein that tracks across the top of Rema’s foot. I did not recognize this man but, given my slightly fragile state, and my slightly ambiguous goal, I hesitated to introduce myself. “You’re late,” he said, interrupting my dilemma by speaking first, without even turning around to look at me. And maybe for a moment I thought he was right, that I was late. But then I remembered I wasn’t scheduled to work at all; in an excess of professionalism, I was coming by extra early to follow up on the faintest lead that could have harmlessly waited until morning to be attended to. It was, therefore, impossible that I was late. Probably he was mistaking me for someone else—someone younger, maybe, of lower rank, who still had to work nights. “Who’s here?” I asked, while nodding my head toward the other side of the one-way observation glass. Over there: just an older man asleep in a wheelchair, wrapped from the waist down in a hospital sheet. Not my patient, not Harvey. The deceptively delicate-looking nurse didn’t stop clicking at his game of hearts, and still without turning to make eye contact he began mumbling quickly, more to himself than to me: “Unevaluated. Likely psychotic. He was spitting and threatening and talking about God on the subway and so they brought him in. He’s sleeping off a dose of Haldol now. Wouldn’t stop shouting about us stealing his leg. I’d leave him for the morning crew. It’ll be a while before his meds wear off.” Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare—actually stare—at me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead. Furrowing his previously lineless brow, enunciating now more clearly than before, the night nurse said to me, “Are you Rema’s husband?” I caught tinted sight of my slouched figure in the reflection of that observation glass that separated the staff from the patients. I noticed—remembered—that I was carrying Rema’s pale blue purse. “Yes,” I said, straightening my back, “I am.” He guffed one violent guffaw. But there was no reason to be laughing. His Rema-esque vein pulsed unappealingly across the characterless creaminess of his skin. “I didn’t know you worked nights,” he said. “I didn’t know if—” I should explain now that ever since I’d gotten Rema a job working as a translator at the hospital, I’d come to understand—from various interactions with people I didn’t really know—that many of Rema’s coworkers were extremely fond of her. She does often manage to give people the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way; I must admit I find it pretty tiresome dealing with all her pathetic devotees who think they play a much larger role in her life than they actually do; I mean, she hardly mentions these people to me; yet they think they’re so important to her; if the night nurse—apparently a member of Rema’s “ranks”—weren’t so obviously barely more than a child, then I might have wondered if he could help me, if I should ask him something, if he might have knowledge of the circumstances behind Rema’s absence, behind her replacement, but I could divine—I just could—that there was nothing—nothing at all—to be learned from that man. “We probably did take his leg,” I said. On the night nurse’s desk lay the patient’s chart, open. Glancing at the intake page I had noticed the high sugar. “What’s that?” the nurse said, still staring at me, but as if he hadn’t heard me. “I mean, the funny thing is that, literally speaking, doctors probably did take that poor man’s leg,” I answered, explaining myself in perhaps a slightly raised voice. “We say amputated, he says stolen”—I was getting my voice back under my own control—“but that’s not psychosis. That’s just poor communication.” A beat went by and then the nurse just shrugged. “Okay. Well. Not exactly the irony of ironies around here.” He turned back to his monitor. “You shouldn’t be sloppy with the label ‘psychotic,’” I said. Just because a man’s in foam slippers, I almost continued lecturing to his back. But as I felt an inchoate anger rising in me, an image came to my mind, of that nervous puppy the simulacrum had come home with, of the puppy’s startled look of the starved, and I remembered that I had other anxieties to which I had intended to be attending. Even if the unidentified patient wasn’t mine, wasn’t Harvey—as long as I was at the hospital, I thought I should look through Harvey’s old files. Maybe there would be clues as to where he might have gone; Rema would have liked to see me pursuing that mystery. And a part of me clung to the hope that if I dallied long enough, then by the time I made it back home Rema would be there, maybe battling it out with the simulacrum, as if in a video game. Rema would be victorious over her other and then together Rema and I would set out (the next level, another world) in search of Harvey. That, anyway, was the resolution that presented itself to me. “I’ll be in the back office,” I announced, feeling, I admit, a bit unbalanced, a bit homuncular, and beginning to develop the headache that had earlier, unexpectedly, and without my even noticing, ebbed. I did call up Harvey’s old records, and I sifted through them, though I could detect no trends. But as I sat there, one Rema clue—or false clue—recalled itself to me. It was this: A mentor of mine from medical school had recently been in town. He had always been a “connoisseur” of women—this pose of his had always irritated, he had in fact once “stolen” a woman from me—nevertheless I admired him for other reasons and had been eager to have him meet my Rema. I had steeled myself against the inevitable jealousy of watching him chat her up—and I’d held my tongue when Rema put on a fitted, demurely sexy 1940s secretary style of dress—but then, all my mental preparations were for naught. Strangely, my mentor hadn’t seemed much charmed by Rema. He’d behaved toward her with serviceable politeness but nothing more. It was odd. At one point he’d made a joke about the election and Rema hadn’t followed. Maybe for a moment I wasn’t charmed by Rema. As if she weren’t really my Rema. My Rema who makes everyone fall in love. Case: the night nurse. But back then it really was still her—I’m almost sure of it. 3. What may be highly relevant I have mentioned my patient Harvey, but I have failed to properly discuss him and the odd coincidence, or almost co-incidence, of his having vanished just two days before Rema did. So, actually, most likely not a “coincidence.” In retrospect I feel confident that the seeds of tragedy were sown in what I had originally misperceived as a (kind of) light comedy of errors. a. A secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology When I first met Harvey just over two years ago, he was twenty-six years old, and for nine years had carried a diagnosis of schizo-typal personality disorder. He lived at home with his mother, had been treated successively, though never (according to his mother) successfully, by eleven different psychiatrists, two Reichian psychotherapists, three acupuncturists, a witch, and a lifestyle coach. Additionally Harvey had a history of heavy alcohol use, with a penchant for absinthe, which lent him a certain air of declining, almost cartoonish, aristocracy. Harvey’s mother had called me after reading an article of mine peripherally about R. D. Laing. In my unintentionally lengthy conversation with her, with me practically pinned against the wall of some insufferably track-lit Upper East Side coffee shop whose coffee, she kept insisting, was “superior,” I quickly came to understand that she had grossly misread my paper. (For example, she interpreted my quoting Laing on “ontological insecurity” and “the shamanic journey” as endorsement rather than derision.) But I didn’t try to set right her misreading—that would have been rude—and I found the case of her son interesting. I could imagine entertaining Rema with its details. Also: it pleased me, the thought of telling Rema that a woman had sought me out after reading an article of mine. Functionally speaking, Harvey’s main problem—or some might say his “conflict with the consensus view of reality”—stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality actually would (and this surprised me at the time) affirm. According to Harvey, the Royal Academy dedicated itself to maintaining weather’s elements of unpredictability and randomness. “I would have thought the opposite,” I said in our initial conversation. “Everything we say here is secret?” Harvey asked. I assured him. He explained: Opposed to the Royal Academy of Meteorology was an underground group known as the 49 Quantum Fathers (not confirmable as existent by a consensus view of reality). The 49 ran self-interested meteorological experiments, in uncountable parallelly processing worlds, and it financed itself through investments in crop futures, crops whose futures, naturally, depended upon the 49’s machinations of the weather. I asked Harvey to clarify, about the parallelly processing worlds. “Yes, well, the Fathers can move between the possible worlds,” he said. “Like they can go to the world that is like this one but Pompeii erupts ten years later. Variables are altered. Like maybe in one of those other worlds you were hit by a produce truck when you were a kid and we aren’t talking here now.” Perhaps my pressing irritated him. He continued, “In one world it’s a rainy spring in Oklahoma, in another world it’s a drought,” though I don’t know if he was aware of himself trying to mitigate an aggression. “Normally the worlds remain isolated from one another, but there are tangencies that the 49 exploit, for muling data and energy from one world to another. I do wonder how they map them—that I don’t know. You understand, of course, that knowing the weather means winning a war, that all weather research is really just war research by other means.” I didn’t really know that, but I later read up on the topic on my own, and although one might argue that he was exaggerating, he was—even by a consensus view—off only in a matter of degree, not of kind. “But,” Harvey said, “I don’t mean to aggrandize my personal work. I’m just the littlest butterfly. I handle mostly mesoscale events; I specialize mostly in local wind patterns.” The Royal Academy sent Harvey orders through Page Six of the New York Post; it wasn’t that he saw text or images that weren’t actually there; rather, he understood what was there as encrypted messages expressly for him. Early rumors of J. Lo’s divorce had, for example, sent Harvey nearby to the Bronx, but often these orders—coded in a Hasselhoff binge or a Gisele B?ndchen real estate acquisition—entailed Harvey setting off unannounced on missions across the country. Harvey’s mom would learn of his whereabouts only days later when she’d receive a call from a distant ER or police station. Harvey’s homecomings were often notable for cuts and bruises he could not explain, occasionally even signs of severe nutritional deficits, once including cerebellar dysfunction. When asked about his absences, Harvey’s elucidation tended to go no further than to say that he was “laboring atmospherically.” Arguably these disappearances actually endangered his life. “From the moment I shook your hand,” Harvey’s mother said to me in her wet-eyed, well-wardrobed way, “I could just tell that you were different from the rest, that you were superior, that you would be the one to solve everything.” She said this after my first meeting with her son. Well, looking through Harvey’s files, I saw that in the past medications had been thrown at him but, not surprisingly, to no avail. As far as I could ascertain, apart from his ideas of reference, he had no auditory or visual hallucinations and no compelling mood symptoms, so it was rather unclear what the medications would have been targeting. In my next several meetings with Harvey, I tried to engage him in some reality testing. I asked him if he’d ever met anyone else who worked as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology. I asked him how he had acquired his special powers for manipulating the weather. He told me that his father had been a top agent for the Academy. He told me that his father had single-handedly prevented a major hurricane off the Gulf of Mexico meant to knock out an entire mango crop. That, Harvey explained to me, was why the 49 Quantum Fathers had abducted his father many years ago, stashed him away in a parallel world. I chose not to pursue the father issue further. I did make a few other efforts to gently instill in Harvey some creative doubt in the internal perceptions of his world—such doubt being the usual cornerstone of delusional treatment and the path back to the consensus view of reality. But I failed. My failure did not hugely surprise me. Reality testing is notoriously unsuccessful for schizotypals, and if taken too far—and too far is not that far—it will serve only to isolate the patient further and deepen his conviction that he alone understands reality. Then a downward spiral begins. The day immediately following my fifth session with Harvey, he again went missing. Nine days later he turned up in a hospital in Omaha. There had been hailstorms. b. An initial deception I should explain about the lying. It was Rema who suggested that I lie to Harvey. I did not come up with that idea by myself. “That you lie como una terapia,” she emphasized. “You lie, but it is to benefit another. So it is a lie that is ethical. Isn’t that fine? Didn’t you tell me they used to hold the heads of disturbed patients underwater for the time it took to recite the Miserere? This treatment would be much nicer than that, this small lie carrying good intentions.” Rema began then, completely impromptu (and this is a perfect example of the kind of Rema-ness absent in her impostress), to propose and elaborate upon a scheme wherein I was to pretend that I—like Harvey—was a secret agent of the actually existent Royal Academy of Meteorology. But that I—unlike Harvey—was an agent of superior rank. Who was in touch with an agent of even more superior rank. “Psychotics very much respect ranking,” she announced authoritatively. “Yes, so does Harvey’s mother,” I added, not meaning to sound encouraging. Rema paused and then added: “I’ll call. I’ll call to your office and you respond the phone and you listen very seriously and pass on the instructions that you will supposedly be receiving from a senior-ranking meteorologist. From me.” Rema particularly liked that detail, of her being the senior-ranking meteorologist. The instructions, primarily, would be that Harvey “labor atmospherically” at locations very close to his home. On street corners. In the park. Handling very important mesoscale phenomena in the greater New York City environs. I remember, strangely, that Rema was eating kumquats as she explained this plan to me. The kumquats still had leaves on them, which made the orange especially vibrant. And within me, as I listened to Rema inventing, as I watched her thinking through an elaborate lie, an alarm was sounding. But all my life, so many alarms seem always to be sounding, and so it becomes near impossible ever to say what any particular alarm might be signaling, or what might have set it off, or if it in any way ought to be heeded. The alarm then could as likely have signaled simply the color of the kumquat—some perhaps atavistic and now obsolete warning of poison—as something more grave. “Not only is it unethical,” I said to Rema, “but your idea won’t even work. Why should it? And if Harvey discovers the lie—well, then it’s all over. The therapeutic relationship: over.” And possibly my career as well, I didn’t say. We went back and forth on this for a good while, my doubts about the plan serving only to energize Rema more. “Let’s imagine for a moment that it is ethical,” I said to her, as if in reconciliation. “And let’s even imagine for a moment that this ‘therapy’ does work. There’d still always loom the possibility of being discovered, of being revealed as a liar. I wouldn’t be able to go a day without worrying. I can’t live like that.” “Oh,” Rema answered with a small unimpressed shrug, “but that’s what life is like all the time, no?” Rema often made these broad, melodramatic declarations that seemed oddly heartfelt and sincere considering that they didn’t mean anything. She was always nervous, though, that was true. She’d accordion-fold any scrap of paper that happened to be in her hand for more than a minute; at movie theaters she had often already decoratively torn her ticket before reaching the front of the line. Occasionally, though, her anxiety bordered on psychosis. For example, once in response to an essay of mine on pathological mourning, I received a threatening letter. It suggested that I didn’t know what real loss was and that he, the letter writer, could teach me. Okay, it was worded more strongly than that, I admit, but it also evidenced such disorganized thought that it was foolish to believe such a person could actually set in motion a plan to cause harm. So there was nothing to fear. I brought the letter home to our apartment to show Rema mostly because of the inexplicable—and oddly beautiful—illustrations. There was no return address, but I thought it might be a kind of romantic mission to try to track down my correspondent. I imagined I might find a Henry Darger character on the other end. But Rema said that if the letter didn’t worry me I should be locked up in an asylum. She began looking into our moving apartments. This even though (1) the letter had been mailed to the journal and not to me directly, (2) our address was unlisted, and (3) only a handful of people knew where we lived. Still, Rema was on the phone with brokers. I decided not to recite what I considered comforting statistics on how often, and which kind of, written threats are actually executed. But I did tell Rema that her response was ludicrously out of proportion. She must actually be worried about something else, I said. She had an endogenous m?salliance, I concluded. She said she didn’t know what a m?salliance was, or what endogenous was, and that I was arrogant, awful, a few other things as well. I liked those accusations and found them flattering and thought she was right. Rema cried and hardly spoke to me for a few days. In bed at night she trembled. But: it’s curious that she could so easily imagine a catastrophe separating us. That did, after all, happen. And yet she was completely comfortable with the risks, professional and personal, of lying to a patient. “Nope. No. Definitely not. No on the lying,” I said. “Your choice of failures,” she said. “In my neighborhood we had a name for people like you: parsley.” In the end—obviously—I decided to lie. Rema brightened considerably after that decision, and we had a sweet space of time, like the Medieval Warm Period, when wine grapes could grow three hundred miles farther north than they do today. Did I think then of the schemes that we would thus be swept into? No. I thought only of Rema. c. An initial appearance After I agreed to the plan, Rema suggested that I find the name of an actual scientist at the Academy, just in case Harvey looked up my superior’s name or was already familiar with the members. I, she said, would have to emphasize that I was, like Harvey, a secret, and therefore unlisted, agent. “Right,” I said. “So no need to involve someone’s real name, if we’re talking about secret agents.” “The real is good for deception,” she insisted. And so. Following Rema’s advice I obtained a list of the fellows of the Royal Academy. I chose the name Tzvi Gal-Chen capriciously, or so I thought. It just seemed like an anomalous and gentle sort of name, somehow authoritative and innocent at once. I almost chose the name Kelvin Droegemeier. That name also had charm and a kind of diffident beauty. But in the end I settled on Tzvi, because I remembered that degrees Kelvin was a temperature scale, which made Kelvin Droegemeier’s name, even though it was a real name, seem fancifully invented. d. Initial anxiety (my m?salliance) The night before I tried Rema’s ruse on Harvey I had several straightforward dreams. In one I was unable to make a teakettle stop whistling, in another Harvey was a homing pigeon in a dovecote (though I’m not actually sure what a dovecote is, in the dream I did know), in a third I was wearing yellow pants that looked terrible on me, and in the last I was simply walking down a street—I was seeing myself from above, as if from a building’s fire escape—and I knew that everyone hated me. I woke inhaling the grassy scent of Rema’s hair. I put a lock of it in my mouth. I tried to comfort myself: Rema and I had prepared a script of sorts together, rehearsed some canned answers, scheduled a phone call. Also I had on my side the awkward flightless-bird beauty of that name, Tzvi Gal-Chen. Just, I reassured myself, because I was capable of imagining Harvey standing on his chair and calling out J’accuse, this did not in any way actually increase the likelihood of such an event occurring. Pressing that salivaed lock against my cheek I told myself that if I failed with Harvey, then so I failed. He couldn’t really get me into any trouble. If he accused me of posing as a secret agent for the Royal Academy, well, that would just sound like more of the same from him and I’d just deny the allegation. I decided that although I fancied myself afraid of failing with Harvey, my real fear of failure likely had to do with my cornsilk Rema. The whole Tzvi Gal-Chen therapy: it was Rema’s, not my own, strangely translated dream, and yet I’d somehow taken it upon myself to realize it. I got out of bed (while Rema slept on) specifically because I felt within me an overwhelming desire to stay in bed. “You’re going to break some legs,” Rema said to me later that morning, sitting across from me at the kitchen table with her hair, I remember, up in a tidy high ponytail; it struck me anew that I’d once thought that after enough time with me she would have put on a precious little potbelly and let her hair remain messy at home. I didn’t think she’d be like my own mother, always so consciously assembled, as if still petitioning for the attention of other, unseen, imaginarily present men. “You know you’re saying it wrong, right? I don’t like it when you try to be cute on purpose.” “I don’t try to be cute.” “Rema, I have a very bad feeling.” Bad feeling about this I should have said. Or at least I think that would have been more properly idiomatic than just saying “bad feeling.” But the little idiosyncrasies of Rema’s language had already thoroughly sunk into me, and I couldn’t hear so clearly anymore the space between what was Rema and what was normal. Rema looked away from me and stared into the tea mug she held. “You ate meat too late. Lamb after eleven. That is the bad feeling. That is all. You should respect my ideas. You should respect your wife.” That is all it is. I remember wanting to correct her, to tell her to add it is. Wouldn’t that have been closer to what she meant? I watched her touch her finger to the surface of her tea and then put her finger to her mouth and then suck on it, as if she had a cut there. She did this again, this very slow way of drinking that she had. (The simulacrum, she drinks like she’s parched, like someone might take her drink away. Some mornings she’s through her first mug of tea in three minutes, though I’ll often find a second one left half drunk, grown cold.) I did respect Rema, obviously I do. Though I know that she didn’t believe or understand that, which I thought had more to do with her own self-doubt about who she was, or what she was doing, or not doing. She didn’t have what one would call a “profession,” but I didn’t know why she particularly wanted one; it seemed like she’d been infected by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid—that seemed silly to me. If I looked like Rema, if I had her ways, and if I weren’t a man, I’d consider it profession enough to have streaky bleached hair, to wear a green scarf, to spill spicy teas, to walk (slightly) unevenly on high heels. What more is there to give to the world than that? I realize this sentiment of mine is currently considered appalling, but these days I find the popularity of ideas even more meaningless than ever before. I had told Rema once, when she complained of feeling aimless and amiss, that she was born in the wrong era and that she should consider just waking up every morning and being her profession enough. I told her she could be my duchess. She may have contemplated taking what I had said as sweet, but in the end chose instead—and I think “chose” is the right word—to be offended, because then she came out saying that maybe her problem was that she had been too happy to marry me, and that that had been good enough for too long, and maybe if she’d stayed lonely she might have made something of herself, even if something really dumb and superfluous, like a tax attorney, or a poet, and that would have been nice, to be able to say what one was. I said she was a Rema. I said, furthermore, that I didn’t really understand what obstacle I posed to either of her mentioned goals, but she just said yes, I didn’t understand, and I said that that was what I was saying precisely, that I didn’t understand. But she was saying that it was that I didn’t understand her. So it was like that sometimes. But about Rema’s lamb after eleven comment. Although I didn’t think she was right in that particular instance of my “bad feeling” before meeting with Harvey, I thought that her general idea—how we can misinterpret our own pain—I thought that was very right. e. An initial (Pyrrhic) victory You really look closely at a person before lying, or confessing love, or doing anything momentous. It is above all Harvey’s outfit from that day that I remember well: navy blue suspenders hooked onto gray trousers (lightly pilling), a thin-striped button-up shirt (cuffs unbuttoned) with a dark ink stain like Argentina at the left floating rib and with sleeves too short and a collar strangely starched and flipped and seeming poised for flight. I don’t know if Harvey actually had one arm notably longer than the other, but he gave off that impression. Rema and I had planned on having her call near the end of Harvey’s session. I was to have already introduced the fact of myself as a secret agent of the Royal Academy. I had failed to do so. I felt too conspicuous, as if I was as exhaustively vivid for Harvey as he was for me that day (his eyes are so improbably blue) and this even though I knew that in truth it was highly doubtful that there was anything remarkable about my appearance at all; that day, like all the previous days, I must have seemed to Harvey simply an unremarkable gray haze of overly gentle inquiry. My feeling of conspicuousness—I’m certain—stemmed from an awareness that a ridiculous lie lay in wait within me; I’m not a natural liar, so I had very little faith in my competence as one. I don’t mean to be smug by proclaiming my inherent honesty; I don’t think of my honesty as moral value, since I think of morality as involving choices, and I’ve never particularly chosen to be honest, have simply never been able to be otherwise, feel rather predetermined to fail at lying. Even as a child, in order to avoid saying thank you, upon prompting, for things I wasn’t truly thankful for, I would bury my face in my mother’s skirt. A smell of certain wools, the sound of a slip brushing up against hosiery, still recalls that emotion back to me. On the rare occasions when I have said I am busy when I am not, or that I like some item of clothing or person that I am indifferent to or hate, I am filled with unreasonable guilt over my “white” lie, and want to cry, confess, unburden. It’s all a bit overblown, really, as if I’ve actually wounded someone, as if my small insincerity might actually matter. I even kind of like it when other people lie, when Rema lies, for example; it’s a way of finding out, if the lie is uncovered, what she thinks is worth lying about. So Harvey was saying something about El Ni?o, and dead fish. Then the telephone rang, startling me far more than it startled Harvey. “Hello?” It was Rema, who, sounding inappropriately giddy, called me Dr. Liebenstein and asked me what I was wearing. “Oh yes hello,” I said, staring at the lines at Harvey’s cuff, watching them blur. Rema chatted comfortably about what she wanted me to pick up for dinner, urging me not to be cheap about the fish—everyone with the fish—asking me also could I pick up the thin almond cookies that she liked, the ones she liked to dip in her tea, did I know which ones she meant? Through all this I nodded sagely. “And these El Ni?o winds?” I asked. She talked on, saying I’m not sure what in her beautiful mint-pitched voice; eventually she suggested that she get off the phone. I said that of course I would pass everything on faithfully. “Well,” I throat-cleared to Harvey, “I apologize for that inter ruption, but I can now say something rather important to you. Are you familiar with the work, the public work that is, of Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen?” Preplanned words exited my mouth hastily, stumblingly, and I heard them as if they were not my own. Blushingly confessing myself a secret agent, I passed on to Harvey Dr. Gal-Chen’s assignment—a cold front approaching Manhattan. And as I spoke—my gaze fixed on the stain on Harvey’s shirt—I further estranged myself from myself, so that while one part of me talked to Harvey, another part thought about a certain shade of pale green that happened to be the exact shade of pale green that the newspaper once published as having been calculated by astronomers to be the color of the universe, after which a correction appeared in the following week’s paper stating that a math error had been made, and that the astronomers now realized the universe, if you could stand outside of it and see it, was actually a shade of beige. (Willed depersonalization is entirely normal, a valid, even laudable, coping technique. Only unwilled depersonalizations would be a cause for concern.) After I stopped talking there was a brief or long—I’m not sure which—moment of silence. “How long have you been working for the Academy?” Harvey asked. I told him that there were very few details of my work that I was allowed to disclose. He asked me if I could tell him if I’d received any awards, in particular the Symons Gold Medal or the Carl-Gustav Rossby Medal. I said it was lonely having secrets and that Harvey probably understood that loneliness. Then Harvey smiled shyly, and talked a few minutes, in a comradely way, of the difficulty and delicacy of meteorological work. It’s never ceased to amaze me how, if you’re calm and quiet, others fill in any gaps in your story. Harvey pulled out his compact irror and smoothed down his eyebrows, and then began to explain something about this instrument of his, which he used, he said, to alter vectors of light and sound. I noticed spidering burst capillaries across his cheeks. I remember well the dejected feeling of having, apparently, succeeded. I wanted to reach across to Harvey and just touch one of his sleeves. I don’t know why, not precisely. Even a well-intentioned deception leaves a metallic taste in the mouth. Did I think I’d ever partner with Harvey in order to find Rema, rather than partner with Rema in order to control and deceive Harvey? I did not. f. An unusual initiation of a kind of friendship with Tzvi Gal-Chen Relaying Dr. Gal-Chen’s instructions to Harvey became easy, ordinary, domestic. The phone would ring, Rema would often recite a grocery list, and I would tell Harvey that Dr. Gal-Chen says high-pressure systems are coming in from the north and Harvey’s assistance is needed locally. And following the initiation of the Gal-Chen therapy, for the next nineteen months, Harvey didn’t go missing even once. He followed strictly Tzvi Gal-Chen’s orders to stay for work in the city. He deregulated tidal winds off the Hudson River estuary; he finely negotiated the chaos of an incoming tropical storm system from the corner of his own street. As for me, Harvey’s mother regularly sent me grids of artisanal chocolates, each chocolate with its own transfer textile type pattern atop—and, well, this made me feel good about myself. Rema also was very pleased—probably more pleased than me—with the success of the Tzvi Gal-Chen therapy. At least in the beginning, at least for a little while. She took to calling herself Dr. Rema, and she often held my hand and pressed the back of it against her cheek. Once, when the weather report interrupted the news, she squeezed my arm and leaned over and kissed me and laughed. She was the kind of happy that made me feel that she would love me, and me alone, forever. But maybe it was just that successful deceptions made her euphoric. “Why,” I asked her one evening, “did you say the corner store was out of clementines when in fact it wasn’t?” In response, she eyed me suspiciously. “I found the receipt for that blue sweater you bought me,” I said, “and you understated its price by eighty dollars.” She ignored me, remained unaffected in her bout of cheer. It was nice, though; contrary to my nature as it was, happiness grew in me. Gal-Chen therapy language made its way into our apartment, first teasingly, but after a while who could say? When Rema and I disagreed, I’d invoke our meteorologist: “Dr. Gal-Chen prefers the green wool,” “Dr. Gal-Chen says no to imitation Nilla Wafers.” Or sometimes, more intimately: “Tzvi wouldn’t be pleased about your not wearing socks,” “Tzvi thinks you should return the movie,” or “Tzvi thinks you should plump a little.” Rema may have tired of this, but, after all, the specter of Tzvi had entered into our lives on account of her therapeutic invention, not mine. I thought of Tzvi as a stranger, certainly, but one whom I felt in some way shared our life, as if he returned to the apartment late, after Rema and I were asleep, and snacked on leftovers from the refrigerator, watched the television with the volume down low, left tea mugs in the sink. One free afternoon, I came across a photo on the Internet of Dr. Gal-Chen with his family; I e-mailed it to Rema. She printed it on a color printer at the hospital, brought it home carefully tucked inside an empty patient folder, and then magneted it onto our refrigerator. “That was nice of you,” I said. “Oh, I just did it for myself,” she responded, maybe a tiny bit irritated. I recall, at the time, having had certain interpretations of this action, this posting of a family photo on the refrigerator. But in retrospect, with all that has since happened, those interpretations now seem too simple. I admit that I had rather unsophisticatedly read the photo in our home as symptomatic of a longing for children, though I wasn’t certain if the longing was Rema’s or my own. Or if really the longing was just for a return to Rema’s own unremarked-upon childhood, or to an alternate of her own childhood. Or maybe the longing was for something else, for someone else. But whatever that photo was, I don’t care, it doesn’t really matter, it was also, and above all, just an amusing photo to look at when one went, from hunger, to let the yellow light and cold out of the refrigerator. The butterfly collar and tinted glasses on Tzvi, the eyeleted cap sleeve with trim on his wife, that stolid Izod polo on the son—it was pleasing to travel back in time like that, falling through those mode details. And that little Bavarian mock-up on that tidy little chub of a child, well, that was just precious. “Why do you only notice clothing?” Rema asked, as if pointing to a moral flaw. But when I pushed her as to what she noticed, she could only point out the creamy crooks of the elbows on the mother and son. Sometimes I wondered at the necklace on the wife, other times at the inscrutable pale blue square on the shirt of Tzvi Gal-Chen. And once Rema and I had a long argument about whether Dr. Gal-Chen’s shirt showed a button or a snap. I argued snap quite heatedly, on the basis of context. She argued button on the basis of visual details that I apparently couldn’t see. But look at the way the light catches on that snap—it’s pearline. It was strange, now that I think about it, how I never tired of that photo. Even though I know better than to trust appearances, especially posed, studio-airbrushed, heathered-backdrop appearances, still: the Gal-Chens had the look of a happy family. Maybe not particularly sophisticated, or good-looking, or fashionable, but still, happy. Even now I do not know if that was, or is, true or not. If they were, indeed, happy. But who can ever really know about anyone’s happiness, even one’s own? And if another woman can have the appearance of Rema, then perhaps I should by now be giving up on appearances entirely. But with that photo it was more than just an appearance, it was also a feeling, a family feeling. A feeling that at least seemed to be responding to something beyond mere appearance, though at times such “feelings”—such limbic system instinctual responses—are the most superficial and anachronistic of all, like the feeling a baby duck must have when it responds more strongly to a stick painted red than to the beak of its own mother. 4. A mysterious knuckle So that was the state of affairs with Harvey—he was again missing—but I did not immediately connect his most recent disappearance (or Tzvi Gal-Chen) with Rema’s replacement, even though I had (as if a part of me knew something another part did not) immediately expected to find Harvey when I was paged shortly after the simulacrum had fallen asleep. When I returned from the hospital where Harvey wasn’t to the apartment where Rema wasn’t, I put Rema’s pale blue shoulder bag underneath the sink, for safekeeping. It was 5 a.m. and my new houseguest was not yet awake. She was hidden beneath Rema’s ugly old yellow quilt, with only one indefinite tan arm and a few tickles of blonde hair showing. I pulled the quilt back a bit; she didn’t stir. It was a little uncanny, the feeling I had, looking at that look-alike. I was reminded of how I used to feel before I actually knew Rema, reminded of the winter when she was still a stranger and I would notice her, nightly, coming to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, wearing nubbly red mittens and her same wool coat with oversized buttons. She always ordered the loose-leaf teas, and when she would sit at a table near mine I liked to watch her try to pour from the little metal teapot without spilling, which wasn’t easy, since at almost any angle the water’s path of choice was to travel retrograde along the outside of the spout and spill on the table. Rema would then pat the table dry with her napkin and then get up and get more napkins, and this was every time, as if she couldn’t have anticipated and stocked up on extra napkins from the beginning. This—and her cornsilk hair, and her slightly clumsy gait, and I don’t know what—I loved her already then. Leaving the sleeping simulacrum to herself I lay myself down on the sofa, experiencing the unhappy d?j? vu of having lain myself down in just the same way not so many hours earlier, expecting Rema’s imminent arrival. I tried to rest. But although the phone did not ring—it was always ringing of late—intrusive thoughts, rising as if carbonated, disturbed me from sleep: a movie dimly recalled from childhood, with a blind samurai who can’t see that the man pursuing him is his double John Donne meeting his wife’s doppelganger in Paris, and this portending his baby’s death Maupassant seeing his own doppelganger, and it portending his own death Rema asleep on my shoulder at the movies a guff of ugly laughter This is just a problem I’m trying to depersonalize, I told myself. Probably just some very normal problem dressed up as a strange one. An ordinary problem masquerading as extraordinary. My mother used to say that almost any problem could be solved by one of the following three solutions: a warm bath, a hot drink, or what she called “going to the bathroom,” though she never specified what was to be done there. I was thinking now how I can’t really recall any episode from my childhood when her advice didn’t work. Our bathtub was in the middle of our kitchen, and the bathroom was a thin-walled room just on the other side of the kitchen sink; both rooms had the same houndstooth hand-layed tile floor, and one always heard water coursing through pipes, or braking, or boiling. The sound of something like Rema walking by woke me from what couldn’t have been much more than an hour of sleep, but an awkward hour, from which I woke—starbursting pain—with a numb and tingly left hand. After again catching sight of the decidedly not Rema’s face, and during the achingly familiar sock- footing about in the kitchen that followed, I decided that I couldn’t just wait around feigning normality; I had to go and search for the real Rema. And though I didn’t know quite what that meant—would I don a cap, grab a magnifying glass, and go dusting for fingerprints?—I knew it was the proper next step to take. Over red zinger tea with honey, I told the ersatz Rema of my plans. Or, at least, I mentioned to her that I thought I’d spend the day—which I could see out the window was another very gray, precipitous day—out walking. “A walk sounds nice,” she responded expectantly, looking across the table at me with her dove dark eyes. “That sounds,” she continued, “like exactly what would please me. You and me and the gentle dog and we’ll—” “I’d rather walk alone,” I braved. “Oh.” The dog lover frowned. The red zinger had stained her lips a pretty pink. “I only offered to join you to be kind. But really the weather is ugly. What does the weatherman call this? Wintry mix? That makes it sound like dried cherries and coconut and pecans. But actually it is not so nice like that at all.” As she spoke I was staring at her hands, both wrapped around her tea mug, staring at the little elephant-knee patterns of lines at the finger joints. I could see the divot in the knucklebone, the grooves that reveal the finger as but a line-and-pulley system. The longer I stared at that knuckle the more it grew foreign rather than familiar. Pretty hands. Pretty knuckles. Pretty little way of holding a tea mug. “Wintry mix,” I finally said, slowly, copying the woman’s copied language. My tea had meanwhile grown cold. When red zinger gets cold it tastes too full of tannins and makes me more rather than less thirsty. “That is kind of a euphemism, isn’t it?” I agreed, trying to sound chummy and casual. But I couldn’t make eye contact with the impostress. It was as if, by not admitting that I planned to go out in search of Rema, I was cheating on her, on this alternate Rema. “Where,” I tried, “is the puppy?” “Bedroom,” she said. “You were sleeping.” And she got up from the table not aglow with happiness, not placated at all, in fact perhaps rather irritated. “And she’s not a puppy. She’s a dog. She’s an adult. In a new and stressful situation and so especially in need of love and attention,” she concluded, beginning to walk away from me. “Why did you bring her home?” I called out with a desperation I didn’t expect. “Why did you not bring her home?” she said. “Why do you not do anything at all?” she continued, not looking at me, and almost out of the room. She was wearing Rema’s green nightie boxers. Her legs were pretty, a faintest blue. And also they were long, with one hip ever so slightly rotated inward. Like Rema. I was proud of myself for having had the strength of character to leave behind such an attractive woman. I wish Rema could have witnessed that. I just would have liked her to enjoy the spectacle of how obviously and entirely and singularly I loved her. 5. An initial search How did I search the city for Rema? I found myself standing in front of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, in front of its fogged windows into which no child had yet traced patterns. Below the windows: the pastel mural of slightly deformed angels. To the left: stacked white plastic chairs. To the right: a man descending into the sidewalk cellar holding a tray of uncooked dumplings, the wrappings pinched and pointing to the sky. And, still standing outside, reflected in the glass, was—and for a moment I didn’t recognize him—me: hairy handed and slope shouldered and not as tall as I like to think I am. With a rising sense of ridiculousness, the thought surfaced: this is how I search for my wife? This was probably the one place she almost certainly would not turn up. Like the most gumshoe of all gumshoes, I’d gone where I wanted her to be, not where there was any reason or unreason for me to believe she actually would be. I went inside anyway—it was warm and humid, like a room for leavening. Near the pastry display case, a young boy was patting at the pocket of his mother’s (I assume his mother’s) coat shouting biscotto! biscotto! A skinny vulture of a man—he had terrible eyebrows—watched from the table; he was a regular who typed pompously, and flirted with the waitstaff, and I’d once overheard him say he was into meditation, and I thought of him like a disease. A little farther back I saw the crowd I thought of as “the dirty kids”: two messy girls who seemed always to have just left a medieval fair—eternally in old velvet or silk or lace—and a young man, with unwashed hair and a small cartoon bear nose, who perpetually wore a shapeless too-short leather jacket. He looked sad that day; the girls were consoling him. Also I saw a pretty wavy-haired undergrad with her thin arms bare. A little boy was crawling under her table and he picked up and turned over a pale green scrap of paper. Sometimes it terrifies me, when I sense the exponenting mass of human lives—of unlabeled evidence of mysteries undiscerned—about which I know nothing. “What did you say?” someone said maybe to me. “Nothing,” I said to almost no one. Having pined for Rema in the past in this very place (her tea’s leaves would stack up in the sieve and look like topiary) I felt my new loneliness echo against the anxiety I used to have watching the door wondering if Rema would walk in, and that feeling was then echoing against the haunting vision I used to have of Rema’s cornsilk hair, which was echoing against the memory of that first day I saw Rema see me notice that she had looked at me after which she had then quickly looked away, all of which echoed against a sensation of her kissing my eyelid, which made me shiver. It was very bad, the acoustics inside of me. I wanted, suddenly, to leave. I ordered a coffee to go—a terrible coffee that pleases only for bearing the name coffee and for being hot. I walked over to Broadway, went underground, boarded the number 1 train heading downtown. Each time new passengers came on, I watched expectantly. Near the bottom of the island, I exited, ascended, crossed the street, redescended, waited, and reboarded the subway going uptown. At the third stop, a man entered the subway car and announced loudly: “I had already apologized, for those of you who did not know.” Then he said those same words again, and again, and again, so I realized he wasn’t speaking to me, at least not in particular. But I anyway couldn’t help but feel that what the man really meant was that I should be sorry, that I should apologize. Maybe everyone on the train felt as I did, that they were the point of all this, of everything. It was like when the music comes on at the Chinese restaurant and suddenly even the random movements of the fish in the aquarium seem choreographed, thick with meaning; then the music pauses and meaning abruptly disperses. The fish seem dumb, as do all the diners. At the 110th Street stop I exited and began a repeat of the whole cycle. Later I did sit for a few hours at the coffee shop, made some drawings of sugar cubes, and of an upside-down cup, and of the pattern that a small coffee spill made when it was soaked up by a napkin, a pattern like an archipelago. Though my initial progress did not look or feel like progress, I believe it was a kind of progress, that of just staying in place, of not slipping backward into despair. 6. An alleged orphan Walking, finally, home, I comforted myself with the likelihood that I would very soon see Rema, that she—the selfsame girl I’d picked up at the coffee shop years before—would be right there at home, russet dog or no russet dog. Maybe she would be shelling pecans. Or reading the newspaper. Maybe she would be very happy to see me. I put my key to the lock, I heard scratching at the door, I opened the door and I found myself being lavished with affection, from the russet dog. Then the dog undid my left shoelace. I heard a voice coming from the bedroom and I heard a hanging up of a telephone. Meanwhile this dog still had my shoelace between its teeth and was shaking its head back and forth madly, behavior that may appear playful but that is quite clearly a manifestation of the instinct to break the neck of caught prey, a manifestation that we refer to as cute. It’s just like how we have so successfully forgotten as a species that a smile was born as a masking afterthought to the sudden baring of teeth. At least that’s the most convincing smile theory I’ve heard. Then the woman emerged from the bedroom. I smiled. She was the same. The same false vision of Rema from before. “The dog makes you happy?” substitute Rema asked, and what could I answer except no. The dog then left me (left my shoelace) for her; she picked that dog up in her arms, snuggled the dog with oversized gestures, as if performing onstage. She told me she didn’t care what I thought about what to name the dog, that she was going to name her without me. I said I didn’t care what she named the dog, the dog that was licking her face with dedication. “But I got this dog,” she said to me, “for you.” The dog had dark, wet eyes; the woman’s eyes were similar. Then I noticed that she—the simulacrum—had fine lines of age on her face. Tiny crow’s-feet, and not just when she smiled, since I could see them and she was not smiling. This look-alike Rema, I began to realize, was not such a perfect look-alike; it would seem Rema was being played by someone older, or who at least looked older. Someone pretty, but not as pretty. Not that there’s anything wrong with an older woman—there is nothing wrong with a woman my age for example, I just don’t happen to be married to one. “You said dogs are brilliant,” she said, her voice supersaturated with emotion. “You said Freud’s dogs could diagnose the patients.” But Rema knew Freud was essentially demoted (in a few specific passages promoted) out of my notion of an ideal psychiatry. As the impostress talked on I wondered: was Rema kidnapped or did she willingly leave? Which would be worse? Determined not to let emotion crack my voice, I tried to avoid speaking altogether. The simulacrum, fortunately, seemed to have the same talent as Rema for filling up silent spaces, and she went on: “You said Freud’s dogs knew when therapy was over, and knew who was psychotic and who was neurotic, and that when memories were recovered the dog would wag its tail. You said you would have liked to have such insight, such dog insight, that it would be better than your own, and so there I was at the hospital, and this poor dog was left orphan, and it seemed like a sign, like not just random, like this dog was sent to us, for us to save her and for her to save us, silly I know, but no, you just look at me strange.” The russet puppy—I mean, dog—was licking tears from the doppelganger’s face. “But Freud’s dogs,” I said, “they were chow dogs.” It was all I could think of to say. I turned away from this woman and went to the bathroom, where I ran hot water over my hands, which is something I like to do in the colder months, it just makes me feel a little bit better. Then I touched my face with my warmed hands. It calms me down, it’s just this very normal thing that I do. Over the sound of the running water I could hear that Remalike voice calling through the door. She didn’t sound pleased. I was thinking, Does Rema know this twin of hers? Did Rema complain about me to her? There were difficult aspects of Rema, I can’t deny that—a lot of this arguing through a bathroom door had been going on of late. The Rema-ish voice came though the door with something about being tired of it always being her getting stuck with the label of unreasonable, irrational, crazy. I thought to shout back that of course it was her getting stuck with that label, and that furthermore I’d only ever said irrational and unreasonable, never crazy, and that it was she alone who was assigning normative value to those labels and, listen, she couldn’t even let a man just wash his hands in peace, but I stopped myself, instead said nothing, thinking to myself: This fight is stupid. This fight is ridiculous. And to have it with a woman I don’t even know—that is even more ridiculous. Older, wrong, and no more manageable, this replacement wife. I heard the front door open and close. 7. I am contacted After finishing my private peace of running hot water in the bathroom I came out to find that the simulacrum and the unnamed dog were not in the kitchen, not in the living room, not in the bedroom—they were gone. Which meant, I decided, that I could think and plan in quiet, which I proceeded to do in a prone position on the sofa, which meant that I was promptly asleep but without knowing that I was asleep, a fact that I did not discover until the phone roused me from my poor and hectic slumber during which I’d suffered a dream in which what was happening to me was exactly what was actually happening to me. Because I woke up with a sense of relief, I had the clawing hope that Rema’s replacement had been not also but only in my dream, a bad dream induced simply by indigestion, or a cold draft, or a foot cramp. That was the stage of loss I was in then I suppose, like the first days after someone dies, when you bend down to pick up every piece of lint, and you wonder what the dead person, when you meet her next, might have to say about her death (or about lint), and you worry, a little bit, about how that is going to be a very awkward conversation, the conversation with the recently dead. Again the phone rang. “Hello,” I said, bringing the cold plastic receiver to my face. “Leo Liebenstein.” “Yes,” I said, not even rising from my reclining position because I didn’t want to lose the warmth I’d invested in the cushions of the sofa. “Leo Lieben—” “Yes,” I interrupted sleepily but louder. “To whom am I speaking?” the voice on the other end said politely, in a strange accent. Or what seemed like a poor imitation of a strange accent. And I began to feel more awake. “Who is this?” I asked. Muffled bickering came through the line; then it sounded like the phone dropped. Just as I was about to hang up, a new voice came on, this time thin, sandy, and ambitious. “I’m calling from the Royal Academy of Meteorology; we’d like to invite you to become a fellow. Would you—” “Harvey?” “Sir, I’m calling from the Royal Aca—” Again I heard a tussle over the phone. Then I heard Rema’s voice, though I couldn’t make out the words. I thought the voice was coming to me through the phone. “Rema?” I called into the phone loudly, startling myself. “The teakettle!” answered Rema’s voice—now clearly traveling directly from the bedroom—and I could feel the hot atmosphere my own voice had made near the phone’s mouthpiece. “We’d like to make you a fellow,” I heard. “Do you understand? It’s a tremendous—” I hung up. I looked around the room: rocking chair, scratched wood floor, Godzilla poster—my familiar life. And Rema? I crossed over to the closed bedroom door, leaned against its unsmooth grain, and listened. I heard just that sound of cupping a hand over an ear. Of a distant ocean marked with a yellow flag, of my own ear anatomy breaking up the trajectories of randomly moving molecules of air, hearing its own little self-made sound universe. And suddenly I sensed my ridiculousness—pressing a cupped ear against a door in my own apartment—sensed, with a rising sadness, my familiar space growing foreign to me. I abandoned the sounds of my ear cupped to the bedroom door. I went to the kitchen, turned the click-clicker of the gas stovetop—blue-orange burst!—filled the kettle with tap water—a nice contact sound!—and rested it on the flame. I love the different sound stages of water on its way to boiling. I like listening to the teakettle’s tremble. Our teakettle’s handle is slightly loose, and its shaking adds another harmonic layer over the tremulousness of the metal. “Who was that?” came the voice. I turned and saw her, under the kitchen’s lintel, wearing my button-up and her little boy shorts, thigh slightly rotated inward, holding that russet puppy—dog—in one hand. She walked past me, leaned against the counter near the stove; Rema had always liked leaning there, in just that way, so she could feel the heat, and so she could turn off the flame before the teakettle’s whistling had ever really begun. Maybe on account of that lean, despite that dog-puppy, I began silently to argue to myself: this must be Rema. This must be her. Believe this Rema like you always do. Look at her. Is she really more strange today than any other day? The hair, the eyes, the long legs leading down to slightly pigeon-toed feet. Who else could it be? Believe this Rema like you always do. But I knew that my reasoning was post hoc, and another voice came in, mocking me, reminding me that post hoc reasoning is the consolation of the psychotic—all evidence interpreted under the shadow of an axiomatic belief that one is Jesus Christ, or the king of Sweden, or made entirely of glass. Why should I believe, just by fiat, that this woman was Rema, when that ran contrary to the phenomenology? The simulacrum tilted her head at me, like puppies tilt their heads. And a high-pitched pain, like a thousand tiny moths, began to collect behind the front of my skull, accelerating, advancing. Something was wrong. I reached out and put my hand on where I expected her abdomen to be, because I had a feeling my hand might pass right through her, as if she were a hologram, as if only the clothing were real. But I was all wrong about what was wrong. My hand did not go through her abdomen, which was real, or appeared to be so, as solid, anyway, as anything else I know, though I suppose they say it’s almost all empty space, the building blocks of matter—a moth in a cathedral?—but one shouldn’t take the extension of such metaphors too seriously. She looked at my hand on her abdomen. Then she squinted at me, as if to put me in focus. “Wait, who was that on the phone?” she asked again. The pain in my head had grown dizzying so I sat down on the cool blue tile floor, sat by that woman’s foot, and looked at the blue vein there across her arch. For a time during my medical training, on account of so often drawing blood and placing IVs, my eyes would travel, of their own accord, to plump veins. I would search feet and hands and wrists and crooks of elbows, and it would be difficult for me not to reach out and place the pad of a finger on those veins and feel the blood coursing through. It’s like a ghost living in us, our blood, that’s what I think it is like, having something within us—like our blood, like our livers, like our loves—that goes on about its business without consulting us. I touched that vein there on Rema’s foot. I feel like I can say that, that the foot at least, that foot was really Rema’s. Or probably not really. Or so only in that every foot becomes, in my mind, Rema’s foot slightly varied. And Rema’s foot is like Rema entire; her foot alone is enough to recall her to me whole. I don’t know, I was very confused then. “Leo,” this woman said to me gently. “Leo, are you all right? I’m sorry I was angry earlier, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings about Harvey’s leaving. I think that is what this must be about. I don’t think it is your fault. Only you think it is your fault. Maybe it is my fault. Is that what this is about?” I was petting her pretty foot. The teakettle’s trembling had advanced somewhat. I could hear the puppy, the dog, in her arms, above me, panting. “What,” I asked her—and I asked gently because even if she wasn’t Rema she still seemed like a very nice person— “would you say if I told you that the Royal Academy called me?” I pressed on the arch’s vein very lightly, and watched its world go white. “The Royal Academy?” “You know which I mean,” I said quietly, wondering if she knew what I meant. I leaned down and kissed her foot, which was cold and dusty, as was the tile floor that I then stretched myself out upon more fully. “Of Meteorology.” “Leo?” “Where Tzvi Gal-Chen is a fellow,” I said, gesturing with my head toward the refrigerator, though Tzvi’s family photo was no longer there, I don’t know where things like that disappear to, the kinds of things one has on one’s fridge. These things are not just under the fridge like you might think, because I could see under the fridge and I saw only a curled fruit label sticker and a child’s jack. The woman turned the kettle off. It wasn’t—by sound stage—even near boiling. She set down that animal (who began licking my face and disturbing my peace) and sat down next to me. “Jokes aren’t funny,” she said to me, “when they need lots of explaining. Are you feeling well? You look sad, Leo.” A prominent vein tortured across her hand too. I could press on the vein and it would fade to white and then return again, to that very particular blue. She said, “Your walk. Do you want to tell me how it was? It’s a cloud out there.” I thought that she was right, not just about the cloud, but about how jokes did lose their humor when they needed explaining, and I thought that maybe I had been making a joke, and that it hadn’t been the Royal Academy that had called. Later, when the phone rang again, I insisted that neither of us pick it up. We sat together on the sofa that evening and I kept my eyes on the floor and at one point I told “Rema” that I missed her, and I leaned over and bit her ear gently, and then I kissed her hand and the inside of her wrist, but that dog was running about, and quietly, in my thoughts, I apologized to Rema because I had wanted to hold that other woman. I think you can imagine the feelings that I had, and their strangeness to me. 8. Single-Doppler weather radar In the salad days of Gal-Chen therapy I used to like to watch NY1 weather and think of Tzvi as the man behind the scenes, the unsung hero who made it all possible, deploying Doppler radar technology and interpreting the data at record speeds, simultaneously forecasting for all five boroughs. It was a light thought, a happy hyperbole, one of the many childish banalities that made up my daily secret life. Not much of a secret life, but enough. Enough to let others—Rema, I hoped—project something grander onto those private spaces. But my projections onto the unknown Tzvi—it turned out they were insufficiently ambitious, palest shadows of the truth. Tzvi Gal-Chen’s contributions to the field of radar meteorology include a series of “retrieval” papers, all of which confront the problems of translating Doppler weather radar data into real-world, and eventually real-time, information. Familiar enough. But Tzvi focuses in particular on how valuable data retrieval can be accomplished with a single-Doppler radar; in this way his research represents a break from more conventional retrieval methods involving dual-Doppler radar systems: two radars, distant from each other, looking at more or less the same volume of air from perpendicular angles so that real-world information can then be divined through triangulation. Why not stick with dual-Doppler radar systems? Tzvi describes his motivation for developing single-Doppler retrieval methods thusly: “Perfectly coupled radar systems are rare, if they exist at all.” And “dual-Doppler analysis requires accurate calibration of radar antennas and simultaneous operation of both radars.” Whereas I was genuinely alone. The therapeutic relationship, like, for example, the mourning process, is inherently asymmetric. I suppose I had let that sort of asymmetry leak into all aspects of my life, so while I had a number of pleasant professional relationships, I had no one I could really turn to for advice about Rema’s replacement, no one whom I could simply call upon as a friend, as a second. Except for Rema, and Rema wasn’t there. I admit that it’s generally better to consult another person, to adjust for a limited perspective, for the distortions of perception. If I’m wondering, for example, “Do I look haggard?” it would be useful to have another person’s eyes on me; between the two of us we might be able to settle the question near the truth. But given the particulars of the situation, corroboration was an unreasonable expectation. I’d have to proceed on my own. The limits of my knowledge and education inevitably restrict my comprehension of Tzvi’s work, so far outside of my own discipline, but I have come to understand the basic ideas quite well. Doppler radar turns to advantage what is known as Doppler effect, an oft-misunderstood concept. Doppler effect describes an apparent—as opposed to actual—change in frequency or wavelength. It is the change perceived by an observer who is, relative to the wave source, in motion. Textbook example: as a speeding car approaches, the sound it emits appears to go up in pitch, in frequency. But in actuality, the emitted frequency—the car’s trembling of the air around it—does not change at all. It only seems to change. Let us imagine a source from which a Rema look-alike emerges every second. If the source is stationary, and I am stationary, then every second one of these Remas will pass me by. But if the single observer, again let’s say me, begins walking toward the source of Remas, then a Rema will pass by me more frequently than every second, even though Remas are still exiting the source at the precise rate of one per second. From my (walking) perspective, there is now less spacing between the Remas, and therefore the wavelength has been affected, the perceived frequency of Remas has changed, has increased. One might also consider the case of my remaining in place, and the source of Remas moving toward me. Or the case of myself and the Rema source both moving. Any frame of reference will do. If in the sum of movement vectors, the source and I are moving away from each other, then Remas will pass by less frequently, the perceived frequency of Remas will have decreased. (A lower pitch will be heard from the receding car.) Being aware of this distortion of perception allows scientists to take advantage of the distortion itself in order to gather accurate data about the actual, and not just the perceived, world. In fact, more and better data than could be gathered if the distortion did not exist. Doppler effect refers to these distorted perceptions, and Doppler radar’s utility relies on savvy interpretations of these distortions that, properly understood, enable a more accurate understanding of the real world. More or less, that is the Doppler effect, most famously used to come to the conclusion that the universe is expanding, since no matter which way a radar is pointing, it detects a redshift, the visual manifestation of wavelengths bouncing off of a receding source. That had been a surprise: the universe, in every direction, was leaving us (and apparently looking beige while doing so). I’m not sure if it’s wrong or silly to feel more sad and lonely on account of such facts, facts like the universe’s expansion, but somehow I do feel that way. But back to the point: Doppler effect. Or as I have come to call it in my more personal experience of it: Dopplerganger effect. 9. Dopplerganger effect in effect She said to me: “Anatole, I am worried about you.” Anatole? I felt for a moment like I could sense my own skin desiccating, that all those people I’d seen in the coffee shop were members of my own self, in masquerade, laughing at me, that I could sense water molecules moving not toward boiling but doing the opposite, colliding together out of the air. What came out of my mouth was: “What?” I saw red. Or beigey stars with red auras, receding. She answered in a very quiet voice, “Well, I said. I said: Well, that I am worried about you.” “You said Anatole,” I said, turning my head to look up at her face. From down below like that—I was still on the floor of the kitchen—her lips looked like bas-relief, exaggerated and grotesque. “For a toll?” She said. “No, no I didn’t say that.” I could still sense the dog in the room, but it was as if she were unfathomably far away, as if her tail were metronoming over a distant horizon. “You said,” I said again, “Anatole.” Her eyes were watering. “No, I didn’t. I said just, oh, that I am worried about you.” “I heard Anatole,” I said again, unembarrassed, because after all she was a stranger. I lifted myself off the cool, dry, dusty floor—feeling somehow a small loss at no longer being able to see the lost jack under the fridge—and I sat myself up next to the woman. “Anatole. Is that the name of the night nurse?” She kept crying very quietly and did not answer me. “Is he your boyfriend? Is he in on this?” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “So stupid,” I heard her mumble. “What?” I said. And one might fault me for not attending to this woman’s suffering—but I myself was still in such shock, under such duress. “No, silly. No, not what you might think at all,” and she began to laugh a little bit in her tears. She stood up then, from the ground, the floor I mean, and walked to the bedroom. I did not follow her, not right away. I went to sleep knowing that if I was somehow wrong, if this really was Rema, then in the morning we’d pretend none of this had happened. That’s how things were with us. I liked that, our mutual commitment to delimiting our intimacy, that commitment, in its way, a supreme form of intimacy, I’d argue. I often miss that very particular habit of ours these days, when it seems everything I’ve said or done or eaten or worn the day before is being made reference to, is being discussed. People need secrets. Anyway, that night I slept at the very edge of the bed; the woman did not seem to mind. She slept with her back to me. She held the dog in her arms and did not touch me. I also let her remain alone. 10. I walk the dog; the dog walks me At some point during that night—after the naming-of-the-dog fight and after Anatole and the foot estrangement, when Rema was still not Rema, and the Royal Academy had either called or not called me, and Harvey was either dead or just missing again—I woke that woman sleeping next to me with her arm around a new animal and I asked her if I was talking in my sleep. She mumbled: You are talking right now but I don’t know if you are sleeping. I shook her again and she said: But I am sleeping, viejito, please please leave me alone. I didn’t know what to make of that. I breathed in her hair, which smelled just right and made my eyes water. And I put my hand on her sleeping forehead, which felt just the right shape. And I carefully reached my arm around her waist to find the handle of her far hip and it felt just like Rema’s hip, though maybe a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller, or something—I was having such a hard time articulating my perceptions, even just to myself. I tried to fall back asleep, and I think I did, but it was the kind of sleep where one later wakes up exhausted, with the conviction of having slept not more than minutes. When I finally awoke, the simulacrum was not in the bed. I found a note, written in a slightly undersized Rema-ish script, magneted onto the refrigerator, where the Gal-Chen family photo used to be. PLEASE TO WALK THE DOG BEFORE YOU LEAVE Well: it was something meaningful to do while I tried to conceive of a better method—I didn’t have one yet—of searching for Rema. Even then I knew I couldn’t just ride the subway all day long. And although I was not yet explicitly thinking of my situation in terms of research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods, I was already aware of the need to overcome the confines of my lonely point of view. I couldn’t yet imagine how to make deductions from my restricted knowledge without it being like trying to determine the position of a star without understanding parallax, or, perhaps more to the point, like trying to determine the actual frequency of an object moving away from me at an unknown speed and in an unknown direction, and not knowing whether it in fact was me or the object doing the moving. I found the nervous russet dog in the closet, jaw on dusty floor, one paw possessively in a yellow high heel of Rema’s. “Okay, little orphan,” I said to her quietly. When she saw me, she thumped her lean tail clumsily and whimpered. “You have no idea,” I went on, trying to lean down toward her slowly, without frightening abruptnesses, “why you’re here, why you’re not at home. Maybe you think I smell odd. It’s very important, did you know, for getting along, for falling in love, to like each other’s smell, even if you’re not aware of noticing it.” She gazed at me steadily. I felt she was calmed by my Rema-like chatter. “Rema smells like cut grass and bread and lemon,” I said. Leashing the pup felt wrong. I walked her over to the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She received numerous compliments, the pup. I received none. I used to sit on the cathedral steps, waiting and waiting for Rema—by chance—to pass by. This was before we were together. Sitting on that cold concrete I inevitably felt like the worst kind of fool—winter and not even a hot drink in my hands or a spiritual temperament to my mind to excuse my presence—and waiting there, exposed to the elements, a part of me vehemently hated the innocent Rema, hated her for taking up my time, for occupying an unclosing preoccupative loop in my mind, but, of course, another part of me loved her, ecstatically, for pretty much the same reasons, with profound gratitude toward her not just for her herself but also for my obsession with her, which rescued me from my unceasing progression of unpunctuated days, because one thing my obsession did, if dizzyingly, was punctuate. And get me out of my apartment, and my habits. And I did occasionally actually see her. And even just that much of Rema, brief sightings of her, would have been worth all my devotion; she’s a finer world. The pup seemed uninterested in ascending the steps; they didn’t mean to her what they meant to me; we walked on, proverbial man and beast, and then, in the reflective glass of a Korean dry cleaner’s window, overlapping with a faded sign showing a shoulder-padded ’80s woman and with the text Modern women wear white too!, I caught sight of an adorable dog leading an old man whose coat was buttoned up wrong. Twice now. I needed to look at myself on purpose, I resolved. Not by accident. I readjusted the buttons of my coat. I looked again in that reflective glass and saw a more distinguished man. And it struck me—as if it hadn’t struck me before, or with more particulars than before—to analyze my situation as if it were not my situation but, instead, a patient’s. This simulation of there being two observers looking at the same problem (my life) without there actually being two observers echoes—though I didn’t realize it at the time—the solution that Tzvi came to in his research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods. I was deploying Tzvi Gal-Chen’s solutions even before I properly understood them to be his solutions, as if his ideas were already coursing invisibly through my veins, which perhaps they were. So the plan came to me, as if flooding into my hand from that leash, to do just what I did with my patients. I would accumulate data, do a literature search. Though on exactly what I wasn’t certain. I would simulate the addition of another radar into the equation, if not a perfectly coupled one. There’d be two of us. An I and a me, I might say, if I felt like being cute about it. Like that interrupter Lacan’s changing of the comma to a semicolon in Descartes’ famous formulation, about thinking and being. I think; therefore I am. That, anyway, was my resolution; or at least that was my hope. I called my office, asked to have my appointments canceled, said I was sick, terribly sick, and left for the public library to research the state of me. 11. Paradigm shift The way I proceeded with my investigation might cause me to lose credibility before mediocre minds. And I should admit that I’ve always simply loved the New York Public Library, so arguably my motivation for going there that day was not just to find more information but also to be comforted, to see the light pouring in through the enormous windows in broad cones as if from giant parallel movie projectors. Maybe—but really the meekest of maybes—I was pursuing the sense I used to have as a child, when I’d see the illuminated dust shimmering and winking and—this was back when the library was always warm—I’d feel myself safe in the belly of an enormous and unknowable beast. When I was ten or eleven, my mother used to take me with her to the library almost every day. She was researching the legal proceedings related to eviction. Or maybe she was researching a family tree. I don’t really remember, so probably both of these things were, at different times, true. She did always believe that some outsized inheritance was seeking her; she’d stand at the newsstand and search the “Seeking” section of the classifieds, and then refold the paper and return it to the stack. But it’s not as if, in obedience to some zeitgeist Freudianism, Rema dimly replaced my mother; if anything Rema made my mother, retrospectively, seem a pale shadow of an original love yet to come. At the library that day I knew that in adopting my new methodology, the logic I was familiar with would inevitably fail me. Certain rules can be said to hold, but only under a very specific set of conditions, conditions even an approximation of which had rapidly receded from me. What rules could be said to hold in my new world? I didn’t know. But I’ve always been logical, quite traditionally so, for example I put my least frequently worn clothing in the bottom drawer, which is the most uncomfortable to reach. And I had my office carpeted in pale blue because it is one of the few colors that are masculine and feminine at once. And when I first got Rema’s number I purposely didn’t enter it into my cell phone so as to keep myself from calling her too often. Instead I taped her number onto my refrigerator, which meant I could have lost it—it could have fallen, been swept away—but I knew the risk was an essential one and so, being rational, I took it. But those old logics of mine had grown suddenly antique—to abandon them for something new was only reasonable. I sat myself down at one of the library’s long communal tables. I pulled the beaded cord of the desk lamp. I stared at the illuminated green lampshade. I was waiting not for me to come up with an idea but for an idea to come up with me. This went on for a while, how long I am not sure. As I sat there, attempting patience, I became conscious of a faint ringing just quieter than the ventilation system, an alternating two-tone ringing of irregular rhythm. Looking around failed to reveal if anyone else heard this, or was disturbed by this, or if it was just me. Along the spine of the long table lay stunted pencils and old beige card catalog cards. I watched myself write—the lead of the pencil was soft and pressing it down against the note card inevitably made me think of Rema applying eyeliner, her gaze up and out—one term on each of three separate note cards: LEO LIEBENSTEIN (ME), DOPPELGANGERS, ROYAL ACADEMY OF METEOROLOGY. A plan came to me: to select a note card at random and to begin my research in the direction thus dictated. Again I stress, it is precisely because I am intensely logical that I recognized that in order to determine how best to proceed I needed a new kind of logic. I had not, however, abandoned my faith in experimental controls. I quickly wrote three more note cards: HERONS, WOOL PROCESSING, HEMOCHROMATOSIS. Those would be my red herrings. Maybe I’d chosen herons with that obscurely in mind. Regardless, I turned all six note cards over and shaped them into a stack, shuffled them, then spread them out on the table. It was difficult for me to convince myself that I didn’t still know which card was which, so I gathered the cards into a pile again, then left for the men’s room, where I washed my hands with horrible bubblegum pink liquid soap and dried my hands on mealy paper towels. This picking of the card would have to be truly, not just apparently, random. Otherwise I ran the risk of being guided by plans that only seemed like my own but that were actually determined by whatever ideas had been seeded into the air, intruded upon me. I returned to the table; I shuffled the cards once more. Sitting across from me was a double-chinned, mustachioed man; he didn’t even glance at me but his left hand kept drifting to just behind his ear, to rub something there, and this somehow made me feel self-conscious and awkward and ugly, as if he were me. Leaving the cards scattered, I rose once more from my seat—the sound of my chair scraping the floor reverberating in the belly of that whale, of course I had doubts—and I took a walk down the long center aisle, looked at a spine on a book shelved at the far wall (Who’s Who in Scandinavia, 1950–1970), touched the gold lettering like a home base, then returned—in that cavern—to my seat. The mustachioed man’s hand was again behind his ear. His earlobe was large and pale, but the antitragus was bright red. I re-reshuffled my sense and nonsense cards, re-redistributed them across the table in front of me, and, finally, picked one. I turned it over: ROYAL ACADEMY OF METEOROLOGY. No red herring! So: I would do a literature search on the Royal Academy of Meteorology. 12. My second search, objective unknown Only very briefly did I panic, when, in my aloneness, I realized that the one reference database I knew how to use, besides the now dead and dismembered card catalog, was Medline. That realization, being surprised by my own inability, shook me up in a way that reminds me of the first trip Rema and I took together, walking hut to warm hut in the Austrian Alps. This was relatively early on in our relationship, and I had told Rema that I knew German “more or less.” In truth I’d once taken a two-week German class. I’d retained maybe four phrases: milch bitte, Ich bin ein Berliner, die Zukunft einer Illusion, and Arbeit macht frei. But I wasn’t quite lying to Rema when I’d said I knew German “more or less,” because I did truly feel that once I got to Austria I would “remember” German. We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in—a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams. Lies—they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could. Well, I thought I’d remember German despite having never actually forgotten it, having never—as I vaguely felt I might have—listened to German radio broadcasts, or spoken German as a child. But we get these wrong feelings sometimes, feelings like articles slipped into our luggage but not properly ours. I think of it like vestigial DNA. Code for nothing, or the wrong thing, or for proteins that don’t fold up properly and that may eventually wreak great destruction. I talked about this wrong luggage thing with the simulacrum the other day, explained to her how maybe she really did feel Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/rivka-galchen/atmospheric-disturbances/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.