Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  I was silent. Killer shifted her gaze to Magda.

  Magda set the tray down. “Actualmente?” she punctuated, meaning “currently” but making me think “actually.”

  I had distinctly not presented myself as a friend of Rema’s husband; I had presented myself as a friend of Rema. I had not known that Magda knew Rema was married—and maybe she didn’t know. So I felt suddenly pressed into revealing something I perhaps oughtn’t—a not unfamiliar situation for me since in the course of my practice I have often found myself in “situations” with patients’ families, situations in which I am being pressed, with more and less subtly manipulative locutions, into revealing what I ought not reveal. But this particular moment with Magda was complicated by the fact that I did not quite know what exactly it was I did not wish to reveal, knew only what I was trying to discover. As I sat on that worn velvet nap, my overwhelming ignorance—about Magda, about Rema—seemed to materialize as the smell of my clothing, not dirty exactly, but overheated, and exhaling parts of itself.

  So you are a friend of Rema’s husband? repeated in my mind.

  And Killer—she looked like a larger version of the doppelganger’s dog.

  “Well,” I began. “Well. Well, yes, I am a friend of his,” I concluded, which when I thought about it I decided was true, or true enough, and I was relieved to get to say something true because trying to maintain a lie, well, that becomes increasingly difficult over time. “That’s how I met Rema. Actually. Yes. Through him.” Which is also arguably not untrue. I reached for my tea with studied casualness. It was a maté, served in a special gourd with a straw, like Rema often made for herself at home, and I knew the drink was associated with several whole countries but I’d always thought of that gourd and its filtering straw as Rema’s own personal eccentricity. “But of course,” I said, sipping, “I’m now, currently—actually—also, very much a friend to Rema herself.”

  The maté tasted terrible, like socks. I eyed the tall chocolate cookies, then lifted my eyes to the woman; the coffee table’s candle had cast her shadow up, against the ceiling, where it in turn loomed over her. “I’m curious,” she said, “to hear what you think of Rema’s husband?”

  I had removed myself—parts of myself—from the conversation; a few cells were listening to Magda but whole factions of me had been devoted for some time to the question of whether enough time had passed to enable me to graciously reach for one of the oddly tall chocolate-covered cookies. “Well,” I found myself saying, as if the word itself had formed a well-filled well within me, “well he’s nice enough, isn’t he?” I made a move to the cookie, realizing that my small half-truth was already tangling my investigation.

  “I only met him once,” she said without making eye contact, and reaching out a hand to pet Killer’s head. “But to be honest—and I’m an excellent judge of character, I’m an analyst—I didn’t like him. I didn’t even like him a small amount.”

  I was busy trying to deal gracefully with the soft caramelly inside that I had not been prepared to find within the tall chocolate-covered cookie. Was she talking about me? Or some other me? Or someone else entirely? I had to wipe my mouth with my sleeve—I had no choice, she had not brought out napkins—and as I did, I thought, in a brief and stupid moment of mistranslated indignation, Did you hear the news about Edward?—another swatch of Rema song that I could not place—and then I swallowed my overrunning cookie too early, causing a pain in my heart (originating in my esophagus of course), as I wiped more crumbs from my mouth, recovering myself. Saliva had rushed to greet the caramel. “Oh?” I asked carefully, belatedly. “When did you meet him? Was he good-looking?”

  Did this other husband know the doppelganger’s dog, the dog who was like an echo of Magda’s dog?

  “You can tell him what I said,” Magda said, nonresponsively. “I don’t care; it’s not a secret, my feelings. I’m not one to keep secrets. Not about those sorts of things.”

  “When,” I asked again, “when did you say—when did you meet him?”

  “But that’s okay if you like him. Beneath your awkwardness and reserve you fall upon me as a nice man. There’s nothing wrong with liking somebody, at least not necessarily,” she said.

  “How long have you had this dog?”

  Then Magda looked closely at me for what may have been the first time—maybe I still had crumbs on my face—and she did not seem to recognize me. “You’re dressed rarely,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “You’re wearing heavy wool. And it’s summer. You’re dressed all wrong. For the weather.”

  “Yes, well, the weather was different. It was cold where I came from.”

  “I should apologize,” Magda said, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. “For my behavior. I’m so rude to not be asking you more about yourself. Just going on about Rema’s husband. Not making you comfortable. What a terrible host I am,” she said, laughing girlishly, performing happiness. “Let me at least go and bring us some pistachios—” And she rose from her chair, which made her shadow terrifying to me.

  “No really, it’s all right,” I said.

  “You don’t like pistachios?” she asked, pursing a heartbreaking pout beneath her monstrous shadow.

  “Oh I love pistachios,” I said. A gross exaggeration.

  “Oh good,” she said, and disappeared again down the hallway.

  The dog chose not to follow her, chose instead to watch over me.

  It was wholly obvious, her avoidance of the other husband issue.

  But me too, I might have been focusing on the wrong issues. In my training, years ago, I had met a patient jaundiced to a curry who had never thought to worry about the changes in his skin and eye color but instead had arrived at the hospital extremely anxious about an insignificant nevus. That yellowed man, displacing his worries onto the meaningless sign, came to my mind then, in Magda’s brief absence, as I worried about pistachios. Did Rema really have some other husband? Maybe she could have deceived me, I’ll admit that—I can admit that—but how, what with sleeping in my bed every night, could Rema have tricked him, whoever he was, Anatole or not Anatole, purportedly (purported by me) my friend? In my mind—I knew it was just in my mind—I heard terrible laughter. I ate another cookie. And then another cookie, before I’d even swallowed the previous.

  Magda returned with a bowl of pistachios, the kind dyed red, and before I could say thank you she began speaking.

  “It’s been years since I’ve seen Rema,” she said. “She calls exactly once a month but won’t give me her phone number and won’t really say anything of substance, just talks instead about things in the news, only the most random things, like new discoveries about Saturn’s moon she brought up recently, as if these are somehow personal events. I can’t bring up anything real, anything personal, because then she shouts at me and hangs up the phone. You must think I’m terrible that she isolates herself from me but really it’s not that at all, it’s just that I can’t have those kinds of conversations that she feels comfortable in, I can’t have them; they are too ugly to me. When you said you’d seen Rema so recently, well, I didn’t want to tell you everything on the phone because I was afraid that then you wouldn’t want to come over here to speak with me, that you’d have a horrible misimpression and then my chances would be lost—”

  I might note that Magda was crying through most of those words. People cry in front of me fairly often, so I have had ample opportunity to consider how one ought to handle such situations, and yet still, I admit, I am not very gracious in responding to performances of emotion. Obviously one can put an arm around the other person, or extend a hand, or murmur sympathetically. Or be silent. In my professional situation, I have (I believe correctly) chosen to adopt the most reserved among these options, because even just a single kind word can turn a few tears into a torrent, and one certainly doesn’t want to ungate such a flood: it’s just not useful. One can watch movies on one’s own time, alone, for that sort of therapy. So—and yes p
erhaps this was wrong, or at least culturally unacceptable—I just sat there silently pretending not to notice the woman’s—Rema’s mother’s—Magda’s—tears. I sat with my eyes downcast and averted, as if Magda were naked. This was my attempt at restoring her dignity to her. There’s a downside, of course, to such a strategy. Dogs offer more comfort than I do. But there’s also this efficiency in which, when you watch someone cry, it can wholly relieve you of the impulse to do the same.

  “You’re not Argentine,” Magda eventually said, recovering herself.

  I looked down at my fingers that were stained pink from the pistachios I’d just eaten. It struck me that while she’d been crying I’d probably been making a great deal of noise, cracking those shells, chewing those nuts, sucking the salt off.

  18. EigenMe

  I have never, for even a minute, believed myself a meteorologist. I wouldn’t want certain concessions I’ve made to my current reality to undermine an accurate understanding of the predicament I was in, a predicament that gave me little choice other than to retreat into the kind of inventiveness that resembles deceit and/or psychosis. And that is why I have gone to the trouble of detailing all the seeming irrelevancies of my initial meeting with Magda. I would like the position I was in at that time to be appreciated. Just think: I did not know where my Rema was, I did not know how much to reveal to Magda about my true identity, I was being watched by a strange dog, and in addition to all the unwelcome data that had been accumulating prior to my arriving at Rema’s childhood home, there was suddenly this unforeseen, somewhat unassimilatable information about Rema having some other husband. Not to mention that: my luggage was missing, my home phone had been mysteriously ringing, my patient had gone absent, someone claiming to be from the Royal Academy had offered me a fellowship, and an old meteorologic research paper had seemed, in its way, to have spoken to me. On top of all this an objectively attractive woman had wept before me, while I sat in sweaty clothes with red pistachio dye on my hands and the corners of my mouth sore from salt. Who, in such a situation, would be safe from slipping into a second small ego-protective lie?

  “So—I’m sorry—how did you meet my daughter and her, well, and him?” Magda asked, after having recollected herself.

  I nodded my head and held up a finger as if to say “one moment,” and then I proceeded to put more pistachios in my mouth, then sip again of the horrible maté, and then eat another cookie, the second to last. Unlike Rema, I’ve no knack for spontaneously inventing stories. In fact, quite the opposite. I can hardly tell anecdotes that are true. Except for the refuge of asking questions, I find speaking very challenging. That’s part of why I’m inevitably the first to finish my meal at any gathering, because my main delay tactic when I’m asked a question is to eat.

  Through the echo-y internal din of molar pistachio devastation, I heard Magda say, trying to speak for me: “You are a colleague of her husband’s? You are also a psychiatrist?”

  I found myself shaking my head—a gesture that can signal either denial or sorrowful disbelief—and swallowing. I like so few of my colleagues.

  “No?” she inquired gently.

  I found myself saying in front of a woman whose trust I would have liked to have gained: “Actually I’m a meteorologist.” Then: “A research meteorologist,” I added, with that liar’s drive toward specificity. “Not one of those guys on television, though. That’s what everyone’s always asking me.”

  I suppose I was and wasn’t thinking of Tzvi Gal-Chen in that moment. Meteorology, quite simply, was the first profession that came to mind. But again I would like to emphasize: I did not believe those words. I had never planned to say them. Some unruliest member of that parliament of me—although admittedly a perhaps intuitively ingenious member—had stolen the podium to speak those irrevocable words, and the rest of me then had no choice but to devote itself to the task of trying to maintain that false face.

  But anyway, at that moment, the lie worked just fine. I maintained, in one move, both my privacy and my politesse.

  “Meteorology. That is interesting,” Magda replied after a moment. “I met a meteorologist once,” she said. “At a dinner,” she modified. And at this, as if suddenly she’d reached some judgment—one that appeared to be positive—she stood up quickly and insisted, “You’re welcome to stay here if you want. Even before the crisis I rented rooms. You should stay here. You can ask Rema. Even with everything, I’m sure she’ll tell you how nice it is here. Maybe she’ll come visit you. Maybe you’ll call her. You’ll think it over. You’ll think.”

  19. Into the noise

  I did indeed think it over; I did so by doing what I often do when I don’t know what to do, which was head to a coffee shop. An aloof and pretty young waitress—she had a lovely mole near her thumb and a waist like Rema’s—brought me cookies with my coffee even though I didn’t ask for cookies. Not that I needed more cookies, but regardless, this small variation in the way I normally experience coffee shops—those gratis cookies—woke me up a little to my situation, recalled to me to not be so foolish as to search for Rema in only one way, by only one method—talking to Rema’s mother. I had another lead. Dipping a cookie, I pulled out my xeroxes of Tzvi Gal-Chen’s research for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, and I began by skimming: The numerical models discussed herein (and elsewhere) are formulated as Initial Value Problems, a phrase that already caused me trouble as I could not feel confident (yes not even feel confident) about what that might mean—Initial Value Problem—though it’s not as if I couldn’t surmise, though my surmises seemed all wrong to me. So I set that reprint—which contained no images—aside. What “Initial Value Problem” could there be, even via stretched metaphor, in my relationship with Rema? I continued on to: A Method for the Initialization of the Anelastic Equations: Implications for Matching Models with Observations. “Anelastic” made me think of the brittleness of psychoses. I read further. An algorithm is proposed, whereby the combined use of the equations of cloud dynamics, and the observed wind, will permit a unique determination of the density and pressure fluctuations. Fluctuations. Yes, that seemed right. And “unique determination,” a compelling account of love. But I knew my brain was eager to perceive order, so I’d have to be rigorous before conceding any genuine concordances—otherwise I’d just be like Harvey reading the New York Post for meteorologic orders. Nothing had yet jumped out at me as much as that image, that thumbprinty image from the retrieval paper, and retrieval—that was so precisely, so straightforwardly, so unmetaphorically what I was trying to do. I dismissed the fluctuations sentence as only seemingly relevant. Then in the middle of a third article a distinct change in tone and content undeniably signaled a clue. The article had begun by discussing numerical prediction models but then, suddenly, read: Plato was apparently the first to state that what we are sensing are only images of the real world. Clearly an unnecessary sentence in a radar meteorology article. Appeals to antiquity naturally, well, appeal, yes, but deploying such a rhetorical move in such a context was highly unusual; clearly it signaled something; it would be foolish to contend otherwise. And why the added play of “apparently”? Gauss, the passage continued, was apparently the first to formulate a mathematical theory of prediction—something then to do with the inaccuracy of our observations hindering accurate extrapolation to future states. Again the “apparently.” Under a noise cloud of percolation I continued reading: In Gauss’s work observations and models were combined to predict the trajectory of a celestial body—which struck me as a rather inappropriate way of referring to Rema. Although, I thought, immediately scolding myself for my single-mindedness, perhaps there were innumerable celestial bodies whose motions needed to be tracked, and then I thought further about that word, “meteorology,” and how it must itself, from the very beginning, have referred to the study of meteors, of objects falling through the sky.

  Tzvi’s article continued: Atmospheric modeling is computationally complex, driving a search for less demanding, nonoptimal a
pproximate methods … The exact approach requires the inversion of large matrices of the order of 105 × 105 but the matrices are sparse so that many of the computations can, in principle, be done in parallel. Nonoptimal approximate methods. Computationally complex. The matrices are sparse. The words ungated certain snatches of music, of time, into my consciousness, but nothing had yet crystallized. There is hope that the development of massively parallel supercomputers (e.g. 1000 desktop Crays working in tandem) could—

  Suddenly my BlackBerry rang and without even thinking, without even checking to see who it was—lost as I was in a haze of a thousand desktop Crays—I answered. As I did, a previously unnoticed cat looked briefly toward me, as did the Rema-waisted waitress—she was beautiful, unusually so—and a man behind the coffee bar wearing a green soccer jersey with the number 9 in white, he also looked over at me—and this made me look down at my shoes, which I realized had a fine beige dust on them, and I felt like while I had been disappearing into those words of Tzvi, everyone, and everything, had been observing me, which made me see myself multiplied, as if in a hall of mirrors, or on the screens of thousands of Crays, though I think this was just a matter of perspective.

  “Hello?” I alarmed into the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?”

  I had no idea with whom I was speaking, but I was welling up with unarticulated emotion, emotion preceding any thought, and I saw images—thin wales of corduroy, hairs of an ink brush, bruisy blue vein on a foot, a yellow cardigan, archipelagoed tea leaves, smudged newsprint, a pulley, the tendon of a neck—and the word that rose to the surface was “Rema.”