Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  I opened my mouth.

  Then my BlackBerry—set there on the table beside me—trembled.

  Magda held a hand up to her heart, as if she’d been given a fright, as if a real alarm had sounded.

  “It’s not Rema,” I said suddenly, perhaps brusquely, I don’t know why.

  “Oh, no, of course not,” she said, and “please,” she added, gesturing toward my retrembling BlackBerry. “Be at home.”

  It was just an e-mail marked “urgent;” I’ve programmed these to ring even when my ringer is off because I usually receive such notes only when an outpatient of mine has been admitted to the hospital.

  Magda looked decidedly the other way; she took a cookie and dipped it into her tea with an expectant look, as if waiting to see if the cookie would crumble.

  The urgent e-mail appeared to be from Harvey.

  Dear Dr. Leo,

  I wrote to Dr. Gal-Chen of my progress against the 49.

  I have not yet heard back from him.

  Have you heard from him? I have sent him three letters.

  I am in central Oklahoma and am unable to obtain a copy of the New York Post. The National Severe Storms Laboratory here was unprotected.

  Please pass on Dr. Gal-Chen’s phone number. It’s urgent.

  —Harvey

  When I looked down at my hands, I saw newsprint smudged on the pads of my fingers. Touching the screen of my BlackBerry left a print. I shouldn’t have been surprised to notice, when I looked up and over at Magda, that she had on full makeup, even already then, first thing in the morning. There is something about a confident thick streak of eyeliner that makes a woman look very emotional. I could also detect Magda’s concealer, there under her eyes, shy about the fine wrinkles to which it clung. Her cheeks had a dramatic swath of blush that slightly sparkled, as if sifted with very fine grains of sand.

  “Who was that?” Magda said.

  “Did any of the disappeared ever reappear?” I then asked Magda, who ignored me for a moment, as if I were talking not to her but to my phone. “I’m sorry,” I said, probably because I thought that was what she should have said to me, for being rude to me. “I was just thinking about it on account of these memorials here in the newspaper.” I wasn’t going to tell her about Harvey. “I mean, those are memorials, yes? I was just curious if maybe there were people who had been believed to have been disappeared, but who had really just wandered off, maybe had gone crazy, or maybe had a bout of amnesia. And then maybe one day, maybe years later”—I was all about the maybes—“those people unexpectedly return. Or are found. I’ve heard of that happening, of mistakes like that. You know, I read recently, in another newspaper, that an unknown, unshowered vagrant had been found playing virtuosic Debussy in a church in a Scottish fishing village; I think the man spoke German; when asked his name he said he couldn’t remember; word spread and hundreds of people—literally hundreds—said they were certain they knew who he was, came to visit expecting to find their lost brother or child or friend—”

  At which point I think she interrupted with something to the tired effect of: oh really? And I realized, heat rising to my face, that I had been going on and on. Still, I added:

  “Someone might have been right. Someone might have found his, or her, missing man.”

  Or I was saying something like that, trying to keep myself from staring at Magda’s emotional makeup and trying to distract her from any questions about the note I’d just received, seeing as I was even less ready than I’d been the day before to invent some story on the spur of the moment.

  But: at least a mystery, if not the mystery, was beginning to reveal itself. Harvey was not dead; he was in Oklahoma.

  22. Method of maximum likelihood

  There was a time when the belief was prevalent that all those who cared for the mentally ill became mentally ill, and at the arrival of Harvey’s message, that idea—infectiousness—stretched its cadaverous hand out from the past to touch my mind.

  I had thought to contact Tzvi Gal-Chen.

  And Harvey had actually contacted him, or at least had tried to.

  But it wasn’t the same Tzvi Gal-Chen we were talking about. That’s why I was nothing like Harvey.

  Magda gestured to my small, empty coffee cup, and I startled back into myself and gestured toward the object about which we were obviously not speaking, my BlackBerry.

  “That was just a colleague of mine,” I said as casually as I could manage, nodding my head about the coffee, which she refilled for me. “Thank you.”

  “She’s all right? Your colleague is all right?”

  “He. It’s a he,” I said. “Yes. Yes, of course. Yes, he’s fine, more than fine.”

  Magda sat down again, wrapped both hands around her own mug. Her hands—they were so much older than Rema’s—were thin and receded away from the knuckles.

  “Yes, this colleague,” I began, trying to set Magda, or really myself, at ease. “He just likes to send me the most random notes, does it all the time,” I said with a little laugh; in truth it was the first e-mail Harvey had ever sent me. “I get the most wonderful e-mails from him all the time,” I said. In truth I have no friends, except for Rema, who send me wonderful e-mails; my e-mails are dully professional. “He’s such a lovely source of entertainment and happiness,” I continued, finally falsely elaborating to true excess.

  I folded up the newspaper like clean laundry. I cleared my throat and stood up. I began to gather dishes over Magda’s protest. I began to wash the dishes and Magda asked me to stop. She told me I was using the wrong sponge.

  I told her that after stopping by the airport, I’d be spending the rest of my day at the university.

  “Which university?” she asked me.

  I didn’t know. It just seemed like the place a research meteorologist would be spending his days. So I just said, “Thank you again for breakfast,” and left.

  23. An alibi not invented by Rema

  I called the airport and a woman’s voice told me assuringly that my suitcase had been found. I splurged on a taxi, but then what they showed me wasn’t even the right color. My suitcase—Rema’s suitcase—is pale blue, baby blue, and hard-shelled with regularly irregular craters like the moon. The suitcase they showed me was periwinklish, which I suppose some people will call blue and some purple, and both camps will be pretty dedicated to their idea of what the real color is, and will see it, often, as, well, a black-and-white issue. Rema and I argued over this once. But how do people make those kinds of mistakes? I wonder if the periwinkle color is an undecided issue in all cultures, or if there are some cultures with so many things to distinguish along the blue-to-violet spectrum that a much more sophisticated and precise language has evolved.

  Anyway, a miscommunication.

  I made my way back to the coffee shop where the Rema-waisted waitress had been. The Rema-waisted waitress was not there. The waitress in her place was attractive, but not as attractive. I asked for a coffee and extra cookies, and I set my first priority: to respond to Harvey’s e-mail, and in that response to come up with a convenient barrier between Dr. Gal-Chen and myself.

  After that, I could (I told myself) with a clear mind return to the central matter—I didn’t see then how they were related—of searching for Rema.

  I took up pen in hand and began writing, with no plan of what I was going to say, just hoping an idea would come to me; something to the effect of what is reproduced below is what my hand wrote:

  Dear Harvey,

  Glad to hear that you are doing well.

  Some news: Tzvi Gal-Chen and I have been moved to separate legions and can no longer communicate directly. I can only send notes upward to my superiors, who will contact his superiors—possibly—who might then possibly choose to contact him, but one can never be sure. YOU SHOULD NOT MAKE ANY FURTHER ATTEMPTS AT CONTACTING DR. GAL-CHEN DIRECTLY. Who can know the ifs and whens of whether messages are transmitted, or if they are intercepted? We must always be wary of the 49.

&
nbsp; These clouds do not cast shadows, they scatter light.

  I am out of my office for an undetermined length of time, but please, keep in touch.

  Dr. L

  Terribly hokey. And not very believable? Why did I use that word “legions”? The use of all caps for emphasis embarrasses me. And I cannot even express the nausea evoked by recalling my feeble attempt at mysterious wisdom. If only I’d had Rema’s help; she would have come up with something so much more compelling.

  I ate a cookie—slightly almond—and considered whether to type in and send my note. I did send the note. Harvey soon sent me back some quite surprising news.

  24. In 1990, Tzvi Gal-Chen publishes “Can Dryline Mixing Create Buoyancy?”

  So there I sat, wearing borrowed clothes, in the southern hemisphere, in a coffee shop near Rema’s childhood home, the Rema-waisted waitress not there, my awkward missive to Harvey sent, time moving at an uncertain rate as sunlight flooded continuously through the window, inducing a not so subtle dew along the plane of my back, and when I glanced—at some moment—back down at the slightly reflective screen of my BlackBerry I saw—in addition to an orangutan-y distortion of my forehead—that I’d already received a response, of sorts, from Harvey.

  He had forwarded me a note from tzvi@galchen.net.

  Dear Harvey,

  Thanks for your compliments. Sorry I’m responding to your e-mail rather than snail mail address; I know you said you were worried, but let me reassure you that e-mail as a form of communication is plenty safe for our purposes here.

  As per your request, let me first say that I have no doubt that you’ve been extremely dedicated in your work as a covert mesoscale operator for the Royal Academy. For that reason and others, I agree with you that you definitely deserve more freedom as regards your assignments. Yes, New York can get dull, especially meteorologically speaking. I also love severe storm season in the plains. Anyway, from here forward consider yourself autonomous; I (and my superiors who must remain nameless) trust your judgment entirely.

  With continued gratitude for all your atmospheric labor,

  Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen

  P.S.—Yes, please do pass on my regards to Dr. L.

  A breeze then entered the coffee shop. I looked up and saw a striking old bald man enter; I took a sip of the fresh-squeezed orange juice before me; then somehow I spilled the glass of orange juice; the pulp mosaiced through the liquid as it spread across the table; the Rema-ish waitress emerged seemingly out of nowhere carrying several white waffled rags with trim of pale blue stripes; she smelled of baby oil; with a paper napkin I patted at the splash on the screen of my BlackBerry, but flecks of pulp remained, looking like scraped cheek cells smeared out on a slide.

  But beneath those not actually cheek cells, the e-mail from Tzvi to Harvey and then on to me, remained unchanged.

  The door had swung shut; the breeze as if it never were; the man seated; a chill still on my dewy back; the Rema-ish waitress again vanished.

  Recall: at that time in my life, the only Tzvi Gal-Chen I knew, really, was Rema. Rema, Rema, Rema, Rema. The Tzvi language didn’t seem like hers, but certainly the note seemed like a clue. I didn’t feel safe typing into my pulpy BlackBerry, but I found an old, very old, receipt in my pocket, and wrote on the back the following list:

  Unnamed dog?

  Anatole?

  Royal Academy?

  Rema’s husband?

  Tzvi Gal-Chen?

  Then I folded the receipt over many times, making a compact little nugget out of it, so that I could reach into the deep and narrow pockets of my borrowed pants and feel the contours of that folded paper; I figured that would help me stay focused in my thinking, stay focused in my search.

  25. A wrongful accusation

  “You’re here,” a voice said, and looking up I again for a moment thought it was Rema, or the Rema-waisted waitress, but it was not the Rema-waisted waitress, nor was it Rema. It was Magda, there in my coffee shop.

  “I’m here. Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly like a child caught skipping school. Magda may have been standing there at the side of my table for rather a few moments before I remembered to offer her a seat, an offer she did not refuse, and we then sat there quietly for a few more moments, as I felt along the contours of the crumpled clue receipt in my pocket. My impersonation of a meteorologist—it was off to a bad start.

  With a nod toward the damp BlackBerry, Magda, breaking the stillness as uninvasively as possible, said simply: “That’s something.” Then: “Before this morning I’d never seen anything like that.”

  “Yes, it’s kind of a new thing,” I said.

  “Something I’ve never seen before,” she repeated.

  “But it’s common,” I said, deciding to let that small electronic device cloud over any false explanatory rays of my not being at any university.

  Then it was quiet again, at least quiet between us. There were other sounds, I suppose—probably milk was steaming, and silverware clinking, and newspaper crinkling—but I wasn’t noticing.

  “Do you know what I’m wondering about?” Magda asked. I did not proffer my guesses, which were my dreads. “Rema’s hair,” she said. “I am wondering how is she wearing it?”

  I must have looked at Magda strangely (but not on account of her question, instead mostly because I had my hand on that crumpled clue and I was still discussing Tzvi and Harvey and everything within the privacy of myself) because Magda began to explain herself: “It’s just that we used to fight over her hair. She’d hardly brush it, and she’d let it hang in her face and you couldn’t see her sweet features and she was making herself look vulgar and it would be this big argument. Between us, it really was ugly, what she’d do with her hair.”

  I offered cautiously, “Her hair looks very nice these days.” And having the chance to say something that was simply true—it was not as much of a relief as I thought it would be. I coughed. Strands of Rema’s cornsilk hair seemed to be snaked at the interstices of my bronchi.

  “And so now—well—so how is she wearing her hair now? She looks pretty?” Magda asked, rolling her eyes and smiling derisively, at herself I think, not at me.

  “She’s very smart. Rema is very smart,” I said to Magda, but—and this just struck me now—I suspect it was myself I was accusing with that blunt comment.

  “I smell oranges?” Magda said.

  I said, “I’m sorry. You’d like her hair, I think. The way it looks now. It’s very tidy. And a beautiful color. Blonde like the inside of corn. She wears it usually in a low—” I demonstrated a ponytail with a gesture. “Holds it in a wide gold clip. And it’s long and trim. And in the summer she pins the flyaway hairs back with neat little parallel hairpins that are a natural color instead of just plain black. But she still gets these pretty little loose strands; they get kind of extra bleachy blonde-ish and wavy in the summertime, I think naturally, or maybe she does that on purpose. My mom used to do that with lemon juice, little highlights like that.” I unpeeled the pads of my fingers from the sticky surface of the table and saw the whorled print of my own grease, and it looked like the image from Tzvi’s research paper. “More or less like that, anyway, is what her hair looks like,” I added quickly. “I mean it’s not like I see Rema every day, so who knows what she’s doing with her hair on just any old day.”

  “You love her, don’t you?” Magda said.

  I re-adhered and de-adhered my finger pads on the sticky table. I patted at the cookie crumbs on the plate where there were no longer cookies. I think I said nothing and looked nowhere, but Magda, like Rema, knew how to crowd up the silent space. “I apologize if I have made you uncomfortable,” she said. “Please understand that I am not narrow-minded in these ways. It makes me happy to see that you love her. It would make me happy to know that she has a lover. I’m just saying this, about this love you seem to have, partially because, well, her husband: I never saw it in him. I never saw that he loved her. That is why you came to see me, yes, because you l
ove her?”

  I spotted the Rema-waisted waitress, re-emerged from the back, attending to a nearby table.

  “Rema,” I declared, “isn’t the type to have affairs under any circumstances.”

  No perceptible response in the spine of the waitress, no twitch of attention.

  Then I dropped a spoon I hadn’t realized I was holding. I reached out to my sticky Blackberry and put it in my pocket. Soon afterward Magda left the coffee shop.

  I love you, I wrote on the bill when I paid it, wrote as if a kind of test, in case somehow that waitress might really be Rema.

  26. Lola

  That evening, after watching the TV weather and reassuringly or disappointingly, I’m not sure which, receiving no signals from the forecast—I needed to verify constantly for myself that I wasn’t perceiving patterns and signals that weren’t actually there—I finally placed a call to the Royal Academy. I somewhat lost control of the conversation. This proved in the end fortuitous, perhaps even destined, or at least, I might say, determined, as in the folding of certain proteins according to the dictates of RNA.

  I dialed what appeared to be the main number. “Yes. I’m returning a call?”

  “Are you calling about the marital tension?”

  “Someone called me.”

  “Yes. Do you know your party’s extension?”

  “Well, really, like I said, I’m returning a call. I was the object of calling, not the subject.”

  There was a bit of confusion, since I really didn’t know to whom I was returning a call. So I mentioned that I was calling from Buenos Aires in hopes that the receptionist would then be put in mind of the expense I was incurring. Our “conversation” was not progressing well, and then on impulse I dropped Harvey’s name—which I of course immediately regretted doing—but suddenly there was a little bit of tender piano music, I was being transferred, and then, abruptly—