Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  “I’m sorry. Of course. Are you mad at me?”

  I’m mad at Tzvi, I didn’t say. And I heard myself saying to Lola: “Well, it’s like what Tzvi Gal-Chen says in his paper ‘A Theory for the Retrievals,’ when he says, ‘It should be emphasized that the thermodynamic retrieval concept does not involve marching forward in time by means of prognostic equations … Rather the retrieval method is a diagnostic procedure using the same prognostic equations, but in a different way.’”

  “I don’t understand what you are saying?”

  I didn’t quite know what I was saying, either; those words had arrived whole from Tzvi’s research writings, writings I hadn’t thought I had so nearly memorized. “Oh, that’s just a thought that comes to my mind now and again—about retrievals, about improving predictions. Oddly enough, introducing errors into models makes for more reliable predictions. But I’m digressing. I really just wanted to hear about the work.”

  “But what did you mean just then? I mean, what’s the meaning behind what you said?”

  “I’m not really sure.” But I did feel somehow relieved, as if I’d made progress. “But it’s like Professor Gal-Chen’s other point, about how we cannot tell what the weather will be tomorrow because we do not know accurately enough what the weather is right now. Like, how can we forecast when we can’t even properly now-cast? You know, an Initial Value Problem.”

  “What’s the weather right now?”

  “Sunny,” I answered. “A light breeze from the southeast.” Lola laughed.

  Lots of serious things get dismissed as jokes; that’s a respectable coping mechanism.

  Then Lola proceeded to fill me—as Arthur—in on the details of the meteorological job that I had apparently been awarded, that I could take if I so desired. I said I so desired. I desired to work for the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

  34. Mesoscale phenomena

  That night the double came into my bedroom (that is, whoever’s bedroom I was staying in, maybe even Rema’s bedroom). The double’s hair carried a scent, in the faintest way, of bacon. I was sitting at the desk chair; she sat down on the bed.

  “Those clothes you’re wearing aren’t yours,” she said. “I am just now noticing that.”

  She had made a true observation. I was wearing the clothes that Magda had lent me. An attractive pale green button-up with a stain of unknown origin on the left breast pocket. I began to pick at that stain which I had not earlier noticed; it seemed like a gravy of some sort, powdery bits precipitated out of the goo. “It’s because I lost my luggage,” I said.

  “You’ve lost your luggage?” she said, which felt like an older and more familiar accusation than it could possibly actually be. As if the simulacrum and I had often been in situations in which I had disappointed her in just this way.

  “Really they lost my luggage,” I explained, while keeping my attention focused on the old stain and not on her. “I mean: it was out of my hands when it was lost, so it’s really not my fault. Others are to blame for having lost it. Though naturally I’m the one suffering as a result. Not that it’s whose fault it is that matters most, that’s just one thing. I mean I just said that, about who is to blame, because it happens to be true, because it’s true that it’s not my fault.” I continued on, still picking at the shirt, though there was little hope for change. “But whose fault it is isn’t the main point. Let’s say it’s Tzvi Gal-Chen’s fault. It’s just gone, the luggage. Anyway, they’re supposed to call me.” I didn’t tell her about my job offer.

  “I’ll buy you new clothes tomorrow,” the woman said abruptly.

  Reaching one hand into a deep and narrow pants pocket, I told her, “Don’t worry about it. I like what I’m wearing.”

  “No,” she said shortly and with authority. Then softer again: “I will buy you something else.” She was staring, like Magda had, at the snap on the cuff of my sleeve. She put her hand on my knee, making all sensation rush patella-ward, and she said: “So that’s something that we’ll do together. Tomorrow. Buy clothing.”

  Then a quiet again, hot at the knee, and I found myself saying boldly: “So who is taking care of that undernourished greyhound puppy? Is it Anatole? Is Anatole taking care of her?”

  The mattress was sunk ever so slightly beneath the woman’s weight, and this made the blanket crease out in radii in a way that made the simulacrum seem like the carpel of a flower, and she looked to me very beautiful, also very deerlike, as she said, withdrawing her hand from my knee: “Who said that name to you? Something is wrong with you.” The woman looked—I only then finally noticed—as if she had not slept in days. The skin beneath her eyes was so dusky, as if the blood there had never breathed. The hair at her temple curled damply. “What,” she sharped, “have you been talking about with my mom? She lied to me, didn’t she? Did she lie to me? She didn’t tell me she told you about him. I should tell you that she’s kind of a crazy liar—”

  And I felt sad, I felt a key change within me, and I involuntarily imagined myself zipping up a dark blue rain jacket—or was someone else zipping up that coat?—that I’d had as a child, and I said, in a dry and professional tone of voice: “She really hasn’t said anything to me of which the truth-value would be considered the most important quality—”

  “And what,” she interrupted, “did you say to her about Tzvi Gal-Chen? What was that about?”

  “Are you,” I asked, feeling like I’d realized something, “the reason Tzvi sent me such a cold reply?” Unexpected emotion lined my throat like a medicine. Just speaking Tzvi’s name to her had made my eyes water. “Are you working with him?”

  Those questions definitively stoppered her rising irritation. That exhausted flower stared at me for seconds or minutes or years. Then she stood up from the bed and approached me. I scooted my chair back. She stepped again toward me. I rose from my chair and went and sat on the far end of the bed. Like eddy fronts we were, forming katabatic winds. She turned and again stepped toward me, and frowned gently at me, and then, her still standing, me still sitting, she moved her hand very, very slowly out toward my cheek—making me tremble—and I let her place her hand tenderly on my face and leave it there, which is what she did, and my face was level with her waist. I—well, I could see her beauty clearly for a moment, the beauty of her waist, at least, and it affected me, probably powerfully—I found myself whispering, as if a secret agent might be in the closet listening to us: “Can’t we work together? Maybe we can help each other? Except that I don’t know your story, I don’t know your background, which makes for an Initial Value Problem, which makes it difficult for me to trust you, just like it must be difficult for Tzvi to trust me. I can’t tell which errors of yours are intentional. It must be so exhausting for you to have to pretend all the time. I want you to feel that you don’t have to pretend with me anymore. Don’t worry yourself with pretending, because, listen, I already know you’re not Rema. I already know that.”

  She moved her hand from my cheek to my forehead.

  I wanted to press my face against her beautiful, beautiful waist.

  She echoed, “I’m not Rema?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Can we go back?” she asked. “When you said Tzvi and ‘cold reply,’ what did you mean?”

  Though I was still thinking about her waist, by considering how the dent I made in the bed might look different from or the same as the one she had made, I cooled my urge to press myself against her. But I wasn’t—as much as I regretted prematurely disclosing my suspicions of her association with Tzvi Gal-Chen—thinking about the dent in the bed just in order to avoid answering.

  “When you say,” the simulacrum said, soldiering very slowly into the quiet, “that I am not Rema, what do you mean? This is just an expression that I’m not familiar with?”

  I said, “Cold reply is an expression, yes. Or really, a dead metaphor.” Rema and I had talked about that, about dead metaphors, about how, when her English was less good, she used to bring dead metaphors bac
k to life by saying them incorrectly, by startling me with phrases like “chill down” for “chill out,” and “weird chicken” for “odd bird.” That had become less frequent, though.

  “And I am not Rema? That also is a dead metaphor?”

  “No,” I whispered, full of regrets. “When I say that I am saying exactly what I mean.”

  “You are saying exactly what you mean?”

  “Yes. What I mean.”

  “Mean,” she repeated, mostly to herself, dropping her hand from my face.

  I’d lost track, I realized, of that originally mysterious scent of bacon.

  The simulacrum wrapped her arms around her own body, and then she sat down next to me, and it was ugly latticing in the bedspread between us, and her upper arm was again pressed into an unappealing shape.

  “Tell me,” she said without looking at me, “how am I not like Rema?”

  Somehow I wasn’t afraid of her; that was just a feeling I had. I sincerely wanted her to understand. Maybe I thought her errors could be useful to me. “For example,” I said, “she’s more emotional than you are. And more nervous.”

  “What about,” she proffered, “when she had the ectopic pregnancy? She was very calm about that.”

  “That’s true,” I said, refusing to be baited by drama. “But she also smells different from you.”

  “But you smell different from you too.” “She smells like grass.”

  “You smell like my mom’s shampoo today,” she tried to counter. “But I’m still here next to you.”

  “And she’s indifferent to dogs. It’s hard to explain how strong a characteristic that is—”

  “Those are the things that you love about her?” she said, raising her voice in impatient judgment. “Her smell, her nervousness, and her indifference to dogs?”

  “Love is a separate issue,” I clarified. “I’m just telling you something of who she is. I don’t even know why I’m telling you.” I’d felt, briefly, tenderly toward her, but now she’d begun to irritate me. “You probably can’t understand.”

  “It must seem so strange to you,” she said darkly, mockingly, and flushing red, and without compassion, “that I know so much about her, that I look so much like her, but then you don’t love me—”

  “Don’t do this,” I said shortly. “Don’t get emotional.”

  The blue beneath her eyes had grown even duskier. Then she started—all of a sudden—to cry, and not even as if just to disobey me. But I don’t know if I’d call her cry a sad cry. And really I suppose one might even call it a sob, but more of a distressed sob than a devastated one. And in between heaves I think she eked out something to me like: “I know all these little things about you, like I know how you sit with a half a watermelon and a spoon and eat the whole thing, and that you read magazines while you brush your teeth, and that you throw away socks for no reason at all, when they’re still perfectly fine. That you never seem to really like anyone, except sometimes me. And I know how much you loved that photo of Tzvi’s family, how much time you spent looking at it, and talking about it, so much so that it made me uncomfortable and I had to take it down, and I like to think that all this knowledge I have of you, that it means something—”

  “Aren’t you tired?” I asked, unaffected by her little show. “I’m so sleepy. Are we expected to sleep in this same room tonight, together?”

  “You don’t make any sense,” she said, still sobbing. “It’s you. It’s you who’s not yourself.”

  35. The ghost in the machine

  I should explain about the renewal of contact between Dr. GalChen and myself.

  We, the simulacrum and I, did share a narrow bed that night together in Magda’s home, but the simulacrum did not permit the dog, whose napping company I had grown accustomed to, to join us. She, the simulacrum, wore Rema’s green nightie boxers and an undershirt of mine; I was fully dressed save socks and shoes. Sleep did not visit me, but stray strands of the simulacrum’s hair gave me the continual illusion of fleas mutely festivaling on my body. And the way the simulacrum’s sleeping fingers searched for the water bowl of my clavicle gave me the feeling of Rema. And the way her knee sought the thick slough of my thighs. And her foot the freedom of the edge of the bed. And though the simulacrum seemed to be in a paralysis of REM sleep, my body, as when it is near Rema, waited nervously for the slightest regularly repeated movement, for the slightest seemingly unrandom touch. I didn’t like that tense waiting feeling. She slept like one exhausted; I slept not at all.

  Who, I thought at one restless point, sleeps with Tzvi Gal-Chen? It was the first note of a discordant thought orchestra tuning up within me. Was the simulacrum, I wondered, in some parallel world, really Tzvi’s wife? In some worlds Tzvi was married to the doppelganger, in other worlds to other women?

  She had a hand on my hip.

  Or: was it possible that it wasn’t the double who was Tzvi’s wife, that maybe the marriage I was perceiving wasn’t one in a parallel world, but in this very world in which I lay in bed with the doppelganger, and it was my Rema who was, or once had been, the wife of Tzvi Gal-Chen? But surely that was just my own mental shuffling; Rema probably had not been married to anyone else, and even if she had been married, it wasn’t to a meteorologist.

  The simulacrum’s hand did not move, as if it were a mannequin’s.

  Still, maybe Tzvi—and not the night nurse, and not the analyst/dog walker, and not someone named Anatole—was the real unturned stone in the submystery of Rema’s previous husband. And thus, by ripple, the central mystery of everything. Maybe he and Rema were involved with each other in some way.

  Although Tzvi was probably—I thought then, before the category seemed obsolete—even older than me.

  But maybe all that meant was that Rema loved him, might still love him, more than she loved me?

  As the simulacrum sleep sighed, her whole thorax centimetered out against me—then receded.

  And who was that in the photo alongside Tzvi Gal-Chen, with the creamy elbow crook? Wasn’t she his wife for all time? And did he and she—the woman in the photo—love each other? Then? Now? And was his wife in any way, through some strange exchange, mine? And though Magda had let on that Rema’s previous husband—or still current one?—was not a meteorologist, who was the meteorologist Magda had met who had led her to pass such hasty good judgment on me when I presented myself as a meteorologist?

  The simulacrum’s right hand lost tone, slipped off me. In a kind of inebriation of sleepiness, my mind just kept swapping and interswapping, this person for that, and that person for this, like some hapless turn-of-the-century dream interpreter. And although nothing in the cacophonous score of my thoughts made strict sense, one thing did seem obvious: my mystery converged upon the point of Tzvi Gal-Chen.

  So I unlimbed myself of the simulacrum, grabbed my handheld, blindly padded my way out to the living room. The perhaps misguided action that I then took later revealed itself, I would argue, as the unexpectedly right step, if the right step executed for the wrong reasons, which when I think about it suggests that maybe my reasons were merely wearing masks and hosiery, that, undressed, they were likely the right reasons all along.

  36. Chills

  Despite having sent Dr. Gal-Chen that e-mail to which he had responded quite coldly, despite having more or less resolved never to communicate with him again, well: there alone in the not quite dark of Rema’s childhood house, amidst the drunken sensuality of all that unseen velvet in the unlit living room, amidst the painful reminder of a Rema in bed with me without there actually being a Rema in bed with me, I found myself able to forget my and Tzvi’s awkward exchange. Able to forget it and yet remember that I should not pursue any questions directly, that in seeking help from Tzvi I would have to approach from an angle. Because when I had asked directly after Rema’s disappearance, asked directly about the 49 Quantum—that had made him nervous, that had made him uncomfortable. But maybe by talking about some seemingly irrelevant third thing, through
a kind of misdirection, then we—the both of us—would be liberated to speak openly and truthfully—like getting a patient to loosen up, and reveal, by asking him to talk about his spouse, or mother, or favorite food, rather than about himself. Or, as in retrievals done by a single-Doppler radar system, one looks at a volume of air from an angle, then accounts for that extra distortion, so as to better deduce what’s actually there if one could see it head-on, but one can’t, because then one loses all dimensionality. Like that.

  So I began composing a note asking how windchill is calculated.

  As I typed, my BlackBerry’s glow filled the room with a palest blue light.

  Is windchill analogous to Doppler effect, I philosophized in a feeble attempt to sound atmospherically savvy, but applied to the movement of heat rather than of light or sound? I thought about making a further analogy, to movements in human relationships, say, to interpersonal coldnesses that feel much colder than they actually are. But then I decided that might be too much, that might feel intrusive.

  How windchill is calculated obviously wasn’t precisely what I most wanted to learn from Tzvi—what I most wanted to learn was what I had written in my earlier missive, whether he knew the whereabouts of Rema, and how to get her back—but I was, nevertheless, inquiring about windchill sincerely because I had indeed often wondered about windchill. It is one temperature, but it feels like another—how does one objectively measure something subjective? I think and thought it a cute question, a cute problem. One answered differently, I imagine, in every field. Do you love me more or less today? I used to ask Rema.

  Before actually sending the note, I hesitated a moment. I was worried about seeming abnormal. But I reassured myself that windchill was an extraordinarily normal thing to ask Tzvi about. After all, I argued to myself, Tzvi is a meteorologist, a real meteorologist, and how many times in one’s life does one have a direct line of communication with a real meteorologist?