Investigating the origin of particular “errors” could, theoretically, solve the proverbial problem of distinguishing the prophet from the madman: if the “psychosis” were text, whom would you surmise to be the author? If the text reflects the fears, desires, or expectations of the “afflicted,” then most likely he or she has authored his or her own vision. A man who fears rats may envision a rat king, and a fanatic television watcher may believe she has her own evening talk show, and a reader of tales of chivalry may believe himself to be a knight errant. But: if, say, an auto worker from Minnesota claims conscious blades of grass are plotting an overthrow of the Ecuadorian government, you should at least listen awhile before assuming it’s another case of self-scripting. Because why would that be on his mind? What does he care for Ecuador? Or grass? If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a “madman” to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the “author” might be reality and the “madman” just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination.
Why do I bring all this up?
When Rema disappeared, I chose to take myself on as my own patient, so I asked myself, did I “write” this new world, or was I just reading it? Reading what was “in reality” actually there? Well: I have never wanted or feared or expected Rema’s replacement by a double, nor have I ever wanted or feared or expected my involvement in a weather-controlling cabal. If I were to have Rema-based psychosis, surely it would take a more mundane form: I’d be convinced that she was seeing other men, or women, or that she contemplated my murder, or that she moonlighted in a massage parlor, or that she had never existed at all, that she had always been just a figment of my imagination, an incarnation of all the women I’ve always wanted but could never have. Or that she was (gasp!) my mom—something banal and pre-scripted and conventionally Mad Lib—y like that. I would not have come up with this drama that is my actual current life. I just don’t have those kinds of thoughts.
And since I could not detect my authorial hand in my strange new world, I could only conclude (at least, so to speak, with a p ≤ 0.05) that it was being perceived accurately. That was the most valid extrapolation from the data that could be made. And that’s why I felt so confident about my decision to speed south to Patagonia, in anticipation of my meteorological labor, which I felt sure would bear some fruit, even if unexpected ones, even if ones I could not divine. It was kind of a wild plan, I admit, but one that came to me, and not from me, and one that therefore (I decided) should be heeded.
2. Variant case of Dopplerganger effect in effect
Consider again that diagram from Tzvi’s article. Is it not the image of a man leaving reluctantly? Is it not a portrait of me, leaving first my apartment, then the comfort of Rema’s childhood home, in order to carry on my sad and uncertain search? How strange, the resemblance.
But isn’t it more strange that in continuing my search for Rema, in (in fact) boldly pursuing a meteorological assignment (under the guise of a young ice climber named Arthur) for which I was in no way prepared, isn’t it strange that through all this—sneaking out the bathroom window of Magda’s home, paying full fare for a turbulent plane ride over Rorschach-y mountain ranges, enduring fierce winds off the silty blue Lago Argentina in search of reasonable shelter amidst the ersatz log architecture of El Calafate, witnessing the indignity of a sidewalk “impromptu” tango performance in that soulless tourist town, entertaining unnecessary self-doubt as I passed an establishment called El Quijote—well, isn’t it strange that through all those obligatory banalities I gave hardly a thought to Rema, instead thought only, and obsessively, of Tzvi Gal-Chen?
I did ask myself if my oddly directed mental attentions were really just feelings for Rema transferred onto—translated over to—Tzvi. Well, if so, it wasn’t as if I couldn’t put that transference to good use. If I worked out an aspect of my evolving feelings for Tzvi Gal-Chen, I might—I reasoned—solve something about my feelings for Rema. And if I could determine the mysterious location of Tzvi Gal-Chen, then might I not learn something of the whereabouts of Rema? Or maybe there was no transference at all; Tzvi had been so helpful to me, and perhaps my growing gratitude toward him was appropriate. I had, before leaving, written him more about the situation with Rema, and about the job offer from Lola; Tzvi had reframed my current life as a diagnostic-prognostic problem, like the one central to his own work in “A Theory for the Retrievals.” And he made an ennobling comparison of my situation to that of a Greek hero. “Go south,” he bid me. “Surely you’ll learn something. About yourself. About the work of the Royal Academy.” And he had listened so patiently to my detailing of how the doppelganger differed from my original Rema. Yes, he had listened as a true friend.
As I waited for my hotel room to be ready—Tzvi’s paper affirmingly noted: “Remotely sensed data … can be grossly inadequate …”—as I warmed myself before a proverbial and actual hearth in the too-tastefully-homaged-to-ancient-cultures lobby of a serviceably nice inn, a vibration in my pocket disturbed me. I answered my phone.
“Hello? Hello? Hello?”
Rema’s voice was what I recognized, maybe because I wanted to believe it was Rema, but also maybe because it really did sound like her, but probably just because a new stimulus extinguishes an old one with astonishing speed, and I had heard the simulacrum speak so much more recently than I had heard the real Rema.
“You disappeared again,” the voice said through tiresome tears.
“May I ask with whom I’m speaking?” I inquired politely.
“It’s me, Leo. You know that,” continued the soppy sad voice, which, objectively speaking, was less sharp, less fiercely lovable, less accented than Rema’s. The real Rema would have cut right to business, no matter how emotional—even because of how emotional—she might be. She would have asked me exactly where I was and she would already have been booking her flight, maybe mine too, and she’d furthermore already be befriending the manager of the hotel.
“And from where are you speaking?” I asked.
“You know exactly where I am, and you leave, and then you act like I’m the difficult one to locate,” she said in an attempt to make, I have to believe, a frame-of-reference argument. But the frames of reference—they were obviously moving.
I was determined to remain analytical, to not be emotionally intimidated by the simulacrum’s posturing as Rema. That would have been a bad kind of transference. “Please clarify? Where are you precisely?”
“It’s crazy,” she said, still crying, “and mean, to just disappear from me—”
But nothing and nobody just disappears. Not actually. Unless mass gets converted entirely into energy. But that doesn’t really apply here, to people, basically never. (And especially an Argentine, it struck me, wouldn’t use the word “disappear” so imprecisely; it would be like an American hosting a picnic on September 11.) So I think it must have been the silliness of the word “disappear,” its rigged smokebox sentiment, that irritated me. Yes the silliness and also the wrongness. Wrong because generally people just leave. Or are taken. They only appear to have disappeared.
“If anyone has disappeared,” I articulated into that telephone as I idly turned over a pamphlet proclaiming my presence in authentic Patagonia!, “it’s not me. And if Rema has disappeared, if that is the correct way to understand this situation, and it seems increasingly likely that that is so, then it seems entirely possible that you’re at least partially, if not wholly, implicated in all this. Tzvi thinks so, anyway. And by the way, Rema would have had a much better handle on this situation, she would have been in control, she never would have let me go—” at which point the woman interjected with some protest and tried to list memories that “proved” who she was—she even mentioned those oversized dogs from our walk in the Austrian Alps—but I soldiered on. “Just because you can deceive Magda, who hasn’t seen Rema in years, and who sees whatever she wants to see, that doesn’t mean you can count the sheep being pulled over my e
yes—” And at the moment of speaking that mixed metaphor, an undeniably accurate image of the real Rema came to me, a sense of her body next to mine in bed, her arm around my waist, one of her knees beneath my own, her breath at my neck. Briefly, very briefly, Tzvi vanished from my thoughts, blotted out by Rema entirely. Or rather, by the painful absence of Rema. I said, “I’ve met complete strangers who remind me more of Rema than you do. You, you’re really no good at what you do at all. What you don’t understand is that this is a really close and intimate relationship, husband and wife. You’re trying to be the woman who essentially saved my life, who made me feel like I really existed, the stuff of metaphysical poems, of all kinds of poems, we’re talking about the first-prepare-you-to-be-sorry-that-you-never-knew-till-now-either-whom-to-love-or-how, that kind of love. I sent that to her once. You can’t fool me. You don’t seem to understand pretty close is not nearly close enough. It’s nothing. It’s not even a cigarette.”
But perhaps it was a tad mean of me to say you’re really no good at what you do at all. That was a bit much. After all, what did I really know about what it was that the double “did”? Impersonation wasn’t necessarily her ultimate goal.
But about it not being Rema on the other end of that phone—about that I was definitely right. So I told myself as I stepped closer to the false hearth (gas and nonburning log sculptures) to warm myself. Wouldn’t Rema on the phone have kept on crying? This woman had dried right up. So I hung up the telephone, not listening to whatever it was the double was saying to me, probably just listing more memories. I walked away from the warmth, felt something like dew forming on my eyebrows as I walked past the check-in desk and around a corner and to a cowboy-labeled restroom to run my hands under the hot water—which I believe I explained before is a very normal thing that I do—but it didn’t get hot right away, and I waited for a while, and then remembered that it was the C tap that would be hot, C for “caliente,” and I just felt so frustrated by the inane problems of even the simplest of translations. I just wanted to go back in time, to be home in Rema’s and my apartment back before we’d ever invented (or discovered or whatever we’d done) Tzvi Gal-Chen. I just wanted everything to return to how it had been before, even if that just meant Rema pouting on the sofa, reading a newspaper in a language I couldn’t understand and being irritated with me for reasons unclear. Had Rema treated her previous husband better than she had treated me? And how had he treated her? How had I treated her? What nicknames did they have for each other? What language did they speak to each other? Maybe I didn’t want to know any of those details. I was searching for Rema but I just wanted to find her, not find out too much else, not find out anything that I didn’t absolutely have to know; about Tzvi I was open to discovering anything—his possible death had made that clear—but about Rema, not so much. (That was a little discovery I guess, discovering there were things I didn’t want to discover.) I didn’t want to think that her other husband, whoever he was, might somehow lie behind the circumstances of my strange new world. I didn’t want to think that I might be wearing that other man’s clothing. I didn’t want to wonder if he and Rema had had sex in unusual positions, or with unusual objects. I didn’t want to think about any men in Rema’s life, actually, or any sex either. And in fact it was good that I so entirely succeeded in blocking those thoughts from my mind. And that I was somewhere cold, which keeps thoughts from associating so easily. Because in the end—or the state near the end, where I am now, ever approaching—they, those thoughts, could hardly have proved themselves more irrelevant.
I washed my face with hot water too.
3. A material intrusion
That conversation. It had laid down the absolutely wrong analytical tracks that my mind then kept running and rerunning over; so in an effort to derail the derailment—and thus clear my mind for rerailing—I voyaged into the cold. Walking that ersatz little tourist town, looking out at the pale blue finnings of the glaciers, feeling my skin desiccated by wind, feeling unreasonable jealousy of bickering families, I thought about Rema’s old remark about Patagonia being considered the wild, uncultivated unconscious of Argentina. Well, I thought, if so, it was a tidy, brisk, unscented Lego-land of an unconscious. At least this corner of it. With clean glaciers, excellent signage and safety precautions, and full up with false gauchos offering pricey horseback-riding tours. Some unconscious. Although maybe that’s what the “wilderness” of our minds looks like, maybe humans really are that dull and predictable.
My meteorologic labor wasn’t scheduled to start until Monday—that might bring me out into the real atmospheric unconscious—but until then, frankly, I didn’t know what I was meant to do to bring myself closer to Rema. When it began to rain lightly, I took that as a sign to return to my hotel.
Picking up an evening newspaper in the lobby, I began to read an article about chimp-human hybridization. That sort of thing (kind of) is on my mind often. Because whenever I feel sad, the sad feeling tends to manifest in my seeing humans (myself included) as orangutans. A human ordering coffee, a human offended when someone cuts in line, a human sprinting to refill a parking meter—in my moods, all those people are orangutans. And this feeling doesn’t make more real the secret emotional lives of orangutans—that would be one option. Instead it makes all the humans (with their loves, their hates, their haircuts, their beloved unconsciouses) seem sublimely ridiculous. Normal life, absurd. She loves you—who cares? She left you—so what? Scratch your armpit with your long, long arm and continue on, or not. The orangutan thing: it’s just a feeling, not a rigorous thought at all. But still. Anyway, between that hybridization article and an article on legislation requiring the sale of larger-sized clothing in girls’ boutiques, just as I was beginning to successfully forget about that phone conversation, I saw Harvey.
He was sitting near the gas hearth in a low, broad upholstered chair, his legs delicately crossed, his girlishly narrow ankles displaying wiry black hairs against paleness. He was wearing his suspenders over a sweater, with the cuffs and collars of two button-up shirts extending from beneath. He appeared occupied with his pocket mirror, seemed not to have noticed me.
I folded up my newspaper. This left the obituaries section facing out. Which seemed distasteful. And which reminded me of Tzvi. So I then unfolded and refolded the paper.
By which time Harvey had risen from his chair and crossed over to me; in response I rose too. He took hold of my entire forearm, gave it a firm, formal shake. I heard him say, “I thought I’d be more on your mind.”
And yes I did feel like we both had unusually long arms, that our shake might have been observed in a zoo. “Wow. What?” I said.
“I’ve had so far,” Harvey said, “a marvelous, marvelous time.”
“Do you think,” I said, stuck on his opening, “that I should have been more worried about you?”
He gestured that I take a seat. “Why are you asking me that, Dr. Leo?”
And I’d wanted to dismiss that conversation we’d begun, but then it was that feeling of some corpuscle of my bone marrow, some meek, undernourished corpuscle, taking the stand at the pulpit of my brain stem. “Do you think,” came out of me in a whisper, and yes, I’d taken that seat, “that, if I really cared for you, I would have taken out an advertisement in the paper?”
Harvey sat down as well, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “Why would you take out an”—and here he stressed the second syllable—“advertisement?” He also made a short vowel of the long “i” of the third syllable, which made him sound very affected—which made him sound very like himself—and which also I recognized as a move to gain ascendancy over me, as if I’d spoken incorrectly, or in a low-class way. “What,” he went on, “would the advertisement have said?”
I laughed loudly, to dispel any sense that I had been asking in earnest. Why had I said that? The thought of publicly declaring something, or even more specifically, of placing an ad in the paper—it was so strange to me, an intrusion, like how whenever I f
ind myself near a high hedge the phrase the secret life of dogs pops into my mind, uninvited yet fully formed. Should I have taken out an ad looking for Rema? Was that the thought, cheaply costumed in generality, that I was really having? Did I think it halfhearted that I was looking for Rema all by myself? Perhaps it was that the image had partially risen again, as it does too often, of my mother looking through the newspaper classifieds. For notification of what? Of someone looking for her? Surely I had been misunderstanding. She always searched the paper so seriously, furrowing her brow just so, pursing her lips just so, and I would think—when I would see that—that maybe she was just terribly stupid. Or perhaps I was thinking of another echo of an advertisement in the paper, which is that a foolish friend once said to me, You could place an ad in the paper, looking for your father. One of the ugliest, stupidest things I’d ever heard anyone say. I wasn’t looking for my father. I had no need to see him or speak to him or know where he was or what he was or wasn’t wearing. Really, I barely remembered him, and I had no reason to believe that he was a particularly interesting or intelligent or good-looking man. (I can only surmise that it was the influence of the setting—the Patagonia of the unconscious that Rema had instilled in me—that prompted me to such banal and family-centered self-inquiry.)
“Yes,” I answered finally. “What would an advertisement say?” I felt like I was delivering a line in a play. “What a silly question!” I gave out one punctuating guffaw, then imagined the newspaper issue, once a seeming bedrock, suddenly revealed to be just wrinkled butcher paper, now hole-punched, the resultant confetti fallen and swept under a chair.
I pulled my chair slightly closer to the hearth.
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 15