Harvey followed suit.
“I heard,” Harvey said very quietly, “about your life, Dr. Leo. I wanted to express my condolences.”
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my life.”
“Your wife, Dr. Leo. I heard. About what happened to her.”
“But that’s my private business, Harvey. That’s not your affair. Who said what to you when?” When I tried to think whom I might have told about the doppelganger, I just saw in my mind an impassably thick hedge. Then a me, emerging out of a hedge, a double of me, speaking words and acting acts for which I was to be held accountable. Instead of recalling anything useful I heard the laughter of that night nurse.
“Dr. Gal-Chen,” Harvey said, “told me.”
“You mean Rema?”
“I mean Tzvi Gal-Chen.”
“I suppose I did tell him.” Though I hadn’t explicitly asked Dr. Gal-Chen to treat my communications as confidential, I still felt, briefly, betrayed.
“And Dr. Gal-Chen told me.”
“He told you?”
“Yes, he mentioned it. Also mentioned that you were here. Also that he was concerned for you. I didn’t think it was a secret.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, good. Of course. No. No, I certainly don’t have any secrets.”
“And I wanted to express my condolences. I wanted to tell you that I’d like to be of help to you in any way that I can.”
4. Recent advances in epistemology
Of course he also wanted help from me. Harvey asked if he could share my room. He said he was out of cash. Naturally I accommodated; I couldn’t imagine any unpleasant consequences, and, honestly, I felt obliged toward Harvey, as if I had abandoned him, as if it weren’t he who had taken flight, or as if it had been my failures that had sent him away. Or maybe as if, obscurely, he were Rema. Who I was no longer, through some boyish idea of adventure, able to not miss.
“Your wife,” Harvey said, settling himself onto my (temporary) bed. “I wonder how she’s involved. What do you think the 49 Quantum Fathers are after? The whole journey here I couldn’t sleep because I was worried they were going after the sheep; that’s what you always hear about, Patagonian lamb; you don’t think they’d go after live animals like that, do you? That would be unprecedented. Maybe it’s just the fruit trees. I bet if you upped the winds on the pampa, not even that much, you could probably destroy all the fruit tree crops in one blustery evening. Cherries, peaches, apples—all smashed to the field of battle. Acres and acres covered in soft fruit flesh, just left to rot. Is your wife the silent, stoic type, or do you think this kind of thing might break her will? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. What’s your current plan of action?”
Watching Harvey talk, I was reminded of a famous psychiatric case from the time of the French Revolution. A distinguished London tea merchant believed that a sinister “air loom gang” that controlled minds through mesmerism had foiled the peace he almost brokered with France. The merchant was placed in the asylum at Bedlam but in the end it proved true that the merchant was held there primarily at the request of a politician rather than for any medically indicated reasons. The details of the merchant’s story were off—there was no air loom gang—but the heart of what he had been saying had a kind of truth to it. He had been lobbying for peace. What I mean to say: Harvey was an acceptable ally, despite everything. And Rema had always been fond of him.
I mentioned to Harvey (without divulging my pseudonym) that I—I and not we—was to begin a job for the Royal Academy that very Monday. That was my plan.
“But that’s five days from now. Surely you can’t sit idle until then,” Harvey admonished, leaning then into an elbow-supported reclining position like the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t girl from those old Diet Pepsi commercials. Not unlike a common Rema pose. “What does Dr. Gal-Chen think you should do?”
Upon reflection I realized that Tzvi and I had spoken primarily of, well, poetry. And affairs of the heart. “I didn’t quite ask him,” I admitted. Curiously, Tzvi and I really hadn’t had the most pragmatic of exchanges. “We did discuss windchill research,” I proffered. “And its relation to war.”
“Maybe we should call Dr. Gal-Chen now?” Harvey suggested in a voice decidedly un-idle, even as he lay himself out more fully on the bed.
I made clear—very clear—that of late Tzvi and I had restricted our communications to e-mail only.
“If there’s been some sort of rift between the two of you, I believe I’m entitled to know about it.” This statement Harvey directed toward the ceiling. For a second I thought Harvey was speaking again of me and Rema, but of course he was speaking of me and Tzvi. “We can’t brook these kinds of interpersonal conflicts right now, Dr. Leo; what we’re up against is too serious.”
So I eventually consented to Harvey and I together contacting Tzvi via my BlackBerry. Much to my distress, Harvey started right up with his rapidly associating theories. One might have—I might have—thought Tzvi would have recoiled from Harvey’s borderline nonsensical ideas, but instead—although Tzvi countered with many emendations—the two of them typed back and forth warmly, with a kind of exuberance, and I was reminded of (1) watching Rema develop Harvey’s therapy, and (2) the absence of a brother I’d never had and whom I most likely would have hated having to compete with. But there they were. Within an hour, with minimal input from me, Tzvi and Harvey worked out that the Rema swapping most likely had been an early move to harvest chaos from our world to bring to a nearby one, that the dog was likely an essential determining agent, that the Patagonian crop-destroying winds—they weren’t after sheep, just fruit—would be deployed soon, but not earlier than my Monday meeting with the Royal Academy, and that nevertheless it was essential to understand this not as a minor skirmish but as a pivotal battle that might be the tipping point to the full determination of our—Harvey’s and my—world. At stake was the eradication of possibility. A fixed order loomed. If we lost, all would be set in proverbial stone. Time future as unredeemable as time past. No uncertainty. Rema still stranded.
“One thing I can’t understand,” I felt compelled to contribute, “is how you two can possibly know that nothing will happen before Monday.”
That really was the single detail that didn’t intuitively seem credible to me. Was I bothered by the parallel between Rema’s therapeutic invention and the reality Tzvi and Harvey’s communication seemed to support? No. I was buoyed by it and considered it a kind of verification by triangulation. What did intellectually shame me was the vivid realization that I had devalued the evidence of Tzvi’s death. I’d breezed right past it, had simply resigned myself to it. But if I was communicating with a dead man—it did seem I was—then the world was radically different from what I had thought. And if I did in fact want to be a true scientist, I should have done more than just accept what had previously seemed unacceptable; I should have followed that new truth out to its logical implications. Where was Tzvi communicating to us from if not from another world? And how was he in our world if not through a kind of intrusion? And if such intrusions were possible, wasn’t it obvious that there would be those who would capitalize on them? And, come to think of it, hadn’t I had feelings, experienced coincidences, my whole life through, that had the character of such intrusions—of otherworldly order that seemed to make no sense? Nonsensical dislikes. Nonsensical likes. Even falling in love with Rema. Even occasionally getting mad at Rema for no obvious reason. And what of her unpredictable flashes at me? Who hasn’t come across behaviors wholly resistant to interpretation—moods not reducible to serotonin or circumstance, Teflon actions that no theory sticks to—and such little unfathomables, wouldn’t it make the most sense to understand them as uncanny intrusions of order from other worlds? Weren’t Tzvi and the simulacrum both just such oddly familiar, not quite fathomable intrusions? And didn’t Harvey and Tzvi’s idea of an impending fixed order bear a strangely strong resemblance to the Eliot poem that talking to Tzvi had somehow seeded back into my mind?
Why indeed had my ninth-grade teacher made us memorize that? Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden … / But to what purpose … / I do not know…/ Shall we follow?
“I have inside information,” Tzvi wrote, thus recalling me to the present. “Part of the brilliance of waging a war through weather is that the layperson doesn’t notice there’s a war going on at all. The layperson just shrugs his shoulders at the ‘randomness’ of it. Fortunately there was the dog this time,” Tzvi added. “The dog was a real misstep, no? Either a misstep or the dog is central to all of this and they had no choice about introducing her, conspicuous as she was.”
Harvey and Tzvi conferred about the possible “centers” of “this,” though in terms of plans—that had been the original goal of the conversation after all—Tzvi said that all he could think for us to do until Monday was to monitor the weather closely.
“That’s it?” I typed, on behalf of Harvey and me both.
“Frustrating, no?” Tzvi responded.
An interlude then. Of nothing.
“Who really,” I asked, as a shadowy hope had blossomed within me, “do you think this work of mine with the Royal Academy will be with?” If I had a pseudonym, maybe my direct employer—a supposed Hilda—had one as well.
Tzvi responded that he couldn’t quite say with whom. Then—and this surprised me—he asked again how I—I specifically, he did not include Harvey—had come across his work. Or rather, across him.
“My wife dreamt of you,” I wrote. I accepted the melodrama of declaring that. Accepted the melodrama because the statement was, in its way, and in other ways, true. As Tzvi’s research notes: add a little bit of white noise to the model, and a little bit of blue noise, and those carefully introduced errors will dramatically enhance the realism of the retrieved fields.
I left the bed to Harvey that night. “I feel so much safer,” he said, “now that we’re working together.” As for myself, I slept, deeply, on the floor.
5. Without effort
Fresh snow the next morning made the light come in the window in a pink and quiet way, and in my dream, Rema was there; she licked a handkerchief and then wiped my cheek with it, near my mouth, where there was chocolate. When the room phone rang, this translated into a sensation that Rema, my real Rema, had left a teakettle boiling, and that we were in our apartment and that she was at her prettiest, and wearing pale yellow, looking like an afterimage of blue, and telling me something about Tzvi GalChen, about the shirt he had on in that photo we had (once had) on our refrigerator, and about how Tzvi was a member of the 49, but the 49 were not our enemies. I used to have a simple recurrent dream, almost embarrassingly simple, in which I’d walk into a room and a woman would be there and I’d say, where were you? I thought you were dead. And she would answer saying, oh, I’ve been just right here, you just didn’t look here, I think you didn’t want to look here, she’d say, a little bit pouty with her lower lip, maybe with her eyes wet. It’s like you didn’t miss me, she says.
So I had the sense that Rema was near me, but when I opened my eyes I realized that I was on the floor with only a sheet and I saw objects that were not mine, that were not part of my apartment: a painting of horses, their manes blowing in a wind that moved nothing else, a faded photo of glaciers under a pink sunset. And I saw Harvey, his head under the covers, just a grip of fingers on comforter showing. And I remembered then, more or less, where I was.
The ring again.
“Yes?” I said, taking the receiver to my ear. Harvey stirred but didn’t seem to wake.
“A woman is waiting for you,” an unidentifiable and accented male voice said to me.
“Tzvi,” I said, “is this you?”
“No. Here. Downstairs. She’s waiting,” the voice said and then hung up.
I didn’t immediately rush down. I washed my face and the back of my neck. And I brushed my teeth and then flossed and then brushed my teeth again. I washed my hands vigorously to remove any dirt from under my fingernails. As for my ears, I had no Q-tips, but I did my best. And the trousers that Magda had given to me, I noticed that they had a small hole developing at the seam of the pocket, but I located a sewing repair kit—this hotel had foreseen everything—and neatly stitched the hole closed, reinforcing the edges, with a sufficiently matching gray thread. Also the button was chipped, so I went ahead and replaced it with a golden other. I just wanted to be very clean and well put together, for whoever that woman was, for whatever woman was waiting all that time, so early in the morning, for me.
6. The realism of retrieved fields
The woman waiting for me wasn’t Rema, and she wasn’t the doppelganger, and she wasn’t—somehow—Tzvi or Tzvi’s wife. She was Rema’s mother, Magda. Magda: whom we hadn’t even discussed the previous evening, whose role in the looming weather wars was unexplored, who might be inconsequential, but whose motherly/analyst presence nevertheless invoked in me a heightened and unwelcome self-consciousness.
“What a surprise,” I said in a failing attempt at warmth. I wanted to return to my ignorance of moments earlier when the woman waiting for me might have been Rema. “I apologize for disappearing on you,” I said, infected by the simulacrum’s silly word choice. “I should have paid you in advance for accommodating me. I really did plan to get back to you on that.” She was sitting, I was standing. Her gaze was level with the waist of my pants, with the golden replacement button. “I’m really—”
“No, no, I hadn’t known that you were my son-in-law.” Her laugh sounded strained, false. “There was so much knowledge hidden from me. I hadn’t known who you were, you see? It is funny. Odd. Peculiar. The situation we were in.”
I wanted to but didn’t suggest “ironic” as a more accurate and succinct representation of our varied levels of knowledge.
Then Magda added, “Those pants; they really fit you just perfectly. That also is peculiar. Even the cuffs are exactly the right length. And the pockets are not deformed.”
And it struck me that a more concise and precise description of my clothing would be to say that I was dressed like Tzvi Gal-Chen. Or, at least, like Tzvi once dressed, at the time of those photos.
“Listen,” she said to me, “I wanted to talk to you about some things,” and she looked around the lobby, where there was a tour group being beckoned by a white flag on a stick. “Somewhat secret things. Very secret things. Where can we go to talk?”
I should at least have left a note for Harvey, letting him know where I was. That would have been the proper way to behave. Even the simulacrum I had treated with such respect—the first time—but I just left, with plans to return as hastily as I (politely) could.
7. Sensitivity studies
“Listen,” Magda said, reaching across the faux wood, faux knotted table of the nearest coffee shop we could find, a shop that claimed to be channeling the ancient Tehuelche spirit into its teas. She took my hand and whispered surreptitiously to me in her odd English, as if English were some obscure and therefore private Eastern European spy language—Hungarian, say, or Albanian—that nobody nearby would understand. “I have need to tell you that Rema has contacted me.”
“What,” I asked, “does that mean, that she ‘contacted’ you? Isn’t she still staying with you?” I asked, feeling the need to engage in the earlier charade of the simulacrum being the real Rema.
“No, no,” Magda said, choking a bit then, on saliva it seemed. “Not that woman, whom you saw in my house. The real Rema contacted me. I see now what you were trying to say, what you knew all along, that you were correct to suspect that other one.”
Did I like having her confirm my difficult-to-fathom conviction? I did not. “How do you know it was the real Rema you spoke to?” I asked.
“I just knew. When I saw her. That it was her.”
Judging by the visible pulsing of Magda’s carotid artery, I suspected her heart was pounding. Tzvi, Harvey, now Magda too: the excess of corroboration actually undermin
ed, rather than strengthened, my developing convictions. “You saw the real Rema?”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t she here with you?”
“Well. Because.” Magda reached out toward the clean and empty mug in front of her, brought it to her mouth, sipped, and then set it down. “Why haven’t they asked us what we want yet?” Scanning the room, she added, “Terrible service.” A pause, then she turned her eyes straight on my unshaved chin. But I was clean in every other way; how had I forgotten to shave? “There’s some. Well. I mean. Well, there are—there are complications.”
As if it were a surgery gone bad, or a post-myocardial-infarction report.
“Medialunas?” I said to the yawning waitress who had suddenly materialized.
“For me the wellness tea. And huevos fritos. And medialunas. And some strawberry jam please. And a side of potatoes. And please extra napkins.”
Her hunger struck me as suspicious.
“Let me just tell you exactly what Rema said to me,” Magda announced after the waitress had left. “That way there will be no game of telephone problems.” She removed from a vast purse one sheet of wrinkled graph paper—boxes outlined in pale blue—and she began to read. “Number one, she sends you her love. Number two, she says you are taking Harvey’s disappearance too hard. And she wants you to know that whatever strange suspicions you may have, she is sure she can explain them. That’s the main idea of number two, that she knows there are some things she needs to explain to you. I’m sorry I have no more details there. But then three. Three is everything important. She says she needs you to return to Buenos Aires. They have her working as a translator at the Earth Simulator, out in Tokyo, and something has gone terribly wrong. It is all just a miscommunication is what she is saying. But some of the scientists there are under the misimpression that she has powers for changing the weather—Rema said you would understand this—but of course she does not have those powers and she didn’t know what she was getting into, and hopefully this will all be straightened out soon. She also wanted me to explain that she’s sorry she didn’t tell you about this job of hers earlier, but it was a new development, and she wanted to get a job all on her own, without your help, and then surprise you, and treat you to a trip all on her own money—”
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 16