“But we’re married,” I interjected.
Magda shrugged and went on, now reading more off her paper, “She says for you to help her. There’s an office in Buenos Aires, the office of the desaparecidos. Her mother—that is me, yes—can take you there directly. And if you can get the paperwork started from the outside, and she’ll be working from the inside, and hopefully everything can be fixed. Quick, quick.”
Our food appeared.
Magda folded the wrinkled graph paper six or seven times, returned it to deep in her oversized purse. Then she looked at her sunny-side-up eggs that were looking at her. Then she glanced up from the eggs, and looked at me, and smiled.
I took a very tiny bite of my medialuna, to make things seem normal, even though I had no hunger. Then I asked casually, “Who told you to come down here?”
“I told you. Rema did.”
“Why didn’t Rema come see me herself?”
“What I said.” Magda took her fork in hand; she broke the yolk of her egg; she startled as it spilled over. “She’s stuck”—yolk rivuleting to the periphery—“over there. In Japan.”
Land of the rising sun, her yolk made me think she was going to say. Which brought to my mind an image of Faye Dunaway gripped in the hand of King Kong. But that was the wrong Faye, the wrong monster, and the wrong country underfoot. It was the wrong image entirely. “But then how did you hear from her?”
Magda set her fork down. She reached again toward her mug, now full of special wellness tea, brought it to her lips, but I don’t think she took a sip. “She visited me. Short time. Then she had to fly back.”
The absolute lack of resonance of the story Magda told me—this confirmed for me that I wasn’t just suggestible, that Tzvi and Harvey’s assessment genuinely and singularly compelled me. I took then—there with Magda—a more sizable bite of my food. A dry edge of pastry scratched the roof of my mouth. “So what you are telling me is that Rema just flew down to Buenos Aires. From the Earth Simulator in Tokyo. To inform her mother—whom she barely speaks to—of her predicament. In order that her mother should speak to me. Then Rema goes back to Tokyo. Back to the arms of her captors. Without visiting me? Instead entrusting you with a wrinkled sheet of paper?”
Magda took hold of my right hand in a way remarkably devoid of any sexual undertones. “I made,” she said with my wrist wrapped in her cold fingers, “a mistake.”
“Okay,” I said, using my awkward left hand to take another bite of pastry, to show my confidence, my ease in the situation, and suddenly I thought, obscurely, of Harvey sleeping, or not sleeping, alone, and maybe wondering where I was.
“I mean,” she said, unhanding me, “I wasn’t being clear. My words were not clear. I meant that Rema had a moment, there at work, in Japan, finally a free moment, and she used it to send me a message. Her message visited me.”
“Her message,” I repeated dryly.
Magda brought her own hand to her lap. “She sent me a message on the computer.”
“Then why are you so sure it’s really from her? Couldn’t anyone be sending messages from an e-mail account with her name?”
Unlike Tzvi’s and Harvey’s and my theory, which had opened up for me, Magda’s “theory” shrunk, retreated—even Magda’s posture was worsening. “I mean not an e-mail,” she said. “It was a message sent through another Argentine person. Through a friend of the both of us. Who also happened to be there with her. He’s very reliable; he would know if it wasn’t really her. I mean, thank God he was there. So that she could get a message out.”
I noticed tattered strips of paper napkin amassed at the side of Magda’s plate; the pile had taken on the look of some strange sea creature, washed ashore and dying. When had she torn that napkin? “Her other husband?” I intoned.
She ignored my words, then she picked up her fork and began eating from her plates round-robin style, fairly quickly, with pronounced deglutition.
We ate for a while, almost competitively.
Our hot drinks were refilled.
“You really believe you’ve received this message from Rema?” I asked finally.
A strand of Magda’s tidy hair had fallen onto her face. “Oh, yes. Yes, definitely.” When she brushed it away I could see the delicate print on the pad of her thumb; a few fibers of paper napkin clung there.
“I know,” I said as sweetly as I could manage, “that we don’t know each other so well. But I feel as if we do. That is a feeling that I have. So that is why I am going to ask you, again, directly: who sent you down here? Someone probably told you a pretty story to get you on their side. Obviously Rema didn’t learn how to lie from you because you’re really no good at lying at all. Lying can be appealing on young women, but not so much on mothers. Don’t worry, I know, of course, that you are innocent. Understand that I certainly in no way blame you. On the contrary. Just tell me, was it the 49 Quantum Fathers? Or maybe a Quantum Father posing as a member of the Royal Academy?” I was trying to form an alliance with her, without really divulging anything of importance. “The more I think about this, the more I’m beginning to suspect there are some pretty powerful forces involved, much larger than just—”
“You’re too old for Rema,” she interrupted, raising her voice, becoming a shrill bird. “And you’re a snob. And you’re crazy. Crazy and not even very good-looking, especially not when I look at you from near like this. I’m happy to fail to bring you home. I don’t care if she’ll be mad at me. She’ll always be mad at me no matter what I do.”
I ignored her diversionary tactic. I ate as my own.
“Why don’t you just come home with me anyway?” Magda eventually sighed. “It will make her happy.”
“It’s very kind of you to invite me,” I said calmly. “But I have work here. I’m doing work here. I can’t just turn my back on my responsibilities.”
“But Leo. You don’t have work here.”
“That’s not true,” I said with conviction. “I’m doing climate change research.”
“Leo, you’re not a meteorologist. You’re not. There’s something wrong with you.”
And of course that was true, what she said, that I wasn’t a meteorologist, but it also wasn’t true, because I was (in a way) employed as a meteorologist. Or would be soon enough. Her doubts did not disturb me.
8. Postprandial insights
I returned to find an anxious Harvey, who, upon my entering the room, threw his arms around my neck. Again I thought about orangutans.
“Where were you?” Harvey asked, with the trembling lip of a child.
“Nowhere important,” I said.
“The snow flurries stopped so abruptly,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll never leave you without notice like that again.” Saying that, to someone, felt nice.
“I thought maybe you’d already grown tired of working with me.”
“I was just answering a phone call. A woman had called me. I had thought it might be important.”
“You’re not leaving me, then?” Harvey asked.
“Of course I’m not leaving you,” I said, thinking of telenovelas but also of genuine tenderness.
And it was that easy to restore happiness. Harvey settled in front of the television weather report, while I set myself to the task of shaving. So I was shaving, and going over in my mind retorts that I hadn’t offered to Magda, and not just vainly gazing into the mirror, when, upon close follicular inspection of (the reflected image of) a tender, raised, false pimple on my neck, the seed of the simulacrum’s word—disappear—began to both germinate and molt in my mind, revealing itself as a two-toned postulating buzz; wasn’t the simulation of Rema’s appearance far more extraordinary than her disappearance? I had been so fixated on the disappearance, probably because it was more painful, but really it was the appearance of the doppelganger that was far stranger. Why not simply take Rema? This simulacrum, was she really deployed just to move a dog, or was she being deployed primarily for some other
reason, to solve some other problem, to generate some other solution? Solution to what? Was the simulation of two observer Remas occurring in order to triangulate, in a perfectly coupled way, on the data of me? I had been comporting myself as if this mystery was proximate to me, but maybe the mystery actually was me.
If the dog was essential, but following me had proved more essential than staying behind with the dog, then didn’t that mean I was more essential than the dog? And if I was deploying a meticulous methodology of being open to chance, while it was chance itself that the Fathers were working to control, then wasn’t it me they were trying to control? The simulacrum had pursued me. As had Magda. Even Harvey had tracked me down.
I set down my razor.
It’s a strangely impersonal feeling, to feel wanted for reasons one doesn’t understand.
Half shaved, half convinced, I turned and said to Harvey, “I think the battle might not be being waged through the dog. It might be that it’s being waged through me. I thought I was following the caprice of my own heart, but now I think maybe my movements might really be determined by some other force. Maybe the determination of the weather patterns is beginning—is getting its foothold into this world—through the determination of the patterns of me. I mean, maybe my movements really matter. Matter to a lot more people than just me. Maybe I’m the proverbial butterfly.”
“Everyone’s a butterfly, Dr. Leo,” Harvey said, not even turning from the television set.
“I know, I know. But I’m saying—I think I might be the central butterfly. I don’t mean to be grandiose; I mean I hope it’s not true. But I just have a feeling.”
“Well,” Harvey said, now turning to me, “when I’m in a situation like that—as I think you know—I try to seek some corroboration, try to verify some hunches. Keeps me out of embarrassing situations, you know?”
Well there were all kinds of corroboration. “I think I should go try to find that woman who sought me out this morning. I need to understand her motivations better, even if she won’t straightforwardly tell me what they are. Do you mind if I leave you again?”
“Do you mind if I order some room service? Go, go, but when can I expect your return?”
Well: it was a small town, that corner of the Argentine unconscious, and by evening I’d managed to refind Rema’s mother.
9. The sensitivity of the solution to uncertainties
After I made a false promise to call the doppelganger after dinner, Magda conceded to sharing another meal with me. As soon as we sat down I began to explain that I of course understood that she was under the impression that there was something wrong with me, and I explained that I thought that was entirely understandable. I told her that if I didn’t know what I knew, and if I didn’t feel what I’d felt, then I too most likely would have thought there was something wrong with me. But maybe she felt, as I felt, that she knew things that I didn’t know, and that if I came to know those things then I might see the world differently, as she did. If she wanted to, she could tell me those things that I didn’t know; she could rest assured that I would handle well the coming to know of them.
The skin around her eyes: gray and recessed. She said nothing, just looked askance. Then sighed.
So I tried a different tack. “The landscape here is so astounding. What a beautiful country,” I said.
“It’s a broken, depressed country,” she responded.
“Everyone seems so nice,” I said.
She said how insincere everyone was. How it was all just appearances. “Even me,” she said. “I’m only nice on the surface.”
If she wanted to indulge in that common grandiose fantasy of not being a nice person, then that was okay with me. “You know more than I do.”
“Yes,” she said, “I do know more than you do.”
“Yes you do,” I agreed, realizing that she most likely hated me, at least for that moment while I had her attention. So I truly had nothing to lose with her, I could only gain. “So the man Rema left Argentina with? Her husband? Was his name, well, by any chance, well—what was his name?”
“I thought you were his friend?” she said, looking suddenly energized and disturbed, as if a bright light from an unidentified source had been shined on her through a window. “That was a lie also?”
“I’ve just been so confused lately,” I said. “It has spilled, or I mean slipped, my mind. That means I have forgotten. I mean, well, was it—was his name—was it Anatole?” My plan was then to ask if she could recall Anatole ever asking after me, or after someone like me.
“Anatole?” she said back to me, pronouncing it differently, making four syllables of it, when I had been saying it over and over and over in my mind with only three. “Is that what you said?” she asked me, as if I’d let a genie—evil or benevolent I could not tell—out of a bottle.
“Yes?” I said. “I’m sorry I lied earlier. You’re right. I don’t know why I said I knew him. There was so much I didn’t know when I met you. I think you can understand. I mean: you’re an analyst. I mean: I was in a rather awkward position.”
“When Rema tells me that you are now her husband, is she lying to me?”
I shook a little bit of salt onto the empty plate in front of me; I thumbed some grains into my mouth; I didn’t want to give information, I wanted only to take. “You mean the woman I shared a bedroom with in your house? Well kind of, well yes, in the strictest interpretation, she is lying. But from a slightly alternate perspective she is not lying. I am Rema’s husband. I am.”
“But you don’t know who Anatole is?”
I tried to picture an Anatole. He looked like me, but me as refracted in an ugly-making funhouse mirror; and then somehow that wavy Anatole took my place, and I had become the distorted him, and this revealed my original position to me as an intensely enviable one. “But you do know him?” I asked.
“Your marriage—if really it is a marriage—it’s very strange. Cold.”
I thought of windchill, as a kind of misdirected rebuttal. Magda went on about just what she thought my marriage was like. She talked on and on, and so confidently, and in such an ugly manner, until finally I interrupted:
“Aren’t you extrapolating a bit too much, a bit too confidently, just from the single fact that I don’t know precisely who Anatole—”
“I don’t blame you,” she said, which led me to understand that she clearly did blame me. “She is a strange girl, my daughter. Maybe that is my fault.”
Then I was quiet as was she; I hoped she didn’t read my silence as judgment. I broke a bite off a crackery breadstick; it cleaved along unexpected planes. As I listened to myself chew, I began to feel distant from myself, and, in that way, clearheaded. “So,” I said, partly to Magda, partly to myself, “Rema left Argentina with this An-a-to-le person.” I adopted the four-syllable pronunciation with confidence, feeling myself an Hercule Poirot: it was near the end of the story, the suspects were in the room. “I had thought he was the night nurse,” I said as an engorging vein imaged in my mind. “But I am relieved to know that he is not the night nurse—”
“You think Anatole is a nurse?”
“No, no. I don’t. Not anymore. I was wrong before,” I said as I felt my investigation growing crystalline.
“Anatole was not Rema’s husband,” Magda said.
“Ah so,” I said, gracefully turning on that dime. “Actually I suspected as much. They were only engaged then, am I right? It ended when they arrived in the States. Then the love just faded.” I felt on a proverbial roll. “They realized it had been a matter of context, of setting. And though they were still fond of each other, it just wasn’t enough for marriage. It was awkward in bed perhaps, pardon my French, and awkward at meals, he wouldn’t eat lentils with her, and he couldn’t handle arguing with her, and he never knew what to say, and he bought her the wrong gifts, things that revealed he could never really know her—”
“You are completely misunderstanding,” Magda said, breaking into English. “These fan
tasies of yours are bizarre.” She was not looking at me in the eyes—instead again looking at the cuffs of my shirt. “Anatole,” Magda said, not hesitating in her pronunciation. “Well. He’s. Well, really I feel rather strange saying this. Well, really. Well.” I noticed Magda set down an accordioned tea bag label. Where had that tea bag come from? Neither of us had ordered tea. “Maybe it is wrong that I am the one telling you this. But. Anatole was my husband.”
I guffed just one violent guffaw. But I felt in that instant that I’d lost all that had held me taut, whatever had tirelessly and praiselessly kept the shell of me from collapsing under the pounds of atmospheric pressure.
“Are you choking?” she said with concern, for me I think, more than for herself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m always hearing the strangest things. Not the things people are actually saying.” I could feel twitching in my face, and itching in my scalp, and laughter in my diaphragm. The room was too much there. I could feel the color of the wallpaper—burgundy—invading.
“You don’t know,” she said, “that Anatole was Rema’s father?”
In the silence that followed I could feel the powdery softness of my button-up shirt, and the fullness of the veins of my feet, and the absence of Rema’s hand on my forehead just where she likes to place it when she stands behind me while I’m seated in a chair and complaining of a headache, and I heard—maybe it was that accordioned tea bag label—a heated kettle, empty of water, not whistling.
I said, “I had a father too.” I don’t know why that is what I said. I find that sort of cheap identification shameful. I then immediately began forking food into my mouth.
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 17