Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

The simulacrum looked off to the side. As if it were a coldness in her eyes that would give her away. Although truthfully, her gaze was warm and full of emotion. She had set down her spoon and licked all around the base of her cone.

  “Different but same,” he answered, smiling. Then he looked over at her again and he repeated that phrase with variation: “Different but also exactly the same beautiful.”

  I asked the interloper if he was in the navy or the army or if he just liked to dress that way, and he said he was in the navy and then went on to say, “We used to have ice cream together almost every day, Rema and I.”

  I thrust my hands into the middle of the table to thwart what might have been his reach across to her unconed hand.

  “We were children together,” he repeated stupidly.

  Then the small man—who still had not been gracious enough to offer his name, not even a false name, just for decorum’s sake—said: “We used to run after the ice-cream truck. The ice-cream man would be yelling, ‘Buy a cone and you’ll be happy forever!’” Military man turned to me then, and he reached past my intercepting hands to point at her cone: “And she liked this same flavor, this same flavor of ice cream then as now.” His musculature shifted grotesquely with each gesture, and he seemed to be perspiring nostalgia.

  “That’s wrong,” the simulacrum said definitively to that other man.

  I almost stood up and cheered.

  “There’s been a mistake,” she said, switching her gaze to her cone. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding that aloof gaze. “You are confusing me with someone else.’

  “No,” he laughed. “You’re a little bit different but you’re exactly the same.”

  “No, you’re wrong, I’m sorry,” she singsonged sadly.

  She apologized even again; then she stood up, knocking over her chair in the process; she righted her chair, threw her ice cream away, then walked out.

  That just left me and the uniformed man there at the table, with my ugly blue ice cream melting. “Is something wrong with Rema?” he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, then excused myself to follow the simulacrum. I felt proud of her even as she distanced herself from me for the rest of the evening. And seeing that man hit on the impostress, seeing him miss her—it prompted in me a deeper kind of affection. Maybe his attention distorted the way I saw her. But maybe that distortion was valuable. Even corrective. Or maybe it was extinguishing my love for my real wife, wherever she was. I wrote Tzvi a detailed note about the whole encounter. Oddly, in his absence, I only felt closer to him. To everyone, I was feeling closer.

  16. Materials and methods

  Though she slept on the distant edge, she did share the bed with me that night. Her showered hair dampened the pillow, and I lay my hand on that cooling cloth. All that night I thought: I had left the simulacrum behind so hastily; regardless of circumstances that was wrong of me; it’s never pleasant to be left behind though that’s not really something that has happened to me much in my life, the case of my father not counting, since he wasn’t leaving me but rather my mother. I really do try to leave people behind as infrequently as possible—I’d never, until this crisis, left a patient behind—but I think others will agree that when I left my mother behind, it would not really be fair to call that “leaving behind.” I mean: I didn’t leave her behind the way my father had. It was very different. I was eighteen years old and was leaving home for college. While it’s true that I was essentially my mom’s only friend, and that I could have attended school while still living at home, and that my mother’s mood swings were increasing in amplitude and frequency and that our neighbor, this large woman who ate a lot of watermelon, kept sententiously saying I just don’t like the idea of her being alone—apart from all of that, I in fact also remember feeling that it would be rather a relief for her to have me out of the way. And sometimes I think, contrary to popular belief, that being the one who is leaving is more difficult than being the one who is left, and I say this only because my mind has often stuck on the image of my mother lying on our yellow wool-acrylic blend upholstered sofa (the sofa had wooden armrests, where you could rest a mug of tea) wearing one of her very tailored outfits that entirely clashed with the idea of lying on a sofa in the middle of the day—and telling me that she’d always wanted upholstery of a different color, sky maybe, and of a quality that would catch a little bit of light, that was maybe a little bit satiny, or at least had a sheen, and that her whole life might look different to her if that was in her living room. And I myself was annoyed when she said this, not only because of her excessive aesthetic sensitivity, her ludicrously devout belief in beauty’s ability to save us, but also because when I said, well, why don’t you do that then, you could make those covers, she said that it would be expensive to get the kind of upholstery that would feel nice on your cheek lying down on it—and I said, well, maybe that wasn’t something to save money on, that if that was what she really wanted, then that was what she should do and one can always find the money somehow—and she sighed and said, well, you don’t care about what covers the sofa, do you? I guess I’m not thinking about that right now, I said, that’s probably true, I probably don’t care and I guess I’m thinking about other things, not fabric, not coverings—and she said yes that I was and she was glad for that. The skin around her eyes was sunken; her legs, which I could see up to the midthigh, were skinny and pale and streaked with blue; it was as if it had been months since she’d eaten a pigmented food. I didn’t want to see that. But now I see it often, those wet cement eyes and her hand running across the fabric of the sofa. That’s not actually the very last time I saw her, but I guess it was close to the last time; I think then I was just going out to buy some food, or go for a walk. But the only reason I am saying all this is to illustrate that I understood something about how the simulacrum must have felt, what with my leaving so hastily. And that maybe my mother would be pleased to know that now I was thinking about fabrics, about the look and touch and feel and necessity of them. Because I had decided to buy the simulacrum a nice and very warm coat; she had seemed so down after our ice-cream date and I thought a gift might cheer her up; and a coat seemed a wise idea if she was going to accompany me for Monday’s meteorological labor, whatever it proved to be. And I wanted her to accompany me. I wanted her to be happy and to feel appreciated. I almost woke her up just to tell her how much I admired her, what a loyal and devoted and steadfast and adorable and loving companion agent she had been to me. Instead I thought a great deal about what kind of fabric the coat should be made of. I mean there was a nice symmetry there—thinking about fabrics—a nice reflection, some concordance, and one can’t help but want to assign meaning to such things, or at least to want to luxuriate in the noise of possible meanings, even if there is no actual meaning there at all.

  It was all brimming over with good intentions, the shopping plan.

  That next day I found a heavy coat that I knew would look beautiful on the simulacrum; it was of a pale blue wool, not wholly unlike Rema’s winter coat; I placed the coat in the simulacrum’s arms with assurance. Although it was not a perfect coat, and not exactly like Rema’s, I knew that later we could locate oversized buttons to sew onto it and then it would be spectacular. And meanwhile it could keep her warm.

  “Doesn’t interest me,” the simulacrum said, seeming annoyed. “I’d prefer another color. And something more sporty, more like for climbing a little mountain.” She tried on an ugly down jacket, very puffy, emergency yellow, with wide-stitch quilting.

  “That would be a mistake,” I said. I tried to explain to her about the buttons that would go on the wool coat and how nice it would look then.

  She said it would look just like a wool coat she already had and that I perfectly well knew that. Then she petted at the sleeves of that ugly yellow thing.

  Not wanting to cause trouble—she already seemed so short-tempered—I didn’t point out that it wasn’t actually her coat, it was Rema’s, and I wasn’t going to let he
r just take it. Certainly not for until the end of time. I mean, what I was thinking then was that even if I found Rema, she and I would probably let the simulacrum live with us, at least for a delimited period, if she had no other place to go; we wouldn’t just kick her out on the street. Who knew what her real circumstances might be? And who could say—maybe she and Rema would become good friends, and share clothes, and secrets, and dog-caring duties.

  “You look like an alarm in that coat,” I said to her. “Like a hazardous crossing signal.” I carried the finer coat folded over my arm like a sommelier’s napkin, and I followed the simulacrum all over the store as she tried on other unflattering jackets. Politely but firmly I held to my opinions. She steadily disagreed with them.

  My pacific nature finally broke. “Why do you care so much?” I said. “Why does it matter to you, one coat or the other? Why can’t you just take a gift graciously?”

  The simulacrum looked right through me. A fluorescence above smoldered. “Why do you care so much?” she finally said.

  I didn’t respond.

  “This is ugly,” she said, looking at me, and I got the sense that she was referring to more than just the coat over my arm. She tried on one more item, traffic cone orange and far too large. “All right, this is it.”

  I quietly pointed out to her that the fabric looked like it was made from recycled tires.

  “It pleases me,” she said. “It’s impregnable.”

  “But the color. I mean, maybe if you didn’t dye your hair blonde. Maybe for a brunette, this color, but—”

  Then—and there was a sweet bitterness in her speech, a bitterness like licorice pills: “Which do you think your friend Tzvi GalChen would prefer?” She tilted her head. And this made me think of that night nurse laughing at me, and of that dog-walking analyst, and the way he had smiled at me that day, a laughing kind of smile, and even of Anatole I thought, and even of fireworks, and also I thought of me, of my unwanted laughter too.

  “Why, which do you think he’d prefer?” I said back to her. She’d ruined the whole fun of everything, had reduced me to echoing.

  “Can you not get him on the phone anymore? Poor thing. Although now that I am thinking,” she said, “maybe he’s not the person I would ask for fashion advice.”

  17. Attacks on the local steady-state hypothesis

  That afternoon, Harvey approached the simulacrum and me with plans for going for “a constitutional.” I agreed, but then the simulacrum backed out, saying she’d rather stay behind preparing for tomorrow’s meeting, reading the research of Tzvi Gal-Chen. Her withdrawal seemed a kind of threat. But only kind of. At the time, I suspected nothing.

  A few blocks out in that chill and Harvey ventured, “I’m concerned about the reality of Tzvi Gal-Chen.”

  “You’re telling me that you’re concerned about the reality of Tzvi Gal-Chen?”

  “No, about the health of Tzvi Gal-Chen,” he said into the wind.

  “About the health of Tzvi Gal-Chen?” I said.

  “No. About the modality of Tzvi Gal-Chen,” he said. “About the modality.”

  “The reality,” I said. “That is what you are saying?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “This is about the out-of-office reply? I got that too, and it distressed me, but I can’t imagine it’s anything serious.”

  “Out-of-office? What? No. My concern pertains to what the blonde told me.”

  I tried to think if I had earlier noticed him referring to the simulacrum as “the blonde.” Instead sheep and fruit came to mind.

  Harvey went on: “She told me that there is no Tzvi Gal-Chen. Not really. Not in any real sense like I thought there was. And then she said this. She said that if there was a Tzvi Gal-Chen, then you may as well say that she is Tzvi Gal-Chen. That’s what she said to me. A bit arrogant, no?”

  I heard a tremendous cracking sound: somewhere ice breaking. We had been told that chunks of glacier often fell, crashing into the lake. “Did you see that sound?” I asked.

  “You’re resistant to this information, Dr. Leo. All I’m saying is: do we really know who she is?”

  I thought of the simulacrum walking out on that military man at the ice-cream shop, and I felt that pang of heartburn that I associate with, well, love. “She is someone, I suppose,” I said. “Or not even suppose, but most likely. Obviously. Of course.” And I did keep hearing ice cracking, sometimes even shattering. Off at a distance, but it made me feel unsteady. “Listen, Harvey—I think I know why she says she’s Tzvi Gal-Chen. But it’s a stupid thing that makes her say so, a very stupid thing, Harvey, and I don’t want you to take the things she says very seriously. She is not a reliable source. Her data is shot through with error. Maybe blue noise, error on the smallest scale, but error nonetheless. Any data from her must be filtered—”

  “But it’s an interesting problem that she brings up, the problem of knowing Tzvi Gal-Chen. It’s a problem that sounds epistemic but that may in fact be metaphysical.”

  “Which analyst used that phrase with you?”

  “Doesn’t it accurately describe the situation?”

  “No. He’s just out of his office. Being out—that’s a totally normal thing that people can be. He’ll return. And until then we know we have our meeting tomorrow. Don’t get nervous over this. After all, how could Tzvi Gal-Chen not be real if you’ve been writing to him? If he has been writing to you? If he has been writing papers in journals since before either of us even knew him and since before the simulacrum was even born?”

  “But he hasn’t written any papers very recently; I even asked him about that, and he admitted that no, he had not. He’s gone underground. But why—”

  “Yes, well,” I said, “the secret nature of some of the work? That’s not something you don’t understand.” A cold, dry wind burned my cheek like a sunburn, or a slap. As I said those words that didn’t quite convince me of anything, I was reminded of a conversation I’d once had shortly after my mother died in which I referred to my mother in the present tense. I said, “She works as a seamstress.” But I should have said, “She worked as a seamstress.” It was a pretty girl’s question I said that in response to and this was during a time in my life when I had difficulties, much greater difficulties than now, talking to girls. Back then I had difficulties talking to anybody, really. Regardless, the girl said back to me, after touching my wrist, oh, will you ask your mother a question for me? Will you ask her if you can serge without a special machine that’s just for serging? (For me the word “serge” heaved with sexuality.) My present-tense slipup grew increasingly problematic, because every time this girl saw me—she really was so pretty—she would ask me again if I’d talked to my mother, if I’d asked her about the serging. I suppose I could have tried to learn about serging on my own and just lied and said I’d asked my mother. Or I could have simply confessed to the fact that my mother was dead and that I therefore could not ask her about serging. But I did neither of those things; instead I worked harder and harder to avoid the girl, who grew lovelier every year (until at the very end of college she cut her hair short), and when I would spy her, at a distance, or in the cafeteria, I would feel a pressing at the walls of my heart, as if I were in love with this girl whom I didn’t know, as if we might have been the happiest couple there ever was save for how I had ruined everything through my simple slip in language.

  “I mean, it’s not as if I’ve never been led astray, in my years of work for the Academy,” Harvey broke back in. “I went back and looked more closely at the e-mails Tzvi had written to me, and to us, and I noticed something. He’s extremely fond of saying ‘rather’ and ‘suppose’ and ‘anyway’ and ‘regardless.’ Which perhaps you’ve noticed are words you’re very fond of too.”

  “That is peculiar,” I acknowledged, censoring myself from saying “rather peculiar.” “But not so peculiar.”

  “Yes, he likes ‘peculiar’ too. And he likes to repeat himself. And like you often say to me—you’ve often
said to me—peculiarity is something true rumpling the bedsheets of assumption—”

  “I’ve never said that—”

  “You said something like that,” Harvey asserted. We had stopped walking; we were just standing out there in the cold. “Or maybe Tzvi said it to me. And I was just thinking that it was funny, that it was odd, but that probably you and he were just different possible versions of essentially the same person. That the two of you are supposed to be in separate worlds, but here you are in the same one. Maybe even vying for something? Just like the blonde and your wife.”

  “Is this an accusation? This strikes me as entirely ludicrous. If anyone is Tzvi, it’s certainly not me.”

  “Not the same person. Just almost the same person. Maybe of varying provenances. Yes, it may seem impossible, but more possible than the other possibilities, no? I thought maybe these swaps might be a kind of prelude to—well, my working hypothesis is that tomorrow, before the storm, there will be a swap back. But maybe the simulacrum says what she says because she will be swapped for Tzvi, and you will be swapped for Rema, so it’ll be a crisscross like that—”

  And it strikes me now as worth recording that on account of Harvey’s ramblings—I had been lulled into believing that I was working with a mostly sane man, my norms had redshifted without my noticing—we had lost our bearings. And it began to rain—sleet, really—rather heavily, and so we could not see far. I will spare you the heroics and dumb luck of our making it back to the hotel, but at one point, when the ground grew too icy, we crawled.

  18. While we were out

  Before we entered—somehow I just knew to do this—I gestured to Harvey to be quiet and I—soaked, cold—gently pressed my ear to the door of my very own room, my own hotel room, anyway, my temporary room. And I overheard the voice of my companion, my copycat companion that is, saying: “—but it’s exhausting too, having to pretend about so many little things when I am with him, it’s like I have to be not myself … I know you’re right, I know I shouldn’t have let him go, not even for an hour … now I’m worried and miserable … I wanted to see who he’s been mailing with, but you’re right … but I do want to stay with him … he used to leave me poems on the kitchen table … and buy me special fruits … and he says things sometimes like ‘the foul rag and bone shop of my heart’… and I’m so happy when I sleep with my head on his chest … Saul didn’t like to cuddle … let’s say he is a little bit crazy … secret huge debts like David did … and so what do I care that he feels close to someone just because he thinks he’s a meteorologist … it’s better than sleeping with other girls … it feels nice to be the center of his world, even if it’s partially because he’s mean about everyone else … I think we love each other … I can feel him coming back to me … I feel—”