The woman turned the kettle off. It wasn’t—by sound stage—even near boiling. She set down that animal (who began licking my face and disturbing my peace) and sat down next to me. “Jokes aren’t funny,” she said to me, “when they need lots of explaining. Are you feeling well? You look sad, Leo.”
A prominent vein tortured across her hand too. I could press on the vein and it would fade to white and then return again, to that very particular blue.
She said, “Your walk. Do you want to tell me how it was? It’s a cloud out there.”
I thought that she was right, not just about the cloud, but about how jokes did lose their humor when they needed explaining, and I thought that maybe I had been making a joke, and that it hadn’t been the Royal Academy that had called. Later, when the phone rang again, I insisted that neither of us pick it up. We sat together on the sofa that evening and I kept my eyes on the floor and at one point I told “Rema” that I missed her, and I leaned over and bit her ear gently, and then I kissed her hand and the inside of her wrist, but that dog was running about, and quietly, in my thoughts, I apologized to Rema because I had wanted to hold that other woman. I think you can imagine the feelings that I had, and their strangeness to me.
8. Single-Doppler weather radar
In the salad days of Gal-Chen therapy I used to like to watch NY1 weather and think of Tzvi as the man behind the scenes, the unsung hero who made it all possible, deploying Doppler radar technology and interpreting the data at record speeds, simultaneously forecasting for all five boroughs. It was a light thought, a happy hyperbole, one of the many childish banalities that made up my daily secret life. Not much of a secret life, but enough. Enough to let others—Rema, I hoped—project something grander onto those private spaces. But my projections onto the unknown Tzvi—it turned out they were insufficiently ambitious, palest shadows of the truth.
Tzvi Gal-Chen’s contributions to the field of radar meteorology include a series of “retrieval” papers, all of which confront the problems of translating Doppler weather radar data into real-world, and eventually real-time, information. Familiar enough. But Tzvi focuses in particular on how valuable data retrieval can be accomplished with a single-Doppler radar; in this way his research represents a break from more conventional retrieval methods involving dual-Doppler radar systems: two radars, distant from each other, looking at more or less the same volume of air from perpendicular angles so that real-world information can then be divined through triangulation. Why not stick with dual-Doppler radar systems? Tzvi describes his motivation for developing single-Doppler retrieval methods thusly: “Perfectly coupled radar systems are rare, if they exist at all.” And “dual-Doppler analysis requires accurate calibration of radar antennas and simultaneous operation of both radars.”
Whereas I was genuinely alone. The therapeutic relationship, like, for example, the mourning process, is inherently asymmetric. I suppose I had let that sort of asymmetry leak into all aspects of my life, so while I had a number of pleasant professional relationships, I had no one I could really turn to for advice about Rema’s replacement, no one whom I could simply call upon as a friend, as a second. Except for Rema, and Rema wasn’t there. I admit that it’s generally better to consult another person, to adjust for a limited perspective, for the distortions of perception. If I’m wondering, for example, “Do I look haggard?” it would be useful to have another person’s eyes on me; between the two of us we might be able to settle the question near the truth.
But given the particulars of the situation, corroboration was an unreasonable expectation. I’d have to proceed on my own.
The limits of my knowledge and education inevitably restrict my comprehension of Tzvi’s work, so far outside of my own discipline, but I have come to understand the basic ideas quite well.
Doppler radar turns to advantage what is known as Doppler effect, an oft-misunderstood concept. Doppler effect describes an apparent—as opposed to actual—change in frequency or wavelength. It is the change perceived by an observer who is, relative to the wave source, in motion. Textbook example: as a speeding car approaches, the sound it emits appears to go up in pitch, in frequency. But in actuality, the emitted frequency—the car’s trembling of the air around it—does not change at all. It only seems to change.
Let us imagine a source from which a Rema look-alike emerges every second.
If the source is stationary, and I am stationary, then every second one of these Remas will pass me by.
But if the single observer, again let’s say me, begins walking toward the source of Remas, then a Rema will pass by me more frequently than every second, even though Remas are still exiting the source at the precise rate of one per second. From my (walking) perspective, there is now less spacing between the Remas, and therefore the wavelength has been affected, the perceived frequency of Remas has changed, has increased.
One might also consider the case of my remaining in place, and the source of Remas moving toward me. Or the case of myself and the Rema source both moving. Any frame of reference will do. If in the sum of movement vectors, the source and I are moving away from each other, then Remas will pass by less frequently, the perceived frequency of Remas will have decreased. (A lower pitch will be heard from the receding car.)
Being aware of this distortion of perception allows scientists to take advantage of the distortion itself in order to gather accurate data about the actual, and not just the perceived, world. In fact, more and better data than could be gathered if the distortion did not exist. Doppler effect refers to these distorted perceptions, and Doppler radar’s utility relies on savvy interpretations of these distortions that, properly understood, enable a more accurate understanding of the real world.
More or less, that is the Doppler effect, most famously used to come to the conclusion that the universe is expanding, since no matter which way a radar is pointing, it detects a redshift, the visual manifestation of wavelengths bouncing off of a receding source. That had been a surprise: the universe, in every direction, was leaving us (and apparently looking beige while doing so). I’m not sure if it’s wrong or silly to feel more sad and lonely on account of such facts, facts like the universe’s expansion, but somehow I do feel that way. But back to the point: Doppler effect. Or as I have come to call it in my more personal experience of it: Dopplerganger effect.
9. Dopplerganger effect in effect
She said to me: “Anatole, I am worried about you.”
Anatole? I felt for a moment like I could sense my own skin desiccating, that all those people I’d seen in the coffee shop were members of my own self, in masquerade, laughing at me, that I could sense water molecules moving not toward boiling but doing the opposite, colliding together out of the air. What came out of my mouth was: “What?” I saw red. Or beigey stars with red auras, receding.
She answered in a very quiet voice, “Well, I said. I said: Well, that I am worried about you.”
“You said Anatole,” I said, turning my head to look up at her face. From down below like that—I was still on the floor of the kitchen—her lips looked like bas-relief, exaggerated and grotesque.
“For a toll?” She said. “No, no I didn’t say that.”
I could still sense the dog in the room, but it was as if she were unfathomably far away, as if her tail were metronoming over a distant horizon.
“You said,” I said again, “Anatole.”
Her eyes were watering. “No, I didn’t. I said just, oh, that I am worried about you.”
“I heard Anatole,” I said again, unembarrassed, because after all she was a stranger. I lifted myself off the cool, dry, dusty floor—feeling somehow a small loss at no longer being able to see the lost jack under the fridge—and I sat myself up next to the woman. “Anatole. Is that the name of the night nurse?”
She kept crying very quietly and did not answer me.
“Is he your boyfriend? Is he in on this?”
She wiped her face with her sleeve. “So stupid,”
I heard her mumble.
“What?” I said. And one might fault me for not attending to this woman’s suffering—but I myself was still in such shock, under such duress.
“No, silly. No, not what you might think at all,” and she began to laugh a little bit in her tears. She stood up then, from the ground, the floor I mean, and walked to the bedroom.
I did not follow her, not right away.
I went to sleep knowing that if I was somehow wrong, if this really was Rema, then in the morning we’d pretend none of this had happened. That’s how things were with us. I liked that, our mutual commitment to delimiting our intimacy, that commitment, in its way, a supreme form of intimacy, I’d argue. I often miss that very particular habit of ours these days, when it seems everything I’ve said or done or eaten or worn the day before is being made reference to, is being discussed. People need secrets. Anyway, that night I slept at the very edge of the bed; the woman did not seem to mind. She slept with her back to me. She held the dog in her arms and did not touch me.
I also let her remain alone.
10. I walk the dog; the dog walks me
At some point during that night—after the naming-of-the-dog fight and after Anatole and the foot estrangement, when Rema was still not Rema, and the Royal Academy had either called or not called me, and Harvey was either dead or just missing again—I woke that woman sleeping next to me with her arm around a new animal and I asked her if I was talking in my sleep. She mumbled: You are talking right now but I don’t know if you are sleeping. I shook her again and she said: But I am sleeping, viejito, please please leave me alone. I didn’t know what to make of that. I breathed in her hair, which smelled just right and made my eyes water. And I put my hand on her sleeping forehead, which felt just the right shape. And I carefully reached my arm around her waist to find the handle of her far hip and it felt just like Rema’s hip, though maybe a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller, or something—I was having such a hard time articulating my perceptions, even just to myself. I tried to fall back asleep, and I think I did, but it was the kind of sleep where one later wakes up exhausted, with the conviction of having slept not more than minutes.
When I finally awoke, the simulacrum was not in the bed.
I found a note, written in a slightly undersized Rema-ish script, magneted onto the refrigerator, where the Gal-Chen family photo used to be.
PLEASE TO WALK THE DOG BEFORE YOU LEAVE
Well: it was something meaningful to do while I tried to conceive of a better method—I didn’t have one yet—of searching for Rema. Even then I knew I couldn’t just ride the subway all day long. And although I was not yet explicitly thinking of my situation in terms of research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods, I was already aware of the need to overcome the confines of my lonely point of view. I couldn’t yet imagine how to make deductions from my restricted knowledge without it being like trying to determine the position of a star without understanding parallax, or, perhaps more to the point, like trying to determine the actual frequency of an object moving away from me at an unknown speed and in an unknown direction, and not knowing whether it in fact was me or the object doing the moving.
I found the nervous russet dog in the closet, jaw on dusty floor, one paw possessively in a yellow high heel of Rema’s. “Okay, little orphan,” I said to her quietly. When she saw me, she thumped her lean tail clumsily and whimpered. “You have no idea,” I went on, trying to lean down toward her slowly, without frightening abruptnesses, “why you’re here, why you’re not at home. Maybe you think I smell odd. It’s very important, did you know, for getting along, for falling in love, to like each other’s smell, even if you’re not aware of noticing it.” She gazed at me steadily. I felt she was calmed by my Rema-like chatter. “Rema smells like cut grass and bread and lemon,” I said.
Leashing the pup felt wrong.
I walked her over to the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She received numerous compliments, the pup. I received none. I used to sit on the cathedral steps, waiting and waiting for Rema—by chance—to pass by. This was before we were together. Sitting on that cold concrete I inevitably felt like the worst kind of fool—winter and not even a hot drink in my hands or a spiritual temperament to my mind to excuse my presence—and waiting there, exposed to the elements, a part of me vehemently hated the innocent Rema, hated her for taking up my time, for occupying an unclosing preoccupative loop in my mind, but, of course, another part of me loved her, ecstatically, for pretty much the same reasons, with profound gratitude toward her not just for her herself but also for my obsession with her, which rescued me from my unceasing progression of unpunctuated days, because one thing my obsession did, if dizzyingly, was punctuate. And get me out of my apartment, and my habits. And I did occasionally actually see her. And even just that much of Rema, brief sightings of her, would have been worth all my devotion; she’s a finer world.
The pup seemed uninterested in ascending the steps; they didn’t mean to her what they meant to me; we walked on, proverbial man and beast, and then, in the reflective glass of a Korean dry cleaner’s window, overlapping with a faded sign showing a shoulder-padded ’80s woman and with the text Modern women wear white too!, I caught sight of an adorable dog leading an old man whose coat was buttoned up wrong.
Twice now. I needed to look at myself on purpose, I resolved. Not by accident.
I readjusted the buttons of my coat.
I looked again in that reflective glass and saw a more distinguished man.
And it struck me—as if it hadn’t struck me before, or with more particulars than before—to analyze my situation as if it were not my situation but, instead, a patient’s.
This simulation of there being two observers looking at the same problem (my life) without there actually being two observers echoes—though I didn’t realize it at the time—the solution that Tzvi came to in his research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods. I was deploying Tzvi Gal-Chen’s solutions even before I properly understood them to be his solutions, as if his ideas were already coursing invisibly through my veins, which perhaps they were.
So the plan came to me, as if flooding into my hand from that leash, to do just what I did with my patients. I would accumulate data, do a literature search. Though on exactly what I wasn’t certain. I would simulate the addition of another radar into the equation, if not a perfectly coupled one. There’d be two of us. An I and a me, I might say, if I felt like being cute about it. Like that interrupter Lacan’s changing of the comma to a semicolon in Descartes’ famous formulation, about thinking and being. I think; therefore I am.
That, anyway, was my resolution; or at least that was my hope.
I called my office, asked to have my appointments canceled, said I was sick, terribly sick, and left for the public library to research the state of me.
11. Paradigm shift
The way I proceeded with my investigation might cause me to lose credibility before mediocre minds. And I should admit that I’ve always simply loved the New York Public Library, so arguably my motivation for going there that day was not just to find more information but also to be comforted, to see the light pouring in through the enormous windows in broad cones as if from giant parallel movie projectors. Maybe—but really the meekest of maybes—I was pursuing the sense I used to have as a child, when I’d see the illuminated dust shimmering and winking and—this was back when the library was always warm—I’d feel myself safe in the belly of an enormous and unknowable beast. When I was ten or eleven, my mother used to take me with her to the library almost every day. She was researching the legal proceedings related to eviction. Or maybe she was researching a family tree. I don’t really remember, so probably both of these things were, at different times, true. She did always believe that some outsized inheritance was seeking her; she’d stand at the newsstand and search the “Seeking” section of the classifieds, and then refold the paper and return it to the stack.
But it’
s not as if, in obedience to some zeitgeist Freudianism, Rema dimly replaced my mother; if anything Rema made my mother, retrospectively, seem a pale shadow of an original love yet to come.
At the library that day I knew that in adopting my new methodology, the logic I was familiar with would inevitably fail me. Certain rules can be said to hold, but only under a very specific set of conditions, conditions even an approximation of which had rapidly receded from me. What rules could be said to hold in my new world? I didn’t know. But I’ve always been logical, quite traditionally so, for example I put my least frequently worn clothing in the bottom drawer, which is the most uncomfortable to reach. And I had my office carpeted in pale blue because it is one of the few colors that are masculine and feminine at once. And when I first got Rema’s number I purposely didn’t enter it into my cell phone so as to keep myself from calling her too often. Instead I taped her number onto my refrigerator, which meant I could have lost it—it could have fallen, been swept away—but I knew the risk was an essential one and so, being rational, I took it.
But those old logics of mine had grown suddenly antique—to abandon them for something new was only reasonable.
I sat myself down at one of the library’s long communal tables. I pulled the beaded cord of the desk lamp. I stared at the illuminated green lampshade. I was waiting not for me to come up with an idea but for an idea to come up with me. This went on for a while, how long I am not sure. As I sat there, attempting patience, I became conscious of a faint ringing just quieter than the ventilation system, an alternating two-tone ringing of irregular rhythm. Looking around failed to reveal if anyone else heard this, or was disturbed by this, or if it was just me.
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 5
