Along the spine of the long table lay stunted pencils and old beige card catalog cards. I watched myself write—the lead of the pencil was soft and pressing it down against the note card inevitably made me think of Rema applying eyeliner, her gaze up and out—one term on each of three separate note cards: LEO LIEBENSTEIN (ME), DOPPELGANGERS, ROYAL ACADEMY OF METEOROLOGY.
A plan came to me: to select a note card at random and to begin my research in the direction thus dictated. Again I stress, it is precisely because I am intensely logical that I recognized that in order to determine how best to proceed I needed a new kind of logic.
I had not, however, abandoned my faith in experimental controls. I quickly wrote three more note cards: HERONS, WOOL PROCESSING, HEMOCHROMATOSIS. Those would be my red herrings. Maybe I’d chosen herons with that obscurely in mind. Regardless, I turned all six note cards over and shaped them into a stack, shuffled them, then spread them out on the table. It was difficult for me to convince myself that I didn’t still know which card was which, so I gathered the cards into a pile again, then left for the men’s room, where I washed my hands with horrible bubblegum pink liquid soap and dried my hands on mealy paper towels.
This picking of the card would have to be truly, not just apparently, random. Otherwise I ran the risk of being guided by plans that only seemed like my own but that were actually determined by whatever ideas had been seeded into the air, intruded upon me.
I returned to the table; I shuffled the cards once more. Sitting across from me was a double-chinned, mustachioed man; he didn’t even glance at me but his left hand kept drifting to just behind his ear, to rub something there, and this somehow made me feel self-conscious and awkward and ugly, as if he were me. Leaving the cards scattered, I rose once more from my seat—the sound of my chair scraping the floor reverberating in the belly of that whale, of course I had doubts—and I took a walk down the long center aisle, looked at a spine on a book shelved at the far wall (Who’s Who in Scandinavia, 1950–1970), touched the gold lettering like a home base, then returned—in that cavern—to my seat.
The mustachioed man’s hand was again behind his ear. His earlobe was large and pale, but the antitragus was bright red.
I re-reshuffled my sense and nonsense cards, re-redistributed them across the table in front of me, and, finally, picked one. I turned it over: ROYAL ACADEMY OF METEOROLOGY.
No red herring!
So: I would do a literature search on the Royal Academy of Meteorology.
12. My second search, objective unknown
Only very briefly did I panic, when, in my aloneness, I realized that the one reference database I knew how to use, besides the now dead and dismembered card catalog, was Medline.
That realization, being surprised by my own inability, shook me up in a way that reminds me of the first trip Rema and I took together, walking hut to warm hut in the Austrian Alps. This was relatively early on in our relationship, and I had told Rema that I knew German “more or less.” In truth I’d once taken a two-week German class. I’d retained maybe four phrases: milch bitte, Ich bin ein Berliner, die Zukunft einer Illusion, and Arbeit macht frei. But I wasn’t quite lying to Rema when I’d said I knew German “more or less,” because I did truly feel that once I got to Austria I would “remember” German. We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in—a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams. Lies—they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could. Well, I thought I’d remember German despite having never actually forgotten it, having never—as I vaguely felt I might have—listened to German radio broadcasts, or spoken German as a child. But we get these wrong feelings sometimes, feelings like articles slipped into our luggage but not properly ours. I think of it like vestigial DNA. Code for nothing, or the wrong thing, or for proteins that don’t fold up properly and that may eventually wreak great destruction. I talked about this wrong luggage thing with the simulacrum the other day, explained to her how maybe she really did feel that she loved me, as if she were actually Rema, and not just “Rema.” Anyway, at the desk of our pensione that evening, I opened my mouth and was genuinely shaken to realize that no German words came to mind.
“Help finding?” I said, leaning over the reference desk.
“Collected papers?” the gentle fernlike woman there answered me. She then tapped on her computer, then wrote something down, then translated from one call-number system to another call-number system, to a particular location, and then, taking me almost by the hand, she delivered me to five oversized, clothbound aquatic blue volumes of compiled papers from the past twenty years of annual conferences of the Royal Academy of Meteorology.
“I’m eternally grateful,” I found myself saying.
The fern nodded politely, but I could see she appeared little interested in the investigation into which she had launched me. She didn’t even ask me if I was a meteorologist. She padded away, as if I were utterly forgettable to her.
Not knowing what else to do, feeling perhaps overly bereft after my fern friend left, I took one of the volumes in hand, sat myself down on the floor. The light was on over my aisle alone, and I could hear its ticking, as if it were on a timer, which maybe it was. I began to hum a little Rema ditty whose words I could not recall, began to turn thin newsprinty pages, then more and more pages, somewhat randomly, not one by one—-flipping through, I believe they call this, some part of me said to the other parts, as if to diminish by chattiness, by music, by anything, the sense of serious portent I felt taking me over. The tiny font of captions, the murmurous italicizations of abstracts, the pridefulness of columns, the unassuming data plots. Hearing those thin pages micro-skid across the grooves of my finger pads was such a comfort I almost forgot my original purpose; that almost forgetting was probably a comfort as well.
I’d thought you didn’t even love her that much anymore, some part of me taunted. Some parts of me are so mean.
Suddenly I was looking at something beautiful. Or something beautiful to me, though I couldn’t say why, something that seemed potent with form, but a form I could not classify. Intrusive beauty, like the cornsilk of Rema’s hair—which is not necessarily unanimously considered beautiful, streaky as it is, and uneven, and sometimes greasy—a mesmerizing, unsolved kind of beauty. An irritant, actually. Something irritatingly beyond category—sublime, the melodramatic might say.
I can reproduce the image here. But I’m unable to reproduce the effect, the effect the image had on me, which was, well, uncanny, like those dolls whose eyes seem to follow you around a room. I felt like I had seen the image before, though what are the chances? Beauty, maybe the sublime, and déjà vu combined, is that what stopped me? Like I was looking at a topographical map of a landscape I knew only from close up. Some sense of concordance, and meaning, of a pattern both inscrutable and yet, at some almost cellular level, detected. I wonder: if I saw my own DNA denaturing in some petri dish, would I experience the slightest spine tingling of recognition? What if I passed my father on the street, would I recognize him, or him me, or would we just have an uncanny feeling, one that we might or might not ever decode?
FIG. 3. Vertical y-z cross section at 90 min. at X = 14.25 km through the model storm showing the rainwater mixing ratio contours (g kg−1, solid), the velocity vectors in the plane, and the potential temperature change from the initial base state (°C, dashed). South is to left and north to right. Wind speed proportional to vector length; areas void of vectors indicate very little flow in this plane.
Anyway, I would be curious to know what this image recalls to others.
After an uncertain length of time spent staring—I heard footsteps in a nearby aisle—I flipped back a few thin pages to the cover page of the article that contained the arresting image.
The
first author: Tzvi Gal-Chen.
The paper was originally presented at a conference in Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires being Rema’s hometown.
And Tzvi Gal-Chen being Tzvi Gal-Chen.
And the article was about retrieval. Specifically: “Retrieval of Thermodynamic Variables Within Deep Convective Clouds: Experiments in Three Dimensions.”
My pulse rose; my fingers went cold. Then the light went out; I crawled along the shelving to turn it back on. I know the ordinary often masquerades as the extraordinary, that if you put thirty people together in a room, the likelihood that two have the same birthday is over ninety percent, that when you learn a new word and it then seems suddenly ever present it is only because you have just begun to notice what was there all along. (This once happened to me with the word cathect. Also Rosicrucian.) Maybe that’s all that this find of mine was. For all I know, maybe Tzvi GalChen and Buenos Aires were both already pervasive terms and I’d simply stumbled across two examples of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. But the fitting together of so many elements—sometimes that really happens, a stray orange peel, a necklace, and a certain joke about iceberg lettuce once converged to reveal a girlfriend’s infidelity—convinced me that I was perceiving something real, that I was not myself in any way cracked, that only my world suddenly was.
So I would go to Buenos Aires. I’d return to Rema’s beginning, a place I’d never been. Why Rema might have gone south—or if she’d been taken there, or if she was still there, and what her connection to Tzvi Gal-Chen might or might not be—I had no idea. But it was that afternoon in the library, in those dusty aisles with the lights always threatening to turn off, when I had only the faintest of knowledge, that I knew with the most certainty what to do next. Like how it is on the foggiest of nights that radio signals come through most clearly and from seemingly impossible distances.
13. We exchange words, not pleasures
The dog lover did not take it well that night over dinner—a heap of lentils and bacon and spinach with a facedown sunny-side-up egg on top, I always loved our messy pile-on meals—when I said that I’d be leaving for an indefinite length of time. She asked me why I was leaving; I said because something had changed and I just needed to get away. She asked what did I mean by leaving and I realized I didn’t quite know, so I decided to be cautious and say that I was taking a personal vacation. Those phrases, something has changed, just need to get away, personal vacation, were not really my words but TV words, movie words, pollen in the air. Not even aliens from within me, but aliens from without. More luggage. She: leaning on an elbow, holding her fork aloft and still, with nothing on it, asking, What did I mean by “changed”? Me saying I wasn’t quite sure what I meant, that I hadn’t found words for it yet. She: asking, Where, exactly, was I going? Me telling her that as nice a person as she seemed to be, I didn’t really feel comfortable telling her. “Not yet,” I clarified. “But maybe never.”
She pressed the empty tines of her fork against her bottom lip. Then she set her fork down. She was very sober, and very calm, very unlike Rema.
“Are you seeing someone?” she then asked, which struck me as funny, because there are so few people in the world that I like even a little bit.
I may have cracked a nervous smile. I shook my head no.
“Are you playing a joke?” she asked.
Again I shook my head.
“Is this related to, are you relating to, um, yesterday?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, which was as honest an answer as I knew.
“Or Harvey?”
“I don’t think so,” I said again.
“I don’t understand,” she said, putting down her fork, which, touching the plate, sounded a gentle reverberating ting like a creeping chill. Her tines then disappeared into the lentils.
“I don’t understand either,” I said, and I also put down my fork, as a gesture of respect, even though I was still hungry, and even a little bit happy, since I had a kind of plan. I could almost see the pulley system—something made of thick gray rope and metal coated over with a chipping white paint—by which my life’s getting better would make this other Rema’s life worse, and just having that thought moved the ropes back against me, for her.
We were quiet for a little while. I looked at her and then when I saw her look at me I looked back away, down at my plate. The lentil dish we were eating that night was made with tarragon, which I always forget smells like licorice until I close my eyes and ask myself why I have an image of myself lying under a patchwork quilt and coughing. I wonder if Rema, or her doppelganger for that matter, experiences silence (or tarragon) the same way I do; for me silence is like a humid swelling of scents, originless clicks, phantom elbow pains, a puff of air near the eyes, a sense of grass pushing up through the earth somewhere, or everywhere at once. I’ve never asked Rema about this.
The simulacrum scooted her chair back, went to sit on the sofa; the russet dog joined her. “You are trying,” she said, not actually looking at me, “to make me say I love you and beg you to sleep with me, but I am not here to perform for you, you can go through your preoccupations on your own and talk to me on the other side of them.”
I said nothing. I just looked at her. There on the sofa, unnamed pup at her side, she was running her fingers perpendicular to the wale of her corduroy skirt. Then parallel to the wale. Then perpendicular. Just by watching, I could feel the grain of the fabric, which made me think of the grooves that make our fingerprints, which made me think of the fingerprinty look of that meteorological image in Tzvi Gal-Chen’s paper, which made me think of the myth of fingerprints, of one of the few things that I remember my father telling me, that really all fingerprints were the same. And snowflakes? I’d asked. And snowflakes, he’d answered.
The russet dog nose-sighed, turned a tired gaze toward me.
“Is it your plan,” the simulacrum said, “to say nothing? You’re not really going to leave. You’re just imitating a drama of me, a show I might put on.”
Despite a certain type of certainty, I remained very unsure as to how conscious this woman was of being an impostor, or perhaps an alternate. As far as I knew she might be like an understudy who’s been lied to and believes that the show goes on only on Tuesdays, and that she is really the only star. Maybe this woman also felt that something was somehow wrong, that she was with the wrong Leo; maybe she, like me, could not articulate precisely what was wrong, but unlike me she did not trust her feeling. Maybe at some point in time, in some place, an other Rema and an other Leo were living together very happily in a whole other parallel possible world. A world not unlike the ones Harvey so often talked about. It was possible.
Again the dog’s nostrils flared.
And I found myself saying to this other Rema, calling out to her across the apartment—and this too felt like clichéd speech that had infected me—that I wanted to tell her the whole truth.
“Okay,” she said, returning her gaze to me.
So laconic. It was details like that that made it clear to me that I was not speaking with my Rema. But even so, the doppelganger, she had a wintry kind of pretty about her that day, chapped and rosy like freshly sanded wood. Even if she wasn’t my wife, I still felt sorry for her. My heart always goes out to beautiful people, which I realize really isn’t fair, but at least my heart goes somewhere. And at least, unlike the previous day, I did not feel that I wanted to hold the impostress, though I was surprised and perhaps a little offended that she didn’t—even as a kind of ploy—try to seduce me. But once I realized that I didn’t want to hold her, I realized that I had nothing further to say. She was still waiting for my promised explication. But I did not know what “the whole truth” was. I cast about for an explanation with the sense that it would arrive whole, entire, like a forgotten memorized poem, if only I could recall the first word or two. Again like my sincere belief in my nonexistent German. But I couldn’t find my way out of the crisscrossing thought: either I tell her she’s
not really Rema and she thinks I’m crazy, or I tell her she’s not really Rema and she doesn’t think I’m crazy, because she already knows she’s not Rema, in which case why should I let on that I know? Those weren’t really the only two options, logically speaking, but I got caught within that syllogism, like in the still place inside of storms.
“You aren’t speaking?” she asked.
Even though the vein on this woman’s forehead had not been prominent before, it became ghostly blue prominent. Like her maybe lover’s, the night nurse’s.
Then the phone rang.
14. Pleasures past
The first time I actually spoke to Rema: she was again sitting right in front of me at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and I had leaned forward toward that hair, and I actually tapped her shoulder, but then what was I going to say if she turned around? I had no plan.
She did indeed turn around in her chair, her profile showing off her long, gently fluted nose and the tendons on her neck.
I found myself asking her if she was Hungarian.
During the silence of indeterminate length that followed I fixed my gaze upon her forehead, since I couldn’t possibly look straight into her eyes, and what I eventually heard, in a lilting long-voweled accent, was: Why do you stare at me?
Over the sound of milk being steamed I asked, alarmed, “Do I stare at you?”
“You are from Hungary?” came from her, now in a louder voice, to the sound of silverware being sorted.
“No, no.”
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 6
