Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  “Oh.”

  “Though my mother. Actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “But no. Not me. A mistake.”

  “A mistake.”

  “Do you make these cakes here?” shouted a surprisingly tiny woman across the nearby counter.

  And I remember it striking me then (as my mishearing had nearly become conversation) how in my line of work the fact that I sometimes can’t hear so well—I just have trouble disarticulating sounds—is almost a plus, since people give out so many clues about what’s ailing them that are so much more important than the actual words they say. But in all other aspects of my life this “quality” left me fairly crippled.

  “So where are you from?” I asked, and somehow our conversation hobbled on from there. I don’t know why she was so willing to talk to me; she had not been in the country for long at that time and I believe she must have felt alone, and Rema does not luxuriate in feelings of aloneness, and she tends to be kind of catholic in her interest in people, at least for a little while.

  “Really?” Rema said when the fact that I am a psychiatrist came out. “Did you know that Argentina has more psychoanalysts per person than has any other country?”

  I did already know that fact about Argentina, about its psychoanalysts, but I said:

  “No, I didn’t know that. That’s so interesting.” Also: normally people’s conflation of psychoanalysis with psychiatry irritates me profoundly—I could never be an analyst, those people are too unpleasant, too passive-aggressively authoritarian, and, yes, all crazy, and out of fashion to boot—but when Rema conflated the two, I was not irritated.

  “And the south side of Buenos Aires—it is the inconsciente,” Rema explained. “Or so they will tell you, no? You see there is Avenida Rivadavia, and it cuts the city, the north from the south. When the streets cross Rivadavia, their names change. From north to south, Esmeralda becomes Piedras, and Reconquista becomes La Defensa, and Florida becomes Peru. That is cute, no?” She brushed unseen hairs off of her face.

  She had a somewhat manic speech pattern, with increased rate and rhythm, though not volume. Also her hair was cowlicked at her temple. Looking at her I had the urge to tell her what I often feel impelled to tell a beautiful person, which was that she really didn’t need to say anything at all, and that she shouldn’t worry, and that it is not just me who will be helplessly devoted to her regardless of what she says. But I didn’t tell Rema that. Pretty people often actually don’t like to hear that kind of thing, I’ve found.

  “And even the whole of Argentina,” she went on, “it is the geography of a mind. Patagonia, in the south, is the savage and inhospitable inconsciente. Or so people say. And on a small scale, like snow globe, my neighborhood in Buenos Aires, it is named Villa Freud.” She smiled at me. “You must think this is very silly what I am saying.” Then she looked down at her napkin, which she began folding into triangles. “I also think it is very silly; maybe it is thinking like that that made me want to leave. Everyone so interested in how they are feeling, and who they maybe really are; even the newspapers, they print passages from psychoanalysis.” Then: “Have you been? To Argentina?”

  I told Rema the truth, that I had not been. I thought about saying something about Borges, but I know that I have a problem with coming off as pretentious, and I was worried that bringing up Borges might appear showy, even though every introverted schoolboy reads Borges, so it’s rather ambiguous what such a reference would or should indicate. Another reason I generally don’t like to mention Borges is because often a response will be to the effect of he has no emotion, and I hate hearing that said, because it is so wrong, and it’s not a discussion that I like to get into. In retrospect I know that Rema would have agreed with me, but back then, I wanted to protect Rema from saying anything that might make me not like her.

  “If the Argentines are generally like you, then it must be a lovely country,” I said, immediately regretting my banality.

  “You will have to go,” she said firmly.

  “Oh I apologize for troubling you,” I said.

  “Yes, you will have to go to Argentina. Unfortunately I can’t go myself now, they might not let me back here, you know? What is that: what is easy to get into, easy to get out of, but almost impossible to return to? It is some very big answer, I think, something like life, or love. Something silly like that. For me, it’s this country.”

  The way her bangs were parted made me think of an ink brush.

  We never went to Argentina together, Rema and I—or, not really. Thinking of that now, I can’t help but wonder if Rema had hid Argentina away from me intentionally, like some token from another lover. But Rema wouldn’t try to hide an entire country. She hid much smaller things. I’m thinking about the time we went to have a slice of pizza together. It was like this: just in front of that mural of deformed angels, the mural at the pastry shop, Rema and I decided to get a bite to eat. And she said, well where should we go? And I, not wanting to look as if I were trying to impress, and not wanting to seem as old as I am, said, well we could go to Koronet for pizza, to which she said, sure, I’m happy with anything. Which I’ve always taken to mean the opposite. And indeed it did mean the opposite. She stopped then a moment—that day she was wearing a yellow jumper with a navy blue cardigan, she looked like an airline stewardess on some small Eastern European line—and said, oh I don’t want to eat there, can we eat elsewhere? And I said that we could have a slice at the Pinnacle—but she said that she didn’t like that pizza—or at the Famiglia—which also she said she didn’t like, that the crust was so thick, and the cheese “unhappy,” and she added, “Oh I’m sorry, you see I said I’m happy with anything when actually the opposite is true, I’m never satisfied.” I blushed and shrugged my shoulders. Indecisiveness, capriciousness—these qualities in Rema never irritated me. I’ve always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions, and so I don’t look down on others for being the same. Maybe that’s what “our humanity” means. My mother was like this also: often she’d run bathwater, set the kettle for tea, and go out for a walk nearly all at once, and when she did this it was usually I who had to stop the bathwater’s running, turn off the kettle before the whistle blew. So Rema and I stopped there a moment on the sidewalk, and stood silent, and then Rema said, “Yes, let’s go to Koronet. I do like it there. I just can’t ever finish the slice and then I feel I am wasting and I feel sometimes a little bit sad—that is silly, no?—but I am very hungry tonight, I am sure I will finish, and the crust is nice and thin and I like the people that work there.”

  In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if maybe she was avoiding someone, what with all the nervousness and mind changing.

  We went there, to Koronet, where I’d originally proposed. But for having fallen out of the plan and then back in, it seemed like a place anew, and if my spirits had been lagging earlier, inevitably disappointed in this woman for agreeing to spend time with me, I now was infatuated with her again, through my standard mathematics of love, a sort of dynamic stability, with Rema being now a new Rema, an always and ever renewable Rema, whose parts never quite added up. What can I say—why should I expect my inner workings to be different from anyone else’s?

  Rema ordered a slice of cheese, and took a plastic fork and knife, and I watched her slicing her pizza. I then took a fork and knife to my own pizza. I sliced the whole thing to pieces before taking a bite. Rema and I sat along the counter where there is a mirror, and I stole glimpses of us, of our reflection, where we looked like a happy blushing pair, and I had a little moment of imagining being over there on that side of the mirror, the side where we were happy and new and now forever.

  We had such nice early days. Everyone looked at Rema, but Rema always complimented me and seemed to notice other men only so as to point out how they paled in comparison to me, how one might be handsome but not clever enough, another clever but not boyish enough, another boyish but without de
pth. She made me small gifts—elaborate origami boxes, uselessly small pillows, socks with my initials embroidered on them—always getting these gifts to me in a hurry, as if there weren’t time enough to finish them, as if our relationship were always on the cusp of ending suddenly, unforeseeably, as if by natural disaster.

  How odd, now that I think about it, that she loved me.

  15. An object that will not be permanent

  I turned my back on the corduroy-petting simulacrum—waiting there for the whole truth as she was—and I answered the ringing phone.

  The other line hung up.

  How random.

  Although a series of hang-ups, I suppose that’s not so random.

  “Who was it?” she said.

  “Who do you think it was?” I said.

  Maybe she was waiting for a call from Anatole. Or the night nurse. Or the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

  “The whole truth,” she said with disgust, getting up to turn on the television. She quite obviously didn’t really think that I would leave, didn’t really believe that I was on to her.

  And I admit that I didn’t entirely believe myself either. If I’d looked up at the ceiling and saw in the drips there an arrow pointing me out the door—well, then I would think I was imposing a self-deluding order onto chaos. If I’d seen three fallen buttons on the floor and perceived them as a triangle pointing me in a particular direction—again I wouldn’t have trusted my perceptions. If I heard voices. If I had a fever. Or any neurological signs. Or feelings of grandeur. Or if all the articles in the newspaper seemed to bear messages especially for me. Even just if the weather had been on when the simulacrum turned on the TV, and if I took that fact too seriously—even then, I would have doubted myself, wondered about the selectiveness of what I noticed. But none of that was happening.

  “You’re like a different person these past couple of days,” she said. “Maybe months.” And there couldn’t have been a more bold, if tacit, acknowledgment of the situation than that. A fresh vision crept over me: myself at an airport desk, in much better shape and younger than I actually am, casually asking to be put on “the next flight to Buenos Aires.” Hurried keyboard tapping, a negotiatory phone call, an underling being sent ahead to the gate to ask them to please hold the door! A seed of happiness in me: at the thought of being a player in some tragedy or comedy so much larger than myself. Surely I was emotionally suffering terribly, but of course our minds play tricks, dress up our emotions in masks, hosiery, feathers. That can be very useful. It was good to feel kind of good.

  I waited for the woman to fall asleep, so that I could leave in peace. I packed a suitcase quietly, filled it with my clothing, and a bit of Rema’s clothing as well, so that I’d have it to bring to her. I kissed the dog goodbye. At the airport I called my mentor, who had been through town and who had reacted to Rema so strangely. I mean sort of strangely. I tried to ask him about his reaction to her, if he thought something was “off” with her; I tried to ask him somewhat discreetly. But this is what he said to me: “You used to just be jealous. Now you’ve converted your jealousy into a psychological gain, some narcissistic pleasure in believing that everyone else wants what you have, wants to sleep with your wife. You should grow up. It’s not healthy.”

  His response was neither random nor spontaneous; it was predetermined by his previous ideas about me; habits of thought are death to truth; I was outside of my habits; and he—he was wrong.

  16. I contact a third party

  Although the elaborate latticing of the ceiling had given me a kind of confidence in the country’s infrastructure, still my suitcase (Rema’s suitcase) did not arrive on the carousel at the airport in Buenos Aires. An attendant—a thin man with pockmarked skin and longish hair and a Roman nose and a filmy oxford shirt through which I could see his undershirt—told me not to wait but to return the next morning, that nothing could be settled until then.

  “I have important things inside,” I said in my poorly accented Spanish. Maybe it sounded like I was talking about my feelings. That first burst of language made me feel like a child, unable to find more precise, or more polite, words.

  “I understand,” the attendant politely lied in response.

  “Shouldn’t an investigation be started?” I asked.

  He reiterated that I should return the next day. “You are not having an unusual experience,” he emphasized, then looked past my shoulder to the woman behind me.

  So luggageless, I set out into the city. I began my search for Rema by settling on the most direct and reasonable of plans: calling her mother. A more bold notion than it might appear. Not only had I never met Rema’s mother, Magda, but she didn’t even know—as far as I knew—that Rema was married to me. She didn’t even know I existed at all. Rema was estranged from her mother, or her mother from her, or both. I didn’t really know the whole story, not even the whole Rema version of the story. (And about Rema’s unmentioned father—I never even asked. I presumed one of several sad variations. I’m not the only psychiatrist who advocates occasionally leaving silences silent, not confounding confession with intimacy.)

  I found a public telephone, a glass and red-painted metal takeoff of a London phone booth. Stepping inside—why did Argentina look so wrong? where were all the beautiful people? why did the architecture look like it belonged in Tel Aviv?—I flipped through the phone book and found her number—so easy! Then I breathed on the glass, then smudged my breath, then breathed again, smudged again, such that I was looking at a saliva-rainbowed distorted reflection, which at least gave me something to look at while I held that phone inevitably infested with the invisible germs of a thousand strangers.

  A woman answered, and I introduced myself as “a friend of Rema.”

  On the other end: “What?”

  I cut to the proverbial chase—very proverbial, I was feeling—with, “Listen, if you don’t mind my asking, when was the last time you saw Rema?”

  She asked, “With whom am I speaking?”

  “This is Leo. I’m a friend—”

  “What,” she interrupted in an anxious blushing voice, “are you asking me about Rema?”

  “I’m in Buenos Aires—” I began, but then I couldn’t remember what I had thought I was going to ask Magda; I could remember only—as if my brain had monochromed—how much I hate speaking on phones. “And—”

  “You know where Rema is?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, feeling vaguely distinguished and proud, “I do believe I saw her as recently as three days ago.”

  “Here?”

  “No. In New York—”

  “Oh. Yes, yes. I knew that. You are an American friend?”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  “But you are in Buenos Aires?”

  “Yes. In this strange red phone booth actually—”

  “And you are Rema’s friend,” she said again, the repetition seemingly undermining the truth-value of the statement. Maybe Rema doesn’t consider me a friend. That’s possible. “Well,” Magda continued, now in a fresh vanilla kind of voice, “you should come over. You should come over anytime. You should come over right now. Would you like to come over right now? We will have a coffee, sweets—”

  “Well—”

  After giving me street names, and after describing to me the front of her home, she concluded with: “And don’t worry about the dog.” She gave a little cough. “Despite appearances, he really is very sweet and there is no reason to be afraid.”

  Everyone with their dogs.

  17. EigenRema

  Far more dogs than I was accustomed to promenaded through Magda’s neighborhood; many dogs appeared unaccompanied; some attended playgroups of others of an equivalent size. It was as if decoys had been deployed to diminish the conspicuousness of the primary clue of the doppelganger’s dog. But also maybe—maybe even probably—there were just many dogs. Consequently much feces. Some of it obviously stepped on. This in contrast to the fresh paint on the low-rise buildings, the pott
ed plants on balconies. As I nearly failed to evade a particularly sculptural pile of feces, the thought came to me of who house-trained the pup now living in my apartment. Someone now dead?

  Soon a woman, dressed in heels and a high-waisted cream dress with a thick navy sash, held my face in her hands, kissed me twice; she smelled of Vaseline and talcum.

  “Rema,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, a misleading affirmation.

  “Rema?” I said.

  “She is coming?” she said.

  “No,” I said, waking up more fully into something.

  The woman laughed.

  Fortunately the drunkenness of longing didn’t last long; I quickly sobered into true perception. This woman looked older than Rema, yes, but not so much on account of any particular feature, more because her hair was more neatly pulled back into a low wide clip, her eyebrows were more perfectly sculpted, and her lipstick was impeccably tamed into the cupid’s bow of a ’40s film star. At her side was a leggy, dignified greyhound.

  “Her name’s Killer,” Magda laughed. Taking my hand, Magda led me inside a home that seemed already all wrong compared to the Rema’s childhood home of my mind—too narrow a hallway, too few mirrors, a heavy and wrong potpourri.

  What I would like to take, or drink, was what she asked me before leaving me alone on a velvet sofa overcrowded with tasseled pillows. Everything looked old, the velvet’s nap diminished in patches. Maybe Rema has touched these things, I thought deliberately, as if I were planning to take fingerprints, and then: I’m here in your pocket came to my mind, a swatch of a song that Rema likes to sing, curled up in a dollar, the chain of your watch around my neck. And I petted the too-smooth upholstery of the sofa, thinking of thin wales of corduroy.

  From a brocaded floor cushion, the greyhound watched me.

  Magda returned with a tray bearing a teapot and two maté mugs and diminutive glasses of water and a plate overloaded with small cookies pressed into different geometries, some covered in chocolate. She said to me, “So you are a friend of Rema’s husband?”