Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  “I miss you” emerged from my mouth unintentionally, before I could think or plan or be wise in any way; it’s ridiculous, to say I miss you to someone when you don’t know who she is. “Where are you?”

  “Leo, I’m at our apartment but where are you?”

  Her words collapsed me into a smaller number of selves, a knowable number, an unpleasant dinner party. I stepped outside, stood under a eucalyptus tree, to continue my conversation.

  “Rema, I love you even more than I could ever have imagined—”

  “I love you too—”

  “Loving other people is really just loving you, I see that now—”

  “Leo, where are you?”

  “When did you return?” I asked.

  “When did you leave?”

  “Did they have to force you to leave, or did you just go along with them, because you knew you had to? I didn’t touch that other woman.”

  “Leo, I don’t know where you are. No one knows where you are. You haven’t been answering your phone. You’ve abandoned your patients. Don’t you think that’s strange? Doesn’t that preoccupy you?” To say “preoccupy” instead of “worry”—that was a studied Rema-ism. Rema, except for when she was very tired, had stopped making that error years ago. I said:

  “You’re the woman who came home with that leggy dog? That’s who you are?”

  “You’re upset—” the voice intruded nonresponsively.

  “That wasn’t actually a greyhound you brought home.” A ray of sun had found me; I felt clearheaded. “Instead a little greyhound look-alike. Like a little toy dog. Is that who I’m speaking with? The lady with the little dog?”

  “Are you with someone?”

  “It’s not polite what you did,” I said with discolored conviction. “To just bring a dog into someone’s apartment. The dog might have a disease. Or fleas. He might have made me sick.”

  “Leo, I’d really like to know exactly where you are.” The woman sniffled—everyone with their tears—in a way that was not at all attractive. “Where you are right now, and why,” she went on in between snarfling chokes that did seem, I concede, genuinely emotional, if repellent. “I just feel so preoccupied.” Even if she wasn’t Rema, I knew I should try harder to be nicer to her; I didn’t know why I was so offended by the dog.

  “If you need to cry,” I said to her, “it’s absolutely okay for you to cry.”

  “You’re lying,” she said, now sobbing. “You hate it when I cry.”

  “But I really am so sorry,” I said. Why did I say that? Well: sometimes the scent of Rema’s grassy shampoo reaches me, but coming from some other passing woman, and I’m then filled with feelings that I don’t know what to do with; that’s how I felt on the phone, with that voice. I found myself continuing on: “It’s not just you, my problem with other people’s crying. When Magda cried, I handled that so terribly.” That was a mistake, to mention Magda by name. Even if I had been talking to the real Rema—and it did sound just like her, and obviously a part of me really wanted to believe that it was her—such a disclosure would likely still have been a blunder because, to state it perhaps too simply, family is a sticky issue, often best left alone.

  But my words did make the woman stop crying. “When did you talk to my mom?” she said with a desiccating cornsilky voice.

  I felt suddenly evaporated and cold, even out there in the sun. “I don’t feel obliged to share with you all the details of my life.”

  “What did you tell her about me?” the voice continued soblessly.

  Having nothing to say, I said nothing. And anyway, other than having mentioned that I was a meteorologist, I hadn’t really said much to Magda at all. “She’s a very attractive woman,” I finally said, which was just a meaningless commonplace making its own merry way out of my mouth. It meant nothing. Maybe Magda is an attractive woman or maybe she’s not, but it’s not the kind of quality I was in a frame of mind to notice. Certainly she wasn’t as attractive as, say, the Rema-waisted waitress whom I could see through the window—she was really beautiful, distractingly beautiful.

  “Does she like you?” the voice asked.

  I said nothing. I watched the Rema-waisted waitress wipe down a table.

  “Does she look happy?” the voice damply whispered.

  Again I said nothing.

  My mind was comforting itself randomly with the name Alice. But not so randomly. I realized then that those snatches of Rema song that I’d had in my mind while I’d been sitting in Magda’s living room, they were songs from an album titled Alice. “Listen,” I finally said to that woman on the phone, “I’m really sorry about this, but I’m actually under quite a bit of stress lately. I’m engaged in some rather pressing and important work—”

  “You left me some very strange notes—” she began, and I held the phone away from my ear during the ridiculousness that followed, “—and if you say there’s not another woman I believe you. I’ll believe you. Leo, did you hit your head on something? Did—”

  When there was a pause in the woman’s excessive and absurd jeremiad—I, squinting in sunshine while she, I assumed, stood in the cold northern hemisphere shivering—I asked: “Is it snowing where you are?” Then impulsively, “It’s summer here, you know.”

  “You’re in Buenos Aires? With my mom?”

  I stopped watching the waitress through the window. “Did you know,” I continued, feeling other voices clawing out my trachea, “that just to discover the state of things as they presently are, let alone to predict the future, is a problem so computationally complex that to solve it even approximately would require a thousand Crays working in tandem?” And as I spoke, I noticed the wrong mental image blooming across the radar screen of my mind, wrong because although I knew very well that Crays referred to supercomputers, I pictured instead a thousand long-necked birds. Craning their necks? Or is cray a type of bird? Or was I just thinking about cranes? Like herons? “Forget,” I added, “about forecasting; even nowcasting is near impossible.” When I heard this fake Rema’s voice, was the Rema stream of images conjured in my mind correct? Or somehow subtly wrong, a series of wrong images that had already begun the process of extinguishing the real images of my real Rema? What if I was picturing the face of the simulacrum? Would it be better not to see anything at all, so as not to blanch out what I still had? Regardless, it struck me that maybe the observation about the Crays was now outdated, since computers are so much more powerful today than in the past; maybe now such computations could be made in real time; Tzvi’s idea either had grown superfluous or had been superfluous all along, had been a means of saying something else. A code? Maybe I was meant to contact Tzvi and ask. All these thoughts ran through my head, at uncertain speeds, entering from uncertain directions. Beneath the din of the phone voice I argued silently to myself that contacting Tzvi GalChen would be ludicrous; the relationship between us was not a reciprocal one; we were allied, yes, but only from my point of view, and only in a somewhat imaginary way, in a somewhat alternately conceived world that didn’t really exist, or that I didn’t think really existed, not then. Don’t get metaphysically and metaphorically extravagant, I admonished myself silently while that Rema-like woman talked on. Only Harvey, I reminded myself, believes in the deception. In reality Tzvi and I know nothing of one another.

  “Maybe we can speak tomorrow?” I pleaded, being as polite as I knew how to be, given the circumstances.

  “What if I said yes?” the voice said. “What if I said I did know something about forecasting and the thousand crayfish? Did you take my clothing, Leo? Did you take my purse? You know there have been many telephone calls—”

  I began to feel a particular kind of nervous, as when an unwanted thought makes its steady migrainous progress toward the surface, a sense of rising water drowning my lungs. So I disconnected. Then I turned off my BlackBerry entirely. It was the only proper thing to do. I needed to go back inside: to the waitress, to dust glittering like tiniest meteors in shafts of natural l
ight.

  I asked the Rema-ish waitress for an apple Danish; it tasted like real apple rather than like apple flavoring. Ironically this made the taste seem ersatz to me, on account of the fact that all my childhood the apple flavor I knew and loved took the form of fritters wrapped in plastic.

  20. Least squares method of fitting functions to data

  I practically ran back to Magda’s home. She received me warmly and began showing me photos of Rema—the hallway was a veritable gallery—while I hummed to myself Rema music. Rema in a baptismal gown, held up by large hands, the holder unseen. Rema as a brunette, sitting in a depression of sand, in a green-and-blue bikini, at the beach. A black-and-white photo taken on the front steps of that very home, with a small child Rema, barefoot, holding sandals in her hand. Rema older, looking bored, or angry, at Carnival, a sequined mask pulled up onto her forehead. Rema in pale blue at first communion. Rema in heels, and glamour hair, sitting atop a tractor, her legs crossed, her eyes squinted and looking off to the side. Rema in a burgundy graduation gown, her face blanched by a flash, with a wreath of baby’s breath on her hair. Rema in a rocking chair with a speckled greyhound crowded onto her lap.

  Only: those photos seemed photos of other Remas. And I suppose, in a certain very straightforward sense—regardless of certain other possibilities—that was inarguably and precisely true: I didn’t know those younger versions of her. But I was unsettled and didn’t know what to do with that unsettlement, didn’t know if it was an ordinary everyday kind of unsettlement, or the paradox that is simply the most visible part of a profound error in an entire worldview.

  Anyway: there were no wedding photos of Rema.

  And no men. No men in any of the photos.

  “Only once, you said,” I said to Magda. “Only once you met her husband?” I asked her, trying to behave casually, as if her gallery of Remas didn’t resemble a mausoleum, as if my questions were just ones of mildest curiosity.

  “So long ago. He looked like the kind of American who would get fat. Did he get fat? I could see it in his jaw.”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” I said, hoping she wasn’t somehow actually talking about me. Then: “I would like to let a room from you,” I blurted out.

  She tightened the low ponytail that held back her hair. A scent of citrus escaped. “I usually charge two hundred seventy pesos a week,” she said, blushing terribly. “Though I’ll take you as a guest, of course—”

  “No, of course not,” I interrupted.

  We both felt (maybe I’m projecting) more awkward, more space-occupying than before.

  Shortly thereafter that awkward money moment resurfaced, transformed, when in asking about the best way to get to the airport I mentioned to Magda the loss of my luggage, and she said So you have none of your objects? to which I shrugged nonspecifically. Maybe I felt bereft though; maybe it showed on my face; but I really wasn’t—not then at least—thinking about that other husband, or even the night nurse, or even Rema. I was just thinking of my suitcase, which actually is Rema’s and which is pale blue. Magda put her hand on my back, which is such a gentle and comforting way to be touched; it’s too easy to get into a vein of living where that no longer ever happens, where no one touches you in that particular kind way, which produces a very particular feeling, not precisely reproduced by anything else, except maybe by that hug machine that autistic woman designed in order to calm down cows on their way to slaughter. Magda brought me a handkerchief. She stood quietly next to me a moment, or maybe a few moments. Then, with her arm on mine, she insisted on lending me some clothes; she said she had some very nice men’s clothing, which she felt confident would not be too far off from my size.

  “No really, I’m entirely fine,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  I again declined the clothes.

  “It’s hot outside,” she said. “And you’re dressed for winter. At least for you to have a change for tonight. And for tomorrow morning.”

  So I consented to her offer. She showed me a mostly bare closet. The closet door rolled on rusty wheels. Inside: clothing hung on metal hangers, covered in plastic like from the dry cleaners. Thin pale button-up shirts with pearline snaps. Tailored pants pinned to themselves in grip around a cardboard rod. A tiny dresser of undershirts, socks, a shoehorn, a glasses’ case. Only after a very late dinner that night did I wonder why Magda had men’s clothing at all. And whose clothing it might be. And again who Rema’s other “husband” was or had been. And what that might have to do with her disappearance, or her double, or, for that matter, with me. And I admit, I wasn’t quite sure in which direction my investigation was or should have been proceeding. And I was surprised, unpleasantly, at how well the clothing fit me, even the pants.

  I slept in that other man’s shirt.

  21. One mystery resolving

  I must confess that the insignificant price of letting a room from Magda relieved me; nevertheless, perseveration over the price of my last-minute, open-return airline ticket disturbed my sleep; and yet when I would succeed in tripping my thoughts off of perseverations on my profligacy, I would then proceed to ruminate over my miserliness, worrying that, in agreeing to such a cheap rate, I was taking advantage of my wife’s mother. Thus I’d be set in pursuit of relief from what had, initially, been relieving me. That’s why, reading the paper the next morning, over the coffee and medialunas that Magda offered me, I somewhat surreptitiously surveyed the classifieds section so that I could get a sense of whether I was paying a reasonable rent—a difficult task because I couldn’t decipher the significance of the abbreviations and the addresses.

  Not far from the classifieds, in those back pages of the tabloid, I came across ’70s-looking portrait photos (long hair, slender faces, tinted glasses, loud print shirts) set off in boxes like yearbook advertisements. Alongside the photos were names and the day’s date, but of a different year: 1977, two from 1979, 1981. Then phrases like: Your struggle continues to inspire us. We carry you in our hearts.

  The feel of those photos, the mood of them, brought to mind the Gal-Chen family photo. So that was what I recognized first, that very particular familiarity. It took me a few moments more—synapses having to wend a very circuitous path—for me to realize that these were not just late ’70s nostalgia photos; these were almost certainly memorials to Argentina’s disappeared, published on the anniversaries of disappearance.

  Let me confess that—what with its being over twenty years since the end of the “dirty war” (a term that strikes me as a too-catchy euphemism for mass murder, “war” misleadingly implying that the paranoid fantasies of the junta were true, but this seems an issue for another time)—I hadn’t imagined that the wounds would still be quite so obviously alive, so manifest. I can see now that I should not have been surprised—what with my experiences, professional ones I mean, I especially should not have been surprised. People naturally perseverate on their personal tragedies, even though such perseveration doesn’t really serve anyone, neither the living nor the dead. I mean, there’s research on these things. It’s simply not a practical use of time to think constantly of the dead. I’m not heartless, and I do regret that I must sound that way, and I understand how resilience is in its way a demonic kind of strength, a strength not unrelated to a capacity for indifference, a strength that is discomfiting evidence against the existence of true, eternal love. But is it better for the living to burn themselves in others’ funeral pyres? As I wrote, once, “Mourning should be mortal.” And, well, I think it’s worth considering why memorial writing is so awful, why it so entirely fails to communicate the feeling of loss. I at least feel that it fails. Those vague earnest words all seem so demeaning, so shameful, like strangers hearing the sound of you going to the bathroom.

  I felt nauseous reading those memorials, almost all of them accompanied by those hazy now kitsch photos that seemed like material downtown kids iron onto T-shirts. Why nauseous instead of, say, sad? some analyst sap might ask me, and yes of course sad I suppo
se, but that’s a separate question. I felt sick, I felt an incipient migraine, and that is the main thing I’m trying to say. That, and maybe society should more seriously consider the coping mechanism of not talking about loss, at least not publicly; a highly superior coping mechanism, I would argue, is to cathart over the sufferings of fictional creations. I realize that in these views I am deeply heretical within my field, but considering the company that makes up my field, I feel no shame in distinguishing myself.

  I hear other voices, maybe some of them my own, pointing out the Orwellian nature of Silence Is Health. But I respond with: well, let’s not aphorize. Maybe politically, yes, nations should remember, the world should remember. But the individual sufferers should not have to. Let the sufferers run. They have a good chance of dying before any grief catches up to them. Myself for example: if Rema had, say, died rather than just disappeared, well, I wouldn’t be turning over in my head the problem of such unresolvable pain. Mysteries that can’t be solved should be passed over in silence, or something like that. If Rema had died I would just not think about her at all—or at least that’s the advice I would give myself. What I face now, Rema’s absence, borders on the unfathomable, but it’s not actually unfathomable, not actually without hope of solution, and that is why I allow myself to think about it, because there’s hope.

  So: I was sitting across from Magda, dressed in a pointy-collared pale green button-up ’70s shirt she had lent me, reading that newspaper, with its classified ads and memorials. I ate two, then three medialunas and drank too quickly, and then had to suppress burps. Just as I was about to ask Magda about the memorials, about whether they were “normal,” or commonly seen, I noticed she was fixated on the cuff of the shirt that I had on, and this somehow made me realize that I didn’t want to be the kind of person interested in asking the kind of question I was about to ask. I had other, more personally pressing, questions that I wasn’t asking.