“You’re calling about the dog?” a trembly, almost theremin-y voice swelled.
“Yes,” I said quite surprised, “I think I am.”
“But the job is in Patagonia, not Buenos Aires. In El Calafate, right on the Moreno Glacier. You know that, yes? I think it wasn’t clear on the posting.”
“Excuse me?”
“El Calafate,” she repeated with warbling irritation. “Patagonia.”
“That’s where the dog is?” I asked.
“Listen. Calling four times in a row doesn’t help. We have your phone number—”
“But I’m not at my home phone anymore—”
“But like I was trying to explain, if you’re willing to be based in Patagonia, then there’s a real chance—”
“Is this related to the offer of fellowship—?”
“Listen,” she said, the pitch of her voice dropping, “the truth is—what the truth is—well the truth is that I just don’t know. And everyone’s been calling with questions. The person before you asked me how we knew that information could be retrieved from black holes. Was that a joke? Why ask me? Was he mocking me? This is not my regular post; this is just a temporary position for me and I’m feeling really overwhelmed—” she said, her voice flaking.
“I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said, with genuine emotion, because I was sincerely moved by this stranger’s circumstances, even from the little I knew of them, just from the timbre of and tremble in her voice. “Really. I am really sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, obviously crying—lately everyone crying to me—and even laughing a little bit as well at the same time. “How ridiculous,” she said. “I don’t know why I can’t just keep my selves together,” she said.
“It’s all right,” I said then. “It’s okay to cry,” I said. And the strange thing was that, not having actually to see this woman, not having actually to feel responsible for her distress, I really did feel it was more than okay to cry. In person, to be honest, I generally find weeping people repulsive. What can I do? I don’t have other antisocial personality disorder traits. I went on, “Crying can be like squeezing the pus out of a gluteal abscess. I mean, listen, some wounds just grow larger and more infected when you expel them, but with others that may be the only option. It’s a risk. You just don’t want to get obsessed with the wound; you don’t want to be looking for pus every day, poking and prodding, and making an ugly mess of your skin … but shedding a few tears over the phone to a stranger … well, maybe that’s just right.”
She was giggling during my little improvised analogy. “You’ve been really sweet,” she said. She sounded very attractive. “I already feel a little better. You’re funny,” she added.
Then there was a silence. Was I supposed to cry too? Then she broke into the silence, as if with the sudden opening of a faucet, and said: “Listen, I think we’re done with this call. Did you say you had a different contact number now? Let me just get that from you and when the regular person returns, the real person, they’ll get back to you.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m Lola.”
I gave Lola my number.
She went on, “I really think there’s not that many people able to go to Patagonia on such short notice. Apparently the person who was originally supposed to take the position dropped out at the last minute, so it’s a bit of a scramble. So I think you have a real chance of getting the job. But listen, I’d really suggest that you don’t keep calling. Some of the staff here are really petty and irritable, and that’ll get used against you; I’ve even seen them purposely put CVs in the wrong pile, just to get them lost—well, listen, bye sweets,” she said finally.
I thanked her for her advice and hung up in a haze of inexplicable happiness and confusion.
Progress may not lie, I told myself, where I might think it would lie. And this made me think of swapping beds, of Baudelaire’s point about life being a hospital in which every patient is possessed of the desire to change beds. Not that I was actually ill, or swapping women, or projecting feelings from one space to another, or harboring unrealizable desires—just that the conversation with Lola had unsettled me. Our phone call seemed like the most substantial advance I’d had yet toward the goal of finding Rema. The waitress, the simulacrum on the phone, even Rema’s mother—they gave the feel of closeness, but this was clearly much more promising.
27. Dog man
I went for a walk, in order to think, to pass the time, to not be alone, to not notice that Magda was still not home; even Killer was not at home. I dodged dog deposits on the sidewalk, was barked at ferociously by a rottweiler behind bars, was approached with love and trust by two skinny beaglish mixes. Then, not having noticed that I’d returned to right across the street from Magda’s home, I saw: congregated, more than a dozen large dogs, all on leashes, connected to an unsettlingly pacific man who was leaning against a wall, smoking.
The dogs: relatively large, vibrant, healthy-looking. None like the miniature greyhound that the double had toted home.
But packs of dogs make me—this truly is entirely normal—very nervous. My feet stopped advancing.
The dog man nodded at me.
I echo nodded.
Then he called across to me, “The sin is yours, huh?”
I did not answer or nod but only looked at him amidst his pack of curs. I hadn’t been flirting with Lola. Or the waitress.
“La señora,” he said, now louder, and emphasizing the second syllable of señora, “no está?”
Magda’s dog, the greyhound Killer: I spotted her among the mob.
Would you believe that I then looked up and immediately saw Sirius, the Dog Star, which appears to be one star but is in fact actually two, or possibly even three?
Then a woman’s voice—it proved to be Magda’s—on the other side of the street, nearing the beasts. She kissed the dog man on each cheek, then beckoned me over, as if not to a dangerous den, so what could I—if I was to maintain decorum—do except cross the street and join the humans and animals?
“I present you my friend,” Magda said in English, pronouncing “present” so that it meant gift, and then giggling.
I bravely extended my hand out over the dogs, toward the dog man, who instead of taking my hand grabbed hold of the back of my neck and pulled me forward, and I nearly fell, save for his having hold of me like a wolf’s grip on its cub. I felt his plump towelly lips press against my cheek. I was in an awkward tilt position—suspended out over that pack of dogs that I imagined looking up at me—and upon my return from the greeting I again almost fell over.
Which returned me mentally to: why so many dogs in my life all of the sudden?
“Dogs are not your dear friends,” the man said to me.
“No, I love dogs,” I said. “I really love them. Some of them. The gentle ones.”
Magda and the dog man laughed. I thought of the vein on the night nurse’s forehead. Amidst the unpleasant moment, I realized that I’d never had to deal with living in a community full of men who might possibly in the past have kissed Rema. At least, I didn’t think that back home I had to be concerned, since Rema had been in the country only a number of months when I met her, since I’d never seen her, during all those months of just looking at her, with anyone else. Though I had at one time wondered if she was trying to avoid someone that first night when she couldn’t decide where we’d have pizza.
I don’t know why I thought she might have kissed, or loved, this oversized man with the dogs. He was hairy handed, much more so than me. When he spoke something more to me, in Spanish, I wasn’t sure what he said, and so in response I just smiled. I guess one might say he was ruggedly handsome.
“Very, very nice to meet you,” I said, then went inside the house. Alone there, I reexamined the gallery of Rema photos, and indeed, as I reconfirmed, Rema was standing next to a man in absolutely none of them. But there was a photo of Magda with a man. Just one, a wedding photo. Maybe this was Rema�
��s father; maybe not. I really had no idea.
Very late that evening, I came across Magda in the living room. She was wearing a full-length, high-necked Victorian nightgown that was somehow immodest in its extreme modesty. “He’s also an analyst,” she said to me as I held my gaze down at the delicate eyelet of her hem. “He walks dogs only because nobody can pay for analysis anymore. He lets his patients pay just symbolically.”
Which sounded dirty. And why could so many people pay to have their dogs walked while so few could pay for analysis? The long nightgown, the high incidence of analysts, the apparent manlessness of Magda’s life—I found it all rather suspicious. And yet I could not cast out the ludicro-banal hypothesis that that man—whatever his name and economic status were—was an earlier object of attraction for Rema and that I might be—for her—a mere reverberance of him. Why? Just because we were both kind of hairy?
This is irrelevant to your investigation, one parliament member of me said to another.
I raised my gaze to Magda’s still eyelinered eyes. “How long have you known that man who walks the dogs?”
“The analyst?” she said. “Since forever. His practice is unusual,” and I was again suddenly anxious that she was going to talk about sex. “He works mostly with relatives of the disappeared. You should understand that he’s very, very respected. He only walks the dogs now in order to be able to continue seeing his patients. And because he loves dogs. He really does,” she added, as if to emphasize his moral superiority over me.
“Yes? Does he especially like—” but I didn’t know the Spanish word for greyhound. Maybe it was just “greyhound.” “Well, is there a special kind of dog that he loves especially?”
“Is there a kind of dog that you love especially?” she answered, stretching out her hands, catpaw-like, on the surface of her gown, over what I deduced was her midthigh.
But I really hate mirroring; I especially abhor the notion that whatever I say is secretly about me. So I didn’t answer her, pawing there at her gown.
Then Magda said, “I should have thought—he also knows the American. I should have thought of that connection, that you know someone in common. Do you want anything? I’m going to bed now.”
She believed I didn’t love dogs, but her dog came and slept in the bed with me that night.
28. What would Tzvi Gal-Chen do?
I really do like gentle dogs. And when I petted the velvety crown of Killer’s head the next morning, when I lifted one of her silken ears and held it like fine cloth between my fingers, she then lifted her gaze to me, which re-reminded me why I suspect people love dogs so passionately, for that loyal devotion of theirs that manages to be simultaneously easy and profound. Or at least their love appears to be like that even if only because I so desperately want to believe in such a love.
My pants were draped over a chair near the bed; the little nugget of paper upon which I’d written my notes had fallen to the floor. It looked like ordinary trash. I felt ashamed about a certain sort of slapdashness converging upon my mission. I put on the foreign pants. I picked up my crumpled note. I sat myself with proper posture at the desk. Killer arranged herself in a curl near my feet. And I uncrumpled:
Unnamed dog?
Anatole?
Royal Academy?
Rema’s husband?
Tzvi Gal-Chen?
Now there were Lola and the dog man to consider as well. There might be duplicates, though: the dog man might be Anatole, Lola might be Tzvi Gal-Chen. And maybe Tzvi, Lola, and the Royal Academy should all be one category. Or Tzvi and Lola just subcategories of the Royal Academy. And what of Harvey?
But this “system,” in terms of action, was getting me nowhere. I felt acutely that I didn’t even have, like, say, Harrison Ford in Frantic, a suitcase to rummage through. My life—so much less compelling, so much less organized, than even a movie. But I knew that was a uselessly vain thought, utterly beside the point, an influence of grogginess, and I did have this lead with Lola at the Academy, surely that would turn up something, sometime, and yet, here I was, indefinitely doing nothing in pursuit of Rema. That’s when I heard in my mind—and I knew it was just in my mind—a Rema voice giggle-accuse-whisper: What would Tzvi Gal-Chen do?
I resolved to look again more closely at Tzvi’s research paper, “A Theory for the Retrievals,” a work that claimed to be retrieving “thermodynamic variables from within deep convective clouds,” but that I suspected—or hoped—might be about quite a bit more. As I combed through the pages a small Rema memory came to me: I had once taken her to a performance of Hamlet, but the antique English of it had meant that she’d hardly followed a word, so it was less than a spectacular evening, and I’d apologized to her for not having thought of how the language would be difficult, but said that maybe it was kind of appropriate to the play, since the play was about, I said, what happens when you grossly overestimate what thinking can accomplish, and she’d said, no, really the play’s about the long influence of dead fathers, that’s how I like to think about it, she said. It just came to me, our little trades, her small indignancies, and I missed her so acutely. Regardless, Tzvi’s paper, despite the difficulty of the language, did indeed reveal to me what was quite compellingly a reference to my situation with Rema. It argued for the validity of introducing into atmospheric models two types of errors: white noise, which referred to errors “on all resolvable scales,” and blue noise, which referred exclusively to “errors on the smallest resolvable scales.” These errors, he argued, enhanced “the realism of retrieved fields.”
Did Tzvi know all about those “errors on the smallest resolvable scales” that characterized the doppelganger? Did he know how this related to retrieval? Certainly he knew about how Crays working in tandem could solve problems of increasing magnitude. So arguably it was as if I was a Cray, and he was a Cray, and … well why, I thought, shouldn’t I turn to Tzvi for help?
That image from the first Gal-Chen paper I’d seen, back in the library: in addition to reminding me of Rema, it also looked to me like a lonely man, in an alien landscape, glancing back over his shoulder as if to ask something of someone whom he was not sure was there.
“Maybe I will write to Tzvi,” I said to gentle Killer, who did not seem to disapprove. “Maybe I need to make progress on the mesoscale, that is, the human scale.” And so, sitting there in my mother-in-law’s room, a mother-in-law I hardly knew and who hardly knew me (and who had been given the wrong clues for getting to know me), I turned my BlackBerry on, switched it to silent, and tried to be professional, direct, and sincerely warm at once. After thanking Tzvi for his correspondence with Harvey, I wrote to him about: the erroneous Rema, wanting to retrieve my own Rema, the inexplicable intrusion of dogs into my life, my most recent contact with the Royal Academy of Meteorology. Then I simply asked, making reference to his work that had wisely directed me to Buenos Aires in the first place, if he had any suggestions for how I might progress in my attempts at retrieval.
29. A mysterious misrepresentation
Dear Leo Liebenstein, MD:
I’m sorry. I suspect this is kind of my fault. I don’t actually know Harvey. There’s been some confusion. I really am sorry. And I’m sorry to hear about your wife. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about her. Or her whereabouts. Again I’m sorry. I regret any confusion I’ve caused. For a few reasons none of which you should take personally I don’t think I’ll write to you about this again.
This reply arrived almost immediately.
I did think, for a moment, that maybe Tzvi had taken Rema. That, though, was just indignation speaking.
A better explanation for the cold reply: maybe Tzvi, like me, thought he had to work all alone because he didn’t know if he could trust in me—after all, when he first received that note from me I was nothing to him but an e-mail address, and anyone can be behind an e-mail address, regardless of who appears to be behind it. (Years after my mother died, I would still receive mail addressed to her and occasionally I woul
d answer her mail; once I went and picked up her glasses prescription.) So I can understand Tzvi’s mysterious misrepresentation of himself and his knowledge—he couldn’t be sure with whom he was communicating. And he knew what I didn’t then know, which was that his own position was ontologically dubious. So he was experiencing, in a sense, an Initial Value Problem in response to having received a communication from me; he didn’t know whether I was a parameter he might safely rely on, in order to accurately infer forward to a forecast of the truth, to reliable predictions of possible futures. Perhaps, all alone as he was then, as he maintained himself, working in isolation for the Royal Academy, he may have worried that he was, proverbially, “going mad.”
I was alone too. If only Killer—very little white shows in dog eyes, so it’s more difficult to tell where they’re looking—could have offered me a second opinion, a second interpretation of the situation. Yes, retrospectively I can certainly understand Tzvi’s retreat from intimacy as a manifestation of his anxiety, but in the chill of the moment I reacted less pacifically. Feeling that I had been condescended to, I responded immediately with:
Dr. Gal-Chen:
I was just kidding. Wrongly believed you understood. Sorry! Ha-ha. Again sorry! I thought you might enjoy this Adorno quote: “The unreality of children’s games gives notice that reality has not yet become real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life.”
—Leo
So a rather petty and passive-aggressively pretentious move on my part, arguably brought on by the underclass feeling evoked by my own temporary dishevelment and isolation. Or maybe by examining too closely the worn nap of the velvet upholstering of Magda’s desk chair in which I sat. (Her wardrobe so immaculate and yet her furniture so Miss Havisham.) To my credit, after sending that note I then immediately turned off my BlackBerry in order to protect myself from further impulsive communication.
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 11
