Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  I thought about New York 1 news.

  I sent the inquiry.

  Then I reclined, alone, on that velvety sofa.

  Where was the dog sleeping? I wondered.

  Unwillingly I pictured the simulacrum’s sleeping position, her foot over an edge.

  The screen on my BlackBerry self-dimmed, and the whole room went inky-black.

  37. In the ghost’s machine

  Then blue suffused the room again.

  “Windchill research got its beginnings in the US military during WWII,” began Tzvi’s response, which arrived so quickly that it was as if he’d been waiting there for me to contact him all that time, like a spurned lover waiting for any sign of reconciliation. “But the National Weather Service didn’t share the information with the public until the 1970s.” He included a link to a Web page that offered a brief explanatory treatise about the history of windchill research. “Nice that you’re interested,” he wrote. He made no reference to his rude earlier missive. He even signed off his note “Love, Tzvi.”

  What was he—or she? I wondered during the one ludicrous moment I again thought I might be communicating with Rema, who had, after all, posed as Tzvi Gal-Chen many times—inviting me to deduce? And why use that word “love”? Why bring up war? And the 1970s? And why the secrecy around windchill research? How was I meant to understand what he had said? How was I meant to respond?

  I began searching the Internet on my handheld in order to do something I had long avoided doing, avoided perhaps because part of me had always felt that I was in some way wronging this stranger whose identity I had co-opted. I sought to learn some biographical, geographical, orthographical, political, diacritical, pathological, and/or other details about the real Tzvi Gal-Chen. Or Galchen. Or Gal Chen.

  I found Russian jugglers known as the Galchenko brothers.

  I found a Scottish rock band, named Galchen, reviewed on a Web page devoted to “Great bands with absolutely terrible names.”

  I found a blogger criticizing the grammar of Tzvi’s use of the phrase “moving frame of references.”

  I found two photos—one in profile, one head-on, like mug shots—of a Tzvi-like man in plaid pants, standing on a balcony, holding a baby of indeterminate gender.

  I found a geologic formation called the GalChen fach.

  And I learned, from a purple Finnish Web page that began tinnily blasting a Mendelssohn dirge, that Tzvi Gal-Chen—most noted for his mesoscale work on downbursts and for his advances in single-Doppler radar research—had died of a sudden heart attack in October of 1994, at the relatively young age of fifty-three.

  Then I noticed that next to Tzvi’s name in that roster of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, there was a pale gray asterisk.

  I reloaded and reread and reconsidered the pages.

  38. Very normal conversation

  If one wishes to be a true scientist—an explorer not in search of what one desires to be true but rather in search of whatever truth there is—then one must be willing to accept, to engage, even to pursue further the most unwelcome and confounding data. One must be willing to make discoveries that shatter one’s most deeply held beliefs. Maybe it turns out that Earth is not the center of the universe. Or that monkeys are our relatives. Maybe we discover that a man is not an expert on himself, or maybe it turns out that we’ve been speaking to the dead.

  A true scientist knows to explore, not dismiss, these uninvited discoveries.

  So I wrote back to Tzvi, saying that I had recently received the impression that he was not alive.

  “Oh. Yes. That is true, in most senses,” he replied without subject heading.

  I felt a breeze then, just very locally, a microclimate, like what happens in a movie when a ghost floats by. “Then why, or rather how, or rather from where are you writing to me? And to Harvey too?”

  Tzvi wrote back: “If you’ll remember, I didn’t initiate contact. All I did was respond. I guess it was flattering when Harvey called me ‘the mesoscale hero of the millennium.’ So maybe I answered just out of curiosity. Or loneliness. But really I think it simply seemed like the proper thing to do. He wrote, and so I replied, as he obviously wanted me to.”

  Pressing Tzvi on the issue of his apparent death—that didn’t seem like the proper thing to do. But those two photos, in mug-shot form … and all the concordances … the retrievals work… so I found myself typing from my heart: “Is it as if in some worlds you’re alive, and in some worlds you’re not? Is that what your retrievals work really is: not between reality and models, but between actual worlds?”

  “How,” he responded, “did you and Harvey come to be interested in my work in the first place?”

  “If you don’t already know, I promise to tell you one day. However, I suspect you do know. But can you tell me—is it that you’re not really dead? Are you just, for some reason, pretending?”

  “I would say more your earlier guess. Do I sound dead to you? I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture—this was years ago, before I died, though just right before—and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante’s dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don’t know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the present, to be suspended in time. She seemed to feel this really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do. When Dante the pilgrim asks, Who are you? the souls are able to offer these very succinct, precise descriptions, without provisos. I’m the one who was seized by love. Or, I am the one who quenched the doubt in Caesar. Everything very settled, you know?”

  When is talking about literature not an evasion of the real question at hand? Although a nice-enough evasion. Into an honest and information-bearing kind of distortion. Was I supposed to ask Tzvi, as a kind of extended shibboleth that could separate the living from the dead, who he was? Was that what he was indirectly trying to ask me to do? But why should I care whether he was alive or dead if my main issue was finding Rema? And wasn’t talking about literature also as straightforward an invitation to interpret his research as he could offer? Because I—I should admit—found my thoughts retreating to literature too. Retreating from what I’m not sure. I thought of the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem I’d once been made to memorize, in which the Eliot character chances upon the ghost of Yeats in the firebombed streets of London; upon recognizing Yeats, Eliot says they are “too strange to each other for misunderstanding.” And the Eliot character says directly to Yeats’s ghost, “The wonder that I feel is easy, Yet ease is the cause of wonder. Therefore speak: / I may not comprehend, may not remember.” Perhaps the simplest interpretation of this starchy turn of my thoughts would be that I thought of Tzvi as of a dead master? One with whom I felt strangely at ease? Or that I should just ask Tzvi to speak and nothing more? And as I sat in that darkness, a cluster of competing hypotheses came to me as I thought how to proceed:

  maybe Tzvi wasn’t dead at all (or, implausibly, I was)

  or maybe this was some mechanical residue of Tzvi, some part of himself translated into software of some kind

  or maybe he was dead inasmuch as I could understand the situation, but his death was a matter of perspective, of frames of reference, or a frame of references

  or maybe Tzvi was somehow Rema, since Rema had for so long pretended to be Tzvi

  And none of these hypotheses dissuaded me from the belief that Tzvi could help me in my search, and so I resolved to ask him about Rema directly.

  39. Conversation interrupted

  But something clouded over my handheld electronic’s moonlight glow, and I turned to see what, and although my pupils’ contraction near blinded me, I made out the silhouette of the simulacrum. Her blotting out of screen glow made me think about the powder on sticks of chewing gum, then the powder
in urns, and then gunpowder, and then the Chinese, and then fireworks, and the feeling was of my mind tripping along an infinitely winding and meaningless path.

  “I had a nightmare,” she said, her voice drawing my mind back to a starting point, “that I was in bed, and I reached my arm out to you, and you weren’t there. And then I woke up and it was true.” She was leaning over me; I think she was trying to read from my screen. But Tzvi Gal-Chen was for me, not her. Even if he was her, he wasn’t this her. Or really just: I had a lot to think over.

  I turned the screen off.

  We were left in the dark, amidst all that velvet, and unaware of the location of the dog.

  “Are you writing,” I heard her say, “or are you reading? Or, what are you doing? What are you doing awake? Now? Out here?”

  Her voice in the dark, so familiar—it was almost as if Rema was actually there with me, in the absence of luminosity, and maybe she really was there, paying me a visitation. Maybe it was, very briefly, Rema. But like a faithless Orpheus I turned the light—my BlackBerry screen, that is—back on again, to verify. And despite the familiar hip, despite the undershirt, it wasn’t Rema.

  “Do you not miss sleeping with me?” she breathed into the blue glow. “It is weird to me. I am no longer even an object of your desire?”

  The cheapest of noir moves. Against my will, my ears filled with heat. As if she were some KGB blonde, distracting me while a spy, an agent, an assassin, stealthed out of a closet, a window, a gate. Or while my contact, my rescuer—quite possibly Tzvi—faded away. “Do you feel like there are other people in this house?” I heard myself whispering as I thought about what Tzvi might or might not know, about what important message might lie hidden in his research papers, translated into science, awaiting interpretation. “Or ghosts in this house?”

  I believe she frowned at me.

  “But of course you are very pretty,” I said as a kind of consolation for what she’d earlier said. “But isn’t it so strange that I had never met my Rema’s mother before? That she didn’t even seem to know I existed? Doesn’t knowing—or not knowing—something about Rema at her initial value—about who she once was—doesn’t that mean that all my predictions about what she’s doing and what she will do and what she might do and what she absolutely will do and what she absolutely will never ever do—doesn’t it seem like my predictions will inevitably be shot through with enormous errors? On account of the Initial Value Problem? I mean, we can’t predict tomorrow’s weather accurately if we have the wrong ideas about what the weather actually is right now. That’s what Tzvi Gal-Chen says. I mean, it’s almost as if I’ve married a stranger, if I think about it that way. Like if we think that it’s one temperature just because it feels that way but actually it’s really some other—”

  Something like that I was saying, just saying whatever I thought the impostress might have expected me to say, nothing real, just filling up some space as if with a distracting puff of colored smoke, so that I could go back to messaging with Tzvi, but then the simulacrum moved her warm front of a body closer to me, whispering, further occluding the small amount of light between us. “Please,” she said. “When I see you asleep I feel like we are the two happiest people in the world. I’m so happy when we’re asleep together. Let’s just sleep and see what comes to mind when we wake up tomorrow morning.” She wiped tears from her eyes. The tears had arrived so slowly.

  “Do you love me very much tonight?” I found myself saying.

  “Why are you asking me this old, old question?” she sniffed. “Of course I love you. Even when I don’t want to.”

  By then my ears felt more than hot, they felt painfully engorged. “Let’s find the dog,” I said. “Let’s bring the dog to bed.”

  “No dog. I think she is sleeping with my mother. Just come to bed.”

  My screen, half Tzvi-corresponded, fell darkly asleep again; I tapped it to bring it back to life. “Please let’s bring the dog,” I almost begged, seeing again an image not of the simulacrum in front of me, but of the simulacrum as she had been earlier, entangled in bed with me.

  “You’ll stay with me tomorrow?” she pleaded.

  It would be ridiculously unwise of me, I conceded to myself, to try to continue my conversation with Tzvi under the simulacrum’s surveillance. “I’ll stay with you tomorrow,” I said, “if you let the dog sleep with us tonight.”

  And we eventually reached just such an accord. She, Killer, slept intercalated between us. She breathed hotly on my thigh.

  40. The real point in space

  But don’t be distracted by my distress, by the simulacrum’s distress, or by the dog’s eventual sleeping position. The real point is that Tzvi Gal-Chen:

  who had first been (to me) just an oddly appealing name

  who had then become (for Rema and me) the unknowing centerpiece of the successful management of a delusional patient

  who furthermore (for Rema and me) rapidly developed into a relationship touchstone

  whom I’d regularly imagined taking leftovers from our refrigerator

  whose research proved to be my first substantial clue regarding Rema’s disappearance

  who then later materialized as Harvey’s correspondent

  but who, when I sought him out myself, had tersely retreated

  and who apparently no longer even numbered among the living

  :yes perhaps, from certain perspectives, the real point of this entire project is that Tzvi Gal-Chen, in my proverbially darkest hour, he had, in his fashion, returned to me.

  Part II

  1. A Method for Calculating Temperature, Pressure and Vertical Velocities from Doppler Radar Observations

  Before proceeding to a description of the more metaphysically extravagant discoveries I made in Patagonia, I’d like to openly engage my own worries, my own oscillating concern, for my, to put it in colloquial speech, sanity. Since naturally, from the beginning of this unwanted adventure of mine, I had borne such an anxiety. I had thought through continually, and rather extensively, the likelihood that I could attribute my perceptions to illness, to psychosis even. But over time I came to the fairly firm—and immensely dispiriting—conclusion that I could not. My thinking ran thusly:

  Our vision involves—and one can produce myriad proofs of this—an interpretive leap. Consider the visual phenomenon of “completion” (that is what Tzvi’s work does; it completes incomplete single-Doppler radar images), which sometimes leads to what is called “completion error” (which is what Tzvi’s work attempts to avoid). I offer the following image from an old sign to illustrate the concept of completion and completion error. The sign reads:

  Music lovers tend to see:

  While others tend to see:

  The basic point—which can also be illustrated by considering the phenomenon of the blind spot—is that with any incomplete perception—and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete—the observer “fills in” by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire’s other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see. By what, in other words, already exists in our mind, what we already have available on file, however dusty the folder.

  For example, when a person dies and we then repeatedly mistake strangers for that now-gone person, we are experiencing “completion error.” We catch a few details of some far-off figure—a broad forehead, a certain slouch, some characteristic stubble—and our aforementioned wants, fears, and expectations fill in the gaps to make a familiar whole, a whole that is a decent but flawed interpretive leap based on the fragments. And it generally doesn’t matter that this reconstituted “whole” is incorrect. We discover our errors soon enough, as the stranger draws nearer, becoming who he actually is rather than who we thought he might be. (How strange but reassuring that when the impostress entered my home that first time, that even when I saw her from a distance—there at the door, with that wet hair
, and that pale blue bag, and that russet puppy—even far away like that, when I could have easily, and even from fatigue, filled in all the missing details appropriately—even then I knew she wasn’t Rema.)

  But we can do more than recognize our errors of interpretation; we can examine those errors as clues to the contents of—the preoccupations and desires of—our own minds.

  We can similarly consider the “errors” of a suspected psychosis, the discrepancies between the presumably psychotic vision of reality and a consensus view of same. Such an examination could (occasionally, conceivably) reveal something other than prismatized fragments (taste of powdered milk + old woman with cataracts + holes in a navy sweater + fresh pretzels = navy poisons milk that the old pretzel factory workers drink down blindly) of the presumed psychotic’s mind. Because although psychosis is often popularly conceived of as an infection or a kind of foreign body, a psychosis is in fact as personal, as eccentric, as interpretable as a dream. Its content comes straight from the mind of its victim, even as its form may be an aberration. (Consider the fact that over the past two hundred years the incidence of religious psychoses has significantly declined, while that of erotic ones has risen. Surely it is not the mental illnesses that have changed but rather the societies of people affected by them.) And so although we can call the process of transforming reality into an alternate reality “madness,” we should not forget that the landscape of that alternate reality, all the molecules that make it up, come from the banalities of the life of the madman himself. Therefore each psychotic experience is singular, a fingerprint.