Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  “They took Anatole,” Magda said. “Rema was very young.”

  10. Primate perturbations

  I ate a delicious corn soup that night. Magda’s meal looked tasty as well—a whole fish, head on, grilled—but I did not ask for a bite of it and she did not offer. My mashed potatoes were flavored with garlic and I imagine hers were too, though she did not eat hers while I did eat mine. (Why wasn’t she hungry?) One might be inclined to lend too much importance to Magda’s statements about Anatole. While such statements might be, of course, inherently important, they were not particularly important in my matter, the matter of locating Rema. After all, out of any assembled body of knowledge, there are many possible data points one might dwell on. That is to say, a piece of information may be important in some very local sense, but what does it have to do with, as they say, the price of tea in China? What with the recent discussion of Initial Value Problems, and of the Dopplerganger effect, surely some busybody will feel inclined to make cheap metaphors, or butterfly metaphors, but such metaphors would rely entirely on associations of only apparent depth. Really the details about Anatole were hardly relevant at all to my investigations, and there was no reason to believe they rippled out to increasingly dramatic effect. Never mind that the simulacrum later insisted that Magda was lying to me, that Anatole was not taken at all, that he simply left. Who knows? The point remains the same: people lose parents all the time, and in all sorts of ways, and if I perhaps did not know the very particulars of what had happened with Rema’s father, it’s not as if I didn’t understand Rema herself, understand her entirely, see within her the exact contours of that disappearance even if I didn’t know it was a loss I was looking at. What this—Magda’s statement—was, was not a mésalliance like Rema’s reaction to the threatening letter on mourning, but a misalliance of a different sort, and I was resolved not to let it derail my search, which it could easily have done if poorly interpreted. I was looking for clues that would help me find Rema, and then I stumbled across something resembling the truth about Anatole, which I had briefly mistaken for a truth about the other husband, something sizable, yes, but something I really had no interest in knowing, a stone I had continually, purposively, wisely even, left unturned. A clue, but to a different mystery. Regardless, I didn’t want to know; I am not gentle enough to know such things; perhaps nobody is.

  At some point during that meal I remember looking down at my hand, which seemed a terribly hairy paw, reached out from that delicate years-worn cloth.

  Magda said to me, “I’m sorry, I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  But I wasn’t uncomfortable. Though it’s true that I did fail to offer Magda any comfort whatsoever. Say what you will of me, but I would defend myself on the fact that (1) her grief, if there was any, was none of my business, (2) I could certainly do nothing to alter the etiology of it, (3) “comforting words” snag, like hangnails, and (4) we didn’t have a professional relationship. Also, (5) disappointment distracted me from figuring out what my duties toward Magda might be, disappointment in learning nothing that seemed likely to bring me closer to retrieving Rema. I had been counting on the Anatole clue. Even if just to help me understand how I figured in all this.

  Instead of following up on Rema’s father, I eventually reiterated my question about who was the original husband of Rema.

  Magda ate the eyeball of her fish. “Ask my daughter yourself. I am living in enough trouble already with that girl and the things that she does and does not want me to say.”

  “It was the dog walker?” I said.

  “He’s an analyst,” she said.

  “The dog walker is? Or the husband is? Or both are?”

  “Stop,” she said, closing her eyes, putting her hands to the sides of her face.

  I whispered, “Was his name Tzvi?”

  “This game is beneath you,” she said, with her ears still covered. “It is, anyway, beneath me. So if you consider me to be beneath you, which you seem to, then I believe it follows that this game is beneath you too.”

  11. I always hated musical chairs

  Harvey, amidst a mess of room service plates, asked me what I had learned.

  “I’m not sure. But I think I’m not the central butterfly. Or I’m not the central man. This Anatole, for example, I wholly misunderstood his significance. And Magda just let me go. It seems like all my assumptions were flawed.”

  He asked me if I had learned that Rema was in love with Anatole.

  I said no.

  “Does the doppelganger love Anatole?”

  “Why all this talk about love, Harvey? What’s happening to your interest in the weather?”

  “I often find that it’s love that lies at the center of things, don’t you?” he mewed sleepily. “One has to presume that the majority of the 49 Quantum Fathers once belonged to the Royal Academy, belonged until they were somehow burned by love. One of my old therapists pointed that out to me. How chance—”

  “That doesn’t sound right to me. Who was this therapist?”

  Harvey shrugged. “You’re the one who likes to talk about love to Tzvi.”

  “Not about love. About Rema maybe. About the doppelganger a little bit. But only as a kind of evidence.”

  “What about that man you told me about who you saw walking dogs? Is that who the doppelganger loves?”

  “No, of course she doesn’t love him,” I answered in a quiet, calm, not at all irritated voice. Our room, with all those dirty dishes, had acquired the cheerless look of a bachelor pad. I set myself down in an armchair. I lacked the peace of mind to think of Rema’s father. “What is sad of course is that even in this short time she has fallen in love with me. She can’t stop calling me. So what can she do with her frustrated love for me, a love perpetually unable to reach its object? Maybe she will end up lavishing attention upon that other man simply because, at least superficially, at least in terms of profession, he resembles me, the forbidden fruit.” I felt moved to attempt a love and chance lecture superior to that of his other unnamed therapist. “Maybe that’s happening right now. But he—well, he wouldn’t even really enjoy her attentions, since surely a man with his training would understand her interest in him as nothing more than simple transference, because he must know that a girl like her—I’m sorry, a woman—could never actually be attracted to him unless she was somehow unconsciously mistaking some superficial aspect of him for some earlier true love. He can be nothing more than the illusion of the recovery of that love; he can only be the ersatz love, you see; no other sensible explanation for her affection toward him would exist.” I knew I was going on, but having arrived so dispirited, I now felt compelled to speak from a position of superior knowledge. “In fact, Harvey, this is all rather analogous to how Freud ‘discovered’ transference in the first place. Do you know? He had this experience, early in his career, of this beautiful young woman emerging from hypnosis, throwing her arms around his neck, and kissing him passionately. It haunted him. He felt certain, I suppose, that she couldn’t really have been attracted to him personally, that he must have functioned as a stand-in for someone else. I mean, it’s interesting—if Freud had considered himself attractive, he might never have made his discovery, he simply would have assumed the girl found him straightforwardly alluring. Surely that’s what Jung would have thought. Although Freud takes his idea to an extreme—he seems to think that transference explains the origin of all love, that there’s always a thicket of past people between any two lovers. There I’d have to disagree. As it goes contrary to my own experiences. Freud erred in universalizing his theory. That’s the problem with calling psychoanalysis a science, because science shouldn’t rely on authority, but—”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot,” Harvey interrupted with a glaze of deafness. He had begun to stack the various dishes. That’s when I picked up on the scent in the room, one that went beyond steak and toast. I realized Harvey had been drinking. “I thought,” he said offhandedly, “maybe you’d find o
ut why your wife left you.”

  I had never said that she’d left me. Who had said that? Surely Harvey didn’t actually think Rema had left me, but rather he was trying to talk about … what? My leaving him? Why did everything have to also mean something else? I wanted to be in a simpler, vaudeville world, where the jokes had to do with ladders being too short, or someone slipping on a banana peel. “Sometimes,” I said to Harvey, “you see connections that aren’t really there.”

  “Yes, you’ve often told me that,” he said.

  “And she didn’t leave me. There’s absolutely no indication of that. She just disappeared. Or rather, was taken. I don’t know why, of all the people who could have been taken, why it was her in particular, but—that’s another reason we’re trying to retrieve her. I wish I understood better, but I don’t. And I told you that I might be out all day, I gave you warning. Listen, why are we talking about me all the time lately? You and I should talk about you. Have you called your mom?” I asked.

  Harvey sententiously set his piled dishes outside our door. “Dr. Gal-Chen wouldn’t want me to do that.”

  “Why not?” I said. “You should call her. If you don’t call her she’ll be terribly disappointed. In you and me both.”

  “I’m not a fool,” Harvey said. “I can see you’re just changing the subject.” He made his way over to the mirror, carefully fixed his hair. “I once received an MRI to rule out neurocysticercosis.” He turned back to me. “You know sometimes when Tzvi would call you to pass on orders to me I would think I could hear your wife’s voice in the background—”

  “I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking, Harvey, but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong,” I announced calmly as my ears tingled, as if vigorously generating too much wax, “and whatever your suspicions are, they’re not the right suspicions. And by the way I’m sleeping in the bed tonight, and you’re not—”

  “You think of me as useless, Dr. Leo. I can see that. That’s okay. But Dr. Gal-Chen doesn’t think like you. Soon enough you’ll understand the essential niche I fill. Until then I can weather the indignity of your indifference. Dr. Gal-Chen knows I’m not just any serviceable cog in the Royal Academy’s wheel. He knows my services are irreplaceable. Not like the object of affection of that patient of Freud’s, the one who could have been anyone.”

  As Harvey rambled on, it became vivid to me that Harvey deployed Tzvi as a kind of psychotic patch, a mending of the rent caused in his universe by the unflagging perception of his own insignificance. Seeing Harvey so unable to understand Tzvi as a real person, seeing him misunderstand Tzvi as whatever Harvey most needed him to be—a new kind of sadness blossomed in me.

  Under the spell of that glittery melancholy, I stayed up late that evening, composing a long and heartfelt note to Tzvi, in which I explained to him that though I had, naturally, been, at least once or twice, “burned by love,” this had in no way tempted me to join the 49. Even Rema, I confessed, had at times been indifferent toward me. Not that long ago, for example, she had rented a miniseries of some sort—something with servants—and I had missed watching the first episode with her, and on those grounds she had then discouraged me from watching any of the rest of the series and she would just sit in front of the TV alone at night, spooning from a bowl of cereal and at the same time telling me she wasn’t hungry for dinner, thus leaving me to eat takeout alone. (At other times nothing had made us happier than spending night after night watching rented movies and holding each other.) Or maybe it was I who had been indifferent to her. Usually we were tender to each other through moody periods, but sometimes we’d get struck by a dark mood at the same time and then we’d be lost. For example, I had recently taken to staying late at the hospital, not because I had to but simply because I’d find myself lying on my office sofa, reading every last square of newspaper and magazine. (“World Briefings” was often my favorite part, and it regularly pained me, the way it was over so quickly.) One night when I came home at 10:30 p.m. Rema asked me why I’d been occupied so late, and I told her, somewhat truthfully, that I’d been engrossed in a lengthy article about the discovery, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, of a species of Hobbit-like people, Homo floresiensis: these three-foot-tall people who lived contemporaneously with Homo sapiens, separated only by geography. The archaeologists had also found, in the same limestone cave as Homo floresiensis, the remains of a Komodo dragon, a dwarf elephant, and stone tools. “Now,” the article had noted, “that race of people is gone.” But why, Rema asked me, couldn’t you just read that here at home? And why did it take you so long? And why are you so interested in those gone people? When you called to say you’d be late, she lectured me, I assumed that you had no choice.

  Anyway, I told Tzvi about these trivial incidents only because I wanted him to feel confident that I was unshakably on the side of the Academy, that I had endured unstable climates in the past, that I could do so in the future. But the simple fact of writing all that to him produced in me a new vulnerability. Too vividly the thought crossed my mind that the 49 had perceived the actual weaknesses in my marriage, that Rema and I had been targeted because the 49 wagered that given the attenuated state of our relationship, I actually might not notice, or respond to, the swap.

  Perhaps just a phantom thought. But when, almost immediately after sending the note to Tzvi, I received an automated out-of-office reply in return, the feeling was one of devastation.

  12. I didn’t feel the way it seemed like I might feel

  Again the room phone woke me from slumber; the message was the same as the day before; the message was that I was to come down to the lobby, preferably immediately, because there was a woman who wished to speak with me.

  Casting about my room, I discovered Harvey wasn’t there.

  Okay, I thought, blocking out thoughts of a missing man, of an unidentified woman, of an absent father or two, blocking out possibly erotic thought, who knew, I was still half asleep. I dressed hastily, went straight downstairs. But instead of seeing Magda there I saw a woman (and at first I just saw her reflected in the mirror-lined wall) with hair blonde like Rema’s cornsilk, but combed in a wholly different way, or rather, not very well combed, back in a sloppy bun, artlessly done, and greasy, with dark roots dramatically showing.

  “Look,” Harvey said—Harvey! looking tidy and proud, with his shirts tucked in just so, and even his cuffs properly buttoned—with a barely suppressed gloating grin, “I found her. She’s a lily of the valley here to see you. A creamy daff of the dill. An atmospheric phenomenon.”

  I was looking at this blonde woman’s image in the mirror; she was looking at that same image of herself in the mirror. Or so it appeared to me. But then I thought about the Dopplerganger effect again, or at least that phrase came into my mind, and those words solved something for me: I realized I was misinterpreting my perceptions. That is: if I saw the blonde woman’s face in the mirror, and if she appeared to be looking at the same point in the mirror that I was looking at, then actually she was looking at my face in the mirror while I was looking at her face in the mirror, that our faces could be in the same places (in the mirror) depending on just where one was looking from. So she wasn’t thinking of, looking at, only herself. Nor was I thinking just of myself. That’s just what it seemed like if one didn’t account for anticipatable perceptive distortions. But hadn’t I known all that about mirrors already? And yet right then it was as if I’d lost that knowledge and had to learn it again. Something about how we really don’t understand how mirrors work, or what they are showing us, which is interesting to think about considering that mirrors are the main way we have of understanding what we look like—what was it that poetic charlatan Lacan said, something about how because we only see ourselves in mirrors we come to know ourselves “in the fictional direction”? I’m not sure why I feel so moved to clarify this brief moment so much; it just seems like an important case of misperception on my part, important because I caught myself misperceiving and immediately readjuste
d my understanding of the situation. This is not one of those cases when I am talking about an unimportant and unrelated topic, some random intellectual distraction, in order to avoid an emotionally laden topic. As if I was overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of that blonde woman. I was not.

  Anyway, she looked at my reflection.

  I looked at hers.

  Quickly enough, my mind had done the corrective math, to realize that she probably could see and understand me seeing her looking at me, and so on and so forth, echoing, echoing, and the first words she spoke to me were, “I’m a better detective now; this time I just looked online at the credit card.”

  She also: I don’t think she was talking about an emotionally less laden subject simply in order to avoid the main subject.

  Harvey touched my sleeve and whispered, “Isn’t she beautiful? She returns to us from another world.”

  She said calmly, “Harvey explained to me that the two of you have been working together this whole time.”

  “Not this whole time,” I protested. “That’s not true. Harvey and I haven’t been together this whole time. I’ve been working very hard and for a great deal of that work I have been very alone. I have been completely alone. Have you been alone?”

  “Harvey says you’ve been trying to find me,” said the woman—she did smell like grass but also like baby oil and sweat—taking hold of my sleeve but turning away from me, turning toward Harvey. “Your mother still has you listed with the police as a missing person. Did you know that? And you are okay for her to be having worry like that? Do you know what that must be like for her, to not know whether you are dead or alive?” She then turned back to me, “Is this one of these disorders where the afflicted lacks empathy?”