I just looked at her.
“Well,” Harvey’s voice came in, “it has to do with someone I work for. That’s the only reason why, unfortunately, I have to put my mother through this suffering, have to leave her, for now, in the dark, without knowledge, like, I mean, as Dr. Leo would say, some character in a Greek tragedy. Maybe after this assignment that Dr. Leo and I are starting Monday, maybe after that I will be dispatched back to my home base.”
“Monday?” the doppelganger asked. “What starts Monday?”
“I think already I’m disclosing more than Dr. Gal-Chen would like,” Harvey replied.
“But how,” the ersatz Rema asked, glancing back over at me, “how did Tzvi Gal-Chen contact you, Harvey? Through this”—she raised my hand, as if it were a puppet’s hand—“man?”
I stared sternly in Harvey’s direction, shook my head ever so discreetly. But that is a characteristic of Harvey—that he doesn’t read body language well. It’s not what the doppelganger was saying; it’s not that he lacks empathy. He simply misreads the person he’s trying to empathize with, so in effect sometimes it can feel like a lack of empathy, when really there’s plenty of empathy, it’s just eccentrically directed. Even with me that happens sometimes.
“You are familiar with Tzvi’s real work?” Harvey continued playing the fool for her. “You do know what I mean?”
The impostress raised her hands to her forehead, pressed in at the sockets of her eyes, as if something needed to be pushed back into place. “Yes,” she said with fatigue, “I think I do. Harvey, you really should call your mother. But don’t worry, if you don’t want to call her, I won’t call her. Even though she’s been calling me.”
“I’m glad,” Harvey said, “you respect the delicate nature of my work.”
“But please tell me,” she continued cloyingly, “how exactly did this Tzvi Gal-Chen get in touch with you? Did you speak with him directly?”
“No, we didn’t speak with him,” Harvey said.
“No, we didn’t speak with him,” I said at the same time.
“JinxBlackMagicYouOweMeACoke,” Harvey said.
We were all quiet a moment.
Then the doppelganger felt compelled to contribute: “And you, Leo. That girl in the coffee shop that you were leaving notes for—she went to high school with me. Also, she’s not interested in you.”
“I don’t think the dog walker is interested in you,” I said.
The exchange ended something like that, anyway. I’m uncertain how we finally broke off from that whole encounter. I’m not quite sure how one puts a cap, or really puts any sort of punctuation, any sort of finality, to those sorts of emotions, to those desires that lose their way and reach out to the wrong people, or those desires that get derailed on their way to you, leave you suffering a ludicrous and misguided jealousy, misguided because so often it can look—seeing events through the mirrors we see into—like someone is looking at, say, herself, or himself, or someone else, and being in love, but really he or she is looking at you just as you are looking at her while giving her the illusion that you are looking elsewhere.
“I haven’t slept,” the simulacrum said.
“You can sleep in our room,” Harvey said. “I’ll be out collecting data during the daylight hours.”
She napped under my covers. I watched her. Breathing. Very slightly irregularly.
Needless to say:
The real Rema wouldn’t have put her hair in a bun.
She wouldn’t have held my wrist so tightly.
She wouldn’t have criticized Harvey, nor, for that matter, would she have listened to him so attentively.
She wouldn’t have had so private a conversation in so public a place.
She would have commented, in at least some small way, on my as yet unshaved morning handsomeness.
And if Rema had tracked me down by looking at our online credit card statement, she would have kept that information to herself.
13. A confession
I did not touch the simulacrum while she napped, but I did look at her closely. Her bangs parted down the middle and clung to her forehead in sweat and made me think of Mata Hari; she was beautiful in that moment, in her strangeness. Beautiful and also like Rema who, with her little secrets, her little silences, was often similarly wrapped in a thin but shimmering cloak of the alien. For a moment I thought of Rema and the simulacrum as genuine twins, or as the separate images that come together in a stereoscope. Shortly after she woke she sat on the floor and hugged my knees—I was sitting on the edge of the bed—and she said she would stay by my side until the end of time. That’s what she said: the end of time. She said she’d thought it through under many conditions and that was what she had decided. Then she said she was hungry.
When we walked outside, the wind mussed up her hair and already she no longer seemed like Mata Hari, or like Rema, to me.
“We have a lot to discuss,” she said like a schoolmarm.
The simulacrum received a menu in Spanish, and I one in English, or a kind of English. The first listing on my menu under Drinks was Bloody Girl. The next was Bloody Great.
“Will you come back to New York with me?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” I answered.
“What’s starting Monday?” she asked.
“My job.”
“What kind of job?”
“I’m not going to discuss that.”
“Did you receive the articles?” she asked.
“Of clothing?” I think I said; I was still busy wondering over the bloodiness on the menu. That’s why it was difficult to make conversation. That and her interrogation style. If only she could have stayed asleep—it was so easy to think fondly of her then. “My luggage has still not turned up. They haven’t called me.”
“I’m talking about the articles I sent you in e-mails. Did you receive those articles?”
Another drink offered on the menu: I crash. That brought a smile to my face.
“Do you think,” she said with a patronizingly patient tone, “those articles might have something to do with what’s happening to you? To us?”
Then I solved something small, the bloody drinks. Sangria chica, sangria grande: they had translated themselves for me, but I crash still had not. I couldn’t keep myself from giggling.
Stone-faced, the simulacrum said to me, “Nervous laughter is okay. I just want to know if you read the articles about the misidentification syndromes. And I want to know what you are thinking. What you are thinking of them. The articles. I’m being patient and not even asking you what you are thinking of me.”
A fourth drink was I crash Great. My giggling grew worse. As some sort of excuse for my poor behavior, I passed my badly translated menu over to the simulacrum.
“Did you even read a sentence?” she asked again.
I used to ask Rema that about my own articles. “Did you read this?” I said, pointing to the menu.
“Don’t copy me.”
“Yes. Okay,” I said, compressing my laughter into just abdominal pain. “I read the articles. I read them very seriously.” This was true. (Rema used to lie about that sort of thing.) Then I noticed that the menu also offered Popes Fried, which really isn’t even that funny, and which I recognized immediately as simply papas fritas, french fries better translated, but already the infection of laughter was returning.
“If you were in my place,” she said dryly, “and I in yours, wouldn’t you want to push me to think very carefully? To step outside of my body and look at this problem from the position of an other body?”
I tried to explain to her then that I did take my problem seriously, very seriously, and so of course I had read those articles, but it wasn’t as if they told me anything I hadn’t already considered.
“Do you remember seeing Godzilla with me?”
“I did see Godzilla with Rema, that’s true.”
“Do you remember her getting mad at you when you finished the brownie without offering
her any?”
“I don’t remember that, no.”
“Okay. Remember how you tried to lecture her about the English phrases in the movie? About Geiger counter and oxygen destroyer, and she told you that you were too dominating?”
“Rema often likes my little lectures. That might even be what she likes best about me.”
“But do you remember the little fight?”
“Listen, I differ with you on the details, but yes, I remember the incident you’re referring to. But it was insignificant—”
“And yet I know all about it. Doesn’t that seem to you strange?”
“Many things are strange,” I said lightly and with confidence. “More things on heaven and earth, you know. Not necessarily all nice things. Nothing nice about a vengeful ghost, for instance.”
“Maybe,” she said gently, reaching across the table to brush some hair off my face, “it’s more strange for me than it is for you. To see this face of yours but not really understand you. You have an absolute conviction that I am not Rema?”
An unintended glance at the menu revealed eggs loins. I had no idea what that might originally have been. “I guess so,” I squeaked. “Yes. I’m certain. You know what I mean.”
“All right,” she said with the kind of quarter smile I associate with photos of people who have died. “From now forward, I’ll be honest with you. I’ll admit to you that I’m not really her.”
The simulacrum had not shredded her napkin anxiously during this time of mistranslated anxiety; she had folded it up neatly, into a floppy fortune-teller.
“Okay,” she further affirmed. “We are saying that you are right. We will say that. Okay?”
I looked away from the simulacrum’s fortune-teller, and toward her hand, and I noticed that she was bleeding, ever so slightly, at the cuticle of her right index finger. Rema generally had ragged cuticles, but they rarely bled. There was just once when one, actually two, of her fingers were bleeding, and this was because Rema had been scratching a Tow Warning sticker off of our car; the car had been unmoved and accumulating parking tickets, but I hadn’t known this because she had, for days and days in a row, taken upon herself the normally alternating task of moving the car, but I guess she would go outside and wander around and just not move it. She had been sad for a while then; that had been a very low time for her when she hadn’t said or done much and once she cried because we were out of milk for the tea. In some ways I had left her alone, assuming she didn’t want someone intruding upon her sadness. I would leave her behind in the bed in the morning. And when I’d come home she’d still have sleep in her eyes. I didn’t quite know what to do for her. I bought her little things and wrote her notes. When she’d take a bath I would go put the towels in the dryer so that they’d be warm when she got out. I’d clip little articles out of the newspaper that I thought might amuse her, and I tried making her homemade marzipan, which I knew she loved, but it didn’t work and I broke our food processor in the attempt. I had thought maybe she was disappointed in me, but in retrospect I see now what was fairly obvious and what maybe I didn’t want to understand, what must have seemed worse to me than her anger: that often her mood had nothing to do with me at all.
The simulacrum reached out her only slightly injured hand and placed it on top of mine. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that I didn’t confess earlier. But I can help you find her. I’m not sure how, but somehow.”
14. A reasonable theory
Did Tzvi think I should join forces with Rema’s double? I wrote to him in detail about her confession but again received in response nothing but an automated out-of-office reply. At least the automated response assured me that my notes weren’t strictly dead letters, not eternally. And even in Tzvi’s absence I could still turn to his work for guidance. One of the triumphs of Tzvi’s 1981 retrievals paper was demonstrating the real-world validity of results obtained through trials on models. For example, output from a three-dimensional numerical cloud model was used in place of observations to test a method for retrieving temperature and pressure deviation fields; then comparison of the theoretically retrieved fields to “real” data affirmed the robustness of the technique. Which I interpreted to mean that, by analogy, working with the model Rema would indeed reveal information about the real Rema.
But what kind of work were we meant to do? Had I accidentally meant what I said when, in anger, I’d quoted to Tzvi about children’s games being a rehearsal for the right life? Harvey, the simulacrum, and I passed all of Friday and Saturday posing as ordinary tourists, blending in perfectly with the local culture of nonlocal pleasure seekers. Temperatures were unstable but the sun shone reliably. We took a boat tour of the lake and admired its protruding glaciers, their fish-scaly façades. When the simulacrum shivered in the wind, I gave her my wool sweater. The soda and chips on the boat were wildly overpriced, but I paid happily and no one felt cheated. I offered a compelling explanation of why glacial ice appears to be blue, and Harvey and the simulacrum both seemed patient, even possibly happy, to listen to my lesson. Later we ate strawberries and walnuts and tender lamb that had been cooked on a spit. We walked to cave paintings that proved disappointing but then were surprised by a black-necked swan on the walk back into town. The next morning we strapped crampons onto our shoes and—herded like ducklings by two young Argentine college boys—we crunched across glacial surfaces, felt awe at crevasses. Harvey sunburned and the simulacrum found an aloe lotion to apply. It was like we were a little family. It was nice. I almost forgot why I was there; I think we all did.
15. A case of mistaken identity
Saturday night just the simulacrum and I went out for ice cream. She ordered a flavor called banana split, one of these childish flavors with too many things in it but that she seemed to enjoy. She didn’t thank me for the ice cream, or offer me a bite, instead she just sat there, smiling, spooning from her cone, humming along to the overhead music.
I myself ordered two scoops, one of chocolate and another of a flavor they called calafate that was colored deep blue, which somehow recalled to me the alarm that sometimes went off when I looked at orange foods. I regretted the adventure of my choice and was eating with considerably less joy than she.
“I don’t want to be a finder of faults,” the simulacrum eventually said idly, “but your way of searching for your wife doesn’t seem to me to be the wisest, or the quickest, or, well—it hardly even seems like you’re looking for her at all.”
“Don’t cavil,” I said, and I admit being pleased to use a word that I suspected she would not understand. “It’s not as if there’s a trail of bread crumbs to follow. What I have here is a nonstandard problem, one that therefore demands a nonstandard solution. It’s not easy to explain, but, for example, maybe eating this ice cream will prove to be useful. And there’s always Monday. Rema may even be there Monday. There are indications.”
“I think you should look for her back home.” She was mining her ice cream for chunks. “Maybe at the Hungarian Pastry Shop if you want. That is the advice I would give to you, if you asked me. Can we set a date together for returning?”
I decided to change the subject. “You look nice in my sweater.” Then I asked the simulacrum how her newfangled flavor was.
“It’s not new,” she said. “Banana split is a classic flavor here. So when should we go back to your apartment? Maybe after this Monday meeting of yours? I really don’t think we are making progress in this place,” she said, gesturing around the room precariously (for her ice cream) with her cone.
“I actually,” I half lied, “expect to hear something important from Tzvi Gal-Chen very soon.” I started to spoon-feed myself with more dedication. “I wish I could go back home. The problem is that my actions, my work—they’re important far beyond the scope even of, say, just my own marriage. Tzvi sees me in this very heroic light and I can’t just let him down. It’s hard to explain, but even though I’ve sometimes had the feeling that my life was insignificant, and even that my lov
e was nothing more than an accumulation of contingencies—still, all that ran contrary to the enduring phenomenon of my own sense of great importance. Unwelcome importance really, an intrusion of importance. I felt central even though such a feeling seemed not to make sense, and to be childish—”
And I was really beginning to open up to her, but then this short young man, with ’70s Warren Beatty hair and a five o’clock shadow and a slouchy uniform on, appeared standing by our table, repeating, in Spanish: Could it be Rema?
The simulacrum’s capillaries dilated, her neck rashed, she emitted a series of sounds that I couldn’t quite understand. She held her cone out to the side as if it were a surrender flag. Then this man was kissing her. Or greeting her, I suppose some people would say, but from an objective point of view he was kissing her, he gave her three kisses, alternating cheeks, so I’m not sure it really matters to what end he was doing this, why he was doing this, regardless the greeting was excessively effusive.
Excusing myself, I left for the bathroom to wash my hands. By the time I came back the small uniformed man was sitting in my chair. His triceps was vulgarly prominent, emerging from the rolled-up sleeve of a uniform shirt that bore as an insignia the Argentine flag. Was he a harbinger of an imminent battle? Could the 49 be so indiscreet? Just to make polite conversation I asked him, in English, as I stood over him, towering: “Did you participate in that hysterical invasion of the Falkland Islands?”
He seemed not to have parsed what I said. He announced in Spanish, “We were children together, Rema and I.” Then he stood up and brought another chair to the table and offered it to me, as if I were the newcomer. “We lived on the same street. As children.”
“Children,” I said. “I was a child once too.” I asked the man if she—I gestured—looked to him like the Rema of his childhood.
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