Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  Or maybe what she felt was me there at the door … there was the question of whom she was talking to, and the question of whom she was talking about … and the question of whether I really went around saying “foul rag and bone shop” far more often than I might have thought … unless it wasn’t me she was talking about with the poems … I’d only ever done that a handful of times … then the question of who didn’t like to cuddle … the answers proliferated even faster than the questions … and what came to mind was a diagram, with each pronoun a blank box on a language tree, and each possible meaning shifting as I filled in the boxes with different names … and what also came to mind was Proust’s narrator, attempting to talk to an elevator operator at Balbec, an elevator operator who did not reply, “either because of astonishment at my words, attention to his work, a regard for etiquette, hardness of hearing, respect for his surroundings, fear of danger, slow-wittedness, or orders from the manager …” But there I went again running into the wrong text simply because I felt intimidated by the lack of context for the simulacrum’s words, but still I was able to generate quickly in my mind, by falling back upon my old list of clues, hypotheses about what this all might mean:

  Unnamed dog—Not even mentioned and thus, as we had thought, either absolutely central (and thus appearing as an elephant-sized silence) or absolutely not.

  Anatole—I knew now was Rema’s father, but did he also buy her fruits? And did he leave her poems? Or was he actually not in her thoughts at every moment of every day?

  Rema’s husband—Or the simulacrum’s. Maybe Saul. Maybe David. Or maybe she just used the names of ancient kings to refer to … who? Or what? Previous missions she’d undertaken for the Academy, or for the Fathers? Or, simply, previous loves?

  Tzvi Gal-Chen—Her approval of my affection for Tzvi lent further weight to the hope or anxiety that she actually was Tzvi, or at least had played the part of Tzvi, which possibly even meant that she was, finally, Rema, and which possibly explained Tzvi’s recent return to absentia. That, or she was unaware of the meaning of Tzvi.

  Royal Academy and Lola and Patagonian research—I figured I’d store these fragments and return to them after I learned more at the meeting the following day.

  All that, and yet. The real and unpleasant yield of that overhearing fell outside of my grid of previous clues. The real yield was the unequivocal sense that I was not alone in my deficient understanding of the situation. She also was floundering—now me with the fish—to understand. She clearly didn’t know what to make of me. I had preferred thinking that the simulacrum—while she might intermittently deceive, while she might withhold—that she, in the end, knew all the facts. But she did not.

  I opened the door; she abruptly hung up the phone. I saw her eyes well up with tears, and she just said, “You two were gone for so long.”

  And I found that I didn’t want to ask her about the dog. And I didn’t want to ask her about the Academy or the Quantum Fathers or Saul or David or poetry or Proust or anything. I found that I just wanted to tell her that I loved her. This strange thing within me, amidst all the other strange things within me, the intrusions from other possible worlds or simply from the recesses of this one: I had thought I could love only my original Rema, but maybe I was wrong. I felt within me those proverbial butterflies, the desire to have her think well of me, the desire to lay myself out beside her, the desire for the world to see her next to me, the flittering conviction that she in fact was the whole world, was all worlds, all those desires.

  I didn’t say anything like that, though; I knew we had to work together.

  Harvey went up to the simulacrum and hugged her.

  19. The misrecognitions

  Draped in her traffic cone orange coat, the simulacrum stood impatiently by the hotel room door, waiting as I finished shaving, as Harvey took down notes in front of the television news. What if we were a family? What if there were a school bus outside? What if I had packed our lunches, and she had always to hound us to leave on time? Or a different family altogether. She a charismatic alcoholic losing her beauty, he a painfully shy jazz aesthete, me a hardworking insurance man. Or she a no-nonsense nurse, and me a philandering musician of little talent, and he not existing at all. Or me a meteorologist, and she a computer programmer, and us settled down in Oklahoma with two spoiled children, both of them bad at soccer, both of them good in math. “Well, boys, let’s go and we’ll finally see,” the simulacrum said, “about this mysterious Monday meeting.”

  I genuinely worried—I’m not sure why—that we were leaving to meet no one.

  But at our appointed meeting spot in the central square, a woman was in fact there. Sitting along the edge of a fallow fountain, wearing purple oven-mitt-ish mittens, eating a lime green popsicle, her phosphorescent blonde hair held back with a fleece headband. Did I feel as a Greek tragic hero must feel at the moment of anagnorisis? Not quite. But why shouldn’t that woman have been Rema? Why not her instead of the simulacrum? She had a dog with her, an exceptionally large German shepherd, with dirty snow-colored fur particularly thick and coarse, and I was reminded—so often—of those Austrian dogs that had seemed inexplicably strange, then explicably strange, once I realized they were simply dramatically larger than I was used to, which made being near them feel like being on a movie set with oversized props and doorways extra tall.

  The woman bit from her popsicle. A chunklet fell to the ground; the oversized dog snarfed it.

  Did I reach my hand into my coat pocket, as if I’d find something there—a swatch of cloth? a lock of hair? an old movie stub? a photograph? a piece of licorice? a special ring? a clipped news article?—something to identify myself to her, something that would prove, across the worlds, that I was really me? I did. But I found only a sugar packet. And a bobby pin that could have belonged to any girl. Nevertheless, I extended my hand to that woman confidently. “I’m Arthur,” I said.

  “You’re not Arthur,” she announced in a voice that seemed to me loud enough for the whole universe to hear. Then she laughed. “I’m sorry, I mean, you might be Arthur. But the funny thing is that I’m waiting for someone named Arthur. But an Arthur who isn’t you.”

  “Twenty-seven? Ice climber? Bowdoin College?”

  She looked at me almost cross-eyed. “You know him?” she said, beckoning her very large dog closer to herself.

  “You know him?” I said, thinking about black magic.

  “Do you know him?” the simulacrum—so intrusive—was saying to this other woman, intending, I believe, the “him” to be me.

  Was this situation terribly disappointing and somewhat humiliating? It was.

  Did that woman walk away? She did.

  Maybe I expected she would eventually pursue me, but she did not.

  20. Falsifiability

  Maybe, as Harvey had been alleging, there was a problem with the reality of Tzvi Gal-Chen. Maybe that accounted for the failure of the Hilda encounter. Maybe that accounted for the lack of storms. Messages I wrote to Tzvi simply bounced back. Calls to the Royal Academy failed to connect me to any Tzvi or to any Lola. And a terrible migraine developed within me, as if to counteract the absence of external weather disturbances.

  “Let’s go home,” the simulacrum whispered—though it sounded to me like shouting—in my ear, as I lay in bed with the lights out, with the shades down, waiting for my migraine to pass, waiting for Harvey to return from the field with news, even though I had no confidence that he would. “You’ll find yourself so happy to be home,” she continued. “You’ll feel like yourself again at home,” and the feeling inside me was of inhabiting a dark and uncanny fairy tale.

  I asked her to please leave me alone. But she said that at my age I shouldn’t be left alone when I wasn’t feeling well. At my age. She said that more than once. I’m barely in my fifties, but she spoke of me like a man on his deathbed. In essence making a deathbed out of that oddly proportioned hotel bed, killing me in her imagination, in a room of false intimacy, with i
ts horse and glacier images. “Most people of my socioeconomic status live quite a bit beyond fifty,” I whispered through the yellowness of my headache. “I will get better. Tzvi will contact us soon enough.”

  Later the simulacrum began crying and accusing me more absurdly.

  “Of course I love the original Rema,” I murmured, trying to placate her into a shush, feeling a touch awkward about the simulacrum’s excessive investment in my feelings for Rema. She continued heaping unfounded anxieties one atop the other. For a long time I said nothing, but finally I interjected: “No, that’s not what any of this is about at all. That’s not why I don’t want to go home yet.”

  Undeterred from her perseverations, she went on saying things that don’t merit transcription, saying that I didn’t find her attractive, repeatedly confounding herself and Rema, lily-padding from irrelevancies to inaccuracies. In a slight ebb tide of my pain, I exhaled the following: “You don’t understand. If anyone is, or was, unfaithful, if anyone is, or was, ‘seeing’ anyone else—maybe seeing many other people—it was her, it was without a doubt her, and it was only her. How many times have I picked up the phone only to have the other person hang up? Rema is very young. She is too young. She probably thought she wanted someone older, and reliable, and financially established; but in the end she didn’t want to be married to a father. I could practically be her father. But I could never be enough of a father and a father is not enough. Maybe no one will ever be enough. Maybe she’s not a person for whom anything will ever suffice. Well, maybe that is understandable, understandable even to me. So she finds someone else, someone younger, maybe. Prettier, maybe. He will disappoint her too. She’ll return. I’m not worried. I have no worries—”

  I didn’t actually believe a word of what I said. Even if I did, briefly, that would have been purely on account of my distorting neurologic state. That’s not what Rema’s like. I was just talking. And women, they’re always wanting to take the side of other women, and so somehow the simulacrum had put me in a position where it seemed like I was arguing against Rema, like I was in some way hurting Rema. I wasn’t. I was loving her and I was looking for her. It was not, as the simulacrum kept alleging, that I wasn’t really looking at all, that I was running away. And the truth of the matter was that the matter between us happened not to be the matter between us—that is, whatever problems we actually suffered within our own marriage were absolutely irrelevant to what was currently keeping us apart. “Tzvi understands what’s keeping us apart,” I declared. I didn’t think he fully did, actually, but I wanted to appeal to an authority outside of myself.

  Later the phone rang. Not my phone, but hers. She wouldn’t answer it. “It’s just my mom,” she claimed.

  “Why don’t you talk to her?” I said, feeling unusually aware of other people’s pain.

  “It is difficult. I don’t like it.”

  “The poor woman,” I scolded. “Can’t you spare a little kindness? You know what happened to her husband, don’t you?”

  “Did she tell you that lie too?” The simulacrum sighed. “He just left her. That’s all. She likes to make it seem something else, something dramatic, but it is very ordinary. She likes to make her pain seem extraordinary when it is just ordinary, ordinary pain for an ordinary, ordinary person.”

  I turned on the TV, very quietly, to stop her mean talk.

  21. A birth of comedy

  In my dream she was there, then I awoke and she wasn’t there, then I fell back to sleep and then woke and she was there. She was wearing, in addition to a frumpy alpaca sweater, a small, sad look of triumph.

  “Where’s Harvey?” I asked.

  “He was called home.”

  From among the chaos she carried within Rema’s pale blue purse, she pulled a folded piece of paper. The filmy folded sheet proved a faxed copy, printed in a powder that finger oils could smudge away, of a page from the September 1996 issue of Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Blue lint had collected along the fray of the folds and when I unfolded the paper it crackled slightly with what I believe were crumbs of rye cracker. I include the full text of the journal page she presented to me.

  As most readers of Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences know, Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen was its co-chief editor for about two years before his sudden passing in October 1994. He was also an influential and stimulating atmospheric scientist and a warm and much-loved human being. As his close friend and colleague, I accepted the task of standing in for him at the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences for a year and also of collecting and editing papers for a special issue of the journal to be published in the month of his birth.

  Tzvi aspired to be a multidisciplinary scientist, with interests and activities in largescale, mesoscale, boundary layer, and climate dynamics, and with a strong emphasis on remote sensing analysis techniques. As most working scientists know, “multidisciplinary” is a favorite word and expectation of administrators and journalists, but it is often regarded with suspicion in the academic community. Tzvi’s earthy way of saying it was, “A multidisciplinary scientist had better be an expert in at least two disciplines, or else he is a charlatan.”

  I am not a great fan of special issues of an archival journal like the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Sometimes the papers are premature, excessively delayed, warmed over, or accepted largely on the basis of their presentation at a conference. I agreed to edit this one on the understanding that the papers, though solicited to some extent, would be fully acceptable to the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences under any conditions and that their subjects would be as broad as Tzvi’s interests. The result is a nice mix. It includes one paper coauthored by Tzvi as the advisor of a doctoral student; two other papers authored at the University of Oklahoma; another by a close former associate using Tzvi’s work as part of the foundation; three papers on geophysical fluids, including a major work in planetary science, an area which Tzvi was associated with in his earlier appointment at NASA; a paper on data assimilation; a paper on TOGA COARE, which was the last observation project in which Tzvi participated; and a boundary layer paper. I feel that all these are contributions that Tzvi would have liked to read. I must admit that in some cases the reviews and authors’ revisions were slightly accelerated to meet the publication deadline. I hope and believe, however, that this issue will be found worthy of the high standards of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and stand as a small but fitting memorial to Tzvi.

  Douglas Lilly

  University of Oklahoma

  The simulacrum sat expectantly at the bed’s edge, with her hands between her knees in that inadvertent prayer position kind of way, waiting for me to read the document. I found myself reading the document over several times. Yes, before looking up I had read it several times and so understood it quite well. When I made eye contact with the blonde, she tilted her head at me, like a puppy. There was then a pregnant pause for language, a repressed face-off of sorts, for who was going to begin with the speaking, me or her. I tilted my head in the opposite direction that the blonde had tilted her head, which thought of in a certain way is the same direction, like in a mirror. And the silence continued from that angle, but I’d like to clarify that it was not a reverent silence that was being maintained, not on my part, not a silence in the face of the greatest of mysteries. This “mystery” that the simulacrum had presented me with—in its own way—well, it was so very small. All she was trying to say was that Tzvi GalChen was dead, and that we should therefore find it strange that I had communicated with him. At least, I think that was all she was trying to say. But that had become, for me, maybe the least of many mysteries, one that mattered to me only as a door to other possibilities, only as a passage through which I followed. Not as a thing unto itself.

  The simulacrum tilted her head in the other direction and then, with an excess of gentleness in her tone, she asked me what I thought “this Tzvi Gal-Chen character that you have been communicating with”—she wanted to know what I thought he might think of this me
morial issue of Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.

  I pointed out the problems inherent in such projective hypothesizing.

  The simulacrum reasked me the same question. What did I think “this Tzvi Gal-Chen character” would think?

  I answered that I thought it would be rather rude to ask such a question of “this Tzvi Gal-Chen character.” I regretted employing the diminishing terminology that she—rather inappropriately—had taken to using.

  What do you mean it would be rude to ask? she wanted to know.

  I said that a feeling I’d often had was that it would be awkward to talk with people about their deaths after they’d died. There might not be much to say about it.

  She said that what I was saying didn’t make sense.

  You mean it doesn’t make sense to you, I clarified.