Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“This is Leo. I’m a friend—”

“What,” she interrupted in an anxious blushing voice, “are you asking me about Rema?”

“I’m in Buenos Aires—” I began, but then I couldn’t remember what I had thought I was going to ask Magda; I could remember only — as if my brain had monochromed — how much I hate speaking on phones. “And—”

“You know where Rema is?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, feeling vaguely distinguished and proud, “I do believe I saw her as recently as three days ago.”

“Here?”

“No. In New York—”

“Oh. Yes, yes. I knew that. You are an American friend?”

“Okay. Yes.”

“But you are in Buenos Aires?”

“Yes. In this strange red phone booth actually—”

“And you are Rema’s friend,” she said again, the repetition seemingly undermining the truth-value of the statement. Maybe Rema doesn’t consider me a friend. That’s possible. “Well,” Magda continued, now in a fresh vanilla kind of voice, “you should come over. You should come over anytime. You should come over right now. Would you like to come over right now? We will have a coffee, sweets—”

“Well—”

After giving me street names, and after describing to me the front of her home, she concluded with: “And don’t worry about the dog.” She gave a little cough. “Despite appearances, he really is very sweet and there is no reason to be afraid.”

Everyone with their dogs.

Far more dogs than I was accustomed to promenaded through Magda’s neighborhood; many dogs appeared unaccompanied; some attended playgroups of others of an equivalent size. It was as if decoys had been deployed to diminish the conspicuousness of the primary clue of the doppelganger’s dog. But also maybe — maybe even probably — there were just many dogs. Consequently much feces. Some of it obviously stepped on. This in contrast to the fresh paint on the low-rise buildings, the potted plants on balconies. As I nearly failed to evade a particularly sculptural pile of feces, the thought came to me of who house-trained the pup now living in my apartment. Someone now dead?

Soon a woman, dressed in heels and a high-waisted cream dress with a thick navy sash, held my face in her hands, kissed me twice; she smelled of Vaseline and talcum.

“Rema,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, a misleading affirmation.

“Rema?” I said.

“She is coming?” she said.

“No,” I said, waking up more fully into something.

The woman laughed.

Fortunately the drunkenness of longing didn’t last long; I quickly sobered into true perception. This woman looked older than Rema, yes, but not so much on account of any particular feature, more because her hair was more neatly pulled back into a low wide clip, her eyebrows were more perfectly sculpted, and her lipstick was impeccably tamed into the cupid’s bow of a ’40s film star. At her side was a leggy, dignified greyhound.

“Her name’s Killer,” Magda laughed. Taking my hand, Magda led me inside a home that seemed already all wrong compared to the Rema’s childhood home of my mind — too narrow a hallway, too few mirrors, a heavy and wrong potpourri.

What I would like to take, or drink, was what she asked me before leaving me alone on a velvet sofa overcrowded with tasseled pillows. Everything looked old, the velvet’s nap diminished in patches. Maybe Rema has touched these things, I thought deliberately, as if I were planning to take fingerprints, and then: I’m here in your pocket came to my mind, a swatch of a song that Rema likes to sing, curled up in a dollar, the chain of your watch around my neck . And I petted the too-smooth upholstery of the sofa, thinking of thin wales of corduroy.

From a brocaded floor cushion, the greyhound watched me.

Magda returned with a tray bearing a teapot and two maté mugs and diminutive glasses of water and a plate overloaded with small cookies pressed into different geometries, some covered in chocolate. She said to me, “So you are a friend of Rema’s husband?”

I was silent. Killer shifted her gaze to Magda.

Magda set the tray down. “Actualmente?” she punctuated, meaning “currently” but making me think “actually.”

I had distinctly not presented myself as a friend of Rema’s husband; I had presented myself as a friend of Rema. I had not known that Magda knew Rema was married — and maybe she didn’t know. So I felt suddenly pressed into revealing something I perhaps oughtn’t — a not unfamiliar situation for me since in the course of my practice I have often found myself in “situations” with patients’ families, situations in which I am being pressed, with more and less subtly manipulative locutions, into revealing what I ought not reveal. But this particular moment with Magda was complicated by the fact that I did not quite know what exactly it was I did not wish to reveal, knew only what I was trying to discover. As I sat on that worn velvet nap, my overwhelming ignorance — about Magda, about Rema — seemed to materialize as the smell of my clothing, not dirty exactly, but overheated, and exhaling parts of itself.

So you are a friend of Rema’s husband? repeated in my mind.

And Killer — she looked like a larger version of the doppelganger’s dog.

“Well,” I began. “Well. Well, yes, I am a friend of his,” I concluded, which when I thought about it I decided was true, or true enough, and I was relieved to get to say something true because trying to maintain a lie, well, that becomes increasingly difficult over time. “That’s how I met Rema. Actually. Yes. Through him.” Which is also arguably not untrue. I reached for my tea with studied casualness. It was a maté, served in a special gourd with a straw, like Rema often made for herself at home, and I knew the drink was associated with several whole countries but I’d always thought of that gourd and its filtering straw as Rema’s own personal eccentricity. “But of course,” I said, sipping, “I’m now, currently — actually — also, very much a friend to Rema herself.”

The maté tasted terrible, like socks. I eyed the tall chocolate cookies, then lifted my eyes to the woman; the coffee table’s candle had cast her shadow up, against the ceiling, where it in turn loomed over her. “I’m curious,” she said, “to hear what you think of Rema’s husband?”

I had removed myself — parts of myself — from the conversation; a few cells were listening to Magda but whole factions of me had been devoted for some time to the question of whether enough time had passed to enable me to graciously reach for one of the oddly tall chocolate-covered cookies. “Well,” I found myself saying, as if the word itself had formed a well-filled well within me, “well he’s nice enough, isn’t he?” I made a move to the cookie, realizing that my small half-truth was already tangling my investigation.

“I only met him once,” she said without making eye contact, and reaching out a hand to pet Killer’s head. “But to be honest — and I’m an excellent judge of character, I’m an analyst — I didn’t like him. I didn’t even like him a small amount.”

I was busy trying to deal gracefully with the soft caramelly inside that I had not been prepared to find within the tall chocolate-covered cookie. Was she talking about me? Or some other me? Or someone else entirely? I had to wipe my mouth with my sleeve — I had no choice, she had not brought out napkins — and as I did, I thought, in a brief and stupid moment of mistranslated indignation, Did you hear the news about Edward? — another swatch of Rema song that I could not place — and then I swallowed my overrunning cookie too early, causing a pain in my heart (originating in my esophagus of course), as I wiped more crumbs from my mouth, recovering myself. Saliva had rushed to greet the caramel. “Oh?” I asked carefully, belatedly. “When did you meet him? Was he good-looking?”