Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“No?” she inquired gently.

I found myself saying in front of a woman whose trust I would have liked to have gained: “Actually I’m a meteorologist.” Then: “A research meteorologist,” I added, with that liar’s drive toward specificity. “Not one of those guys on television, though. That’s what everyone’s always asking me.”

I suppose I was and wasn’t thinking of Tzvi Gal-Chen in that moment. Meteorology, quite simply, was the first profession that came to mind. But again I would like to emphasize: I did not believe those words. I had never planned to say them. Some unruliest member of that parliament of me — although admittedly a perhaps intuitively ingenious member — had stolen the podium to speak those irrevocable words, and the rest of me then had no choice but to devote itself to the task of trying to maintain that false face.

But anyway, at that moment, the lie worked just fine. I maintained, in one move, both my privacy and my politesse.

“Meteorology. That is interesting,” Magda replied after a moment. “I met a meteorologist once,” she said. “At a dinner,” she modified. And at this, as if suddenly she’d reached some judgment — one that appeared to be positive — she stood up quickly and insisted, “You’re welcome to stay here if you want. Even before the crisis I rented rooms. You should stay here. You can ask Rema. Even with everything, I’m sure she’ll tell you how nice it is here. Maybe she’ll come visit you. Maybe you’ll call her. You’ll think it over. You’ll think.”

I did indeed think it over; I did so by doing what I often do when I don’t know what to do, which was head to a coffee shop. An aloof and pretty young waitress — she had a lovely mole near her thumb and a waist like Rema’s — brought me cookies with my coffee even though I didn’t ask for cookies. Not that I needed more cookies, but regardless, this small variation in the way I normally experience coffee shops — those gratis cookies — woke me up a little to my situation, recalled to me to not be so foolish as to search for Rema in only one way, by only one method — talking to Rema’s mother. I had another lead. Dipping a cookie, I pulled out my xeroxes of Tzvi Gal-Chen’s research for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, and I began by skimming: The numerical models discussed herein (and elsewhere) are formulated as Initial Value Problems , a phrase that already caused me trouble as I could not feel confident (yes not even feel confident) about what that might mean— Initial Value Problem —though it’s not as if I couldn’t surmise, though my surmises seemed all wrong to me. So I set that reprint — which contained no images — aside. What “Initial Value Problem” could there be, even via stretched metaphor, in my relationship with Rema? I continued on to: A Method for the Initialization of the Anelastic Equations: Implications for Matching Models with Observations . “Anelastic” made me think of the brittleness of psychoses. I read further. An algorithm is proposed, whereby the combined use of the equations of cloud dynamics, and the observed wind, will permit a unique determination of the density and pressure fluctuations . Fluctuations. Yes, that seemed right. And “unique determination,” a compelling account of love. But I knew my brain was eager to perceive order, so I’d have to be rigorous before conceding any genuine concordances — otherwise I’d just be like Harvey reading the New York Post for meteorologic orders. Nothing had yet jumped out at me as much as that image, that thumbprinty image from the retrieval paper, and retrieval — that was so precisely, so straightforwardly, so unmetaphorically what I was trying to do. I dismissed the fluctuations sentence as only seemingly relevant. Then in the middle of a third article a distinct change in tone and content undeniably signaled a clue. The article had begun by discussing numerical prediction models but then, suddenly, read: Plato was apparently the first to state that what we are sensing are only images of the real world . Clearly an unnecessary sentence in a radar meteorology article. Appeals to antiquity naturally, well, appeal, yes, but deploying such a rhetorical move in such a context was highly unusual; clearly it signaled something; it would be foolish to contend otherwise. And why the added play of “apparently”? Gauss , the passage continued, was apparently the first to formulate a mathematical theory of prediction —something then to do with the inaccuracy of our observations hindering accurate extrapolation to future states. Again the “apparently.” Under a noise cloud of percolation I continued reading: In Gauss’s work observations and models were combined to predict the trajectory of a celestial body —which struck me as a rather inappropriate way of referring to Rema. Although, I thought, immediately scolding myself for my single-mindedness, perhaps there were innumerable celestial bodies whose motions needed to be tracked, and then I thought further about that word, “meteorology,” and how it must itself, from the very beginning, have referred to the study of meteors, of objects falling through the sky.

Tzvi’s article continued: Atmospheric modeling is computationally complex, driving a search for less demanding, nonoptimal approximate methods … The exact approach requires the inversion of large matrices of the order of 10 5× 10 5but the matrices are sparse so that many of the computations can, in principle, be done in parallel . Nonoptimal approximate methods. Computationally complex. The matrices are sparse. The words ungated certain snatches of music, of time, into my consciousness, but nothing had yet crystallized. There is hope that the development of massively parallel supercomputers (e.g. 1000 desktop Crays working in tandem) could—

Suddenly my BlackBerry rang and without even thinking, without even checking to see who it was — lost as I was in a haze of a thousand desktop Crays — I answered. As I did, a previously unnoticed cat looked briefly toward me, as did the Rema-waisted waitress — she was beautiful, unusually so — and a man behind the coffee bar wearing a green soccer jersey with the number 9 in white, he also looked over at me — and this made me look down at my shoes, which I realized had a fine beige dust on them, and I felt like while I had been disappearing into those words of Tzvi, everyone, and everything, had been observing me, which made me see myself multiplied, as if in a hall of mirrors, or on the screens of thousands of Crays, though I think this was just a matter of perspective.

“Hello?” I alarmed into the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

I had no idea with whom I was speaking, but I was welling up with unarticulated emotion, emotion preceding any thought, and I saw images — thin wales of corduroy, hairs of an ink brush, bruisy blue vein on a foot, a yellow cardigan, archipelagoed tea leaves, smudged newsprint, a pulley, the tendon of a neck — and the word that rose to the surface was “Rema.”

“I miss you” emerged from my mouth unintentionally, before I could think or plan or be wise in any way; it’s ridiculous, to say I miss you to someone when you don’t know who she is. “Where are you?”

“Leo, I’m at our apartment but where are you?”

Her words collapsed me into a smaller number of selves, a knowable number, an unpleasant dinner party. I stepped outside, stood under a eucalyptus tree, to continue my conversation.

“Rema, I love you even more than I could ever have imagined—”

“I love you too—”

“Loving other people is really just loving you, I see that now—”