Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“Leo, where are you?”

“When did you return?” I asked.

“When did you leave?”

“Did they have to force you to leave, or did you just go along with them, because you knew you had to? I didn’t touch that other woman.”

“Leo, I don’t know where you are. No one knows where you are. You haven’t been answering your phone. You’ve abandoned your patients. Don’t you think that’s strange? Doesn’t that preoccupy you?” To say “preoccupy” instead of “worry”—that was a studied Rema-ism. Rema, except for when she was very tired, had stopped making that error years ago. I said:

“You’re the woman who came home with that leggy dog? That’s who you are?”

“You’re upset—” the voice intruded nonresponsively.

“That wasn’t actually a greyhound you brought home.” A ray of sun had found me; I felt clearheaded. “Instead a little greyhound look-alike. Like a little toy dog. Is that who I’m speaking with? The lady with the little dog?”

“Are you with someone?”

“It’s not polite what you did,” I said with discolored conviction. “To just bring a dog into someone’s apartment. The dog might have a disease. Or fleas. He might have made me sick.”

“Leo, I’d really like to know exactly where you are.” The woman sniffled — everyone with their tears — in a way that was not at all attractive. “Where you are right now, and why,” she went on in between snarfling chokes that did seem, I concede, genuinely emotional, if repellent. “I just feel so preoccupied.” Even if she wasn’t Rema, I knew I should try harder to be nicer to her; I didn’t know why I was so offended by the dog.

“If you need to cry,” I said to her, “it’s absolutely okay for you to cry.”

“You’re lying,” she said, now sobbing. “You hate it when I cry.”

“But I really am so sorry,” I said. Why did I say that? Well: sometimes the scent of Rema’s grassy shampoo reaches me, but coming from some other passing woman, and I’m then filled with feelings that I don’t know what to do with; that’s how I felt on the phone, with that voice. I found myself continuing on: “It’s not just you, my problem with other people’s crying. When Magda cried, I handled that so terribly.” That was a mistake, to mention Magda by name. Even if I had been talking to the real Rema — and it did sound just like her, and obviously a part of me really wanted to believe that it was her — such a disclosure would likely still have been a blunder because, to state it perhaps too simply, family is a sticky issue, often best left alone.

But my words did make the woman stop crying. “When did you talk to my mom?” she said with a desiccating cornsilky voice.

I felt suddenly evaporated and cold, even out there in the sun. “I don’t feel obliged to share with you all the details of my life.”

“What did you tell her about me?” the voice continued soblessly.

Having nothing to say, I said nothing. And anyway, other than having mentioned that I was a meteorologist, I hadn’t really said much to Magda at all. “She’s a very attractive woman,” I finally said, which was just a meaningless commonplace making its own merry way out of my mouth. It meant nothing. Maybe Magda is an attractive woman or maybe she’s not, but it’s not the kind of quality I was in a frame of mind to notice. Certainly she wasn’t as attractive as, say, the Rema-waisted waitress whom I could see through the window — she was really beautiful, distractingly beautiful.

“Does she like you?” the voice asked.

I said nothing. I watched the Rema-waisted waitress wipe down a table.

“Does she look happy?” the voice damply whispered.

Again I said nothing.

My mind was comforting itself randomly with the name Alice. But not so randomly. I realized then that those snatches of Rema song that I’d had in my mind while I’d been sitting in Magda’s living room, they were songs from an album titled Alice . “Listen,” I finally said to that woman on the phone, “I’m really sorry about this, but I’m actually under quite a bit of stress lately. I’m engaged in some rather pressing and important work—”

“You left me some very strange notes—” she began, and I held the phone away from my ear during the ridiculousness that followed, “—and if you say there’s not another woman I believe you. I’ll believe you. Leo, did you hit your head on something? Did—”

When there was a pause in the woman’s excessive and absurd jeremiad — I, squinting in sunshine while she, I assumed, stood in the cold northern hemisphere shivering — I asked: “Is it snowing where you are?” Then impulsively, “It’s summer here, you know.”

“You’re in Buenos Aires? With my mom?”

I stopped watching the waitress through the window. “Did you know,” I continued, feeling other voices clawing out my trachea, “that just to discover the state of things as they presently are, let alone to predict the future, is a problem so computationally complex that to solve it even approximately would require a thousand Crays working in tandem?” And as I spoke, I noticed the wrong mental image blooming across the radar screen of my mind, wrong because although I knew very well that Crays referred to supercomputers, I pictured instead a thousand long-necked birds. Craning their necks? Or is cray a type of bird? Or was I just thinking about cranes? Like herons? “Forget,” I added, “about forecasting; even nowcasting is near impossible.” When I heard this fake Rema’s voice, was the Rema stream of images conjured in my mind correct? Or somehow subtly wrong, a series of wrong images that had already begun the process of extinguishing the real images of my real Rema? What if I was picturing the face of the simulacrum? Would it be better not to see anything at all, so as not to blanch out what I still had? Regardless, it struck me that maybe the observation about the Crays was now outdated, since computers are so much more powerful today than in the past; maybe now such computations could be made in real time; Tzvi’s idea either had grown superfluous or had been superfluous all along, had been a means of saying something else. A code? Maybe I was meant to contact Tzvi and ask. All these thoughts ran through my head, at uncertain speeds, entering from uncertain directions. Beneath the din of the phone voice I argued silently to myself that contacting Tzvi GalChen would be ludicrous; the relationship between us was not a reciprocal one; we were allied, yes, but only from my point of view, and only in a somewhat imaginary way, in a somewhat alternately conceived world that didn’t really exist, or that I didn’t think really existed, not then. Don’t get metaphysically and metaphorically extravagant , I admonished myself silently while that Rema-like woman talked on. Only Harvey , I reminded myself, believes in the deception. In reality Tzvi and I know nothing of one another .

“Maybe we can speak tomorrow?” I pleaded, being as polite as I knew how to be, given the circumstances.

“What if I said yes?” the voice said. “What if I said I did know something about forecasting and the thousand crayfish? Did you take my clothing, Leo? Did you take my purse? You know there have been many telephone calls—”

I began to feel a particular kind of nervous, as when an unwanted thought makes its steady migrainous progress toward the surface, a sense of rising water drowning my lungs. So I disconnected. Then I turned off my BlackBerry entirely. It was the only proper thing to do. I needed to go back inside: to the waitress, to dust glittering like tiniest meteors in shafts of natural light.

I asked the Rema-ish waitress for an apple Danish; it tasted like real apple rather than like apple flavoring. Ironically this made the taste seem ersatz to me, on account of the fact that all my childhood the apple flavor I knew and loved took the form of fritters wrapped in plastic.