Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

I felt nauseous reading those memorials, almost all of them accompanied by those hazy now kitsch photos that seemed like material downtown kids iron onto T-shirts. Why nauseous instead of, say, sad? some analyst sap might ask me, and yes of course sad I suppose, but that’s a separate question. I felt sick, I felt an incipient migraine, and that is the main thing I’m trying to say. That, and maybe society should more seriously consider the coping mechanism of not talking about loss, at least not publicly; a highly superior coping mechanism, I would argue, is to cathart over the sufferings of fictional creations. I realize that in these views I am deeply heretical within my field, but considering the company that makes up my field, I feel no shame in distinguishing myself.

I hear other voices, maybe some of them my own, pointing out the Orwellian nature of Silence Is Health. But I respond with: well, let’s not aphorize. Maybe politically, yes, nations should remember, the world should remember. But the individual sufferers should not have to. Let the sufferers run. They have a good chance of dying before any grief catches up to them. Myself for example: if Rema had, say, died rather than just disappeared, well, I wouldn’t be turning over in my head the problem of such unresolvable pain. Mysteries that can’t be solved should be passed over in silence, or something like that. If Rema had died I would just not think about her at all — or at least that’s the advice I would give myself. What I face now, Rema’s absence, borders on the unfathomable, but it’s not actually unfathomable, not actually without hope of solution, and that is why I allow myself to think about it, because there’s hope.

So: I was sitting across from Magda, dressed in a pointy-collared pale green button-up ’70s shirt she had lent me, reading that newspaper, with its classified ads and memorials. I ate two, then three medialunas and drank too quickly, and then had to suppress burps. Just as I was about to ask Magda about the memorials, about whether they were “normal,” or commonly seen, I noticed she was fixated on the cuff of the shirt that I had on, and this somehow made me realize that I didn’t want to be the kind of person interested in asking the kind of question I was about to ask. I had other, more personally pressing, questions that I wasn’t asking.

I opened my mouth.

Then my BlackBerry — set there on the table beside me — trembled.

Magda held a hand up to her heart, as if she’d been given a fright, as if a real alarm had sounded.

“It’s not Rema,” I said suddenly, perhaps brusquely, I don’t know why.

“Oh, no, of course not,” she said, and “please,” she added, gesturing toward my retrembling BlackBerry. “Be at home.”

It was just an e-mail marked “urgent;” I’ve programmed these to ring even when my ringer is off because I usually receive such notes only when an outpatient of mine has been admitted to the hospital.

Magda looked decidedly the other way; she took a cookie and dipped it into her tea with an expectant look, as if waiting to see if the cookie would crumble.

The urgent e-mail appeared to be from Harvey.

Dear Dr. Leo

,

I wrote to Dr. Gal-Chen of my progress against the 49

.

I have not yet heard back from him

.

Have you heard from him? I have sent him three letters

.

I am in central Oklahoma and am unable to obtain a copy of the

New York Post.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory here was unprotected

.

Please pass on Dr. Gal-Chen’s phone number. It’s urgent

.

— Harvey

When I looked down at my hands, I saw newsprint smudged on the pads of my fingers. Touching the screen of my BlackBerry left a print. I shouldn’t have been surprised to notice, when I looked up and over at Magda, that she had on full makeup, even already then, first thing in the morning. There is something about a confident thick streak of eyeliner that makes a woman look very emotional. I could also detect Magda’s concealer, there under her eyes, shy about the fine wrinkles to which it clung. Her cheeks had a dramatic swath of blush that slightly sparkled, as if sifted with very fine grains of sand.

“Who was that?” Magda said.

“Did any of the disappeared ever reappear?” I then asked Magda, who ignored me for a moment, as if I were talking not to her but to my phone. “I’m sorry,” I said, probably because I thought that was what she should have said to me, for being rude to me. “I was just thinking about it on account of these memorials here in the newspaper.” I wasn’t going to tell her about Harvey. “I mean, those are memorials , yes? I was just curious if maybe there were people who had been believed to have been disappeared, but who had really just wandered off, maybe had gone crazy, or maybe had a bout of amnesia. And then maybe one day, maybe years later”—I was all about the maybes—“those people unexpectedly return. Or are found. I’ve heard of that happening, of mistakes like that. You know, I read recently, in another newspaper, that an unknown, unshowered vagrant had been found playing virtuosic Debussy in a church in a Scottish fishing village; I think the man spoke German; when asked his name he said he couldn’t remember; word spread and hundreds of people — literally hundreds — said they were certain they knew who he was, came to visit expecting to find their lost brother or child or friend—”

At which point I think she interrupted with something to the tired effect of: oh really? And I realized, heat rising to my face, that I had been going on and on. Still, I added:

“Someone might have been right. Someone might have found his, or her, missing man.”

Or I was saying something like that, trying to keep myself from staring at Magda’s emotional makeup and trying to distract her from any questions about the note I’d just received, seeing as I was even less ready than I’d been the day before to invent some story on the spur of the moment.

But: at least a mystery, if not the mystery, was beginning to reveal itself. Harvey was not dead; he was in Oklahoma.

There was a time when the belief was prevalent that all those who cared for the mentally ill became mentally ill, and at the arrival of Harvey’s message, that idea — infectiousness — stretched its cadaverous hand out from the past to touch my mind.

I had thought to contact Tzvi Gal-Chen.

And Harvey had actually contacted him, or at least had tried to.

But it wasn’t the same Tzvi Gal-Chen we were talking about. That’s why I was nothing like Harvey.

Magda gestured to my small, empty coffee cup, and I startled back into myself and gestured toward the object about which we were obviously not speaking, my BlackBerry.

“That was just a colleague of mine,” I said as casually as I could manage, nodding my head about the coffee, which she refilled for me. “Thank you.”

“She’s all right? Your colleague is all right?”

“He. It’s a he,” I said. “Yes. Yes, of course. Yes, he’s fine, more than fine.”

Magda sat down again, wrapped both hands around her own mug. Her hands — they were so much older than Rema’s — were thin and receded away from the knuckles.

“Yes, this colleague,” I began, trying to set Magda, or really myself, at ease. “He just likes to send me the most random notes, does it all the time,” I said with a little laugh; in truth it was the first e-mail Harvey had ever sent me. “I get the most wonderful e-mails from him all the time,” I said. In truth I have no friends, except for Rema, who send me wonderful e-mails; my e-mails are dully professional. “He’s such a lovely source of entertainment and happiness,” I continued, finally falsely elaborating to true excess.