Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

She was giggling during my little improvised analogy. “You’ve been really sweet,” she said. She sounded very attractive. “I already feel a little better. You’re funny,” she added.

Then there was a silence. Was I supposed to cry too? Then she broke into the silence, as if with the sudden opening of a faucet, and said: “Listen, I think we’re done with this call. Did you say you had a different contact number now? Let me just get that from you and when the regular person returns, the real person, they’ll get back to you.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Lola.”

I gave Lola my number.

She went on, “I really think there’s not that many people able to go to Patagonia on such short notice. Apparently the person who was originally supposed to take the position dropped out at the last minute, so it’s a bit of a scramble. So I think you have a real chance of getting the job. But listen, I’d really suggest that you don’t keep calling. Some of the staff here are really petty and irritable, and that’ll get used against you; I’ve even seen them purposely put CVs in the wrong pile, just to get them lost — well, listen, bye sweets,” she said finally.

I thanked her for her advice and hung up in a haze of inexplicable happiness and confusion.

Progress may not lie, I told myself, where I might think it would lie. And this made me think of swapping beds, of Baudelaire’s point about life being a hospital in which every patient is possessed of the desire to change beds. Not that I was actually ill, or swapping women, or projecting feelings from one space to another, or harboring unrealizable desires — just that the conversation with Lola had unsettled me. Our phone call seemed like the most substantial advance I’d had yet toward the goal of finding Rema. The waitress, the simulacrum on the phone, even Rema’s mother — they gave the feel of closeness, but this was clearly much more promising.

I went for a walk, in order to think, to pass the time, to not be alone, to not notice that Magda was still not home; even Killer was not at home. I dodged dog deposits on the sidewalk, was barked at ferociously by a rottweiler behind bars, was approached with love and trust by two skinny beaglish mixes. Then, not having noticed that I’d returned to right across the street from Magda’s home, I saw: congregated, more than a dozen large dogs, all on leashes, connected to an unsettlingly pacific man who was leaning against a wall, smoking.

The dogs: relatively large, vibrant, healthy-looking. None like the miniature greyhound that the double had toted home.

But packs of dogs make me — this truly is entirely normal — very nervous. My feet stopped advancing.

The dog man nodded at me.

I echo nodded.

Then he called across to me, “The sin is yours, huh?”

I did not answer or nod but only looked at him amidst his pack of curs. I hadn’t been flirting with Lola. Or the waitress.

“La señora,” he said, now louder, and emphasizing the second syllable of señora, “no está?”

Magda’s dog, the greyhound Killer: I spotted her among the mob.

Would you believe that I then looked up and immediately saw Sirius, the Dog Star, which appears to be one star but is in fact actually two, or possibly even three?

Then a woman’s voice — it proved to be Magda’s — on the other side of the street, nearing the beasts. She kissed the dog man on each cheek, then beckoned me over, as if not to a dangerous den, so what could I — if I was to maintain decorum — do except cross the street and join the humans and animals?

“I present you my friend,” Magda said in English, pronouncing “present” so that it meant gift, and then giggling.

I bravely extended my hand out over the dogs, toward the dog man, who instead of taking my hand grabbed hold of the back of my neck and pulled me forward, and I nearly fell, save for his having hold of me like a wolf’s grip on its cub. I felt his plump towelly lips press against my cheek. I was in an awkward tilt position — suspended out over that pack of dogs that I imagined looking up at me — and upon my return from the greeting I again almost fell over.

Which returned me mentally to: why so many dogs in my life all of the sudden?

“Dogs are not your dear friends,” the man said to me.

“No, I love dogs,” I said. “I really love them. Some of them. The gentle ones.”

Magda and the dog man laughed. I thought of the vein on the night nurse’s forehead. Amidst the unpleasant moment, I realized that I’d never had to deal with living in a community full of men who might possibly in the past have kissed Rema. At least, I didn’t think that back home I had to be concerned, since Rema had been in the country only a number of months when I met her, since I’d never seen her, during all those months of just looking at her, with anyone else. Though I had at one time wondered if she was trying to avoid someone that first night when she couldn’t decide where we’d have pizza.

I don’t know why I thought she might have kissed, or loved, this oversized man with the dogs. He was hairy handed, much more so than me. When he spoke something more to me, in Spanish, I wasn’t sure what he said, and so in response I just smiled. I guess one might say he was ruggedly handsome.

“Very, very nice to meet you,” I said, then went inside the house. Alone there, I reexamined the gallery of Rema photos, and indeed, as I reconfirmed, Rema was standing next to a man in absolutely none of them. But there was a photo of Magda with a man. Just one, a wedding photo. Maybe this was Rema’s father; maybe not. I really had no idea.

Very late that evening, I came across Magda in the living room. She was wearing a full-length, high-necked Victorian nightgown that was somehow immodest in its extreme modesty. “He’s also an analyst,” she said to me as I held my gaze down at the delicate eyelet of her hem. “He walks dogs only because nobody can pay for analysis anymore. He lets his patients pay just symbolically.”

Which sounded dirty. And why could so many people pay to have their dogs walked while so few could pay for analysis? The long nightgown, the high incidence of analysts, the apparent manlessness of Magda’s life — I found it all rather suspicious. And yet I could not cast out the ludicro-banal hypothesis that that man — whatever his name and economic status were — was an earlier object of attraction for Rema and that I might be — for her — a mere reverberance of him. Why? Just because we were both kind of hairy?

This is irrelevant to your investigation , one parliament member of me said to another.

I raised my gaze to Magda’s still eyelinered eyes. “How long have you known that man who walks the dogs?”

“The analyst?” she said. “Since forever. His practice is unusual,” and I was again suddenly anxious that she was going to talk about sex. “He works mostly with relatives of the disappeared. You should understand that he’s very, very respected. He only walks the dogs now in order to be able to continue seeing his patients. And because he loves dogs. He really does,” she added, as if to emphasize his moral superiority over me.

“Yes? Does he especially like—” but I didn’t know the Spanish word for greyhound. Maybe it was just “greyhound.” “Well, is there a special kind of dog that he loves especially?”

“Is there a kind of dog that you love especially?” she answered, stretching out her hands, catpaw-like, on the surface of her gown, over what I deduced was her midthigh.

But I really hate mirroring; I especially abhor the notion that whatever I say is secretly about me. So I didn’t answer her, pawing there at her gown.