Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“You can’t be nice to Magda only when it’s convenient for you,” I said to her. “And it’s not right to treat people as interchangeable, to replace one for another however and whenever makes you feel okay—” I don’t know why I was saying all those things. I definitely wasn’t thinking about my own behavior with other women. But as I said those random things, I was pushing that woman away from me — which was easy because she’s smaller than me — and I turned to head into the home, and I think the simulacrum started shouting at me. But I am the kind of man who treats mothers very well. I wasn’t going to pretend that I hadn’t heard Magda calling to us. I don’t know if I believe that our relationships with our parents establish patterns we are doomed to repeat and repeat but — I am surprised that I was not more anxious about marrying a woman who very well may have just abandoned her parents. For all I knew Rema had misrepresented and cheaply blamed this beautiful mother whose only fault may have been accurately perceiving the ugly truth — even with little information — about the rude American whom Rema had chosen to marry before she had chosen to marry me. I should at least have learned more about how it had come to be that Rema had abandoned her mother, before I asked her to marry — and hopefully not abandon — me. But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon, and actually I’m glad love does that, I shouldn’t complain about love, or love’s perspective — distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing.

Whoever the caller was had hung up, not waiting for the simulacrum to reach the phone’s cradle. In the kitchen, Magda shruggingly informed us of this, and then the three of us just remained there, leaning against the kitchen counter, with nothing to say. Killer slurpled at her water bowl, then lay down, head between paws. She raised her gaze to us humans; we were in a row; I was in the middle.

“She’s with a friend,” the simulacrum said suddenly but without looking at anyone. “If you’re wondering where the dog is. I left her with a friend from work.”

“A dog,” Magda echoed.

“Friend from work,” I repeated.

Then another bruisy quiet, in which I felt my feet swelling, my ears growing, my vertebrae pressing down upon the cartilaginous disks betwixt and between, myself growing just shorter enough, just slow enough, to invoke a vaguest unsettlement, of everything, the whole world, looking a little bit off, a little too large.

“All for whores?” Magda erupted cheerily.

Turning toward the simulacrum as if I kind of knew her — and I did kind of know her, we had spent a couple of rather intense days together — I whispered, “Whores?”

“And Nescafé?” Magda added to my back.

“Alpha,” the simulacrum enunciated to me — I watched her lips — in a cold, dry voice. “Alpha. Whore. Rays.”

Was this a meteorological term? A military code?

Magda pulled down a package of cookies. She set to boil the teakettle, whose sound I had already, so quickly, become familiar with, although it was an electric teakettle, so instead of a certain trembling there’s a more cavernous gentle rumbling sound, and one waits expectantly for the understated click that means the thermostat has been thrown and the water is boiled, though electric-teakettled water is never hot enough for me, never as hot as from boiling on the stove, though I know that it’s impossible that it’s not hot enough, I know that all boiled water should be, barring major atmospheric differences, equally hot.

“Go sit in the living room,” Magda said, shooing us off like children. “I’ll bring.”

We didn’t go. Were we both listening to that sound?

Killer rose to her paws and loped out.

“El es mi esposo,” the simulacrum burst out in Spanish with a nervous laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. “Esposo” meaning “handcuff.” But also “husband.” Which is, I assume, what she meant.

“Who is?” Magda asked.

With a head tilt, the simulacrum indicated me. But she did not look at or touch me. The real Rema: having kept a secret from her mother for so many years, she wouldn’t have hastily disclosed it so gracelessly.

“Him?” Magda said. “This man?” she added, pointing, as if I were just a statue. “Your lover I thought maybe he was.”

“No,” the simulacrum de-affirmed. “Not my lover. My husband.”

“Those terms,” I said in English. “They’re nonexclusionary. They overlap. Often substantially.”

The teakettle clicked gently. No one moved. Magda said, “It is like I am not hearing well?”

What surprised me during all of this was that Magda — and at this thought I couldn’t help but picture her uterus — showed no signs of suspicion toward this false child, this woman whom she had never borne. I had overestimated Magda’s ability to account for the redshift of her own desires, to account for Dopplerganger effect. I had miscalculated the internal error of the other observer I was observing; I should have known that a mother who has not seen her daughter for years, who so desperately wants to see her, well, one could put Kim Novak in front of her and she would likely “recognize” her as her daughter, and it would all feel very right, and very profound, when really all that was being recognized would be a sense of recognition unhinged from its source, a misinterpretation of data, a forcing of facts into a model they didn’t match. “I don’t understand,” Magda continued as if I weren’t there. “Are you saying that you are married to the meteorologist?”

And I–I thought of a fork tine vanishing into lentils.

“Meteorologist?” the simulacrum echoed.

“What happened to the psychoanalyst?” Magda asked.

I was craving — craving instant coffee.

“Are you talking about Tzvi Gal-Chen?” the simulacrum said to Magda, alarmed. And then the simulacrum actually turned to me, looked at me, took hold of my wrist — and that made all the vastly spaced particles of me seem to crowd together — and she loud-whispered at me: “You told her about Tzvi Gal-Chen?”

“Of course I didn’t tell her about Tzvi Gal-Chen,” I murmured in a tense voice that, when it returned to my ears, sounded too high-pitched.

“What,” Magda asked, “is chewy galleon?”

“I’m absolutely not in contact with him,” I announced firmly to nobody.

More noncommunicative communication went on. To be honest I could no longer really listen, my head filling with the fluttering as if of a thousand mothers, or moths, emerging from an old winter coat not pulled out of a closet for years; I began to think of stepping out to return, again, for the nth time, to the coffee shop, where I could have a properly hot coffee and some cookies and a look at the pretty waitress. But I did not leave. “Doesn’t she look strange to you?” I said, finally breaking into the blue, or really white, noise and speaking directly to Magda and only to Magda and not feeling bad about turning my back on that other woman.

“No,” Magda said, reaching her hand past me, toward that woman. “I like the hair, Rema.” I found myself imprisoned behind Magda’s arm. “The color — it’s more natural than your natural color.”

The simulacrum flinched, as if it were winter and sparks had flown between them. But it wasn’t winter, not there, anyway; it was warm outside, and there was a real chance that someone was going to cry, or snap, that was the feeling I had, and that sort of thing takes up so much space in a room that I thought that I should leave instead of suffocate, but I didn’t know how to exit gracefully — leaving in the middle of a movie is an offense to the director, though I’m not sure, analogously, who was the director I was worried about offending — but then, thank God, or at least thanks to the most powerful institution of which I know, my phone rang, after which point the rudeness of staying surely outweighed the rudeness of stepping out, so I ducked under Magda’s arm and headed out the front door.