Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

And I felt sad, I felt a key change within me, and I involuntarily imagined myself zipping up a dark blue rain jacket — or was someone else zipping up that coat? — that I’d had as a child, and I said, in a dry and professional tone of voice: “She really hasn’t said anything to me of which the truth-value would be considered the most important quality—”

“And what,” she interrupted, “did you say to her about Tzvi Gal-Chen? What was that about?”

“Are you,” I asked, feeling like I’d realized something, “the reason Tzvi sent me such a cold reply?” Unexpected emotion lined my throat like a medicine. Just speaking Tzvi’s name to her had made my eyes water. “Are you working with him?”

Those questions definitively stoppered her rising irritation. That exhausted flower stared at me for seconds or minutes or years. Then she stood up from the bed and approached me. I scooted my chair back. She stepped again toward me. I rose from my chair and went and sat on the far end of the bed. Like eddy fronts we were, forming katabatic winds. She turned and again stepped toward me, and frowned gently at me, and then, her still standing, me still sitting, she moved her hand very, very slowly out toward my cheek — making me tremble — and I let her place her hand tenderly on my face and leave it there, which is what she did, and my face was level with her waist. I — well, I could see her beauty clearly for a moment, the beauty of her waist, at least, and it affected me, probably powerfully — I found myself whispering, as if a secret agent might be in the closet listening to us: “Can’t we work together? Maybe we can help each other? Except that I don’t know your story, I don’t know your background, which makes for an Initial Value Problem, which makes it difficult for me to trust you, just like it must be difficult for Tzvi to trust me. I can’t tell which errors of yours are intentional. It must be so exhausting for you to have to pretend all the time. I want you to feel that you don’t have to pretend with me anymore. Don’t worry yourself with pretending, because, listen, I already know you’re not Rema. I already know that.”

She moved her hand from my cheek to my forehead.

I wanted to press my face against her beautiful, beautiful waist.

She echoed, “I’m not Rema?”

I didn’t reply.

“Can we go back?” she asked. “When you said Tzvi and ‘cold reply,’ what did you mean?”

Though I was still thinking about her waist, by considering how the dent I made in the bed might look different from or the same as the one she had made, I cooled my urge to press myself against her. But I wasn’t — as much as I regretted prematurely disclosing my suspicions of her association with Tzvi Gal-Chen — thinking about the dent in the bed just in order to avoid answering.

“When you say,” the simulacrum said, soldiering very slowly into the quiet, “that I am not Rema, what do you mean? This is just an expression that I’m not familiar with?”

I said, “Cold reply is an expression, yes. Or really, a dead metaphor.” Rema and I had talked about that, about dead metaphors, about how, when her English was less good, she used to bring dead metaphors back to life by saying them incorrectly, by startling me with phrases like “chill down” for “chill out,” and “weird chicken” for “odd bird.” That had become less frequent, though.

“And I am not Rema? That also is a dead metaphor?”

“No,” I whispered, full of regrets. “When I say that I am saying exactly what I mean.”

“You are saying exactly what you mean?”

“Yes. What I mean.”

“Mean,” she repeated, mostly to herself, dropping her hand from my face.

I’d lost track, I realized, of that originally mysterious scent of bacon.

The simulacrum wrapped her arms around her own body, and then she sat down next to me, and it was ugly latticing in the bedspread between us, and her upper arm was again pressed into an unappealing shape.

“Tell me,” she said without looking at me, “how am I not like Rema?”

Somehow I wasn’t afraid of her; that was just a feeling I had. I sincerely wanted her to understand. Maybe I thought her errors could be useful to me. “For example,” I said, “she’s more emotional than you are. And more nervous.”

“What about,” she proffered, “when she had the ectopic pregnancy? She was very calm about that.”

“That’s true,” I said, refusing to be baited by drama. “But she also smells different from you.”

“But you smell different from you too.” “She smells like grass.”

“You smell like my mom’s shampoo today,” she tried to counter. “But I’m still here next to you.”

“And she’s indifferent to dogs. It’s hard to explain how strong a characteristic that is—”

“Those are the things that you love about her?” she said, raising her voice in impatient judgment. “Her smell, her nervousness, and her indifference to dogs?”

“Love is a separate issue,” I clarified. “I’m just telling you something of who she is. I don’t even know why I’m telling you.” I’d felt, briefly, tenderly toward her, but now she’d begun to irritate me. “You probably can’t understand.”

“It must seem so strange to you,” she said darkly, mockingly, and flushing red, and without compassion, “that I know so much about her, that I look so much like her, but then you don’t love me—”

“Don’t do this,” I said shortly. “Don’t get emotional.”

The blue beneath her eyes had grown even duskier. Then she started — all of a sudden — to cry, and not even as if just to disobey me. But I don’t know if I’d call her cry a sad cry. And really I suppose one might even call it a sob, but more of a distressed sob than a devastated one. And in between heaves I think she eked out something to me like: “I know all these little things about you, like I know how you sit with a half a watermelon and a spoon and eat the whole thing, and that you read magazines while you brush your teeth, and that you throw away socks for no reason at all, when they’re still perfectly fine. That you never seem to really like anyone, except sometimes me. And I know how much you loved that photo of Tzvi’s family, how much time you spent looking at it, and talking about it, so much so that it made me uncomfortable and I had to take it down, and I like to think that all this knowledge I have of you, that it means something—”

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked, unaffected by her little show. “I’m so sleepy. Are we expected to sleep in this same room tonight, together?”

“You don’t make any sense,” she said, still sobbing. “It’s you. It’s you who’s not yourself.”

I should explain about the renewal of contact between Dr. GalChen and myself.

We, the simulacrum and I, did share a narrow bed that night together in Magda’s home, but the simulacrum did not permit the dog, whose napping company I had grown accustomed to, to join us. She, the simulacrum, wore Rema’s green nightie boxers and an undershirt of mine; I was fully dressed save socks and shoes. Sleep did not visit me, but stray strands of the simulacrum’s hair gave me the continual illusion of fleas mutely festivaling on my body. And the way the simulacrum’s sleeping fingers searched for the water bowl of my clavicle gave me the feeling of Rema. And the way her knee sought the thick slough of my thighs. And her foot the freedom of the edge of the bed. And though the simulacrum seemed to be in a paralysis of REM sleep, my body, as when it is near Rema, waited nervously for the slightest regularly repeated movement, for the slightest seemingly unrandom touch. I didn’t like that tense waiting feeling. She slept like one exhausted; I slept not at all.