Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Who, I thought at one restless point, sleeps with Tzvi Gal-Chen? It was the first note of a discordant thought orchestra tuning up within me. Was the simulacrum, I wondered, in some parallel world, really Tzvi’s wife? In some worlds Tzvi was married to the doppelganger, in other worlds to other women?

She had a hand on my hip.

Or: was it possible that it wasn’t the double who was Tzvi’s wife, that maybe the marriage I was perceiving wasn’t one in a parallel world, but in this very world in which I lay in bed with the doppelganger, and it was my Rema who was, or once had been, the wife of Tzvi Gal-Chen? But surely that was just my own mental shuffling; Rema probably had not been married to anyone else, and even if she had been married, it wasn’t to a meteorologist.

The simulacrum’s hand did not move, as if it were a mannequin’s.

Still, maybe Tzvi — and not the night nurse, and not the analyst/dog walker, and not someone named Anatole — was the real unturned stone in the submystery of Rema’s previous husband. And thus, by ripple, the central mystery of everything. Maybe he and Rema were involved with each other in some way.

Although Tzvi was probably — I thought then, before the category seemed obsolete — even older than me.

But maybe all that meant was that Rema loved him, might still love him, more than she loved me?

As the simulacrum sleep sighed, her whole thorax centimetered out against me — then receded.

And who was that in the photo alongside Tzvi Gal-Chen, with the creamy elbow crook? Wasn’t she his wife for all time? And did he and she — the woman in the photo — love each other? Then? Now? And was his wife in any way, through some strange exchange, mine? And though Magda had let on that Rema’s previous husband — or still current one? — was not a meteorologist, who was the meteorologist Magda had met who had led her to pass such hasty good judgment on me when I presented myself as a meteorologist?

The simulacrum’s right hand lost tone, slipped off me. In a kind of inebriation of sleepiness, my mind just kept swapping and interswapping, this person for that, and that person for this, like some hapless turn-of-the-century dream interpreter. And although nothing in the cacophonous score of my thoughts made strict sense, one thing did seem obvious: my mystery converged upon the point of Tzvi Gal-Chen.

So I unlimbed myself of the simulacrum, grabbed my handheld, blindly padded my way out to the living room. The perhaps misguided action that I then took later revealed itself, I would argue, as the unexpectedly right step, if the right step executed for the wrong reasons, which when I think about it suggests that maybe my reasons were merely wearing masks and hosiery, that, undressed, they were likely the right reasons all along.

Despite having sent Dr. Gal-Chen that e-mail to which he had responded quite coldly, despite having more or less resolved never to communicate with him again, well: there alone in the not quite dark of Rema’s childhood house, amidst the drunken sensuality of all that unseen velvet in the unlit living room, amidst the painful reminder of a Rema in bed with me without there actually being a Rema in bed with me, I found myself able to forget my and Tzvi’s awkward exchange. Able to forget it and yet remember that I should not pursue any questions directly, that in seeking help from Tzvi I would have to approach from an angle. Because when I had asked directly after Rema’s disappearance, asked directly about the 49 Quantum — that had made him nervous, that had made him uncomfortable. But maybe by talking about some seemingly irrelevant third thing, through a kind of misdirection, then we — the both of us — would be liberated to speak openly and truthfully — like getting a patient to loosen up, and reveal, by asking him to talk about his spouse, or mother, or favorite food, rather than about himself. Or, as in retrievals done by a single-Doppler radar system, one looks at a volume of air from an angle, then accounts for that extra distortion, so as to better deduce what’s actually there if one could see it head-on, but one can’t, because then one loses all dimensionality. Like that.

So I began composing a note asking how windchill is calculated.

As I typed, my BlackBerry’s glow filled the room with a palest blue light.

Is windchill analogous to Doppler effect , I philosophized in a feeble attempt to sound atmospherically savvy, but applied to the movement of heat rather than of light or sound? I thought about making a further analogy, to movements in human relationships, say, to interpersonal coldnesses that feel much colder than they actually are. But then I decided that might be too much, that might feel intrusive.

How windchill is calculated obviously wasn’t precisely what I most wanted to learn from Tzvi — what I most wanted to learn was what I had written in my earlier missive, whether he knew the whereabouts of Rema, and how to get her back — but I was, nevertheless, inquiring about windchill sincerely because I had indeed often wondered about windchill. It is one temperature, but it feels like another — how does one objectively measure something subjective? I think and thought it a cute question, a cute problem. One answered differently, I imagine, in every field. Do you love me more or less today? I used to ask Rema.

Before actually sending the note, I hesitated a moment. I was worried about seeming abnormal. But I reassured myself that windchill was an extraordinarily normal thing to ask Tzvi about. After all, I argued to myself, Tzvi is a meteorologist, a real meteorologist, and how many times in one’s life does one have a direct line of communication with a real meteorologist?

I thought about New York 1 news.

I sent the inquiry.

Then I reclined, alone, on that velvety sofa.

Where was the dog sleeping? I wondered.

Unwillingly I pictured the simulacrum’s sleeping position, her foot over an edge.

The screen on my BlackBerry self-dimmed, and the whole room went inky-black.

Then blue suffused the room again.

“Windchill research got its beginnings in the US military during WWII,” began Tzvi’s response, which arrived so quickly that it was as if he’d been waiting there for me to contact him all that time, like a spurned lover waiting for any sign of reconciliation. “But the National Weather Service didn’t share the information with the public until the 1970s.” He included a link to a Web page that offered a brief explanatory treatise about the history of windchill research. “Nice that you’re interested,” he wrote. He made no reference to his rude earlier missive. He even signed off his note “Love, Tzvi.”

What was he — or she? I wondered during the one ludicrous moment I again thought I might be communicating with Rema, who had, after all, posed as Tzvi Gal-Chen many times — inviting me to deduce? And why use that word “love”? Why bring up war? And the 1970s? And why the secrecy around windchill research? How was I meant to understand what he had said? How was I meant to respond?

I began searching the Internet on my handheld in order to do something I had long avoided doing, avoided perhaps because part of me had always felt that I was in some way wronging this stranger whose identity I had co-opted. I sought to learn some biographical, geographical, orthographical, political, diacritical, pathological, and/or other details about the real Tzvi Gal-Chen. Or Galchen. Or Gal Chen.

I found Russian jugglers known as the Galchenko brothers.

I found a Scottish rock band, named Galchen, reviewed on a Web page devoted to “Great bands with absolutely terrible names.”