Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

The cheapest of noir moves. Against my will, my ears filled with heat. As if she were some KGB blonde, distracting me while a spy, an agent, an assassin, stealthed out of a closet, a window, a gate. Or while my contact, my rescuer — quite possibly Tzvi — faded away. “Do you feel like there are other people in this house?” I heard myself whispering as I thought about what Tzvi might or might not know, about what important message might lie hidden in his research papers, translated into science, awaiting interpretation. “Or ghosts in this house?”

I believe she frowned at me.

“But of course you are very pretty,” I said as a kind of consolation for what she’d earlier said. “But isn’t it so strange that I had never met my Rema’s mother before? That she didn’t even seem to know I existed? Doesn’t knowing — or not knowing — something about Rema at her initial value — about who she once was — doesn’t that mean that all my predictions about what she’s doing and what she will do and what she might do and what she absolutely will do and what she absolutely will never ever do — doesn’t it seem like my predictions will inevitably be shot through with enormous errors? On account of the Initial Value Problem? I mean, we can’t predict tomorrow’s weather accurately if we have the wrong ideas about what the weather actually is right now. That’s what Tzvi Gal-Chen says. I mean, it’s almost as if I’ve married a stranger, if I think about it that way. Like if we think that it’s one temperature just because it feels that way but actually it’s really some other—”

Something like that I was saying, just saying whatever I thought the impostress might have expected me to say, nothing real, just filling up some space as if with a distracting puff of colored smoke, so that I could go back to messaging with Tzvi, but then the simulacrum moved her warm front of a body closer to me, whispering, further occluding the small amount of light between us. “Please,” she said. “When I see you asleep I feel like we are the two happiest people in the world. I’m so happy when we’re asleep together. Let’s just sleep and see what comes to mind when we wake up tomorrow morning.” She wiped tears from her eyes. The tears had arrived so slowly.

“Do you love me very much tonight?” I found myself saying.

“Why are you asking me this old, old question?” she sniffed. “Of course I love you. Even when I don’t want to.”

By then my ears felt more than hot, they felt painfully engorged. “Let’s find the dog,” I said. “Let’s bring the dog to bed.”

“No dog. I think she is sleeping with my mother. Just come to bed.”

My screen, half Tzvi-corresponded, fell darkly asleep again; I tapped it to bring it back to life. “Please let’s bring the dog,” I almost begged, seeing again an image not of the simulacrum in front of me, but of the simulacrum as she had been earlier, entangled in bed with me.

“You’ll stay with me tomorrow?” she pleaded.

It would be ridiculously unwise of me, I conceded to myself, to try to continue my conversation with Tzvi under the simulacrum’s surveillance. “I’ll stay with you tomorrow,” I said, “if you let the dog sleep with us tonight.”

And we eventually reached just such an accord. She, Killer, slept intercalated between us. She breathed hotly on my thigh.

But don’t be distracted by my distress, by the simulacrum’s distress, or by the dog’s eventual sleeping position. The real point is that Tzvi Gal-Chen:

who had first been (to me) just an oddly appealing name

who had then become (for Rema and me) the unknowing centerpiece of the successful management of a delusional patient

who furthermore (for Rema and me) rapidly developed into a relationship touchstone

whom I’d regularly imagined taking leftovers from our refrigerator

whose research proved to be my first substantial clue regarding Rema’s disappearance

who then later materialized as Harvey’s correspondent

but who, when I sought him out myself, had tersely retreated

and who apparently no longer even numbered among the living

:yes perhaps, from certain perspectives, the real point of this entire project is that Tzvi Gal-Chen, in my proverbially darkest hour, he had, in his fashion, returned to me.

Before proceeding to a description of the more metaphysically extravagant discoveries I made in Patagonia, I’d like to openly engage my own worries, my own oscillating concern, for my, to put it in colloquial speech, sanity. Since naturally, from the beginning of this unwanted adventure of mine, I had borne such an anxiety. I had thought through continually, and rather extensively, the likelihood that I could attribute my perceptions to illness, to psychosis even. But over time I came to the fairly firm — and immensely dispiriting — conclusion that I could not. My thinking ran thusly:

Our vision involves — and one can produce myriad proofs of this — an interpretive leap. Consider the visual phenomenon of “completion” (that is what Tzvi’s work does; it completes incomplete single-Doppler radar images), which sometimes leads to what is called “completion error” (which is what Tzvi’s work attempts to avoid). I offer the following image from an old sign to illustrate the concept of completion and completion error. The sign reads:

Music lovers tend to see:

While others tend to see:

The basic point — which can also be illustrated by considering the phenomenon of the blind spot — is that with any incomplete perception — and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete — the observer “fills in” by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire’s other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see. By what, in other words, already exists in our mind, what we already have available on file, however dusty the folder.

For example, when a person dies and we then repeatedly mistake strangers for that now-gone person, we are experiencing “completion error.” We catch a few details of some far-off figure — a broad forehead, a certain slouch, some characteristic stubble — and our aforementioned wants, fears, and expectations fill in the gaps to make a familiar whole, a whole that is a decent but flawed interpretive leap based on the fragments. And it generally doesn’t matter that this reconstituted “whole” is incorrect. We discover our errors soon enough, as the stranger draws nearer, becoming who he actually is rather than who we thought he might be. (How strange but reassuring that when the impostress entered my home that first time, that even when I saw her from a distance — there at the door, with that wet hair, and that pale blue bag, and that russet puppy — even far away like that, when I could have easily, and even from fatigue, filled in all the missing details appropriately — even then I knew she wasn’t Rema.)

But we can do more than recognize our errors of interpretation; we can examine those errors as clues to the contents of — the preoccupations and desires of — our own minds.