Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“You know exactly where I am, and you leave, and then you act like I’m the difficult one to locate,” she said in an attempt to make, I have to believe, a frame-of-reference argument. But the frames of reference — they were obviously moving.

I was determined to remain analytical, to not be emotionally intimidated by the simulacrum’s posturing as Rema. That would have been a bad kind of transference. “Please clarify? Where are you precisely?”

“It’s crazy,” she said, still crying, “and mean, to just disappear from me—”

But nothing and nobody just disappears. Not actually. Unless mass gets converted entirely into energy. But that doesn’t really apply here, to people, basically never. (And especially an Argentine, it struck me, wouldn’t use the word “disappear” so imprecisely; it would be like an American hosting a picnic on September 11.) So I think it must have been the silliness of the word “disappear,” its rigged smokebox sentiment, that irritated me. Yes the silliness and also the wrongness. Wrong because generally people just leave. Or are taken. They only appear to have disappeared.

“If anyone has disappeared,” I articulated into that telephone as I idly turned over a pamphlet proclaiming my presence in authentic Patagonia! , “it’s not me. And if Rema has disappeared, if that is the correct way to understand this situation, and it seems increasingly likely that that is so, then it seems entirely possible that you’re at least partially, if not wholly, implicated in all this. Tzvi thinks so, anyway. And by the way, Rema would have had a much better handle on this situation, she would have been in control, she never would have let me go—” at which point the woman interjected with some protest and tried to list memories that “proved” who she was — she even mentioned those oversized dogs from our walk in the Austrian Alps — but I soldiered on. “Just because you can deceive Magda, who hasn’t seen Rema in years, and who sees whatever she wants to see, that doesn’t mean you can count the sheep being pulled over my eyes—” And at the moment of speaking that mixed metaphor, an undeniably accurate image of the real Rema came to me, a sense of her body next to mine in bed, her arm around my waist, one of her knees beneath my own, her breath at my neck. Briefly, very briefly, Tzvi vanished from my thoughts, blotted out by Rema entirely. Or rather, by the painful absence of Rema. I said, “I’ve met complete strangers who remind me more of Rema than you do. You, you’re really no good at what you do at all. What you don’t understand is that this is a really close and intimate relationship, husband and wife. You’re trying to be the woman who essentially saved my life, who made me feel like I really existed, the stuff of metaphysical poems, of all kinds of poems, we’re talking about the first-prepare-you-to-be-sorry-that-you-never-knew-till-now-either-whom-to-love-or-how, that kind of love. I sent that to her once. You can’t fool me. You don’t seem to understand pretty close is not nearly close enough. It’s nothing. It’s not even a cigarette.”

But perhaps it was a tad mean of me to say you’re really no good at what you do at all . That was a bit much. After all, what did I really know about what it was that the double “did”? Impersonation wasn’t necessarily her ultimate goal.

But about it not being Rema on the other end of that phone — about that I was definitely right. So I told myself as I stepped closer to the false hearth (gas and nonburning log sculptures) to warm myself. Wouldn’t Rema on the phone have kept on crying? This woman had dried right up. So I hung up the telephone, not listening to whatever it was the double was saying to me, probably just listing more memories. I walked away from the warmth, felt something like dew forming on my eyebrows as I walked past the check-in desk and around a corner and to a cowboy-labeled restroom to run my hands under the hot water — which I believe I explained before is a very normal thing that I do — but it didn’t get hot right away, and I waited for a while, and then remembered that it was the C tap that would be hot, C for “caliente,” and I just felt so frustrated by the inane problems of even the simplest of translations. I just wanted to go back in time, to be home in Rema’s and my apartment back before we’d ever invented (or discovered or whatever we’d done) Tzvi Gal-Chen. I just wanted everything to return to how it had been before, even if that just meant Rema pouting on the sofa, reading a newspaper in a language I couldn’t understand and being irritated with me for reasons unclear. Had Rema treated her previous husband better than she had treated me? And how had he treated her? How had I treated her? What nicknames did they have for each other? What language did they speak to each other? Maybe I didn’t want to know any of those details. I was searching for Rema but I just wanted to find her, not find out too much else, not find out anything that I didn’t absolutely have to know; about Tzvi I was open to discovering anything — his possible death had made that clear — but about Rema, not so much. (That was a little discovery I guess, discovering there were things I didn’t want to discover.) I didn’t want to think that her other husband, whoever he was, might somehow lie behind the circumstances of my strange new world. I didn’t want to think that I might be wearing that other man’s clothing. I didn’t want to wonder if he and Rema had had sex in unusual positions, or with unusual objects. I didn’t want to think about any men in Rema’s life, actually, or any sex either. And in fact it was good that I so entirely succeeded in blocking those thoughts from my mind. And that I was somewhere cold, which keeps thoughts from associating so easily. Because in the end — or the state near the end, where I am now, ever approaching — they, those thoughts, could hardly have proved themselves more irrelevant.

I washed my face with hot water too.

That conversation. It had laid down the absolutely wrong analytical tracks that my mind then kept running and rerunning over; so in an effort to derail the derailment — and thus clear my mind for rerailing — I voyaged into the cold. Walking that ersatz little tourist town, looking out at the pale blue finnings of the glaciers, feeling my skin desiccated by wind, feeling unreasonable jealousy of bickering families, I thought about Rema’s old remark about Patagonia being considered the wild, uncultivated unconscious of Argentina. Well, I thought, if so, it was a tidy, brisk, unscented Lego-land of an unconscious. At least this corner of it. With clean glaciers, excellent signage and safety precautions, and full up with false gauchos offering pricey horseback-riding tours. Some unconscious. Although maybe that’s what the “wilderness” of our minds looks like, maybe humans really are that dull and predictable.

My meteorologic labor wasn’t scheduled to start until Monday —that might bring me out into the real atmospheric unconscious — but until then, frankly, I didn’t know what I was meant to do to bring myself closer to Rema. When it began to rain lightly, I took that as a sign to return to my hotel.

Picking up an evening newspaper in the lobby, I began to read an article about chimp-human hybridization. That sort of thing (kind of) is on my mind often. Because whenever I feel sad, the sad feeling tends to manifest in my seeing humans (myself included) as orangutans. A human ordering coffee, a human offended when someone cuts in line, a human sprinting to refill a parking meter — in my moods, all those people are orangutans. And this feeling doesn’t make more real the secret emotional lives of orangutans — that would be one option. Instead it makes all the humans (with their loves, their hates, their haircuts, their beloved unconsciouses) seem sublimely ridiculous. Normal life, absurd. She loves you — who cares? She left you — so what? Scratch your armpit with your long, long arm and continue on, or not. The orangutan thing: it’s just a feeling, not a rigorous thought at all. But still. Anyway, between that hybridization article and an article on legislation requiring the sale of larger-sized clothing in girls’ boutiques, just as I was beginning to successfully forget about that phone conversation, I saw Harvey.