Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“But that’s five days from now. Surely you can’t sit idle until then,” Harvey admonished, leaning then into an elbow-supported reclining position like the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t girl from those old Diet Pepsi commercials. Not unlike a common Rema pose. “What does Dr. Gal-Chen think you should do?”

Upon reflection I realized that Tzvi and I had spoken primarily of, well, poetry. And affairs of the heart. “I didn’t quite ask him,” I admitted. Curiously, Tzvi and I really hadn’t had the most pragmatic of exchanges. “We did discuss windchill research,” I proffered. “And its relation to war.”

“Maybe we should call Dr. Gal-Chen now?” Harvey suggested in a voice decidedly un-idle, even as he lay himself out more fully on the bed.

I made clear — very clear — that of late Tzvi and I had restricted our communications to e-mail only.

“If there’s been some sort of rift between the two of you, I believe I’m entitled to know about it.” This statement Harvey directed toward the ceiling. For a second I thought Harvey was speaking again of me and Rema, but of course he was speaking of me and Tzvi. “We can’t brook these kinds of interpersonal conflicts right now, Dr. Leo; what we’re up against is too serious.”

So I eventually consented to Harvey and I together contacting Tzvi via my BlackBerry. Much to my distress, Harvey started right up with his rapidly associating theories. One might have — I might have — thought Tzvi would have recoiled from Harvey’s borderline nonsensical ideas, but instead — although Tzvi countered with many emendations — the two of them typed back and forth warmly, with a kind of exuberance, and I was reminded of (1) watching Rema develop Harvey’s therapy, and (2) the absence of a brother I’d never had and whom I most likely would have hated having to compete with. But there they were. Within an hour, with minimal input from me, Tzvi and Harvey worked out that the Rema swapping most likely had been an early move to harvest chaos from our world to bring to a nearby one, that the dog was likely an essential determining agent, that the Patagonian crop-destroying winds — they weren’t after sheep, just fruit — would be deployed soon, but not earlier than my Monday meeting with the Royal Academy, and that nevertheless it was essential to understand this not as a minor skirmish but as a pivotal battle that might be the tipping point to the full determination of our — Harvey’s and my — world. At stake was the eradication of possibility. A fixed order loomed. If we lost, all would be set in proverbial stone. Time future as unredeemable as time past. No uncertainty. Rema still stranded.

“One thing I can’t understand,” I felt compelled to contribute, “is how you two can possibly know that nothing will happen before Monday.”

That really was the single detail that didn’t intuitively seem credible to me. Was I bothered by the parallel between Rema’s therapeutic invention and the reality Tzvi and Harvey’s communication seemed to support? No. I was buoyed by it and considered it a kind of verification by triangulation. What did intellectually shame me was the vivid realization that I had devalued the evidence of Tzvi’s death. I’d breezed right past it, had simply resigned myself to it. But if I was communicating with a dead man — it did seem I was — then the world was radically different from what I had thought. And if I did in fact want to be a true scientist, I should have done more than just accept what had previously seemed unacceptable; I should have followed that new truth out to its logical implications. Where was Tzvi communicating to us from if not from another world? And how was he in our world if not through a kind of intrusion? And if such intrusions were possible, wasn’t it obvious that there would be those who would capitalize on them? And, come to think of it, hadn’t I had feelings, experienced coincidences, my whole life through, that had the character of such intrusions — of otherworldly order that seemed to make no sense? Nonsensical dislikes. Nonsensical likes. Even falling in love with Rema. Even occasionally getting mad at Rema for no obvious reason. And what of her unpredictable flashes at me? Who hasn’t come across behaviors wholly resistant to interpretation — moods not reducible to serotonin or circumstance, Teflon actions that no theory sticks to — and such little unfathomables, wouldn’t it make the most sense to understand them as uncanny intrusions of order from other worlds? Weren’t Tzvi and the simulacrum both just such oddly familiar, not quite fathomable intrusions? And didn’t Harvey and Tzvi’s idea of an impending fixed order bear a strangely strong resemblance to the Eliot poem that talking to Tzvi had somehow seeded back into my mind? Why indeed had my ninth-grade teacher made us memorize that? Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden … / But to what purpose … / I do not know…/ Shall we follow?

“I have inside information,” Tzvi wrote, thus recalling me to the present. “Part of the brilliance of waging a war through weather is that the layperson doesn’t notice there’s a war going on at all. The layperson just shrugs his shoulders at the ‘randomness’ of it. Fortunately there was the dog this time,” Tzvi added. “The dog was a real misstep, no? Either a misstep or the dog is central to all of this and they had no choice about introducing her, conspicuous as she was.”

Harvey and Tzvi conferred about the possible “centers” of “this,” though in terms of plans — that had been the original goal of the conversation after all — Tzvi said that all he could think for us to do until Monday was to monitor the weather closely.

“That’s it?” I typed, on behalf of Harvey and me both.

“Frustrating, no?” Tzvi responded.

An interlude then. Of nothing.

“Who really,” I asked, as a shadowy hope had blossomed within me, “do you think this work of mine with the Royal Academy will be with?” If I had a pseudonym, maybe my direct employer — a supposed Hilda — had one as well.

Tzvi responded that he couldn’t quite say with whom. Then — and this surprised me — he asked again how I–I specifically, he did not include Harvey — had come across his work. Or rather, across him.

“My wife dreamt of you,” I wrote. I accepted the melodrama of declaring that. Accepted the melodrama because the statement was, in its way, and in other ways, true. As Tzvi’s research notes: add a little bit of white noise to the model, and a little bit of blue noise, and those carefully introduced errors will dramatically enhance the realism of the retrieved fields.

I left the bed to Harvey that night. “I feel so much safer,” he said, “now that we’re working together.” As for myself, I slept, deeply, on the floor.

Fresh snow the next morning made the light come in the window in a pink and quiet way, and in my dream, Rema was there; she licked a handkerchief and then wiped my cheek with it, near my mouth, where there was chocolate. When the room phone rang, this translated into a sensation that Rema, my real Rema, had left a teakettle boiling, and that we were in our apartment and that she was at her prettiest, and wearing pale yellow, looking like an afterimage of blue, and telling me something about Tzvi GalChen, about the shirt he had on in that photo we had (once had) on our refrigerator, and about how Tzvi was a member of the 49, but the 49 were not our enemies. I used to have a simple recurrent dream, almost embarrassingly simple, in which I’d walk into a room and a woman would be there and I’d say, where were you? I thought you were dead. And she would answer saying, oh, I’ve been just right here, you just didn’t look here, I think you didn’t want to look here, she’d say, a little bit pouty with her lower lip, maybe with her eyes wet. It’s like you didn’t miss me, she says.