Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Our food appeared.

Magda folded the wrinkled graph paper six or seven times, returned it to deep in her oversized purse. Then she looked at her sunny-side-up eggs that were looking at her. Then she glanced up from the eggs, and looked at me, and smiled.

I took a very tiny bite of my medialuna, to make things seem normal, even though I had no hunger. Then I asked casually, “Who told you to come down here?”

“I told you. Rema did.”

“Why didn’t Rema come see me herself?”

“What I said.” Magda took her fork in hand; she broke the yolk of her egg; she startled as it spilled over. “She’s stuck”—yolk rivuleting to the periphery—“over there. In Japan.”

Land of the rising sun , her yolk made me think she was going to say. Which brought to my mind an image of Faye Dunaway gripped in the hand of King Kong. But that was the wrong Faye, the wrong monster, and the wrong country underfoot. It was the wrong image entirely. “But then how did you hear from her?”

Magda set her fork down. She reached again toward her mug, now full of special wellness tea, brought it to her lips, but I don’t think she took a sip. “She visited me. Short time. Then she had to fly back.”

The absolute lack of resonance of the story Magda told me — this confirmed for me that I wasn’t just suggestible, that Tzvi and Harvey’s assessment genuinely and singularly compelled me. I took then — there with Magda — a more sizable bite of my food. A dry edge of pastry scratched the roof of my mouth. “So what you are telling me is that Rema just flew down to Buenos Aires. From the Earth Simulator in Tokyo. To inform her mother — whom she barely speaks to — of her predicament. In order that her mother should speak to me. Then Rema goes back to Tokyo. Back to the arms of her captors. Without visiting me? Instead entrusting you with a wrinkled sheet of paper?”

Magda took hold of my right hand in a way remarkably devoid of any sexual undertones. “I made,” she said with my wrist wrapped in her cold fingers, “a mistake.”

“Okay,” I said, using my awkward left hand to take another bite of pastry, to show my confidence, my ease in the situation, and suddenly I thought, obscurely, of Harvey sleeping, or not sleeping, alone, and maybe wondering where I was.

“I mean,” she said, unhanding me, “I wasn’t being clear. My words were not clear. I meant that Rema had a moment, there at work, in Japan, finally a free moment, and she used it to send me a message. Her message visited me.”

“Her message,” I repeated dryly.

Magda brought her own hand to her lap. “She sent me a message on the computer.”

“Then why are you so sure it’s really from her? Couldn’t anyone be sending messages from an e-mail account with her name?”

Unlike Tzvi’s and Harvey’s and my theory, which had opened up for me, Magda’s “theory” shrunk, retreated — even Magda’s posture was worsening. “I mean not an e-mail,” she said. “It was a message sent through another Argentine person. Through a friend of the both of us. Who also happened to be there with her. He’s very reliable; he would know if it wasn’t really her. I mean, thank God he was there. So that she could get a message out.”

I noticed tattered strips of paper napkin amassed at the side of Magda’s plate; the pile had taken on the look of some strange sea creature, washed ashore and dying. When had she torn that napkin? “Her other husband?” I intoned.

She ignored my words, then she picked up her fork and began eating from her plates round-robin style, fairly quickly, with pronounced deglutition.

We ate for a while, almost competitively.

Our hot drinks were refilled.

“You really believe you’ve received this message from Rema?” I asked finally.

A strand of Magda’s tidy hair had fallen onto her face. “Oh, yes. Yes, definitely.” When she brushed it away I could see the delicate print on the pad of her thumb; a few fibers of paper napkin clung there.

“I know,” I said as sweetly as I could manage, “that we don’t know each other so well. But I feel as if we do. That is a feeling that I have. So that is why I am going to ask you, again, directly: who sent you down here? Someone probably told you a pretty story to get you on their side. Obviously Rema didn’t learn how to lie from you because you’re really no good at lying at all. Lying can be appealing on young women, but not so much on mothers. Don’t worry, I know, of course, that you are innocent. Understand that I certainly in no way blame you. On the contrary. Just tell me, was it the 49 Quantum Fathers? Or maybe a Quantum Father posing as a member of the Royal Academy?” I was trying to form an alliance with her, without really divulging anything of importance. “The more I think about this, the more I’m beginning to suspect there are some pretty powerful forces involved, much larger than just—”

“You’re too old for Rema,” she interrupted, raising her voice, becoming a shrill bird. “And you’re a snob. And you’re crazy. Crazy and not even very good-looking, especially not when I look at you from near like this. I’m happy to fail to bring you home. I don’t care if she’ll be mad at me. She’ll always be mad at me no matter what I do.”

I ignored her diversionary tactic. I ate as my own.

“Why don’t you just come home with me anyway?” Magda eventually sighed. “It will make her happy.”

“It’s very kind of you to invite me,” I said calmly. “But I have work here. I’m doing work here. I can’t just turn my back on my responsibilities.”

“But Leo. You don’t have work here.”

“That’s not true,” I said with conviction. “I’m doing climate change research.”

“Leo, you’re not a meteorologist. You’re not. There’s something wrong with you.”

And of course that was true, what she said, that I wasn’t a meteorologist, but it also wasn’t true, because I was (in a way) employed as a meteorologist. Or would be soon enough. Her doubts did not disturb me.

I returned to find an anxious Harvey, who, upon my entering the room, threw his arms around my neck. Again I thought about orangutans.

“Where were you?” Harvey asked, with the trembling lip of a child.

“Nowhere important,” I said.

“The snow flurries stopped so abruptly,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll never leave you without notice like that again.” Saying that, to someone, felt nice.

“I thought maybe you’d already grown tired of working with me.”

“I was just answering a phone call. A woman had called me. I had thought it might be important.”

“You’re not leaving me, then?” Harvey asked.

“Of course I’m not leaving you,” I said, thinking of telenovelas but also of genuine tenderness.

And it was that easy to restore happiness. Harvey settled in front of the television weather report, while I set myself to the task of shaving. So I was shaving, and going over in my mind retorts that I hadn’t offered to Magda, and not just vainly gazing into the mirror, when, upon close follicular inspection of (the reflected image of) a tender, raised, false pimple on my neck, the seed of the simulacrum’s word — disappear — began to both germinate and molt in my mind, revealing itself as a two-toned postulating buzz; wasn’t the simulation of Rema’s appearance far more extraordinary than her disappearance? I had been so fixated on the disappearance, probably because it was more painful, but really it was the appearance of the doppelganger that was far stranger. Why not simply take Rema? This simulacrum, was she really deployed just to move a dog, or was she being deployed primarily for some other reason, to solve some other problem, to generate some other solution? Solution to what? Was the simulation of two observer Remas occurring in order to triangulate, in a perfectly coupled way, on the data of me? I had been comporting myself as if this mystery was proximate to me, but maybe the mystery actually was me.