Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“Not only is it unethical,” I said to Rema, “but your idea won’t even work. Why should it? And if Harvey discovers the lie — well, then it’s all over. The therapeutic relationship: over.” And possibly my career as well, I didn’t say.

We went back and forth on this for a good while, my doubts about the plan serving only to energize Rema more.

“Let’s imagine for a moment that it is ethical,” I said to her, as if in reconciliation. “And let’s even imagine for a moment that this ‘therapy’ does work. There’d still always loom the possibility of being discovered, of being revealed as a liar. I wouldn’t be able to go a day without worrying. I can’t live like that.”

“Oh,” Rema answered with a small unimpressed shrug, “but that’s what life is like all the time, no?”

Rema often made these broad, melodramatic declarations that seemed oddly heartfelt and sincere considering that they didn’t mean anything. She was always nervous, though, that was true. She’d accordion-fold any scrap of paper that happened to be in her hand for more than a minute; at movie theaters she had often already decoratively torn her ticket before reaching the front of the line. Occasionally, though, her anxiety bordered on psychosis. For example, once in response to an essay of mine on pathological mourning, I received a threatening letter. It suggested that I didn’t know what real loss was and that he, the letter writer, could teach me. Okay, it was worded more strongly than that, I admit, but it also evidenced such disorganized thought that it was foolish to believe such a person could actually set in motion a plan to cause harm. So there was nothing to fear. I brought the letter home to our apartment to show Rema mostly because of the inexplicable — and oddly beautiful — illustrations. There was no return address, but I thought it might be a kind of romantic mission to try to track down my correspondent. I imagined I might find a Henry Darger character on the other end. But Rema said that if the letter didn’t worry me I should be locked up in an asylum. She began looking into our moving apartments. This even though (1) the letter had been mailed to the journal and not to me directly, (2) our address was unlisted, and (3) only a handful of people knew where we lived. Still, Rema was on the phone with brokers. I decided not to recite what I considered comforting statistics on how often, and which kind of, written threats are actually executed. But I did tell Rema that her response was ludicrously out of proportion. She must actually be worried about something else , I said. She had an endogenous mésalliance, I concluded. She said she didn’t know what a mésalliance was, or what endogenous was, and that I was arrogant, awful, a few other things as well. I liked those accusations and found them flattering and thought she was right. Rema cried and hardly spoke to me for a few days. In bed at night she trembled.

But: it’s curious that she could so easily imagine a catastrophe separating us. That did, after all, happen.

And yet she was completely comfortable with the risks, professional and personal, of lying to a patient.

“Nope. No. Definitely not. No on the lying,” I said.

“Your choice of failures,” she said. “In my neighborhood we had a name for people like you: parsley.”

In the end — obviously — I decided to lie. Rema brightened considerably after that decision, and we had a sweet space of time, like the Medieval Warm Period, when wine grapes could grow three hundred miles farther north than they do today. Did I think then of the schemes that we would thus be swept into? No. I thought only of Rema.

c. An initial appearance

After I agreed to the plan, Rema suggested that I find the name of an actual scientist at the Academy, just in case Harvey looked up my superior’s name or was already familiar with the members. I, she said, would have to emphasize that I was, like Harvey, a secret , and therefore unlisted, agent.

“Right,” I said. “So no need to involve someone’s real name, if we’re talking about secret agents.”

“The real is good for deception,” she insisted.

And so.

Following Rema’s advice I obtained a list of the fellows of the Royal Academy. I chose the name Tzvi Gal-Chen capriciously, or so I thought. It just seemed like an anomalous and gentle sort of name, somehow authoritative and innocent at once. I almost chose the name Kelvin Droegemeier. That name also had charm and a kind of diffident beauty. But in the end I settled on Tzvi, because I remembered that degrees Kelvin was a temperature scale, which made Kelvin Droegemeier’s name, even though it was a real name, seem fancifully invented.

d. Initial anxiety (my mésalliance)

The night before I tried Rema’s ruse on Harvey I had several straightforward dreams. In one I was unable to make a teakettle stop whistling, in another Harvey was a homing pigeon in a dovecote (though I’m not actually sure what a dovecote is, in the dream I did know), in a third I was wearing yellow pants that looked terrible on me, and in the last I was simply walking down a street — I was seeing myself from above, as if from a building’s fire escape — and I knew that everyone hated me.

I woke inhaling the grassy scent of Rema’s hair. I put a lock of it in my mouth. I tried to comfort myself: Rema and I had prepared a script of sorts together, rehearsed some canned answers, scheduled a phone call. Also I had on my side the awkward flightless-bird beauty of that name, Tzvi Gal-Chen. Just, I reassured myself, because I was capable of imagining Harvey standing on his chair and calling out J’accuse , this did not in any way actually increase the likelihood of such an event occurring. Pressing that salivaed lock against my cheek I told myself that if I failed with Harvey, then so I failed. He couldn’t really get me into any trouble. If he accused me of posing as a secret agent for the Royal Academy, well, that would just sound like more of the same from him and I’d just deny the allegation. I decided that although I fancied myself afraid of failing with Harvey, my real fear of failure likely had to do with my cornsilk Rema. The whole Tzvi Gal-Chen therapy: it was Rema’s, not my own, strangely translated dream, and yet I’d somehow taken it upon myself to realize it.

I got out of bed (while Rema slept on) specifically because I felt within me an overwhelming desire to stay in bed.

“You’re going to break some legs,” Rema said to me later that morning, sitting across from me at the kitchen table with her hair, I remember, up in a tidy high ponytail; it struck me anew that I’d once thought that after enough time with me she would have put on a precious little potbelly and let her hair remain messy at home. I didn’t think she’d be like my own mother, always so consciously assembled, as if still petitioning for the attention of other, unseen, imaginarily present men.

“You know you’re saying it wrong, right? I don’t like it when you try to be cute on purpose.”

“I don’t try to be cute.”

“Rema, I have a very bad feeling.”

Bad feeling about this I should have said. Or at least I think that would have been more properly idiomatic than just saying “bad feeling.” But the little idiosyncrasies of Rema’s language had already thoroughly sunk into me, and I couldn’t hear so clearly anymore the space between what was Rema and what was normal.

Rema looked away from me and stared into the tea mug she held. “You ate meat too late. Lamb after eleven. That is the bad feeling. That is all. You should respect my ideas. You should respect your wife.”

That is all it is . I remember wanting to correct her, to tell her to add it is . Wouldn’t that have been closer to what she meant? I watched her touch her finger to the surface of her tea and then put her finger to her mouth and then suck on it, as if she had a cut there. She did this again, this very slow way of drinking that she had. (The simulacrum, she drinks like she’s parched, like someone might take her drink away. Some mornings she’s through her first mug of tea in three minutes, though I’ll often find a second one left half drunk, grown cold.)