Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“You’ve thought about this a lot,” Harvey interrupted with a glaze of deafness. He had begun to stack the various dishes. That’s when I picked up on the scent in the room, one that went beyond steak and toast. I realized Harvey had been drinking. “I thought,” he said offhandedly, “maybe you’d find out why your wife left you.”

I had never said that she’d left me. Who had said that? Surely Harvey didn’t actually think Rema had left me, but rather he was trying to talk about … what? My leaving him? Why did everything have to also mean something else? I wanted to be in a simpler, vaudeville world, where the jokes had to do with ladders being too short, or someone slipping on a banana peel. “Sometimes,” I said to Harvey, “you see connections that aren’t really there.”

“Yes, you’ve often told me that,” he said.

“And she didn’t leave me. There’s absolutely no indication of that. She just disappeared. Or rather, was taken. I don’t know why, of all the people who could have been taken, why it was her in particular, but — that’s another reason we’re trying to retrieve her. I wish I understood better, but I don’t. And I told you that I might be out all day, I gave you warning. Listen, why are we talking about me all the time lately? You and I should talk about you. Have you called your mom?” I asked.

Harvey sententiously set his piled dishes outside our door. “Dr. Gal-Chen wouldn’t want me to do that.”

“Why not?” I said. “You should call her. If you don’t call her she’ll be terribly disappointed. In you and me both.”

“I’m not a fool,” Harvey said. “I can see you’re just changing the subject.” He made his way over to the mirror, carefully fixed his hair. “I once received an MRI to rule out neurocysticercosis.” He turned back to me. “You know sometimes when Tzvi would call you to pass on orders to me I would think I could hear your wife’s voice in the background—”

“I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking, Harvey, but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong,” I announced calmly as my ears tingled, as if vigorously generating too much wax, “and whatever your suspicions are, they’re not the right suspicions. And by the way I’m sleeping in the bed tonight, and you’re not—”

“You think of me as useless, Dr. Leo. I can see that. That’s okay. But Dr. Gal-Chen doesn’t think like you. Soon enough you’ll understand the essential niche I fill. Until then I can weather the indignity of your indifference. Dr. Gal-Chen knows I’m not just any serviceable cog in the Royal Academy’s wheel. He knows my services are irreplaceable. Not like the object of affection of that patient of Freud’s, the one who could have been anyone.”

As Harvey rambled on, it became vivid to me that Harvey deployed Tzvi as a kind of psychotic patch, a mending of the rent caused in his universe by the unflagging perception of his own insignificance. Seeing Harvey so unable to understand Tzvi as a real person, seeing him misunderstand Tzvi as whatever Harvey most needed him to be — a new kind of sadness blossomed in me.

Under the spell of that glittery melancholy, I stayed up late that evening, composing a long and heartfelt note to Tzvi, in which I explained to him that though I had, naturally, been, at least once or twice, “burned by love,” this had in no way tempted me to join the 49. Even Rema, I confessed, had at times been indifferent toward me. Not that long ago, for example, she had rented a miniseries of some sort — something with servants — and I had missed watching the first episode with her, and on those grounds she had then discouraged me from watching any of the rest of the series and she would just sit in front of the TV alone at night, spooning from a bowl of cereal and at the same time telling me she wasn’t hungry for dinner, thus leaving me to eat takeout alone. (At other times nothing had made us happier than spending night after night watching rented movies and holding each other.) Or maybe it was I who had been indifferent to her. Usually we were tender to each other through moody periods, but sometimes we’d get struck by a dark mood at the same time and then we’d be lost. For example, I had recently taken to staying late at the hospital, not because I had to but simply because I’d find myself lying on my office sofa, reading every last square of newspaper and magazine. (“World Briefings” was often my favorite part, and it regularly pained me, the way it was over so quickly.) One night when I came home at 10:30 p.m. Rema asked me why I’d been occupied so late, and I told her, somewhat truthfully, that I’d been engrossed in a lengthy article about the discovery, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, of a species of Hobbit-like people, Homo floresiensis: these three-foot-tall people who lived contemporaneously with Homo sapiens , separated only by geography. The archaeologists had also found, in the same limestone cave as Homo floresiensis , the remains of a Komodo dragon, a dwarf elephant, and stone tools. “Now,” the article had noted, “that race of people is gone.” But why, Rema asked me, couldn’t you just read that here at home? And why did it take you so long? And why are you so interested in those gone people? When you called to say you’d be late, she lectured me, I assumed that you had no choice.

Anyway, I told Tzvi about these trivial incidents only because I wanted him to feel confident that I was unshakably on the side of the Academy, that I had endured unstable climates in the past, that I could do so in the future. But the simple fact of writing all that to him produced in me a new vulnerability. Too vividly the thought crossed my mind that the 49 had perceived the actual weaknesses in my marriage, that Rema and I had been targeted because the 49 wagered that given the attenuated state of our relationship, I actually might not notice, or respond to, the swap.

Perhaps just a phantom thought. But when, almost immediately after sending the note to Tzvi, I received an automated out-of-office reply in return, the feeling was one of devastation.

Again the room phone woke me from slumber; the message was the same as the day before; the message was that I was to come down to the lobby, preferably immediately, because there was a woman who wished to speak with me.

Casting about my room, I discovered Harvey wasn’t there.

Okay, I thought, blocking out thoughts of a missing man, of an unidentified woman, of an absent father or two, blocking out possibly erotic thought, who knew, I was still half asleep. I dressed hastily, went straight downstairs. But instead of seeing Magda there I saw a woman (and at first I just saw her reflected in the mirror-lined wall) with hair blonde like Rema’s cornsilk, but combed in a wholly different way, or rather, not very well combed, back in a sloppy bun, artlessly done, and greasy, with dark roots dramatically showing.

“Look,” Harvey said — Harvey! looking tidy and proud, with his shirts tucked in just so, and even his cuffs properly buttoned — with a barely suppressed gloating grin, “I found her. She’s a lily of the valley here to see you. A creamy daff of the dill. An atmospheric phenomenon.”

I was looking at this blonde woman’s image in the mirror; she was looking at that same image of herself in the mirror. Or so it appeared to me. But then I thought about the Dopplerganger effect again, or at least that phrase came into my mind, and those words solved something for me: I realized I was misinterpreting my perceptions. That is: if I saw the blonde woman’s face in the mirror, and if she appeared to be looking at the same point in the mirror that I was looking at, then actually she was looking at my face in the mirror while I was looking at her face in the mirror, that our faces could be in the same places (in the mirror) depending on just where one was looking from. So she wasn’t thinking of, looking at, only herself. Nor was I thinking just of myself. That’s just what it seemed like if one didn’t account for anticipatable perceptive distortions. But hadn’t I known all that about mirrors already? And yet right then it was as if I’d lost that knowledge and had to learn it again. Something about how we really don’t understand how mirrors work, or what they are showing us, which is interesting to think about considering that mirrors are the main way we have of understanding what we look like — what was it that poetic charlatan Lacan said, something about how because we only see ourselves in mirrors we come to know ourselves “in the fictional direction”? I’m not sure why I feel so moved to clarify this brief moment so much; it just seems like an important case of misperception on my part, important because I caught myself misperceiving and immediately readjusted my understanding of the situation. This is not one of those cases when I am talking about an unimportant and unrelated topic, some random intellectual distraction, in order to avoid an emotionally laden topic. As if I was overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of that blonde woman. I was not.