Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Anyway, she looked at my reflection.

I looked at hers.

Quickly enough, my mind had done the corrective math, to realize that she probably could see and understand me seeing her looking at me, and so on and so forth, echoing, echoing, and the first words she spoke to me were, “I’m a better detective now; this time I just looked online at the credit card.”

She also: I don’t think she was talking about an emotionally less laden subject simply in order to avoid the main subject.

Harvey touched my sleeve and whispered, “Isn’t she beautiful? She returns to us from another world.”

She said calmly, “Harvey explained to me that the two of you have been working together this whole time.”

“Not this whole time,” I protested. “That’s not true. Harvey and I haven’t been together this whole time. I’ve been working very hard and for a great deal of that work I have been very alone. I have been completely alone. Have you been alone?”

“Harvey says you’ve been trying to find me,” said the woman — she did smell like grass but also like baby oil and sweat — taking hold of my sleeve but turning away from me, turning toward Harvey. “Your mother still has you listed with the police as a missing person. Did you know that? And you are okay for her to be having worry like that? Do you know what that must be like for her, to not know whether you are dead or alive?” She then turned back to me, “Is this one of these disorders where the afflicted lacks empathy?”

I just looked at her.

“Well,” Harvey’s voice came in, “it has to do with someone I work for. That’s the only reason why, unfortunately, I have to put my mother through this suffering, have to leave her, for now, in the dark, without knowledge, like, I mean, as Dr. Leo would say, some character in a Greek tragedy. Maybe after this assignment that Dr. Leo and I are starting Monday, maybe after that I will be dispatched back to my home base.”

“Monday?” the doppelganger asked. “What starts Monday?”

“I think already I’m disclosing more than Dr. Gal-Chen would like,” Harvey replied.

“But how,” the ersatz Rema asked, glancing back over at me, “how did Tzvi Gal-Chen contact you, Harvey? Through this”—she raised my hand, as if it were a puppet’s hand—“man?”

I stared sternly in Harvey’s direction, shook my head ever so discreetly. But that is a characteristic of Harvey — that he doesn’t read body language well. It’s not what the doppelganger was saying; it’s not that he lacks empathy. He simply misreads the person he’s trying to empathize with, so in effect sometimes it can feel like a lack of empathy, when really there’s plenty of empathy, it’s just eccentrically directed. Even with me that happens sometimes.

“You are familiar with Tzvi’s real work?” Harvey continued playing the fool for her. “You do know what I mean?”

The impostress raised her hands to her forehead, pressed in at the sockets of her eyes, as if something needed to be pushed back into place. “Yes,” she said with fatigue, “I think I do. Harvey, you really should call your mother. But don’t worry, if you don’t want to call her, I won’t call her. Even though she’s been calling me.”

“I’m glad,” Harvey said, “you respect the delicate nature of my work.”

“But please tell me,” she continued cloyingly, “how exactly did this Tzvi Gal-Chen get in touch with you? Did you speak with him directly?”

“No, we didn’t speak with him,” Harvey said.

“No, we didn’t speak with him,” I said at the same time.

“JinxBlackMagicYouOweMeACoke,” Harvey said.

We were all quiet a moment.

Then the doppelganger felt compelled to contribute: “And you, Leo. That girl in the coffee shop that you were leaving notes for — she went to high school with me. Also, she’s not interested in you.”

“I don’t think the dog walker is interested in you,” I said.

The exchange ended something like that, anyway. I’m uncertain how we finally broke off from that whole encounter. I’m not quite sure how one puts a cap, or really puts any sort of punctuation, any sort of finality, to those sorts of emotions, to those desires that lose their way and reach out to the wrong people, or those desires that get derailed on their way to you, leave you suffering a ludicrous and misguided jealousy, misguided because so often it can look — seeing events through the mirrors we see into — like someone is looking at, say, herself, or himself, or someone else, and being in love, but really he or she is looking at you just as you are looking at her while giving her the illusion that you are looking elsewhere.

“I haven’t slept,” the simulacrum said.

“You can sleep in our room,” Harvey said. “I’ll be out collecting data during the daylight hours.”

She napped under my covers. I watched her. Breathing. Very slightly irregularly.

Needless to say:

The real Rema wouldn’t have put her hair in a bun.

She wouldn’t have held my wrist so tightly.

She wouldn’t have criticized Harvey, nor, for that matter, would she have listened to him so attentively.

She wouldn’t have had so private a conversation in so public a place.

She would have commented, in at least some small way, on my as yet unshaved morning handsomeness.

And if Rema had tracked me down by looking at our online credit card statement, she would have kept that information to herself.

I did not touch the simulacrum while she napped, but I did look at her closely. Her bangs parted down the middle and clung to her forehead in sweat and made me think of Mata Hari; she was beautiful in that moment, in her strangeness. Beautiful and also like Rema who, with her little secrets, her little silences, was often similarly wrapped in a thin but shimmering cloak of the alien. For a moment I thought of Rema and the simulacrum as genuine twins, or as the separate images that come together in a stereoscope. Shortly after she woke she sat on the floor and hugged my knees — I was sitting on the edge of the bed — and she said she would stay by my side until the end of time. That’s what she said: the end of time. She said she’d thought it through under many conditions and that was what she had decided. Then she said she was hungry.

When we walked outside, the wind mussed up her hair and already she no longer seemed like Mata Hari, or like Rema, to me.

“We have a lot to discuss,” she said like a schoolmarm.

The simulacrum received a menu in Spanish, and I one in English, or a kind of English. The first listing on my menu under Drinks was Bloody Girl . The next was Bloody Great .

“Will you come back to New York with me?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” I answered.

“What’s starting Monday?” she asked.

“My job.”

“What kind of job?”

“I’m not going to discuss that.”

“Did you receive the articles?” she asked.

“Of clothing?” I think I said; I was still busy wondering over the bloodiness on the menu. That’s why it was difficult to make conversation. That and her interrogation style. If only she could have stayed asleep — it was so easy to think fondly of her then. “My luggage has still not turned up. They haven’t called me.”

“I’m talking about the articles I sent you in e-mails. Did you receive those articles?”

Another drink offered on the menu: I crash . That brought a smile to my face.

“Do you think,” she said with a patronizingly patient tone, “those articles might have something to do with what’s happening to you? To us?”