Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Then I solved something small, the bloody drinks. Sangria chica, sangria grande: they had translated themselves for me, but I crash still had not. I couldn’t keep myself from giggling.

Stone-faced, the simulacrum said to me, “Nervous laughter is okay. I just want to know if you read the articles about the misidentification syndromes. And I want to know what you are thinking. What you are thinking of them. The articles. I’m being patient and not even asking you what you are thinking of me.”

A fourth drink was I crash Great . My giggling grew worse. As some sort of excuse for my poor behavior, I passed my badly translated menu over to the simulacrum.

“Did you even read a sentence?” she asked again.

I used to ask Rema that about my own articles. “Did you read this?” I said, pointing to the menu.

“Don’t copy me.”

“Yes. Okay,” I said, compressing my laughter into just abdominal pain. “I read the articles. I read them very seriously.” This was true. (Rema used to lie about that sort of thing.) Then I noticed that the menu also offered Popes Fried , which really isn’t even that funny, and which I recognized immediately as simply papas fritas , french fries better translated, but already the infection of laughter was returning.

“If you were in my place,” she said dryly, “and I in yours, wouldn’t you want to push me to think very carefully? To step outside of my body and look at this problem from the position of an other body?”

I tried to explain to her then that I did take my problem seriously, very seriously, and so of course I had read those articles, but it wasn’t as if they told me anything I hadn’t already considered.

“Do you remember seeing Godzilla with me?”

“I did see Godzilla with Rema, that’s true.”

“Do you remember her getting mad at you when you finished the brownie without offering her any?”

“I don’t remember that, no.”

“Okay. Remember how you tried to lecture her about the English phrases in the movie? About Geiger counter and oxygen destroyer, and she told you that you were too dominating?”

“Rema often likes my little lectures. That might even be what she likes best about me.”

“But do you remember the little fight?”

“Listen, I differ with you on the details, but yes, I remember the incident you’re referring to. But it was insignificant—”

“And yet I know all about it. Doesn’t that seem to you strange?”

“Many things are strange,” I said lightly and with confidence. “More things on heaven and earth, you know. Not necessarily all nice things. Nothing nice about a vengeful ghost, for instance.”

“Maybe,” she said gently, reaching across the table to brush some hair off my face, “it’s more strange for me than it is for you. To see this face of yours but not really understand you. You have an absolute conviction that I am not Rema?”

An unintended glance at the menu revealed eggs loins . I had no idea what that might originally have been. “I guess so,” I squeaked. “Yes. I’m certain. You know what I mean.”

“All right,” she said with the kind of quarter smile I associate with photos of people who have died. “From now forward, I’ll be honest with you. I’ll admit to you that I’m not really her.”

The simulacrum had not shredded her napkin anxiously during this time of mistranslated anxiety; she had folded it up neatly, into a floppy fortune-teller.

“Okay,” she further affirmed. “We are saying that you are right. We will say that. Okay?”

I looked away from the simulacrum’s fortune-teller, and toward her hand, and I noticed that she was bleeding, ever so slightly, at the cuticle of her right index finger. Rema generally had ragged cuticles, but they rarely bled. There was just once when one, actually two, of her fingers were bleeding, and this was because Rema had been scratching a Tow Warning sticker off of our car; the car had been unmoved and accumulating parking tickets, but I hadn’t known this because she had, for days and days in a row, taken upon herself the normally alternating task of moving the car, but I guess she would go outside and wander around and just not move it. She had been sad for a while then; that had been a very low time for her when she hadn’t said or done much and once she cried because we were out of milk for the tea. In some ways I had left her alone, assuming she didn’t want someone intruding upon her sadness. I would leave her behind in the bed in the morning. And when I’d come home she’d still have sleep in her eyes. I didn’t quite know what to do for her. I bought her little things and wrote her notes. When she’d take a bath I would go put the towels in the dryer so that they’d be warm when she got out. I’d clip little articles out of the newspaper that I thought might amuse her, and I tried making her homemade marzipan, which I knew she loved, but it didn’t work and I broke our food processor in the attempt. I had thought maybe she was disappointed in me, but in retrospect I see now what was fairly obvious and what maybe I didn’t want to understand, what must have seemed worse to me than her anger: that often her mood had nothing to do with me at all.

The simulacrum reached out her only slightly injured hand and placed it on top of mine. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that I didn’t confess earlier. But I can help you find her. I’m not sure how, but somehow.”

Did Tzvi think I should join forces with Rema’s double? I wrote to him in detail about her confession but again received in response nothing but an automated out-of-office reply. At least the automated response assured me that my notes weren’t strictly dead letters, not eternally. And even in Tzvi’s absence I could still turn to his work for guidance. One of the triumphs of Tzvi’s 1981 retrievals paper was demonstrating the real-world validity of results obtained through trials on models. For example, output from a three-dimensional numerical cloud model was used in place of observations to test a method for retrieving temperature and pressure deviation fields; then comparison of the theoretically retrieved fields to “real” data affirmed the robustness of the technique. Which I interpreted to mean that, by analogy, working with the model Rema would indeed reveal information about the real Rema.

But what kind of work were we meant to do? Had I accidentally meant what I said when, in anger, I’d quoted to Tzvi about children’s games being a rehearsal for the right life? Harvey, the simulacrum, and I passed all of Friday and Saturday posing as ordinary tourists, blending in perfectly with the local culture of nonlocal pleasure seekers. Temperatures were unstable but the sun shone reliably. We took a boat tour of the lake and admired its protruding glaciers, their fish-scaly façades. When the simulacrum shivered in the wind, I gave her my wool sweater. The soda and chips on the boat were wildly overpriced, but I paid happily and no one felt cheated. I offered a compelling explanation of why glacial ice appears to be blue, and Harvey and the simulacrum both seemed patient, even possibly happy, to listen to my lesson. Later we ate strawberries and walnuts and tender lamb that had been cooked on a spit. We walked to cave paintings that proved disappointing but then were surprised by a black-necked swan on the walk back into town. The next morning we strapped crampons onto our shoes and — herded like ducklings by two young Argentine college boys — we crunched across glacial surfaces, felt awe at crevasses. Harvey sunburned and the simulacrum found an aloe lotion to apply. It was like we were a little family. It was nice. I almost forgot why I was there; I think we all did.