Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Saturday night just the simulacrum and I went out for ice cream. She ordered a flavor called banana split, one of these childish flavors with too many things in it but that she seemed to enjoy. She didn’t thank me for the ice cream, or offer me a bite, instead she just sat there, smiling, spooning from her cone, humming along to the overhead music.

I myself ordered two scoops, one of chocolate and another of a flavor they called calafate that was colored deep blue, which somehow recalled to me the alarm that sometimes went off when I looked at orange foods. I regretted the adventure of my choice and was eating with considerably less joy than she.

“I don’t want to be a finder of faults,” the simulacrum eventually said idly, “but your way of searching for your wife doesn’t seem to me to be the wisest, or the quickest, or, well — it hardly even seems like you’re looking for her at all.”

“Don’t cavil,” I said, and I admit being pleased to use a word that I suspected she would not understand. “It’s not as if there’s a trail of bread crumbs to follow. What I have here is a nonstandard problem, one that therefore demands a nonstandard solution. It’s not easy to explain, but, for example, maybe eating this ice cream will prove to be useful. And there’s always Monday. Rema may even be there Monday. There are indications.”

“I think you should look for her back home.” She was mining her ice cream for chunks. “Maybe at the Hungarian Pastry Shop if you want. That is the advice I would give to you, if you asked me. Can we set a date together for returning?”

I decided to change the subject. “You look nice in my sweater.” Then I asked the simulacrum how her newfangled flavor was.

“It’s not new,” she said. “Banana split is a classic flavor here. So when should we go back to your apartment? Maybe after this Monday meeting of yours? I really don’t think we are making progress in this place,” she said, gesturing around the room precariously (for her ice cream) with her cone.

“I actually,” I half lied, “expect to hear something important from Tzvi Gal-Chen very soon.” I started to spoon-feed myself with more dedication. “I wish I could go back home. The problem is that my actions, my work — they’re important far beyond the scope even of, say, just my own marriage. Tzvi sees me in this very heroic light and I can’t just let him down. It’s hard to explain, but even though I’ve sometimes had the feeling that my life was insignificant, and even that my love was nothing more than an accumulation of contingencies — still, all that ran contrary to the enduring phenomenon of my own sense of great importance. Unwelcome importance really, an intrusion of importance. I felt central even though such a feeling seemed not to make sense, and to be childish—”

And I was really beginning to open up to her, but then this short young man, with ’70s Warren Beatty hair and a five o’clock shadow and a slouchy uniform on, appeared standing by our table, repeating, in Spanish: Could it be Rema?

The simulacrum’s capillaries dilated, her neck rashed, she emitted a series of sounds that I couldn’t quite understand. She held her cone out to the side as if it were a surrender flag. Then this man was kissing her. Or greeting her, I suppose some people would say, but from an objective point of view he was kissing her, he gave her three kisses, alternating cheeks, so I’m not sure it really matters to what end he was doing this, why he was doing this, regardless the greeting was excessively effusive.

Excusing myself, I left for the bathroom to wash my hands. By the time I came back the small uniformed man was sitting in my chair. His triceps was vulgarly prominent, emerging from the rolled-up sleeve of a uniform shirt that bore as an insignia the Argentine flag. Was he a harbinger of an imminent battle? Could the 49 be so indiscreet? Just to make polite conversation I asked him, in English, as I stood over him, towering: “Did you participate in that hysterical invasion of the Falkland Islands?”

He seemed not to have parsed what I said. He announced in Spanish, “We were children together, Rema and I.” Then he stood up and brought another chair to the table and offered it to me, as if I were the newcomer. “We lived on the same street. As children.”

“Children,” I said. “I was a child once too.” I asked the man if she — I gestured — looked to him like the Rema of his childhood.

The simulacrum looked off to the side. As if it were a coldness in her eyes that would give her away. Although truthfully, her gaze was warm and full of emotion. She had set down her spoon and licked all around the base of her cone.

“Different but same,” he answered, smiling. Then he looked over at her again and he repeated that phrase with variation: “Different but also exactly the same beautiful.”

I asked the interloper if he was in the navy or the army or if he just liked to dress that way, and he said he was in the navy and then went on to say, “We used to have ice cream together almost every day, Rema and I.”

I thrust my hands into the middle of the table to thwart what might have been his reach across to her unconed hand.

“We were children together,” he repeated stupidly.

Then the small man — who still had not been gracious enough to offer his name, not even a false name, just for decorum’s sake — said: “We used to run after the ice-cream truck. The ice-cream man would be yelling, ‘Buy a cone and you’ll be happy forever!’” Military man turned to me then, and he reached past my intercepting hands to point at her cone: “And she liked this same flavor, this same flavor of ice cream then as now.” His musculature shifted grotesquely with each gesture, and he seemed to be perspiring nostalgia.

“That’s wrong,” the simulacrum said definitively to that other man.

I almost stood up and cheered.

“There’s been a mistake,” she said, switching her gaze to her cone. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding that aloof gaze. “You are confusing me with someone else.’

“No,” he laughed. “You’re a little bit different but you’re exactly the same.”

“No, you’re wrong, I’m sorry,” she singsonged sadly.

She apologized even again; then she stood up, knocking over her chair in the process; she righted her chair, threw her ice cream away, then walked out.

That just left me and the uniformed man there at the table, with my ugly blue ice cream melting. “Is something wrong with Rema?” he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, then excused myself to follow the simulacrum. I felt proud of her even as she distanced herself from me for the rest of the evening. And seeing that man hit on the impostress, seeing him miss her — it prompted in me a deeper kind of affection. Maybe his attention distorted the way I saw her. But maybe that distortion was valuable. Even corrective. Or maybe it was extinguishing my love for my real wife, wherever she was. I wrote Tzvi a detailed note about the whole encounter. Oddly, in his absence, I only felt closer to him. To everyone, I was feeling closer.

Though she slept on the distant edge, she did share the bed with me that night. Her showered hair dampened the pillow, and I lay my hand on that cooling cloth. All that night I thought: I had left the simulacrum behind so hastily; regardless of circumstances that was wrong of me; it’s never pleasant to be left behind though that’s not really something that has happened to me much in my life, the case of my father not counting, since he wasn’t leaving me but rather my mother. I really do try to leave people behind as infrequently as possible — I’d never, until this crisis, left a patient behind — but I think others will agree that when I left my mother behind, it would not really be fair to call that “leaving behind.” I mean: I didn’t leave her behind the way my father had. It was very different. I was eighteen years old and was leaving home for college. While it’s true that I was essentially my mom’s only friend, and that I could have attended school while still living at home, and that my mother’s mood swings were increasing in amplitude and frequency and that our neighbor, this large woman who ate a lot of watermelon, kept sententiously saying I just don’t like the idea of her being alone —apart from all of that, I in fact also remember feeling that it would be rather a relief for her to have me out of the way. And sometimes I think, contrary to popular belief, that being the one who is leaving is more difficult than being the one who is left, and I say this only because my mind has often stuck on the image of my mother lying on our yellow wool-acrylic blend upholstered sofa (the sofa had wooden armrests, where you could rest a mug of tea) wearing one of her very tailored outfits that entirely clashed with the idea of lying on a sofa in the middle of the day — and telling me that she’d always wanted upholstery of a different color, sky maybe, and of a quality that would catch a little bit of light, that was maybe a little bit satiny, or at least had a sheen, and that her whole life might look different to her if that was in her living room. And I myself was annoyed when she said this, not only because of her excessive aesthetic sensitivity, her ludicrously devout belief in beauty’s ability to save us, but also because when I said, well, why don’t you do that then, you could make those covers, she said that it would be expensive to get the kind of upholstery that would feel nice on your cheek lying down on it — and I said, well, maybe that wasn’t something to save money on, that if that was what she really wanted, then that was what she should do and one can always find the money somehow — and she sighed and said, well, you don’t care about what covers the sofa, do you? I guess I’m not thinking about that right now, I said, that’s probably true, I probably don’t care and I guess I’m thinking about other things, not fabric, not coverings — and she said yes that I was and she was glad for that. The skin around her eyes was sunken; her legs, which I could see up to the midthigh, were skinny and pale and streaked with blue; it was as if it had been months since she’d eaten a pigmented food. I didn’t want to see that. But now I see it often, those wet cement eyes and her hand running across the fabric of the sofa. That’s not actually the very last time I saw her, but I guess it was close to the last time; I think then I was just going out to buy some food, or go for a walk. But the only reason I am saying all this is to illustrate that I understood something about how the simulacrum must have felt, what with my leaving so hastily. And that maybe my mother would be pleased to know that now I was thinking about fabrics, about the look and touch and feel and necessity of them. Because I had decided to buy the simulacrum a nice and very warm coat; she had seemed so down after our ice-cream date and I thought a gift might cheer her up; and a coat seemed a wise idea if she was going to accompany me for Monday’s meteorological labor, whatever it proved to be. And I wanted her to accompany me. I wanted her to be happy and to feel appreciated. I almost woke her up just to tell her how much I admired her, what a loyal and devoted and steadfast and adorable and loving companion agent she had been to me. Instead I thought a great deal about what kind of fabric the coat should be made of. I mean there was a nice symmetry there — thinking about fabrics — a nice reflection, some concordance, and one can’t help but want to assign meaning to such things, or at least to want to luxuriate in the noise of possible meanings, even if there is no actual meaning there at all.