Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

“I mean, it’s not as if I’ve never been led astray, in my years of work for the Academy,” Harvey broke back in. “I went back and looked more closely at the e-mails Tzvi had written to me, and to us, and I noticed something. He’s extremely fond of saying ‘rather’ and ‘suppose’ and ‘anyway’ and ‘regardless.’ Which perhaps you’ve noticed are words you’re very fond of too.”

“That is peculiar,” I acknowledged, censoring myself from saying “rather peculiar.” “But not so peculiar.”

“Yes, he likes ‘peculiar’ too. And he likes to repeat himself. And like you often say to me — you’ve often said to me — peculiarity is something true rumpling the bedsheets of assumption—”

“I’ve never said that—”

“You said something like that,” Harvey asserted. We had stopped walking; we were just standing out there in the cold. “Or maybe Tzvi said it to me. And I was just thinking that it was funny, that it was odd, but that probably you and he were just different possible versions of essentially the same person. That the two of you are supposed to be in separate worlds, but here you are in the same one. Maybe even vying for something? Just like the blonde and your wife.”

“Is this an accusation? This strikes me as entirely ludicrous. If anyone is Tzvi, it’s certainly not me.”

“Not the same person. Just almost the same person. Maybe of varying provenances. Yes, it may seem impossible, but more possible than the other possibilities, no? I thought maybe these swaps might be a kind of prelude to — well, my working hypothesis is that tomorrow, before the storm, there will be a swap back. But maybe the simulacrum says what she says because she will be swapped for Tzvi, and you will be swapped for Rema, so it’ll be a crisscross like that—”

And it strikes me now as worth recording that on account of Harvey’s ramblings — I had been lulled into believing that I was working with a mostly sane man, my norms had redshifted without my noticing — we had lost our bearings. And it began to rain — sleet, really — rather heavily, and so we could not see far. I will spare you the heroics and dumb luck of our making it back to the hotel, but at one point, when the ground grew too icy, we crawled.

Before we entered — somehow I just knew to do this — I gestured to Harvey to be quiet and I — soaked, cold — gently pressed my ear to the door of my very own room, my own hotel room, anyway, my temporary room. And I overheard the voice of my companion, my copycat companion that is, saying: “—but it’s exhausting too, having to pretend about so many little things when I am with him, it’s like I have to be not myself … I know you’re right, I know I shouldn’t have let him go, not even for an hour … now I’m worried and miserable … I wanted to see who he’s been mailing with, but you’re right … but I do want to stay with him … he used to leave me poems on the kitchen table … and buy me special fruits … and he says things sometimes like ‘the foul rag and bone shop of my heart’… and I’m so happy when I sleep with my head on his chest … Saul didn’t like to cuddle … let’s say he is a little bit crazy … secret huge debts like David did … and so what do I care that he feels close to someone just because he thinks he’s a meteorologist … it’s better than sleeping with other girls … it feels nice to be the center of his world, even if it’s partially because he’s mean about everyone else … I think we love each other … I can feel him coming back to me … I feel—”

Or maybe what she felt was me there at the door … there was the question of whom she was talking to, and the question of whom she was talking about … and the question of whether I really went around saying “foul rag and bone shop” far more often than I might have thought … unless it wasn’t me she was talking about with the poems … I’d only ever done that a handful of times … then the question of who didn’t like to cuddle … the answers proliferated even faster than the questions … and what came to mind was a diagram, with each pronoun a blank box on a language tree, and each possible meaning shifting as I filled in the boxes with different names … and what also came to mind was Proust’s narrator, attempting to talk to an elevator operator at Balbec, an elevator operator who did not reply, “either because of astonishment at my words, attention to his work, a regard for etiquette, hardness of hearing, respect for his surroundings, fear of danger, slow-wittedness, or orders from the manager …” But there I went again running into the wrong text simply because I felt intimidated by the lack of context for the simulacrum’s words, but still I was able to generate quickly in my mind, by falling back upon my old list of clues, hypotheses about what this all might mean:

Unnamed dog

— Not even mentioned and thus, as we had thought, either absolutely central (and thus appearing as an elephant-sized silence) or absolutely not.

Anatole

— I knew now was Rema’s father, but did he also buy her fruits? And did he leave her poems? Or was he actually not in her thoughts at every moment of every day?

Rema’s husband

— Or the simulacrum’s. Maybe Saul. Maybe David. Or maybe she just used the names of ancient kings to refer to … who? Or what? Previous missions she’d undertaken for the Academy, or for the Fathers? Or, simply, previous loves?

Tzvi Gal-Chen

— Her approval of my affection for Tzvi lent further weight to the hope or anxiety that she actually was Tzvi, or at least had played the part of Tzvi, which possibly even meant that she was, finally, Rema, and which possibly explained Tzvi’s recent return to absentia. That, or she was unaware of the meaning of Tzvi.

Royal Academy

and

Lola

and

Patagonian research

— I figured I’d store these fragments and return to them after I learned more at the meeting the following day.

All that, and yet. The real and unpleasant yield of that overhearing fell outside of my grid of previous clues. The real yield was the unequivocal sense that I was not alone in my deficient understanding of the situation. She also was floundering — now me with the fish — to understand. She clearly didn’t know what to make of me. I had preferred thinking that the simulacrum — while she might intermittently deceive, while she might withhold — that she, in the end, knew all the facts. But she did not.

I opened the door; she abruptly hung up the phone. I saw her eyes well up with tears, and she just said, “You two were gone for so long.”

And I found that I didn’t want to ask her about the dog. And I didn’t want to ask her about the Academy or the Quantum Fathers or Saul or David or poetry or Proust or anything. I found that I just wanted to tell her that I loved her. This strange thing within me, amidst all the other strange things within me, the intrusions from other possible worlds or simply from the recesses of this one: I had thought I could love only my original Rema, but maybe I was wrong. I felt within me those proverbial butterflies, the desire to have her think well of me, the desire to lay myself out beside her, the desire for the world to see her next to me, the flittering conviction that she in fact was the whole world, was all worlds, all those desires.

I didn’t say anything like that, though; I knew we had to work together.

Harvey went up to the simulacrum and hugged her.

Draped in her traffic cone orange coat, the simulacrum stood impatiently by the hotel room door, waiting as I finished shaving, as Harvey took down notes in front of the television news. What if we were a family? What if there were a school bus outside? What if I had packed our lunches, and she had always to hound us to leave on time? Or a different family altogether. She a charismatic alcoholic losing her beauty, he a painfully shy jazz aesthete, me a hardworking insurance man. Or she a no-nonsense nurse, and me a philandering musician of little talent, and he not existing at all. Or me a meteorologist, and she a computer programmer, and us settled down in Oklahoma with two spoiled children, both of them bad at soccer, both of them good in math. “Well, boys, let’s go and we’ll finally see,” the simulacrum said, “about this mysterious Monday meeting.”