Atmospheric Disturbances

1. On a temperate stormy night

Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife. This woman casually closed the door behind her. In an oversized pale blue purse — Rema’s purse — she was carrying a russet puppy. I did not know the puppy. And the real Rema, she doesn’t greet dogs on the sidewalk, she doesn’t like dogs at all. The hayfeverishly fresh scent of Rema’s shampoo was filling the air and through that brashness I squinted at this woman, and at that small dog, acknowledging to myself only that something was extraordinarily wrong.

She, the woman, the possible dog lover, leaned down to de-shoe. Her hair obscured her face somewhat, and my migraine occluded the edges of my vision, but still, I could see: same unzipping of wrinkly boots, same taking off of same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed cornsilk blonde hair. Same bangs cut straight across like on those dolls done up in native costumes that live their whole lives in plastic cases held up by a metal wire around the waist. Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema. It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew. Like the moment near the end of a dream when I am sometimes able to whisper to myself, “I am dreaming.” I remember once waking up from a dream in which my mother, dead now for thirty-three years, was sipping tea at my kitchen table, reading a newspaper on the back of which there was the headline “Wrong Man, Right Name, Convicted in Murder Trial.” I was trying to read the smaller print of the article, but my mother kept moving the paper, readjusting, turning pages, a sound like a mess of pigeons taking sudden flight. When I woke up I searched all through the house for that newspaper, and through the trash outside as well, but I never found it.

“Oh!” the simulacrum said quietly, seeming to notice the dimmed lights. “I’m so sorry.” She imitated Rema’s Argentine accent perfectly, the halos around the vowels. “You are having your migraine?” She pressed that lean russet puppy against her chest; the puppy trembled.

I held a hushing finger to my lips, maybe hamming up my physical suffering, but also signing truly, because I was terrified, though of precisely what I could not yet say.

“You,” the simulacrum whispered seemingly to herself, or maybe to the dog, or maybe to me, “can meet your gentle new friend later.” She then began a remarkable imitation of Rema’s slightly irregularly rhythmed walk across the room, past me, into the kitchen. I heard her set the teakettle to boil.

“You look odd,” I found myself calling out to the woman I could no longer see.

“Yes, a dog,” she singsonged from the kitchen, still flawlessly reproducing Rema’s foreign intonations. And, as if already forget about my migraine, she trounced on, speaking at length, maybe about the dog, maybe not, I couldn’t quite concentrate. She said something about Chinatown. And a dying man. Not seeing her, just hearing her voice, and the rhythm of Rema’s customary evasions, made me feel that she really was my wife.

But this strange impostress, emerging from the kitchen moments later, when she kissed my forehead, I blushed. This young woman, leaning over me intimately — would the real Rema walk in at any moment and find us like this?

“Rema should have been home an hour ago,” I said.

“Yes,” she said inscrutably.

“You brought home a dog,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory.

“I want you to love her, you’ll meet her when you feel better, I put her away—”

“I don’t think,” I said suddenly, surprised by my own words, “you’re Rema.”

“You’re still mad with me, Leo?” she said.

“No,” I said and turned to hide my face in the sofa’s cushions. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled to the tight wool weave of the cushion’s covering.

She left my side. As the water neared its boil — the ascending pitches of our teakettle’s tremble are so familiar to me — I reached for the telephone and dialed Rema’s cell. A muffled ring then, from the purse, a ring decidedly not in stereo with the sound from the receiver in my hand, and the ersatz Rema thus hearkened back out to the living room, now holding the dog, and then the teakettle whistling, and, literally, sirens wailing outside.

She laughed at me.

I was then a fifty-one-year-old male psychiatrist with no previous hospitalizations and no relevant past medical, social, or family history.

After the impostress fell asleep (the dog in her arms, their breathing synchronous) I found myself searching through Rema’s pale blue purse that smelled only very faintly of dog. But when I noticed what I was doing — unfolding credit card receipts, breathing in the scent of her change purse, licking the powder off a half stick of cinnamon gum — I felt like a cuckolded husband in an old movie. Why did I seem to think this simulacrum’s appearance meant that Rema was deceiving me? It was as if I was expecting to find theater tickets, or a monogrammed cigarette case, or a bottle of arsenic. Just because Rema is so much younger than me, just because I didn’t necessarily know at every moment exactly where she was or what, precisely, in Spanish, she said over the phone to people who might very well have been perfect strangers to me and whom I was respectful enough to never ask about — just because of these very normal facets of our relationship, it still was not necessarily likely — not at all — that she was, or is, in love with some, or many, other people. And isn’t this all irrelevant anyway? Why would infidelities lead to disappearances? Or false appearances? Or dog appearances?

2. Around 2 a.m

Amidst the continued nonarrival of the real Rema, I received a page. An unidentified patient — but possibly one of my patients — had turned up in the Psychiatric ER. Instead of phoning in I decided to head over immediately, without further contemplation, or further gathering of information.

It seemed so clearly like a clue.

I left a note for the sleeping woman, though I wasn’t quite sure to whom I was really addressing it, so it was sort of addressed to Rema and sort of addressed to a false Rema; I simply let her know that I had been called to the hospital for an emergency. And even though this was slightly less than true, still, leaving a note at all, regardless of what it said, was clearly the right and considerate and caring thing to do — even for a stranger.

I took Rema’s purse — the comfort of an everyday thought of her — and left to find out about this unidentified someone. A patient of mine, a certain Harvey, had recently gone missing; Rema had accused me of not doing enough to locate him; maybe now I would find him.

When I arrived at the Psychiatric ER, it was quiet and a night nurse was dejectedly resting his face in his hand and playing hearts on the computer. He, the night nurse, was boyishly handsome, very thin, his skin almost translucent, and the vein that showed at his forehead reminded me, inexplicably, of a vein that tracks across the top of Rema’s foot. I did not recognize this man but, given my slightly fragile state, and my slightly ambiguous goal, I hesitated to introduce myself.

“You’re late,” he said, interrupting my dilemma by speaking first, without even turning around to look at me.

And maybe for a moment I thought he was right, that I was late. But then I remembered I wasn’t scheduled to work at all; in an excess of professionalism, I was coming by extra early to follow up on the faintest lead that could have harmlessly waited until morning to be attended to. It was, therefore, impossible that I was late. Probably he was mistaking me for someone else — someone younger, maybe, of lower rank, who still had to work nights.

“Who’s here?” I asked, while nodding my head toward the other side of the one-way observation glass. Over there: just an older man asleep in a wheelchair, wrapped from the waist down in a hospital sheet.

Not my patient, not Harvey.

The deceptively delicate-looking nurse didn’t stop clicking at his game of hearts, and still without turning to make eye contact he began mumbling quickly, more to himself than to me:

“Unevaluated. Likely psychotic. He was spitting and threatening and talking about God on the subway and so they brought him in. He’s sleeping off a dose of Haldol now. Wouldn’t stop shouting about us stealing his leg. I’d leave him for the morning crew. It’ll be a while before his meds wear off.”

Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare — actually stare — at me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead.

Furrowing his previously lineless brow, enunciating now more clearly than before, the night nurse said to me, “Are you Rema’s husband?”

I caught tinted sight of my slouched figure in the reflection of that observation glass that separated the staff from the patients. I noticed — remembered — that I was carrying Rema’s pale blue purse. “Yes,” I said, straightening my back, “I am.”

He guffed one violent guffaw.

But there was no reason to be laughing.

His Rema-esque vein pulsed unappealingly across the characterless creaminess of his skin. “I didn’t know you worked nights,” he said. “I didn’t know if—”

I should explain now that ever since I’d gotten Rema a job working as a translator at the hospital, I’d come to understand — from various interactions with people I didn’t really know — that many of Rema’s coworkers were extremely fond of her. She does often manage to give people the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way; I must admit I find it pretty tiresome dealing with all her pathetic devotees who think they play a much larger role in her life than they actually do; I mean, she hardly mentions these people to me; yet they think they’re so important to her; if the night nurse — apparently a member of Rema’s “ranks”—weren’t so obviously barely more than a child, then I might have wondered if he could help me, if I should ask him something, if he might have knowledge of the circumstances behind Rema’s absence, behind her replacement, but I could divine — I just could — that there was nothing — nothing at all — to be learned from that man.

“We probably did take his leg,” I said. On the night nurse’s desk lay the patient’s chart, open. Glancing at the intake page I had noticed the high sugar.

“What’s that?” the nurse said, still staring at me, but as if he hadn’t heard me.

“I mean, the funny thing is that, literally speaking, doctors probably did take that poor man’s leg,” I answered, explaining myself in perhaps a slightly raised voice. “We say amputated, he says stolen”—I was getting my voice back under my own control—“but that’s not psychosis. That’s just poor communication.”

A beat went by and then the nurse just shrugged. “Okay. Well. Not exactly the irony of ironies around here.” He turned back to his monitor.

“You shouldn’t be sloppy with the label ‘psychotic,’” I said. Just because a man’s in foam slippers, I almost continued lecturing to his back. But as I felt an inchoate anger rising in me, an image came to my mind, of that nervous puppy the simulacrum had come home with, of the puppy’s startled look of the starved, and I remembered that I had other anxieties to which I had intended to be attending.

Even if the unidentified patient wasn’t mine, wasn’t Harvey — as long as I was at the hospital, I thought I should look through Harvey’s old files. Maybe there would be clues as to where he might have gone; Rema would have liked to see me pursuing that mystery. And a part of me clung to the hope that if I dallied long enough, then by the time I made it back home Rema would be there, maybe battling it out with the simulacrum, as if in a video game. Rema would be victorious over her other and then together Rema and I would set out (the next level, another world) in search of Harvey.

That, anyway, was the resolution that presented itself to me.

“I’ll be in the back office,” I announced, feeling, I admit, a bit unbalanced, a bit homuncular, and beginning to develop the headache that had earlier, unexpectedly, and without my even noticing, ebbed.

I did call up Harvey’s old records, and I sifted through them, though I could detect no trends. But as I sat there, one Rema clue — or false clue — recalled itself to me. It was this: A mentor of mine from medical school had recently been in town. He had always been a “connoisseur” of women — this pose of his had always irritated, he had in fact once “stolen” a woman from me — nevertheless I admired him for other reasons and had been eager to have him meet my Rema. I had steeled myself against the inevitable jealousy of watching him chat her up — and I’d held my tongue when Rema put on a fitted, demurely sexy 1940s secretary style of dress — but then, all my mental preparations were for naught. Strangely, my mentor hadn’t seemed much charmed by Rema. He’d behaved toward her with serviceable politeness but nothing more. It was odd. At one point he’d made a joke about the election and Rema hadn’t followed. Maybe for a moment I wasn’t charmed by Rema. As if she weren’t really my Rema. My Rema who makes everyone fall in love. Case: the night nurse.

But back then it really was still her — I’m almost sure of it.

3. What may be highly relevant

I have mentioned my patient Harvey, but I have failed to properly discuss him and the odd coincidence, or almost co-incidence, of his having vanished just two days before Rema did. So, actually, most likely not a “coincidence.” In retrospect I feel confident that the seeds of tragedy were sown in what I had originally misperceived as a (kind of) light comedy of errors.

a. A secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology

When I first met Harvey just over two years ago, he was twenty-six years old, and for nine years had carried a diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder. He lived at home with his mother, had been treated successively, though never (according to his mother) successfully, by eleven different psychiatrists, two Reichian psychotherapists, three acupuncturists, a witch, and a lifestyle coach. Additionally Harvey had a history of heavy alcohol use, with a penchant for absinthe, which lent him a certain air of declining, almost cartoonish, aristocracy.

Harvey’s mother had called me after reading an article of mine peripherally about R. D. Laing. In my unintentionally lengthy conversation with her, with me practically pinned against the wall of some insufferably track-lit Upper East Side coffee shop whose coffee, she kept insisting, was “superior,” I quickly came to understand that she had grossly misread my paper. (For example, she interpreted my quoting Laing on “ontological insecurity” and “the shamanic journey” as endorsement rather than derision.) But I didn’t try to set right her misreading — that would have been rude — and I found the case of her son interesting. I could imagine entertaining Rema with its details. Also: it pleased me, the thought of telling Rema that a woman had sought me out after reading an article of mine.

Functionally speaking, Harvey’s main problem — or some might say his “conflict with the consensus view of reality”—stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality actually would (and this surprised me at the time) affirm. According to Harvey, the Royal Academy dedicated itself to maintaining weather’s elements of unpredictability and randomness.

“I would have thought the opposite,” I said in our initial conversation.

“Everything we say here is secret?” Harvey asked.

I assured him.

He explained: Opposed to the Royal Academy of Meteorology was an underground group known as the 49 Quantum Fathers (not confirmable as existent by a consensus view of reality). The 49 ran self-interested meteorological experiments, in uncountable parallelly processing worlds, and it financed itself through investments in crop futures, crops whose futures, naturally, depended upon the 49’s machinations of the weather.

I asked Harvey to clarify, about the parallelly processing worlds.

“Yes, well, the Fathers can move between the possible worlds,” he said. “Like they can go to the world that is like this one but Pompeii erupts ten years later. Variables are altered. Like maybe in one of those other worlds you were hit by a produce truck when you were a kid and we aren’t talking here now.”

Perhaps my pressing irritated him.

He continued, “In one world it’s a rainy spring in Oklahoma, in another world it’s a drought,” though I don’t know if he was aware of himself trying to mitigate an aggression. “Normally the worlds remain isolated from one another, but there are tangencies that the 49 exploit, for muling data and energy from one world to another. I do wonder how they map them — that I don’t know. You understand, of course, that knowing the weather means winning a war, that all weather research is really just war research by other means.”

I didn’t really know that, but I later read up on the topic on my own, and although one might argue that he was exaggerating, he was — even by a consensus view — off only in a matter of degree, not of kind.

“But,” Harvey said, “I don’t mean to aggrandize my personal work. I’m just the littlest butterfly. I handle mostly mesoscale events; I specialize mostly in local wind patterns.”

The Royal Academy sent Harvey orders through Page Six of the New York Post; it wasn’t that he saw text or images that weren’t actually there; rather, he understood what was there as encrypted messages expressly for him. Early rumors of J. Lo’s divorce had, for example, sent Harvey nearby to the Bronx, but often these orders — coded in a Hasselhoff binge or a Gisele Bündchen real estate acquisition — entailed Harvey setting off unannounced on missions across the country. Harvey’s mom would learn of his whereabouts only days later when she’d receive a call from a distant ER or police station. Harvey’s homecomings were often notable for cuts and bruises he could not explain, occasionally even signs of severe nutritional deficits, once including cerebellar dysfunction.

When asked about his absences, Harvey’s elucidation tended to go no further than to say that he was “laboring atmospherically.”

Arguably these disappearances actually endangered his life.

“From the moment I shook your hand,” Harvey’s mother said to me in her wet-eyed, well-wardrobed way, “I could just tell that you were different from the rest, that you were superior, that you would be the one to solve everything.” She said this after my first meeting with her son.

Well, looking through Harvey’s files, I saw that in the past medications had been thrown at him but, not surprisingly, to no avail. As far as I could ascertain, apart from his ideas of reference, he had no auditory or visual hallucinations and no compelling mood symptoms, so it was rather unclear what the medications would have been targeting.

In my next several meetings with Harvey, I tried to engage him in some reality testing. I asked him if he’d ever met anyone else who worked as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology. I asked him how he had acquired his special powers for manipulating the weather.

He told me that his father had been a top agent for the Academy. He told me that his father had single-handedly prevented a major hurricane off the Gulf of Mexico meant to knock out an entire mango crop. That, Harvey explained to me, was why the 49 Quantum Fathers had abducted his father many years ago, stashed him away in a parallel world.

I chose not to pursue the father issue further.

I did make a few other efforts to gently instill in Harvey some creative doubt in the internal perceptions of his world — such doubt being the usual cornerstone of delusional treatment and the path back to the consensus view of reality. But I failed. My failure did not hugely surprise me. Reality testing is notoriously unsuccessful for schizotypals, and if taken too far — and too far is not that far — it will serve only to isolate the patient further and deepen his conviction that he alone understands reality. Then a downward spiral begins.

The day immediately following my fifth session with Harvey, he again went missing. Nine days later he turned up in a hospital in Omaha. There had been hailstorms.

b. An initial deception

I should explain about the lying.

It was Rema who suggested that I lie to Harvey. I did not come up with that idea by myself. “That you lie como una terapia,” she emphasized. “You lie, but it is to benefit another. So it is a lie that is ethical. Isn’t that fine? Didn’t you tell me they used to hold the heads of disturbed patients underwater for the time it took to recite the Miserere? This treatment would be much nicer than that, this small lie carrying good intentions.”

Rema began then, completely impromptu (and this is a perfect example of the kind of Rema-ness absent in her impostress), to propose and elaborate upon a scheme wherein I was to pretend that I — like Harvey — was a secret agent of the actually existent Royal Academy of Meteorology. But that I — unlike Harvey — was an agent of superior rank. Who was in touch with an agent of even more superior rank. “Psychotics very much respect ranking,” she announced authoritatively.

“Yes, so does Harvey’s mother,” I added, not meaning to sound encouraging.

Rema paused and then added: “I’ll call. I’ll call to your office and you respond the phone and you listen very seriously and pass on the instructions that you will supposedly be receiving from a senior-ranking meteorologist. From me.” Rema particularly liked that detail, of her being the senior-ranking meteorologist.

The instructions, primarily, would be that Harvey “labor atmospherically” at locations very close to his home. On street corners. In the park. Handling very important mesoscale phenomena in the greater New York City environs.

I remember, strangely, that Rema was eating kumquats as she explained this plan to me. The kumquats still had leaves on them, which made the orange especially vibrant. And within me, as I listened to Rema inventing, as I watched her thinking through an elaborate lie, an alarm was sounding. But all my life, so many alarms seem always to be sounding, and so it becomes near impossible ever to say what any particular alarm might be signaling, or what might have set it off, or if it in any way ought to be heeded. The alarm then could as likely have signaled simply the color of the kumquat — some perhaps atavistic and now obsolete warning of poison — as something more grave.

“Not only is it unethical,” I said to Rema, “but your idea won’t even work. Why should it? And if Harvey discovers the lie — well, then it’s all over. The therapeutic relationship: over.” And possibly my career as well, I didn’t say.

We went back and forth on this for a good while, my doubts about the plan serving only to energize Rema more.

“Let’s imagine for a moment that it is ethical,” I said to her, as if in reconciliation. “And let’s even imagine for a moment that this ‘therapy’ does work. There’d still always loom the possibility of being discovered, of being revealed as a liar. I wouldn’t be able to go a day without worrying. I can’t live like that.”

“Oh,” Rema answered with a small unimpressed shrug, “but that’s what life is like all the time, no?”

Rema often made these broad, melodramatic declarations that seemed oddly heartfelt and sincere considering that they didn’t mean anything. She was always nervous, though, that was true. She’d accordion-fold any scrap of paper that happened to be in her hand for more than a minute; at movie theaters she had often already decoratively torn her ticket before reaching the front of the line. Occasionally, though, her anxiety bordered on psychosis. For example, once in response to an essay of mine on pathological mourning, I received a threatening letter. It suggested that I didn’t know what real loss was and that he, the letter writer, could teach me. Okay, it was worded more strongly than that, I admit, but it also evidenced such disorganized thought that it was foolish to believe such a person could actually set in motion a plan to cause harm. So there was nothing to fear. I brought the letter home to our apartment to show Rema mostly because of the inexplicable — and oddly beautiful — illustrations. There was no return address, but I thought it might be a kind of romantic mission to try to track down my correspondent. I imagined I might find a Henry Darger character on the other end. But Rema said that if the letter didn’t worry me I should be locked up in an asylum. She began looking into our moving apartments. This even though (1) the letter had been mailed to the journal and not to me directly, (2) our address was unlisted, and (3) only a handful of people knew where we lived. Still, Rema was on the phone with brokers. I decided not to recite what I considered comforting statistics on how often, and which kind of, written threats are actually executed. But I did tell Rema that her response was ludicrously out of proportion. She must actually be worried about something else, I said. She had an endogenous mésalliance, I concluded. She said she didn’t know what a mésalliance was, or what endogenous was, and that I was arrogant, awful, a few other things as well. I liked those accusations and found them flattering and thought she was right. Rema cried and hardly spoke to me for a few days. In bed at night she trembled.

But: it’s curious that she could so easily imagine a catastrophe separating us. That did, after all, happen.

And yet she was completely comfortable with the risks, professional and personal, of lying to a patient.

“Nope. No. Definitely not. No on the lying,” I said.

“Your choice of failures,” she said. “In my neighborhood we had a name for people like you: parsley.”

In the end — obviously — I decided to lie. Rema brightened considerably after that decision, and we had a sweet space of time, like the Medieval Warm Period, when wine grapes could grow three hundred miles farther north than they do today. Did I think then of the schemes that we would thus be swept into? No. I thought only of Rema.

c. An initial appearance

After I agreed to the plan, Rema suggested that I find the name of an actual scientist at the Academy, just in case Harvey looked up my superior’s name or was already familiar with the members. I, she said, would have to emphasize that I was, like Harvey, a secret, and therefore unlisted, agent.

“Right,” I said. “So no need to involve someone’s real name, if we’re talking about secret agents.”

“The real is good for deception,” she insisted.

And so.

Following Rema’s advice I obtained a list of the fellows of the Royal Academy. I chose the name Tzvi Gal-Chen capriciously, or so I thought. It just seemed like an anomalous and gentle sort of name, somehow authoritative and innocent at once. I almost chose the name Kelvin Droegemeier. That name also had charm and a kind of diffident beauty. But in the end I settled on Tzvi, because I remembered that degrees Kelvin was a temperature scale, which made Kelvin Droegemeier’s name, even though it was a real name, seem fancifully invented.

d. Initial anxiety (my mésalliance)

The night before I tried Rema’s ruse on Harvey I had several straightforward dreams. In one I was unable to make a teakettle stop whistling, in another Harvey was a homing pigeon in a dovecote (though I’m not actually sure what a dovecote is, in the dream I did know), in a third I was wearing yellow pants that looked terrible on me, and in the last I was simply walking down a street — I was seeing myself from above, as if from a building’s fire escape — and I knew that everyone hated me.

I woke inhaling the grassy scent of Rema’s hair. I put a lock of it in my mouth. I tried to comfort myself: Rema and I had prepared a script of sorts together, rehearsed some canned answers, scheduled a phone call. Also I had on my side the awkward flightless-bird beauty of that name, Tzvi Gal-Chen. Just, I reassured myself, because I was capable of imagining Harvey standing on his chair and calling out J’accuse, this did not in any way actually increase the likelihood of such an event occurring. Pressing that salivaed lock against my cheek I told myself that if I failed with Harvey, then so I failed. He couldn’t really get me into any trouble. If he accused me of posing as a secret agent for the Royal Academy, well, that would just sound like more of the same from him and I’d just deny the allegation. I decided that although I fancied myself afraid of failing with Harvey, my real fear of failure likely had to do with my cornsilk Rema. The whole Tzvi Gal-Chen therapy: it was Rema’s, not my own, strangely translated dream, and yet I’d somehow taken it upon myself to realize it.

I got out of bed (while Rema slept on) specifically because I felt within me an overwhelming desire to stay in bed.

“You’re going to break some legs,” Rema said to me later that morning, sitting across from me at the kitchen table with her hair, I remember, up in a tidy high ponytail; it struck me anew that I’d once thought that after enough time with me she would have put on a precious little potbelly and let her hair remain messy at home. I didn’t think she’d be like my own mother, always so consciously assembled, as if still petitioning for the attention of other, unseen, imaginarily present men.

“You know you’re saying it wrong, right? I don’t like it when you try to be cute on purpose.”

“I don’t try to be cute.”

“Rema, I have a very bad feeling.”

Bad feeling about this I should have said. Or at least I think that would have been more properly idiomatic than just saying “bad feeling.” But the little idiosyncrasies of Rema’s language had already thoroughly sunk into me, and I couldn’t hear so clearly anymore the space between what was Rema and what was normal.

Rema looked away from me and stared into the tea mug she held. “You ate meat too late. Lamb after eleven. That is the bad feeling. That is all. You should respect my ideas. You should respect your wife.”

That is all it is. I remember wanting to correct her, to tell her to add it is. Wouldn’t that have been closer to what she meant? I watched her touch her finger to the surface of her tea and then put her finger to her mouth and then suck on it, as if she had a cut there. She did this again, this very slow way of drinking that she had. (The simulacrum, she drinks like she’s parched, like someone might take her drink away. Some mornings she’s through her first mug of tea in three minutes, though I’ll often find a second one left half drunk, grown cold.)

I did respect Rema, obviously I do. Though I know that she didn’t believe or understand that, which I thought had more to do with her own self-doubt about who she was, or what she was doing, or not doing. She didn’t have what one would call a “profession,” but I didn’t know why she particularly wanted one; it seemed like she’d been infected by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid — that seemed silly to me. If I looked like Rema, if I had her ways, and if I weren’t a man, I’d consider it profession enough to have streaky bleached hair, to wear a green scarf, to spill spicy teas, to walk (slightly) unevenly on high heels. What more is there to give to the world than that? I realize this sentiment of mine is currently considered appalling, but these days I find the popularity of ideas even more meaningless than ever before. I had told Rema once, when she complained of feeling aimless and amiss, that she was born in the wrong era and that she should consider just waking up every morning and being her profession enough. I told her she could be my duchess. She may have contemplated taking what I had said as sweet, but in the end chose instead — and I think “chose” is the right word — to be offended, because then she came out saying that maybe her problem was that she had been too happy to marry me, and that that had been good enough for too long, and maybe if she’d stayed lonely she might have made something of herself, even if something really dumb and superfluous, like a tax attorney, or a poet, and that would have been nice, to be able to say what one was. I said she was a Rema. I said, furthermore, that I didn’t really understand what obstacle I posed to either of her mentioned goals, but she just said yes, I didn’t understand, and I said that that was what I was saying precisely, that I didn’t understand. But she was saying that it was that I didn’t understand her.

So it was like that sometimes.

But about Rema’s lamb after eleven comment. Although I didn’t think she was right in that particular instance of my “bad feeling” before meeting with Harvey, I thought that her general idea — how we can misinterpret our own pain — I thought that was very right.

e. An initial (Pyrrhic) victory

You really look closely at a person before lying, or confessing love, or doing anything momentous. It is above all Harvey’s outfit from that day that I remember well: navy blue suspenders hooked onto gray trousers (lightly pilling), a thin-striped button-up shirt (cuffs unbuttoned) with a dark ink stain like Argentina at the left floating rib and with sleeves too short and a collar strangely starched and flipped and seeming poised for flight. I don’t know if Harvey actually had one arm notably longer than the other, but he gave off that impression.

Rema and I had planned on having her call near the end of Harvey’s session. I was to have already introduced the fact of myself as a secret agent of the Royal Academy. I had failed to do so. I felt too conspicuous, as if I was as exhaustively vivid for Harvey as he was for me that day (his eyes are so improbably blue) and this even though I knew that in truth it was highly doubtful that there was anything remarkable about my appearance at all; that day, like all the previous days, I must have seemed to Harvey simply an unremarkable gray haze of overly gentle inquiry.

My feeling of conspicuousness — I’m certain — stemmed from an awareness that a ridiculous lie lay in wait within me; I’m not a natural liar, so I had very little faith in my competence as one. I don’t mean to be smug by proclaiming my inherent honesty; I don’t think of my honesty as moral value, since I think of morality as involving choices, and I’ve never particularly chosen to be honest, have simply never been able to be otherwise, feel rather predetermined to fail at lying. Even as a child, in order to avoid saying thank you, upon prompting, for things I wasn’t truly thankful for, I would bury my face in my mother’s skirt. A smell of certain wools, the sound of a slip brushing up against hosiery, still recalls that emotion back to me. On the rare occasions when I have said I am busy when I am not, or that I like some item of clothing or person that I am indifferent to or hate, I am filled with unreasonable guilt over my “white” lie, and want to cry, confess, unburden. It’s all a bit overblown, really, as if I’ve actually wounded someone, as if my small insincerity might actually matter. I even kind of like it when other people lie, when Rema lies, for example; it’s a way of finding out, if the lie is uncovered, what she thinks is worth lying about.

So Harvey was saying something about El Niño, and dead fish.

Then the telephone rang, startling me far more than it startled Harvey.

“Hello?”

It was Rema, who, sounding inappropriately giddy, called me Dr. Liebenstein and asked me what I was wearing.

“Oh yes hello,” I said, staring at the lines at Harvey’s cuff, watching them blur.

Rema chatted comfortably about what she wanted me to pick up for dinner, urging me not to be cheap about the fish — everyone with the fish — asking me also could I pick up the thin almond cookies that she liked, the ones she liked to dip in her tea, did I know which ones she meant? Through all this I nodded sagely.

“And these El Niño winds?” I asked.

She talked on, saying I’m not sure what in her beautiful mint-pitched voice; eventually she suggested that she get off the phone. I said that of course I would pass everything on faithfully.

“Well,” I throat-cleared to Harvey, “I apologize for that interruption, but I can now say something rather important to you. Are you familiar with the work, the public work that is, of Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen?”

Preplanned words exited my mouth hastily, stumblingly, and I heard them as if they were not my own. Blushingly confessing myself a secret agent, I passed on to Harvey Dr. Gal-Chen’s assignment — a cold front approaching Manhattan. And as I spoke — my gaze fixed on the stain on Harvey’s shirt — I further estranged myself from myself, so that while one part of me talked to Harvey, another part thought about a certain shade of pale green that happened to be the exact shade of pale green that the newspaper once published as having been calculated by astronomers to be the color of the universe, after which a correction appeared in the following week’s paper stating that a math error had been made, and that the astronomers now realized the universe, if you could stand outside of it and see it, was actually a shade of beige. (Willed depersonalization is entirely normal, a valid, even laudable, coping technique. Only unwilled depersonalizations would be a cause for concern.)

After I stopped talking there was a brief or long — I’m not sure which — moment of silence.

“How long have you been working for the Academy?” Harvey asked.

I told him that there were very few details of my work that I was allowed to disclose.

He asked me if I could tell him if I’d received any awards, in particular the Symons Gold Medal or the Carl-Gustav Rossby Medal.

I said it was lonely having secrets and that Harvey probably understood that loneliness.

Then Harvey smiled shyly, and talked a few minutes, in a comradely way, of the difficulty and delicacy of meteorological work. It’s never ceased to amaze me how, if you’re calm and quiet, others fill in any gaps in your story. Harvey pulled out his compact mirror and smoothed down his eyebrows, and then began to explain something about this instrument of his, which he used, he said, to alter vectors of light and sound.

I noticed spidering burst capillaries across his cheeks. I remember well the dejected feeling of having, apparently, succeeded. I wanted to reach across to Harvey and just touch one of his sleeves. I don’t know why, not precisely. Even a well-intentioned deception leaves a metallic taste in the mouth.

Did I think I’d ever partner with Harvey in order to find Rema, rather than partner with Rema in order to control and deceive Harvey? I did not.

f. An unusual initiation of a kind of friendship with Tzvi Gal-Chen

Relaying Dr. Gal-Chen’s instructions to Harvey became easy, ordinary, domestic. The phone would ring, Rema would often recite a grocery list, and I would tell Harvey that Dr. Gal-Chen says high-pressure systems are coming in from the north and Harvey’s assistance is needed locally.

And following the initiation of the Gal-Chen therapy, for the next nineteen months, Harvey didn’t go missing even once. He followed strictly Tzvi Gal-Chen’s orders to stay for work in the city. He deregulated tidal winds off the Hudson River estuary; he finely negotiated the chaos of an incoming tropical storm system from the corner of his own street. As for me, Harvey’s mother regularly sent me grids of artisanal chocolates, each chocolate with its own transfer textile type pattern atop — and, well, this made me feel good about myself.

Rema also was very pleased — probably more pleased than me — with the success of the Tzvi Gal-Chen therapy. At least in the beginning, at least for a little while. She took to calling herself Dr. Rema, and she often held my hand and pressed the back of it against her cheek. Once, when the weather report interrupted the news, she squeezed my arm and leaned over and kissed me and laughed. She was the kind of happy that made me feel that she would love me, and me alone, forever. But maybe it was just that successful deceptions made her euphoric. “Why,” I asked her one evening, “did you say the corner store was out of clementines when in fact it wasn’t?” In response, she eyed me suspiciously. “I found the receipt for that blue sweater you bought me,” I said, “and you understated its price by eighty dollars.” She ignored me, remained unaffected in her bout of cheer. It was nice, though; contrary to my nature as it was, happiness grew in me.

Gal-Chen therapy language made its way into our apartment, first teasingly, but after a while who could say? When Rema and I disagreed, I’d invoke our meteorologist: “Dr. Gal-Chen prefers the green wool,” “Dr. Gal-Chen says no to imitation Nilla Wafers.” Or sometimes, more intimately: “Tzvi wouldn’t be pleased about your not wearing socks,” “Tzvi thinks you should return the movie,” or “Tzvi thinks you should plump a little.” Rema may have tired of this, but, after all, the specter of Tzvi had entered into our lives on account of her therapeutic invention, not mine. I thought of Tzvi as a stranger, certainly, but one whom I felt in some way shared our life, as if he returned to the apartment late, after Rema and I were asleep, and snacked on leftovers from the refrigerator, watched the television with the volume down low, left tea mugs in the sink.

One free afternoon, I came across a photo on the Internet of Dr. Gal-Chen with his family; I e-mailed it to Rema. She printed it on a color printer at the hospital, brought it home carefully tucked inside an empty patient folder, and then magneted it onto our refrigerator.

“That was nice of you,” I said.

“Oh, I just did it for myself,” she responded, maybe a tiny bit irritated.

I recall, at the time, having had certain interpretations of this action, this posting of a family photo on the refrigerator. But in retrospect, with all that has since happened, those interpretations now seem too simple. I admit that I had rather unsophisticatedly read the photo in our home as symptomatic of a longing for children, though I wasn’t certain if the longing was Rema’s or my own. Or if really the longing was just for a return to Rema’s own unremarked-upon childhood, or to an alternate of her own childhood. Or maybe the longing was for something else, for someone else. But whatever that photo was, I don’t care, it doesn’t really matter, it was also, and above all, just an amusing photo to look at when one went, from hunger, to let the yellow light and cold out of the refrigerator.

The butterfly collar and tinted glasses on Tzvi, the eyeleted cap sleeve with trim on his wife, that stolid Izod polo on the son — it was pleasing to travel back in time like that, falling through those mode details. And that little Bavarian mock-up on that tidy little chub of a child, well, that was just precious. “Why do you only notice clothing?” Rema asked, as if pointing to a moral flaw. But when I pushed her as to what she noticed, she could only point out the creamy crooks of the elbows on the mother and son. Sometimes I wondered at the necklace on the wife, other times at the inscrutable pale blue square on the shirt of Tzvi Gal-Chen. And once Rema and I had a long argument about whether Dr. Gal-Chen’s shirt showed a button or a snap. I argued snap quite heatedly, on the basis of context. She argued button on the basis of visual details that I apparently couldn’t see. But look at the way the light catches on that snap — it’s pearline.

It was strange, now that I think about it, how I never tired of that photo.

Even though I know better than to trust appearances, especially posed, studio-airbrushed, heathered-backdrop appearances, still: the Gal-Chens had the look of a happy family. Maybe not particularly sophisticated, or good-looking, or fashionable, but still, happy. Even now I do not know if that was, or is, true or not. If they were, indeed, happy. But who can ever really know about anyone’s happiness, even one’s own? And if another woman can have the appearance of Rema, then perhaps I should by now be giving up on appearances entirely. But with that photo it was more than just an appearance, it was also a feeling, a family feeling. A feeling that at least seemed to be responding to something beyond mere appearance, though at times such “feelings”—such limbic system instinctual responses — are the most superficial and anachronistic of all, like the feeling a baby duck must have when it responds more strongly to a stick painted red than to the beak of its own mother.

4. A mysterious knuckle

So that was the state of affairs with Harvey — he was again missing — but I did not immediately connect his most recent disappearance (or Tzvi Gal-Chen) with Rema’s replacement, even though I had (as if a part of me knew something another part did not) immediately expected to find Harvey when I was paged shortly after the simulacrum had fallen asleep. When I returned from the hospital where Harvey wasn’t to the apartment where Rema wasn’t, I put Rema’s pale blue shoulder bag underneath the sink, for safekeeping. It was 5 a.m. and my new houseguest was not yet awake. She was hidden beneath Rema’s ugly old yellow quilt, with only one indefinite tan arm and a few tickles of blonde hair showing. I pulled the quilt back a bit; she didn’t stir.

It was a little uncanny, the feeling I had, looking at that look-alike. I was reminded of how I used to feel before I actually knew Rema, reminded of the winter when she was still a stranger and I would notice her, nightly, coming to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, wearing nubbly red mittens and her same wool coat with oversized buttons. She always ordered the loose-leaf teas, and when she would sit at a table near mine I liked to watch her try to pour from the little metal teapot without spilling, which wasn’t easy, since at almost any angle the water’s path of choice was to travel retrograde along the outside of the spout and spill on the table. Rema would then pat the table dry with her napkin and then get up and get more napkins, and this was every time, as if she couldn’t have anticipated and stocked up on extra napkins from the beginning. This — and her cornsilk hair, and her slightly clumsy gait, and I don’t know what — I loved her already then.

Leaving the sleeping simulacrum to herself I lay myself down on the sofa, experiencing the unhappy déjà vu of having lain myself down in just the same way not so many hours earlier, expecting Rema’s imminent arrival. I tried to rest. But although the phone did not ring — it was always ringing of late — intrusive thoughts, rising as if carbonated, disturbed me from sleep:

a movie dimly recalled from childhood, with a blind samurai who can’t see that the man pursuing him is his double

John Donne meeting his wife’s doppelganger in Paris, and this portending his baby’s death

Maupassant seeing his own doppelganger, and it portending his own death

Rema asleep on my shoulder at the movies

a guff of ugly laughter

This is just a problem I’m trying to depersonalize, I told myself. Probably just some very normal problem dressed up as a strange one. An ordinary problem masquerading as extraordinary. My mother used to say that almost any problem could be solved by one of the following three solutions: a warm bath, a hot drink, or what she called “going to the bathroom,” though she never specified what was to be done there. I was thinking now how I can’t really recall any episode from my childhood when her advice didn’t work. Our bathtub was in the middle of our kitchen, and the bathroom was a thin-walled room just on the other side of the kitchen sink; both rooms had the same houndstooth hand-layed tile floor, and one always heard water coursing through pipes, or braking, or boiling.

The sound of something like Rema walking by woke me from what couldn’t have been much more than an hour of sleep, but an awkward hour, from which I woke — starbursting pain — with a numb and tingly left hand. After again catching sight of the decidedly not Rema’s face, and during the achingly familiar sock-footing about in the kitchen that followed, I decided that I couldn’t just wait around feigning normality; I had to go and search for the real Rema. And though I didn’t know quite what that meant — would I don a cap, grab a magnifying glass, and go dusting for fingerprints? — I knew it was the proper next step to take.

Over red zinger tea with honey, I told the ersatz Rema of my plans. Or, at least, I mentioned to her that I thought I’d spend the day — which I could see out the window was another very gray, precipitous day — out walking.

“A walk sounds nice,” she responded expectantly, looking across the table at me with her dove dark eyes. “That sounds,” she continued, “like exactly what would please me. You and me and the gentle dog and we’ll—”

“I’d rather walk alone,” I braved.

“Oh.” The dog lover frowned. The red zinger had stained her lips a pretty pink. “I only offered to join you to be kind. But really the weather is ugly. What does the weatherman call this? Wintry mix? That makes it sound like dried cherries and coconut and pecans. But actually it is not so nice like that at all.”

As she spoke I was staring at her hands, both wrapped around her tea mug, staring at the little elephant-knee patterns of lines at the finger joints. I could see the divot in the knucklebone, the grooves that reveal the finger as but a line-and-pulley system. The longer I stared at that knuckle the more it grew foreign rather than familiar. Pretty hands. Pretty knuckles. Pretty little way of holding a tea mug.

“Wintry mix,” I finally said, slowly, copying the woman’s copied language. My tea had meanwhile grown cold. When red zinger gets cold it tastes too full of tannins and makes me more rather than less thirsty. “That is kind of a euphemism, isn’t it?” I agreed, trying to sound chummy and casual. But I couldn’t make eye contact with the impostress. It was as if, by not admitting that I planned to go out in search of Rema, I was cheating on her, on this alternate Rema.

“Where,” I tried, “is the puppy?”

“Bedroom,” she said. “You were sleeping.” And she got up from the table not aglow with happiness, not placated at all, in fact perhaps rather irritated. “And she’s not a puppy. She’s a dog. She’s an adult. In a new and stressful situation and so especially in need of love and attention,” she concluded, beginning to walk away from me.

“Why did you bring her home?” I called out with a desperation I didn’t expect.

“Why did you not bring her home?” she said. “Why do you not do anything at all?” she continued, not looking at me, and almost out of the room.

She was wearing Rema’s green nightie boxers. Her legs were pretty, a faintest blue. And also they were long, with one hip ever so slightly rotated inward. Like Rema. I was proud of myself for having had the strength of character to leave behind such an attractive woman. I wish Rema could have witnessed that. I just would have liked her to enjoy the spectacle of how obviously and entirely and singularly I loved her.

5. An initial search

How did I search the city for Rema? I found myself standing in front of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, in front of its fogged windows into which no child had yet traced patterns. Below the windows: the pastel mural of slightly deformed angels. To the left: stacked white plastic chairs. To the right: a man descending into the sidewalk cellar holding a tray of uncooked dumplings, the wrappings pinched and pointing to the sky. And, still standing outside, reflected in the glass, was — and for a moment I didn’t recognize him — me: hairy handed and slope shouldered and not as tall as I like to think I am. With a rising sense of ridiculousness, the thought surfaced: this is how I search for my wife? This was probably the one place she almost certainly would not turn up. Like the most gumshoe of all gumshoes, I’d gone where I wanted her to be, not where there was any reason or unreason for me to believe she actually would be.

I went inside anyway — it was warm and humid, like a room for leavening. Near the pastry display case, a young boy was patting at the pocket of his mother’s (I assume his mother’s) coat shouting biscotto! biscotto! A skinny vulture of a man — he had terrible eyebrows — watched from the table; he was a regular who typed pompously, and flirted with the waitstaff, and I’d once overheard him say he was into meditation, and I thought of him like a disease. A little farther back I saw the crowd I thought of as “the dirty kids”: two messy girls who seemed always to have just left a medieval fair — eternally in old velvet or silk or lace — and a young man, with unwashed hair and a small cartoon bear nose, who perpetually wore a shapeless too-short leather jacket. He looked sad that day; the girls were consoling him. Also I saw a pretty wavy-haired undergrad with her thin arms bare. A little boy was crawling under her table and he picked up and turned over a pale green scrap of paper.

Sometimes it terrifies me, when I sense the exponenting mass of human lives — of unlabeled evidence of mysteries undiscerned — about which I know nothing.

“What did you say?” someone said maybe to me.

“Nothing,” I said to almost no one.

Having pined for Rema in the past in this very place (her tea’s leaves would stack up in the sieve and look like topiary) I felt my new loneliness echo against the anxiety I used to have watching the door wondering if Rema would walk in, and that feeling was then echoing against the haunting vision I used to have of Rema’s cornsilk hair, which was echoing against the memory of that first day I saw Rema see me notice that she had looked at me after which she had then quickly looked away, all of which echoed against a sensation of her kissing my eyelid, which made me shiver.

It was very bad, the acoustics inside of me.

I wanted, suddenly, to leave.

I ordered a coffee to go — a terrible coffee that pleases only for bearing the name coffee and for being hot. I walked over to Broadway, went underground, boarded the number 1 train heading downtown. Each time new passengers came on, I watched expectantly. Near the bottom of the island, I exited, ascended, crossed the street, redescended, waited, and reboarded the subway going uptown. At the third stop, a man entered the subway car and announced loudly: “I had already apologized, for those of you who did not know.” Then he said those same words again, and again, and again, so I realized he wasn’t speaking to me, at least not in particular. But I anyway couldn’t help but feel that what the man really meant was that I should be sorry, that I should apologize. Maybe everyone on the train felt as I did, that they were the point of all this, of everything. It was like when the music comes on at the Chinese restaurant and suddenly even the random movements of the fish in the aquarium seem choreographed, thick with meaning; then the music pauses and meaning abruptly disperses. The fish seem dumb, as do all the diners.

At the 110th Street stop I exited and began a repeat of the whole cycle. Later I did sit for a few hours at the coffee shop, made some drawings of sugar cubes, and of an upside-down cup, and of the pattern that a small coffee spill made when it was soaked up by a napkin, a pattern like an archipelago.

Though my initial progress did not look or feel like progress, I believe it was a kind of progress, that of just staying in place, of not slipping backward into despair.

6. An alleged orphan

Walking, finally, home, I comforted myself with the likelihood that I would very soon see Rema, that she — the selfsame girl I’d picked up at the coffee shop years before — would be right there at home, russet dog or no russet dog. Maybe she would be shelling pecans. Or reading the newspaper. Maybe she would be very happy to see me.

I put my key to the lock, I heard scratching at the door, I opened the door and I found myself being lavished with affection, from the russet dog. Then the dog undid my left shoelace. I heard a voice coming from the bedroom and I heard a hanging up of a telephone. Meanwhile this dog still had my shoelace between its teeth and was shaking its head back and forth madly, behavior that may appear playful but that is quite clearly a manifestation of the instinct to break the neck of caught prey, a manifestation that we refer to as cute. It’s just like how we have so successfully forgotten as a species that a smile was born as a masking afterthought to the sudden baring of teeth. At least that’s the most convincing smile theory I’ve heard.

Then the woman emerged from the bedroom. I smiled. She was the same. The same false vision of Rema from before.

“The dog makes you happy?” substitute Rema asked, and what could I answer except no. The dog then left me (left my shoelace) for her; she picked that dog up in her arms, snuggled the dog with oversized gestures, as if performing onstage. She told me she didn’t care what I thought about what to name the dog, that she was going to name her without me. I said I didn’t care what she named the dog, the dog that was licking her face with dedication.

“But I got this dog,” she said to me, “for you.”

The dog had dark, wet eyes; the woman’s eyes were similar. Then I noticed that she — the simulacrum — had fine lines of age on her face. Tiny crow’s-feet, and not just when she smiled, since I could see them and she was not smiling. This look-alike Rema, I began to realize, was not such a perfect look-alike; it would seem Rema was being played by someone older, or who at least looked older. Someone pretty, but not as pretty. Not that there’s anything wrong with an older woman — there is nothing wrong with a woman my age for example, I just don’t happen to be married to one.

“You said dogs are brilliant,” she said, her voice supersaturated with emotion. “You said Freud’s dogs could diagnose the patients.”

But Rema knew Freud was essentially demoted (in a few specific passages promoted) out of my notion of an ideal psychiatry. As the impostress talked on I wondered: was Rema kidnapped or did she willingly leave? Which would be worse? Determined not to let emotion crack my voice, I tried to avoid speaking altogether. The simulacrum, fortunately, seemed to have the same talent as Rema for filling up silent spaces, and she went on: “You said Freud’s dogs knew when therapy was over, and knew who was psychotic and who was neurotic, and that when memories were recovered the dog would wag its tail. You said you would have liked to have such insight, such dog insight, that it would be better than your own, and so there I was at the hospital, and this poor dog was left orphan, and it seemed like a sign, like not just random, like this dog was sent to us, for us to save her and for her to save us, silly I know, but no, you just look at me strange.” The russet puppy — I mean, dog — was licking tears from the doppelganger’s face.

“But Freud’s dogs,” I said, “they were chow dogs.”

It was all I could think of to say. I turned away from this woman and went to the bathroom, where I ran hot water over my hands, which is something I like to do in the colder months, it just makes me feel a little bit better. Then I touched my face with my warmed hands. It calms me down, it’s just this very normal thing that I do.

Over the sound of the running water I could hear that Rema-like voice calling through the door. She didn’t sound pleased. I was thinking, Does Rema know this twin of hers? Did Rema complain about me to her? There were difficult aspects of Rema, I can’t deny that — a lot of this arguing through a bathroom door had been going on of late.

The Rema-ish voice came though the door with something about being tired of it always being her getting stuck with the label of unreasonable, irrational, crazy. I thought to shout back that of course it was her getting stuck with that label, and that furthermore I’d only ever said irrational and unreasonable, never crazy, and that it was she alone who was assigning normative value to those labels and, listen, she couldn’t even let a man just wash his hands in peace, but I stopped myself, instead said nothing, thinking to myself: This fight is stupid. This fight is ridiculous. And to have it with a woman I don’t even know — that is even more ridiculous.

Older, wrong, and no more manageable, this replacement wife.

I heard the front door open and close.

7. I am contacted

After finishing my private peace of running hot water in the bathroom I came out to find that the simulacrum and the unnamed dog were not in the kitchen, not in the living room, not in the bedroom — they were gone. Which meant, I decided, that I could think and plan in quiet, which I proceeded to do in a prone position on the sofa, which meant that I was promptly asleep but without knowing that I was asleep, a fact that I did not discover until the phone roused me from my poor and hectic slumber during which I’d suffered a dream in which what was happening to me was exactly what was actually happening to me. Because I woke up with a sense of relief, I had the clawing hope that Rema’s replacement had been not also but only in my dream, a bad dream induced simply by indigestion, or a cold draft, or a foot cramp. That was the stage of loss I was in then I suppose, like the first days after someone dies, when you bend down to pick up every piece of lint, and you wonder what the dead person, when you meet her next, might have to say about her death (or about lint), and you worry, a little bit, about how that is going to be a very awkward conversation, the conversation with the recently dead.

Again the phone rang.

“Hello,” I said, bringing the cold plastic receiver to my face.

“Leo Liebenstein.”

“Yes,” I said, not even rising from my reclining position because I didn’t want to lose the warmth I’d invested in the cushions of the sofa.

“Leo Lieben—”

“Yes,” I interrupted sleepily but louder.

“To whom am I speaking?” the voice on the other end said politely, in a strange accent. Or what seemed like a poor imitation of a strange accent.

And I began to feel more awake. “Who is this?” I asked.

Muffled bickering came through the line; then it sounded like the phone dropped. Just as I was about to hang up, a new voice came on, this time thin, sandy, and ambitious.

“I’m calling from the Royal Academy of Meteorology; we’d like to invite you to become a fellow. Would you—”

“Harvey?”

“Sir, I’m calling from the Royal Aca—” Again I heard a tussle over the phone. Then I heard Rema’s voice, though I couldn’t make out the words. I thought the voice was coming to me through the phone.

“Rema?” I called into the phone loudly, startling myself.

“The teakettle!” answered Rema’s voice — now clearly traveling directly from the bedroom — and I could feel the hot atmosphere my own voice had made near the phone’s mouthpiece.

“We’d like to make you a fellow,” I heard. “Do you understand? It’s a tremendous—”

I hung up.

I looked around the room: rocking chair, scratched wood floor, Godzilla poster — my familiar life. And Rema? I crossed over to the closed bedroom door, leaned against its unsmooth grain, and listened. I heard just that sound of cupping a hand over an ear. Of a distant ocean marked with a yellow flag, of my own ear anatomy breaking up the trajectories of randomly moving molecules of air, hearing its own little self-made sound universe. And suddenly I sensed my ridiculousness — pressing a cupped ear against a door in my own apartment — sensed, with a rising sadness, my familiar space growing foreign to me.

I abandoned the sounds of my ear cupped to the bedroom door. I went to the kitchen, turned the click-clicker of the gas stovetop — blue-orange burst! — filled the kettle with tap water — a nice contact sound! — and rested it on the flame. I love the different sound stages of water on its way to boiling. I like listening to the teakettle’s tremble. Our teakettle’s handle is slightly loose, and its shaking adds another harmonic layer over the tremulousness of the metal.

“Who was that?” came the voice.

I turned and saw her, under the kitchen’s lintel, wearing my button-up and her little boy shorts, thigh slightly rotated inward, holding that russet puppy — dog — in one hand. She walked past me, leaned against the counter near the stove; Rema had always liked leaning there, in just that way, so she could feel the heat, and so she could turn off the flame before the teakettle’s whistling had ever really begun. Maybe on account of that lean, despite that dog-puppy, I began silently to argue to myself: this must be Rema. This must be her. Believe this Rema like you always do. Look at her. Is she really more strange today than any other day? The hair, the eyes, the long legs leading down to slightly pigeon-toed feet. Who else could it be? Believe this Rema like you always do.

But I knew that my reasoning was post hoc, and another voice came in, mocking me, reminding me that post hoc reasoning is the consolation of the psychotic — all evidence interpreted under the shadow of an axiomatic belief that one is Jesus Christ, or the king of Sweden, or made entirely of glass.

Why should I believe, just by fiat, that this woman was Rema, when that ran contrary to the phenomenology?

The simulacrum tilted her head at me, like puppies tilt their heads.

And a high-pitched pain, like a thousand tiny moths, began to collect behind the front of my skull, accelerating, advancing. Something was wrong. I reached out and put my hand on where I expected her abdomen to be, because I had a feeling my hand might pass right through her, as if she were a hologram, as if only the clothing were real. But I was all wrong about what was wrong. My hand did not go through her abdomen, which was real, or appeared to be so, as solid, anyway, as anything else I know, though I suppose they say it’s almost all empty space, the building blocks of matter — a moth in a cathedral? — but one shouldn’t take the extension of such metaphors too seriously.

She looked at my hand on her abdomen. Then she squinted at me, as if to put me in focus.

“Wait, who was that on the phone?” she asked again.

The pain in my head had grown dizzying so I sat down on the cool blue tile floor, sat by that woman’s foot, and looked at the blue vein there across her arch. For a time during my medical training, on account of so often drawing blood and placing IVs, my eyes would travel, of their own accord, to plump veins. I would search feet and hands and wrists and crooks of elbows, and it would be difficult for me not to reach out and place the pad of a finger on those veins and feel the blood coursing through. It’s like a ghost living in us, our blood, that’s what I think it is like, having something within us — like our blood, like our livers, like our loves — that goes on about its business without consulting us. I touched that vein there on Rema’s foot. I feel like I can say that, that the foot at least, that foot was really Rema’s. Or probably not really. Or so only in that every foot becomes, in my mind, Rema’s foot slightly varied. And Rema’s foot is like Rema entire; her foot alone is enough to recall her to me whole. I don’t know, I was very confused then.

“Leo,” this woman said to me gently. “Leo, are you all right? I’m sorry I was angry earlier, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings about Harvey’s leaving. I think that is what this must be about. I don’t think it is your fault. Only you think it is your fault. Maybe it is my fault. Is that what this is about?”

I was petting her pretty foot. The teakettle’s trembling had advanced somewhat. I could hear the puppy, the dog, in her arms, above me, panting.

“What,” I asked her — and I asked gently because even if she wasn’t Rema she still seemed like a very nice person—“would you say if I told you that the Royal Academy called me?” I pressed on the arch’s vein very lightly, and watched its world go white.

“The Royal Academy?”

“You know which I mean,” I said quietly, wondering if she knew what I meant. I leaned down and kissed her foot, which was cold and dusty, as was the tile floor that I then stretched myself out upon more fully. “Of Meteorology.”

“Leo?”

“Where Tzvi Gal-Chen is a fellow,” I said, gesturing with my head toward the refrigerator, though Tzvi’s family photo was no longer there, I don’t know where things like that disappear to, the kinds of things one has on one’s fridge. These things are not just under the fridge like you might think, because I could see under the fridge and I saw only a curled fruit label sticker and a child’s jack.

The woman turned the kettle off. It wasn’t — by sound stage — even near boiling. She set down that animal (who began licking my face and disturbing my peace) and sat down next to me. “Jokes aren’t funny,” she said to me, “when they need lots of explaining. Are you feeling well? You look sad, Leo.”

A prominent vein tortured across her hand too. I could press on the vein and it would fade to white and then return again, to that very particular blue.

She said, “Your walk. Do you want to tell me how it was? It’s a cloud out there.”

I thought that she was right, not just about the cloud, but about how jokes did lose their humor when they needed explaining, and I thought that maybe I had been making a joke, and that it hadn’t been the Royal Academy that had called. Later, when the phone rang again, I insisted that neither of us pick it up. We sat together on the sofa that evening and I kept my eyes on the floor and at one point I told “Rema” that I missed her, and I leaned over and bit her ear gently, and then I kissed her hand and the inside of her wrist, but that dog was running about, and quietly, in my thoughts, I apologized to Rema because I had wanted to hold that other woman. I think you can imagine the feelings that I had, and their strangeness to me.

8. Single-Doppler weather radar

In the salad days of Gal-Chen therapy I used to like to watch NY1 weather and think of Tzvi as the man behind the scenes, the unsung hero who made it all possible, deploying Doppler radar technology and interpreting the data at record speeds, simultaneously forecasting for all five boroughs. It was a light thought, a happy hyperbole, one of the many childish banalities that made up my daily secret life. Not much of a secret life, but enough. Enough to let others — Rema, I hoped — project something grander onto those private spaces. But my projections onto the unknown Tzvi — it turned out they were insufficiently ambitious, palest shadows of the truth.

Tzvi Gal-Chen’s contributions to the field of radar meteorology include a series of “retrieval” papers, all of which confront the problems of translating Doppler weather radar data into real-world, and eventually real-time, information. Familiar enough. But Tzvi focuses in particular on how valuable data retrieval can be accomplished with a single-Doppler radar; in this way his research represents a break from more conventional retrieval methods involving dual-Doppler radar systems: two radars, distant from each other, looking at more or less the same volume of air from perpendicular angles so that real-world information can then be divined through triangulation. Why not stick with dual-Doppler radar systems? Tzvi describes his motivation for developing single-Doppler retrieval methods thusly: “Perfectly coupled radar systems are rare, if they exist at all.” And “dual-Doppler analysis requires accurate calibration of radar antennas and simultaneous operation of both radars.”

Whereas I was genuinely alone. The therapeutic relationship, like, for example, the mourning process, is inherently asymmetric. I suppose I had let that sort of asymmetry leak into all aspects of my life, so while I had a number of pleasant professional relationships, I had no one I could really turn to for advice about Rema’s replacement, no one whom I could simply call upon as a friend, as a second. Except for Rema, and Rema wasn’t there. I admit that it’s generally better to consult another person, to adjust for a limited perspective, for the distortions of perception. If I’m wondering, for example, “Do I look haggard?” it would be useful to have another person’s eyes on me; between the two of us we might be able to settle the question near the truth.

But given the particulars of the situation, corroboration was an unreasonable expectation. I’d have to proceed on my own.

The limits of my knowledge and education inevitably restrict my comprehension of Tzvi’s work, so far outside of my own discipline, but I have come to understand the basic ideas quite well.

Doppler radar turns to advantage what is known as Doppler effect, an oft-misunderstood concept. Doppler effect describes an apparent — as opposed to actual — change in frequency or wavelength. It is the change perceived by an observer who is, relative to the wave source, in motion. Textbook example: as a speeding car approaches, the sound it emits appears to go up in pitch, in frequency. But in actuality, the emitted frequency — the car’s trembling of the air around it — does not change at all. It only seems to change.

Let us imagine a source from which a Rema look-alike emerges every second.

If the source is stationary, and I am stationary, then every second one of these Remas will pass me by.

But if the single observer, again let’s say me, begins walking toward the source of Remas, then a Rema will pass by me more frequently than every second, even though Remas are still exiting the source at the precise rate of one per second. From my (walking) perspective, there is now less spacing between the Remas, and therefore the wavelength has been affected, the perceived frequency of Remas has changed, has increased.

One might also consider the case of my remaining in place, and the source of Remas moving toward me. Or the case of myself and the Rema source both moving. Any frame of reference will do. If in the sum of movement vectors, the source and I are moving away from each other, then Remas will pass by less frequently, the perceived frequency of Remas will have decreased. (A lower pitch will be heard from the receding car.)

Being aware of this distortion of perception allows scientists to take advantage of the distortion itself in order to gather accurate data about the actual, and not just the perceived, world. In fact, more and better data than could be gathered if the distortion did not exist. Doppler effect refers to these distorted perceptions, and Doppler radar’s utility relies on savvy interpretations of these distortions that, properly understood, enable a more accurate understanding of the real world.

More or less, that is the Doppler effect, most famously used to come to the conclusion that the universe is expanding, since no matter which way a radar is pointing, it detects a redshift, the visual manifestation of wavelengths bouncing off of a receding source. That had been a surprise: the universe, in every direction, was leaving us (and apparently looking beige while doing so). I’m not sure if it’s wrong or silly to feel more sad and lonely on account of such facts, facts like the universe’s expansion, but somehow I do feel that way. But back to the point: Doppler effect. Or as I have come to call it in my more personal experience of it: Dopplerganger effect.

9. Dopplerganger effect in effect

She said to me: “Anatole, I am worried about you.”

Anatole? I felt for a moment like I could sense my own skin desiccating, that all those people I’d seen in the coffee shop were members of my own self, in masquerade, laughing at me, that I could sense water molecules moving not toward boiling but doing the opposite, colliding together out of the air. What came out of my mouth was: “What?” I saw red. Or beigey stars with red auras, receding.

She answered in a very quiet voice, “Well, I said. I said: Well, that I am worried about you.”

“You said Anatole,” I said, turning my head to look up at her face. From down below like that — I was still on the floor of the kitchen — her lips looked like bas-relief, exaggerated and grotesque.

“For a toll?” She said. “No, no I didn’t say that.”

I could still sense the dog in the room, but it was as if she were unfathomably far away, as if her tail were metronoming over a distant horizon.

“You said,” I said again, “Anatole.”

Her eyes were watering. “No, I didn’t. I said just, oh, that I am worried about you.”

“I heard Anatole,” I said again, unembarrassed, because after all she was a stranger. I lifted myself off the cool, dry, dusty floor — feeling somehow a small loss at no longer being able to see the lost jack under the fridge — and I sat myself up next to the woman. “Anatole. Is that the name of the night nurse?”

She kept crying very quietly and did not answer me.

“Is he your boyfriend? Is he in on this?”

She wiped her face with her sleeve. “So stupid,” I heard her mumble.

“What?” I said. And one might fault me for not attending to this woman’s suffering — but I myself was still in such shock, under such duress.

“No, silly. No, not what you might think at all,” and she began to laugh a little bit in her tears. She stood up then, from the ground, the floor I mean, and walked to the bedroom.

I did not follow her, not right away.

I went to sleep knowing that if I was somehow wrong, if this really was Rema, then in the morning we’d pretend none of this had happened. That’s how things were with us. I liked that, our mutual commitment to delimiting our intimacy, that commitment, in its way, a supreme form of intimacy, I’d argue. I often miss that very particular habit of ours these days, when it seems everything I’ve said or done or eaten or worn the day before is being made reference to, is being discussed. People need secrets. Anyway, that night I slept at the very edge of the bed; the woman did not seem to mind. She slept with her back to me. She held the dog in her arms and did not touch me.

I also let her remain alone.

10. I walk the dog; the dog walks me

At some point during that night — after the naming-of-the-dog fight and after Anatole and the foot estrangement, when Rema was still not Rema, and the Royal Academy had either called or not called me, and Harvey was either dead or just missing again — I woke that woman sleeping next to me with her arm around a new animal and I asked her if I was talking in my sleep. She mumbled: You are talking right now but I don’t know if you are sleeping. I shook her again and she said: But I am sleeping, viejito, please please leave me alone. I didn’t know what to make of that. I breathed in her hair, which smelled just right and made my eyes water. And I put my hand on her sleeping forehead, which felt just the right shape. And I carefully reached my arm around her waist to find the handle of her far hip and it felt just like Rema’s hip, though maybe a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller, or something — I was having such a hard time articulating my perceptions, even just to myself. I tried to fall back asleep, and I think I did, but it was the kind of sleep where one later wakes up exhausted, with the conviction of having slept not more than minutes.

When I finally awoke, the simulacrum was not in the bed.

I found a note, written in a slightly undersized Rema-ish script, magneted onto the refrigerator, where the Gal-Chen family photo used to be.

PLEASE TO WALK THE DOG BEFORE YOU LEAVE

Well: it was something meaningful to do while I tried to conceive of a better method — I didn’t have one yet — of searching for Rema. Even then I knew I couldn’t just ride the subway all day long. And although I was not yet explicitly thinking of my situation in terms of research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods, I was already aware of the need to overcome the confines of my lonely point of view. I couldn’t yet imagine how to make deductions from my restricted knowledge without it being like trying to determine the position of a star without understanding parallax, or, perhaps more to the point, like trying to determine the actual frequency of an object moving away from me at an unknown speed and in an unknown direction, and not knowing whether it in fact was me or the object doing the moving.

I found the nervous russet dog in the closet, jaw on dusty floor, one paw possessively in a yellow high heel of Rema’s. “Okay, little orphan,” I said to her quietly. When she saw me, she thumped her lean tail clumsily and whimpered. “You have no idea,” I went on, trying to lean down toward her slowly, without frightening abruptnesses, “why you’re here, why you’re not at home. Maybe you think I smell odd. It’s very important, did you know, for getting along, for falling in love, to like each other’s smell, even if you’re not aware of noticing it.” She gazed at me steadily. I felt she was calmed by my Rema-like chatter. “Rema smells like cut grass and bread and lemon,” I said.

Leashing the pup felt wrong.

I walked her over to the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She received numerous compliments, the pup. I received none. I used to sit on the cathedral steps, waiting and waiting for Rema — by chance — to pass by. This was before we were together. Sitting on that cold concrete I inevitably felt like the worst kind of fool — winter and not even a hot drink in my hands or a spiritual temperament to my mind to excuse my presence — and waiting there, exposed to the elements, a part of me vehemently hated the innocent Rema, hated her for taking up my time, for occupying an unclosing preoccupative loop in my mind, but, of course, another part of me loved her, ecstatically, for pretty much the same reasons, with profound gratitude toward her not just for her herself but also for my obsession with her, which rescued me from my unceasing progression of unpunctuated days, because one thing my obsession did, if dizzyingly, was punctuate. And get me out of my apartment, and my habits. And I did occasionally actually see her. And even just that much of Rema, brief sightings of her, would have been worth all my devotion; she’s a finer world.

The pup seemed uninterested in ascending the steps; they didn’t mean to her what they meant to me; we walked on, proverbial man and beast, and then, in the reflective glass of a Korean dry cleaner’s window, overlapping with a faded sign showing a shoulder-padded ’80s woman and with the text Modern women wear white too!, I caught sight of an adorable dog leading an old man whose coat was buttoned up wrong.

Twice now. I needed to look at myself on purpose, I resolved. Not by accident.

I readjusted the buttons of my coat.

I looked again in that reflective glass and saw a more distinguished man.

And it struck me — as if it hadn’t struck me before, or with more particulars than before — to analyze my situation as if it were not my situation but, instead, a patient’s.

This simulation of there being two observers looking at the same problem (my life) without there actually being two observers echoes — though I didn’t realize it at the time — the solution that Tzvi came to in his research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods. I was deploying Tzvi Gal-Chen’s solutions even before I properly understood them to be his solutions, as if his ideas were already coursing invisibly through my veins, which perhaps they were.

So the plan came to me, as if flooding into my hand from that leash, to do just what I did with my patients. I would accumulate data, do a literature search. Though on exactly what I wasn’t certain. I would simulate the addition of another radar into the equation, if not a perfectly coupled one. There’d be two of us. An I and a me, I might say, if I felt like being cute about it. Like that interrupter Lacan’s changing of the comma to a semicolon in Descartes’ famous formulation, about thinking and being. I think; therefore I am.

That, anyway, was my resolution; or at least that was my hope.

I called my office, asked to have my appointments canceled, said I was sick, terribly sick, and left for the public library to research the state of me.

11. Paradigm shift

The way I proceeded with my investigation might cause me to lose credibility before mediocre minds. And I should admit that I’ve always simply loved the New York Public Library, so arguably my motivation for going there that day was not just to find more information but also to be comforted, to see the light pouring in through the enormous windows in broad cones as if from giant parallel movie projectors. Maybe — but really the meekest of maybes — I was pursuing the sense I used to have as a child, when I’d see the illuminated dust shimmering and winking and — this was back when the library was always warm — I’d feel myself safe in the belly of an enormous and unknowable beast. When I was ten or eleven, my mother used to take me with her to the library almost every day. She was researching the legal proceedings related to eviction. Or maybe she was researching a family tree. I don’t really remember, so probably both of these things were, at different times, true. She did always believe that some outsized inheritance was seeking her; she’d stand at the newsstand and search the “Seeking” section of the classifieds, and then refold the paper and return it to the stack.

But it’s not as if, in obedience to some zeitgeist Freudianism, Rema dimly replaced my mother; if anything Rema made my mother, retrospectively, seem a pale shadow of an original love yet to come.

At the library that day I knew that in adopting my new methodology, the logic I was familiar with would inevitably fail me. Certain rules can be said to hold, but only under a very specific set of conditions, conditions even an approximation of which had rapidly receded from me. What rules could be said to hold in my new world? I didn’t know. But I’ve always been logical, quite traditionally so, for example I put my least frequently worn clothing in the bottom drawer, which is the most uncomfortable to reach. And I had my office carpeted in pale blue because it is one of the few colors that are masculine and feminine at once. And when I first got Rema’s number I purposely didn’t enter it into my cell phone so as to keep myself from calling her too often. Instead I taped her number onto my refrigerator, which meant I could have lost it — it could have fallen, been swept away — but I knew the risk was an essential one and so, being rational, I took it.

But those old logics of mine had grown suddenly antique — to abandon them for something new was only reasonable.

I sat myself down at one of the library’s long communal tables. I pulled the beaded cord of the desk lamp. I stared at the illuminated green lampshade. I was waiting not for me to come up with an idea but for an idea to come up with me. This went on for a while, how long I am not sure. As I sat there, attempting patience, I became conscious of a faint ringing just quieter than the ventilation system, an alternating two-tone ringing of irregular rhythm. Looking around failed to reveal if anyone else heard this, or was disturbed by this, or if it was just me.

Along the spine of the long table lay stunted pencils and old beige card catalog cards. I watched myself write — the lead of the pencil was soft and pressing it down against the note card inevitably made me think of Rema applying eyeliner, her gaze up and out — one term on each of three separate note cards: LEO LIEBENSTEIN (ME), DOPPELGANGERS, ROYAL ACADEMY OF METEOROLOGY.

A plan came to me: to select a note card at random and to begin my research in the direction thus dictated. Again I stress, it is precisely because I am intensely logical that I recognized that in order to determine how best to proceed I needed a new kind of logic.

I had not, however, abandoned my faith in experimental controls. I quickly wrote three more note cards: HERONS, WOOL PROCESSING, HEMOCHROMATOSIS. Those would be my red herrings. Maybe I’d chosen herons with that obscurely in mind. Regardless, I turned all six note cards over and shaped them into a stack, shuffled them, then spread them out on the table. It was difficult for me to convince myself that I didn’t still know which card was which, so I gathered the cards into a pile again, then left for the men’s room, where I washed my hands with horrible bubblegum pink liquid soap and dried my hands on mealy paper towels.

This picking of the card would have to be truly, not just apparently, random. Otherwise I ran the risk of being guided by plans that only seemed like my own but that were actually determined by whatever ideas had been seeded into the air, intruded upon me.

I returned to the table; I shuffled the cards once more. Sitting across from me was a double-chinned, mustachioed man; he didn’t even glance at me but his left hand kept drifting to just behind his ear, to rub something there, and this somehow made me feel self-conscious and awkward and ugly, as if he were me. Leaving the cards scattered, I rose once more from my seat — the sound of my chair scraping the floor reverberating in the belly of that whale, of course I had doubts — and I took a walk down the long center aisle, looked at a spine on a book shelved at the far wall (Who’s Who in Scandinavia, 1950–1970), touched the gold lettering like a home base, then returned — in that cavern — to my seat.

The mustachioed man’s hand was again behind his ear. His earlobe was large and pale, but the antitragus was bright red.

I re-reshuffled my sense and nonsense cards, re-redistributed them across the table in front of me, and, finally, picked one. I turned it over: ROYAL ACADEMY OF METEOROLOGY.

No red herring!

So: I would do a literature search on the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

12. My second search, objective unknown

Only very briefly did I panic, when, in my aloneness, I realized that the one reference database I knew how to use, besides the now dead and dismembered card catalog, was Medline.

That realization, being surprised by my own inability, shook me up in a way that reminds me of the first trip Rema and I took together, walking hut to warm hut in the Austrian Alps. This was relatively early on in our relationship, and I had told Rema that I knew German “more or less.” In truth I’d once taken a two-week German class. I’d retained maybe four phrases: milch bitte, Ich bin ein Berliner, die Zukunft einer Illusion, and Arbeit macht frei. But I wasn’t quite lying to Rema when I’d said I knew German “more or less,” because I did truly feel that once I got to Austria I would “remember” German. We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in — a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams. Lies — they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could. Well, I thought I’d remember German despite having never actually forgotten it, having never — as I vaguely felt I might have — listened to German radio broadcasts, or spoken German as a child. But we get these wrong feelings sometimes, feelings like articles slipped into our luggage but not properly ours. I think of it like vestigial DNA. Code for nothing, or the wrong thing, or for proteins that don’t fold up properly and that may eventually wreak great destruction. I talked about this wrong luggage thing with the simulacrum the other day, explained to her how maybe she really did feel that she loved me, as if she were actually Rema, and not just “Rema.” Anyway, at the desk of our pensione that evening, I opened my mouth and was genuinely shaken to realize that no German words came to mind.

“Help finding?” I said, leaning over the reference desk.

“Collected papers?” the gentle fernlike woman there answered me. She then tapped on her computer, then wrote something down, then translated from one call-number system to another call-number system, to a particular location, and then, taking me almost by the hand, she delivered me to five oversized, clothbound aquatic blue volumes of compiled papers from the past twenty years of annual conferences of the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

“I’m eternally grateful,” I found myself saying.

The fern nodded politely, but I could see she appeared little interested in the investigation into which she had launched me. She didn’t even ask me if I was a meteorologist. She padded away, as if I were utterly forgettable to her.

Not knowing what else to do, feeling perhaps overly bereft after my fern friend left, I took one of the volumes in hand, sat myself down on the floor. The light was on over my aisle alone, and I could hear its ticking, as if it were on a timer, which maybe it was. I began to hum a little Rema ditty whose words I could not recall, began to turn thin newsprinty pages, then more and more pages, somewhat randomly, not one by one—-flipping through, I believe they call this, some part of me said to the other parts, as if to diminish by chattiness, by music, by anything, the sense of serious portent I felt taking me over. The tiny font of captions, the murmurous italicizations of abstracts, the pridefulness of columns, the unassuming data plots. Hearing those thin pages micro-skid across the grooves of my finger pads was such a comfort I almost forgot my original purpose; that almost forgetting was probably a comfort as well.

I’d thought you didn’t even love her that much anymore, some part of me taunted. Some parts of me are so mean.

Suddenly I was looking at something beautiful. Or something beautiful to me, though I couldn’t say why, something that seemed potent with form, but a form I could not classify. Intrusive beauty, like the cornsilk of Rema’s hair — which is not necessarily unanimously considered beautiful, streaky as it is, and uneven, and sometimes greasy — a mesmerizing, unsolved kind of beauty. An irritant, actually. Something irritatingly beyond category — sublime, the melodramatic might say.

I can reproduce the image here. But I’m unable to reproduce the effect, the effect the image had on me, which was, well, uncanny, like those dolls whose eyes seem to follow you around a room. I felt like I had seen the image before, though what are the chances? Beauty, maybe the sublime, and déjà vu combined, is that what stopped me? Like I was looking at a topographical map of a landscape I knew only from close up. Some sense of concordance, and meaning, of a pattern both inscrutable and yet, at some almost cellular level, detected. I wonder: if I saw my own DNA denaturing in some petri dish, would I experience the slightest spine tingling of recognition? What if I passed my father on the street, would I recognize him, or him me, or would we just have an uncanny feeling, one that we might or might not ever decode?

FIG. 3. Vertical y-z cross section at 90 min. at X = 14.25 km through the model storm showing the rainwater mixing ratio contours (g kg⁻¹, solid), the velocity vectors in the plane, and the potential temperature change from the initial base state (°C, dashed). South is to left and north to right. Wind speed proportional to vector length; areas void of vectors indicate very little flow in this plane

.

Anyway, I would be curious to know what this image recalls to others.

After an uncertain length of time spent staring — I heard footsteps in a nearby aisle — I flipped back a few thin pages to the cover page of the article that contained the arresting image.

The first author: Tzvi Gal-Chen.

The paper was originally presented at a conference in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires being Rema’s hometown.

And Tzvi Gal-Chen being Tzvi Gal-Chen.

And the article was about retrieval. Specifically: “Retrieval of Thermodynamic Variables Within Deep Convective Clouds: Experiments in Three Dimensions.”

My pulse rose; my fingers went cold. Then the light went out; I crawled along the shelving to turn it back on. I know the ordinary often masquerades as the extraordinary, that if you put thirty people together in a room, the likelihood that two have the same birthday is over ninety percent, that when you learn a new word and it then seems suddenly ever present it is only because you have just begun to notice what was there all along. (This once happened to me with the word cathect. Also Rosicrucian.) Maybe that’s all that this find of mine was. For all I know, maybe Tzvi GalChen and Buenos Aires were both already pervasive terms and I’d simply stumbled across two examples of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. But the fitting together of so many elements — sometimes that really happens, a stray orange peel, a necklace, and a certain joke about iceberg lettuce once converged to reveal a girlfriend’s infidelity — convinced me that I was perceiving something real, that I was not myself in any way cracked, that only my world suddenly was.

So I would go to Buenos Aires. I’d return to Rema’s beginning, a place I’d never been. Why Rema might have gone south — or if she’d been taken there, or if she was still there, and what her connection to Tzvi Gal-Chen might or might not be — I had no idea. But it was that afternoon in the library, in those dusty aisles with the lights always threatening to turn off, when I had only the faintest of knowledge, that I knew with the most certainty what to do next. Like how it is on the foggiest of nights that radio signals come through most clearly and from seemingly impossible distances.

13. We exchange words, not pleasures

The dog lover did not take it well that night over dinner — a heap of lentils and bacon and spinach with a facedown sunny-side-up egg on top, I always loved our messy pile-on meals — when I said that I’d be leaving for an indefinite length of time. She asked me why I was leaving; I said because something had changed and I just needed to get away. She asked what did I mean by leaving and I realized I didn’t quite know, so I decided to be cautious and say that I was taking a personal vacation. Those phrases, something has changed, just need to get away, personal vacation, were not really my words but TV words, movie words, pollen in the air. Not even aliens from within me, but aliens from without. More luggage. She: leaning on an elbow, holding her fork aloft and still, with nothing on it, asking, What did I mean by “changed”? Me saying I wasn’t quite sure what I meant, that I hadn’t found words for it yet. She: asking, Where, exactly, was I going? Me telling her that as nice a person as she seemed to be, I didn’t really feel comfortable telling her. “Not yet,” I clarified. “But maybe never.”

She pressed the empty tines of her fork against her bottom lip. Then she set her fork down. She was very sober, and very calm, very unlike Rema.

“Are you seeing someone?” she then asked, which struck me as funny, because there are so few people in the world that I like even a little bit.

I may have cracked a nervous smile. I shook my head no.

“Are you playing a joke?” she asked.

Again I shook my head.

“Is this related to, are you relating to, um, yesterday?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, which was as honest an answer as I knew.

“Or Harvey?”

“I don’t think so,” I said again.

“I don’t understand,” she said, putting down her fork, which, touching the plate, sounded a gentle reverberating ting like a creeping chill. Her tines then disappeared into the lentils.

“I don’t understand either,” I said, and I also put down my fork, as a gesture of respect, even though I was still hungry, and even a little bit happy, since I had a kind of plan. I could almost see the pulley system — something made of thick gray rope and metal coated over with a chipping white paint — by which my life’s getting better would make this other Rema’s life worse, and just having that thought moved the ropes back against me, for her.

We were quiet for a little while. I looked at her and then when I saw her look at me I looked back away, down at my plate. The lentil dish we were eating that night was made with tarragon, which I always forget smells like licorice until I close my eyes and ask myself why I have an image of myself lying under a patchwork quilt and coughing. I wonder if Rema, or her doppelganger for that matter, experiences silence (or tarragon) the same way I do; for me silence is like a humid swelling of scents, originless clicks, phantom elbow pains, a puff of air near the eyes, a sense of grass pushing up through the earth somewhere, or everywhere at once. I’ve never asked Rema about this.

The simulacrum scooted her chair back, went to sit on the sofa; the russet dog joined her. “You are trying,” she said, not actually looking at me, “to make me say I love you and beg you to sleep with me, but I am not here to perform for you, you can go through your preoccupations on your own and talk to me on the other side of them.”

I said nothing. I just looked at her. There on the sofa, unnamed pup at her side, she was running her fingers perpendicular to the wale of her corduroy skirt. Then parallel to the wale. Then perpendicular. Just by watching, I could feel the grain of the fabric, which made me think of the grooves that make our fingerprints, which made me think of the fingerprinty look of that meteorological image in Tzvi Gal-Chen’s paper, which made me think of the myth of fingerprints, of one of the few things that I remember my father telling me, that really all fingerprints were the same. And snowflakes? I’d asked. And snowflakes, he’d answered.

The russet dog nose-sighed, turned a tired gaze toward me.

“Is it your plan,” the simulacrum said, “to say nothing? You’re not really going to leave. You’re just imitating a drama of me, a show I might put on.”

Despite a certain type of certainty, I remained very unsure as to how conscious this woman was of being an impostor, or perhaps an alternate. As far as I knew she might be like an understudy who’s been lied to and believes that the show goes on only on Tuesdays, and that she is really the only star. Maybe this woman also felt that something was somehow wrong, that she was with the wrong Leo; maybe she, like me, could not articulate precisely what was wrong, but unlike me she did not trust her feeling. Maybe at some point in time, in some place, an other Rema and an other Leo were living together very happily in a whole other parallel possible world. A world not unlike the ones Harvey so often talked about. It was possible.

Again the dog’s nostrils flared.

And I found myself saying to this other Rema, calling out to her across the apartment — and this too felt like clichéd speech that had infected me — that I wanted to tell her the whole truth.

“Okay,” she said, returning her gaze to me.

So laconic. It was details like that that made it clear to me that I was not speaking with my Rema. But even so, the doppelganger, she had a wintry kind of pretty about her that day, chapped and rosy like freshly sanded wood. Even if she wasn’t my wife, I still felt sorry for her. My heart always goes out to beautiful people, which I realize really isn’t fair, but at least my heart goes somewhere. And at least, unlike the previous day, I did not feel that I wanted to hold the impostress, though I was surprised and perhaps a little offended that she didn’t — even as a kind of ploy — try to seduce me. But once I realized that I didn’t want to hold her, I realized that I had nothing further to say. She was still waiting for my promised explication. But I did not know what “the whole truth” was. I cast about for an explanation with the sense that it would arrive whole, entire, like a forgotten memorized poem, if only I could recall the first word or two. Again like my sincere belief in my nonexistent German. But I couldn’t find my way out of the crisscrossing thought: either I tell her she’s not really Rema and she thinks I’m crazy, or I tell her she’s not really Rema and she doesn’t think I’m crazy, because she already knows she’s not Rema, in which case why should I let on that I know? Those weren’t really the only two options, logically speaking, but I got caught within that syllogism, like in the still place inside of storms.

“You aren’t speaking?” she asked.

Even though the vein on this woman’s forehead had not been prominent before, it became ghostly blue prominent. Like her maybe lover’s, the night nurse’s.

Then the phone rang.

14. Pleasures past

The first time I actually spoke to Rema: she was again sitting right in front of me at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and I had leaned forward toward that hair, and I actually tapped her shoulder, but then what was I going to say if she turned around? I had no plan.

She did indeed turn around in her chair, her profile showing off her long, gently fluted nose and the tendons on her neck.

I found myself asking her if she was Hungarian.

During the silence of indeterminate length that followed I fixed my gaze upon her forehead, since I couldn’t possibly look straight into her eyes, and what I eventually heard, in a lilting long-voweled accent, was: Why do you stare at me?

Over the sound of milk being steamed I asked, alarmed, “Do I stare at you?”

“You are from Hungary?” came from her, now in a louder voice, to the sound of silverware being sorted.

“No, no.”

“Oh.”

“Though my mother. Actually.”

“Oh?”

“But no. Not me. A mistake.”

“A mistake.”

“Do you make these cakes here?” shouted a surprisingly tiny woman across the nearby counter.

And I remember it striking me then (as my mishearing had nearly become conversation) how in my line of work the fact that I sometimes can’t hear so well — I just have trouble disarticulating sounds — is almost a plus, since people give out so many clues about what’s ailing them that are so much more important than the actual words they say. But in all other aspects of my life this “quality” left me fairly crippled.

“So where are you from?” I asked, and somehow our conversation hobbled on from there. I don’t know why she was so willing to talk to me; she had not been in the country for long at that time and I believe she must have felt alone, and Rema does not luxuriate in feelings of aloneness, and she tends to be kind of catholic in her interest in people, at least for a little while.

“Really?” Rema said when the fact that I am a psychiatrist came out. “Did you know that Argentina has more psychoanalysts per person than has any other country?”

I did already know that fact about Argentina, about its psychoanalysts, but I said:

“No, I didn’t know that. That’s so interesting.” Also: normally people’s conflation of psychoanalysis with psychiatry irritates me profoundly — I could never be an analyst, those people are too unpleasant, too passive-aggressively authoritarian, and, yes, all crazy, and out of fashion to boot — but when Rema conflated the two, I was not irritated.

“And the south side of Buenos Aires — it is the inconsciente,” Rema explained. “Or so they will tell you, no? You see there is Avenida Rivadavia, and it cuts the city, the north from the south. When the streets cross Rivadavia, their names change. From north to south, Esmeralda becomes Piedras, and Reconquista becomes La Defensa, and Florida becomes Peru. That is cute, no?” She brushed unseen hairs off of her face.

She had a somewhat manic speech pattern, with increased rate and rhythm, though not volume. Also her hair was cowlicked at her temple. Looking at her I had the urge to tell her what I often feel impelled to tell a beautiful person, which was that she really didn’t need to say anything at all, and that she shouldn’t worry, and that it is not just me who will be helplessly devoted to her regardless of what she says. But I didn’t tell Rema that. Pretty people often actually don’t like to hear that kind of thing, I’ve found.

“And even the whole of Argentina,” she went on, “it is the geography of a mind. Patagonia, in the south, is the savage and inhospitable inconsciente. Or so people say. And on a small scale, like snow globe, my neighborhood in Buenos Aires, it is named Villa Freud.” She smiled at me. “You must think this is very silly what I am saying.” Then she looked down at her napkin, which she began folding into triangles. “I also think it is very silly; maybe it is thinking like that that made me want to leave. Everyone so interested in how they are feeling, and who they maybe really are; even the newspapers, they print passages from psychoanalysis.” Then: “Have you been? To Argentina?”

I told Rema the truth, that I had not been. I thought about saying something about Borges, but I know that I have a problem with coming off as pretentious, and I was worried that bringing up Borges might appear showy, even though every introverted schoolboy reads Borges, so it’s rather ambiguous what such a reference would or should indicate. Another reason I generally don’t like to mention Borges is because often a response will be to the effect of he has no emotion, and I hate hearing that said, because it is so wrong, and it’s not a discussion that I like to get into. In retrospect I know that Rema would have agreed with me, but back then, I wanted to protect Rema from saying anything that might make me not like her.

“If the Argentines are generally like you, then it must be a lovely country,” I said, immediately regretting my banality.

“You will have to go,” she said firmly.

“Oh I apologize for troubling you,” I said.

“Yes, you will have to go to Argentina. Unfortunately I can’t go myself now, they might not let me back here, you know? What is that: what is easy to get into, easy to get out of, but almost impossible to return to? It is some very big answer, I think, something like life, or love. Something silly like that. For me, it’s this country.”

The way her bangs were parted made me think of an ink brush.

We never went to Argentina together, Rema and I — or, not really. Thinking of that now, I can’t help but wonder if Rema had hid Argentina away from me intentionally, like some token from another lover. But Rema wouldn’t try to hide an entire country. She hid much smaller things. I’m thinking about the time we went to have a slice of pizza together. It was like this: just in front of that mural of deformed angels, the mural at the pastry shop, Rema and I decided to get a bite to eat. And she said, well where should we go? And I, not wanting to look as if I were trying to impress, and not wanting to seem as old as I am, said, well we could go to Koronet for pizza, to which she said, sure, I’m happy with anything. Which I’ve always taken to mean the opposite. And indeed it did mean the opposite. She stopped then a moment — that day she was wearing a yellow jumper with a navy blue cardigan, she looked like an airline stewardess on some small Eastern European line — and said, oh I don’t want to eat there, can we eat elsewhere? And I said that we could have a slice at the Pinnacle — but she said that she didn’t like that pizza — or at the Famiglia — which also she said she didn’t like, that the crust was so thick, and the cheese “unhappy,” and she added, “Oh I’m sorry, you see I said I’m happy with anything when actually the opposite is true, I’m never satisfied.” I blushed and shrugged my shoulders. Indecisiveness, capriciousness — these qualities in Rema never irritated me. I’ve always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions, and so I don’t look down on others for being the same. Maybe that’s what “our humanity” means. My mother was like this also: often she’d run bathwater, set the kettle for tea, and go out for a walk nearly all at once, and when she did this it was usually I who had to stop the bathwater’s running, turn off the kettle before the whistle blew. So Rema and I stopped there a moment on the sidewalk, and stood silent, and then Rema said, “Yes, let’s go to Koronet. I do like it there. I just can’t ever finish the slice and then I feel I am wasting and I feel sometimes a little bit sad — that is silly, no? — but I am very hungry tonight, I am sure I will finish, and the crust is nice and thin and I like the people that work there.”

In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if maybe she was avoiding someone, what with all the nervousness and mind changing.

We went there, to Koronet, where I’d originally proposed. But for having fallen out of the plan and then back in, it seemed like a place anew, and if my spirits had been lagging earlier, inevitably disappointed in this woman for agreeing to spend time with me, I now was infatuated with her again, through my standard mathematics of love, a sort of dynamic stability, with Rema being now a new Rema, an always and ever renewable Rema, whose parts never quite added up. What can I say — why should I expect my inner workings to be different from anyone else’s?

Rema ordered a slice of cheese, and took a plastic fork and knife, and I watched her slicing her pizza. I then took a fork and knife to my own pizza. I sliced the whole thing to pieces before taking a bite. Rema and I sat along the counter where there is a mirror, and I stole glimpses of us, of our reflection, where we looked like a happy blushing pair, and I had a little moment of imagining being over there on that side of the mirror, the side where we were happy and new and now forever.

We had such nice early days. Everyone looked at Rema, but Rema always complimented me and seemed to notice other men only so as to point out how they paled in comparison to me, how one might be handsome but not clever enough, another clever but not boyish enough, another boyish but without depth. She made me small gifts — elaborate origami boxes, uselessly small pillows, socks with my initials embroidered on them — always getting these gifts to me in a hurry, as if there weren’t time enough to finish them, as if our relationship were always on the cusp of ending suddenly, unforeseeably, as if by natural disaster.

How odd, now that I think about it, that she loved me.

15. An object that will not be permanent

I turned my back on the corduroy-petting simulacrum — waiting there for the whole truth as she was — and I answered the ringing phone.

The other line hung up.

How random.

Although a series of hang-ups, I suppose that’s not so random.

“Who was it?” she said.

“Who do you think it was?” I said.

Maybe she was waiting for a call from Anatole. Or the night nurse. Or the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

“The whole truth,” she said with disgust, getting up to turn on the television. She quite obviously didn’t really think that I would leave, didn’t really believe that I was on to her.

And I admit that I didn’t entirely believe myself either. If I’d looked up at the ceiling and saw in the drips there an arrow pointing me out the door — well, then I would think I was imposing a self-deluding order onto chaos. If I’d seen three fallen buttons on the floor and perceived them as a triangle pointing me in a particular direction — again I wouldn’t have trusted my perceptions. If I heard voices. If I had a fever. Or any neurological signs. Or feelings of grandeur. Or if all the articles in the newspaper seemed to bear messages especially for me. Even just if the weather had been on when the simulacrum turned on the TV, and if I took that fact too seriously — even then, I would have doubted myself, wondered about the selectiveness of what I noticed. But none of that was happening.

“You’re like a different person these past couple of days,” she said. “Maybe months.” And there couldn’t have been a more bold, if tacit, acknowledgment of the situation than that. A fresh vision crept over me: myself at an airport desk, in much better shape and younger than I actually am, casually asking to be put on “the next flight to Buenos Aires.” Hurried keyboard tapping, a negotiatory phone call, an underling being sent ahead to the gate to ask them to please hold the door! A seed of happiness in me: at the thought of being a player in some tragedy or comedy so much larger than myself. Surely I was emotionally suffering terribly, but of course our minds play tricks, dress up our emotions in masks, hosiery, feathers. That can be very useful. It was good to feel kind of good.

I waited for the woman to fall asleep, so that I could leave in peace. I packed a suitcase quietly, filled it with my clothing, and a bit of Rema’s clothing as well, so that I’d have it to bring to her. I kissed the dog goodbye. At the airport I called my mentor, who had been through town and who had reacted to Rema so strangely. I mean sort of strangely. I tried to ask him about his reaction to her, if he thought something was “off” with her; I tried to ask him somewhat discreetly. But this is what he said to me: “You used to just be jealous. Now you’ve converted your jealousy into a psychological gain, some narcissistic pleasure in believing that everyone else wants what you have, wants to sleep with your wife. You should grow up. It’s not healthy.”

His response was neither random nor spontaneous; it was predetermined by his previous ideas about me; habits of thought are death to truth; I was outside of my habits; and he — he was wrong.

16. I contact a third party

Although the elaborate latticing of the ceiling had given me a kind of confidence in the country’s infrastructure, still my suitcase (Rema’s suitcase) did not arrive on the carousel at the airport in Buenos Aires. An attendant — a thin man with pockmarked skin and longish hair and a Roman nose and a filmy oxford shirt through which I could see his undershirt — told me not to wait but to return the next morning, that nothing could be settled until then.

“I have important things inside,” I said in my poorly accented Spanish. Maybe it sounded like I was talking about my feelings. That first burst of language made me feel like a child, unable to find more precise, or more polite, words.

“I understand,” the attendant politely lied in response.

“Shouldn’t an investigation be started?” I asked.

He reiterated that I should return the next day. “You are not having an unusual experience,” he emphasized, then looked past my shoulder to the woman behind me.

So luggageless, I set out into the city. I began my search for Rema by settling on the most direct and reasonable of plans: calling her mother. A more bold notion than it might appear. Not only had I never met Rema’s mother, Magda, but she didn’t even know — as far as I knew — that Rema was married to me. She didn’t even know I existed at all. Rema was estranged from her mother, or her mother from her, or both. I didn’t really know the whole story, not even the whole Rema version of the story. (And about Rema’s unmentioned father — I never even asked. I presumed one of several sad variations. I’m not the only psychiatrist who advocates occasionally leaving silences silent, not confounding confession with intimacy.)

I found a public telephone, a glass and red-painted metal takeoff of a London phone booth. Stepping inside — why did Argentina look so wrong? where were all the beautiful people? why did the architecture look like it belonged in Tel Aviv? — I flipped through the phone book and found her number — so easy! Then I breathed on the glass, then smudged my breath, then breathed again, smudged again, such that I was looking at a saliva-rainbowed distorted reflection, which at least gave me something to look at while I held that phone inevitably infested with the invisible germs of a thousand strangers.

A woman answered, and I introduced myself as “a friend of Rema.”

On the other end: “What?”

I cut to the proverbial chase — very proverbial, I was feeling — with, “Listen, if you don’t mind my asking, when was the last time you saw Rema?”

She asked, “With whom am I speaking?”

“This is Leo. I’m a friend—”

“What,” she interrupted in an anxious blushing voice, “are you asking me about Rema?”

“I’m in Buenos Aires—” I began, but then I couldn’t remember what I had thought I was going to ask Magda; I could remember only — as if my brain had monochromed — how much I hate speaking on phones. “And—”

“You know where Rema is?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, feeling vaguely distinguished and proud, “I do believe I saw her as recently as three days ago.”

“Here?”

“No. In New York—”

“Oh. Yes, yes. I knew that. You are an American friend?”

“Okay. Yes.”

“But you are in Buenos Aires?”

“Yes. In this strange red phone booth actually—”

“And you are Rema’s friend,” she said again, the repetition seemingly undermining the truth-value of the statement. Maybe Rema doesn’t consider me a friend. That’s possible. “Well,” Magda continued, now in a fresh vanilla kind of voice, “you should come over. You should come over anytime. You should come over right now. Would you like to come over right now? We will have a coffee, sweets—”

“Well—”

After giving me street names, and after describing to me the front of her home, she concluded with: “And don’t worry about the dog.” She gave a little cough. “Despite appearances, he really is very sweet and there is no reason to be afraid.”

Everyone with their dogs.

17. EigenRema

Far more dogs than I was accustomed to promenaded through Magda’s neighborhood; many dogs appeared unaccompanied; some attended playgroups of others of an equivalent size. It was as if decoys had been deployed to diminish the conspicuousness of the primary clue of the doppelganger’s dog. But also maybe — maybe even probably — there were just many dogs. Consequently much feces. Some of it obviously stepped on. This in contrast to the fresh paint on the low-rise buildings, the potted plants on balconies. As I nearly failed to evade a particularly sculptural pile of feces, the thought came to me of who house-trained the pup now living in my apartment. Someone now dead?

Soon a woman, dressed in heels and a high-waisted cream dress with a thick navy sash, held my face in her hands, kissed me twice; she smelled of Vaseline and talcum.

“Rema,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, a misleading affirmation.

“Rema?” I said.

“She is coming?” she said.

“No,” I said, waking up more fully into something.

The woman laughed.

Fortunately the drunkenness of longing didn’t last long; I quickly sobered into true perception. This woman looked older than Rema, yes, but not so much on account of any particular feature, more because her hair was more neatly pulled back into a low wide clip, her eyebrows were more perfectly sculpted, and her lipstick was impeccably tamed into the cupid’s bow of a ’40s film star. At her side was a leggy, dignified greyhound.

“Her name’s Killer,” Magda laughed. Taking my hand, Magda led me inside a home that seemed already all wrong compared to the Rema’s childhood home of my mind — too narrow a hallway, too few mirrors, a heavy and wrong potpourri.

What I would like to take, or drink, was what she asked me before leaving me alone on a velvet sofa overcrowded with tasseled pillows. Everything looked old, the velvet’s nap diminished in patches. Maybe Rema has touched these things, I thought deliberately, as if I were planning to take fingerprints, and then: I’m here in your pocket came to my mind, a swatch of a song that Rema likes to sing, curled up in a dollar, the chain of your watch around my neck. And I petted the too-smooth upholstery of the sofa, thinking of thin wales of corduroy.

From a brocaded floor cushion, the greyhound watched me.

Magda returned with a tray bearing a teapot and two maté mugs and diminutive glasses of water and a plate overloaded with small cookies pressed into different geometries, some covered in chocolate. She said to me, “So you are a friend of Rema’s husband?”

I was silent. Killer shifted her gaze to Magda.

Magda set the tray down. “Actualmente?” she punctuated, meaning “currently” but making me think “actually.”

I had distinctly not presented myself as a friend of Rema’s husband; I had presented myself as a friend of Rema. I had not known that Magda knew Rema was married — and maybe she didn’t know. So I felt suddenly pressed into revealing something I perhaps oughtn’t — a not unfamiliar situation for me since in the course of my practice I have often found myself in “situations” with patients’ families, situations in which I am being pressed, with more and less subtly manipulative locutions, into revealing what I ought not reveal. But this particular moment with Magda was complicated by the fact that I did not quite know what exactly it was I did not wish to reveal, knew only what I was trying to discover. As I sat on that worn velvet nap, my overwhelming ignorance — about Magda, about Rema — seemed to materialize as the smell of my clothing, not dirty exactly, but overheated, and exhaling parts of itself.

So you are a friend of Rema’s husband? repeated in my mind.

And Killer — she looked like a larger version of the doppelganger’s dog.

“Well,” I began. “Well. Well, yes, I am a friend of his,” I concluded, which when I thought about it I decided was true, or true enough, and I was relieved to get to say something true because trying to maintain a lie, well, that becomes increasingly difficult over time. “That’s how I met Rema. Actually. Yes. Through him.” Which is also arguably not untrue. I reached for my tea with studied casualness. It was a maté, served in a special gourd with a straw, like Rema often made for herself at home, and I knew the drink was associated with several whole countries but I’d always thought of that gourd and its filtering straw as Rema’s own personal eccentricity. “But of course,” I said, sipping, “I’m now, currently — actually — also, very much a friend to Rema herself.”

The maté tasted terrible, like socks. I eyed the tall chocolate cookies, then lifted my eyes to the woman; the coffee table’s candle had cast her shadow up, against the ceiling, where it in turn loomed over her. “I’m curious,” she said, “to hear what you think of Rema’s husband?”

I had removed myself — parts of myself — from the conversation; a few cells were listening to Magda but whole factions of me had been devoted for some time to the question of whether enough time had passed to enable me to graciously reach for one of the oddly tall chocolate-covered cookies. “Well,” I found myself saying, as if the word itself had formed a well-filled well within me, “well he’s nice enough, isn’t he?” I made a move to the cookie, realizing that my small half-truth was already tangling my investigation.

“I only met him once,” she said without making eye contact, and reaching out a hand to pet Killer’s head. “But to be honest — and I’m an excellent judge of character, I’m an analyst — I didn’t like him. I didn’t even like him a small amount.”

I was busy trying to deal gracefully with the soft caramelly inside that I had not been prepared to find within the tall chocolate-covered cookie. Was she talking about me? Or some other me? Or someone else entirely? I had to wipe my mouth with my sleeve — I had no choice, she had not brought out napkins — and as I did, I thought, in a brief and stupid moment of mistranslated indignation, Did you hear the news about Edward? — another swatch of Rema song that I could not place — and then I swallowed my overrunning cookie too early, causing a pain in my heart (originating in my esophagus of course), as I wiped more crumbs from my mouth, recovering myself. Saliva had rushed to greet the caramel. “Oh?” I asked carefully, belatedly. “When did you meet him? Was he good-looking?”

Did this other husband know the doppelganger’s dog, the dog who was like an echo of Magda’s dog?

“You can tell him what I said,” Magda said, nonresponsively. “I don’t care; it’s not a secret, my feelings. I’m not one to keep secrets. Not about those sorts of things.”

“When,” I asked again, “when did you say — when did you meet him?”

“But that’s okay if you like him. Beneath your awkwardness and reserve you fall upon me as a nice man. There’s nothing wrong with liking somebody, at least not necessarily,” she said.

“How long have you had this dog?”

Then Magda looked closely at me for what may have been the first time — maybe I still had crumbs on my face — and she did not seem to recognize me. “You’re dressed rarely,” she said.

“Me?”

“You’re wearing heavy wool. And it’s summer. You’re dressed all wrong. For the weather.”

“Yes, well, the weather was different. It was cold where I came from.”

“I should apologize,” Magda said, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. “For my behavior. I’m so rude to not be asking you more about yourself. Just going on about Rema’s husband. Not making you comfortable. What a terrible host I am,” she said, laughing girlishly, performing happiness. “Let me at least go and bring us some pistachios—” And she rose from her chair, which made her shadow terrifying to me.

“No really, it’s all right,” I said.

“You don’t like pistachios?” she asked, pursing a heartbreaking pout beneath her monstrous shadow.

“Oh I love pistachios,” I said. A gross exaggeration.

“Oh good,” she said, and disappeared again down the hallway.

The dog chose not to follow her, chose instead to watch over me.

It was wholly obvious, her avoidance of the other husband issue.

But me too, I might have been focusing on the wrong issues. In my training, years ago, I had met a patient jaundiced to a curry who had never thought to worry about the changes in his skin and eye color but instead had arrived at the hospital extremely anxious about an insignificant nevus. That yellowed man, displacing his worries onto the meaningless sign, came to my mind then, in Magda’s brief absence, as I worried about pistachios. Did Rema really have some other husband? Maybe she could have deceived me, I’ll admit that — I can admit that — but how, what with sleeping in my bed every night, could Rema have tricked him, whoever he was, Anatole or not Anatole, purportedly (purported by me) my friend? In my mind — I knew it was just in my mind — I heard terrible laughter. I ate another cookie. And then another cookie, before I’d even swallowed the previous.

Magda returned with a bowl of pistachios, the kind dyed red, and before I could say thank you she began speaking.

“It’s been years since I’ve seen Rema,” she said. “She calls exactly once a month but won’t give me her phone number and won’t really say anything of substance, just talks instead about things in the news, only the most random things, like new discoveries about Saturn’s moon she brought up recently, as if these are somehow personal events. I can’t bring up anything real, anything personal, because then she shouts at me and hangs up the phone. You must think I’m terrible that she isolates herself from me but really it’s not that at all, it’s just that I can’t have those kinds of conversations that she feels comfortable in, I can’t have them; they are too ugly to me. When you said you’d seen Rema so recently, well, I didn’t want to tell you everything on the phone because I was afraid that then you wouldn’t want to come over here to speak with me, that you’d have a horrible misimpression and then my chances would be lost—”

I might note that Magda was crying through most of those words. People cry in front of me fairly often, so I have had ample opportunity to consider how one ought to handle such situations, and yet still, I admit, I am not very gracious in responding to performances of emotion. Obviously one can put an arm around the other person, or extend a hand, or murmur sympathetically. Or be silent. In my professional situation, I have (I believe correctly) chosen to adopt the most reserved among these options, because even just a single kind word can turn a few tears into a torrent, and one certainly doesn’t want to ungate such a flood: it’s just not useful. One can watch movies on one’s own time, alone, for that sort of therapy. So — and yes perhaps this was wrong, or at least culturally unacceptable — I just sat there silently pretending not to notice the woman’s — Rema’s mother’s — Magda’s — tears. I sat with my eyes downcast and averted, as if Magda were naked. This was my attempt at restoring her dignity to her. There’s a downside, of course, to such a strategy. Dogs offer more comfort than I do. But there’s also this efficiency in which, when you watch someone cry, it can wholly relieve you of the impulse to do the same.

“You’re not Argentine,” Magda eventually said, recovering herself.

I looked down at my fingers that were stained pink from the pistachios I’d just eaten. It struck me that while she’d been crying I’d probably been making a great deal of noise, cracking those shells, chewing those nuts, sucking the salt off.

18. EigenMe

I have never, for even a minute, believed myself a meteorologist. I wouldn’t want certain concessions I’ve made to my current reality to undermine an accurate understanding of the predicament I was in, a predicament that gave me little choice other than to retreat into the kind of inventiveness that resembles deceit and/or psychosis. And that is why I have gone to the trouble of detailing all the seeming irrelevancies of my initial meeting with Magda. I would like the position I was in at that time to be appreciated. Just think: I did not know where my Rema was, I did not know how much to reveal to Magda about my true identity, I was being watched by a strange dog, and in addition to all the unwelcome data that had been accumulating prior to my arriving at Rema’s childhood home, there was suddenly this unforeseen, somewhat unassimilatable information about Rema having some other husband. Not to mention that: my luggage was missing, my home phone had been mysteriously ringing, my patient had gone absent, someone claiming to be from the Royal Academy had offered me a fellowship, and an old meteorologic research paper had seemed, in its way, to have spoken to me. On top of all this an objectively attractive woman had wept before me, while I sat in sweaty clothes with red pistachio dye on my hands and the corners of my mouth sore from salt. Who, in such a situation, would be safe from slipping into a second small ego-protective lie?

“So — I’m sorry — how did you meet my daughter and her, well, and him?” Magda asked, after having recollected herself.

I nodded my head and held up a finger as if to say “one moment,” and then I proceeded to put more pistachios in my mouth, then sip again of the horrible maté, and then eat another cookie, the second to last. Unlike Rema, I’ve no knack for spontaneously inventing stories. In fact, quite the opposite. I can hardly tell anecdotes that are true. Except for the refuge of asking questions, I find speaking very challenging. That’s part of why I’m inevitably the first to finish my meal at any gathering, because my main delay tactic when I’m asked a question is to eat.

Through the echo-y internal din of molar pistachio devastation, I heard Magda say, trying to speak for me: “You are a colleague of her husband’s? You are also a psychiatrist?”

I found myself shaking my head — a gesture that can signal either denial or sorrowful disbelief — and swallowing. I like so few of my colleagues.

“No?” she inquired gently.

I found myself saying in front of a woman whose trust I would have liked to have gained: “Actually I’m a meteorologist.” Then: “A research meteorologist,” I added, with that liar’s drive toward specificity. “Not one of those guys on television, though. That’s what everyone’s always asking me.”

I suppose I was and wasn’t thinking of Tzvi Gal-Chen in that moment. Meteorology, quite simply, was the first profession that came to mind. But again I would like to emphasize: I did not believe those words. I had never planned to say them. Some unruliest member of that parliament of me — although admittedly a perhaps intuitively ingenious member — had stolen the podium to speak those irrevocable words, and the rest of me then had no choice but to devote itself to the task of trying to maintain that false face.

But anyway, at that moment, the lie worked just fine. I maintained, in one move, both my privacy and my politesse.

“Meteorology. That is interesting,” Magda replied after a moment. “I met a meteorologist once,” she said. “At a dinner,” she modified. And at this, as if suddenly she’d reached some judgment — one that appeared to be positive — she stood up quickly and insisted, “You’re welcome to stay here if you want. Even before the crisis I rented rooms. You should stay here. You can ask Rema. Even with everything, I’m sure she’ll tell you how nice it is here. Maybe she’ll come visit you. Maybe you’ll call her. You’ll think it over. You’ll think.”

19. Into the noise

I did indeed think it over; I did so by doing what I often do when I don’t know what to do, which was head to a coffee shop. An aloof and pretty young waitress — she had a lovely mole near her thumb and a waist like Rema’s — brought me cookies with my coffee even though I didn’t ask for cookies. Not that I needed more cookies, but regardless, this small variation in the way I normally experience coffee shops — those gratis cookies — woke me up a little to my situation, recalled to me to not be so foolish as to search for Rema in only one way, by only one method — talking to Rema’s mother. I had another lead. Dipping a cookie, I pulled out my xeroxes of Tzvi Gal-Chen’s research for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, and I began by skimming: The numerical models discussed herein (and elsewhere) are formulated as Initial Value Problems, a phrase that already caused me trouble as I could not feel confident (yes not even feel confident) about what that might mean—Initial Value Problem—though it’s not as if I couldn’t surmise, though my surmises seemed all wrong to me. So I set that reprint — which contained no images — aside. What “Initial Value Problem” could there be, even via stretched metaphor, in my relationship with Rema? I continued on to: A Method for the Initialization of the Anelastic Equations: Implications for Matching Models with Observations. “Anelastic” made me think of the brittleness of psychoses. I read further. An algorithm is proposed, whereby the combined use of the equations of cloud dynamics, and the observed wind, will permit a unique determination of the density and pressure fluctuations. Fluctuations. Yes, that seemed right. And “unique determination,” a compelling account of love. But I knew my brain was eager to perceive order, so I’d have to be rigorous before conceding any genuine concordances — otherwise I’d just be like Harvey reading the New York Post for meteorologic orders. Nothing had yet jumped out at me as much as that image, that thumbprinty image from the retrieval paper, and retrieval — that was so precisely, so straightforwardly, so unmetaphorically what I was trying to do. I dismissed the fluctuations sentence as only seemingly relevant. Then in the middle of a third article a distinct change in tone and content undeniably signaled a clue. The article had begun by discussing numerical prediction models but then, suddenly, read: Plato was apparently the first to state that what we are sensing are only images of the real world. Clearly an unnecessary sentence in a radar meteorology article. Appeals to antiquity naturally, well, appeal, yes, but deploying such a rhetorical move in such a context was highly unusual; clearly it signaled something; it would be foolish to contend otherwise. And why the added play of “apparently”? Gauss, the passage continued, was apparently the first to formulate a mathematical theory of prediction—something then to do with the inaccuracy of our observations hindering accurate extrapolation to future states. Again the “apparently.” Under a noise cloud of percolation I continued reading: In Gauss’s work observations and models were combined to predict the trajectory of a celestial body—which struck me as a rather inappropriate way of referring to Rema. Although, I thought, immediately scolding myself for my single-mindedness, perhaps there were innumerable celestial bodies whose motions needed to be tracked, and then I thought further about that word, “meteorology,” and how it must itself, from the very beginning, have referred to the study of meteors, of objects falling through the sky.

Tzvi’s article continued: Atmospheric modeling is computationally complex, driving a search for less demanding, nonoptimal approximate methods … The exact approach requires the inversion of large matrices of the order of 10⁵ × 10⁵ but the matrices are sparse so that many of the computations can, in principle, be done in parallel. Nonoptimal approximate methods. Computationally complex. The matrices are sparse. The words ungated certain snatches of music, of time, into my consciousness, but nothing had yet crystallized. There is hope that the development of massively parallel supercomputers (e.g. 1000 desktop Crays working in tandem) could—

Suddenly my BlackBerry rang and without even thinking, without even checking to see who it was — lost as I was in a haze of a thousand desktop Crays — I answered. As I did, a previously unnoticed cat looked briefly toward me, as did the Rema-waisted waitress — she was beautiful, unusually so — and a man behind the coffee bar wearing a green soccer jersey with the number 9 in white, he also looked over at me — and this made me look down at my shoes, which I realized had a fine beige dust on them, and I felt like while I had been disappearing into those words of Tzvi, everyone, and everything, had been observing me, which made me see myself multiplied, as if in a hall of mirrors, or on the screens of thousands of Crays, though I think this was just a matter of perspective.

“Hello?” I alarmed into the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

I had no idea with whom I was speaking, but I was welling up with unarticulated emotion, emotion preceding any thought, and I saw images — thin wales of corduroy, hairs of an ink brush, bruisy blue vein on a foot, a yellow cardigan, archipelagoed tea leaves, smudged newsprint, a pulley, the tendon of a neck — and the word that rose to the surface was “Rema.”

“I miss you” emerged from my mouth unintentionally, before I could think or plan or be wise in any way; it’s ridiculous, to say I miss you to someone when you don’t know who she is. “Where are you?”

“Leo, I’m at our apartment but where are you?”

Her words collapsed me into a smaller number of selves, a knowable number, an unpleasant dinner party. I stepped outside, stood under a eucalyptus tree, to continue my conversation.

“Rema, I love you even more than I could ever have imagined—”

“I love you too—”

“Loving other people is really just loving you, I see that now—”

“Leo, where are you?”

“When did you return?” I asked.

“When did you leave?”

“Did they have to force you to leave, or did you just go along with them, because you knew you had to? I didn’t touch that other woman.”

“Leo, I don’t know where you are. No one knows where you are. You haven’t been answering your phone. You’ve abandoned your patients. Don’t you think that’s strange? Doesn’t that preoccupy you?” To say “preoccupy” instead of “worry”—that was a studied Rema-ism. Rema, except for when she was very tired, had stopped making that error years ago. I said:

“You’re the woman who came home with that leggy dog? That’s who you are?”

“You’re upset—” the voice intruded nonresponsively.

“That wasn’t actually a greyhound you brought home.” A ray of sun had found me; I felt clearheaded. “Instead a little greyhound look-alike. Like a little toy dog. Is that who I’m speaking with? The lady with the little dog?”

“Are you with someone?”

“It’s not polite what you did,” I said with discolored conviction. “To just bring a dog into someone’s apartment. The dog might have a disease. Or fleas. He might have made me sick.”

“Leo, I’d really like to know exactly where you are.” The woman sniffled — everyone with their tears — in a way that was not at all attractive. “Where you are right now, and why,” she went on in between snarfling chokes that did seem, I concede, genuinely emotional, if repellent. “I just feel so preoccupied.” Even if she wasn’t Rema, I knew I should try harder to be nicer to her; I didn’t know why I was so offended by the dog.

“If you need to cry,” I said to her, “it’s absolutely okay for you to cry.”

“You’re lying,” she said, now sobbing. “You hate it when I cry.”

“But I really am so sorry,” I said. Why did I say that? Well: sometimes the scent of Rema’s grassy shampoo reaches me, but coming from some other passing woman, and I’m then filled with feelings that I don’t know what to do with; that’s how I felt on the phone, with that voice. I found myself continuing on: “It’s not just you, my problem with other people’s crying. When Magda cried, I handled that so terribly.” That was a mistake, to mention Magda by name. Even if I had been talking to the real Rema — and it did sound just like her, and obviously a part of me really wanted to believe that it was her — such a disclosure would likely still have been a blunder because, to state it perhaps too simply, family is a sticky issue, often best left alone.

But my words did make the woman stop crying. “When did you talk to my mom?” she said with a desiccating cornsilky voice.

I felt suddenly evaporated and cold, even out there in the sun. “I don’t feel obliged to share with you all the details of my life.”

“What did you tell her about me?” the voice continued soblessly.

Having nothing to say, I said nothing. And anyway, other than having mentioned that I was a meteorologist, I hadn’t really said much to Magda at all. “She’s a very attractive woman,” I finally said, which was just a meaningless commonplace making its own merry way out of my mouth. It meant nothing. Maybe Magda is an attractive woman or maybe she’s not, but it’s not the kind of quality I was in a frame of mind to notice. Certainly she wasn’t as attractive as, say, the Rema-waisted waitress whom I could see through the window — she was really beautiful, distractingly beautiful.

“Does she like you?” the voice asked.

I said nothing. I watched the Rema-waisted waitress wipe down a table.

“Does she look happy?” the voice damply whispered.

Again I said nothing.

My mind was comforting itself randomly with the name Alice. But not so randomly. I realized then that those snatches of Rema song that I’d had in my mind while I’d been sitting in Magda’s living room, they were songs from an album titled Alice. “Listen,” I finally said to that woman on the phone, “I’m really sorry about this, but I’m actually under quite a bit of stress lately. I’m engaged in some rather pressing and important work—”

“You left me some very strange notes—” she began, and I held the phone away from my ear during the ridiculousness that followed, “—and if you say there’s not another woman I believe you. I’ll believe you. Leo, did you hit your head on something? Did—”

When there was a pause in the woman’s excessive and absurd jeremiad — I, squinting in sunshine while she, I assumed, stood in the cold northern hemisphere shivering — I asked: “Is it snowing where you are?” Then impulsively, “It’s summer here, you know.”

“You’re in Buenos Aires? With my mom?”

I stopped watching the waitress through the window. “Did you know,” I continued, feeling other voices clawing out my trachea, “that just to discover the state of things as they presently are, let alone to predict the future, is a problem so computationally complex that to solve it even approximately would require a thousand Crays working in tandem?” And as I spoke, I noticed the wrong mental image blooming across the radar screen of my mind, wrong because although I knew very well that Crays referred to supercomputers, I pictured instead a thousand long-necked birds. Craning their necks? Or is cray a type of bird? Or was I just thinking about cranes? Like herons? “Forget,” I added, “about forecasting; even nowcasting is near impossible.” When I heard this fake Rema’s voice, was the Rema stream of images conjured in my mind correct? Or somehow subtly wrong, a series of wrong images that had already begun the process of extinguishing the real images of my real Rema? What if I was picturing the face of the simulacrum? Would it be better not to see anything at all, so as not to blanch out what I still had? Regardless, it struck me that maybe the observation about the Crays was now outdated, since computers are so much more powerful today than in the past; maybe now such computations could be made in real time; Tzvi’s idea either had grown superfluous or had been superfluous all along, had been a means of saying something else. A code? Maybe I was meant to contact Tzvi and ask. All these thoughts ran through my head, at uncertain speeds, entering from uncertain directions. Beneath the din of the phone voice I argued silently to myself that contacting Tzvi GalChen would be ludicrous; the relationship between us was not a reciprocal one; we were allied, yes, but only from my point of view, and only in a somewhat imaginary way, in a somewhat alternately conceived world that didn’t really exist, or that I didn’t think really existed, not then. Don’t get metaphysically and metaphorically extravagant, I admonished myself silently while that Rema-like woman talked on. Only Harvey, I reminded myself, believes in the deception. In reality Tzvi and I know nothing of one another.

“Maybe we can speak tomorrow?” I pleaded, being as polite as I knew how to be, given the circumstances.

“What if I said yes?” the voice said. “What if I said I did know something about forecasting and the thousand crayfish? Did you take my clothing, Leo? Did you take my purse? You know there have been many telephone calls—”

I began to feel a particular kind of nervous, as when an unwanted thought makes its steady migrainous progress toward the surface, a sense of rising water drowning my lungs. So I disconnected. Then I turned off my BlackBerry entirely. It was the only proper thing to do. I needed to go back inside: to the waitress, to dust glittering like tiniest meteors in shafts of natural light.

I asked the Rema-ish waitress for an apple Danish; it tasted like real apple rather than like apple flavoring. Ironically this made the taste seem ersatz to me, on account of the fact that all my childhood the apple flavor I knew and loved took the form of fritters wrapped in plastic.

20. Least squares method of fitting functions to data

I practically ran back to Magda’s home. She received me warmly and began showing me photos of Rema — the hallway was a veritable gallery — while I hummed to myself Rema music. Rema in a baptismal gown, held up by large hands, the holder unseen. Rema as a brunette, sitting in a depression of sand, in a green-and-blue bikini, at the beach. A black-and-white photo taken on the front steps of that very home, with a small child Rema, barefoot, holding sandals in her hand. Rema older, looking bored, or angry, at Carnival, a sequined mask pulled up onto her forehead. Rema in pale blue at first communion. Rema in heels, and glamour hair, sitting atop a tractor, her legs crossed, her eyes squinted and looking off to the side. Rema in a burgundy graduation gown, her face blanched by a flash, with a wreath of baby’s breath on her hair. Rema in a rocking chair with a speckled greyhound crowded onto her lap.

Only: those photos seemed photos of other Remas. And I suppose, in a certain very straightforward sense — regardless of certain other possibilities — that was inarguably and precisely true: I didn’t know those younger versions of her. But I was unsettled and didn’t know what to do with that unsettlement, didn’t know if it was an ordinary everyday kind of unsettlement, or the paradox that is simply the most visible part of a profound error in an entire worldview.

Anyway: there were no wedding photos of Rema.

And no men. No men in any of the photos.

“Only once, you said,” I said to Magda. “Only once you met her husband?” I asked her, trying to behave casually, as if her gallery of Remas didn’t resemble a mausoleum, as if my questions were just ones of mildest curiosity.

“So long ago. He looked like the kind of American who would get fat. Did he get fat? I could see it in his jaw.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” I said, hoping she wasn’t somehow actually talking about me. Then: “I would like to let a room from you,” I blurted out.

She tightened the low ponytail that held back her hair. A scent of citrus escaped. “I usually charge two hundred seventy pesos a week,” she said, blushing terribly. “Though I’ll take you as a guest, of course—”

“No, of course not,” I interrupted.

We both felt (maybe I’m projecting) more awkward, more space-occupying than before.

Shortly thereafter that awkward money moment resurfaced, transformed, when in asking about the best way to get to the airport I mentioned to Magda the loss of my luggage, and she said So you have none of your objects? to which I shrugged nonspecifically. Maybe I felt bereft though; maybe it showed on my face; but I really wasn’t — not then at least — thinking about that other husband, or even the night nurse, or even Rema. I was just thinking of my suitcase, which actually is Rema’s and which is pale blue. Magda put her hand on my back, which is such a gentle and comforting way to be touched; it’s too easy to get into a vein of living where that no longer ever happens, where no one touches you in that particular kind way, which produces a very particular feeling, not precisely reproduced by anything else, except maybe by that hug machine that autistic woman designed in order to calm down cows on their way to slaughter. Magda brought me a handkerchief. She stood quietly next to me a moment, or maybe a few moments. Then, with her arm on mine, she insisted on lending me some clothes; she said she had some very nice men’s clothing, which she felt confident would not be too far off from my size.

“No really, I’m entirely fine,” I said.

“No,” she said.

I again declined the clothes.

“It’s hot outside,” she said. “And you’re dressed for winter. At least for you to have a change for tonight. And for tomorrow morning.”

So I consented to her offer. She showed me a mostly bare closet. The closet door rolled on rusty wheels. Inside: clothing hung on metal hangers, covered in plastic like from the dry cleaners. Thin pale button-up shirts with pearline snaps. Tailored pants pinned to themselves in grip around a cardboard rod. A tiny dresser of undershirts, socks, a shoehorn, a glasses’ case. Only after a very late dinner that night did I wonder why Magda had men’s clothing at all. And whose clothing it might be. And again who Rema’s other “husband” was or had been. And what that might have to do with her disappearance, or her double, or, for that matter, with me. And I admit, I wasn’t quite sure in which direction my investigation was or should have been proceeding. And I was surprised, unpleasantly, at how well the clothing fit me, even the pants.

I slept in that other man’s shirt.

21. One mystery resolving

I must confess that the insignificant price of letting a room from Magda relieved me; nevertheless, perseveration over the price of my last-minute, open-return airline ticket disturbed my sleep; and yet when I would succeed in tripping my thoughts off of perseverations on my profligacy, I would then proceed to ruminate over my miserliness, worrying that, in agreeing to such a cheap rate, I was taking advantage of my wife’s mother. Thus I’d be set in pursuit of relief from what had, initially, been relieving me. That’s why, reading the paper the next morning, over the coffee and medialunas that Magda offered me, I somewhat surreptitiously surveyed the classifieds section so that I could get a sense of whether I was paying a reasonable rent — a difficult task because I couldn’t decipher the significance of the abbreviations and the addresses.

Not far from the classifieds, in those back pages of the tabloid, I came across ’70s-looking portrait photos (long hair, slender faces, tinted glasses, loud print shirts) set off in boxes like yearbook advertisements. Alongside the photos were names and the day’s date, but of a different year: 1977, two from 1979, 1981. Then phrases like: Your struggle continues to inspire us. We carry you in our hearts.

The feel of those photos, the mood of them, brought to mind the Gal-Chen family photo. So that was what I recognized first, that very particular familiarity. It took me a few moments more — synapses having to wend a very circuitous path — for me to realize that these were not just late ’70s nostalgia photos; these were almost certainly memorials to Argentina’s disappeared, published on the anniversaries of disappearance.

Let me confess that — what with its being over twenty years since the end of the “dirty war” (a term that strikes me as a too-catchy euphemism for mass murder, “war” misleadingly implying that the paranoid fantasies of the junta were true, but this seems an issue for another time) — I hadn’t imagined that the wounds would still be quite so obviously alive, so manifest. I can see now that I should not have been surprised — what with my experiences, professional ones I mean, I especially should not have been surprised. People naturally perseverate on their personal tragedies, even though such perseveration doesn’t really serve anyone, neither the living nor the dead. I mean, there’s research on these things. It’s simply not a practical use of time to think constantly of the dead. I’m not heartless, and I do regret that I must sound that way, and I understand how resilience is in its way a demonic kind of strength, a strength not unrelated to a capacity for indifference, a strength that is discomfiting evidence against the existence of true, eternal love. But is it better for the living to burn themselves in others’ funeral pyres? As I wrote, once, “Mourning should be mortal.” And, well, I think it’s worth considering why memorial writing is so awful, why it so entirely fails to communicate the feeling of loss. I at least feel that it fails. Those vague earnest words all seem so demeaning, so shameful, like strangers hearing the sound of you going to the bathroom.

I felt nauseous reading those memorials, almost all of them accompanied by those hazy now kitsch photos that seemed like material downtown kids iron onto T-shirts. Why nauseous instead of, say, sad? some analyst sap might ask me, and yes of course sad I suppose, but that’s a separate question. I felt sick, I felt an incipient migraine, and that is the main thing I’m trying to say. That, and maybe society should more seriously consider the coping mechanism of not talking about loss, at least not publicly; a highly superior coping mechanism, I would argue, is to cathart over the sufferings of fictional creations. I realize that in these views I am deeply heretical within my field, but considering the company that makes up my field, I feel no shame in distinguishing myself.

I hear other voices, maybe some of them my own, pointing out the Orwellian nature of Silence Is Health. But I respond with: well, let’s not aphorize. Maybe politically, yes, nations should remember, the world should remember. But the individual sufferers should not have to. Let the sufferers run. They have a good chance of dying before any grief catches up to them. Myself for example: if Rema had, say, died rather than just disappeared, well, I wouldn’t be turning over in my head the problem of such unresolvable pain. Mysteries that can’t be solved should be passed over in silence, or something like that. If Rema had died I would just not think about her at all — or at least that’s the advice I would give myself. What I face now, Rema’s absence, borders on the unfathomable, but it’s not actually unfathomable, not actually without hope of solution, and that is why I allow myself to think about it, because there’s hope.

So: I was sitting across from Magda, dressed in a pointy-collared pale green button-up ’70s shirt she had lent me, reading that newspaper, with its classified ads and memorials. I ate two, then three medialunas and drank too quickly, and then had to suppress burps. Just as I was about to ask Magda about the memorials, about whether they were “normal,” or commonly seen, I noticed she was fixated on the cuff of the shirt that I had on, and this somehow made me realize that I didn’t want to be the kind of person interested in asking the kind of question I was about to ask. I had other, more personally pressing, questions that I wasn’t asking.

I opened my mouth.

Then my BlackBerry — set there on the table beside me — trembled.

Magda held a hand up to her heart, as if she’d been given a fright, as if a real alarm had sounded.

“It’s not Rema,” I said suddenly, perhaps brusquely, I don’t know why.

“Oh, no, of course not,” she said, and “please,” she added, gesturing toward my retrembling BlackBerry. “Be at home.”

It was just an e-mail marked “urgent;” I’ve programmed these to ring even when my ringer is off because I usually receive such notes only when an outpatient of mine has been admitted to the hospital.

Magda looked decidedly the other way; she took a cookie and dipped it into her tea with an expectant look, as if waiting to see if the cookie would crumble.

The urgent e-mail appeared to be from Harvey.

Dear Dr. Leo

,

I wrote to Dr. Gal-Chen of my progress against the 49

.

I have not yet heard back from him

.

Have you heard from him? I have sent him three letters

.

I am in central Oklahoma and am unable to obtain a copy of the

New York Post.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory here was unprotected

.

Please pass on Dr. Gal-Chen’s phone number. It’s urgent

.

— Harvey

When I looked down at my hands, I saw newsprint smudged on the pads of my fingers. Touching the screen of my BlackBerry left a print. I shouldn’t have been surprised to notice, when I looked up and over at Magda, that she had on full makeup, even already then, first thing in the morning. There is something about a confident thick streak of eyeliner that makes a woman look very emotional. I could also detect Magda’s concealer, there under her eyes, shy about the fine wrinkles to which it clung. Her cheeks had a dramatic swath of blush that slightly sparkled, as if sifted with very fine grains of sand.

“Who was that?” Magda said.

“Did any of the disappeared ever reappear?” I then asked Magda, who ignored me for a moment, as if I were talking not to her but to my phone. “I’m sorry,” I said, probably because I thought that was what she should have said to me, for being rude to me. “I was just thinking about it on account of these memorials here in the newspaper.” I wasn’t going to tell her about Harvey. “I mean, those are memorials, yes? I was just curious if maybe there were people who had been believed to have been disappeared, but who had really just wandered off, maybe had gone crazy, or maybe had a bout of amnesia. And then maybe one day, maybe years later”—I was all about the maybes—“those people unexpectedly return. Or are found. I’ve heard of that happening, of mistakes like that. You know, I read recently, in another newspaper, that an unknown, unshowered vagrant had been found playing virtuosic Debussy in a church in a Scottish fishing village; I think the man spoke German; when asked his name he said he couldn’t remember; word spread and hundreds of people — literally hundreds — said they were certain they knew who he was, came to visit expecting to find their lost brother or child or friend—”

At which point I think she interrupted with something to the tired effect of: oh really? And I realized, heat rising to my face, that I had been going on and on. Still, I added:

“Someone might have been right. Someone might have found his, or her, missing man.”

Or I was saying something like that, trying to keep myself from staring at Magda’s emotional makeup and trying to distract her from any questions about the note I’d just received, seeing as I was even less ready than I’d been the day before to invent some story on the spur of the moment.

But: at least a mystery, if not the mystery, was beginning to reveal itself. Harvey was not dead; he was in Oklahoma.

22. Method of maximum likelihood

There was a time when the belief was prevalent that all those who cared for the mentally ill became mentally ill, and at the arrival of Harvey’s message, that idea — infectiousness — stretched its cadaverous hand out from the past to touch my mind.

I had thought to contact Tzvi Gal-Chen.

And Harvey had actually contacted him, or at least had tried to.

But it wasn’t the same Tzvi Gal-Chen we were talking about. That’s why I was nothing like Harvey.

Magda gestured to my small, empty coffee cup, and I startled back into myself and gestured toward the object about which we were obviously not speaking, my BlackBerry.

“That was just a colleague of mine,” I said as casually as I could manage, nodding my head about the coffee, which she refilled for me. “Thank you.”

“She’s all right? Your colleague is all right?”

“He. It’s a he,” I said. “Yes. Yes, of course. Yes, he’s fine, more than fine.”

Magda sat down again, wrapped both hands around her own mug. Her hands — they were so much older than Rema’s — were thin and receded away from the knuckles.

“Yes, this colleague,” I began, trying to set Magda, or really myself, at ease. “He just likes to send me the most random notes, does it all the time,” I said with a little laugh; in truth it was the first e-mail Harvey had ever sent me. “I get the most wonderful e-mails from him all the time,” I said. In truth I have no friends, except for Rema, who send me wonderful e-mails; my e-mails are dully professional. “He’s such a lovely source of entertainment and happiness,” I continued, finally falsely elaborating to true excess.

I folded up the newspaper like clean laundry. I cleared my throat and stood up. I began to gather dishes over Magda’s protest. I began to wash the dishes and Magda asked me to stop. She told me I was using the wrong sponge.

I told her that after stopping by the airport, I’d be spending the rest of my day at the university.

“Which university?” she asked me.

I didn’t know. It just seemed like the place a research meteorologist would be spending his days. So I just said, “Thank you again for breakfast,” and left.

23. An alibi not invented by Rema

I called the airport and a woman’s voice told me assuringly that my suitcase had been found. I splurged on a taxi, but then what they showed me wasn’t even the right color. My suitcase — Rema’s suitcase — is pale blue, baby blue, and hard-shelled with regularly irregular craters like the moon. The suitcase they showed me was periwinklish, which I suppose some people will call blue and some purple, and both camps will be pretty dedicated to their idea of what the real color is, and will see it, often, as, well, a black-and-white issue. Rema and I argued over this once. But how do people make those kinds of mistakes? I wonder if the periwinkle color is an undecided issue in all cultures, or if there are some cultures with so many things to distinguish along the blue-to-violet spectrum that a much more sophisticated and precise language has evolved.

Anyway, a miscommunication.

I made my way back to the coffee shop where the Rema-waisted waitress had been. The Rema-waisted waitress was not there. The waitress in her place was attractive, but not as attractive. I asked for a coffee and extra cookies, and I set my first priority: to respond to Harvey’s e-mail, and in that response to come up with a convenient barrier between Dr. Gal-Chen and myself.

After that, I could (I told myself) with a clear mind return to the central matter — I didn’t see then how they were related — of searching for Rema.

I took up pen in hand and began writing, with no plan of what I was going to say, just hoping an idea would come to me; something to the effect of what is reproduced below is what my hand wrote:

Dear Harvey

,

Glad to hear that you are doing well

.

Some news: Tzvi Gal-Chen and I have been moved to separate legions and can no longer communicate directly. I can only send notes upward to my superiors, who will contact his superiors — possibly — who might then possibly choose to contact him, but one can never be sure. YOU SHOULD NOT MAKE ANY FURTHER ATTEMPTS AT CONTACTING DR. GAL–CHEN DIRECTLY. Who can know the ifs and whens of whether messages are transmitted, or if they are intercepted? We must always be wary of the 49

.

These clouds do not cast shadows, they scatter light

.

I am out of my office for an undetermined length of time, but please, keep in touch

.

Dr. L

Terribly hokey. And not very believable? Why did I use that word “legions”? The use of all caps for emphasis embarrasses me. And I cannot even express the nausea evoked by recalling my feeble attempt at mysterious wisdom. If only I’d had Rema’s help; she would have come up with something so much more compelling.

I ate a cookie — slightly almond — and considered whether to type in and send my note. I did send the note. Harvey soon sent me back some quite surprising news.

24. In 1990, Tzvi Gal-Chen publishes “Can Dryline Mixing Create Buoyancy?”

So there I sat, wearing borrowed clothes, in the southern hemisphere, in a coffee shop near Rema’s childhood home, the Rema-waisted waitress not there, my awkward missive to Harvey sent, time moving at an uncertain rate as sunlight flooded continuously through the window, inducing a not so subtle dew along the plane of my back, and when I glanced — at some moment — back down at the slightly reflective screen of my BlackBerry I saw — in addition to an orangutan-y distortion of my forehead — that I’d already received a response, of sorts, from Harvey.

He had forwarded me a note from tzvi@galchen.net.

Dear Harvey

,

Thanks for your compliments. Sorry I’m responding to your e-mail rather than snail mail address; I know you said you were worried, but let me reassure you that e-mail as a form of communication is plenty safe for our purposes here

.

As per your request, let me first say that I have no doubt that you’ve been extremely dedicated in your work as a covert mesoscale operator for the Royal Academy. For that reason and others, I agree with you that you definitely deserve more freedom as regards your assignments. Yes, New York can get dull, especially meteorologically speaking. I also love severe storm season in the plains. Anyway, from here forward consider yourself autonomous; I (and my superiors who must remain nameless) trust your judgment entirely

.

With continued gratitude for all your atmospheric labor,

Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen

P.S. — Yes, please do pass on my regards to Dr. L

.

A breeze then entered the coffee shop. I looked up and saw a striking old bald man enter; I took a sip of the fresh-squeezed orange juice before me; then somehow I spilled the glass of orange juice; the pulp mosaiced through the liquid as it spread across the table; the Rema-ish waitress emerged seemingly out of nowhere carrying several white waffled rags with trim of pale blue stripes; she smelled of baby oil; with a paper napkin I patted at the splash on the screen of my BlackBerry, but flecks of pulp remained, looking like scraped cheek cells smeared out on a slide.

But beneath those not actually cheek cells, the e-mail from Tzvi to Harvey and then on to me, remained unchanged.

The door had swung shut; the breeze as if it never were; the man seated; a chill still on my dewy back; the Rema-ish waitress again vanished.

Recall: at that time in my life, the only Tzvi Gal-Chen I knew, really, was Rema. Rema, Rema, Rema, Rema. The Tzvi language didn’t seem like hers, but certainly the note seemed like a clue. I didn’t feel safe typing into my pulpy BlackBerry, but I found an old, very old, receipt in my pocket, and wrote on the back the following list:

Unnamed dog?

Anatole?

Royal Academy?

Rema’s husband?

Tzvi Gal-Chen?

Then I folded the receipt over many times, making a compact little nugget out of it, so that I could reach into the deep and narrow pockets of my borrowed pants and feel the contours of that folded paper; I figured that would help me stay focused in my thinking, stay focused in my search.

25. A wrongful accusation

“You’re here,” a voice said, and looking up I again for a moment thought it was Rema, or the Rema-waisted waitress, but it was not the Rema-waisted waitress, nor was it Rema. It was Magda, there in my coffee shop.

“I’m here. Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly like a child caught skipping school. Magda may have been standing there at the side of my table for rather a few moments before I remembered to offer her a seat, an offer she did not refuse, and we then sat there quietly for a few more moments, as I felt along the contours of the crumpled clue receipt in my pocket. My impersonation of a meteorologist — it was off to a bad start.

With a nod toward the damp BlackBerry, Magda, breaking the stillness as uninvasively as possible, said simply: “That’s something.” Then: “Before this morning I’d never seen anything like that.”

“Yes, it’s kind of a new thing,” I said.

“Something I’ve never seen before,” she repeated.

“But it’s common,” I said, deciding to let that small electronic device cloud over any false explanatory rays of my not being at any university.

Then it was quiet again, at least quiet between us. There were other sounds, I suppose — probably milk was steaming, and silverware clinking, and newspaper crinkling — but I wasn’t noticing.

“Do you know what I’m wondering about?” Magda asked. I did not proffer my guesses, which were my dreads. “Rema’s hair,” she said. “I am wondering how is she wearing it?”

I must have looked at Magda strangely (but not on account of her question, instead mostly because I had my hand on that crumpled clue and I was still discussing Tzvi and Harvey and everything within the privacy of myself) because Magda began to explain herself: “It’s just that we used to fight over her hair. She’d hardly brush it, and she’d let it hang in her face and you couldn’t see her sweet features and she was making herself look vulgar and it would be this big argument. Between us, it really was ugly, what she’d do with her hair.”

I offered cautiously, “Her hair looks very nice these days.” And having the chance to say something that was simply true — it was not as much of a relief as I thought it would be. I coughed. Strands of Rema’s cornsilk hair seemed to be snaked at the interstices of my bronchi.

“And so now — well — so how is she wearing her hair now? She looks pretty?” Magda asked, rolling her eyes and smiling derisively, at herself I think, not at me.

“She’s very smart. Rema is very smart,” I said to Magda, but — and this just struck me now — I suspect it was myself I was accusing with that blunt comment.

“I smell oranges?” Magda said.

I said, “I’m sorry. You’d like her hair, I think. The way it looks now. It’s very tidy. And a beautiful color. Blonde like the inside of corn. She wears it usually in a low—” I demonstrated a ponytail with a gesture. “Holds it in a wide gold clip. And it’s long and trim. And in the summer she pins the flyaway hairs back with neat little parallel hairpins that are a natural color instead of just plain black. But she still gets these pretty little loose strands; they get kind of extra bleachy blonde-ish and wavy in the summertime, I think naturally, or maybe she does that on purpose. My mom used to do that with lemon juice, little highlights like that.” I unpeeled the pads of my fingers from the sticky surface of the table and saw the whorled print of my own grease, and it looked like the image from Tzvi’s research paper. “More or less like that, anyway, is what her hair looks like,” I added quickly. “I mean it’s not like I see Rema every day, so who knows what she’s doing with her hair on just any old day.”

“You love her, don’t you?” Magda said.

I re-adhered and de-adhered my finger pads on the sticky table. I patted at the cookie crumbs on the plate where there were no longer cookies. I think I said nothing and looked nowhere, but Magda, like Rema, knew how to crowd up the silent space. “I apologize if I have made you uncomfortable,” she said. “Please understand that I am not narrow-minded in these ways. It makes me happy to see that you love her. It would make me happy to know that she has a lover. I’m just saying this, about this love you seem to have, partially because, well, her husband: I never saw it in him. I never saw that he loved her. That is why you came to see me, yes, because you love her?”

I spotted the Rema-waisted waitress, re-emerged from the back, attending to a nearby table.

“Rema,” I declared, “isn’t the type to have affairs under any circumstances.”

No perceptible response in the spine of the waitress, no twitch of attention.

Then I dropped a spoon I hadn’t realized I was holding. I reached out to my sticky Blackberry and put it in my pocket. Soon afterward Magda left the coffee shop.

I love you, I wrote on the bill when I paid it, wrote as if a kind of test, in case somehow that waitress might really be Rema.

26. Lola

That evening, after watching the TV weather and reassuringly or disappointingly, I’m not sure which, receiving no signals from the forecast — I needed to verify constantly for myself that I wasn’t perceiving patterns and signals that weren’t actually there — I finally placed a call to the Royal Academy. I somewhat lost control of the conversation. This proved in the end fortuitous, perhaps even destined, or at least, I might say, determined, as in the folding of certain proteins according to the dictates of RNA.

I dialed what appeared to be the main number. “Yes. I’m returning a call?”

“Are you calling about the marital tension?”

“Someone called me.”

“Yes. Do you know your party’s extension?”

“Well, really, like I said, I’m returning a call. I was the object of calling, not the subject.”

There was a bit of confusion, since I really didn’t know to whom I was returning a call. So I mentioned that I was calling from Buenos Aires in hopes that the receptionist would then be put in mind of the expense I was incurring. Our “conversation” was not progressing well, and then on impulse I dropped Harvey’s name — which I of course immediately regretted doing — but suddenly there was a little bit of tender piano music, I was being transferred, and then, abruptly—

“You’re calling about the dog?” a trembly, almost theremin-y voice swelled.

“Yes,” I said quite surprised, “I think I am.”

“But the job is in Patagonia, not Buenos Aires. In El Calafate, right on the Moreno Glacier. You know that, yes? I think it wasn’t clear on the posting.”

“Excuse me?”

“El Calafate,” she repeated with warbling irritation. “Patagonia.”

“That’s where the dog is?” I asked.

“Listen. Calling four times in a row doesn’t help. We have your phone number—”

“But I’m not at my home phone anymore—”

“But like I was trying to explain, if you’re willing to be based in Patagonia, then there’s a real chance—”

“Is this related to the offer of fellowship—?”

“Listen,” she said, the pitch of her voice dropping, “the truth is — what the truth is — well the truth is that I just don’t know. And everyone’s been calling with questions. The person before you asked me how we knew that information could be retrieved from black holes. Was that a joke? Why ask me? Was he mocking me? This is not my regular post; this is just a temporary position for me and I’m feeling really overwhelmed—” she said, her voice flaking.

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said, with genuine emotion, because I was sincerely moved by this stranger’s circumstances, even from the little I knew of them, just from the timbre of and tremble in her voice. “Really. I am really sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said, obviously crying — lately everyone crying to me — and even laughing a little bit as well at the same time. “How ridiculous,” she said. “I don’t know why I can’t just keep my selves together,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said then. “It’s okay to cry,” I said. And the strange thing was that, not having actually to see this woman, not having actually to feel responsible for her distress, I really did feel it was more than okay to cry. In person, to be honest, I generally find weeping people repulsive. What can I do? I don’t have other antisocial personality disorder traits. I went on, “Crying can be like squeezing the pus out of a gluteal abscess. I mean, listen, some wounds just grow larger and more infected when you expel them, but with others that may be the only option. It’s a risk. You just don’t want to get obsessed with the wound; you don’t want to be looking for pus every day, poking and prodding, and making an ugly mess of your skin … but shedding a few tears over the phone to a stranger … well, maybe that’s just right.”

She was giggling during my little improvised analogy. “You’ve been really sweet,” she said. She sounded very attractive. “I already feel a little better. You’re funny,” she added.

Then there was a silence. Was I supposed to cry too? Then she broke into the silence, as if with the sudden opening of a faucet, and said: “Listen, I think we’re done with this call. Did you say you had a different contact number now? Let me just get that from you and when the regular person returns, the real person, they’ll get back to you.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Lola.”

I gave Lola my number.

She went on, “I really think there’s not that many people able to go to Patagonia on such short notice. Apparently the person who was originally supposed to take the position dropped out at the last minute, so it’s a bit of a scramble. So I think you have a real chance of getting the job. But listen, I’d really suggest that you don’t keep calling. Some of the staff here are really petty and irritable, and that’ll get used against you; I’ve even seen them purposely put CVs in the wrong pile, just to get them lost — well, listen, bye sweets,” she said finally.

I thanked her for her advice and hung up in a haze of inexplicable happiness and confusion.

Progress may not lie, I told myself, where I might think it would lie. And this made me think of swapping beds, of Baudelaire’s point about life being a hospital in which every patient is possessed of the desire to change beds. Not that I was actually ill, or swapping women, or projecting feelings from one space to another, or harboring unrealizable desires — just that the conversation with Lola had unsettled me. Our phone call seemed like the most substantial advance I’d had yet toward the goal of finding Rema. The waitress, the simulacrum on the phone, even Rema’s mother — they gave the feel of closeness, but this was clearly much more promising.

27. Dog man

I went for a walk, in order to think, to pass the time, to not be alone, to not notice that Magda was still not home; even Killer was not at home. I dodged dog deposits on the sidewalk, was barked at ferociously by a rottweiler behind bars, was approached with love and trust by two skinny beaglish mixes. Then, not having noticed that I’d returned to right across the street from Magda’s home, I saw: congregated, more than a dozen large dogs, all on leashes, connected to an unsettlingly pacific man who was leaning against a wall, smoking.

The dogs: relatively large, vibrant, healthy-looking. None like the miniature greyhound that the double had toted home.

But packs of dogs make me — this truly is entirely normal — very nervous. My feet stopped advancing.

The dog man nodded at me.

I echo nodded.

Then he called across to me, “The sin is yours, huh?”

I did not answer or nod but only looked at him amidst his pack of curs. I hadn’t been flirting with Lola. Or the waitress.

“La señora,” he said, now louder, and emphasizing the second syllable of señora, “no está?”

Magda’s dog, the greyhound Killer: I spotted her among the mob.

Would you believe that I then looked up and immediately saw Sirius, the Dog Star, which appears to be one star but is in fact actually two, or possibly even three?

Then a woman’s voice — it proved to be Magda’s — on the other side of the street, nearing the beasts. She kissed the dog man on each cheek, then beckoned me over, as if not to a dangerous den, so what could I — if I was to maintain decorum — do except cross the street and join the humans and animals?

“I present you my friend,” Magda said in English, pronouncing “present” so that it meant gift, and then giggling.

I bravely extended my hand out over the dogs, toward the dog man, who instead of taking my hand grabbed hold of the back of my neck and pulled me forward, and I nearly fell, save for his having hold of me like a wolf’s grip on its cub. I felt his plump towelly lips press against my cheek. I was in an awkward tilt position — suspended out over that pack of dogs that I imagined looking up at me — and upon my return from the greeting I again almost fell over.

Which returned me mentally to: why so many dogs in my life all of the sudden?

“Dogs are not your dear friends,” the man said to me.

“No, I love dogs,” I said. “I really love them. Some of them. The gentle ones.”

Magda and the dog man laughed. I thought of the vein on the night nurse’s forehead. Amidst the unpleasant moment, I realized that I’d never had to deal with living in a community full of men who might possibly in the past have kissed Rema. At least, I didn’t think that back home I had to be concerned, since Rema had been in the country only a number of months when I met her, since I’d never seen her, during all those months of just looking at her, with anyone else. Though I had at one time wondered if she was trying to avoid someone that first night when she couldn’t decide where we’d have pizza.

I don’t know why I thought she might have kissed, or loved, this oversized man with the dogs. He was hairy handed, much more so than me. When he spoke something more to me, in Spanish, I wasn’t sure what he said, and so in response I just smiled. I guess one might say he was ruggedly handsome.

“Very, very nice to meet you,” I said, then went inside the house. Alone there, I reexamined the gallery of Rema photos, and indeed, as I reconfirmed, Rema was standing next to a man in absolutely none of them. But there was a photo of Magda with a man. Just one, a wedding photo. Maybe this was Rema’s father; maybe not. I really had no idea.

Very late that evening, I came across Magda in the living room. She was wearing a full-length, high-necked Victorian nightgown that was somehow immodest in its extreme modesty. “He’s also an analyst,” she said to me as I held my gaze down at the delicate eyelet of her hem. “He walks dogs only because nobody can pay for analysis anymore. He lets his patients pay just symbolically.”

Which sounded dirty. And why could so many people pay to have their dogs walked while so few could pay for analysis? The long nightgown, the high incidence of analysts, the apparent manlessness of Magda’s life — I found it all rather suspicious. And yet I could not cast out the ludicro-banal hypothesis that that man — whatever his name and economic status were — was an earlier object of attraction for Rema and that I might be — for her — a mere reverberance of him. Why? Just because we were both kind of hairy?

This is irrelevant to your investigation, one parliament member of me said to another.

I raised my gaze to Magda’s still eyelinered eyes. “How long have you known that man who walks the dogs?”

“The analyst?” she said. “Since forever. His practice is unusual,” and I was again suddenly anxious that she was going to talk about sex. “He works mostly with relatives of the disappeared. You should understand that he’s very, very respected. He only walks the dogs now in order to be able to continue seeing his patients. And because he loves dogs. He really does,” she added, as if to emphasize his moral superiority over me.

“Yes? Does he especially like—” but I didn’t know the Spanish word for greyhound. Maybe it was just “greyhound.” “Well, is there a special kind of dog that he loves especially?”

“Is there a kind of dog that you love especially?” she answered, stretching out her hands, catpaw-like, on the surface of her gown, over what I deduced was her midthigh.

But I really hate mirroring; I especially abhor the notion that whatever I say is secretly about me. So I didn’t answer her, pawing there at her gown.

Then Magda said, “I should have thought — he also knows the American. I should have thought of that connection, that you know someone in common. Do you want anything? I’m going to bed now.”

She believed I didn’t love dogs, but her dog came and slept in the bed with me that night.

28. What would Tzvi Gal-Chen do?

I really do like gentle dogs. And when I petted the velvety crown of Killer’s head the next morning, when I lifted one of her silken ears and held it like fine cloth between my fingers, she then lifted her gaze to me, which re-reminded me why I suspect people love dogs so passionately, for that loyal devotion of theirs that manages to be simultaneously easy and profound. Or at least their love appears to be like that even if only because I so desperately want to believe in such a love.

My pants were draped over a chair near the bed; the little nugget of paper upon which I’d written my notes had fallen to the floor. It looked like ordinary trash. I felt ashamed about a certain sort of slapdashness converging upon my mission. I put on the foreign pants. I picked up my crumpled note. I sat myself with proper posture at the desk. Killer arranged herself in a curl near my feet. And I uncrumpled:

Unnamed dog?

Anatole?

Royal Academy?

Rema’s husband?

Tzvi Gal-Chen?

Now there were Lola and the dog man to consider as well. There might be duplicates, though: the dog man might be Anatole, Lola might be Tzvi Gal-Chen. And maybe Tzvi, Lola, and the Royal Academy should all be one category. Or Tzvi and Lola just subcategories of the Royal Academy. And what of Harvey?

But this “system,” in terms of action, was getting me nowhere. I felt acutely that I didn’t even have, like, say, Harrison Ford in Frantic, a suitcase to rummage through. My life — so much less compelling, so much less organized, than even a movie. But I knew that was a uselessly vain thought, utterly beside the point, an influence of grogginess, and I did have this lead with Lola at the Academy, surely that would turn up something, sometime, and yet, here I was, indefinitely doing nothing in pursuit of Rema. That’s when I heard in my mind — and I knew it was just in my mind — a Rema voice giggle-accuse-whisper: What would Tzvi Gal-Chen do?

I resolved to look again more closely at Tzvi’s research paper, “A Theory for the Retrievals,” a work that claimed to be retrieving “thermodynamic variables from within deep convective clouds,” but that I suspected — or hoped — might be about quite a bit more. As I combed through the pages a small Rema memory came to me: I had once taken her to a performance of Hamlet, but the antique English of it had meant that she’d hardly followed a word, so it was less than a spectacular evening, and I’d apologized to her for not having thought of how the language would be difficult, but said that maybe it was kind of appropriate to the play, since the play was about, I said, what happens when you grossly overestimate what thinking can accomplish, and she’d said, no, really the play’s about the long influence of dead fathers, that’s how I like to think about it, she said. It just came to me, our little trades, her small indignancies, and I missed her so acutely. Regardless, Tzvi’s paper, despite the difficulty of the language, did indeed reveal to me what was quite compellingly a reference to my situation with Rema. It argued for the validity of introducing into atmospheric models two types of errors: white noise, which referred to errors “on all resolvable scales,” and blue noise, which referred exclusively to “errors on the smallest resolvable scales.” These errors, he argued, enhanced “the realism of retrieved fields.”

Did Tzvi know all about those “errors on the smallest resolvable scales” that characterized the doppelganger? Did he know how this related to retrieval? Certainly he knew about how Crays working in tandem could solve problems of increasing magnitude. So arguably it was as if I was a Cray, and he was a Cray, and … well why, I thought, shouldn’t I turn to Tzvi for help?

That image from the first Gal-Chen paper I’d seen, back in the library: in addition to reminding me of Rema, it also looked to me like a lonely man, in an alien landscape, glancing back over his shoulder as if to ask something of someone whom he was not sure was there.

“Maybe I will write to Tzvi,” I said to gentle Killer, who did not seem to disapprove. “Maybe I need to make progress on the mesoscale, that is, the human scale.” And so, sitting there in my mother-in-law’s room, a mother-in-law I hardly knew and who hardly knew me (and who had been given the wrong clues for getting to know me), I turned my BlackBerry on, switched it to silent, and tried to be professional, direct, and sincerely warm at once. After thanking Tzvi for his correspondence with Harvey, I wrote to him about: the erroneous Rema, wanting to retrieve my own Rema, the inexplicable intrusion of dogs into my life, my most recent contact with the Royal Academy of Meteorology. Then I simply asked, making reference to his work that had wisely directed me to Buenos Aires in the first place, if he had any suggestions for how I might progress in my attempts at retrieval.

29. A mysterious misrepresentation

Dear Leo Liebenstein, MD:

I’m sorry. I suspect this is kind of my fault. I don’t actually know Harvey. There’s been some confusion. I really am sorry. And I’m sorry to hear about your wife. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about her. Or her whereabouts. Again I’m sorry. I regret any confusion I’ve caused. For a few reasons none of which you should take personally I don’t think I’ll write to you about this again

.

This reply arrived almost immediately.

I did think, for a moment, that maybe Tzvi had taken Rema. That, though, was just indignation speaking.

A better explanation for the cold reply: maybe Tzvi, like me, thought he had to work all alone because he didn’t know if he could trust in me — after all, when he first received that note from me I was nothing to him but an e-mail address, and anyone can be behind an e-mail address, regardless of who appears to be behind it. (Years after my mother died, I would still receive mail addressed to her and occasionally I would answer her mail; once I went and picked up her glasses prescription.) So I can understand Tzvi’s mysterious misrepresentation of himself and his knowledge — he couldn’t be sure with whom he was communicating. And he knew what I didn’t then know, which was that his own position was ontologically dubious. So he was experiencing, in a sense, an Initial Value Problem in response to having received a communication from me; he didn’t know whether I was a parameter he might safely rely on, in order to accurately infer forward to a forecast of the truth, to reliable predictions of possible futures. Perhaps, all alone as he was then, as he maintained himself, working in isolation for the Royal Academy, he may have worried that he was, proverbially, “going mad.”

I was alone too. If only Killer — very little white shows in dog eyes, so it’s more difficult to tell where they’re looking — could have offered me a second opinion, a second interpretation of the situation. Yes, retrospectively I can certainly understand Tzvi’s retreat from intimacy as a manifestation of his anxiety, but in the chill of the moment I reacted less pacifically. Feeling that I had been condescended to, I responded immediately with:

Dr. Gal-Chen:

I was just kidding. Wrongly believed you understood. Sorry! Ha-ha. Again sorry! I thought you might enjoy this Adorno quote: “The unreality of children’s games gives notice that reality has not yet become real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life.”

— Leo

So a rather petty and passive-aggressively pretentious move on my part, arguably brought on by the underclass feeling evoked by my own temporary dishevelment and isolation. Or maybe by examining too closely the worn nap of the velvet upholstering of Magda’s desk chair in which I sat. (Her wardrobe so immaculate and yet her furniture so Miss Havisham.) To my credit, after sending that note I then immediately turned off my BlackBerry in order to protect myself from further impulsive communication.

I later lay around in that living room for what seemed like hours, waiting for someone — anyone — to pass through. But no stirrings. I felt that if I couldn’t get into a terrible argument I might have to shred reams of paper into very, very tiny pieces. And I hate that feeling, of having a feeling within me that just vibrates but that has nowhere to go, like sound in a vacuum, never being received. Then I suffer the self-hatred of having allowed that undesired feeling to pile up, so that adds another layer of ugliness.

In the kitchen I found a tin of butter cookies, some with crystallized sugar atop, crystallized in a way that made me feel, by comparison, hazy and unresolved. I ate many of the cookies. Then overfull, and as if half the cookies were still in my esophagus waiting patiently to become part of me, I stared at the ceiling of the kitchen. It was painted in drips and drabbles—“spackled,” I think is the word, the real word, not just Rema’s riff on “speckled”—and the shapes that normally morph and merge out upon the random pattern of such a ceiling did not morph and merge for me as I sat there, though I waited for them to do so, even just playfully, but they didn’t, which made it seem as if I’d become the worst kind of literalist and could no longer be startled past the surface of things. As if I really believed in a world where Tzvi didn’t know about Rema, a world where people, oddly enough, meant just what they said.

30. An ersatz return

Did I think of going home? I thought of going home. Did I go to the coffee shop and stare too much at the Rema-like waitress? I did. After all, in the aftermath of Rema’s disappearance, it had been Tzvi’s work that had directed me to Argentina in the first place. And actually, it was Rema who, in the aftermath of the beautiful ordinariness of our days, had sent me, as a corrective of sorts, to Tzvi Gal-Chen. Now I suspected the circle of referents might be meaningless. Or at least unsolvable, despite my turning round them again and again. Why had I automatically cast Tzvi in the role of heroic leader? Why had I expected him to tell me what to do next? I could see that he was relevant to my mystery, perhaps even central, yes, but that didn’t mean he was necessarily, say, good. Maybe his work was important, even while he himself was not. Or so I tried to reason, through seven coffees, eleven cookies, and two rounds of toast with marmalade. It was imperative, I eventually decided, that I undertake a more thorough study of Tzvi’s work. Regardless of what he had written in his e-mail. His research — I had just skated on the surface of those words, had turned for help prematurely. Surely, even on my own, I could yield more clues than I had so far. And what with the Lola-arranged meteorological labor that lay on my horizon, I needed to grow more fluent with meteorological vocabulary. Tzvi’s abrupt dismissal of me only emphasized the relevance and import of the work, I decided, as I left a sizable tip and wrote xoxoxo on the merchant receipt.

With impressive resolve, I headed back to Magda’s home, to Tzvi’s research. I really was ready to go straight to work.

But outside Magda’s home I saw a woman. Without urgency, ascending like a lava lamp bubble, a tamped thought: she looks just like Rema. Far more so than even the waitress. This woman was just sitting on the front step, her feet turned inward, elbows on knees, chin in hands, fringe of cornsilk blonde hair hanging over dove dark eyes. Next to her a dog. But not the small nervous dog from New York. Instead Killer, the magnified version of that orphaned dog.

I stood dead still, considered turning and never returning. Why was I instinctually afraid of her? Why had I automatically cast her into the simple role of antagonist? If my casting was so off to begin with, then my hopeless forecasting, wasn’t that wrong too? She looked so forlorn and pretty.

The simulacrum — not aware of me — then moved her arms. She crossed them over and held on to opposite elbows as if she were cold. This flattened out her upper arm — pressing it against her side — made her arm look larger and also exaggerated its shape, distorting it, funhouse mirroring a form that I love, an ideal form, a just-so curve. This woman was definitely not as pretty as my Rema, not, at least, with her arm all flattened out that way, looking chubby. And that tincture of unattractiveness — well, it made the simulacrum seem to me suddenly harmless.

I stepped forward, into the woman’s view, and said, with an admirable affect of nonchalance, “Isn’t that the wrong puppy?”

Before I knew anything, she was holding on to me, and had her arms around me at the shoulders, and her cheek against my cheek, and there was that smell of grass in her hair, which really made me see in blurred triplicate, and then she was kissing my face, the manys of her, and to be perfectly honest this was all reminding me far too acutely of Rema (I felt her teeth on my cheek), of my Rema of the pecans and tea topiaries and foreign newspapers, and frankly it was all making me really too sad. I didn’t like feeling sad, only perverse people like to feel sad — I hadn’t been feeling sad, I had put that off for more important emotions — I wanted to push that woman off of me but couldn’t because I felt like I’d lost control over my limbs, as if they were someone else’s.

31. A call not for me

She was kissing me; then when I opened my eyes a moment I saw, in a sideways glance, Magda. It was strange to be seen kissing; it was a very not-me situation in which to be.

“Rema!” came Magda’s voice. “Phone call!”

Not a single muscle of the simulacrum responded to the sound of Magda’s voice.

“I’m coming,” I called out, willfully misunderstanding whom Magda was addressing.

“I was having so much fear,” the simulacrum said, kissing my eyelids — and I couldn’t help but think about the eyelid kissing, and how this is a thing Rema always liked to do, and though I understand that eyelid kissing is a fairly standard part of any amatory repertoire, I remember how it really needled me at the beginning, needled me for being a sort of learned behavior, which therefore pointed to that whole world that was Rema before I knew her, and pointed to all those people who were not me who had gone into the creation of her as she was, and — well, in that way she was like some alien sedentary rock formation, some meteor fallen to my planet, and it seemed a violation of me to have no choice but to love some charred castaway, with all its strata — I guess I am very jealous and possessive — I just found it very difficult those moments, like eyelid kissing, when I couldn’t help but perceive her duplicity, her triplicity. She took firm hold of my wrist. “I started by writing down a long list of mean things to say to you, but—”

“It’s rude to Magda—”

“And I almost thought this was just an ordinary fight we were having, and I went through in my mind all the people who are more nice to me than you are, because many people are very nice to me, but then—”

“You can’t be nice to Magda only when it’s convenient for you,” I said to her. “And it’s not right to treat people as interchangeable, to replace one for another however and whenever makes you feel okay—” I don’t know why I was saying all those things. I definitely wasn’t thinking about my own behavior with other women. But as I said those random things, I was pushing that woman away from me — which was easy because she’s smaller than me — and I turned to head into the home, and I think the simulacrum started shouting at me. But I am the kind of man who treats mothers very well. I wasn’t going to pretend that I hadn’t heard Magda calling to us. I don’t know if I believe that our relationships with our parents establish patterns we are doomed to repeat and repeat but — I am surprised that I was not more anxious about marrying a woman who very well may have just abandoned her parents. For all I knew Rema had misrepresented and cheaply blamed this beautiful mother whose only fault may have been accurately perceiving the ugly truth — even with little information — about the rude American whom Rema had chosen to marry before she had chosen to marry me. I should at least have learned more about how it had come to be that Rema had abandoned her mother, before I asked her to marry — and hopefully not abandon — me. But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon, and actually I’m glad love does that, I shouldn’t complain about love, or love’s perspective — distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing.

32. Measured radiances at various frequencies

Whoever the caller was had hung up, not waiting for the simulacrum to reach the phone’s cradle. In the kitchen, Magda shruggingly informed us of this, and then the three of us just remained there, leaning against the kitchen counter, with nothing to say. Killer slurpled at her water bowl, then lay down, head between paws. She raised her gaze to us humans; we were in a row; I was in the middle.

“She’s with a friend,” the simulacrum said suddenly but without looking at anyone. “If you’re wondering where the dog is. I left her with a friend from work.”

“A dog,” Magda echoed.

“Friend from work,” I repeated.

Then another bruisy quiet, in which I felt my feet swelling, my ears growing, my vertebrae pressing down upon the cartilaginous disks betwixt and between, myself growing just shorter enough, just slow enough, to invoke a vaguest unsettlement, of everything, the whole world, looking a little bit off, a little too large.

“All for whores?” Magda erupted cheerily.

Turning toward the simulacrum as if I kind of knew her — and I did kind of know her, we had spent a couple of rather intense days together — I whispered, “Whores?”

“And Nescafé?” Magda added to my back.

“Alpha,” the simulacrum enunciated to me — I watched her lips — in a cold, dry voice. “Alpha. Whore. Rays.”

Was this a meteorological term? A military code?

Magda pulled down a package of cookies. She set to boil the teakettle, whose sound I had already, so quickly, become familiar with, although it was an electric teakettle, so instead of a certain trembling there’s a more cavernous gentle rumbling sound, and one waits expectantly for the understated click that means the thermostat has been thrown and the water is boiled, though electric-teakettled water is never hot enough for me, never as hot as from boiling on the stove, though I know that it’s impossible that it’s not hot enough, I know that all boiled water should be, barring major atmospheric differences, equally hot.

“Go sit in the living room,” Magda said, shooing us off like children. “I’ll bring.”

We didn’t go. Were we both listening to that sound?

Killer rose to her paws and loped out.

“El es mi esposo,” the simulacrum burst out in Spanish with a nervous laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. “Esposo” meaning “handcuff.” But also “husband.” Which is, I assume, what she meant.

“Who is?” Magda asked.

With a head tilt, the simulacrum indicated me. But she did not look at or touch me. The real Rema: having kept a secret from her mother for so many years, she wouldn’t have hastily disclosed it so gracelessly.

“Him?” Magda said. “This man?” she added, pointing, as if I were just a statue. “Your lover I thought maybe he was.”

“No,” the simulacrum de-affirmed. “Not my lover. My husband.”

“Those terms,” I said in English. “They’re nonexclusionary. They overlap. Often substantially.”

The teakettle clicked gently. No one moved. Magda said, “It is like I am not hearing well?”

What surprised me during all of this was that Magda — and at this thought I couldn’t help but picture her uterus — showed no signs of suspicion toward this false child, this woman whom she had never borne. I had overestimated Magda’s ability to account for the redshift of her own desires, to account for Dopplerganger effect. I had miscalculated the internal error of the other observer I was observing; I should have known that a mother who has not seen her daughter for years, who so desperately wants to see her, well, one could put Kim Novak in front of her and she would likely “recognize” her as her daughter, and it would all feel very right, and very profound, when really all that was being recognized would be a sense of recognition unhinged from its source, a misinterpretation of data, a forcing of facts into a model they didn’t match. “I don’t understand,” Magda continued as if I weren’t there. “Are you saying that you are married to the meteorologist?”

And I–I thought of a fork tine vanishing into lentils.

“Meteorologist?” the simulacrum echoed.

“What happened to the psychoanalyst?” Magda asked.

I was craving — craving instant coffee.

“Are you talking about Tzvi Gal-Chen?” the simulacrum said to Magda, alarmed. And then the simulacrum actually turned to me, looked at me, took hold of my wrist — and that made all the vastly spaced particles of me seem to crowd together — and she loud-whispered at me: “You told her about Tzvi Gal-Chen?”

“Of course I didn’t tell her about Tzvi Gal-Chen,” I murmured in a tense voice that, when it returned to my ears, sounded too high-pitched.

“What,” Magda asked, “is chewy galleon?”

“I’m absolutely not in contact with him,” I announced firmly to nobody.

More noncommunicative communication went on. To be honest I could no longer really listen, my head filling with the fluttering as if of a thousand mothers, or moths, emerging from an old winter coat not pulled out of a closet for years; I began to think of stepping out to return, again, for the nth time, to the coffee shop, where I could have a properly hot coffee and some cookies and a look at the pretty waitress. But I did not leave. “Doesn’t she look strange to you?” I said, finally breaking into the blue, or really white, noise and speaking directly to Magda and only to Magda and not feeling bad about turning my back on that other woman.

“No,” Magda said, reaching her hand past me, toward that woman. “I like the hair, Rema.” I found myself imprisoned behind Magda’s arm. “The color — it’s more natural than your natural color.”

The simulacrum flinched, as if it were winter and sparks had flown between them. But it wasn’t winter, not there, anyway; it was warm outside, and there was a real chance that someone was going to cry, or snap, that was the feeling I had, and that sort of thing takes up so much space in a room that I thought that I should leave instead of suffocate, but I didn’t know how to exit gracefully — leaving in the middle of a movie is an offense to the director, though I’m not sure, analogously, who was the director I was worried about offending — but then, thank God, or at least thanks to the most powerful institution of which I know, my phone rang, after which point the rudeness of staying surely outweighed the rudeness of stepping out, so I ducked under Magda’s arm and headed out the front door.

33. Synoptic meteorology

Isn’t it strange how conveniently timed my incoming phone calls were?

But isn’t it also strange that the Gospel According to Matthew ends with Jesus on the cross saying, Father, Father, why have you forsaken me? Who could have foreseen that ending?

“Hi, this is Lola?” a voice said.

I was still stepping out front, to the courtyard full of dusty bougainvillea. “Who?”

“Lola?”

“No, I’m not Lola. Leo here.”

“Leo? This is Lola. I’m calling for Arthur. Arthur Corning. About the job in the South.”

“Arthur?”

“Yes. Arthur. Twenty-seven. Bowdoin College. Recreational ice climber? We talked about wounds?”

Then I finally, sun heating my back, relaxed enough to recognize that sensually quavering voice. The simulacrum’s appearance must have temporarily blotted out my imagined image of Lola from the Royal Academy. “Oh,” I said, my palms beginning to sweat as random sensuality carbonated up to my cortex. “Yes. That’s me. Arthur.”

Why did I say that? Say that I was Arthur when I was not? Well, the name was bestowed upon me, I did not come up with it myself. I had to be open to the disguised ways in which progress, clues, might present themselves to me. Lola and I had established a real connection; it would have been foolish to disregard that; that personal connection was what mattered; maybe paperwork had been randomly mixed up, but maybe it had been randomly mixed up on purpose; maybe this would lead nowhere, this name, but I couldn’t reject it out of hand just because I remained ignorant of the details behind it, and just because I was, in a sense, lying.

“We want to offer it to you,” Lola silked. “That position. Down South.” Lola’s words sounded dirty to me. I don’t believe this was just because I suddenly imagined that she imagined me as a sexy, well-built, young ice climber. Nor do I believe those words sounded dirty because I was projecting my own anxieties — or hopes — about what likely never happened between Rema and the dog man, or Rema and Anatole, or Rema and no one. I think it was just overstimulation; it was just as if I had been watching night skies and a new planet had swum into my ken, and a new planet naturally throws off one’s calculations about the movements of all the other celestial bodies, and that made me think again of the Dog Star, Sirius, that had appeared to be just one star but was later discovered to be two, or maybe even three, and when they learned that, that must have changed everything, all the calculations. My mind was running like that.

“You were very sweet the other day,” Lola continued. “I was feeling very—”

“Can you review again for me the exact details of the job?” I said. I wasn’t trying to be mean, cutting her off just as she began speaking about her feelings. I wasn’t actually developing the detachment of a disordered psychotic — I just wanted to concentrate, to stick to the business at hand.

“I’m sorry. Of course. Are you mad at me?”

I’m mad at Tzvi, I didn’t say. And I heard myself saying to Lola: “Well, it’s like what Tzvi Gal-Chen says in his paper ‘A Theory for the Retrievals,’ when he says, ‘It should be emphasized that the thermodynamic retrieval concept does not involve marching forward in time by means of prognostic equations … Rather the retrieval method is a diagnostic procedure using the same prognostic equations, but in a different way.’”

“I don’t understand what you are saying?”

I didn’t quite know what I was saying, either; those words had arrived whole from Tzvi’s research writings, writings I hadn’t thought I had so nearly memorized. “Oh, that’s just a thought that comes to my mind now and again — about retrievals, about improving predictions. Oddly enough, introducing errors into models makes for more reliable predictions. But I’m digressing. I really just wanted to hear about the work.”

“But what did you mean just then? I mean, what’s the meaning behind what you said?”

“I’m not really sure.” But I did feel somehow relieved, as if I’d made progress. “But it’s like Professor Gal-Chen’s other point, about how we cannot tell what the weather will be tomorrow because we do not know accurately enough what the weather is right now. Like, how can we forecast when we can’t even properly now-cast? You know, an Initial Value Problem.”

“What’s the weather right now?”

“Sunny,” I answered. “A light breeze from the southeast.” Lola laughed.

Lots of serious things get dismissed as jokes; that’s a respectable coping mechanism.

Then Lola proceeded to fill me — as Arthur — in on the details of the meteorological job that I had apparently been awarded, that I could take if I so desired. I said I so desired. I desired to work for the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

34. Mesoscale phenomena

That night the double came into my bedroom (that is, whoever’s bedroom I was staying in, maybe even Rema’s bedroom). The double’s hair carried a scent, in the faintest way, of bacon. I was sitting at the desk chair; she sat down on the bed.

“Those clothes you’re wearing aren’t yours,” she said. “I am just now noticing that.”

She had made a true observation. I was wearing the clothes that Magda had lent me. An attractive pale green button-up with a stain of unknown origin on the left breast pocket. I began to pick at that stain which I had not earlier noticed; it seemed like a gravy of some sort, powdery bits precipitated out of the goo. “It’s because I lost my luggage,” I said.

“You’ve lost your luggage?” she said, which felt like an older and more familiar accusation than it could possibly actually be. As if the simulacrum and I had often been in situations in which I had disappointed her in just this way.

“Really they lost my luggage,” I explained, while keeping my attention focused on the old stain and not on her. “I mean: it was out of my hands when it was lost, so it’s really not my fault. Others are to blame for having lost it. Though naturally I’m the one suffering as a result. Not that it’s whose fault it is that matters most, that’s just one thing. I mean I just said that, about who is to blame, because it happens to be true, because it’s true that it’s not my fault.” I continued on, still picking at the shirt, though there was little hope for change. “But whose fault it is isn’t the main point. Let’s say it’s Tzvi Gal-Chen’s fault. It’s just gone, the luggage. Anyway, they’re supposed to call me.” I didn’t tell her about my job offer.

“I’ll buy you new clothes tomorrow,” the woman said abruptly.

Reaching one hand into a deep and narrow pants pocket, I told her, “Don’t worry about it. I like what I’m wearing.”

“No,” she said shortly and with authority. Then softer again: “I will buy you something else.” She was staring, like Magda had, at the snap on the cuff of my sleeve. She put her hand on my knee, making all sensation rush patella-ward, and she said: “So that’s something that we’ll do together. Tomorrow. Buy clothing.”

Then a quiet again, hot at the knee, and I found myself saying boldly: “So who is taking care of that undernourished greyhound puppy? Is it Anatole? Is Anatole taking care of her?”

The mattress was sunk ever so slightly beneath the woman’s weight, and this made the blanket crease out in radii in a way that made the simulacrum seem like the carpel of a flower, and she looked to me very beautiful, also very deerlike, as she said, withdrawing her hand from my knee: “Who said that name to you? Something is wrong with you.” The woman looked — I only then finally noticed — as if she had not slept in days. The skin beneath her eyes was so dusky, as if the blood there had never breathed. The hair at her temple curled damply. “What,” she sharped, “have you been talking about with my mom? She lied to me, didn’t she? Did she lie to me? She didn’t tell me she told you about him. I should tell you that she’s kind of a crazy liar—”

And I felt sad, I felt a key change within me, and I involuntarily imagined myself zipping up a dark blue rain jacket — or was someone else zipping up that coat? — that I’d had as a child, and I said, in a dry and professional tone of voice: “She really hasn’t said anything to me of which the truth-value would be considered the most important quality—”

“And what,” she interrupted, “did you say to her about Tzvi Gal-Chen? What was that about?”

“Are you,” I asked, feeling like I’d realized something, “the reason Tzvi sent me such a cold reply?” Unexpected emotion lined my throat like a medicine. Just speaking Tzvi’s name to her had made my eyes water. “Are you working with him?”

Those questions definitively stoppered her rising irritation. That exhausted flower stared at me for seconds or minutes or years. Then she stood up from the bed and approached me. I scooted my chair back. She stepped again toward me. I rose from my chair and went and sat on the far end of the bed. Like eddy fronts we were, forming katabatic winds. She turned and again stepped toward me, and frowned gently at me, and then, her still standing, me still sitting, she moved her hand very, very slowly out toward my cheek — making me tremble — and I let her place her hand tenderly on my face and leave it there, which is what she did, and my face was level with her waist. I — well, I could see her beauty clearly for a moment, the beauty of her waist, at least, and it affected me, probably powerfully — I found myself whispering, as if a secret agent might be in the closet listening to us: “Can’t we work together? Maybe we can help each other? Except that I don’t know your story, I don’t know your background, which makes for an Initial Value Problem, which makes it difficult for me to trust you, just like it must be difficult for Tzvi to trust me. I can’t tell which errors of yours are intentional. It must be so exhausting for you to have to pretend all the time. I want you to feel that you don’t have to pretend with me anymore. Don’t worry yourself with pretending, because, listen, I already know you’re not Rema. I already know that.”

She moved her hand from my cheek to my forehead.

I wanted to press my face against her beautiful, beautiful waist.

She echoed, “I’m not Rema?”

I didn’t reply.

“Can we go back?” she asked. “When you said Tzvi and ‘cold reply,’ what did you mean?”

Though I was still thinking about her waist, by considering how the dent I made in the bed might look different from or the same as the one she had made, I cooled my urge to press myself against her. But I wasn’t — as much as I regretted prematurely disclosing my suspicions of her association with Tzvi Gal-Chen — thinking about the dent in the bed just in order to avoid answering.

“When you say,” the simulacrum said, soldiering very slowly into the quiet, “that I am not Rema, what do you mean? This is just an expression that I’m not familiar with?”

I said, “Cold reply is an expression, yes. Or really, a dead metaphor.” Rema and I had talked about that, about dead metaphors, about how, when her English was less good, she used to bring dead metaphors back to life by saying them incorrectly, by startling me with phrases like “chill down” for “chill out,” and “weird chicken” for “odd bird.” That had become less frequent, though.

“And I am not Rema? That also is a dead metaphor?”

“No,” I whispered, full of regrets. “When I say that I am saying exactly what I mean.”

“You are saying exactly what you mean?”

“Yes. What I mean.”

“Mean,” she repeated, mostly to herself, dropping her hand from my face.

I’d lost track, I realized, of that originally mysterious scent of bacon.

The simulacrum wrapped her arms around her own body, and then she sat down next to me, and it was ugly latticing in the bedspread between us, and her upper arm was again pressed into an unappealing shape.

“Tell me,” she said without looking at me, “how am I not like Rema?”

Somehow I wasn’t afraid of her; that was just a feeling I had. I sincerely wanted her to understand. Maybe I thought her errors could be useful to me. “For example,” I said, “she’s more emotional than you are. And more nervous.”

“What about,” she proffered, “when she had the ectopic pregnancy? She was very calm about that.”

“That’s true,” I said, refusing to be baited by drama. “But she also smells different from you.”

“But you smell different from you too.” “She smells like grass.”

“You smell like my mom’s shampoo today,” she tried to counter. “But I’m still here next to you.”

“And she’s indifferent to dogs. It’s hard to explain how strong a characteristic that is—”

“Those are the things that you love about her?” she said, raising her voice in impatient judgment. “Her smell, her nervousness, and her indifference to dogs?”

“Love is a separate issue,” I clarified. “I’m just telling you something of who she is. I don’t even know why I’m telling you.” I’d felt, briefly, tenderly toward her, but now she’d begun to irritate me. “You probably can’t understand.”

“It must seem so strange to you,” she said darkly, mockingly, and flushing red, and without compassion, “that I know so much about her, that I look so much like her, but then you don’t love me—”

“Don’t do this,” I said shortly. “Don’t get emotional.”

The blue beneath her eyes had grown even duskier. Then she started — all of a sudden — to cry, and not even as if just to disobey me. But I don’t know if I’d call her cry a sad cry. And really I suppose one might even call it a sob, but more of a distressed sob than a devastated one. And in between heaves I think she eked out something to me like: “I know all these little things about you, like I know how you sit with a half a watermelon and a spoon and eat the whole thing, and that you read magazines while you brush your teeth, and that you throw away socks for no reason at all, when they’re still perfectly fine. That you never seem to really like anyone, except sometimes me. And I know how much you loved that photo of Tzvi’s family, how much time you spent looking at it, and talking about it, so much so that it made me uncomfortable and I had to take it down, and I like to think that all this knowledge I have of you, that it means something—”

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked, unaffected by her little show. “I’m so sleepy. Are we expected to sleep in this same room tonight, together?”

“You don’t make any sense,” she said, still sobbing. “It’s you. It’s you who’s not yourself.”

35. The ghost in the machine

I should explain about the renewal of contact between Dr. GalChen and myself.

We, the simulacrum and I, did share a narrow bed that night together in Magda’s home, but the simulacrum did not permit the dog, whose napping company I had grown accustomed to, to join us. She, the simulacrum, wore Rema’s green nightie boxers and an undershirt of mine; I was fully dressed save socks and shoes. Sleep did not visit me, but stray strands of the simulacrum’s hair gave me the continual illusion of fleas mutely festivaling on my body. And the way the simulacrum’s sleeping fingers searched for the water bowl of my clavicle gave me the feeling of Rema. And the way her knee sought the thick slough of my thighs. And her foot the freedom of the edge of the bed. And though the simulacrum seemed to be in a paralysis of REM sleep, my body, as when it is near Rema, waited nervously for the slightest regularly repeated movement, for the slightest seemingly unrandom touch. I didn’t like that tense waiting feeling. She slept like one exhausted; I slept not at all.

Who, I thought at one restless point, sleeps with Tzvi Gal-Chen? It was the first note of a discordant thought orchestra tuning up within me. Was the simulacrum, I wondered, in some parallel world, really Tzvi’s wife? In some worlds Tzvi was married to the doppelganger, in other worlds to other women?

She had a hand on my hip.

Or: was it possible that it wasn’t the double who was Tzvi’s wife, that maybe the marriage I was perceiving wasn’t one in a parallel world, but in this very world in which I lay in bed with the doppelganger, and it was my Rema who was, or once had been, the wife of Tzvi Gal-Chen? But surely that was just my own mental shuffling; Rema probably had not been married to anyone else, and even if she had been married, it wasn’t to a meteorologist.

The simulacrum’s hand did not move, as if it were a mannequin’s.

Still, maybe Tzvi — and not the night nurse, and not the analyst/dog walker, and not someone named Anatole — was the real unturned stone in the submystery of Rema’s previous husband. And thus, by ripple, the central mystery of everything. Maybe he and Rema were involved with each other in some way.

Although Tzvi was probably — I thought then, before the category seemed obsolete — even older than me.

But maybe all that meant was that Rema loved him, might still love him, more than she loved me?

As the simulacrum sleep sighed, her whole thorax centimetered out against me — then receded.

And who was that in the photo alongside Tzvi Gal-Chen, with the creamy elbow crook? Wasn’t she his wife for all time? And did he and she — the woman in the photo — love each other? Then? Now? And was his wife in any way, through some strange exchange, mine? And though Magda had let on that Rema’s previous husband — or still current one? — was not a meteorologist, who was the meteorologist Magda had met who had led her to pass such hasty good judgment on me when I presented myself as a meteorologist?

The simulacrum’s right hand lost tone, slipped off me. In a kind of inebriation of sleepiness, my mind just kept swapping and interswapping, this person for that, and that person for this, like some hapless turn-of-the-century dream interpreter. And although nothing in the cacophonous score of my thoughts made strict sense, one thing did seem obvious: my mystery converged upon the point of Tzvi Gal-Chen.

So I unlimbed myself of the simulacrum, grabbed my handheld, blindly padded my way out to the living room. The perhaps misguided action that I then took later revealed itself, I would argue, as the unexpectedly right step, if the right step executed for the wrong reasons, which when I think about it suggests that maybe my reasons were merely wearing masks and hosiery, that, undressed, they were likely the right reasons all along.

36. Chills

Despite having sent Dr. Gal-Chen that e-mail to which he had responded quite coldly, despite having more or less resolved never to communicate with him again, well: there alone in the not quite dark of Rema’s childhood house, amidst the drunken sensuality of all that unseen velvet in the unlit living room, amidst the painful reminder of a Rema in bed with me without there actually being a Rema in bed with me, I found myself able to forget my and Tzvi’s awkward exchange. Able to forget it and yet remember that I should not pursue any questions directly, that in seeking help from Tzvi I would have to approach from an angle. Because when I had asked directly after Rema’s disappearance, asked directly about the 49 Quantum — that had made him nervous, that had made him uncomfortable. But maybe by talking about some seemingly irrelevant third thing, through a kind of misdirection, then we — the both of us — would be liberated to speak openly and truthfully — like getting a patient to loosen up, and reveal, by asking him to talk about his spouse, or mother, or favorite food, rather than about himself. Or, as in retrievals done by a single-Doppler radar system, one looks at a volume of air from an angle, then accounts for that extra distortion, so as to better deduce what’s actually there if one could see it head-on, but one can’t, because then one loses all dimensionality. Like that.

So I began composing a note asking how windchill is calculated.

As I typed, my BlackBerry’s glow filled the room with a palest blue light.

Is windchill analogous to Doppler effect, I philosophized in a feeble attempt to sound atmospherically savvy, but applied to the movement of heat rather than of light or sound? I thought about making a further analogy, to movements in human relationships, say, to interpersonal coldnesses that feel much colder than they actually are. But then I decided that might be too much, that might feel intrusive.

How windchill is calculated obviously wasn’t precisely what I most wanted to learn from Tzvi — what I most wanted to learn was what I had written in my earlier missive, whether he knew the whereabouts of Rema, and how to get her back — but I was, nevertheless, inquiring about windchill sincerely because I had indeed often wondered about windchill. It is one temperature, but it feels like another — how does one objectively measure something subjective? I think and thought it a cute question, a cute problem. One answered differently, I imagine, in every field. Do you love me more or less today? I used to ask Rema.

Before actually sending the note, I hesitated a moment. I was worried about seeming abnormal. But I reassured myself that windchill was an extraordinarily normal thing to ask Tzvi about. After all, I argued to myself, Tzvi is a meteorologist, a real meteorologist, and how many times in one’s life does one have a direct line of communication with a real meteorologist?

I thought about New York 1 news.

I sent the inquiry.

Then I reclined, alone, on that velvety sofa.

Where was the dog sleeping? I wondered.

Unwillingly I pictured the simulacrum’s sleeping position, her foot over an edge.

The screen on my BlackBerry self-dimmed, and the whole room went inky-black.

37. In the ghost’s machine

Then blue suffused the room again.

“Windchill research got its beginnings in the US military during WWII,” began Tzvi’s response, which arrived so quickly that it was as if he’d been waiting there for me to contact him all that time, like a spurned lover waiting for any sign of reconciliation. “But the National Weather Service didn’t share the information with the public until the 1970s.” He included a link to a Web page that offered a brief explanatory treatise about the history of windchill research. “Nice that you’re interested,” he wrote. He made no reference to his rude earlier missive. He even signed off his note “Love, Tzvi.”

What was he — or she? I wondered during the one ludicrous moment I again thought I might be communicating with Rema, who had, after all, posed as Tzvi Gal-Chen many times — inviting me to deduce? And why use that word “love”? Why bring up war? And the 1970s? And why the secrecy around windchill research? How was I meant to understand what he had said? How was I meant to respond?

I began searching the Internet on my handheld in order to do something I had long avoided doing, avoided perhaps because part of me had always felt that I was in some way wronging this stranger whose identity I had co-opted. I sought to learn some biographical, geographical, orthographical, political, diacritical, pathological, and/or other details about the real Tzvi Gal-Chen. Or Galchen. Or Gal Chen.

I found Russian jugglers known as the Galchenko brothers.

I found a Scottish rock band, named Galchen, reviewed on a Web page devoted to “Great bands with absolutely terrible names.”

I found a blogger criticizing the grammar of Tzvi’s use of the phrase “moving frame of references.”

I found two photos — one in profile, one head-on, like mug shots — of a Tzvi-like man in plaid pants, standing on a balcony, holding a baby of indeterminate gender.

I found a geologic formation called the GalChen fach.

And I learned, from a purple Finnish Web page that began tinnily blasting a Mendelssohn dirge, that Tzvi Gal-Chen — most noted for his mesoscale work on downbursts and for his advances in single-Doppler radar research — had died of a sudden heart attack in October of 1994, at the relatively young age of fifty-three.

Then I noticed that next to Tzvi’s name in that roster of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, there was a pale gray asterisk.

I reloaded and reread and reconsidered the pages.

38. Very normal conversation

If one wishes to be a true scientist — an explorer not in search of what one desires to be true but rather in search of whatever truth there is — then one must be willing to accept, to engage, even to pursue further the most unwelcome and confounding data. One must be willing to make discoveries that shatter one’s most deeply held beliefs. Maybe it turns out that Earth is not the center of the universe. Or that monkeys are our relatives. Maybe we discover that a man is not an expert on himself, or maybe it turns out that we’ve been speaking to the dead.

A true scientist knows to explore, not dismiss, these uninvited discoveries.

So I wrote back to Tzvi, saying that I had recently received the impression that he was not alive.

“Oh. Yes. That is true, in most senses,” he replied without subject heading.

I felt a breeze then, just very locally, a microclimate, like what happens in a movie when a ghost floats by. “Then why, or rather how, or rather from where are you writing to me? And to Harvey too?”

Tzvi wrote back: “If you’ll remember, I didn’t initiate contact. All I did was respond. I guess it was flattering when Harvey called me ‘the mesoscale hero of the millennium.’ So maybe I answered just out of curiosity. Or loneliness. But really I think it simply seemed like the proper thing to do. He wrote, and so I replied, as he obviously wanted me to.”

Pressing Tzvi on the issue of his apparent death — that didn’t seem like the proper thing to do. But those two photos, in mug-shot form … and all the concordances … the retrievals work… so I found myself typing from my heart: “Is it as if in some worlds you’re alive, and in some worlds you’re not? Is that what your retrievals work really is: not between reality and models, but between actual worlds?”

“How,” he responded, “did you and Harvey come to be interested in my work in the first place?”

“If you don’t already know, I promise to tell you one day. However, I suspect you do know. But can you tell me — is it that you’re not really dead? Are you just, for some reason, pretending?”

“I would say more your earlier guess. Do I sound dead to you? I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture — this was years ago, before I died, though just right before — and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante’s dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don’t know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the present, to be suspended in time. She seemed to feel this really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do. When Dante the pilgrim asks, Who are you? the souls are able to offer these very succinct, precise descriptions, without provisos. I’m the one who was seized by love. Or, I am the one who quenched the doubt in Caesar. Everything very settled, you know?”

When is talking about literature not an evasion of the real question at hand? Although a nice-enough evasion. Into an honest and information-bearing kind of distortion. Was I supposed to ask Tzvi, as a kind of extended shibboleth that could separate the living from the dead, who he was? Was that what he was indirectly trying to ask me to do? But why should I care whether he was alive or dead if my main issue was finding Rema? And wasn’t talking about literature also as straightforward an invitation to interpret his research as he could offer? Because I–I should admit — found my thoughts retreating to literature too. Retreating from what I’m not sure. I thought of the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem I’d once been made to memorize, in which the Eliot character chances upon the ghost of Yeats in the firebombed streets of London; upon recognizing Yeats, Eliot says they are “too strange to each other for misunderstanding.” And the Eliot character says directly to Yeats’s ghost, “The wonder that I feel is easy, Yet ease is the cause of wonder. Therefore speak: / I may not comprehend, may not remember.” Perhaps the simplest interpretation of this starchy turn of my thoughts would be that I thought of Tzvi as of a dead master? One with whom I felt strangely at ease? Or that I should just ask Tzvi to speak and nothing more? And as I sat in that darkness, a cluster of competing hypotheses came to me as I thought how to proceed:

maybe Tzvi wasn’t dead at all (or, implausibly, I was)

or maybe this was some mechanical residue of Tzvi, some part of himself translated into software of some kind

or maybe he was dead inasmuch as I could understand the situation, but his death was a matter of perspective, of frames of reference, or a frame of references

or maybe Tzvi was somehow Rema, since Rema had for so long pretended to be Tzvi

And none of these hypotheses dissuaded me from the belief that Tzvi could help me in my search, and so I resolved to ask him about Rema directly.

39. Conversation interrupted

But something clouded over my handheld electronic’s moonlight glow, and I turned to see what, and although my pupils’ contraction near blinded me, I made out the silhouette of the simulacrum. Her blotting out of screen glow made me think about the powder on sticks of chewing gum, then the powder in urns, and then gunpowder, and then the Chinese, and then fireworks, and the feeling was of my mind tripping along an infinitely winding and meaningless path.

“I had a nightmare,” she said, her voice drawing my mind back to a starting point, “that I was in bed, and I reached my arm out to you, and you weren’t there. And then I woke up and it was true.” She was leaning over me; I think she was trying to read from my screen. But Tzvi Gal-Chen was for me, not her. Even if he was her, he wasn’t this her. Or really just: I had a lot to think over.

I turned the screen off.

We were left in the dark, amidst all that velvet, and unaware of the location of the dog.

“Are you writing,” I heard her say, “or are you reading? Or, what are you doing? What are you doing awake? Now? Out here?”

Her voice in the dark, so familiar — it was almost as if Rema was actually there with me, in the absence of luminosity, and maybe she really was there, paying me a visitation. Maybe it was, very briefly, Rema. But like a faithless Orpheus I turned the light — my BlackBerry screen, that is — back on again, to verify. And despite the familiar hip, despite the undershirt, it wasn’t Rema.

“Do you not miss sleeping with me?” she breathed into the blue glow. “It is weird to me. I am no longer even an object of your desire?”

The cheapest of noir moves. Against my will, my ears filled with heat. As if she were some KGB blonde, distracting me while a spy, an agent, an assassin, stealthed out of a closet, a window, a gate. Or while my contact, my rescuer — quite possibly Tzvi — faded away. “Do you feel like there are other people in this house?” I heard myself whispering as I thought about what Tzvi might or might not know, about what important message might lie hidden in his research papers, translated into science, awaiting interpretation. “Or ghosts in this house?”

I believe she frowned at me.

“But of course you are very pretty,” I said as a kind of consolation for what she’d earlier said. “But isn’t it so strange that I had never met my Rema’s mother before? That she didn’t even seem to know I existed? Doesn’t knowing — or not knowing — something about Rema at her initial value — about who she once was — doesn’t that mean that all my predictions about what she’s doing and what she will do and what she might do and what she absolutely will do and what she absolutely will never ever do — doesn’t it seem like my predictions will inevitably be shot through with enormous errors? On account of the Initial Value Problem? I mean, we can’t predict tomorrow’s weather accurately if we have the wrong ideas about what the weather actually is right now. That’s what Tzvi Gal-Chen says. I mean, it’s almost as if I’ve married a stranger, if I think about it that way. Like if we think that it’s one temperature just because it feels that way but actually it’s really some other—”

Something like that I was saying, just saying whatever I thought the impostress might have expected me to say, nothing real, just filling up some space as if with a distracting puff of colored smoke, so that I could go back to messaging with Tzvi, but then the simulacrum moved her warm front of a body closer to me, whispering, further occluding the small amount of light between us. “Please,” she said. “When I see you asleep I feel like we are the two happiest people in the world. I’m so happy when we’re asleep together. Let’s just sleep and see what comes to mind when we wake up tomorrow morning.” She wiped tears from her eyes. The tears had arrived so slowly.

“Do you love me very much tonight?” I found myself saying.

“Why are you asking me this old, old question?” she sniffed. “Of course I love you. Even when I don’t want to.”

By then my ears felt more than hot, they felt painfully engorged. “Let’s find the dog,” I said. “Let’s bring the dog to bed.”

“No dog. I think she is sleeping with my mother. Just come to bed.”

My screen, half Tzvi-corresponded, fell darkly asleep again; I tapped it to bring it back to life. “Please let’s bring the dog,” I almost begged, seeing again an image not of the simulacrum in front of me, but of the simulacrum as she had been earlier, entangled in bed with me.

“You’ll stay with me tomorrow?” she pleaded.

It would be ridiculously unwise of me, I conceded to myself, to try to continue my conversation with Tzvi under the simulacrum’s surveillance. “I’ll stay with you tomorrow,” I said, “if you let the dog sleep with us tonight.”

And we eventually reached just such an accord. She, Killer, slept intercalated between us. She breathed hotly on my thigh.

40. The real point in space

But don’t be distracted by my distress, by the simulacrum’s distress, or by the dog’s eventual sleeping position. The real point is that Tzvi Gal-Chen:

who had first been (to me) just an oddly appealing name

who had then become (for Rema and me) the unknowing centerpiece of the successful management of a delusional patient

who furthermore (for Rema and me) rapidly developed into a relationship touchstone

whom I’d regularly imagined taking leftovers from our refrigerator

whose research proved to be my first substantial clue regarding Rema’s disappearance

who then later materialized as Harvey’s correspondent

but who, when I sought him out myself, had tersely retreated

and who apparently no longer even numbered among the living

:yes perhaps, from certain perspectives, the real point of this entire project is that Tzvi Gal-Chen, in my proverbially darkest hour, he had, in his fashion, returned to me.