Atmospheric Disturbances

1. A Method for Calculating Temperature, Pressure and Vertical Velocities from Doppler Radar Observations

Before proceeding to a description of the more metaphysically extravagant discoveries I made in Patagonia, I’d like to openly engage my own worries, my own oscillating concern, for my, to put it in colloquial speech, sanity. Since naturally, from the beginning of this unwanted adventure of mine, I had borne such an anxiety. I had thought through continually, and rather extensively, the likelihood that I could attribute my perceptions to illness, to psychosis even. But over time I came to the fairly firm — and immensely dispiriting — conclusion that I could not. My thinking ran thusly:

Our vision involves — and one can produce myriad proofs of this — an interpretive leap. Consider the visual phenomenon of “completion” (that is what Tzvi’s work does; it completes incomplete single-Doppler radar images), which sometimes leads to what is called “completion error” (which is what Tzvi’s work attempts to avoid). I offer the following image from an old sign to illustrate the concept of completion and completion error. The sign reads:

Music lovers tend to see:

While others tend to see:

The basic point — which can also be illustrated by considering the phenomenon of the blind spot — is that with any incomplete perception — and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete — the observer “fills in” by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire’s other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see. By what, in other words, already exists in our mind, what we already have available on file, however dusty the folder.

For example, when a person dies and we then repeatedly mistake strangers for that now-gone person, we are experiencing “completion error.” We catch a few details of some far-off figure — a broad forehead, a certain slouch, some characteristic stubble — and our aforementioned wants, fears, and expectations fill in the gaps to make a familiar whole, a whole that is a decent but flawed interpretive leap based on the fragments. And it generally doesn’t matter that this reconstituted “whole” is incorrect. We discover our errors soon enough, as the stranger draws nearer, becoming who he actually is rather than who we thought he might be. (How strange but reassuring that when the impostress entered my home that first time, that even when I saw her from a distance — there at the door, with that wet hair, and that pale blue bag, and that russet puppy — even far away like that, when I could have easily, and even from fatigue, filled in all the missing details appropriately — even then I knew she wasn’t Rema.)

But we can do more than recognize our errors of interpretation; we can examine those errors as clues to the contents of — the preoccupations and desires of — our own minds.

We can similarly consider the “errors” of a suspected psychosis, the discrepancies between the presumably psychotic vision of reality and a consensus view of same. Such an examination could (occasionally, conceivably) reveal something other than prismatized fragments (taste of powdered milk + old woman with cataracts + holes in a navy sweater + fresh pretzels = navy poisons milk that the old pretzel factory workers drink down blindly) of the presumed psychotic’s mind. Because although psychosis is often popularly conceived of as an infection or a kind of foreign body, a psychosis is in fact as personal, as eccentric, as interpretable as a dream. Its content comes straight from the mind of its victim, even as its form may be an aberration. (Consider the fact that over the past two hundred years the incidence of religious psychoses has significantly declined, while that of erotic ones has risen. Surely it is not the mental illnesses that have changed but rather the societies of people affected by them.) And so although we can call the process of transforming reality into an alternate reality “madness,” we should not forget that the landscape of that alternate reality, all the molecules that make it up, come from the banalities of the life of the madman himself. Therefore each psychotic experience is singular, a fingerprint.

Investigating the origin of particular “errors” could, theoretically, solve the proverbial problem of distinguishing the prophet from the madman: if the “psychosis” were text, whom would you surmise to be the author? If the text reflects the fears, desires, or expectations of the “afflicted,” then most likely he or she has authored his or her own vision. A man who fears rats may envision a rat king, and a fanatic television watcher may believe she has her own evening talk show, and a reader of tales of chivalry may believe himself to be a knight errant. But: if, say, an auto worker from Minnesota claims conscious blades of grass are plotting an overthrow of the Ecuadorian government, you should at least listen awhile before assuming it’s another case of self-scripting. Because why would that be on his mind? What does he care for Ecuador? Or grass? If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a “madman” to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the “author” might be reality and the “madman” just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination.

Why do I bring all this up?

When Rema disappeared, I chose to take myself on as my own patient, so I asked myself, did I “write” this new world, or was I just reading it? Reading what was “in reality” actually there? Well: I have never wanted or feared or expected Rema’s replacement by a double, nor have I ever wanted or feared or expected my involvement in a weather-controlling cabal. If I were to have Rema-based psychosis, surely it would take a more mundane form: I’d be convinced that she was seeing other men, or women, or that she contemplated my murder, or that she moonlighted in a massage parlor, or that she had never existed at all, that she had always been just a figment of my imagination, an incarnation of all the women I’ve always wanted but could never have. Or that she was (gasp!) my mom — something banal and pre-scripted and conventionally Mad Lib — y like that. I would not have come up with this drama that is my actual current life. I just don’t have those kinds of thoughts.

And since I could not detect my authorial hand in my strange new world, I could only conclude (at least, so to speak, with a p ≤ 0.05) that it was being perceived accurately. That was the most valid extrapolation from the data that could be made. And that’s why I felt so confident about my decision to speed south to Patagonia, in anticipation of my meteorological labor, which I felt sure would bear some fruit, even if unexpected ones, even if ones I could not divine. It was kind of a wild plan, I admit, but one that came to me, and not from me, and one that therefore (I decided) should be heeded.

2. Variant case of Dopplerganger effect in effect

Consider again that diagram from Tzvi’s article. Is it not the image of a man leaving reluctantly? Is it not a portrait of me, leaving first my apartment, then the comfort of Rema’s childhood home, in order to carry on my sad and uncertain search? How strange, the resemblance.

But isn’t it more strange that in continuing my search for Rema, in (in fact) boldly pursuing a meteorological assignment (under the guise of a young ice climber named Arthur) for which I was in no way prepared, isn’t it strange that through all this — sneaking out the bathroom window of Magda’s home, paying full fare for a turbulent plane ride over Rorschach-y mountain ranges, enduring fierce winds off the silty blue Lago Argentina in search of reasonable shelter amidst the ersatz log architecture of El Calafate, witnessing the indignity of a sidewalk “impromptu” tango performance in that soulless tourist town, entertaining unnecessary self-doubt as I passed an establishment called El Quijote — well, isn’t it strange that through all those obligatory banalities I gave hardly a thought to Rema, instead thought only, and obsessively, of Tzvi Gal-Chen?

I did ask myself if my oddly directed mental attentions were really just feelings for Rema transferred onto — translated over to — Tzvi. Well, if so, it wasn’t as if I couldn’t put that transference to good use. If I worked out an aspect of my evolving feelings for Tzvi Gal-Chen, I might — I reasoned — solve something about my feelings for Rema. And if I could determine the mysterious location of Tzvi Gal-Chen, then might I not learn something of the whereabouts of Rema? Or maybe there was no transference at all; Tzvi had been so helpful to me, and perhaps my growing gratitude toward him was appropriate. I had, before leaving, written him more about the situation with Rema, and about the job offer from Lola; Tzvi had reframed my current life as a diagnostic-prognostic problem, like the one central to his own work in “A Theory for the Retrievals.” And he made an ennobling comparison of my situation to that of a Greek hero. “Go south,” he bid me. “Surely you’ll learn something. About yourself. About the work of the Royal Academy.” And he had listened so patiently to my detailing of how the doppelganger differed from my original Rema. Yes, he had listened as a true friend.

As I waited for my hotel room to be ready — Tzvi’s paper affirmingly noted: “Remotely sensed data … can be grossly inadequate …”—as I warmed myself before a proverbial and actual hearth in the too-tastefully-homaged-to-ancient-cultures lobby of a serviceably nice inn, a vibration in my pocket disturbed me. I answered my phone.

“Hello? Hello? Hello?”

Rema’s voice was what I recognized, maybe because I wanted to believe it was Rema, but also maybe because it really did sound like her, but probably just because a new stimulus extinguishes an old one with astonishing speed, and I had heard the simulacrum speak so much more recently than I had heard the real Rema.

“You disappeared again,” the voice said through tiresome tears.

“May I ask with whom I’m speaking?” I inquired politely.

“It’s me, Leo. You know that,” continued the soppy sad voice, which, objectively speaking, was less sharp, less fiercely lovable, less accented than Rema’s. The real Rema would have cut right to business, no matter how emotional — even because of how emotional — she might be. She would have asked me exactly where I was and she would already have been booking her flight, maybe mine too, and she’d furthermore already be befriending the manager of the hotel.

“And from where are you speaking?” I asked.

“You know exactly where I am, and you leave, and then you act like I’m the difficult one to locate,” she said in an attempt to make, I have to believe, a frame-of-reference argument. But the frames of reference — they were obviously moving.

I was determined to remain analytical, to not be emotionally intimidated by the simulacrum’s posturing as Rema. That would have been a bad kind of transference. “Please clarify? Where are you precisely?”

“It’s crazy,” she said, still crying, “and mean, to just disappear from me—”

But nothing and nobody just disappears. Not actually. Unless mass gets converted entirely into energy. But that doesn’t really apply here, to people, basically never. (And especially an Argentine, it struck me, wouldn’t use the word “disappear” so imprecisely; it would be like an American hosting a picnic on September 11.) So I think it must have been the silliness of the word “disappear,” its rigged smokebox sentiment, that irritated me. Yes the silliness and also the wrongness. Wrong because generally people just leave. Or are taken. They only appear to have disappeared.

“If anyone has disappeared,” I articulated into that telephone as I idly turned over a pamphlet proclaiming my presence in authentic Patagonia!, “it’s not me. And if Rema has disappeared, if that is the correct way to understand this situation, and it seems increasingly likely that that is so, then it seems entirely possible that you’re at least partially, if not wholly, implicated in all this. Tzvi thinks so, anyway. And by the way, Rema would have had a much better handle on this situation, she would have been in control, she never would have let me go—” at which point the woman interjected with some protest and tried to list memories that “proved” who she was — she even mentioned those oversized dogs from our walk in the Austrian Alps — but I soldiered on. “Just because you can deceive Magda, who hasn’t seen Rema in years, and who sees whatever she wants to see, that doesn’t mean you can count the sheep being pulled over my eyes—” And at the moment of speaking that mixed metaphor, an undeniably accurate image of the real Rema came to me, a sense of her body next to mine in bed, her arm around my waist, one of her knees beneath my own, her breath at my neck. Briefly, very briefly, Tzvi vanished from my thoughts, blotted out by Rema entirely. Or rather, by the painful absence of Rema. I said, “I’ve met complete strangers who remind me more of Rema than you do. You, you’re really no good at what you do at all. What you don’t understand is that this is a really close and intimate relationship, husband and wife. You’re trying to be the woman who essentially saved my life, who made me feel like I really existed, the stuff of metaphysical poems, of all kinds of poems, we’re talking about the first-prepare-you-to-be-sorry-that-you-never-knew-till-now-either-whom-to-love-or-how, that kind of love. I sent that to her once. You can’t fool me. You don’t seem to understand pretty close is not nearly close enough. It’s nothing. It’s not even a cigarette.”

But perhaps it was a tad mean of me to say you’re really no good at what you do at all. That was a bit much. After all, what did I really know about what it was that the double “did”? Impersonation wasn’t necessarily her ultimate goal.

But about it not being Rema on the other end of that phone — about that I was definitely right. So I told myself as I stepped closer to the false hearth (gas and nonburning log sculptures) to warm myself. Wouldn’t Rema on the phone have kept on crying? This woman had dried right up. So I hung up the telephone, not listening to whatever it was the double was saying to me, probably just listing more memories. I walked away from the warmth, felt something like dew forming on my eyebrows as I walked past the check-in desk and around a corner and to a cowboy-labeled restroom to run my hands under the hot water — which I believe I explained before is a very normal thing that I do — but it didn’t get hot right away, and I waited for a while, and then remembered that it was the C tap that would be hot, C for “caliente,” and I just felt so frustrated by the inane problems of even the simplest of translations. I just wanted to go back in time, to be home in Rema’s and my apartment back before we’d ever invented (or discovered or whatever we’d done) Tzvi Gal-Chen. I just wanted everything to return to how it had been before, even if that just meant Rema pouting on the sofa, reading a newspaper in a language I couldn’t understand and being irritated with me for reasons unclear. Had Rema treated her previous husband better than she had treated me? And how had he treated her? How had I treated her? What nicknames did they have for each other? What language did they speak to each other? Maybe I didn’t want to know any of those details. I was searching for Rema but I just wanted to find her, not find out too much else, not find out anything that I didn’t absolutely have to know; about Tzvi I was open to discovering anything — his possible death had made that clear — but about Rema, not so much. (That was a little discovery I guess, discovering there were things I didn’t want to discover.) I didn’t want to think that her other husband, whoever he was, might somehow lie behind the circumstances of my strange new world. I didn’t want to think that I might be wearing that other man’s clothing. I didn’t want to wonder if he and Rema had had sex in unusual positions, or with unusual objects. I didn’t want to think about any men in Rema’s life, actually, or any sex either. And in fact it was good that I so entirely succeeded in blocking those thoughts from my mind. And that I was somewhere cold, which keeps thoughts from associating so easily. Because in the end — or the state near the end, where I am now, ever approaching — they, those thoughts, could hardly have proved themselves more irrelevant.

I washed my face with hot water too.

3. A material intrusion

That conversation. It had laid down the absolutely wrong analytical tracks that my mind then kept running and rerunning over; so in an effort to derail the derailment — and thus clear my mind for rerailing — I voyaged into the cold. Walking that ersatz little tourist town, looking out at the pale blue finnings of the glaciers, feeling my skin desiccated by wind, feeling unreasonable jealousy of bickering families, I thought about Rema’s old remark about Patagonia being considered the wild, uncultivated unconscious of Argentina. Well, I thought, if so, it was a tidy, brisk, unscented Lego-land of an unconscious. At least this corner of it. With clean glaciers, excellent signage and safety precautions, and full up with false gauchos offering pricey horseback-riding tours. Some unconscious. Although maybe that’s what the “wilderness” of our minds looks like, maybe humans really are that dull and predictable.

My meteorologic labor wasn’t scheduled to start until Monday—that might bring me out into the real atmospheric unconscious — but until then, frankly, I didn’t know what I was meant to do to bring myself closer to Rema. When it began to rain lightly, I took that as a sign to return to my hotel.

Picking up an evening newspaper in the lobby, I began to read an article about chimp-human hybridization. That sort of thing (kind of) is on my mind often. Because whenever I feel sad, the sad feeling tends to manifest in my seeing humans (myself included) as orangutans. A human ordering coffee, a human offended when someone cuts in line, a human sprinting to refill a parking meter — in my moods, all those people are orangutans. And this feeling doesn’t make more real the secret emotional lives of orangutans — that would be one option. Instead it makes all the humans (with their loves, their hates, their haircuts, their beloved unconsciouses) seem sublimely ridiculous. Normal life, absurd. She loves you — who cares? She left you — so what? Scratch your armpit with your long, long arm and continue on, or not. The orangutan thing: it’s just a feeling, not a rigorous thought at all. But still. Anyway, between that hybridization article and an article on legislation requiring the sale of larger-sized clothing in girls’ boutiques, just as I was beginning to successfully forget about that phone conversation, I saw Harvey.

He was sitting near the gas hearth in a low, broad upholstered chair, his legs delicately crossed, his girlishly narrow ankles displaying wiry black hairs against paleness. He was wearing his suspenders over a sweater, with the cuffs and collars of two button-up shirts extending from beneath. He appeared occupied with his pocket mirror, seemed not to have noticed me.

I folded up my newspaper. This left the obituaries section facing out. Which seemed distasteful. And which reminded me of Tzvi. So I then unfolded and refolded the paper.

By which time Harvey had risen from his chair and crossed over to me; in response I rose too. He took hold of my entire forearm, gave it a firm, formal shake. I heard him say, “I thought I’d be more on your mind.”

And yes I did feel like we both had unusually long arms, that our shake might have been observed in a zoo. “Wow. What?” I said.

“I’ve had so far,” Harvey said, “a marvelous, marvelous time.”

“Do you think,” I said, stuck on his opening, “that I should have been more worried about you?”

He gestured that I take a seat. “Why are you asking me that, Dr. Leo?”

And I’d wanted to dismiss that conversation we’d begun, but then it was that feeling of some corpuscle of my bone marrow, some meek, undernourished corpuscle, taking the stand at the pulpit of my brain stem. “Do you think,” came out of me in a whisper, and yes, I’d taken that seat, “that, if I really cared for you, I would have taken out an advertisement in the paper?”

Harvey sat down as well, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “Why would you take out an”—and here he stressed the second syllable—“advertisement?” He also made a short vowel of the long “i” of the third syllable, which made him sound very affected — which made him sound very like himself — and which also I recognized as a move to gain ascendancy over me, as if I’d spoken incorrectly, or in a low-class way. “What,” he went on, “would the advertisement have said?”

I laughed loudly, to dispel any sense that I had been asking in earnest. Why had I said that? The thought of publicly declaring something, or even more specifically, of placing an ad in the paper — it was so strange to me, an intrusion, like how whenever I find myself near a high hedge the phrase the secret life of dogs pops into my mind, uninvited yet fully formed. Should I have taken out an ad looking for Rema? Was that the thought, cheaply costumed in generality, that I was really having? Did I think it halfhearted that I was looking for Rema all by myself? Perhaps it was that the image had partially risen again, as it does too often, of my mother looking through the newspaper classifieds. For notification of what? Of someone looking for her? Surely I had been misunderstanding. She always searched the paper so seriously, furrowing her brow just so, pursing her lips just so, and I would think — when I would see that — that maybe she was just terribly stupid. Or perhaps I was thinking of another echo of an advertisement in the paper, which is that a foolish friend once said to me, You could place an ad in the paper, looking for your father. One of the ugliest, stupidest things I’d ever heard anyone say. I wasn’t looking for my father. I had no need to see him or speak to him or know where he was or what he was or wasn’t wearing. Really, I barely remembered him, and I had no reason to believe that he was a particularly interesting or intelligent or good-looking man. (I can only surmise that it was the influence of the setting — the Patagonia of the unconscious that Rema had instilled in me — that prompted me to such banal and family-centered self-inquiry.)

“Yes,” I answered finally. “What would an advertisement say?” I felt like I was delivering a line in a play. “What a silly question!” I gave out one punctuating guffaw, then imagined the newspaper issue, once a seeming bedrock, suddenly revealed to be just wrinkled butcher paper, now hole-punched, the resultant confetti fallen and swept under a chair.

I pulled my chair slightly closer to the hearth.

Harvey followed suit.

“I heard,” Harvey said very quietly, “about your life, Dr. Leo. I wanted to express my condolences.”

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my life.”

“Your wife, Dr. Leo. I heard. About what happened to her.”

“But that’s my private business, Harvey. That’s not your affair. Who said what to you when?” When I tried to think whom I might have told about the doppelganger, I just saw in my mind an impassably thick hedge. Then a me, emerging out of a hedge, a double of me, speaking words and acting acts for which I was to be held accountable. Instead of recalling anything useful I heard the laughter of that night nurse.

“Dr. Gal-Chen,” Harvey said, “told me.”

“You mean Rema?”

“I mean Tzvi Gal-Chen.”

“I suppose I did tell him.” Though I hadn’t explicitly asked Dr. Gal-Chen to treat my communications as confidential, I still felt, briefly, betrayed.

“And Dr. Gal-Chen told me.”

“He told you?”

“Yes, he mentioned it. Also mentioned that you were here. Also that he was concerned for you. I didn’t think it was a secret.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, good. Of course. No. No, I certainly don’t have any secrets.”

“And I wanted to express my condolences. I wanted to tell you that I’d like to be of help to you in any way that I can.”

4. Recent advances in epistemology

Of course he also wanted help from me. Harvey asked if he could share my room. He said he was out of cash. Naturally I accommodated; I couldn’t imagine any unpleasant consequences, and, honestly, I felt obliged toward Harvey, as if I had abandoned him, as if it weren’t he who had taken flight, or as if it had been my failures that had sent him away. Or maybe as if, obscurely, he were Rema. Who I was no longer, through some boyish idea of adventure, able to not miss.

“Your wife,” Harvey said, settling himself onto my (temporary) bed. “I wonder how she’s involved. What do you think the 49 Quantum Fathers are after? The whole journey here I couldn’t sleep because I was worried they were going after the sheep; that’s what you always hear about, Patagonian lamb; you don’t think they’d go after live animals like that, do you? That would be unprecedented. Maybe it’s just the fruit trees. I bet if you upped the winds on the pampa, not even that much, you could probably destroy all the fruit tree crops in one blustery evening. Cherries, peaches, apples — all smashed to the field of battle. Acres and acres covered in soft fruit flesh, just left to rot. Is your wife the silent, stoic type, or do you think this kind of thing might break her will? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. What’s your current plan of action?”

Watching Harvey talk, I was reminded of a famous psychiatric case from the time of the French Revolution. A distinguished London tea merchant believed that a sinister “air loom gang” that controlled minds through mesmerism had foiled the peace he almost brokered with France. The merchant was placed in the asylum at Bedlam but in the end it proved true that the merchant was held there primarily at the request of a politician rather than for any medically indicated reasons. The details of the merchant’s story were off — there was no air loom gang — but the heart of what he had been saying had a kind of truth to it. He had been lobbying for peace. What I mean to say: Harvey was an acceptable ally, despite everything. And Rema had always been fond of him.

I mentioned to Harvey (without divulging my pseudonym) that I–I and not we — was to begin a job for the Royal Academy that very Monday. That was my plan.

“But that’s five days from now. Surely you can’t sit idle until then,” Harvey admonished, leaning then into an elbow-supported reclining position like the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t girl from those old Diet Pepsi commercials. Not unlike a common Rema pose. “What does Dr. Gal-Chen think you should do?”

Upon reflection I realized that Tzvi and I had spoken primarily of, well, poetry. And affairs of the heart. “I didn’t quite ask him,” I admitted. Curiously, Tzvi and I really hadn’t had the most pragmatic of exchanges. “We did discuss windchill research,” I proffered. “And its relation to war.”

“Maybe we should call Dr. Gal-Chen now?” Harvey suggested in a voice decidedly un-idle, even as he lay himself out more fully on the bed.

I made clear — very clear — that of late Tzvi and I had restricted our communications to e-mail only.

“If there’s been some sort of rift between the two of you, I believe I’m entitled to know about it.” This statement Harvey directed toward the ceiling. For a second I thought Harvey was speaking again of me and Rema, but of course he was speaking of me and Tzvi. “We can’t brook these kinds of interpersonal conflicts right now, Dr. Leo; what we’re up against is too serious.”

So I eventually consented to Harvey and I together contacting Tzvi via my BlackBerry. Much to my distress, Harvey started right up with his rapidly associating theories. One might have — I might have — thought Tzvi would have recoiled from Harvey’s borderline nonsensical ideas, but instead — although Tzvi countered with many emendations — the two of them typed back and forth warmly, with a kind of exuberance, and I was reminded of (1) watching Rema develop Harvey’s therapy, and (2) the absence of a brother I’d never had and whom I most likely would have hated having to compete with. But there they were. Within an hour, with minimal input from me, Tzvi and Harvey worked out that the Rema swapping most likely had been an early move to harvest chaos from our world to bring to a nearby one, that the dog was likely an essential determining agent, that the Patagonian crop-destroying winds — they weren’t after sheep, just fruit — would be deployed soon, but not earlier than my Monday meeting with the Royal Academy, and that nevertheless it was essential to understand this not as a minor skirmish but as a pivotal battle that might be the tipping point to the full determination of our — Harvey’s and my — world. At stake was the eradication of possibility. A fixed order loomed. If we lost, all would be set in proverbial stone. Time future as unredeemable as time past. No uncertainty. Rema still stranded.

“One thing I can’t understand,” I felt compelled to contribute, “is how you two can possibly know that nothing will happen before Monday.”

That really was the single detail that didn’t intuitively seem credible to me. Was I bothered by the parallel between Rema’s therapeutic invention and the reality Tzvi and Harvey’s communication seemed to support? No. I was buoyed by it and considered it a kind of verification by triangulation. What did intellectually shame me was the vivid realization that I had devalued the evidence of Tzvi’s death. I’d breezed right past it, had simply resigned myself to it. But if I was communicating with a dead man — it did seem I was — then the world was radically different from what I had thought. And if I did in fact want to be a true scientist, I should have done more than just accept what had previously seemed unacceptable; I should have followed that new truth out to its logical implications. Where was Tzvi communicating to us from if not from another world? And how was he in our world if not through a kind of intrusion? And if such intrusions were possible, wasn’t it obvious that there would be those who would capitalize on them? And, come to think of it, hadn’t I had feelings, experienced coincidences, my whole life through, that had the character of such intrusions — of otherworldly order that seemed to make no sense? Nonsensical dislikes. Nonsensical likes. Even falling in love with Rema. Even occasionally getting mad at Rema for no obvious reason. And what of her unpredictable flashes at me? Who hasn’t come across behaviors wholly resistant to interpretation — moods not reducible to serotonin or circumstance, Teflon actions that no theory sticks to — and such little unfathomables, wouldn’t it make the most sense to understand them as uncanny intrusions of order from other worlds? Weren’t Tzvi and the simulacrum both just such oddly familiar, not quite fathomable intrusions? And didn’t Harvey and Tzvi’s idea of an impending fixed order bear a strangely strong resemblance to the Eliot poem that talking to Tzvi had somehow seeded back into my mind? Why indeed had my ninth-grade teacher made us memorize that? Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden … / But to what purpose … / I do not know…/ Shall we follow?

“I have inside information,” Tzvi wrote, thus recalling me to the present. “Part of the brilliance of waging a war through weather is that the layperson doesn’t notice there’s a war going on at all. The layperson just shrugs his shoulders at the ‘randomness’ of it. Fortunately there was the dog this time,” Tzvi added. “The dog was a real misstep, no? Either a misstep or the dog is central to all of this and they had no choice about introducing her, conspicuous as she was.”

Harvey and Tzvi conferred about the possible “centers” of “this,” though in terms of plans — that had been the original goal of the conversation after all — Tzvi said that all he could think for us to do until Monday was to monitor the weather closely.

“That’s it?” I typed, on behalf of Harvey and me both.

“Frustrating, no?” Tzvi responded.

An interlude then. Of nothing.

“Who really,” I asked, as a shadowy hope had blossomed within me, “do you think this work of mine with the Royal Academy will be with?” If I had a pseudonym, maybe my direct employer — a supposed Hilda — had one as well.

Tzvi responded that he couldn’t quite say with whom. Then — and this surprised me — he asked again how I–I specifically, he did not include Harvey — had come across his work. Or rather, across him.

“My wife dreamt of you,” I wrote. I accepted the melodrama of declaring that. Accepted the melodrama because the statement was, in its way, and in other ways, true. As Tzvi’s research notes: add a little bit of white noise to the model, and a little bit of blue noise, and those carefully introduced errors will dramatically enhance the realism of the retrieved fields.

I left the bed to Harvey that night. “I feel so much safer,” he said, “now that we’re working together.” As for myself, I slept, deeply, on the floor.

5. Without effort

Fresh snow the next morning made the light come in the window in a pink and quiet way, and in my dream, Rema was there; she licked a handkerchief and then wiped my cheek with it, near my mouth, where there was chocolate. When the room phone rang, this translated into a sensation that Rema, my real Rema, had left a teakettle boiling, and that we were in our apartment and that she was at her prettiest, and wearing pale yellow, looking like an afterimage of blue, and telling me something about Tzvi GalChen, about the shirt he had on in that photo we had (once had) on our refrigerator, and about how Tzvi was a member of the 49, but the 49 were not our enemies. I used to have a simple recurrent dream, almost embarrassingly simple, in which I’d walk into a room and a woman would be there and I’d say, where were you? I thought you were dead. And she would answer saying, oh, I’ve been just right here, you just didn’t look here, I think you didn’t want to look here, she’d say, a little bit pouty with her lower lip, maybe with her eyes wet. It’s like you didn’t miss me, she says.

So I had the sense that Rema was near me, but when I opened my eyes I realized that I was on the floor with only a sheet and I saw objects that were not mine, that were not part of my apartment: a painting of horses, their manes blowing in a wind that moved nothing else, a faded photo of glaciers under a pink sunset. And I saw Harvey, his head under the covers, just a grip of fingers on comforter showing. And I remembered then, more or less, where I was.

The ring again.

“Yes?” I said, taking the receiver to my ear. Harvey stirred but didn’t seem to wake.

“A woman is waiting for you,” an unidentifiable and accented male voice said to me.

“Tzvi,” I said, “is this you?”

“No. Here. Downstairs. She’s waiting,” the voice said and then hung up.

I didn’t immediately rush down. I washed my face and the back of my neck. And I brushed my teeth and then flossed and then brushed my teeth again. I washed my hands vigorously to remove any dirt from under my fingernails. As for my ears, I had no Q-tips, but I did my best. And the trousers that Magda had given to me, I noticed that they had a small hole developing at the seam of the pocket, but I located a sewing repair kit — this hotel had foreseen everything — and neatly stitched the hole closed, reinforcing the edges, with a sufficiently matching gray thread. Also the button was chipped, so I went ahead and replaced it with a golden other. I just wanted to be very clean and well put together, for whoever that woman was, for whatever woman was waiting all that time, so early in the morning, for me.

6. The realism of retrieved fields

The woman waiting for me wasn’t Rema, and she wasn’t the doppelganger, and she wasn’t — somehow — Tzvi or Tzvi’s wife. She was Rema’s mother, Magda. Magda: whom we hadn’t even discussed the previous evening, whose role in the looming weather wars was unexplored, who might be inconsequential, but whose motherly/analyst presence nevertheless invoked in me a heightened and unwelcome self-consciousness.

“What a surprise,” I said in a failing attempt at warmth. I wanted to return to my ignorance of moments earlier when the woman waiting for me might have been Rema. “I apologize for disappearing on you,” I said, infected by the simulacrum’s silly word choice. “I should have paid you in advance for accommodating me. I really did plan to get back to you on that.” She was sitting, I was standing. Her gaze was level with the waist of my pants, with the golden replacement button. “I’m really—”

“No, no, I hadn’t known that you were my son-in-law.” Her laugh sounded strained, false. “There was so much knowledge hidden from me. I hadn’t known who you were, you see? It is funny. Odd. Peculiar. The situation we were in.”

I wanted to but didn’t suggest “ironic” as a more accurate and succinct representation of our varied levels of knowledge.

Then Magda added, “Those pants; they really fit you just perfectly. That also is peculiar. Even the cuffs are exactly the right length. And the pockets are not deformed.”

And it struck me that a more concise and precise description of my clothing would be to say that I was dressed like Tzvi Gal-Chen. Or, at least, like Tzvi once dressed, at the time of those photos.

“Listen,” she said to me, “I wanted to talk to you about some things,” and she looked around the lobby, where there was a tour group being beckoned by a white flag on a stick. “Somewhat secret things. Very secret things. Where can we go to talk?”

I should at least have left a note for Harvey, letting him know where I was. That would have been the proper way to behave. Even the simulacrum I had treated with such respect — the first time — but I just left, with plans to return as hastily as I (politely) could.

7. Sensitivity studies

“Listen,” Magda said, reaching across the faux wood, faux knotted table of the nearest coffee shop we could find, a shop that claimed to be channeling the ancient Tehuelche spirit into its teas. She took my hand and whispered surreptitiously to me in her odd English, as if English were some obscure and therefore private Eastern European spy language — Hungarian, say, or Albanian — that nobody nearby would understand. “I have need to tell you that Rema has contacted me.”

“What,” I asked, “does that mean, that she ‘contacted’ you? Isn’t she still staying with you?” I asked, feeling the need to engage in the earlier charade of the simulacrum being the real Rema.

“No, no,” Magda said, choking a bit then, on saliva it seemed. “Not that woman, whom you saw in my house. The real Rema contacted me. I see now what you were trying to say, what you knew all along, that you were correct to suspect that other one.”

Did I like having her confirm my difficult-to-fathom conviction? I did not. “How do you know it was the real Rema you spoke to?” I asked.

“I just knew. When I saw her. That it was her.”

Judging by the visible pulsing of Magda’s carotid artery, I suspected her heart was pounding. Tzvi, Harvey, now Magda too: the excess of corroboration actually undermined, rather than strengthened, my developing convictions. “You saw the real Rema?”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t she here with you?”

“Well. Because.” Magda reached out toward the clean and empty mug in front of her, brought it to her mouth, sipped, and then set it down. “Why haven’t they asked us what we want yet?” Scanning the room, she added, “Terrible service.” A pause, then she turned her eyes straight on my unshaved chin. But I was clean in every other way; how had I forgotten to shave? “There’s some. Well. I mean. Well, there are — there are complications.”

As if it were a surgery gone bad, or a post-myocardial-infarction report.

“Medialunas?” I said to the yawning waitress who had suddenly materialized.

“For me the wellness tea. And huevos fritos. And medialunas. And some strawberry jam please. And a side of potatoes. And please extra napkins.”

Her hunger struck me as suspicious.

“Let me just tell you exactly what Rema said to me,” Magda announced after the waitress had left. “That way there will be no game of telephone problems.” She removed from a vast purse one sheet of wrinkled graph paper — boxes outlined in pale blue — and she began to read. “Number one, she sends you her love. Number two, she says you are taking Harvey’s disappearance too hard. And she wants you to know that whatever strange suspicions you may have, she is sure she can explain them. That’s the main idea of number two, that she knows there are some things she needs to explain to you. I’m sorry I have no more details there. But then three. Three is everything important. She says she needs you to return to Buenos Aires. They have her working as a translator at the Earth Simulator, out in Tokyo, and something has gone terribly wrong. It is all just a miscommunication is what she is saying. But some of the scientists there are under the misimpression that she has powers for changing the weather — Rema said you would understand this — but of course she does not have those powers and she didn’t know what she was getting into, and hopefully this will all be straightened out soon. She also wanted me to explain that she’s sorry she didn’t tell you about this job of hers earlier, but it was a new development, and she wanted to get a job all on her own, without your help, and then surprise you, and treat you to a trip all on her own money—”

“But we’re married,” I interjected.

Magda shrugged and went on, now reading more off her paper, “She says for you to help her. There’s an office in Buenos Aires, the office of the desaparecidos. Her mother — that is me, yes — can take you there directly. And if you can get the paperwork started from the outside, and she’ll be working from the inside, and hopefully everything can be fixed. Quick, quick.”

Our food appeared.

Magda folded the wrinkled graph paper six or seven times, returned it to deep in her oversized purse. Then she looked at her sunny-side-up eggs that were looking at her. Then she glanced up from the eggs, and looked at me, and smiled.

I took a very tiny bite of my medialuna, to make things seem normal, even though I had no hunger. Then I asked casually, “Who told you to come down here?”

“I told you. Rema did.”

“Why didn’t Rema come see me herself?”

“What I said.” Magda took her fork in hand; she broke the yolk of her egg; she startled as it spilled over. “She’s stuck”—yolk rivuleting to the periphery—“over there. In Japan.”

Land of the rising sun, her yolk made me think she was going to say. Which brought to my mind an image of Faye Dunaway gripped in the hand of King Kong. But that was the wrong Faye, the wrong monster, and the wrong country underfoot. It was the wrong image entirely. “But then how did you hear from her?”

Magda set her fork down. She reached again toward her mug, now full of special wellness tea, brought it to her lips, but I don’t think she took a sip. “She visited me. Short time. Then she had to fly back.”

The absolute lack of resonance of the story Magda told me — this confirmed for me that I wasn’t just suggestible, that Tzvi and Harvey’s assessment genuinely and singularly compelled me. I took then — there with Magda — a more sizable bite of my food. A dry edge of pastry scratched the roof of my mouth. “So what you are telling me is that Rema just flew down to Buenos Aires. From the Earth Simulator in Tokyo. To inform her mother — whom she barely speaks to — of her predicament. In order that her mother should speak to me. Then Rema goes back to Tokyo. Back to the arms of her captors. Without visiting me? Instead entrusting you with a wrinkled sheet of paper?”

Magda took hold of my right hand in a way remarkably devoid of any sexual undertones. “I made,” she said with my wrist wrapped in her cold fingers, “a mistake.”

“Okay,” I said, using my awkward left hand to take another bite of pastry, to show my confidence, my ease in the situation, and suddenly I thought, obscurely, of Harvey sleeping, or not sleeping, alone, and maybe wondering where I was.

“I mean,” she said, unhanding me, “I wasn’t being clear. My words were not clear. I meant that Rema had a moment, there at work, in Japan, finally a free moment, and she used it to send me a message. Her message visited me.”

“Her message,” I repeated dryly.

Magda brought her own hand to her lap. “She sent me a message on the computer.”

“Then why are you so sure it’s really from her? Couldn’t anyone be sending messages from an e-mail account with her name?”

Unlike Tzvi’s and Harvey’s and my theory, which had opened up for me, Magda’s “theory” shrunk, retreated — even Magda’s posture was worsening. “I mean not an e-mail,” she said. “It was a message sent through another Argentine person. Through a friend of the both of us. Who also happened to be there with her. He’s very reliable; he would know if it wasn’t really her. I mean, thank God he was there. So that she could get a message out.”

I noticed tattered strips of paper napkin amassed at the side of Magda’s plate; the pile had taken on the look of some strange sea creature, washed ashore and dying. When had she torn that napkin? “Her other husband?” I intoned.

She ignored my words, then she picked up her fork and began eating from her plates round-robin style, fairly quickly, with pronounced deglutition.

We ate for a while, almost competitively.

Our hot drinks were refilled.

“You really believe you’ve received this message from Rema?” I asked finally.

A strand of Magda’s tidy hair had fallen onto her face. “Oh, yes. Yes, definitely.” When she brushed it away I could see the delicate print on the pad of her thumb; a few fibers of paper napkin clung there.

“I know,” I said as sweetly as I could manage, “that we don’t know each other so well. But I feel as if we do. That is a feeling that I have. So that is why I am going to ask you, again, directly: who sent you down here? Someone probably told you a pretty story to get you on their side. Obviously Rema didn’t learn how to lie from you because you’re really no good at lying at all. Lying can be appealing on young women, but not so much on mothers. Don’t worry, I know, of course, that you are innocent. Understand that I certainly in no way blame you. On the contrary. Just tell me, was it the 49 Quantum Fathers? Or maybe a Quantum Father posing as a member of the Royal Academy?” I was trying to form an alliance with her, without really divulging anything of importance. “The more I think about this, the more I’m beginning to suspect there are some pretty powerful forces involved, much larger than just—”

“You’re too old for Rema,” she interrupted, raising her voice, becoming a shrill bird. “And you’re a snob. And you’re crazy. Crazy and not even very good-looking, especially not when I look at you from near like this. I’m happy to fail to bring you home. I don’t care if she’ll be mad at me. She’ll always be mad at me no matter what I do.”

I ignored her diversionary tactic. I ate as my own.

“Why don’t you just come home with me anyway?” Magda eventually sighed. “It will make her happy.”

“It’s very kind of you to invite me,” I said calmly. “But I have work here. I’m doing work here. I can’t just turn my back on my responsibilities.”

“But Leo. You don’t have work here.”

“That’s not true,” I said with conviction. “I’m doing climate change research.”

“Leo, you’re not a meteorologist. You’re not. There’s something wrong with you.”

And of course that was true, what she said, that I wasn’t a meteorologist, but it also wasn’t true, because I was (in a way) employed as a meteorologist. Or would be soon enough. Her doubts did not disturb me.

8. Postprandial insights

I returned to find an anxious Harvey, who, upon my entering the room, threw his arms around my neck. Again I thought about orangutans.

“Where were you?” Harvey asked, with the trembling lip of a child.

“Nowhere important,” I said.

“The snow flurries stopped so abruptly,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll never leave you without notice like that again.” Saying that, to someone, felt nice.

“I thought maybe you’d already grown tired of working with me.”

“I was just answering a phone call. A woman had called me. I had thought it might be important.”

“You’re not leaving me, then?” Harvey asked.

“Of course I’m not leaving you,” I said, thinking of telenovelas but also of genuine tenderness.

And it was that easy to restore happiness. Harvey settled in front of the television weather report, while I set myself to the task of shaving. So I was shaving, and going over in my mind retorts that I hadn’t offered to Magda, and not just vainly gazing into the mirror, when, upon close follicular inspection of (the reflected image of) a tender, raised, false pimple on my neck, the seed of the simulacrum’s word — disappear — began to both germinate and molt in my mind, revealing itself as a two-toned postulating buzz; wasn’t the simulation of Rema’s appearance far more extraordinary than her disappearance? I had been so fixated on the disappearance, probably because it was more painful, but really it was the appearance of the doppelganger that was far stranger. Why not simply take Rema? This simulacrum, was she really deployed just to move a dog, or was she being deployed primarily for some other reason, to solve some other problem, to generate some other solution? Solution to what? Was the simulation of two observer Remas occurring in order to triangulate, in a perfectly coupled way, on the data of me? I had been comporting myself as if this mystery was proximate to me, but maybe the mystery actually was me.

If the dog was essential, but following me had proved more essential than staying behind with the dog, then didn’t that mean I was more essential than the dog? And if I was deploying a meticulous methodology of being open to chance, while it was chance itself that the Fathers were working to control, then wasn’t it me they were trying to control? The simulacrum had pursued me. As had Magda. Even Harvey had tracked me down.

I set down my razor.

It’s a strangely impersonal feeling, to feel wanted for reasons one doesn’t understand.

Half shaved, half convinced, I turned and said to Harvey, “I think the battle might not be being waged through the dog. It might be that it’s being waged through me. I thought I was following the caprice of my own heart, but now I think maybe my movements might really be determined by some other force. Maybe the determination of the weather patterns is beginning — is getting its foothold into this world — through the determination of the patterns of me. I mean, maybe my movements really matter. Matter to a lot more people than just me. Maybe I’m the proverbial butterfly.”

“Everyone’s a butterfly, Dr. Leo,” Harvey said, not even turning from the television set.

“I know, I know. But I’m saying — I think I might be the central butterfly. I don’t mean to be grandiose; I mean I hope it’s not true. But I just have a feeling.”

“Well,” Harvey said, now turning to me, “when I’m in a situation like that — as I think you know — I try to seek some corroboration, try to verify some hunches. Keeps me out of embarrassing situations, you know?”

Well there were all kinds of corroboration. “I think I should go try to find that woman who sought me out this morning. I need to understand her motivations better, even if she won’t straightforwardly tell me what they are. Do you mind if I leave you again?”

“Do you mind if I order some room service? Go, go, but when can I expect your return?”

Well: it was a small town, that corner of the Argentine unconscious, and by evening I’d managed to refind Rema’s mother.

9. The sensitivity of the solution to uncertainties

After I made a false promise to call the doppelganger after dinner, Magda conceded to sharing another meal with me. As soon as we sat down I began to explain that I of course understood that she was under the impression that there was something wrong with me, and I explained that I thought that was entirely understandable. I told her that if I didn’t know what I knew, and if I didn’t feel what I’d felt, then I too most likely would have thought there was something wrong with me. But maybe she felt, as I felt, that she knew things that I didn’t know, and that if I came to know those things then I might see the world differently, as she did. If she wanted to, she could tell me those things that I didn’t know; she could rest assured that I would handle well the coming to know of them.

The skin around her eyes: gray and recessed. She said nothing, just looked askance. Then sighed.

So I tried a different tack. “The landscape here is so astounding. What a beautiful country,” I said.

“It’s a broken, depressed country,” she responded.

“Everyone seems so nice,” I said.

She said how insincere everyone was. How it was all just appearances. “Even me,” she said. “I’m only nice on the surface.”

If she wanted to indulge in that common grandiose fantasy of not being a nice person, then that was okay with me. “You know more than I do.”

“Yes,” she said, “I do know more than you do.”

“Yes you do,” I agreed, realizing that she most likely hated me, at least for that moment while I had her attention. So I truly had nothing to lose with her, I could only gain. “So the man Rema left Argentina with? Her husband? Was his name, well, by any chance, well — what was his name?”

“I thought you were his friend?” she said, looking suddenly energized and disturbed, as if a bright light from an unidentified source had been shined on her through a window. “That was a lie also?”

“I’ve just been so confused lately,” I said. “It has spilled, or I mean slipped, my mind. That means I have forgotten. I mean, well, was it — was his name — was it Anatole?” My plan was then to ask if she could recall Anatole ever asking after me, or after someone like me.

“Anatole?” she said back to me, pronouncing it differently, making four syllables of it, when I had been saying it over and over and over in my mind with only three. “Is that what you said?” she asked me, as if I’d let a genie — evil or benevolent I could not tell — out of a bottle.

“Yes?” I said. “I’m sorry I lied earlier. You’re right. I don’t know why I said I knew him. There was so much I didn’t know when I met you. I think you can understand. I mean: you’re an analyst. I mean: I was in a rather awkward position.”

“When Rema tells me that you are now her husband, is she lying to me?”

I shook a little bit of salt onto the empty plate in front of me; I thumbed some grains into my mouth; I didn’t want to give information, I wanted only to take. “You mean the woman I shared a bedroom with in your house? Well kind of, well yes, in the strictest interpretation, she is lying. But from a slightly alternate perspective she is not lying. I am Rema’s husband. I am.”

“But you don’t know who Anatole is?”

I tried to picture an Anatole. He looked like me, but me as refracted in an ugly-making funhouse mirror; and then somehow that wavy Anatole took my place, and I had become the distorted him, and this revealed my original position to me as an intensely enviable one. “But you do know him?” I asked.

“Your marriage — if really it is a marriage — it’s very strange. Cold.”

I thought of windchill, as a kind of misdirected rebuttal. Magda went on about just what she thought my marriage was like. She talked on and on, and so confidently, and in such an ugly manner, until finally I interrupted:

“Aren’t you extrapolating a bit too much, a bit too confidently, just from the single fact that I don’t know precisely who Anatole—”

“I don’t blame you,” she said, which led me to understand that she clearly did blame me. “She is a strange girl, my daughter. Maybe that is my fault.”

Then I was quiet as was she; I hoped she didn’t read my silence as judgment. I broke a bite off a crackery breadstick; it cleaved along unexpected planes. As I listened to myself chew, I began to feel distant from myself, and, in that way, clearheaded. “So,” I said, partly to Magda, partly to myself, “Rema left Argentina with this An-a-to-le person.” I adopted the four-syllable pronunciation with confidence, feeling myself an Hercule Poirot: it was near the end of the story, the suspects were in the room. “I had thought he was the night nurse,” I said as an engorging vein imaged in my mind. “But I am relieved to know that he is not the night nurse—”

“You think Anatole is a nurse?”

“No, no. I don’t. Not anymore. I was wrong before,” I said as I felt my investigation growing crystalline.

“Anatole was not Rema’s husband,” Magda said.

“Ah so,” I said, gracefully turning on that dime. “Actually I suspected as much. They were only engaged then, am I right? It ended when they arrived in the States. Then the love just faded.” I felt on a proverbial roll. “They realized it had been a matter of context, of setting. And though they were still fond of each other, it just wasn’t enough for marriage. It was awkward in bed perhaps, pardon my French, and awkward at meals, he wouldn’t eat lentils with her, and he couldn’t handle arguing with her, and he never knew what to say, and he bought her the wrong gifts, things that revealed he could never really know her—”

“You are completely misunderstanding,” Magda said, breaking into English. “These fantasies of yours are bizarre.” She was not looking at me in the eyes — instead again looking at the cuffs of my shirt. “Anatole,” Magda said, not hesitating in her pronunciation. “Well. He’s. Well, really I feel rather strange saying this. Well, really. Well.” I noticed Magda set down an accordioned tea bag label. Where had that tea bag come from? Neither of us had ordered tea. “Maybe it is wrong that I am the one telling you this. But. Anatole was my husband.”

I guffed just one violent guffaw. But I felt in that instant that I’d lost all that had held me taut, whatever had tirelessly and praiselessly kept the shell of me from collapsing under the pounds of atmospheric pressure.

“Are you choking?” she said with concern, for me I think, more than for herself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m always hearing the strangest things. Not the things people are actually saying.” I could feel twitching in my face, and itching in my scalp, and laughter in my diaphragm. The room was too much there. I could feel the color of the wallpaper — burgundy — invading.

“You don’t know,” she said, “that Anatole was Rema’s father?”

In the silence that followed I could feel the powdery softness of my button-up shirt, and the fullness of the veins of my feet, and the absence of Rema’s hand on my forehead just where she likes to place it when she stands behind me while I’m seated in a chair and complaining of a headache, and I heard — maybe it was that accordioned tea bag label — a heated kettle, empty of water, not whistling.

I said, “I had a father too.” I don’t know why that is what I said. I find that sort of cheap identification shameful. I then immediately began forking food into my mouth.

“They took Anatole,” Magda said. “Rema was very young.”

10. Primate perturbations

I ate a delicious corn soup that night. Magda’s meal looked tasty as well — a whole fish, head on, grilled — but I did not ask for a bite of it and she did not offer. My mashed potatoes were flavored with garlic and I imagine hers were too, though she did not eat hers while I did eat mine. (Why wasn’t she hungry?) One might be inclined to lend too much importance to Magda’s statements about Anatole. While such statements might be, of course, inherently important, they were not particularly important in my matter, the matter of locating Rema. After all, out of any assembled body of knowledge, there are many possible data points one might dwell on. That is to say, a piece of information may be important in some very local sense, but what does it have to do with, as they say, the price of tea in China? What with the recent discussion of Initial Value Problems, and of the Dopplerganger effect, surely some busybody will feel inclined to make cheap metaphors, or butterfly metaphors, but such metaphors would rely entirely on associations of only apparent depth. Really the details about Anatole were hardly relevant at all to my investigations, and there was no reason to believe they rippled out to increasingly dramatic effect. Never mind that the simulacrum later insisted that Magda was lying to me, that Anatole was not taken at all, that he simply left. Who knows? The point remains the same: people lose parents all the time, and in all sorts of ways, and if I perhaps did not know the very particulars of what had happened with Rema’s father, it’s not as if I didn’t understand Rema herself, understand her entirely, see within her the exact contours of that disappearance even if I didn’t know it was a loss I was looking at. What this — Magda’s statement — was, was not a mésalliance like Rema’s reaction to the threatening letter on mourning, but a misalliance of a different sort, and I was resolved not to let it derail my search, which it could easily have done if poorly interpreted. I was looking for clues that would help me find Rema, and then I stumbled across something resembling the truth about Anatole, which I had briefly mistaken for a truth about the other husband, something sizable, yes, but something I really had no interest in knowing, a stone I had continually, purposively, wisely even, left unturned. A clue, but to a different mystery. Regardless, I didn’t want to know; I am not gentle enough to know such things; perhaps nobody is.

At some point during that meal I remember looking down at my hand, which seemed a terribly hairy paw, reached out from that delicate years-worn cloth.

Magda said to me, “I’m sorry, I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.”

But I wasn’t uncomfortable. Though it’s true that I did fail to offer Magda any comfort whatsoever. Say what you will of me, but I would defend myself on the fact that (1) her grief, if there was any, was none of my business, (2) I could certainly do nothing to alter the etiology of it, (3) “comforting words” snag, like hangnails, and (4) we didn’t have a professional relationship. Also, (5) disappointment distracted me from figuring out what my duties toward Magda might be, disappointment in learning nothing that seemed likely to bring me closer to retrieving Rema. I had been counting on the Anatole clue. Even if just to help me understand how I figured in all this.

Instead of following up on Rema’s father, I eventually reiterated my question about who was the original husband of Rema.

Magda ate the eyeball of her fish. “Ask my daughter yourself. I am living in enough trouble already with that girl and the things that she does and does not want me to say.”

“It was the dog walker?” I said.

“He’s an analyst,” she said.

“The dog walker is? Or the husband is? Or both are?”

“Stop,” she said, closing her eyes, putting her hands to the sides of her face.

I whispered, “Was his name Tzvi?”

“This game is beneath you,” she said, with her ears still covered. “It is, anyway, beneath me. So if you consider me to be beneath you, which you seem to, then I believe it follows that this game is beneath you too.”

11. I always hated musical chairs

Harvey, amidst a mess of room service plates, asked me what I had learned.

“I’m not sure. But I think I’m not the central butterfly. Or I’m not the central man. This Anatole, for example, I wholly misunderstood his significance. And Magda just let me go. It seems like all my assumptions were flawed.”

He asked me if I had learned that Rema was in love with Anatole.

I said no.

“Does the doppelganger love Anatole?”

“Why all this talk about love, Harvey? What’s happening to your interest in the weather?”

“I often find that it’s love that lies at the center of things, don’t you?” he mewed sleepily. “One has to presume that the majority of the 49 Quantum Fathers once belonged to the Royal Academy, belonged until they were somehow burned by love. One of my old therapists pointed that out to me. How chance—”

“That doesn’t sound right to me. Who was this therapist?”

Harvey shrugged. “You’re the one who likes to talk about love to Tzvi.”

“Not about love. About Rema maybe. About the doppelganger a little bit. But only as a kind of evidence.”

“What about that man you told me about who you saw walking dogs? Is that who the doppelganger loves?”

“No, of course she doesn’t love him,” I answered in a quiet, calm, not at all irritated voice. Our room, with all those dirty dishes, had acquired the cheerless look of a bachelor pad. I set myself down in an armchair. I lacked the peace of mind to think of Rema’s father. “What is sad of course is that even in this short time she has fallen in love with me. She can’t stop calling me. So what can she do with her frustrated love for me, a love perpetually unable to reach its object? Maybe she will end up lavishing attention upon that other man simply because, at least superficially, at least in terms of profession, he resembles me, the forbidden fruit.” I felt moved to attempt a love and chance lecture superior to that of his other unnamed therapist. “Maybe that’s happening right now. But he — well, he wouldn’t even really enjoy her attentions, since surely a man with his training would understand her interest in him as nothing more than simple transference, because he must know that a girl like her — I’m sorry, a woman — could never actually be attracted to him unless she was somehow unconsciously mistaking some superficial aspect of him for some earlier true love. He can be nothing more than the illusion of the recovery of that love; he can only be the ersatz love, you see; no other sensible explanation for her affection toward him would exist.” I knew I was going on, but having arrived so dispirited, I now felt compelled to speak from a position of superior knowledge. “In fact, Harvey, this is all rather analogous to how Freud ‘discovered’ transference in the first place. Do you know? He had this experience, early in his career, of this beautiful young woman emerging from hypnosis, throwing her arms around his neck, and kissing him passionately. It haunted him. He felt certain, I suppose, that she couldn’t really have been attracted to him personally, that he must have functioned as a stand-in for someone else. I mean, it’s interesting — if Freud had considered himself attractive, he might never have made his discovery, he simply would have assumed the girl found him straightforwardly alluring. Surely that’s what Jung would have thought. Although Freud takes his idea to an extreme — he seems to think that transference explains the origin of all love, that there’s always a thicket of past people between any two lovers. There I’d have to disagree. As it goes contrary to my own experiences. Freud erred in universalizing his theory. That’s the problem with calling psychoanalysis a science, because science shouldn’t rely on authority, but—”

“You’ve thought about this a lot,” Harvey interrupted with a glaze of deafness. He had begun to stack the various dishes. That’s when I picked up on the scent in the room, one that went beyond steak and toast. I realized Harvey had been drinking. “I thought,” he said offhandedly, “maybe you’d find out why your wife left you.”

I had never said that she’d left me. Who had said that? Surely Harvey didn’t actually think Rema had left me, but rather he was trying to talk about … what? My leaving him? Why did everything have to also mean something else? I wanted to be in a simpler, vaudeville world, where the jokes had to do with ladders being too short, or someone slipping on a banana peel. “Sometimes,” I said to Harvey, “you see connections that aren’t really there.”

“Yes, you’ve often told me that,” he said.

“And she didn’t leave me. There’s absolutely no indication of that. She just disappeared. Or rather, was taken. I don’t know why, of all the people who could have been taken, why it was her in particular, but — that’s another reason we’re trying to retrieve her. I wish I understood better, but I don’t. And I told you that I might be out all day, I gave you warning. Listen, why are we talking about me all the time lately? You and I should talk about you. Have you called your mom?” I asked.

Harvey sententiously set his piled dishes outside our door. “Dr. Gal-Chen wouldn’t want me to do that.”

“Why not?” I said. “You should call her. If you don’t call her she’ll be terribly disappointed. In you and me both.”

“I’m not a fool,” Harvey said. “I can see you’re just changing the subject.” He made his way over to the mirror, carefully fixed his hair. “I once received an MRI to rule out neurocysticercosis.” He turned back to me. “You know sometimes when Tzvi would call you to pass on orders to me I would think I could hear your wife’s voice in the background—”

“I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking, Harvey, but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong,” I announced calmly as my ears tingled, as if vigorously generating too much wax, “and whatever your suspicions are, they’re not the right suspicions. And by the way I’m sleeping in the bed tonight, and you’re not—”

“You think of me as useless, Dr. Leo. I can see that. That’s okay. But Dr. Gal-Chen doesn’t think like you. Soon enough you’ll understand the essential niche I fill. Until then I can weather the indignity of your indifference. Dr. Gal-Chen knows I’m not just any serviceable cog in the Royal Academy’s wheel. He knows my services are irreplaceable. Not like the object of affection of that patient of Freud’s, the one who could have been anyone.”

As Harvey rambled on, it became vivid to me that Harvey deployed Tzvi as a kind of psychotic patch, a mending of the rent caused in his universe by the unflagging perception of his own insignificance. Seeing Harvey so unable to understand Tzvi as a real person, seeing him misunderstand Tzvi as whatever Harvey most needed him to be — a new kind of sadness blossomed in me.

Under the spell of that glittery melancholy, I stayed up late that evening, composing a long and heartfelt note to Tzvi, in which I explained to him that though I had, naturally, been, at least once or twice, “burned by love,” this had in no way tempted me to join the 49. Even Rema, I confessed, had at times been indifferent toward me. Not that long ago, for example, she had rented a miniseries of some sort — something with servants — and I had missed watching the first episode with her, and on those grounds she had then discouraged me from watching any of the rest of the series and she would just sit in front of the TV alone at night, spooning from a bowl of cereal and at the same time telling me she wasn’t hungry for dinner, thus leaving me to eat takeout alone. (At other times nothing had made us happier than spending night after night watching rented movies and holding each other.) Or maybe it was I who had been indifferent to her. Usually we were tender to each other through moody periods, but sometimes we’d get struck by a dark mood at the same time and then we’d be lost. For example, I had recently taken to staying late at the hospital, not because I had to but simply because I’d find myself lying on my office sofa, reading every last square of newspaper and magazine. (“World Briefings” was often my favorite part, and it regularly pained me, the way it was over so quickly.) One night when I came home at 10:30 p.m. Rema asked me why I’d been occupied so late, and I told her, somewhat truthfully, that I’d been engrossed in a lengthy article about the discovery, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, of a species of Hobbit-like people, Homo floresiensis: these three-foot-tall people who lived contemporaneously with Homo sapiens, separated only by geography. The archaeologists had also found, in the same limestone cave as Homo floresiensis, the remains of a Komodo dragon, a dwarf elephant, and stone tools. “Now,” the article had noted, “that race of people is gone.” But why, Rema asked me, couldn’t you just read that here at home? And why did it take you so long? And why are you so interested in those gone people? When you called to say you’d be late, she lectured me, I assumed that you had no choice.

Anyway, I told Tzvi about these trivial incidents only because I wanted him to feel confident that I was unshakably on the side of the Academy, that I had endured unstable climates in the past, that I could do so in the future. But the simple fact of writing all that to him produced in me a new vulnerability. Too vividly the thought crossed my mind that the 49 had perceived the actual weaknesses in my marriage, that Rema and I had been targeted because the 49 wagered that given the attenuated state of our relationship, I actually might not notice, or respond to, the swap.

Perhaps just a phantom thought. But when, almost immediately after sending the note to Tzvi, I received an automated out-of-office reply in return, the feeling was one of devastation.

12. I didn’t feel the way it seemed like I might feel

Again the room phone woke me from slumber; the message was the same as the day before; the message was that I was to come down to the lobby, preferably immediately, because there was a woman who wished to speak with me.

Casting about my room, I discovered Harvey wasn’t there.

Okay, I thought, blocking out thoughts of a missing man, of an unidentified woman, of an absent father or two, blocking out possibly erotic thought, who knew, I was still half asleep. I dressed hastily, went straight downstairs. But instead of seeing Magda there I saw a woman (and at first I just saw her reflected in the mirror-lined wall) with hair blonde like Rema’s cornsilk, but combed in a wholly different way, or rather, not very well combed, back in a sloppy bun, artlessly done, and greasy, with dark roots dramatically showing.

“Look,” Harvey said — Harvey! looking tidy and proud, with his shirts tucked in just so, and even his cuffs properly buttoned — with a barely suppressed gloating grin, “I found her. She’s a lily of the valley here to see you. A creamy daff of the dill. An atmospheric phenomenon.”

I was looking at this blonde woman’s image in the mirror; she was looking at that same image of herself in the mirror. Or so it appeared to me. But then I thought about the Dopplerganger effect again, or at least that phrase came into my mind, and those words solved something for me: I realized I was misinterpreting my perceptions. That is: if I saw the blonde woman’s face in the mirror, and if she appeared to be looking at the same point in the mirror that I was looking at, then actually she was looking at my face in the mirror while I was looking at her face in the mirror, that our faces could be in the same places (in the mirror) depending on just where one was looking from. So she wasn’t thinking of, looking at, only herself. Nor was I thinking just of myself. That’s just what it seemed like if one didn’t account for anticipatable perceptive distortions. But hadn’t I known all that about mirrors already? And yet right then it was as if I’d lost that knowledge and had to learn it again. Something about how we really don’t understand how mirrors work, or what they are showing us, which is interesting to think about considering that mirrors are the main way we have of understanding what we look like — what was it that poetic charlatan Lacan said, something about how because we only see ourselves in mirrors we come to know ourselves “in the fictional direction”? I’m not sure why I feel so moved to clarify this brief moment so much; it just seems like an important case of misperception on my part, important because I caught myself misperceiving and immediately readjusted my understanding of the situation. This is not one of those cases when I am talking about an unimportant and unrelated topic, some random intellectual distraction, in order to avoid an emotionally laden topic. As if I was overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of that blonde woman. I was not.

Anyway, she looked at my reflection.

I looked at hers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just looked at her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“JinxBlackMagicYouOweMeACoke,” Harvey said.

We were all quiet a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needless to say:

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

She wouldn’t have held my wrist so tightly.

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

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

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

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

13. A confession

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m afraid I can’t,” I answered.

“What’s starting Monday?” she asked.

“My job.”

“What kind of job?”

“I’m not going to discuss that.”

“Did you receive the articles?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t copy me.”

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

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

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

“Do you remember seeing Godzilla with me?”

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

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

“I don’t remember that, no.”

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

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

“But do you remember the little fight?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14. A reasonable theory

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

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

15. A case of mistaken identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We were children together,” he repeated stupidly.

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

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

I almost stood up and cheered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. Materials and methods

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

It was all brimming over with good intentions, the shopping plan.

That next day I found a heavy coat that I knew would look beautiful on the simulacrum; it was of a pale blue wool, not wholly unlike Rema’s winter coat; I placed the coat in the simulacrum’s arms with assurance. Although it was not a perfect coat, and not exactly like Rema’s, I knew that later we could locate oversized buttons to sew onto it and then it would be spectacular. And meanwhile it could keep her warm.

“Doesn’t interest me,” the simulacrum said, seeming annoyed. “I’d prefer another color. And something more sporty, more like for climbing a little mountain.” She tried on an ugly down jacket, very puffy, emergency yellow, with wide-stitch quilting.

“That would be a mistake,” I said. I tried to explain to her about the buttons that would go on the wool coat and how nice it would look then.

She said it would look just like a wool coat she already had and that I perfectly well knew that. Then she petted at the sleeves of that ugly yellow thing.

Not wanting to cause trouble — she already seemed so short-tempered — I didn’t point out that it wasn’t actually her coat, it was Rema’s, and I wasn’t going to let her just take it. Certainly not for until the end of time. I mean, what I was thinking then was that even if I found Rema, she and I would probably let the simulacrum live with us, at least for a delimited period, if she had no other place to go; we wouldn’t just kick her out on the street. Who knew what her real circumstances might be? And who could say — maybe she and Rema would become good friends, and share clothes, and secrets, and dog-caring duties.

“You look like an alarm in that coat,” I said to her. “Like a hazardous crossing signal.” I carried the finer coat folded over my arm like a sommelier’s napkin, and I followed the simulacrum all over the store as she tried on other unflattering jackets. Politely but firmly I held to my opinions. She steadily disagreed with them.

My pacific nature finally broke. “Why do you care so much?” I said. “Why does it matter to you, one coat or the other? Why can’t you just take a gift graciously?”

The simulacrum looked right through me. A fluorescence above smoldered. “Why do you care so much?” she finally said.

I didn’t respond.

“This is ugly,” she said, looking at me, and I got the sense that she was referring to more than just the coat over my arm. She tried on one more item, traffic cone orange and far too large. “All right, this is it.”

I quietly pointed out to her that the fabric looked like it was made from recycled tires.

“It pleases me,” she said. “It’s impregnable.”

“But the color. I mean, maybe if you didn’t dye your hair blonde. Maybe for a brunette, this color, but—”

Then — and there was a sweet bitterness in her speech, a bitterness like licorice pills: “Which do you think your friend Tzvi GalChen would prefer?” She tilted her head. And this made me think of that night nurse laughing at me, and of that dog-walking analyst, and the way he had smiled at me that day, a laughing kind of smile, and even of Anatole I thought, and even of fireworks, and also I thought of me, of my unwanted laughter too.

“Why, which do you think he’d prefer?” I said back to her. She’d ruined the whole fun of everything, had reduced me to echoing.

“Can you not get him on the phone anymore? Poor thing. Although now that I am thinking,” she said, “maybe he’s not the person I would ask for fashion advice.”

17. Attacks on the local steady-state hypothesis

That afternoon, Harvey approached the simulacrum and me with plans for going for “a constitutional.” I agreed, but then the simulacrum backed out, saying she’d rather stay behind preparing for tomorrow’s meeting, reading the research of Tzvi Gal-Chen. Her withdrawal seemed a kind of threat. But only kind of. At the time, I suspected nothing.

A few blocks out in that chill and Harvey ventured, “I’m concerned about the reality of Tzvi Gal-Chen.”

“You’re telling me that you’re concerned about the reality of Tzvi Gal-Chen?”

“No, about the health of Tzvi Gal-Chen,” he said into the wind.

“About the health of Tzvi Gal-Chen?” I said.

“No. About the modality of Tzvi Gal-Chen,” he said. “About the modality.”

“The reality,” I said. “That is what you are saying?”

“Yes,” he said.

“This is about the out-of-office reply? I got that too, and it distressed me, but I can’t imagine it’s anything serious.”

“Out-of-office? What? No. My concern pertains to what the blonde told me.”

I tried to think if I had earlier noticed him referring to the simulacrum as “the blonde.” Instead sheep and fruit came to mind.

Harvey went on: “She told me that there is no Tzvi Gal-Chen. Not really. Not in any real sense like I thought there was. And then she said this. She said that if there was a Tzvi Gal-Chen, then you may as well say that she is Tzvi Gal-Chen. That’s what she said to me. A bit arrogant, no?”

I heard a tremendous cracking sound: somewhere ice breaking. We had been told that chunks of glacier often fell, crashing into the lake. “Did you see that sound?” I asked.

“You’re resistant to this information, Dr. Leo. All I’m saying is: do we really know who she is?”

I thought of the simulacrum walking out on that military man at the ice-cream shop, and I felt that pang of heartburn that I associate with, well, love. “She is someone, I suppose,” I said. “Or not even suppose, but most likely. Obviously. Of course.” And I did keep hearing ice cracking, sometimes even shattering. Off at a distance, but it made me feel unsteady. “Listen, Harvey — I think I know why she says she’s Tzvi Gal-Chen. But it’s a stupid thing that makes her say so, a very stupid thing, Harvey, and I don’t want you to take the things she says very seriously. She is not a reliable source. Her data is shot through with error. Maybe blue noise, error on the smallest scale, but error nonetheless. Any data from her must be filtered—”

“But it’s an interesting problem that she brings up, the problem of knowing Tzvi Gal-Chen. It’s a problem that sounds epistemic but that may in fact be metaphysical.”

“Which analyst used that phrase with you?”

“Doesn’t it accurately describe the situation?”

“No. He’s just out of his office. Being out — that’s a totally normal thing that people can be. He’ll return. And until then we know we have our meeting tomorrow. Don’t get nervous over this. After all, how could Tzvi Gal-Chen not be real if you’ve been writing to him? If he has been writing to you? If he has been writing papers in journals since before either of us even knew him and since before the simulacrum was even born?”

“But he hasn’t written any papers very recently; I even asked him about that, and he admitted that no, he had not. He’s gone underground. But why—”

“Yes, well,” I said, “the secret nature of some of the work? That’s not something you don’t understand.” A cold, dry wind burned my cheek like a sunburn, or a slap. As I said those words that didn’t quite convince me of anything, I was reminded of a conversation I’d once had shortly after my mother died in which I referred to my mother in the present tense. I said, “She works as a seamstress.” But I should have said, “She worked as a seamstress.” It was a pretty girl’s question I said that in response to and this was during a time in my life when I had difficulties, much greater difficulties than now, talking to girls. Back then I had difficulties talking to anybody, really. Regardless, the girl said back to me, after touching my wrist, oh, will you ask your mother a question for me? Will you ask her if you can serge without a special machine that’s just for serging? (For me the word “serge” heaved with sexuality.) My present-tense slipup grew increasingly problematic, because every time this girl saw me — she really was so pretty — she would ask me again if I’d talked to my mother, if I’d asked her about the serging. I suppose I could have tried to learn about serging on my own and just lied and said I’d asked my mother. Or I could have simply confessed to the fact that my mother was dead and that I therefore could not ask her about serging. But I did neither of those things; instead I worked harder and harder to avoid the girl, who grew lovelier every year (until at the very end of college she cut her hair short), and when I would spy her, at a distance, or in the cafeteria, I would feel a pressing at the walls of my heart, as if I were in love with this girl whom I didn’t know, as if we might have been the happiest couple there ever was save for how I had ruined everything through my simple slip in language.

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

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

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

“I’ve never said that—”

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

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

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

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

18. While we were out

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

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

Unnamed dog

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

Anatole

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

Rema’s husband

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

Tzvi Gal-Chen

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

Royal Academy

and

Lola

and

Patagonian research

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

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

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

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

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

Harvey went up to the simulacrum and hugged her.

19. The misrecognitions

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

I genuinely worried — I’m not sure why — that we were leaving to meet no one.

But at our appointed meeting spot in the central square, a woman was in fact there. Sitting along the edge of a fallow fountain, wearing purple oven-mitt-ish mittens, eating a lime green popsicle, her phosphorescent blonde hair held back with a fleece headband. Did I feel as a Greek tragic hero must feel at the moment of anagnorisis? Not quite. But why shouldn’t that woman have been Rema? Why not her instead of the simulacrum? She had a dog with her, an exceptionally large German shepherd, with dirty snow-colored fur particularly thick and coarse, and I was reminded — so often — of those Austrian dogs that had seemed inexplicably strange, then explicably strange, once I realized they were simply dramatically larger than I was used to, which made being near them feel like being on a movie set with oversized props and doorways extra tall.

The woman bit from her popsicle. A chunklet fell to the ground; the oversized dog snarfed it.

Did I reach my hand into my coat pocket, as if I’d find something there — a swatch of cloth? a lock of hair? an old movie stub? a photograph? a piece of licorice? a special ring? a clipped news article? — something to identify myself to her, something that would prove, across the worlds, that I was really me? I did. But I found only a sugar packet. And a bobby pin that could have belonged to any girl. Nevertheless, I extended my hand to that woman confidently. “I’m Arthur,” I said.

“You’re not Arthur,” she announced in a voice that seemed to me loud enough for the whole universe to hear. Then she laughed. “I’m sorry, I mean, you might be Arthur. But the funny thing is that I’m waiting for someone named Arthur. But an Arthur who isn’t you.”

“Twenty-seven? Ice climber? Bowdoin College?”

She looked at me almost cross-eyed. “You know him?” she said, beckoning her very large dog closer to herself.

“You know him?” I said, thinking about black magic.

“Do you know him?” the simulacrum — so intrusive — was saying to this other woman, intending, I believe, the “him” to be me.

Was this situation terribly disappointing and somewhat humiliating? It was.

Did that woman walk away? She did.

Maybe I expected she would eventually pursue me, but she did not.

20. Falsifiability

Maybe, as Harvey had been alleging, there was a problem with the reality of Tzvi Gal-Chen. Maybe that accounted for the failure of the Hilda encounter. Maybe that accounted for the lack of storms. Messages I wrote to Tzvi simply bounced back. Calls to the Royal Academy failed to connect me to any Tzvi or to any Lola. And a terrible migraine developed within me, as if to counteract the absence of external weather disturbances.

“Let’s go home,” the simulacrum whispered — though it sounded to me like shouting — in my ear, as I lay in bed with the lights out, with the shades down, waiting for my migraine to pass, waiting for Harvey to return from the field with news, even though I had no confidence that he would. “You’ll find yourself so happy to be home,” she continued. “You’ll feel like yourself again at home,” and the feeling inside me was of inhabiting a dark and uncanny fairy tale.

I asked her to please leave me alone. But she said that at my age I shouldn’t be left alone when I wasn’t feeling well. At my age. She said that more than once. I’m barely in my fifties, but she spoke of me like a man on his deathbed. In essence making a deathbed out of that oddly proportioned hotel bed, killing me in her imagination, in a room of false intimacy, with its horse and glacier images. “Most people of my socioeconomic status live quite a bit beyond fifty,” I whispered through the yellowness of my headache. “I will get better. Tzvi will contact us soon enough.”

Later the simulacrum began crying and accusing me more absurdly.

“Of course I love the original Rema,” I murmured, trying to placate her into a shush, feeling a touch awkward about the simulacrum’s excessive investment in my feelings for Rema. She continued heaping unfounded anxieties one atop the other. For a long time I said nothing, but finally I interjected: “No, that’s not what any of this is about at all. That’s not why I don’t want to go home yet.”

Undeterred from her perseverations, she went on saying things that don’t merit transcription, saying that I didn’t find her attractive, repeatedly confounding herself and Rema, lily-padding from irrelevancies to inaccuracies. In a slight ebb tide of my pain, I exhaled the following: “You don’t understand. If anyone is, or was, unfaithful, if anyone is, or was, ‘seeing’ anyone else — maybe seeing many other people — it was her, it was without a doubt her, and it was only her. How many times have I picked up the phone only to have the other person hang up? Rema is very young. She is too young. She probably thought she wanted someone older, and reliable, and financially established; but in the end she didn’t want to be married to a father. I could practically be her father. But I could never be enough of a father and a father is not enough. Maybe no one will ever be enough. Maybe she’s not a person for whom anything will ever suffice. Well, maybe that is understandable, understandable even to me. So she finds someone else, someone younger, maybe. Prettier, maybe. He will disappoint her too. She’ll return. I’m not worried. I have no worries—”

I didn’t actually believe a word of what I said. Even if I did, briefly, that would have been purely on account of my distorting neurologic state. That’s not what Rema’s like. I was just talking. And women, they’re always wanting to take the side of other women, and so somehow the simulacrum had put me in a position where it seemed like I was arguing against Rema, like I was in some way hurting Rema. I wasn’t. I was loving her and I was looking for her. It was not, as the simulacrum kept alleging, that I wasn’t really looking at all, that I was running away. And the truth of the matter was that the matter between us happened not to be the matter between us — that is, whatever problems we actually suffered within our own marriage were absolutely irrelevant to what was currently keeping us apart. “Tzvi understands what’s keeping us apart,” I declared. I didn’t think he fully did, actually, but I wanted to appeal to an authority outside of myself.

Later the phone rang. Not my phone, but hers. She wouldn’t answer it. “It’s just my mom,” she claimed.

“Why don’t you talk to her?” I said, feeling unusually aware of other people’s pain.

“It is difficult. I don’t like it.”

“The poor woman,” I scolded. “Can’t you spare a little kindness? You know what happened to her husband, don’t you?”

“Did she tell you that lie too?” The simulacrum sighed. “He just left her. That’s all. She likes to make it seem something else, something dramatic, but it is very ordinary. She likes to make her pain seem extraordinary when it is just ordinary, ordinary pain for an ordinary, ordinary person.”

I turned on the TV, very quietly, to stop her mean talk.

21. A birth of comedy

In my dream she was there, then I awoke and she wasn’t there, then I fell back to sleep and then woke and she was there. She was wearing, in addition to a frumpy alpaca sweater, a small, sad look of triumph.

“Where’s Harvey?” I asked.

“He was called home.”

From among the chaos she carried within Rema’s pale blue purse, she pulled a folded piece of paper. The filmy folded sheet proved a faxed copy, printed in a powder that finger oils could smudge away, of a page from the September 1996 issue of Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Blue lint had collected along the fray of the folds and when I unfolded the paper it crackled slightly with what I believe were crumbs of rye cracker. I include the full text of the journal page she presented to me.

As most readers of

Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

know, Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen was its co-chief editor for about two years before his sudden passing in October 1994. He was also an influential and stimulating atmospheric scientist and a warm and much-loved human being. As his close friend and colleague, I accepted the task of standing in for him at the

Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

for a year and also of collecting and editing papers for a special issue of the journal to be published in the month of his birth.

Tzvi aspired to be a multidisciplinary scientist, with interests and activities in largescale, mesoscale, boundary layer, and climate dynamics, and with a strong emphasis on remote sensing analysis techniques. As most working scientists know, “multidisciplinary” is a favorite word and expectation of administrators and journalists, but it is often regarded with suspicion in the academic community. Tzvi’s earthy way of saying it was, “A multidisciplinary scientist had better be an expert in at least two disciplines, or else he is a charlatan.”

I am not a great fan of special issues of an archival journal like the

Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

Sometimes the papers are premature, excessively delayed, warmed over, or accepted largely on the basis of their presentation at a conference. I agreed to edit this one on the understanding that the papers, though solicited to some extent, would be fully acceptable to the

Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

under any conditions and that their subjects would be as broad as Tzvi’s interests. The result is a nice mix. It includes one paper coauthored by Tzvi as the advisor of a doctoral student; two other papers authored at the University of Oklahoma; another by a close former associate using Tzvi’s work as part of the foundation; three papers on geophysical fluids, including a major work in planetary science, an area which Tzvi was associated with in his earlier appointment at NASA; a paper on data assimilation; a paper on TOGA COARE, which was the last observation project in which Tzvi participated; and a boundary layer paper. I feel that all these are contributions that Tzvi would have liked to read. I must admit that in some cases the reviews and authors’ revisions were slightly accelerated to meet the publication deadline. I hope and believe, however, that this issue will be found worthy of the high standards of the

Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

and stand as a small but fitting memorial to Tzvi.

Douglas Lilly

University of Oklahoma

The simulacrum sat expectantly at the bed’s edge, with her hands between her knees in that inadvertent prayer position kind of way, waiting for me to read the document. I found myself reading the document over several times. Yes, before looking up I had read it several times and so understood it quite well. When I made eye contact with the blonde, she tilted her head at me, like a puppy. There was then a pregnant pause for language, a repressed face-off of sorts, for who was going to begin with the speaking, me or her. I tilted my head in the opposite direction that the blonde had tilted her head, which thought of in a certain way is the same direction, like in a mirror. And the silence continued from that angle, but I’d like to clarify that it was not a reverent silence that was being maintained, not on my part, not a silence in the face of the greatest of mysteries. This “mystery” that the simulacrum had presented me with — in its own way — well, it was so very small. All she was trying to say was that Tzvi GalChen was dead, and that we should therefore find it strange that I had communicated with him. At least, I think that was all she was trying to say. But that had become, for me, maybe the least of many mysteries, one that mattered to me only as a door to other possibilities, only as a passage through which I followed. Not as a thing unto itself.

The simulacrum tilted her head in the other direction and then, with an excess of gentleness in her tone, she asked me what I thought “this Tzvi Gal-Chen character that you have been communicating with”—she wanted to know what I thought he might think of this memorial issue of Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.

I pointed out the problems inherent in such projective hypothesizing.

The simulacrum reasked me the same question. What did I think “this Tzvi Gal-Chen character” would think?

I answered that I thought it would be rather rude to ask such a question of “this Tzvi Gal-Chen character.” I regretted employing the diminishing terminology that she — rather inappropriately — had taken to using.

What do you mean it would be rude to ask? she wanted to know.

I said that a feeling I’d often had was that it would be awkward to talk with people about their deaths after they’d died. There might not be much to say about it.

She said that what I was saying didn’t make sense.

You mean it doesn’t make sense to you, I clarified.

No, no, no, no, no, she said, standing up, moving too close to me, talking right into my face, her body so close that I thought I could feel the air move out of her way. She went on: “It doesn’t make sense to anybody, at least not to anybody else that I know,” she said, infected, I believe, with my admirable tendency to qualify. “Not even to Harvey. It’s just you,” she continued. “Doesn’t that make you wonder when something is just only you?”

“I didn’t come up with this craziness,” I said. “It came to me, not from me.”

22. Conclusions and future work

Toward the end of his retrievals paper Tzvi wrote: “Are these errors a reasonable simulation of those actually present in Doppler radar data? Is there any way to recover useful information from the resulting fields?” Naturally these questions came to mind when I was deciding whether or not to return with the simulacrum to the apartment that I shared with Rema.

Let’s say that I agreed to return, that she agreed to return with me. We arrive. I imagine the apartment will smell musty and she’ll open the windows and cold blasts will compete with one another through the length of the space; the curtains will billow. The thin dog — who will return her? — will retreat to the simulacrum’s lap for warmth. An old newspaper will be out on the coffee table, as if still important, something circled in red pen. The bed will not be made. Four spoons and a glass will be sitting unwashed in the sink. Not sure how to behave, I will offer to make tea. The click-click of the gas stovetop will make a nice contact sound as I set the teakettle to boil. I don’t want tea, she will say. So if you’re doing that for me, don’t do it, she will add. I’ll ask her if she wants coffee. She’ll say no. Hot milk? Do you want to rent a movie? Go for a walk? Eat chocolate? Lie under covers? She’ll be inconsolable and I’ll find myself curiously dedicated toward her immediate consolation.

“Sometimes you’re not very mean,” she’ll concede, eventually, after dozens of suggestions.

We’ll go out for dinner, which Rema and I never do, and the dinner will be okay. The butter will be unusually good, but neither of us will speak much, and I’ll order a hamburger in an attempt to be cheap and will regret it. She’ll finish less than half of her lamb. I’ll mention something I saw in the newspaper — young Turks’ voting patterns maybe, or the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut — and she will say that she also saw that — whatever it might be — in the newspaper, but we’ll fail to turn our mutual reading into a conversation. When we decide to return home, the nearby subway station will be closed; we’ll walk ten blocks to an open station and then descend and wait. She’ll say she doesn’t believe the train will ever come. I’ll assure her that she is right, that the train will never come and that also the gates will close, and we’ll be locked in the station, and she’ll say that she is just so tired and regrets ever having thought that she wanted to go anywhere. Then the train will come; there will be plenty of seats; she’ll lay her head on my shoulder. And in the dark glass of the subway car I’ll see this gentle sleepy her leaning on me. We should have had pizza, she’ll say. Even though there’s no good pizza in the neighborhood.

The next morning I’ll catch the grassy scent of Rema’s shampoo coming from the shower. I’ll walk into that steamed room. The dog will have preceded me, will be curled up on the bath mat waiting for her. Without saying hello but also without apologizing for my presence, I’ll wash my face in the sink. Later I’ll find she’s wearing my socks.

Maybe we’ll eventually get a second dog, one who dotes on me more than on her.

As time passes, I will begin to wonder how far my collaboration with the simulacrum might, or could, or should, or shouldn’t go. Perhaps we’ll eventually find ourselves wholly making believe as if she is the original Rema, as if nothing has happened. That is perhaps what we were meant to do. Be partners in solving a poorly defined crime. Appear normal. Share the wide bed. Take turns doing laundry, walking the dog (or dogs), parking the car. Cook lentils, watch old movies, fumble through the recycling to find a news story. Maybe we’ll do the crossword puzzle together and she will be a little bit better than me. If one night she wakes up in an undefined terror it will be my responsibility to put an arm around her, pet her until she falls back asleep. Though of course then I’ll be awake, from having woken to calm her; I will disentangle myself; I’ll leave the bed to take a long hot bath; I will use her soap with its flecks of abrasive and I will use her pumice to scrape my feet, and when, still very awake, I bring my handheld into the bed so as to be able to read the news online — there will be conflict somewhere in the world, atrocity — the tiny glow will reawaken her, and she’ll be furious with me for this, so the next day I will sweep, and bring home nice fruit, and then everything will be more or less okay between us.

This will repeat itself, in variations.

In many ways, I’ll realize, this alternate life of mine will be a small but fitting memorial to my life with Rema.

One evening I’ll put key to door but find the door unlocked. No creature will greet me. I’ll hear only an inscrutable but distantly familiar, tinny, regularly irregular popping sound. Proceeding toward the noise, I’ll discover the kitchen ceiling covered with soot; strangely, this sight won’t make me think of anything else. My mind will stick just to that covered surface, but my heart rate will increase, my hands will feel cold, the popping sound will continue until I finally realize that the sound comes from the teakettle having been left on the burner empty, with all the water boiled away. I’ll call out to her and no one will answer. I’ll turn off the flame and try to transfer the kettle over to the sink, but even the safe rubber handle will have become too hot. I’ll call out to her again. I’ll search the space of the small apartment. That very slow way of drinking that she sometimes has, of putting her finger to the surface of the tea and then bringing her finger to her lips — that will come to my mind. That and yellow panic.

Then I’ll hear the apartment door open. Then I’ll see her. Unmarred, happy, with the russet dog in her purse, she’ll pull several date cookies out of a brown paper bag and offer them to me. She’ll tell me she just went for a walk and forgot; she’ll go to survey the kitchen and wipe stripes in the soot with her finger. She’ll smudge ash on my cheek and nose. She’ll say let’s clean it tomorrow, not today, I had this whole happy idea of having tea and these date cookies and reading the paper and that’s what I want to do. She’ll boil water in a saucepan. I could have fallen in love with this woman, I’ll realize, just meeting her right that very moment, even if there was no history between us. I’ll tell her that. Or something to that effect.

Yes, I will have the feeling that this life I am living with the simulacrum is real. And one morning I’ll get out of bed first and set the kettle to boil and the heat will smell chalky, and the puppy, or dog — and I will know the creature’s name intimately — will follow my every move in the kitchen and I will be speaking amiably with this creature, distracted, but then when I look up from those dog eyes she will have appeared, standing under the lintel, in green nightie boxers and an undershirt of mine, and her hair will be messy, and she’ll rub her eyes and smile shyly.

One day, on the subway, she will peel a clementine and hand me slices. When we transfer trains, she will be showing me the pith gathered under her fingernails and this will distract me and then I will find I have bumped into Tzvi Gal-Chen.

We will all mumble apologies.

Tzvi will be wearing plaid pants. He will be holding an uncrying baby. He will acknowledge us — the recognition, the uncanniness, the whole situation — very discreetly.

Then I’ll remember that something has been forgotten.

I will begin, again, to notice. To really see. Small errors in her performance.

I’ll note fork, not spoon, marks in the ice-cream container. I’ll think maybe it was a guest I’d forgotten about. But she’ll be walking comfortably in heels; she’ll drink her teas quickly; weeks will go by in which she isn’t irritated with me; I’ll meet people she works with who don’t seem to be in love with her. We’ll go to a movie and before it’s over she’ll tell me, without embarrassment or explanation, that she wants to leave. Later I’ll come across her ticket stub in her jeans pocket, and it will be flat, whole, nearly unhandled. Of course I will want to deny such evidence. But when the lost luggage from Argentina, full of Rema’s shirts, finally returns, this will excite her not at all. One evening I’ll arrive home two hours late and find her unworried, eating blueberry yogurt. I’ll begin to notice how often she gazes philosophically into the eyes of the russet puppy, as if no other creature in the world really understands her. One day she’ll even stop dyeing her hair. And she’ll cut it short. I’ll run out of ways to deceive myself. And though all of this will be painful — it will be like losing her all over — I will at least know then, again, that I must find her, that I can only ever truly love the original Rema. I won’t know what this means for me, or for anyone else, or for the Academy, or for the Fathers, or for the world; probably I won’t even really be able to care. But for all that ignorance, still — that image of Tzvi in my mind, underground, holding that baby, dressed in a way that could make him a foreigner or a hipster or an accident or a transplant from another time — I’ll at least know the purpose of the rest of my life.