Atmospheric Disturbances. Rivka Galchen

about in the kitchen that followed, I decided that I couldn’t just wait around feigning normality; I had to go and search for the real Rema. And though I didn’t know quite what that meant—would I don a cap, grab a magnifying glass, and go dusting for fingerprints?—I knew it was the proper next step to take.

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

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

      “I’d rather walk alone,” I braved.

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

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

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

      “Where,” I tried, “is the puppy?”

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

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

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

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

      5. An initial search

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

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

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

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

      “Nothing,” I said to almost no one.

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

      It was very bad, the acoustics inside of me.

      I wanted, suddenly, to leave.

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

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

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

      6. An alleged orphan

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

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