Atmospheric Disturbances. Rivka Galchen

then every second one of these Remas will pass me by.

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

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

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

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

      9. Dopplerganger effect in effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

      “You said,” I said again, “Anatole.”

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

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

      She kept crying very quietly and did not answer me.

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

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

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

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

      I did not follow her, not right away.

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

      I also let her remain alone.

      10. I walk the dog; the dog walks me

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

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

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

      PLEASE TO WALK THE DOG BEFORE YOU LEAVE

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

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

      Leashing the pup felt wrong.

      I walked her over to the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She received numerous compliments, the pup. I received none. I used to sit on the cathedral steps, waiting and waiting for Rema—by chance—to pass by. This was before we were together. Sitting on that cold concrete I inevitably felt like the worst