Atmospheric Disturbances. Rivka Galchen

long legs leading down to slightly pigeon-toed feet. Who else could it be? Believe this Rema like you always do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      “The Royal Academy?”

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

      “Leo?”

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

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

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

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

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

      8. Single-Doppler weather radar

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Let us imagine