Atmospheric Disturbances. Rivka Galchen

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

      11. Paradigm shift

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      No red herring!

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

      12. My second search, objective unknown

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

      That realization, being surprised by my own inability, shook me up in a way that reminds me of the first trip Rema and I took together, walking hut to warm hut in the Austrian Alps. This was relatively early on in our relationship, and I had told Rema that I knew German “more or less.” In truth I’d once taken a two-week German class. I’d retained maybe four phrases: milch bitte, Ich bin ein Berliner, die Zukunft einer Illusion, and Arbeit macht frei. But I wasn’t quite lying to Rema when I’d said I knew German “more or less,” because I did truly feel that once I got to Austria I would “remember” German. We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in—a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams. Lies—they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could. Well, I thought I’d remember German despite having never actually forgotten it, having never—as I vaguely felt I might have—listened to German radio broadcasts, or spoken German as a child. But we get these wrong feelings sometimes, feelings like articles slipped into our luggage but not properly ours. I think of it like vestigial DNA. Code for nothing, or the wrong thing, or for proteins that don’t fold up properly and that may eventually wreak great destruction. I talked about this wrong luggage thing with the simulacrum the other day, explained to her how maybe she really did feel

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