Atmospheric Disturbances. Rivka Galchen
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took Rema’s purse—the comfort of an everyday thought of her—and left to find out about this unidentified someone. A patient of mine, a certain Harvey, had recently gone missing; Rema had accused me of not doing enough to locate him; maybe now I would find him.
When I arrived at the Psychiatric ER, it was quiet and a night nurse was dejectedly resting his face in his hand and playing hearts on the computer. He, the night nurse, was boyishly handsome, very thin, his skin almost translucent, and the vein that showed at his forehead reminded me, inexplicably, of a vein that tracks across the top of Rema’s foot. I did not recognize this man but, given my slightly fragile state, and my slightly ambiguous goal, I hesitated to introduce myself.
“You’re late,” he said, interrupting my dilemma by speaking first, without even turning around to look at me.
And maybe for a moment I thought he was right, that I was late. But then I remembered I wasn’t scheduled to work at all; in an excess of professionalism, I was coming by extra early to follow up on the faintest lead that could have harmlessly waited until morning to be attended to. It was, therefore, impossible that I was late. Probably he was mistaking me for someone else—someone younger, maybe, of lower rank, who still had to work nights.
“Who’s here?” I asked, while nodding my head toward the other side of the one-way observation glass. Over there: just an older man asleep in a wheelchair, wrapped from the waist down in a hospital sheet.
Not my patient, not Harvey.
The deceptively delicate-looking nurse didn’t stop clicking at his game of hearts, and still without turning to make eye contact he began mumbling quickly, more to himself than to me:
“Unevaluated. Likely psychotic. He was spitting and threatening and talking about God on the subway and so they brought him in. He’s sleeping off a dose of Haldol now. Wouldn’t stop shouting about us stealing his leg. I’d leave him for the morning crew. It’ll be a while before his meds wear off.”
Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare—actually stare—at me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead.
Furrowing his previously lineless brow, enunciating now more clearly than before, the night nurse said to me, “Are you Rema’s husband?”
I caught tinted sight of my slouched figure in the reflection of that observation glass that separated the staff from the patients. I noticed—remembered—that I was carrying Rema’s pale blue purse. “Yes,” I said, straightening my back, “I am.”
He guffed one violent guffaw.
But there was no reason to be laughing.
His Rema-esque vein pulsed unappealingly across the characterless creaminess of his skin. “I didn’t know you worked nights,” he said. “I didn’t know if—”
I should explain now that ever since I’d gotten Rema a job working as a translator at the hospital, I’d come to understand—from various interactions with people I didn’t really know—that many of Rema’s coworkers were extremely fond of her. She does often manage to give people the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way; I must admit I find it pretty tiresome dealing with all her pathetic devotees who think they play a much larger role in her life than they actually do; I mean, she hardly mentions these people to me; yet they think they’re so important to her; if the night nurse—apparently a member of Rema’s “ranks”—weren’t so obviously barely more than a child, then I might have wondered if he could help me, if I should ask him something, if he might have knowledge of the circumstances behind Rema’s absence, behind her replacement, but I could divine—I just could—that there was nothing—nothing at all—to be learned from that man.
“We probably did take his leg,” I said. On the night nurse’s desk lay the patient’s chart, open. Glancing at the intake page I had noticed the high sugar.
“What’s that?” the nurse said, still staring at me, but as if he hadn’t heard me.
“I mean, the funny thing is that, literally speaking, doctors probably did take that poor man’s leg,” I answered, explaining myself in perhaps a slightly raised voice. “We say amputated, he says stolen”—I was getting my voice back under my own control—“but that’s not psychosis. That’s just poor communication.”
A beat went by and then the nurse just shrugged. “Okay. Well. Not exactly the irony of ironies around here.” He turned back to his monitor.
“You shouldn’t be sloppy with the label ‘psychotic,’” I said. Just because a man’s in foam slippers, I almost continued lecturing to his back. But as I felt an inchoate anger rising in me, an image came to my mind, of that nervous puppy the simulacrum had come home with, of the puppy’s startled look of the starved, and I remembered that I had other anxieties to which I had intended to be attending.
Even if the unidentified patient wasn’t mine, wasn’t Harvey—as long as I was at the hospital, I thought I should look through Harvey’s old files. Maybe there would be clues as to where he might have gone; Rema would have liked to see me pursuing that mystery. And a part of me clung to the hope that if I dallied long enough, then by the time I made it back home Rema would be there, maybe battling it out with the simulacrum, as if in a video game. Rema would be victorious over her other and then together Rema and I would set out (the next level, another world) in search of Harvey.
That, anyway, was the resolution that presented itself to me.
“I’ll be in the back office,” I announced, feeling, I admit, a bit unbalanced, a bit homuncular, and beginning to develop the headache that had earlier, unexpectedly, and without my even noticing, ebbed.
I did call up Harvey’s old records, and I sifted through them, though I could detect no trends. But as I sat there, one Rema clue—or false clue—recalled itself to me. It was this: A mentor of mine from medical school had recently been in town. He had always been a “connoisseur” of women—this pose of his had always irritated, he had in fact once “stolen” a woman from me—nevertheless I admired him for other reasons and had been eager to have him meet my Rema. I had steeled myself against the inevitable jealousy of watching him chat her up—and I’d held my tongue when Rema put on a fitted, demurely sexy 1940s secretary style of dress—but then, all my mental preparations were for naught. Strangely, my mentor hadn’t seemed much charmed by Rema. He’d behaved toward her with serviceable politeness but nothing more. It was odd. At one point he’d made a joke about the election and Rema hadn’t followed. Maybe for a moment I wasn’t charmed by Rema. As if she weren’t really my Rema. My Rema who makes everyone fall in love. Case: the night nurse.
But back then it really was still her—I’m almost sure of it.
3. What may be highly relevant
I have mentioned my patient Harvey, but I have failed to properly discuss him and the odd coincidence, or almost co-incidence, of his having vanished just two days before Rema did. So, actually, most likely not a “coincidence.” In retrospect I feel confident that the seeds of tragedy were sown in what I had originally misperceived as a (kind of) light comedy of errors.
a. A secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology
When I first met Harvey just over two years ago, he was twenty-six years old, and for nine years had carried a diagnosis of schizo-typal personality disorder. He lived at home with his mother, had been treated successively, though never (according to his mother) successfully, by eleven different psychiatrists, two Reichian psychotherapists, three acupuncturists, a witch, and a lifestyle coach. Additionally Harvey had a history of heavy alcohol use, with a penchant for absinthe, which lent him a certain air of declining, almost cartoonish, aristocracy.
Harvey’s mother had called me after reading an article of mine peripherally about R. D. Laing. In my unintentionally lengthy conversation with her, with me practically pinned against the wall of some insufferably track-lit Upper East Side coffee