“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
Welclass="underline" 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 kind of fool — winter and not even a hot drink in my hands or a spiritual temperament to my mind to excuse my presence — and waiting there, exposed to the elements, a part of me vehemently hated the innocent Rema, hated her for taking up my time, for occupying an unclosing preoccupative loop in my mind, but, of course, another part of me loved her, ecstatically, for pretty much the same reasons, with profound gratitude toward her not just for her herself but also for my obsession with her, which rescued me from my unceasing progression of unpunctuated days, because one thing my obsession did, if dizzyingly, was punctuate. And get me out of my apartment, and my habits. And I did occasionally actually see her. And even just that much of Rema, brief sightings of her, would have been worth all my devotion; she’s a finer world.
The pup seemed uninterested in ascending the steps; they didn’t mean to her what they meant to me; we walked on, proverbial man and beast, and then, in the reflective glass of a Korean dry cleaner’s window, overlapping with a faded sign showing a shoulder-padded ’80s woman and with the text Modern women wear white too!, I caught sight of an adorable dog leading an old man whose coat was buttoned up wrong.
Twice now. I needed to look at myself on purpose, I resolved. Not by accident.
I readjusted the buttons of my coat.
I looked again in that reflective glass and saw a more distinguished man.
And it struck me — as if it hadn’t struck me before, or with more particulars than before — to analyze my situation as if it were not my situation but, instead, a patient’s.
This simulation of there being two observers looking at the same problem (my life) without there actually being two observers echoes — though I didn’t realize it at the time — the solution that Tzvi came to in his research into single-Doppler radar retrieval methods. I was deploying Tzvi Gal-Chen’s solutions even before I properly understood them to be his solutions, as if his ideas were already coursing invisibly through my veins, which perhaps they were.
So the plan came to me, as if flooding into my hand from that leash, to do just what I did with my patients. I would accumulate data, do a literature search. Though on exactly what I wasn’t certain. I would simulate the addition of another radar into the equation, if not a perfectly coupled one. There’d be two of us. An I and a me, I might say, if I felt like being cute about it. Like that interrupter Lacan’s changing of the comma to a semicolon in Descartes’ famous formulation, about thinking and being. I think; therefore I am.
That, anyway, was my resolution; or at least that was my hope.