Atmospheric Disturbances. Rivka Galchen

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