The Waters & the Wild

course of my practice, I have listened to my patients grapple with an array of astonishing disclosures. One patient, an analyst-in-training, was informed in his early thirties that he was the son not of his father but of his uncle. Another patient, in her late twenties, discovered that she was not an only child, as she had always been told, but had an older brother, profoundly retarded, institutionalized upstate since childhood. An older woman discovered that her husband of twenty-nine years had maintained for the last thirty-five an apartment for his male lover.

As stupefying as these revelations are in the moment, most startling is how little they alter the fabric of a patient’s life. It is as though such a disclosure plunges the recipient into a maze of clichés, bewildering and dark, but with a single issue, inevitably depositing him right back where he started in his ordinary life. Once articulated, the familiar phrases (“blindsided!” “out of the blue!”) dissipate their power, and the “world turned upside down” reveals itself to be nothing other than the same old world. Even when cataclysms ensue (divorce, abandonment, flight), they blaze and flare out against the background of a world impassive and unchanged. Every patient, without exception, says, “I am certain that somehow, on some level, I always knew.”

In the early weeks of a treatment, the period when I take extensive notes on the sessions at the end of the working day, how difficult it is to recall the substance and sequence of what a patient has so recently said, in some cases only an hour or two before. The story Béatrice told, however, repeats itself to me unbidden, in perfect faithfulness. What had I learned then, speaking with her? What accounted for the sense I had, as Béatrice was speaking, that the details of her story had only given substance to something already there, a shape or shadow hovering always at the edge of sight? Béatrice had merely directed my gaze toward it, that motionless figure in a clearing, bundled in its sleeping bag.

—

Miriam was asleep when I finally climbed the stairs that night, so I undressed in the dark. In my narrow bed, I waited for my eyes to adjust, but the room retained its perfect blackness, though the chirring of insects and the song of a night bird filled our little room. After some hours, Miriam got up and groped out into the hallway. Through the wall separating our room from the WC, I could hear a little torrent of urine, followed by the toilet’s gush. Returning, she kicked the foot of the bed, and with a sleepy “Putain!” she climbed back in. Almost immediately after she settled herself back under the sheet, her breathing roughened and grew regular, and she was asleep again.

What did I think then? That some new knowledge, some new understanding, beckoned to me, pleading its case? Surely I had grasped at once the import of Béatrice’s account: I was not merely someone Miriam had encountered, a dalliance, a summer’s love. Whoever I had been in Miriam’s eyes or against her skin, in the shadows of her soul I must have been a faceless doctor or, rather, a composite of many doctors, the doctors who had the ambiguous honor of having restored her to life. I was for her not myself but a compound ghost: at once an avatar of her past and the doorkeeper to a future—a future she had taken painstaking and unflinching steps to decline.

I listened to Miriam’s breathing. Had this person, had this body asleep beside me, changed? Was it marked now with the seal of some inescapable obligation? If she believed another doctor, or other doctors, had saved her life, was I required to take up that role? Or was that obligation, as Béatrice had suggested, nothing more than the sweet constraint of love itself? Perhaps I thought that whatever obligation may have existed had now been dissolved by Béatrice’s very revelation. Or if not by Béatrice’s revelation, by Miriam’s decision to keep her past hidden. Her religious vocation, if that was the word for it, had not been a revelation, not a fateful encounter with the Love whereof Herbert spoke. It was a bid for rescue, a salvage operation, incomplete and uncertain. What if my unwitting participation had endangered us both?

But I do not know what thoughts troubled that darkness, otherwise filled with the hush of wings, the singular voice of the night bird. How unwilling the mind is to make an account of itself. What I remember: only the bird’s solitary voice, and in the bed beside mine, the regular, roughened breathing.

In time a gray glow filled the window. There would be no more sleep for me. I rose and slipped from the room, pulling on my clothes and shoes in the hallway to keep from waking Miriam. Outside, the little walkway brought me over the milldam, and I climbed the far slope up to the pastures. Finding at last the lane Jean-Marie had led us down when we were moving the cattle, I set out between the hedgerows, traversing the fields.

I did not believe I had walked very far, certainly not the nine kilometers separating the mill from the town of Leuvray, but there it was, the Leuvray church perched on the brow of its hill under a blue sky, buttresses slender as rigging, the bell tower leaning against the racing clouds, the building’s silhouette as lumbering and weightless as a lightship riding at anchor. At the hill’s skirt, among the newish outlying houses, the lane turned into a road. I crossed an athletic field and climbed toward the center of town. On the main street, a solitary, aproned man was cranking down a café awning. The café looked to be the only establishment open in town.

—

“Someone is up early,” said the proprietor of the café. The awning’s scalloped edges snapped in the wind.

I was passing through? he asked, drying cups on his apron.

A double coffee? Coming right