Swallow Wahweap: Drink Bitter Water: A Dark Little Fictional Book of Murder and My Last Year at New York Medical School

By Sarah Feather West

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 15, 2000
• ISBN: 9781465327000

Sarah Feather West

Sarah Feather West is a Lakotan native of Swallow Wahweap, in the western United States. She is currently a surgeon. Her great-great-grandmother was of the largest tribe of the Nadowessioux, forced west by the Ojibwa with their French guns. But somewhere along her branch of the tree there is a little Cheyenne from a raiding party, some Wahpekute, some Sisseton. She is more Dakota than Lakota, more Santee than Teton. In Swallow Wahweap, she is believed to be pure Lakotan, and her father says that is close enough.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Throughout the day, there was the mercenary and voluptuous smell of overripe Anjou pears. Too sweet, too ripe, the flesh was already degraded, but still on the hungered-for side across the line from rotten. The guilty odor hung in the dim air of the marble entrance hall, scintillating against the deep red walls and the ancient chandeliers, after Alexander Tiller received a wooden crate postmarked in the south of France. The musk of pears came with the crate, and it was less substantial than the plain bare woman he had loved, but he recognized the straightforward carnality. Within the crate, there were stacks of yellowed and frayed papers, each taking on the scent of the broken fruit box.

When he heard the doorbell this morning, the elderly man had set aside his first edition volume of Chatterton’s poems, and his second-best snuff. He straightened up his slim frame. It was a fine morning in Manhattan with the usual street clatter far below his large apartment. Normally, he would stand for a moment at his window looking far down on other people’s daily hurry, separate and conscious of it. And then he would have proceeded languidly to the door, to turn away whoever might stand there. For no one reached his door these past thirty years, except in error.

This morning, however, he had been waiting for the package. And he could not change the faint disorder in his usually impeccably quiet face. He sat immobile on a delicate pale yellow settee with mahogany claw feet, embroidered with tiny sprays of spring buds. Alexander Tiller was drowning in the old charcoal pinstriped suit that he had put on at daybreak.

It was the first time in twenty years that he had risen before ten in the morning. But he had been waiting six months for the call from his lawyer, Mr. Xanthippe. Mr. Tiller had instructed the lawyer, who was as elderly as he was after serving Alexander’s family for three generations, to reach him the moment there was any news.

Mr. Xanthippe had encountered this carton addressed to him this morning. It was rougher than he had expected. The clumsy painted wooden box had once contained some local pears, and the name of the Marseilles farmer had only been partly painted out. The lawyer, who was lyric by nature, thought that he could still sniff the pears’ last scent.

A pear is a loose woman, assured of being kept, at least in her youth, Mr. Xanthippe thought. Then he wondered for a moment why not mangos, the taste of complete dissipation. Are we so ascetic that there must be a drop of bitterness in the fruit we keep? A scene from his youth shot through his consciousness, and then dissolved itself into a kaleidoscope of flesh until he focused back on the rough crate. And with this focus came the thought that mangos are eaten. Mangos are immediate surrender. He smiled as he thought of it, and of the woman from so long ago. Immediate surrender, he repeated to himself again.

As he looked back at his secretary over the package, he thought rashly of papaya. Papaya, the working class fruit that can be dressed up in a pie or peeled before it is ripe, but never aspires above a semi-detached house.

Mr. Xanthippe’s secretary was one of the long line of the dark-haired, coral lipped girls from Long Island or the Bronx who had worked for the lawyer over his long career. She was late and hurrying to apply her makeup. This one was named Lorelei, but when Mr. Xanthippe had asked her, she had never heard the poem.

Didn’t even have a propah mail-ah, she commented disapprovingly to the wooden shambles on her desk. She paused between blue swipes at her eyelids, licking her teeth free of lipstick. The wintry attorney had looked at her first with a faint look of dissatisfaction, and then his shoulders dropped and his face became subdued again.

That’s good of you to notice, he breathed, in his soft voice. And so perhaps you could deliver it.

Lorelei wrinkled her ovine nose and gingerly approached the rough package. She was paid too much to disagree.

Mr. Xanthippe said, closing the door to the office suite that she had left ajar in her flurried entry, The address is on your desk. Look under Tiller, Alexander. The last Tiller, in fact. Any other Tillers in the files should be destroyed.

It will take a while, the secretary complained, trying to decide how to touch the crate without allowing the splintering wood to touch her fuschia jacket, which had been guaranteed to look just like silk.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it should take you through lunch, Mr. Xanthippe replied, and grinning to himself he made for the inner office.

What’s in it anyway? Lorelei demanded. She was still assessing how she could carry this countryside shrapnel surrounding the musty papers that were visible through the open slats. The attorney had already closed the door to his inner sanctum, so she did not hear him answer, Regret.

The secretary called her friends first, to arrange a long lunch. She knew that she wouldn’t be missed. And then she lugged the awkward parcel for eleven blocks to the doorman of Mr. Tiller’s building. She would charge Mr. Xanthippe for cab fare. He never asked for a receipt.

For a Mr. Tillman or something. From my boss, Mr. Xanthippe, she droned, shoving the crate toward the caped doorman.

Yes, he murmured. Mr. Tiller has been waiting for a package.

But Lorelei had already fluffed her hair and started down the block. Jesus H. Christ! the doorman heard her squeal as she retreated, brushing furiously at her short skirt.

After the doorman had left the package with him, Alexander Tiller moved past the somber etchings down a long crimson hallway to a small sofa in his library. He finally sat under a window onto Fifth Avenue. There was a very distant sound of metal deforming other metal down on the street below. It sounded so final by the time it reached his ears that he did not bother to look down on to the street. Alexander had thought that he would want to sit and look at the crate once it finally arrived. But he discovered that the packaging meant nothing to him.

He took an old knife and easily pried the old wood away from the papers as though he was slicing into the flesh of the fruit it once contained. Then he sat back against his sofa, using the early morning light to read with total concentration. He did not stop to wipe away the fine dust that rained down over his face and chest from the fusty papers that were included in the wooden box.

When he set them down again, it was late afternoon, and his hand shook as he spilled them onto his coffee table. He went into the kitchen, and searched around behind his untouched china for scissors. Then he went into the library and cut a large square of the finely embroidered fabric from the center of his beautiful lemon silk settee. The old scissors were too stiff to cut through the embroidered flowers, so he cut around them, using both hands to work the old shears. Alexander made up a second package of a few papers he took from a locked drawer in his study, and wrapped them in the cloth torn from his furniture. He put the lot into the remains of the crate, and addressed it back to Mr. Xanthippe in his precise script.

Mr. Tiller took his usual walk down Fifth Avenue to the boat basin at Seventy-second Street. There, he rested on the bench where, some decades before, he had met the girl. He didn’t think about that first day at all. He had already thought about it every day for thirty years. He looked at the trees, recognizing each of them in its proper place. And he looked at the sky as though he would be tested afterward, noting each cloud and its particulars. After sitting for half an hour in the faint chill of an early spring day, watching a few middle-aged men sailing their mechanical boats around the basin, he rose and walked away from the bench without looking back.

When he reached the other side of the basin, he turned very slightly, and squinted through his wire-rimmed glasses. His white hair hung still in a perfect widow’s peak, capping his narrow form and the deep red bow of his petulant upper lip. The bench was empty, but he pictured a faint memory of a girl with calf muscles as sharply delineated as a boy’s. He had thought of them as her Giambattista Tiepolo legs, the exuberant muscles still somehow womanly. He briefly saw her once again on the end of the bench, relaxing in the hot sun in a dingy shirt and dark running shorts.

Alexander Tiller walked to his usual tobacconist and with a nod of his head bought some of the proprietor’s Cohibas, kept under the counter and claimed to be postmarked directly from Eduardo Rivera. The tobacconist inquired if he would also like some of his every day Fuente Fuente Opus X, and he affably shook his head in the negative. Mr. Tiller returned to his apartment on Seventy-ninth and nodded to the doorman, who snapped a salute to this correct silent man. Inside, he methodically lit one of the Cohibas. He went into the wide snooker room beyond his library and took down his great-grandfather’s English hunting rifle. It had been recently oiled. He had choreographed this moment one year ago in Greece, and it had been his nighttime habit to review it in his mind, practicing.

Substituting the muzzle for the cigar, he settled on to the green felt of the billiards table and tasted the metal of the gun for a moment. He looked into the angle where the wall met the ceiling and his childless great-uncle had commissioned a fresco of Greek youth, wrestling.

Alexander had only ever lain there once before, when she had laughed and pulled him down onto the green cloth almost three decades before. But he had not touched her. Now, he turned his eyes, and caught a glimpse of the head of an impala ram that his grandfather had killed in Africa. The fluted turns of the fierce horns seemed very clear to him.

Time was becalmed. This particular moment would continue endlessly until he was driven to madness by his inability to move away from himself and this time when he was fully himself.

His mind flickered like a hide under swarming flies as he pulled the trigger.

There was a silence, and then a roar, and a tuft of his white hair, unbloodied and as soft as a rabbit’s foot, sailed into the corner pocket.

When his housekeeper, Josephina, came that afternoon, she did as she had been told. Mr. Tiller had warned her nearly a month ago that one day soon, she would have some extraordinary duties. The signal would be a ribbon on the outside door handle so that she need not go in to the billiards room. He would spare her that shock. And when she had arrived this afternoon, there had been a yellow scarf hanging on his apartment door.

He had paid her well for her duties in advance. First, she sent his package to Mr. Xanthippe before cleaning the entire set of rooms and then calling the police. She left his papers from the south of France undisturbed, as he had requested, with the letter he had received on top.

February 20, Galanti

Dear Sir,

As you never told me your name, I hope that this will reach you. I have put down the address of your lawyer, Mr. Xanthippe, because his name was on the card that you sent to me with your recent letter and check. Thank you kindly for the generous funds to restore Galanti in exchange for the sundries it contains. I hope that you will find them interesting for such a great sum of money. As I told you on the boat from Santorini, the papers are years old, mostly bills and some fanciful stories by a young girl named Sarah Feather West who came for a summer to live in this chateau.

Our lawyers established that the chateau was held in the name of a man named Bartolomeo Giacometti, who died some twenty years ago without heirs. My title has been declared legitimate in the local court, according to the laws of Provence. As you requested to know, there have been no known visitors to Galanti in the past thirty years.

Other than that, despite your generosity and kind request, I am unable to tell you very much at all about Sarah Feather West or the recent history of the chateau. It appears that the girl was only here for one summer, three decades ago.

The door had been unlocked all these years, and the chateau itself is in very poor repair. So I can not guarantee that these papers are complete. But I am sending you what we could find. I’m sorry that they will probably disappoint you. There are the stories that I mentioned, and a paper figuring the costs of running something called head of cattle. And we found a postcard in pencil from Foxford, Ireland that says, Certainly, Sarah. Swallow Wahweap, Thomas All are forwarded to Mr. Xanthippe.

As you asked, I am sending all the contents of the house except for furniture. please find some few hundred pages, a yellow scarf, and a straw hat in which some mice were discovered nesting. I have cleaned it as well as I could, and I have found the mice a new home in my hedge.

Should you ever find yourself in the south of France, kind sir, please know you are always welcome to visit Galanti.

With deepest regards and appreciation,

Flora Michel

ONE

Alexander only once deliberately slept in someone else’s bed. And then his brother flushed him out and shouted filthy threats for his treachery. Apart from hotels or as a guest in other people’s homes, he hasn’t got a taste for the art of finding other people’s mattresses.

Alexander can’t describe what was so delicious in his brother’s room. Perhaps something in dark wood with heavy drapes, his younger brother’s coy smile. And Alexander has never slept in Sylvie’s bed. Sylvie J. Prier only has a blanket that she rolls up and stows on a shelf against the wall, or sometimes she just sleeps naked on the floor. She has so many nightmares that she always wants to sleep in different places where she has never dreamed. There is something dangerous and unnatural about sleeping too many nights on the same ground.

Or maybe it’s because the Prier girls have the Go-Fever, can’t stay put. The tribe, or what is left of it in Swallow Wahweap, was always nomadic, raiding ferociously, and proud of it. Sylvie has a sister named Beatrice, who has this obsession too. Of the symptoms of Go-Fever, hers is the more practical. She has slept in every fine hotel in Manhattan, and she cultivates friends in Long Island and the Hamptons according to their beds. When she calls her parents, home on the Lazy J ranch, out west near Swallow Wahweap, they always ask her, where are you dreaming now? Her midtown Manhattan studio apartment has no plants, and her doormen keep the keys. And so the Prier girls sleep wherever they can, and never restfully.

Beatrice and Sylvie are different kinds of gypsies of the world. Sylvie can’t sleep among her own possessions, and Beatrice seeks out others’ possessions to surround her as she sleeps. Beatrice and

Sylvie have the Go-Fever; there is no comfortable bed for long without sagebrush, there is no safe destination without acreage. They have a separate desperation for the possibilities that used to surround them: the mighty sky with room enough for rolling clouds and still yet desperately blue to the far ends of the visible earth, the earned boots and shiny honest buckles, scrub oak, monarch butterflies, elk, and Indian paintbrush splashing over meadows toward the strong rivers chanting old war cries. Swallow Wahweap is defiant now that all is lost.

Coming out of Swallow Wahweap, the Prier girls could be anyone else. Nothing is expected of the faltering native, approaching higher society on bloody knees to be civilized, sanctified. The sorrow is that they cannot be what they were. Forget about kissing granite, knowing how to skin a rattlesnake. They have met the eastern quota, left the red rock and the sagebrush. In the East, this is enough. Sylvie and Beatrice could fail the rest of their lives and someone would assure them that they have already triumphed by leaving the land, embracing Opportunity. They are being domesticated and refined, a powerful goal with a ruinous price. There is a different standard. They are few and different, and in the East they are weak. They are the last of Swallow Wahweap.

Sylvie’s tales of buffalo streaming through Hayden Valley, dewlaps, dusters, justice contingent on long rifles are no part of what she should become. And that is Swallow Wahweap. Sylvie and Beatrice Prier are not pure Lakota. They’re not even half-breeds.

In the East, Sylvie’s olive features look Jewish to some people, Mediterranean to others. And yet she’s light, with fine hair and a broad face, and practically no eyebrows. Her great-great-grandmother was of the largest tribe of the Nadowessioux, forced west by the Ojibwa with their French guns. But somewhere along her branch of the tree there is a little Cheyenne from a raiding party, some Wahpekute, some Sisseton. They are more Dakota than Lakota, more Santee than Teton. In Swallow Wahweap, Beatrice is believed to be pure Lakotan, and her father said that was close enough. But the Priers are their own self-reliant nation, their own fierce clan.

Their mother likes to say that every native nation has met in the Prier bedroom, and that her daughters are the international result, the United Nations of American Indians and American immigrants in one body. And the tribe of Swallow Wahweap includes those Lazy J men that eat and fuck and smoke hand-rolled cigars and sleep next to their horse in a downpour with their shit kickers on. They built Swallow Wahweap and the Lazy J Ranch with the Prier family. Together they sustain themselves.

Beatrice and Sylvie’s great-great grand daddy Hubert was a German boy who was too much trouble to keep somewhere in Bavaria in a dark boat on an unlit river with an enormous violent man he called Der Rabenvater. So he was sent to bust horses and ride out for some family in Luckenbach, Texas. He must have had the Go-Fever too, or like every John Wayne character, he‘d rather walk for himself than ride for the Topaz. He ended up around the Tetons and Mount Moran one winter without any food, a dangerously stolen Appaloosa, and the ability to track a deer only if it had been dangerously wounded.

One day he was sitting over a little hot pot, breathing in the sulfur, warming up some in the steam. Mostly, he was terrified, deciding how to die. Starvation or gunshot? It had become an equal decision. He said that he looked into the lodgepole pines and saw a beautiful woman in doeskin, floating down toward him.

Great-grandmother Rosa Prier says that this part is a lie. Her mother, who was a distant relative of Sitting Bull but also had some Ute or Paiute in her, came over to the hot pot and saw some young and skimpy boy fast asleep who couldn’t’a swung a coyote over more than a wire thin lick.

The two of them homesteaded northeast of there, and Sylvie’s great-great grand daddy became a pretty fair shot. From Rosa’s stories, it sounds as though Hubert beat his wife every single day.

Nobody remembers anything about this Lakota woman, not even Rosa, because her mother died with a skull fracture when Rosa was four. Something crystalline seeped from the back of her head into the earth all day long in the vegetable garden. And Rosa toddled around her in a widening circle, weeping and laughing because she didn’t know if it was bad or better.

The Priers believe that their great-great-grandmother did not teach Hubert what the word Wahweap means in Ute when she named the whole great territory around the cabin Swallow Wahweap. The name and the land were beautiful to him. Perhaps he believed it was two kinds of birds.

Wahweap is stale water, bitter water, and the taste of sorrow and of tears. It‘s alkaline soil and droughty horses. And when they came through for the mining company to make the company map, the name was carried on and made official. Sylvie thinks that even now, coiled in the bark of a birch tree in some sacred place, that the name of the land makes her great-great grandmother laugh and shake her leaves.

When she was fourteen, great-grandmother Rosa and her husband moved down within Swallow Wahweap after she had her first baby so that her children could go to the only school for five hundred miles. Maybe also to escape Hubert, who drank and fought and beat, but loved his land. They moved their things by hand out of Horsethief Canyon, the baby on top of each load.

When they first went down toward the southern side of Swallow Wahweap, the Cheyenne who had been their neighbors, fifty acres west of Hubert’s place, told them that the buffalo invented their humps to carry rations with them when they went to that poor valley. Nobody but a couple of wounded hunters and trappers at that time wanted to settle there. Most people passed through because the soil was dry and so it was an excellent place to cache furs and goods between trading. But like anywhere west, now there are shops and museums and widening asphalt roads through the sagebrush.

When Sylvie was eight years old, developers put up two wooden posts outside the Lazy J Ranch, to survey a new project. And she took a picture of the crags and scrub oak behind the two poles. Sylvie hung it on a wall and called it Doorway to Nowhere. Now, standing in the same place you can’t see a single native plant.

Everything is imported and landscaped. And the men in the dark sweat-stained shirts, trimming the foreign shrubs, are a mixture of the original keepers of their vanished land.

The new houses outside of Swallow Wahweap are palatial, and built too high up in the elk’s foothills. Each year, mudslides wipe out their expensive retaining walls, and the deer come down in winter to feed on their fertilized bushes. Late fawns warm themselves on the tennis courts until they are chased away by the honking cars and the motion-activated outdoor lights. Or they stand, transfixed by the brilliant traffic on their old deer trails, their necks always thrown back proudly as they are cast off to the side of the road.

The Bureau of Land Management bought up nearly all the open land, and now the creeks are fouled from the cattle, who grazed the land down to dust. Abandoned sheep roam in some of the canyons. The last mountain lion died when Sylvie was ten. Nobody wanted the ratty hide.

Alexander Tiller cannot understand why the Prier girls only smoke cigars on the fence by the mooseponds outside of Swallow Wahweap, up by the Gunsight River in Horsethief Canyon where their great-great-granddaddy Hubert used to live.

My dear, either you smoke cigars or you don’t, he once said in his spiritless manner. I don’t mind either way, but no one only smokes cigars in one location.

Other places, he pointed out, are as still and contemplative. But not as funereal, Sylvie told him. Like the best man smoking outside after a wedding, by that moosepond they mark a shameful passage. The West is gone and exists gloriously only in their minds.

And so Beatrice and Sylvie have the war party Go-Fever, probably because they each have two hearts, the native western heart kicking like a calf in a squeeze chute to make room for the new.

It wasn’t until the third year of medical school that Sylvie realized with relief how many other people have two hearts. So many natives of some other land live in the East, like Joseph, an exile in a place of alienation. They come to Egypt to unwillingly become Egyptian, to survive in the emerging world. But they keep their original hearts fertile, remembering the journey into exile, their pits and places of ignominy and calamity. Out East so many natives of some other place are amphibious, between parents, between races, between countries. Before that day of realization, Sylvie was jealous of the societies in school that seemed to neatly pigeonhole what each person was. She wanted to be Korean, or Jewish. She wanted a group of her tribe in the East to show the world that there are more than two. She wanted her Friday afternoon to be a meeting of the club of Swallow Wahweap. But Sylvie is nothing like her sister Beatrice, and they are like no one else on earth.

And the little tribe that works the land of Swallow Wahweap one by one extinguishes its own flame. Too many of them unable to leave the land or continue on in its transfigured shadow, all gone.

Sylvie sleeps with a piece of Hubert’s wooden shack, now long destroyed by an avalanche. It was strung on a necklace of juniper berries by one of her aunts in Swallow Wahweap in a Blessing Way, and sometimes it keeps her from having nightmares. Beatrice has no amulet, and still searches among all others’ things.

Beatrice Prier, through her Go-Fever, has a steady boyfriend from Cali, Colombia, who has homes all over Manhattan, owned by his business. They keep apartments where you would expect. The new expensive landmark buildings that easterners will respect, but only the immigrants need to purchase. They live in apartments with square walls, no centuries-old warp to the wooden floors. They each have that transparent, inarticulate shade of paint that is only two layers thick.

Beatrice Prier, international attorney at law, surrounds herself in places to sleep. What happiness to be of no place you can admit to or adequately describe, to invent a self and then fiercely inhabit it against constantly changing scenery. Not the happiness of continuing to be yourself, but better than any other alternative. Beatrice is summerwood and Sylvie is the layer laid down by the spring. Sylvie is the one you learn to whittle, unpredictable and generously fissured. Beatrice is the one you polish when you’ve become skillful, and keep. And like a Douglas fir, they keep surrounding themselves with each other, layer by layer the last of the forest trying to grow true.

Swallow Wahweap is gone. And each young generation bred there briefly flickers hope of the life that once was, and then softly lets the wind extinguish them. Eight of Sylvie’s high school classmates by now have committed suicide: the car’s sickening exhaust, the oncoming lane of traffic, pills, razors, the oldest rope in the back of the garage, the shotgun also hanging there, spinning on every substance into a blur of fields, of mountains, of the crushing weight of snow. They have become their own mountain lions with unsalable hides, their own avalanches, weak chests, bad tobacco, rusty spurs, and bucking horses. Or they can hear their own voices without the din of the city, and know their time to go.

Beatrice Prier’s Go-Fever takes her from thing to thing and Sylvie’s from place to place and this keeps them alive in the east. At night, when he listens, Sylvie’s lover Boutré pretends she has a double heartbeat. At home in New York, she naps in her roommate George’s bed. She loves the hunter green flannel duvet cover, the room’s queer light off the Hudson, its other-than-mineness, the possibility of Georgiana’s conquered nightmares. And, of course, at Alexander’s apartment Sylvie sleep in his enormous mahogany four-post bed. He has Tiffany blue sheets and a mattress that feels as deep as the feather beds on her grandparents’ farm.

In the mornings, when Alexander goes for a bath without speaking to Sylvie, she rolls all the covers around her on his side to see if that flank is, as he claims, blank of dreams. Boutré does not have a bed. He has a hammock in his Harlem apartment that is big enough for two, and swings over his collection of African drums.

Sylvie has only ever had two dreams about Alexander. In the first one, soon after she met him in Central Park, he was very old and swimming far out in the ocean. She walked over the strand into the water without removing her clothes, and she swam toward him as he got smaller and smaller and his relatives lined up on the beach, applauding.

Later, she dreamed of him running in Swallow Wahweap. But she woke when her roommate, Beth Anne, came back to the apartment after seeing the sunrise with her psychiatrist. The wobbly doorknob tumbled off and rolled along the wooden floor to the depression in the hallway from the kitchen where crumbs and dust congregate.

Sylvie had dreamed that Alexander saw two babies on a beach and rushed toward them as she stood away. After she woke, she marveled at snow dust on the fire escape. Catching some early sun, it hotly disappeared. How many things were evanescent while she slept; Alexander’s warmth, snow’s chill.

When he arrived at the babies, Sylvie saw they were plastic dolls, but Alexander fell to his knees, slain by their weakness. She could not, awake, have thought of him being so compassionate.

How old was I? he later questioned Sylvie when she told him of the dream. Was I twenty years older in your dreams, too?

But she had not looked at him in the dream, swimming so far away from her that she hoped he was drowning.

I did not look at you, Sylvie said without malice, because you were swimming away so far, so very far away from me that I thought you might be drowning.

Stevie Smith has done it already, he said in his bored voice, and better. You can’t write a poem for copying, dear.

Sylvie does not dream about Boutré, but he dreams about her. Some mornings, she wakes and finds him searching her face, trying to decide if his dreams are true.

She tells him, If you dreamed that someday I’ll leave you, or that I’m dating another man behind your back, believe it. If you dream that I love you, believe that too. Anything else was a lie. He always laughs, but his dreams about her are growing darker, and wilder.

Sometimes they are in a hotel room, and he is attempting to speak, but photographers enter the room and drive him away from Sylvie onto the balcony, where he squeezes his fingers through the cracks in the French doors and tries to wiggle them to signal his love. Once, he said that he managed to push a white sheet through a broken pane, but she only thought he was admitting defeat. Also, Boutré dreams about his mother, cooking for him, at home in Nigeria. Then he speaks another language and Yoruba in his sleep and waves his massive arms over the side of the hammock, as though he is flying or drumming.

Since beginning at New York Medical School three years ago, Sylvie can count at least one hundred other places she has slept. She has drowsed in a chair on call in the Roosevelt Hospital obstetrics ward, on the desk in her laboratory, in the empty bed in the intensive care unit on an overnight shift, in the Plaza Hotel, in an office in the locked psychiatric ward at Harlem Hospital while a young homeless woman could not stop crying outside.

The summer before medical school, Sylvie got a job in Ireland, where she slept with the goats in rock-strewn fields. She slept under a curragh in the rain. She slept while fishing beside canals in long grass, and on a pier that crumbled and nearly sank in heavy rains during the night. And of course she slept indoors. In pubs, in barns, in cheerful little scoured homes and, once, in an abandoned post office with a Catholic priest.

She was traveling in Ireland for Styleways, an American company that develops massive tours. They wanted a route for hundreds of people in buses that would pollute a route with guaranteed culture and a taste of Ireland’s simple charm. She thought of Swallow Wahweap, of the mountains and the wolves talking to the moon with other wolves. And so she began to plot a dull route throughout the west of Ireland for one day a week, and for the other six she fished. Years from now, delighted insular tourists may praise their innovative bus ride that only impacts quaint towns, like Doolin, that were already discovered and destroyed. The trip she designed avoids any genuine niche of provincial Ireland, but goes miles out of its way for a mediocre sandwich in a starving man’s pub.

This was her last summer before she would begin medical school, and she spent it in the snug of the pubs singing old drinking songs, but still getting up early in the morning to fish.

Fishing and skiing are religions that require daily devotions in return for any absolution. Glory