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ran over his face from the pressure of the air bags exploding and he could not see to turn on the radio. But he could reach the lock of the hatch, and when it fell open the barrel only half filled with water.
    Cindee and Sam walked to the pay phone beside the rail. They stopped as Sam felt his pockets for a quarter. “You are such a sonofabitch,” Cindee said.
    Sam turned his back on her and looked out at the water. He thought he saw something, and pointed. Cindee leaned forward over the rail. Sam climbed the rail and stood on it, shading his eyes and staring. Nothing. Just water glinting in the sun. Cindee reached over and pushed behind Sam’s knees. He looked down wildly, as he toppled. Sam grabbed for the rail as he fell but he had too much momentum to stop himself and he swept by, his chin hitting the lip of concrete beneath the rail. She watched as he hit the water, making a huge splash. She thought she saw his face staring upward for an instant and then he disappeared in the current.
    Cindee wondered again that that could have just happened, but it had. She stood clutching the rail and stared at the water and the falls and all that mist. Thenshe walked back to the pay phone to call 911 and report another drowning beneath the falls.
    Lester pulled himself out and stood heaving and shivering on the riverbank. Every time he shivered his flesh rippled like a waterbed through his wet T-shirt. He wiped the blood from his face and pushed the barrel back into the current and watched it float away, filling with water through the open hatch. He lay back on the riverbank and looked at the sky.
    This was in 1997.

When Cindee and Sam had first met they were very young and not conscious of their beauty. In those days she was disconcerted by admiration, found it suspect and threatening. In large groups—at church, for instance, when they both still went—they drew glances from everyone. It would not last. They knew that even then. The attention was not a function of their substance, she thought, and was meaningless. But she was wrong. Beauty is of the essence, is evidence of what lies beneath, and it bleeds into what lies beneath: either way, the beautiful are or become a certain way. They feel and think and act like beautiful people. They can easily be identified even by the blind, or over the telephone.
    Later, after he was dead, she remembered what he had looked like, what she had looked like, in various mirrors in motel rooms and apartments around the prairie. She recalled sitting astride him and staring athis neck, taut, like cable under load. She recalled watching him watch her in the ugly large and plastic-framed mirror in that furnished apartment they had rented. The rural Manitoba rental market being what it is, there wasn’t often much beauty in the linoleum and wood-panelled rooms they had lived in. But they could have sold tickets to the sight of them dressing in the morning.

INTERPOSITION
    In her neighbourhood she was as much a fixture as the
caserne de pompiers;
when she’d walk to a café, barks and whistles followed her like she was the sausage truck. Her daughter was nine years old and had thick black hair and long limbs like a marionette; on the street mother and child were constantly assailed by old women and street cleaners with their respective exclamations of approval. Mother and daughter bore these nuisances with equal equanimity and perfect poise. The child’s name was Giselle and she understood very well why she was fussed over.
    The child’s father was Leonard, an engineer who had studied at MIT and then returned home to France with his American girlfriend in tow. It’s okay, my family will adore you and even if things are a little cool right at first, who cares, let’s just have some fun and enjoy ourselves.Which is the sort of thing young men are prone to saying, for the first six months.
    Paris is expensive, there is no escaping this. Tourists shake their heads at the ten-dollar sandwiches and