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By Root 616 0

movable books on the dining table. The three of them fell into a discussion of paper engineering – pivot points, rocker arms, angle folds, closed tents, wheels, and fulcrums. In her face, a transformation, a restoration worthy of one of her magical books – complete fulfillment, as if she'd been waiting decades for just this single afternoon of conversation – as William and his father sat with their teacups teetering excitedly in their laps, bearing avid witness to her life's work. After they left, this enravishment lasted for some hours before beginning to fade. By the time the shadows had grown between the trees, Annie had taken to her room, subdued. I never again saw that same pleasure in her face.

Jean and Marina sat looking into the fire, surrounded by the smell of damp wool and turpentine.

– Later, William's father helped me find my parents and my sister … but they had already died, in Fohrenwald …

For better or for worse, said Marina, slowly rising from her chair, love is a catastrophe.

Whenever Avery came down from Quebec, Marina and Jean greeted him with a lovingly prepared feast, which he received gratefully: pies, sweet and savoury, soups and stews made of vegetables from the marsh, pumpkin mashed and baked with butter and maple syrup, served hot, with cream. Afterwards, they spent the night around Marina's table, listening to Avery's stories.

Once, while walking in the woods above the river, Avery had met a young man, a teenager, who was helping his uncles build pylons for the dam. Avery watched him running between the trees in a pattern, endlessly, the same course.

– He saw me watching, said Avery, and came over to me without embarrassment, on the contrary, lit from within with urgency.

‘I'm going to be a race driver,’ he told me. ‘I won't always be pouring concrete. Someday I'll have enough money to buy my own car.’

He looked at me a moment and decided I would understand.

‘There are drivers who dare death – those are the ones who won't last. Then there are the drivers who respect death – those are the ones who hardly ever win.’ He began to sway back and forth, following with his eyes the circuit he'd just run. ‘And there are drivers,’ he continued, ‘who have so ingested – ingérer, gorger, s'empiffrer – death that they no longer have a taste for it. These are the ones who are already ghosts.’

‘How do you know this?’ I asked him.

The young man in the forest looked alien, mushroom white, his eyes an artificial blue.

‘Are the ghosts the ones who win?’ I asked.

The young man laughed. ‘Remember my name,’ he said. ‘Remember Villeneuve!’ And he ran off, one arm outstretched over the steep edge of the gorge.

Jean and Avery lay together on the floor of the Clarendon flat. It was a cold autumn night, a rainy wind. Marina had painted paper lampshades for Jean, in copper, madder, and gold, which gave Jean in her living room the feeling of sitting in the last minutes of sunset. Avery reached over and closed Jean's book.

– There's a new project … A new kind of project … I want you to come with me, said Avery.

– You look so worried, said Jean.

– It's far away.

Avery took Jean's hand and opened it, palm up, in his lap.

– Please close your eyes …

Your thumb is the Atlantic, your smallest finger, the Pacific. Your fingertips are Egypt, and the heel of your hand is Africa … Your heart line is the Arabian desert, your fate line is the river Nile …

Avery and Jean were married in the house on the marsh. It was a civil ceremony with two guests to act as witnesses, Marina's neighbours to the east, who'd kept a kind eye on her in her widowhood. Jean watched through the window as they arrived, their boots trailing out a brown path behind them across the marsh, through the snow. They left their woollen scarves and leather gloves to dry on the radiator, and Jean, standing with Avery, waiting for the ceremony to begin, committed the sight of these to memory: symbols of kindness. Is there no one you wish to invite? Marina had asked, and Jean, in her aloneness, had felt ashamed. Never mind, said Marina, we have