I announce this with bravado, remembering Gerard had a violin last year and shared with me the outrageous stories he makes up to charm customers: it was handmade by a Portuguese traveller, or it came from a short-lived artisanal German workshop and is made of rare black walnut, or its origin is unknown but possibly from the time of that great Cremonese who died when I was ten, though of course Gerard won’t go as far as to say Stradivari made the instrument. He likes, rather, to imply that it came from a secondary talent somewhere in the greater man’s orbit.

I also recall how much, last year, I liked hearing Gerard mention that secondary talent. I feel an affinity with an anonymous man who is not a hero, not a famed miracle worker, just a competent tradesman working behind the scenes. No famous museum or stratospheric prodigy covets his work. Instead, it lies unheralded in Gerard’s dark little shop around the corner from the street that has been named with such reluctance after myself.

I wish nothing at all had been named after me.

—

MY BRAVADO ABANDONS ME in the small hours. “Have you fallen asleep?…Sophie?”

“Mpph…”

“Soph…”

“Huh. Now you’re the lonely one? I was here by myself all evening pining for a story while you were off someplace. Now shut up and lemme sleep.”

If Sophie truly wanted to hear a story, a real story and not just a sensational piece of news about the dragonfly girls, or Hangman Hawley, my brutal mentor whom I’d like to forget, I’d tell her about the river. Isn’t it amazing that the same river passing below us now—south of the park and Boulevard de Maisonneuve and Saint Catherine and all the old, cobbled streets of the old Iroquois way—is the very same river it was when I knew it so long ago? In spite of what the river has experienced: every crisis, every freeze and thaw, every passing canoe and every sunken suicide, it remains recognizable. The river’s form might have widened a little here, narrowed somewhat there, but anyone who knew it in 1759 would know it instantly now, as I know it, upon sight.

Back then, I battled with the river more than I did with men—I was convinced the river found me unpalatable. It spat me out on its demented ebb-tide—it guzzled rain and swelled its current evermore until my slightest manoeuvre took ten times longer than it should’ve.

Drizzle infected the banks with unease.