There were so many ways to go over the Falls, whether in a barrel or a book or in a body. When she was a child she used to especially like a certain series of illustrated books where every chapter or so was punctuated by an ink line illustration. She read these books as if they were tunnels where each illustration was a glimpse of light before you burrowed back under. It was like when you tarried too long underwater and had to pump your legs and pull the water down from overhead in long strokes behind you in order to surface. Breathless, the upper world seemed miraculous, a place of impossible beauty beyond the blue page of the water, too dazzling to look at for long.

Tunnels in her own or any body likewise led to impossibly bright vistas.

In retrospect she realized that the illustrations in the children's classics were almost surely tied to some episode or chapter but she knew she never really saw them as such. Instead they seemed another story in each story, wordless and isolate, as secretive as icebergs.

You could fall through the world in any book really. That was the point of the rabbit hole that Alice fell through, an image so obvious she always found the story tiresome although girls were supposed to like it. There were times sometimes when she found herself reading a scientific journal in the same way she read as a girl, each figure and illustration an inner landscape, like lovers entwined in a blue and white field of waves.