Doctorow used the title of this novel a decade earlier for a very brief tale in Lives of the Poets (1984). In four pages Doctorow has a narrator watch a sinister figure take the body of a drowned boy away form the waterworks. Not only is this prior sketch the germ of the novel, but Doctorow includes it almost word for word in a late chapter of The Waterworks. Here it appears as a nightmare vision of Sartorius, but the narrator wonders if the dream is not a glimpse into "a companion life . . .

running parallel in time." If three or four pages from Lives of the Poets can reappear like a ghost in The Waterworks, perhaps all of Doctorow's stories are still running parallel in time in the mind of their creator.