Bruno had understood—when he fell in love with a young man, when they bought a house together, when he agreed to children (one child at least)—that his life would become narrower and deeper, fewer trips to Europe, more moments of surprising headlong love. He had never imagined that family life would mean this: a visit to an indoor German-themed waterpark in Galveston, Texas. The fog had done it. They were headed to a location called Schlitterbahn, where there was an artificial river, for their river-obsessed son.

“You’ll feel at home,” said Ernest consolingly. “Being German-themed yourself.”

“Darling, I’m German-flavored. German-scented. Only my mother.”

“A mother counts double,” said Ernest.

Bruno inclined his head toward their son—born to a surrogate, with an anonymous donor egg—in the back seat. They had forbidden him video games, so the boy had fallen in thrall to a pocket calculator, which he carried everywhere, calculating nothing: he could count, reliably, to six. “Well,” Bruno said.

“I mean, your mother,” Ernest said. “Your particular mother.”

But that was something Bruno and their son had in common. Bruno had an adoptive German-born mother, and a presumably English biological mother who had left him at a public library in Nottingham, England. Not in the book deposit, as he liked to claim, but in the ladies’ room. In this way Bruno and the boy had the same mother: Anonymous. As in anthologies of poetry, she was the most prolific in human history. This particular Anonymous—Anonymous Nottingham—had left him behind like a beseeching letter to strangers; his parents had adopted him; his parents had divorced; his mother had brought him to America. That was his provenance. He cataloged manuscripts for an auction house in Houston, other people’s beseeching letters, other people’s diaries. Provenance was everything and nothing. The point was not to stay from whence you came, but to move along spectacularly and record every stop.

Still, he did hate the seaside. His beloved worked as a PR person for a technology company that specialized in something called cloud services, but Bruno was a person of paper, and the ocean was his enemy. The seaside turned books blowsy and loose. It threw sand everywhere. Its trashy restaurants left you blemished, oil-spotted. It drowned children, according to Bruno’s mother. She had few fears, but drowning was one, and she had handed it down to her only son, like an ancestral christening gown that every generation must be photographed in.

The fog made them drive slowly, as though not to break their car upon it. Down on the beach a wedding party walked toward them: bride, groom, six blue-clad bridesmaids, two men in tuxes, all of them overweight, one whippet-thin photographer walking backward. In the lactic light they looked peculiarly buoyant on the sand. Above them, a line of large khaki birds flew parallel to the ocean, heads ducked to avoid the clouds.