In the locker room they crammed their clothing into a minuscule cubby. Only in a bathing suit did Ernest seem un-American: dark, furred, in a pair of unfashionably short but devastating red swim trunks, a 1960s movie idol from another country. Not a Frankie or a Bobby—a Francesco, a Roberto. “Handsome,” said Bruno, accusingly, but Ernest shook his head.

“Ah well,” said Bruno, and started to pull on his navy swimming shirt.

“You don’t need that,” said Ernest. “It’s all inside.”

“I need it,” said Bruno, touching his stomach. “What’s so German about this place? Apart from the nonsensical names?”

“I want a river,” said Cody, shivering in his lime-green tights—ankle-length, to protect him from the sun and cold both.

“And so you shall have one,” said Bruno.

Bruno took one hand, Ernest the other. They could feel the current flow through their little conductor.

The boy and his rivers. At this, and only this, he was a prodigy. He was slow to walk, to talk, to eat solid food. He still wore a diaper at night, requested another diaper once a day to move his bowels, which he would only do in the kitchen, next to the cupboard with the lazy Susan. Bruno, according to his mother, had been entirely toilet-trained at one and a half, but Cody would be a kindergartener before the process was done. “It’s the sign of a genius,” said one of the mothers at preschool. “Coincidentally,” Bruno had answered, “also the sign of an idiot.” What the mother had meant was it could go either way; they were not yet at the fork in the road between gifted and special. But this mother had children who were toilet-trained at ordinary ages, who hit every milestone in excellent time. Modern parenthood: other parents examined your children for deficiencies so they could augur their own child’s future from your child’s psychic entrails.

They wandered down a Plexiglas corridor, in and out of the warmth that fell from the overhead heat lamps. At a dead end a gothicky arrow captioned with gothicky letters pointed right, to something called FAUST UND FURIOUS.

“He was German, wasn’t he?” Ernest asked. “Faust?”

After a moment Bruno said, “Technically.”

Eventually they found a room filled with children and their parents, a pirate ship run aground in a shallow pool, hordes of insufficiently dressed mortals. The variety of swimming costumes! Chubby women in two-piece suits, middle-aged women in waterproof dresses, men in flowered trunks, Speedos, ankle-length pants. And the navels: sinkholes, champagne corks, thumbprints. Bruno’s own belly button was inward; so was Ernest’s; the boy’s a little love knot, a souvenir of the day he’d been delivered to them.