Back inside, around the corner, some poor soul in a dachshund costume talked—no, silently communed—with a tube-topped woman and her crewcutted preteen son. The dachshund costume wore a collar with a large round tag that said SCHATZIE! Its mouth was open in a hideous permanent smile, filled in with a black net grille. Behind the grille glittered a pair of human eyes. Bruno tried to meet them. It was as misbegotten a creature as Hieronymus Bosch ever dreamt up. Bruno and Cody turned onto a bridge, and looked over, and there it was: the river. Families floated along on single inner tubes, or on figure-eight-shaped inner tubes built for two. In Texas, tube was a verb, meaning, to ride upon one. The chlorinated air smelled of infection being held just at bay.

“River,” said Cody.

The bridge led eventually to an artificial beach. The river was circular. On the right families pushed off on their journeys; on the left, they staggered out, pulling their inner tubes behind them. Bruno had the familiar sensation of having washed up himself on some shore, with no memory of his passage—not just how he got here, Schlitterbahn, Galveston, Texas, but his life, in which he lived with a man and had a child and loved both.

He found a double inner tube from a stack near the water, a doughnut on one side and on the other a ring with a plastic floor that said BABY SEAT. MAX WEIGHT 25 POUNDS. He had no idea how much the boy weighed. That was Ernest’s department. Look at him, skinny thing, his rib cage an upturned rowboat. They waded in, and Bruno lifted Cody into the baby seat so he faced forward, could hold on to the handles on either side. They pushed out, and the current took them. Bruno heaved his torso up and grabbed the tube on either side of the boy. They went around a corner, past a palm tree and a flotilla of fully dressed women in hijabs floating together.