Above the river the burghers of Schlitterbahn saw the flash of pale flesh, the hair that streamed behind as though a cephalopodic defense, Stay away. The last inhabitant of the lost city of Atlantis, washed into the waters of Torrent River—that was its name. A little boy, surrounded and then eclipsed by the bigger boys, the wild boys of the German-themed waterpark. “Look out!” shouted a blue-tongued woman from the bridge, but she was drunk, and already the other people doubted what they had seen, and besides, so what? Those feral boys would take him in. They never went home, those boys; they lived here, they circled and circled, howling and laughing and dreaming of home.

“Cody!” Bruno shouted. “Cody!”

The boys found the body, and lifted it up, and then there was his own child’s stunned face, one hand out, and Bruno snagged it, and they were back in each other’s arms, bumping up onto the incline of the concrete beach. Cody coughed. He was alive. Not a lifeguard had shifted. They were surrounded by wild delight, shrieking, flesh, stove by a whale, but safe.

When they had staggered out—not onto dry land; there was nothing, nothing, nothing dry in all of Schlitterbahn—Bruno realized that the water had stripped the swimming tights right off, that Cody now stood naked, just as God had made him—though God hadn’t been anywhere near Cody’s conception, an event Ernest called a miracle. Quite the opposite, Bruno had thought. Ordinarily he hated God getting credit for Science’s good work. Yet here the boy was, the narrow naked awkward miracle.

“Jesus,” said a voice. A man, this new model they now made, tremendously fat from the hips up, an epidermic barrel, skinny as a kid from the hips down, such a precarious construction it hurt Bruno to look at him. “Cover that kid up!”

Their towels were back by the pirate ship. Bruno took off his shirt and draped it over his son to make him decent.

At the Wasserfest bar, Ernest stirred the slush at the bottom of his drink. O Schlitterbahn! The freckled, the fat, the hairy, the veiny, the chubby girls in bikinis, the umbilically pierced, the expertly tattooed, the amateurishly scrawled on, the comely, the grotesque, all the Boolean overlap: Ernest thought he’d never felt so tender to the variety of human bodies. He loved them all. Every bathing suit was an act of bravery.

“Yes,” he said, to the bartender, whose name was Romeo, “I’d like another,” and there was his family: Bruno with water dripping from his beard, Cody wrapped in some black cape, which he now flung off, saying, “Daddy! Daddy! I capsized! I capsized! I was saved!”

“You’re naked!”

“Naked!” said Cody.

“Marry me,” said Bruno, galumphing in.

A Walk-Through Human Heart