Talking animals, p.12
Talking Animals, page 12
They got the giggles so bad that the animals around the bar started giving them looks. Alfonzo huffed and hummed to calm down.
By now it was fully dark outside. The bar had come to life as waves of animals crowded in post-work. There was no room to move. The bartender had gotten fresh assistance in the form of two crow servers who carried wooden trays on cords around their necks. They hopped back and forth across the bar, distributing glasses, returning with empties. The demand was constant. No sooner had they alighted than the bartender was loading up their trays with fresh drinks. She garnished cocktails with sprigs of grass or splashed them with tuna juice; she opened bottles of Dogs Head beer and poured glasses of Yellow Tail at a dizzying pace.
In pausing, it hit Alfonzo how far they were from home and how drunk they were. His head spun.
Mitchell leaned over. “There was something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
“Unless it has to do with getting home or eating pizza, I don’t think I’m in any state to process.”
“Okay, another time.”
“You want to spring for a taxi?”
“What are we, Rockefellers?”
They stumbled into the night and toward the subway.
15.
At home, headachy after the half-drunk hysterical euphoria, Alfonzo riffled through his bag in search of ibuprofen. He couldn’t locate the pills, but he did find a mysterious little blue book.
He recognized the name from that afternoon, Borrowed Times, written above the logo of a striped fish. It must have come from the cats’ apartment. Sprawling on the floor, he leafed through it. It was a crude publication without pictures or much information as to who produced it. It had only a cryptic text on the back inside cover.
Produced by Friends of SERF (Sea Equality Revolutionary Front). F-SERF is a society of land creatures dedicated to furthering the cause of sea liberation by any and all means.
The printing was a little blurry, and the pamphlet reminded him of the hard-core zines of his youth. He liked documents like this: subcultural, self-produced work. It felt a little dangerous or at least a swerve away from adulthood.
He started at the beginning.
History
We came from the sea.
Our ancient selves were aquatic. Life on land only began with a valiant crawl by fin upward. Sea and land were always family.
Family may scatter, but all honored sea womb. Remember salt-lick snot of mothers and mothers’ mothers?
We maintained ties. Family was family was family.
Those who moved to land kept the sea inside alive. Ancient ancestors painted shells and wave forms; they carved fish shapes and dolphin profiles in bas-relief. Ocean gods were equal to other deities. Water prayers were pounded out with hooves, and villages were built in spirals, like shells. Communities grew like coral.
This relationship between wet and dry went on for millennia.
Gradually, though, those on land began to deny their sea roots. They grew arrogant and thought they were the creators of all. They forgot the sea mothers, as if a sky father alone could birth you.
The landed decided the sea was foreign space. They forgot the means of communication and wondered if our sea others even knew how to speak or think. They threw letters in bottles into the sea. They gave speeches and sang. Then another land war began.
In war, land creatures had to entrust themselves to ships they’d built. They spent months sailing and came down with scurvy and mange. Plague traveled in fleas. When the sailor warriors got to shore they jumped into the business of biting and scratching, mauling and kicking, all the while spreading their diseases. Wars are a dirty business.
In that time of war and plunder, many filled ships were lost. Seafarers who survived told ghastly tales of storms and drowning.
Thinkers and politicians developed new anti-sea ideas. It became easier to blame whatever lay unknown beneath the waves than to look hard at what they were creating.
Philosophers began to argue for a hierarchy of existence, with the sea at the bottom. “Who has rightful dominion?” asked those who presumed that dominion was already theirs. “What does it mean to breathe? Who has feelings?” Scholars taught classes on classification and standardization.
Then came yet another age, yet another spirit.
There was gold to be mined, and silver, diamonds, copper, and tin. Oil to drill for. Coffee, nuts, and fruits to be harvested. Wood to be cut. Kings, slave drivers, capitalists, and militaries ground animals into nothing, into bone piles.
The ancient excretions of the sea were no longer sacred. The land animals grabbed all the guano they could carry. Ancient waste was mined and spread, killing the living in the process. But this shit-gold turned deserts into new Edens of blossom, fruit, and nuts. So, they thought all the blood was worth it. We wouldn’t have modernity without artificial seabird shit.
Invasive populations exploded with a great squealing sound in clouds of feather and fur. Then came general disorder. Everyone was effulgent except the workers, who coughed with black, brown, with guano lung and coal lung, with wet lung and silica lung. The workers’ life expectations were kept low.
Ancient History
So much has changed and yet so little too.
Land society has undergone massive transformations. Packs of determined creatures have clawed rights from the ruling classes. Whole societies and small groups have argued and gnawed innovations into existence. We made life better and came to believe democracy was possible.
But the struggle has been fierce, and some might say we have fallen backward, even as the good that surrounds us has become ever shinier and ever more chewable, ever softer and ever more transfixing.
Everyone is making, buying, and using plastic and oil. Industry is visible in the exploded view. See the guts of the machine and rejoice. We breathe particles and eat micro flecks. Now we sit in cramped cat cafés eating tuna from cans. We are post-industry now, they crow, yet so many of us are still busy making industries run.
Lead pipes still carry our water. Styrofoam bowls that held our kibble fly free from dump trucks. Dye baths in clothing factories flow toward the oceans, turn rivers foamy red, pink, and green in the process. Tanks, cars, trucks, and boats, septic ranches and sepsis farms, leak themselves into the sea. Imagine millions of motor engines dripping a drop of oil each day onto roads and parking lots. All that mixes and flows into the sea. Chemicals travel great distances and accumulate in marine life. All this waste finds its way back to us.
While the most visible forms of our destruction are catastrophic spills, avalanches, fires, and explosions, those are minor in comparison and serve as spectacles to obscure the greater violence of the unspectacular. Shards, flecks, dribbles, and specks are what we wish to forget. What’s really destroying us is this slow carcinogenic drip. It comes from everywhere. What you can’t see is more dangerous than what you can.
We have long since forgotten our link to the sea.
Near Future
We are a coalition started in the seaside city of industry and money. Now we span the globe in an invisible web. We are linked by boats and belief. From our vantage, we have seen the ups and downs of the system and the tides. The clearheaded among us see a connection.
We have been treating the ocean like a garbage dump, and it has been taking it for a long time. But there are so many signs that this cannot continue.
Storms are coming, and they threaten all of us. Yet the captains of industry do not care. They are busy fashioning mountaintops into bunkers in which they will retreat while the rest of us drown.
The problems are tidal waves coming one after another.
So, what do we do?
Bury our heads in the wet sand?
Curl into a ball so that our tails cover our eyes as the waves break?
NO!
We, the creatures of today, the Friends of SERF, will act.
We are rising up and spreading truth!
We ask you to join this survival struggle. When the time comes to act out, you will know. You will know when you know the sea inside your soul!
In the meantime, forward with the struggle for clean water, strong nature, and a unified animalism! Be open and friendly to your friends. Listen for the water to communicate its truths. To you.
Let us rise with the tides and move with the SERF!
ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
16.
It was some Tuesday morning tucked in the folds of November. A weekday bathed in the weak light of fall. Alfonzo trudged up the gunky subway stairs.
A strong wind busied itself rifling through the contents of City Hall’s park. Alfonzo crossed the street. Got a coffee without making a joke or exchanging words with Pamella beyond “Americano” and “Thank you.” He did not linger on his bench or watch the tourists waiting for their tour guide. He went straight to the basement.
The Department of Records existed. The department was open Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The department rustled with paper. It accumulated dust that needed to be swept. The floors were concrete, the walls brick, the shelves wood. The temperature was controlled. The air was central. Water pooled, and he was there to mop up the puddles. City Hall existed. Alfonzo gave it that, though it was all he could give.
Information scientists had long ago devised and adapted systems of organization to keep collections useful. Animals like Alfonzo, not an expert just a cog, were tasked with bringing these systems to life. He himself was not empowered to officially change what he worked within. Any adaptation he introduced was private, an unofficial quirk or a work-around; on the record his variations didn’t exist, so they didn’t exist. Whatever flair he had could be swept away like the dust bunnies. But on paper and therefore in some version of reality, Alfonzo’s position within records existed, so his body showed up to fill it.
For much of Alfonzo’s life, this routine of filling an available space for pay had comforted him. “Come and repeat,” the city said, so he did. Rhythm was comfort. But ever since Vinograd, rhythm had become a suffocating constraint. He was just another rat in the nest, just one more bat within the castle. Wind whistled in the pneumatic tubes, whistled for his soul. The enclosure promised all its creatures, “You are safe within me, you are protected here, but you must never leave.”
He unlocked the basement door, negotiating his body through the dark. He turned on his small lamp, which gave just enough light to despair to, and slumped down behind his desk.
Alfonzo never used the overhead fluorescents if he could help it. They emitted an almost inaudible, yet horrid, buzzing. They also intensified the wall color, a green-gray-rust shade called Industrial Catbabble. The floors and ceiling were a beige-mauve-aqua called Skink. Alfonzo knew the paints’ official names from reading Department of Maintenance files. He knew the city had purchased fifteen thousand gallons from a company called Gold Brush—a company that just happened to be owned by Mayor Shergar’s college roommate.
Alfonzo theorized that the higher-ups had chosen these specific colors not just because of the company’s ties but also because they drained animals’ spirits. He felt sure the mayor wanted city workers floppy and despondent. Some psychologist could prove this if he or she ever took the time to study paint. “Guilt, Authority, and Chromatics: A Study of the Effects of Paint Hue on Mammal Desolation.” He would read that paper. Or maybe these were simply the random colors that came from mixing the leftovers of all other colors. Either the city wanted to crush workers or the crushing was an unintended consequence of cost saving. Anything was possible.
His neck ached, and it was only 9:18 a.m.
Somewhere upstairs, an assistant was placing a rye latte with organic oat milk on the mayor’s desk. Various phones were ringing. Someone answered a call and jotted down a request. “The deputy will get back to you.” She stuffed the note into the appropriate message cubby. Through the hallways scurried assistants, council members, and interns. In a chamber outside the bullpen, an undersecretary for public communications was speaking to reporters on the city beat. “The press conference will begin shortly,” he barked. “The mayor is just running a touch late.” Upstairs it was business as immutable.
Alfonzo contemplated work. He should do some. That was what he was here for, after all. He lifted his head and began to examine the day’s folders in his wire-basket inbox. There was the fire incident dispatch data from the last quarter, August’s facades-compliance filings, a report on boiler safety, and the directory of teachers’ pension fund financial reports. His toes clattered the keys of his machine as he entered his first code of the day, 7–2–4–1–7–8–3-C-V.
His hunched body felt dwarfed yet unwieldy. The furniture surrounding him towered and perched, shelves too tall and chairs too small. The only object his size was the Aztek Howtek. It sat cold and silent in the corner.
Alfonzo typed slowly for the next hour. He just about finished a single task. His neck, ankles, and stomach ached. Pain roamed freely through his body, around his shoulders, up his neck and back down. He ached and twisted. Bits of him went to sleep, then awoke pinned and needled. How had he ever written a whole dissertation? It seemed ludicrous now, though it hadn’t been so long ago. How had he learned to type? Middle school technology class was the literal answer, but Alfonzo’s question was more metaphysical. How did his brain trace through to his limbs? He watched himself as he hunted-and-pecked the next code. 7–1–5–1–8–9–2-B-G.
How does an animal type? Move your toes one at a time, but quick. Remember the pattern or just feel the alphabet out of order. Setting his attention straight meant losing his body’s confidence. He used the keyboard every day, but he could not tell where the letters fell. A was beside S, and the space bar stretched the bottom.
How did he write? Alfonzo puzzled. How did he form words, even, let alone strings of words that he wove into blankets of thought? It didn’t make sense when he thought about it, yet language was what supposedly distinguished him from fishes.
Alfonzo no longer felt like a thinking creature. He was growing dumb, or maybe had always been. What was he good for but carrying bits of paper back and forth? He was a pack animal, after all.
Alfonzo turned off his emotional self and began to type away at great speed. His keyboard let Alfonzo’s codes flow through it. Animal and object gave in to the thoughtless repetition. This was supposed to be useful. The paperwork pile shrank, then rose again as more files arrived from the singing tubes. This was what he was paid for. He typed and he filed. The process was so rhythmic it drowned out thought. He became a smooth surface.
At 5:18 p.m., Alfonzo returned to himself. He turned off his machines, switched the basement dark, locked the door, and wandered up into the world.
* * *
The city had just emerged from a late-afternoon shower in time for sunset. Water drops slicked the navy awning of a salad bar. Long fall rays slanted across wet-paper-bag leaves. The city was preparing for a night of drinking and flirting.
Alfonzo decided to unwind by walking home. He hadn’t crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in a dog’s age. The after-work herd gave him a sense of dissolving. Delivery creatures pinged along the bike lanes. Birds flew just overhead wearing tiny messenger bags. Sheep in neckties and dogs in coats stepped along beside anxious raccoons pushing strollers. Was it so bad to be a herd animal? In this together, carrying our loads.
He passed the Seafarers Institute with its sentinel line of statues. The bear and the eagle peered out from the rooftop. He’d learned during his research that these statues had been put there to greet arriving ships. Alfonzo felt not that the city was a port, but that the whole of New York was its own kind of vessel, one that stayed in one place but rocked continually.
He crossed onto one of the bridges that roped boroughs together.
In his research, he had learned that the Andean ancestors had erected pillars on the mountain peaks and hills to create a huge sun clock. They had laid out their whole built environment to mirror their map of the cosmos. Each time the sun aligned with one of the pillars, the ancient animals knew it was time to plant or harvest, sacrifice or dance. They embedded symbols of the astral plane into their buildings. Midway across the bridge, he turned to look back to Manhattan. The skyline was dotted with gargoyles, cupolas, signs, water towers, and sheer cliffs of glass. The setting sun turned everything gold and shadowy.
Strolling reminded Alfonzo of how much school had taken from him, how much work had been done at the expense of living life.
The water moved beneath. He looked down, then onward to Dumbo. He threaded his way into Brooklyn Heights. The streetlights were on, illuminating parents and their young meandering toward dinner. He passed a horse carrying both her work bag and her foal’s fish-shaped backpack. The child clipped along, chattering joyfully.
Alfonzo passed finally into what he considered the boundaries of his own neighborhood of Gowanus. Like most of Brooklyn, it was mutating, or experiencing a kind of trauma. Every week an old store closed and a more expensive version replaced it. A popular no-frills Siamese cat restaurant had disappeared, and in its place came a fine-dining street-food spot with dim lights and rope-decorated walls. Across the street, an old-fashioned grooming parlor called You Have Nails had been supplanted by a barber shop run by rugged bandana-wearing dogs. It was a process of repetition and replacement with difference, where the main difference was always price.
Animals who’d been forced out of their dens in other neighborhoods came to a new area. The locals grumbled, and the arrivistes felt wounded. They’d only moved out to Brooklyn because they could no longer afford Manhattan. Furious creatures organized meetings. Aggrieved animals wrote op-eds and occasionally attacked one another. The mayor said the lack of affordable apartments was actually a good thing. Residents without millions asked, “But where the hell are we supposed to dwell?”
The song played on repeat. Samples found their way into joints that played on Hot 97. These songs were sung in every language of New York. The din was so constant it felt redundant to mention it. Or rather, everyone discussed these issues so constantly that outrage and criticism became just an undertone of the general hum. The whole city danced to the sounds of disappearing habitat.
By now it was fully dark outside. The bar had come to life as waves of animals crowded in post-work. There was no room to move. The bartender had gotten fresh assistance in the form of two crow servers who carried wooden trays on cords around their necks. They hopped back and forth across the bar, distributing glasses, returning with empties. The demand was constant. No sooner had they alighted than the bartender was loading up their trays with fresh drinks. She garnished cocktails with sprigs of grass or splashed them with tuna juice; she opened bottles of Dogs Head beer and poured glasses of Yellow Tail at a dizzying pace.
In pausing, it hit Alfonzo how far they were from home and how drunk they were. His head spun.
Mitchell leaned over. “There was something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
“Unless it has to do with getting home or eating pizza, I don’t think I’m in any state to process.”
“Okay, another time.”
“You want to spring for a taxi?”
“What are we, Rockefellers?”
They stumbled into the night and toward the subway.
15.
At home, headachy after the half-drunk hysterical euphoria, Alfonzo riffled through his bag in search of ibuprofen. He couldn’t locate the pills, but he did find a mysterious little blue book.
He recognized the name from that afternoon, Borrowed Times, written above the logo of a striped fish. It must have come from the cats’ apartment. Sprawling on the floor, he leafed through it. It was a crude publication without pictures or much information as to who produced it. It had only a cryptic text on the back inside cover.
Produced by Friends of SERF (Sea Equality Revolutionary Front). F-SERF is a society of land creatures dedicated to furthering the cause of sea liberation by any and all means.
The printing was a little blurry, and the pamphlet reminded him of the hard-core zines of his youth. He liked documents like this: subcultural, self-produced work. It felt a little dangerous or at least a swerve away from adulthood.
He started at the beginning.
History
We came from the sea.
Our ancient selves were aquatic. Life on land only began with a valiant crawl by fin upward. Sea and land were always family.
Family may scatter, but all honored sea womb. Remember salt-lick snot of mothers and mothers’ mothers?
We maintained ties. Family was family was family.
Those who moved to land kept the sea inside alive. Ancient ancestors painted shells and wave forms; they carved fish shapes and dolphin profiles in bas-relief. Ocean gods were equal to other deities. Water prayers were pounded out with hooves, and villages were built in spirals, like shells. Communities grew like coral.
This relationship between wet and dry went on for millennia.
Gradually, though, those on land began to deny their sea roots. They grew arrogant and thought they were the creators of all. They forgot the sea mothers, as if a sky father alone could birth you.
The landed decided the sea was foreign space. They forgot the means of communication and wondered if our sea others even knew how to speak or think. They threw letters in bottles into the sea. They gave speeches and sang. Then another land war began.
In war, land creatures had to entrust themselves to ships they’d built. They spent months sailing and came down with scurvy and mange. Plague traveled in fleas. When the sailor warriors got to shore they jumped into the business of biting and scratching, mauling and kicking, all the while spreading their diseases. Wars are a dirty business.
In that time of war and plunder, many filled ships were lost. Seafarers who survived told ghastly tales of storms and drowning.
Thinkers and politicians developed new anti-sea ideas. It became easier to blame whatever lay unknown beneath the waves than to look hard at what they were creating.
Philosophers began to argue for a hierarchy of existence, with the sea at the bottom. “Who has rightful dominion?” asked those who presumed that dominion was already theirs. “What does it mean to breathe? Who has feelings?” Scholars taught classes on classification and standardization.
Then came yet another age, yet another spirit.
There was gold to be mined, and silver, diamonds, copper, and tin. Oil to drill for. Coffee, nuts, and fruits to be harvested. Wood to be cut. Kings, slave drivers, capitalists, and militaries ground animals into nothing, into bone piles.
The ancient excretions of the sea were no longer sacred. The land animals grabbed all the guano they could carry. Ancient waste was mined and spread, killing the living in the process. But this shit-gold turned deserts into new Edens of blossom, fruit, and nuts. So, they thought all the blood was worth it. We wouldn’t have modernity without artificial seabird shit.
Invasive populations exploded with a great squealing sound in clouds of feather and fur. Then came general disorder. Everyone was effulgent except the workers, who coughed with black, brown, with guano lung and coal lung, with wet lung and silica lung. The workers’ life expectations were kept low.
Ancient History
So much has changed and yet so little too.
Land society has undergone massive transformations. Packs of determined creatures have clawed rights from the ruling classes. Whole societies and small groups have argued and gnawed innovations into existence. We made life better and came to believe democracy was possible.
But the struggle has been fierce, and some might say we have fallen backward, even as the good that surrounds us has become ever shinier and ever more chewable, ever softer and ever more transfixing.
Everyone is making, buying, and using plastic and oil. Industry is visible in the exploded view. See the guts of the machine and rejoice. We breathe particles and eat micro flecks. Now we sit in cramped cat cafés eating tuna from cans. We are post-industry now, they crow, yet so many of us are still busy making industries run.
Lead pipes still carry our water. Styrofoam bowls that held our kibble fly free from dump trucks. Dye baths in clothing factories flow toward the oceans, turn rivers foamy red, pink, and green in the process. Tanks, cars, trucks, and boats, septic ranches and sepsis farms, leak themselves into the sea. Imagine millions of motor engines dripping a drop of oil each day onto roads and parking lots. All that mixes and flows into the sea. Chemicals travel great distances and accumulate in marine life. All this waste finds its way back to us.
While the most visible forms of our destruction are catastrophic spills, avalanches, fires, and explosions, those are minor in comparison and serve as spectacles to obscure the greater violence of the unspectacular. Shards, flecks, dribbles, and specks are what we wish to forget. What’s really destroying us is this slow carcinogenic drip. It comes from everywhere. What you can’t see is more dangerous than what you can.
We have long since forgotten our link to the sea.
Near Future
We are a coalition started in the seaside city of industry and money. Now we span the globe in an invisible web. We are linked by boats and belief. From our vantage, we have seen the ups and downs of the system and the tides. The clearheaded among us see a connection.
We have been treating the ocean like a garbage dump, and it has been taking it for a long time. But there are so many signs that this cannot continue.
Storms are coming, and they threaten all of us. Yet the captains of industry do not care. They are busy fashioning mountaintops into bunkers in which they will retreat while the rest of us drown.
The problems are tidal waves coming one after another.
So, what do we do?
Bury our heads in the wet sand?
Curl into a ball so that our tails cover our eyes as the waves break?
NO!
We, the creatures of today, the Friends of SERF, will act.
We are rising up and spreading truth!
We ask you to join this survival struggle. When the time comes to act out, you will know. You will know when you know the sea inside your soul!
In the meantime, forward with the struggle for clean water, strong nature, and a unified animalism! Be open and friendly to your friends. Listen for the water to communicate its truths. To you.
Let us rise with the tides and move with the SERF!
ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
16.
It was some Tuesday morning tucked in the folds of November. A weekday bathed in the weak light of fall. Alfonzo trudged up the gunky subway stairs.
A strong wind busied itself rifling through the contents of City Hall’s park. Alfonzo crossed the street. Got a coffee without making a joke or exchanging words with Pamella beyond “Americano” and “Thank you.” He did not linger on his bench or watch the tourists waiting for their tour guide. He went straight to the basement.
The Department of Records existed. The department was open Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The department rustled with paper. It accumulated dust that needed to be swept. The floors were concrete, the walls brick, the shelves wood. The temperature was controlled. The air was central. Water pooled, and he was there to mop up the puddles. City Hall existed. Alfonzo gave it that, though it was all he could give.
Information scientists had long ago devised and adapted systems of organization to keep collections useful. Animals like Alfonzo, not an expert just a cog, were tasked with bringing these systems to life. He himself was not empowered to officially change what he worked within. Any adaptation he introduced was private, an unofficial quirk or a work-around; on the record his variations didn’t exist, so they didn’t exist. Whatever flair he had could be swept away like the dust bunnies. But on paper and therefore in some version of reality, Alfonzo’s position within records existed, so his body showed up to fill it.
For much of Alfonzo’s life, this routine of filling an available space for pay had comforted him. “Come and repeat,” the city said, so he did. Rhythm was comfort. But ever since Vinograd, rhythm had become a suffocating constraint. He was just another rat in the nest, just one more bat within the castle. Wind whistled in the pneumatic tubes, whistled for his soul. The enclosure promised all its creatures, “You are safe within me, you are protected here, but you must never leave.”
He unlocked the basement door, negotiating his body through the dark. He turned on his small lamp, which gave just enough light to despair to, and slumped down behind his desk.
Alfonzo never used the overhead fluorescents if he could help it. They emitted an almost inaudible, yet horrid, buzzing. They also intensified the wall color, a green-gray-rust shade called Industrial Catbabble. The floors and ceiling were a beige-mauve-aqua called Skink. Alfonzo knew the paints’ official names from reading Department of Maintenance files. He knew the city had purchased fifteen thousand gallons from a company called Gold Brush—a company that just happened to be owned by Mayor Shergar’s college roommate.
Alfonzo theorized that the higher-ups had chosen these specific colors not just because of the company’s ties but also because they drained animals’ spirits. He felt sure the mayor wanted city workers floppy and despondent. Some psychologist could prove this if he or she ever took the time to study paint. “Guilt, Authority, and Chromatics: A Study of the Effects of Paint Hue on Mammal Desolation.” He would read that paper. Or maybe these were simply the random colors that came from mixing the leftovers of all other colors. Either the city wanted to crush workers or the crushing was an unintended consequence of cost saving. Anything was possible.
His neck ached, and it was only 9:18 a.m.
Somewhere upstairs, an assistant was placing a rye latte with organic oat milk on the mayor’s desk. Various phones were ringing. Someone answered a call and jotted down a request. “The deputy will get back to you.” She stuffed the note into the appropriate message cubby. Through the hallways scurried assistants, council members, and interns. In a chamber outside the bullpen, an undersecretary for public communications was speaking to reporters on the city beat. “The press conference will begin shortly,” he barked. “The mayor is just running a touch late.” Upstairs it was business as immutable.
Alfonzo contemplated work. He should do some. That was what he was here for, after all. He lifted his head and began to examine the day’s folders in his wire-basket inbox. There was the fire incident dispatch data from the last quarter, August’s facades-compliance filings, a report on boiler safety, and the directory of teachers’ pension fund financial reports. His toes clattered the keys of his machine as he entered his first code of the day, 7–2–4–1–7–8–3-C-V.
His hunched body felt dwarfed yet unwieldy. The furniture surrounding him towered and perched, shelves too tall and chairs too small. The only object his size was the Aztek Howtek. It sat cold and silent in the corner.
Alfonzo typed slowly for the next hour. He just about finished a single task. His neck, ankles, and stomach ached. Pain roamed freely through his body, around his shoulders, up his neck and back down. He ached and twisted. Bits of him went to sleep, then awoke pinned and needled. How had he ever written a whole dissertation? It seemed ludicrous now, though it hadn’t been so long ago. How had he learned to type? Middle school technology class was the literal answer, but Alfonzo’s question was more metaphysical. How did his brain trace through to his limbs? He watched himself as he hunted-and-pecked the next code. 7–1–5–1–8–9–2-B-G.
How does an animal type? Move your toes one at a time, but quick. Remember the pattern or just feel the alphabet out of order. Setting his attention straight meant losing his body’s confidence. He used the keyboard every day, but he could not tell where the letters fell. A was beside S, and the space bar stretched the bottom.
How did he write? Alfonzo puzzled. How did he form words, even, let alone strings of words that he wove into blankets of thought? It didn’t make sense when he thought about it, yet language was what supposedly distinguished him from fishes.
Alfonzo no longer felt like a thinking creature. He was growing dumb, or maybe had always been. What was he good for but carrying bits of paper back and forth? He was a pack animal, after all.
Alfonzo turned off his emotional self and began to type away at great speed. His keyboard let Alfonzo’s codes flow through it. Animal and object gave in to the thoughtless repetition. This was supposed to be useful. The paperwork pile shrank, then rose again as more files arrived from the singing tubes. This was what he was paid for. He typed and he filed. The process was so rhythmic it drowned out thought. He became a smooth surface.
At 5:18 p.m., Alfonzo returned to himself. He turned off his machines, switched the basement dark, locked the door, and wandered up into the world.
* * *
The city had just emerged from a late-afternoon shower in time for sunset. Water drops slicked the navy awning of a salad bar. Long fall rays slanted across wet-paper-bag leaves. The city was preparing for a night of drinking and flirting.
Alfonzo decided to unwind by walking home. He hadn’t crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in a dog’s age. The after-work herd gave him a sense of dissolving. Delivery creatures pinged along the bike lanes. Birds flew just overhead wearing tiny messenger bags. Sheep in neckties and dogs in coats stepped along beside anxious raccoons pushing strollers. Was it so bad to be a herd animal? In this together, carrying our loads.
He passed the Seafarers Institute with its sentinel line of statues. The bear and the eagle peered out from the rooftop. He’d learned during his research that these statues had been put there to greet arriving ships. Alfonzo felt not that the city was a port, but that the whole of New York was its own kind of vessel, one that stayed in one place but rocked continually.
He crossed onto one of the bridges that roped boroughs together.
In his research, he had learned that the Andean ancestors had erected pillars on the mountain peaks and hills to create a huge sun clock. They had laid out their whole built environment to mirror their map of the cosmos. Each time the sun aligned with one of the pillars, the ancient animals knew it was time to plant or harvest, sacrifice or dance. They embedded symbols of the astral plane into their buildings. Midway across the bridge, he turned to look back to Manhattan. The skyline was dotted with gargoyles, cupolas, signs, water towers, and sheer cliffs of glass. The setting sun turned everything gold and shadowy.
Strolling reminded Alfonzo of how much school had taken from him, how much work had been done at the expense of living life.
The water moved beneath. He looked down, then onward to Dumbo. He threaded his way into Brooklyn Heights. The streetlights were on, illuminating parents and their young meandering toward dinner. He passed a horse carrying both her work bag and her foal’s fish-shaped backpack. The child clipped along, chattering joyfully.
Alfonzo passed finally into what he considered the boundaries of his own neighborhood of Gowanus. Like most of Brooklyn, it was mutating, or experiencing a kind of trauma. Every week an old store closed and a more expensive version replaced it. A popular no-frills Siamese cat restaurant had disappeared, and in its place came a fine-dining street-food spot with dim lights and rope-decorated walls. Across the street, an old-fashioned grooming parlor called You Have Nails had been supplanted by a barber shop run by rugged bandana-wearing dogs. It was a process of repetition and replacement with difference, where the main difference was always price.
Animals who’d been forced out of their dens in other neighborhoods came to a new area. The locals grumbled, and the arrivistes felt wounded. They’d only moved out to Brooklyn because they could no longer afford Manhattan. Furious creatures organized meetings. Aggrieved animals wrote op-eds and occasionally attacked one another. The mayor said the lack of affordable apartments was actually a good thing. Residents without millions asked, “But where the hell are we supposed to dwell?”
The song played on repeat. Samples found their way into joints that played on Hot 97. These songs were sung in every language of New York. The din was so constant it felt redundant to mention it. Or rather, everyone discussed these issues so constantly that outrage and criticism became just an undertone of the general hum. The whole city danced to the sounds of disappearing habitat.
