But then again, could Alfonzo really know, separated as he was from that era? They say that to take in her art, one had to not only hear but also see Josephine in the flesh, or rather the fur. The recording was an imperfect substitute. On the back of the album was a black-and-white photo from the concert at which it was recorded. The mouse was small yet powerful on the high-contrast stage. In the background were little faces of the crowd caught in countless frozen expressions that ranged from ecstasy to distraction to incomprehension. Josephine had been called the voice of the voiceless, but from the picture you could see that the voiceless were not that. Were they even one group, or were they a multiplicity of voices who also listened? But yes, Alfonzo thought, they were for an instant a together something, because they allowed themselves to be an audience for her. To listen together. To differentiate the normal songs of work and life from a performance. To gather together around Josephine’s sound made them a group, and in that collection maybe they could imagine their collective need, or pain.

  He thought of that era, the heady years after Napoleon Herbert’s fall, before the birth of his own generation, when his parents and their friends had been young. Josephine’s voice reminded Alfonzo of his mother. It made him think of an ambient, collective nostalgia for groups of shaggy animals, large and small, shoulder to shoulder, swaying in the twilight summer of Central Park and humming songs together. They united then in what they were against, but they did not know that their enemies would go after their ability to think of what they were for. It was believed that that era contained a momentary electricity that had dissipated as quickly as it had been generated. They thought they were making a new reality. And they did. It’s just that what they ended up making was nothing like what they’d dreamed.

  The last song on the album always got him. It was Josephine’s most iconic. The hope and power and longing she transmitted with just her piping was almost impossibly poignant. Her delivery was a howl, a hollow envelopment. Her voice made a womb big enough to hold everyone who listened. The mouse was a keening mother. A war mother. An exile mother. A mother made of monochromatic stripes brown, red, and purple. A wailing mother.

  Alfonzo’s eyes grew hot. He tried to breathe them cool. Just breathe it out.

  * * *

  Far off, at the other side of the cavern room, the front door clicked, and Vivi and her friends entered in animated conversation, carrying sacks of food. Vivi’s buoyant gaggle invaded the fancy home like they owned the place. For all intents and purposes they were its current possessors. Alfonzo’s melancholy skittered away like dust-bunny fluff.

  Vivi gave Alfonzo a flurry of details about the others as they unpacked groceries. He caught what he could. There was a badger who took care of the grounds but also had a law degree. There was Tania George, a fluffy brown lynx from Montreal whom Vivi described as an amateur witch and a professional cuddler. Alfonzo asked if professional cuddling was like a sex thing, and Vivi just rolled her eyes.

  “He’s a dumb joker,” Vivi explained.

  Roberto Snowy was a scruffy dog artist who had spent years traveling the world.

  The final creature Vivi introduced was Flann, whose last name Alfonzo didn’t catch, a sleek pig sailor who was the captain of Cappuccino’s boat. The boat itself was named The Man Ray.

  “And what about you?” Flann inquired.

  “Vivi didn’t tell you? She and I used t-to…,” Alfonzo stuttered.

  “He and Mitchell are best friends in the city,” Vivi volunteered. “He’s involved in the leak.”

  This was how it had always been with Vivi. She befriended the kinds of animals who turned Alfonzo shy and defensive. She was never just herself, but always a part of a larger entity. She gravitated toward the exotic, the beautiful, the radical.

  Though Alfonzo had just had his coffee, his companions were thinking about dinner. He realized he’d slept much of the day.

  They began preparations for a feast.

  “In your honor,” Vivi teased.

  Alfonzo was ordered to assist Tania. Tania told him they would be in charge of salad, and somehow this carnivore made the task sound endlessly complicated. She demonstrated carrot grating. He did his best not to roll his eyes. He got nervous around predators, even ones on the small side. He didn’t want to think about what Tania ate when not in mixed company. His brain got a bit cloudy at the possibilities.

  After a little while grating and dicing, Alfonzo worked up the nerve for banter.

  “So, Tania, what do you call an alpaca with a carrot in his ear?”

  She squinted.

  “Anything you want. He won’t be able to hear you.”

  Not even a hint of a smile. Alfonzo began shredding some centipede grass. They set the table with apples, kale, hay, and grainy mash.

  Though the group had mostly ignored Alfonzo thus far, once they’d eaten and were dawdling over wine, Vivi’s friends started sniffing at him with friendly aggression.

  “So, are you here to join us, or is this radical sightseeing?”

  “Don’t put him on the spot like that.”

  “Do you feel implicated in what the mayor is doing?”

  “Tania, you know better than to believe this is a representative system. And I told you, he and Mitchell are working from the inside.”

  “But I mean, at what point does it get to be too much? Have you ever considered quitting City Hall over the mayor’s rhetoric?”

  Alfonzo felt himself getting so wound up, he wanted to spit.

  “Where is the outside? I mean, you think I’m inside and you’re out?” He knew he should know better.

  “Cool down, brother,” Roberto said. “You’re among friends here.”

  “Let’s all be nice,” Vivi admonished. “Alfie’s in a sensitive state. He came to learn about SERF.”

  “Right,” Roberto chimed in. “If we want to get him on our side, we can’t fight with him.”

  “Front toward enemy!” Vivi declaimed ironically to break the tension.

  Tania said they should toast to that.

  28.

  The next day, Sunday, Vivi suggested a walk, just the two of them. She lent Alfonzo a sweater. He hardly needed it. The day was clear and mild, warm for November. It rarely felt like the month it was anymore.

  Vivi led him down toward the beach.

  From the outside Alfonzo saw that the exterior of Cappuccino’s house was not so much a structure as a dune with windows. Despite its interior volume, the place almost disappeared into the island. You’d never know it was there, save for the windows’ reflections flashing from behind a screen of seagrasses. Even when he studied the building straight on, Alfonzo couldn’t tell if it was buried on purpose or by nature. Was it a result of slow disaster or design that winked at disaster? Alfonzo saw that Cappuccino’s mound lay between more traditionally designed mansions owned by other millionaires, billionaires, or whatever sort of -aire you had to be to own a piece of beach.

  The air moved the sand and turned everything into waves, sand particles and light, bird calls and echoing horns. Nothing was solid. Sand caught in their wool. The land was less land and more loose matter in continual flux. The wind was catching bits of him and carrying them away.

  In college, Alfonzo and Vivi had taken a class with a famous bird. The bird was a linguist who focused on time and speech. In one lecture he had explained that Aymara—a language spoken in the Andes—appeared to be the only one in the world in which the past was conceptualized as physically in front and the future behind. What most of us are used to imagining is the past at our back and the future ahead of us. It’s so ingrained it feels natural, invisible in the way seasons used to be. The future comes at us, the past recedes at our backs.

  In the Aymara framework, by contrast, one moved backward into the future. In that period of college, Alfonzo had been experimenting with mind-altering substances—locoweed, chocolate, catnip. Perhaps it was that, or that this information related to the Andes, but the lecture had struck Alfonzo. One backed into one’s life while looking “forward” at history. When Alfonzo considered it, the Aymara conception made more sense than the one we’re used to. We’ve already seen our past, so one might imagine that we’re facing it. Our future, however, sneaks up behind us. It leaps out and shocks even the most careful creature. The future is unknown until it grabs us by the tail.

  Everyone leaves a trail of their disintegration. Move through time and watch the marks you leave: photographs, cologne whiffs hovering over an empty sidewalk, notes tucked in bicycle spokes, wet footprints in foyers. Flakes of breakfast pastry, stray hairs, eye gunk wiped away, dead cells, dandruff—you are always leaving something behind. Some microns of matter are hard, others very soft. Our bodies slough apart as navel lint, follicular meringue, dried spittle crystals. We leave these crumbs just in case we ever get the chance to return. But we never do. There is no retracing. Everyone falls to pieces eventually. Melancholy is just that experience of backward-looking. Even the most focused, striving prognosticator can’t see what will happen next. We back into what’s coming, no matter how hard we crane our necks. Aging is our only means of time travel. Winds blow us into the future, and all we leave behind is a collection of decaying mementos.

  Be here now, looking back, backing forward, Alfonzo hummed to himself.

  Intermittent gusts carried away every other word of the conversations Alfonzo and Vivi tried to have. Were they murmuring to one another or to themselves? Each blink dissolved the positions of objects in relation to one another. Birds hung suspended in the static pressure of competing gusts. Clouds blew between them and the sun.

  Vivi gestured to a wooden boat pulled up on the beach. They sat down in its shelter, facing the sea. The gray-green-black waves kept coming and going, never tiring. The waves came. The waves went. Alfonzo imagined all the fish out there and wondered at their shapes, what they saw and heard.

  The briny aquatic life odors mixed with decay: plant, animal, and mineral mingled.

  Vivi turned to Alfonzo and began to hum a new story.

  When I went out to sea the first time I was terrified. The terror was a constant ringing or groaning within. I was losing my mind. I got so sick I couldn’t leave the cabin. It wasn’t even that the water was choppy or that there was some real danger. I just had this feeling the trip was the end. I panted and rocked and cried and hummed over what was lost—you, Silvio, my childhood, the idea of my life. Time stretched painfully. I felt I couldn’t handle living, and yet I continued breathing. Sleep didn’t relieve the pain. Dreams didn’t. I couldn’t eat or drink. And all the while we were moving farther out to sea.

  We sailed, and the inner angst got a little quieter, or rather it got more manageable. Calmed, I began to listen in a new way. I rejoined the crew. They had been busy all during my crisis, keeping us afloat and moving. The other crew had been carrying me, and themselves, on.

  Above board I began to notice things about the landscape of the sea. Huge ships passed us by, rocking us like we were a toy. We moved through oil slicks that fouled the hull. Dead birds and fish swirled in the waves. We heard strange booms and felt shocks.

  We arrived at a zone of blue water crosshatched with orange-brown seaweed. I didn’t think there could be seas within the sea, but that’s what it was. The Sargasso. We’d been sailing south, not west. We stopped and stayed there, still, floating on this edge. I asked what we were doing, but my friends wouldn’t tell me. Maybe they didn’t really know.

  What I began to notice in our stillness was the trash, large and small and smaller still, all mixed into the water. I had heard there were trash islands. That’s how they’re described in the news, right? I’d always pictured them as solid heaps made of car parts, Styrofoam, and basketballs covered in mussels all wrapped together by rotting ropes. Like a trash mountain that drifted and spun with the tides. I imagined something you could climb. But what I saw was more like a cloud, billows of milky dust in the water. The others told me all the tiny particles were plastics and what kept them together was the Atlantic vortex. I kept watching the sea. The weather was warm. The days and nights were of equal length.

  I listened to the VHF radio, and Tania explained what I was hearing. Codes, strings of three letters, squeaks and static and silences. Send three letters and wait for a response. That was how it worked, she told me. It has a poetry to it, a call-and-response musicality.

  We sent out a question, to whom, I did not know. We asked, “QOA?” Can you communicate by radiotelegraphy? And after a pause we would hear back, “I can communicate by radiotelegraphy.”

  We asked, “QOF?” What is the quality of my signals? They would reply, “The quality is good.”

  “QUK?” Can you tell us the condition of the sea observed? “The sea is calm with blue mixed sargassum waves,” they replied.

  We knew they were close. But still we had to wait. We just sat, rocking. Two more days passed like this in undulating stasis. On the third evening, we were sharing stories to pass the time. And just as the orange sun slipped below the horizon, we heard the radio whistle.

  “QRV?” Are you ready? they called to us. We responded, “We are ready.”

  Then we asked, “QUP?” Should we indicate our position by searchlight, black smoke trail, or pyrotechnic light? We heard back, “No searchlight, black smoke trail, or pyrotechnic light. Just wait.”

  We asked, “QBH?” Are you flying below cloud? But we heard nothing.

  Then someone hooted up on deck. We went to see, and there was Bobby Seal. He was profoundly calm. He was glossy black-brown and big, powerful and graceful in his movements. We offered him water, food, whatever we had, but he didn’t want anything. He just stared, and we stared back.

  After some secret cue, he began to sing. His mouth was closed, but there were words. It was like humming or piping, or maybe there wasn’t even sound. But we could all feel the vibrations. The strange thing was, we could understand him perfectly. We compared what we had retained and our memories matched. Parts of this foreign song lodged in our brains. After he’d gone, we tried to write down what we knew. We tried to keep it all fresh.

  Alfonzo found he could hardly breathe. He managed only a whisper. “What did he sing? What was the message?”

  The ocean came and went, almost touchable yet infinitely far away. The waves didn’t so much crash as relax into the beach. All along the waterline were bits of plastic, slime-coated bags indistinguishable from the jellyfish corpses that lay beside them. Vivi vibrated her subtle body.

  29.

  Alfonzo and Vivi found her friends whispering back in the kitchen. Roberto and Tania stopped and stared when they entered.

  “So?”

  “So, what?”

  “What have you two been up to? Necking?”

  “No! Someone’s got to bring him into our cult, right, Robbie?” Vivi said.

  “Oh, good, so you’re becoming one of us?”

  “One of us!” Tania yipped.

  Vivi nuzzled her friends, and whispered something to Tania.

  “We’re going to make dinner, if you want to help out.”

  They’d been slow cooking appaloosa beans. Roberto was going to prepare a tagine the way he’d learned in Rabat.

  Outside, darkness arrived with wailing wind. The season returned to its traditional form, and Alfonzo snuggled himself into Vivi’s sweater. They set candles around the dining room zone of the grand room. Cheap beer and wine and little bowls of herbs and nuts appeared. The animals gathered around the table. They made toasts to togetherness and the unknown. Conversation unspooled. Alfonzo felt embraced by the group.

  “What is the task other than to mourn what we know but cannot bear to speak?”

  “Well, true acceptance would require so great a change.”

  “Of what we have become.”

  “Hum.”

  “It isn’t unsolvable if the Western bubbles change.”

  “What will it take to change?”

  “I don’t know, something deafening? Something almost silent?”

  “Almost nothing at all.”

  “I remember when one of Cappuccino’s friends commissioned an alchemist bird to make a rhodiola tincture. The alchemist promised it would show the future. Cappuccino took it with her stockbroker. He became obsessed. He kept going back to the bird to get more and more…”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went insane.”

  “Wasn’t he already?”

  “Touché.”

  “We’re all in the same boat whether we admit it or not.”

  “A sinking one.”

  “But also, we’re trying to know what we already know. If you think you’re exempt, you’re wrong. If you think the cities won’t sink. If you believe the system isn’t a death cult…”

  “Have you heard about the mass beachings?”

  “In the news they’re always reported as these mysterious anomalies,” Alfonzo offered. “Like, ‘The poor creatures are confused,’ or ‘Look at these evil beasts out to get us.’”

  “The sea animal is not some mystical other.”

  “Ice is melting into the sea.”

  “These are the facts!”

  He felt Vivi staring, and he tried to hum some vague ideas. It was hard to keep up with radical thinking. He’d been trapped in the city while Vivi was traveling. She could sail off to Venice and come up with sweeping theories about economics and ethics, but he was stuck in the city, in his studio apartment, his basement job. This was not his beach, he hummed.

  “Some of us don’t have the luxury of living our ideals,” he said, hating himself even as he expressed that idea. This was not how he wanted to be.

 

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