Fine, fine, he hummed in resignation. Anyway, he could not be late. He struggled up from the straw and toward the French press.
His father lived out in Ozone Park, in the same house Alfonzo had been raised in. Every couple of weeks Luis would guilt Alfonzo into coming out for breakfast at Libertad Diner. They’d started this after Alfonzo’s mother died. He felt too sad to resist. Alfonzo was, in his heart, a dutiful son, though he dreaded the ritual.
As he finished his coffee, Alfonzo wondered if it was jacket weather. The temperature had been seesawing between seasons all week. He opted for no jacket because the day before had been muggy. He locked his door and stepped onto the stoop. Peering around instinctively for predators, he saw only his neighbor, a frowsy goat in a blue sweater, pushing her grocery cart full of carrots. The wind was a touch Canadian this morning. He shuffled back and forth. His coat was now behind a double-locked door. The die was cast. He couldn’t afford the time it took to go back.
The trip to Ozone always took a while, even when the MTA was running seamlessly. And the Metropolitan Transit Authority obeyed no animal’s wishes for ease. The system was all seams. It was caution-yellow strips warning animals not to jump or push. It was wood benches shellacked with generations of public secretion. It wasn’t that the trains didn’t work; it was that they didn’t want questions about where they’d been and why they were so late. The trains wanted privacy. The trains considered themselves a natural phenomenon.
Sometimes one train slipped into a station across from another train like they were two silver fish of the same school. But just as often, one train would enter the station with just enough time to give its passengers a glimpse of its fellow disappearing into the depths of the tunnel. You could not assume coordination. Yet no matter the vagaries of the weekend subway, Alfonzo would hear static from his father should he arrive late.
A notification flapped at the station entry. Leaves and garbage swirled as Alfonzo tried to decode it. In multiple languages, the sign alerted passengers of track work, delays, and buses filling in for trains out sick. He slowly assembled the words into a plan. The R wasn’t running, so he would take the K to Jay Street and then transfer to the A. Okay, okay, okay, he hummed.
He thought he understood as he descended into the underworld. But then no. A rat family dressed in matching blue as if on a team chattered in the corner of the platform. They, like him, looked into the tunnel expecting, no, yearning for the yellow lights of some train, any train to appear, but none did. The K was supposed to be running over the R line, but no K ever came. At the end of his patience, Alfonzo climbed the stairs and doubled back to the nearest F/G/H station, only to arrive there just as an F was pulling away. As he silently cursed the rolling disaster of infrastructure funding, an H arrived. He calculated and felt relieved. He would still make it. He transferred from the H to the P, then after a few stops to an A, and found a place to sit in the corner of the car. Only forty-five more minutes to Ozone Park. He crossed his toes.
The train ride lasted the length of two New Yorker features. The first detailed the workings of an international criminal group known as the Fancy Bears, who were thought to be responsible for the biggest maple syrup heist of all time. Despite the comic sound of their crime, multiple beaver and elk had been kidnapped and abused during the theft. The Fancy Bears did not sound like nice creatures.
The other article was about Ocean Melt Greenland (OMG), a government research initiative to study ice. According to the article, Earth’s ice was melting at a much faster rate than previously predicted, and the animals aboard an OMG research ship were extremely worried. When they attempted to share their findings with the government, OMG funding was abruptly canceled. Since their initial trip, two of the researchers had died, one by drowning and the other by choking on a twig. It was sinister, but the officials interviewed insisted it was all unfortunate coincidence.
Through his sleepiness, all Alfonzo could muster was a vague “we’re so fucked” feeling. When the train got to the Ozone Park stop, Alfonzo shook his back and brightened his face in preparation. He wanted to keep things positive for his father’s benefit.
Ozone was where both Alfonzo and Mitchell had grown up, and where all their relatives still resided. It was vestigial. A dewclaw neighborhood. An inert leg hanging off the body of Queens. An indefinite somewhere with yards and parking spots where golden pollen swirled down from the many privately owned trees like yellow snow in a snow globe.
The neighborhood was a speck of foam within the bubble of New York. In his dissertation, Alfonzo had written at length about a theory of urban bubbles. For a bubble to be, it must have interior, skin, and some atmosphere or substance called the outside. The form requires tension. The inner substance presses out, while the outside substance presses in, but they remain distinct because of the membrane. In and out yearn to touch and blend, but the skin prevents it, at least until all the tension proves too great.
Bubbles are economic and metaphoric; they are made with saliva or rubber, soap or blood. Bubbles multiply, merge, burst, and form afresh. Life would be impossible without this structure. Earth is a bubble of rock and water spinning within its own fluid, gaseous, clinging film of an atmosphere. Bodies are themselves bubbles made of different-sized bubble-like organs, cells, and other wiggly globules. Alfonzo had barely passed high school biology, so maybe a real scientist would protest his imagery, but he thought this theory poetically true. So what if technical terms refused to stay in his head? The universe was bubbles all the way down.
It was common knowledge that an invisible medium—like psychic oxygen—flowed through the city. It was an effervescent, intoxicating substance. In Manhattan, the center, the air was so abundant it changed animals’ behavior. It made them buoyant and prone to hysteria. It gave them outsized confidence and naïve optimism. The animals at the far edges, however, suffered from a lack of clean air. They moved slower and wheezed heavier. If Manhattan was a nested series of hollow spheres, then Alfonzo had grown up in one of the outer layers.
In the third grade, Alfonzo had learned that the word ozone meant something beyond his home. That day in class was the first time he’d collided a small reality with an environmental, even cosmic, thought. His teacher, Ms. Malanga, stood before the class and explained a big poster behind her. A green-blue ball with white clouds and brown continents. A red sticker where they were. Ms. Malanga pointed her nose there and said, “Home.” Alfonzo and his classmates nodded. Above was a light blue layer punctuated with birds and raindrops. Another layer held a yellow balloon, then golden orbs representing meteors, then wavy purple-white smudges meant to be light. The outermost area of the chart was a deep blue-black dotted with white stars. Ms. Malanga pointed her nose at the orb layer and said, “Ozone.” The class oohed. Ms. Malanga was an excitable auburn collie who favored patterned bandanas. Alfonzo’s dad called her a fellow traveler. She was his favorite teacher in grade school, and he remembered fondly all the animals in class drawing posters illustrating different aspects of the natural world. Ms. Malanga described the invisible gases cocooning the planet, each layer serving the purpose of protecting and facilitating life. The ozone was like a fine shield, she told them. It was a rare but significant gas, like a celebrity or a gifted soul. The planet needed all these bubbles, Ms. Malanga explained. Without them, life would be impossible.