Though each age seemed as if it would go on indefinitely, the wheel of fortune turned. Outside wanted in afresh. Up wanted down. Those who’d fled to live in smaller herds drifted back to join the urban masses.
The bubble shifted and shimmered.
The city was a mystical chimera that spoke in the voices of multiple animals. It was a teacher, and its core lesson was that all must find peace with their own restless suffering. It also taught restlessness. The city didn’t care who was jubilant and who was suicidal. It witnessed without comment. As a great teacher, the city had its true devotees, and they would twist themselves into knots to make sense of their master’s riddles. They turned the incomprehensible into a logo, a slogan, a beast, a balloon in the parade. Pressure from within countered that from without in exquisite tension.
The city was an impossibility. An impossible yet existing place. It was a real piece of work. Animals from everywhere loved its whole routine. They adored the city enough to wear its name silk-screened on T-shirts. These shirts hailed others with a greeting that doubled as warning.
WELCOME TO NEW YORK, it read. NOW DUCK, MOTHERFUCKER.
UTOPIA OF RULES
2.
It was the start of some August Friday. The green-copper, brown-gold island gleamed. The park exhaled a cool sigh held from the night before.
Alfonzo Velloso Faca—student of urban behavior, public servant, and brown, fluffy, big-eyed alpaca—emerged from the subway. He trotted along with the great flock of animals coming to Manhattan to make their dough. The crowd was large yet hushed. Everyone felt good because it wasn’t humid for a change.
When the traffic lulled, Alfonzo dashed across Broadway and entered his favorite coffee shop, The Early Cenozoic. He hummed a few versions of a joke, and when it was his turn with the lemur barista he tried one out. She’d been working there since late spring but he had yet to establish a rapport.
“Did you hear the news?” he asked. “Some sea animals escaped from the aquarium.”
“No! Did this just happen? Was it an uprising? Which aquarium?” The lemur clutched a mug, her eyes wide. Her machine hissed, temporarily forgotten. In the short line behind Alfonzo, a German shepherd was tapping her tail against the counter and a raccoon was fiddling with his newspaper.
Alfonzo had imagined more banter around the joke. He hadn’t anticipated her seriousness. He stumbled. “I mean. It didn’t happen in reality. I just—I heard it was otter chaos.”
The music that had been playing reached its conclusion, leaving a silence for Alfonzo to squirm in. He felt like he’d shoved a used tissue into her paw. He watched the barista take his pun, turn it over and around in English until she saw what it was. “Oh. Utter like otter.” Finally she bestowed upon him a slight nod, releasing them both from this snare of awkwardness.
Alfonzo added a wheatgrass cake he didn’t really want to his coffee order and left a large tip as a mea culpa. Slinking toward the door, he heard the lemur apologizing to the shepherd for the wait.
These jokes were his hiccups. They came on without warning, spasmed through him, then departed. There was no repressing them, although his former fiancée, Vivi, insisted he could if he tried. Vivi said one should at least be good at punning if one had the indecency to say them aloud, and she even went further, suggesting that Alfonzo told bad jokes to humiliate himself because he was afraid of intimacy and craved judgment. Rather than responding to her comment, Alfonzo had searched for a good rhyme to pun with intimacy: nutritionally, illiteracy, idiocy? But Vivi’s criticism returned to haunt him, at times like these, with its accuracy. He couldn’t guess why he wanted to alienate the barista.
Alfonzo entered the park. It was 8:46 a.m. He had fourteen more minutes of freedom, and he could feel the building counting. City Hall knew the minutes and the seconds even for the most insignificant of its animal workers. Alfonzo thought of his dream from this morning and hummed the words The End. He had a pressing task to complete, but for the moment he wanted to let his thoughts float as he sipped his coffee. Taking a bench beside the central fountain, he basked in the sound of the water and in the yellow of the flowers. Shaggy green linden and thornless honey locust trees arched above. Beyond the trees towered Woolworths and the municipal building with its golden top. These old buildings dwarfed the trees just as the corporate towers dwarfed the old buildings. Traffic snaked along. The rhythmic mélange of sensations soothed, like a cool stream.
Baseball-hatted tourists milled around the park, oblivious to the space they took up as they waited for the morning tour of City Hall to begin. Workers darted around the clustered creatures as Alfonzo pondered and judged.
These tourists wanted, came for, and found another New York, a model city that existed within and yet separate from the one locals inhabited. These visitors came to pay full price at flagship department stores. They stopped by to wander MoMA at midday and scrunch their foreheads disapprovingly at the CoBrA retrospective. They seemed to enjoy waiting in long lines to eat mille-feuilles served by feathery exchange-student waitstaff. They shelled out big for tickets to musicals like Laika and Bats in the Belfry. They came to collect little anecdotes of Staten Island ferry rides and colorful characters. To become a tourist was to be rendered temporarily innocent.
The scurrying locals inhabited another layer. These two populations flowed along side by side, yet maintained a separation, like a rainbow of oil in a puddle.
To belong was taxing. It involved so much will and work. Alfonzo and everyone he knew was depleted. The locals were tired. They felt the constant need to show who they were or wanted to be with little symbols of significant affiliation or aspiration. Tote bags announced jobs at banks or time spent at an Ivy. A miniature flag stitched to a young goat’s backpack told the world he was Dominican. According to their shirts, the pigeons at the breakfast cart were all union members from 32BJ SEIU. A pair of Siamese cats who emerged from an entryway touched noses before parting ways; if Alfonzo had to guess, he’d say they were executives. He based this on their purses. The city was an exhausting text that demanded endless reading.
Alfonzo saw in his mind’s eye a poster, bought from a street vendor, of the Brooklyn Bridge. It hung in a black-and-white-tiled kitchen. He thought of the creature who’d taken the image. He thought of the ink suppliers, the printshop worker, and the brotherhood of printer-repair animals who kept the machines working. He pictured the paper dust of all those images being made swirling into a storm that enveloped the whole city. He coughed.
The City Hall tour guide tromped down the steps to lead the lost souls inside for the 9:00 a.m. tour. It was the cue Alfonzo wanted to ignore. He scanned the newspaper headlines to wring out a last moment of freedom.
MAYOR SHERGAR LOOSENS REGULATIONS FOR WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT
PANEL URGES ACTION TO PROTECT FRAGILE ICE SHELVES; INDUSTRY OBJECTS
ABANDON BREEZY AFTER HURRICANE SPARKY? WATER-EVER, SAY LOCALS
That was a bad one, he thought with a snort. How many mechanisms must exist to turn tragedy into a digestible headline pun? His own plays on words were, he thought, harmless. But what were the puns of the news? These media makers were forming minds in this influential city. Some of the very creatures who oversaw this transformation had likely just passed before his judging eyes. Yet what right had he to judge? He was as much a part of the machine as anyone—scribbling and filing away. A humble cog, but still a cog. Alfonzo didn’t joke because of intimacy, he joked because of fear and angst. He gathered his things and ambled inside.