How does an alpaca get to work on time?
Sheer force of wool.
3.
Alfonzo worked in the city’s Department of Records, the shelf-lined memory folds of the civic brain. Building deeds; bids; city council minutes; birth, marriage, and death certificates; court notice and procurement decisions; survey photographs; weather charts; blueprints for libraries and park restrooms; tree maps; and sewer maps—all city documents that had ceased to be of active use were sent down to Alfonzo’s department by way of an antique network of pneumatic tubes.
When he wanted to defend the department, he would say it was the foundation. When he was in despair, he would say he labored in a grave.
The archive room—or rather chain of rooms—twisted through the ground beneath the white marble of City Hall. These underworld caverns had been dug by the noble badgers and moles of yesteryear.
The archive shelves were laid out in a grid. Regular files were stored in gray, acid-free boxes of uniform shape and color, but some of these boxes held not files but smaller blue, red, and orange boxes. These in turn contained scraps of bark, skin, and other out-of-date writing surfaces. You couldn’t tell from the outside which was which. You simply had to know.
Though the grid system appeared repetitive to the untrained eye, Alfonzo knew all the little details that delineated different neighborhoods and moods within the larger structure. He could navigate by department name, year, content code, category and subcategory, and other basic shelving data, yes, but he also had a haptic sense of where things might be based on a mental map. There was the beige Chile-shaped water stain on the ceiling above the marriage records shelf. And off in the far corner of room 3, near last century’s roadwork budget books, there was a mysterious cold draft with an accompanying spooky whistling noise.
Unique, precious, and historically important records were kept in a fireproof vault at a far corner of the deepest archive room. Even if the whole island were to go up in a great conflagration, the signature of the territories’ first director general, Lord Corn; the speeches of the beaver mayor Nanfan St. Bernard; and that famous photo of city council speaker Niceto “Needles” Catanzarese, the trailblazing swine, would survive for future creatures to ignore.
Alfonzo’s official title was second assistant to the commissioner of records. As second assistant, he had a series of unchanging tasks. One was to receive incoming documents, record said documents, and then file them in their proper locations. The pneumatic tubes wheezed before each new document arrived, that airy heave followed by an excremental plop as the envelope fell into the bag beneath the chute. That sequence sounded in Alfonzo’s dreams.
In addition to tending paper, Alfonzo was in charge of recycling office materials, sweeping dust bunnies, and monitoring the humidity. The Department of Records was in a persistent battle with dampness, leaks, and mold. Those in City Hall who bothered to consider the combination of vital papers and subterranean damp knew that the department’s location was far from ideal, but they knew just as well that moving the department was impossible, politically speaking.
It would be reasonable to assume that above Alfonzo there existed a first assistant, as well as a commissioner requiring assistance, but the positions were both vacant, and had been for some time. Alfonzo had been hired by Ketzel Tres Marias, the last commissioner of records. She pretended to be a nice raccoon grandma but was in reality a sharp-clawed operator. When Alfonzo started, a studious border collie named Lucky Saint Cloud was first assistant. Ketzel and Lucky did most of the challenging work and made Alfonzo handle the basic tasks they found too boring. But Alfonzo had just started grad school and was reeling from the collapse of his serious relationship with Vivi, so this arrangement had suited all of them. While Alfonzo moped and sorted, Ketzel could keep arguing about funding with the beasts upstairs and Lucky could run circles around the basement. He’d appreciated his two bosses, and they all worked in harmony for seasons.
The situation unraveled when Baldwin Shergar III was elected mayor.
Ketzel clashed with this new administration. She became convinced they were trying to force her into early retirement. In her younger days, she might have schemed some subtle revenge, but she was in truth older, and fighting had become less appealing. Her husband wanted to move to Boca, she told Alfonzo with a sigh. “They don’t have winter there.” When it became clear Ketzel was going, Lucky might have used the opening as his chance to jump on top of the dog pile. But Alfonzo learned that Lucky harbored dreams of moving to the countryside. A short time after Ketzel announced her retirement, Lucky revealed he had accepted a job in the Buffalo library. Lucky told Alfonzo he had gotten into an intentional-living collective with a sheepdog couple, fifty sheep, three goats, and a flock of chickens. It sounded new-agey to Alfonzo, but he was happy for Lucky.
From then on, Alfonzo was alone. He thought replacement bosses would arrive, but they never did. It had something to do with the budget, the higher-ups said.
The vacancies, like the leaks and so many other problems, were always related to the budget. The budget was a practical and yet abstract creature invoked to explain away any and every issue within City Hall. Why do the subways run slow? Because the budget ate the money meant for a new signal system. Why must that hospital close? Because the budget got squeamish about the outer-borough ill.
Mayor Shergar had campaigned as a horse who would tame the budget. He snorted over pensions and promised that fat would be trimmed, departments streamlined and modernized and revamped. There would be public–private partnerships, and he would shrink the budget from a tiger to a kitten, which would make it easier for the city to drown the budget in the river.
And yet, once Shergar took office, the budget only acquired new cravings. It wanted the mayor to throw soirées and give tax breaks as party favors. It sulked. The budget didn’t want to expend too much of itself on the old or young, the infirm or the unruly. It wanted the attention of the rich and private. The budget had fantasies of omnipotence. It was hard to tell who, mayor or budget, was Svengali to whom.
The ins and outs of this relationship was of mostly casual interest to Alfonzo, but then he heard rumors that the mayor was planning to hire a private firm—Bunnywell Animals Atlantic—to take over public records.
When the city council opposed Shergar’s plan and voted against the deal, Alfonzo sighed in relief. Though he did sometimes fantasize about getting fired, the voice of responsibility intruded on those daydreams to remind him of all the reasons he needed this steady job. Without City Hall you’ll slide into poverty, or you’ll end up working at a wheatgrass shop and living with Luis in Ozone, his fear wailed. So, he confined his dream to quitting only in order to become a professor. He crossed his toes and kept on filing and daydreaming.
Alfonzo continued working as the mayor and the council argued in chambers upstairs. The mayor retaliated by refusing to hire a commissioner of records or a first assistant. By leaving these two positions vacant, Shergar drained the department of power without creating a spectacle. Few involved in the upstairs fight even knew the name of the second assistant. Alfonzo was a placeholder. As long as some warm body puttered in the basement, the records department was technically functional. Two unfilled positions in the labyrinth of city government was not news. All agreed to table the issue for an indefinite period. The foes moved on to arguing about lead in playground equipment. The budget whispered to the mayor about wasteful expense. The mayor wondered if lead was like iron; didn’t doctors say iron was good for bones? Shergar’s loyalists on the council suggested convening a panel of doctors to present the pros and cons of ingesting metals. The mayor approved.