Murphy’s Law is cosmic office truth. “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” is one formulation, but it could be restated as follows: “Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.” Whatever has gone right in the past will go wrong when it matters most. Or, put yet another way, just when you think you’ve got a system, the system has got you. These mysterious machines will betray you, not out of malevolence, but because you have not learned to behave by their rules or see their intrinsic nature.
Alfonzo was trying to force the printer to act based on a zoomorphic understanding. He thought of the printer as a fellow animal who ate paper and drank ink. He had told himself a story in which the printer was, like him, a bored basement-dweller hungry for plant matter.
Alfonzo ransacked drawers and shelves for blank paper. And every ten seconds the machine beeped. Alfonzo paced around his basement. He sighed and twitched. He stared at the Aztek Howtek printer and sighed again. He studied the already printed portion of his dissertation, the first 786 pages. He hummed to himself, Calm down, wool for brains. But how could he? He had no more paper.
There was a lump of wheatgrass cake from breakfast in Alfonzo’s left cheek and he was working it hard. The fresh chlorophyll had gone, and all that was left was a stringy, cardboard-tasting mass. Not that he minded; chewing helped with his anxiety. A Black Cat brand ciggie would have helped more, but he’d quit. No, he hummed to himself, smoking is bad. Ugh.
Alpacas are habit-prone animals. Humming and chewing were the two habits most common to their kind. Birthright traits entwined with the deep identity of all camelids. Alfonzo had written two chapters—both now caught in the limbo between processor and printer—on the practical and psychic significance of humming and chewing. In a way, humming was straightforward, a dialect, a mode of communication that turned in toward the organs and out toward the Other. It was a way to work through stresses and questions. It was also the way camelids communicated among themselves when they wanted to be private. Humming was untranslatable. In the community, it served as quotidian telepathy. Other animals couldn’t understand, just as camelids couldn’t understand the chatter of other species. Dogs had dog tongue—or conversation with scent and saliva—just as birds had bird speak, and rabbits had whatever anxious chatter they had. It was impolite to probe into the private communication systems of others.
Chewing, in contrast, was complicated and more brutish. To chew was to be judged. Yet camelids weren’t the only chewers, or even spitters for that matter. And chewing was, like humming, both soothing and nourishing; it likewise filled odd moments and provided something to do during nervous ones. Chewing cut across alpaca/llama society and connected with larger political, emotional, and social issues. Chewing was a hallmark of the entire ruminant community, and the ruminant matrix was complex.
The most famous and influential ruminants were, of course, cows, but the wider classification included many. Alpacas, llamas, vicuñas, sheep, goats, and moose were all united by their multiple stomachs and love of vegetarian restaurants.
Ruminants were frequently mocked by the socially dominant single-stomached. Cats, dogs, horses, pigs, and raccoons were all too comfortable making cracks about grass-bag bellies, about burps and endless chawing. A whole hygiene and supplement industry had arisen to “solve” what was deemed a shameful digestive problem.
Ruminant intellectuals had developed whole philosophies based around the digestion question. Alimentary deconstructionists envisioned stomach as mind and food as information. They held that beauty and complexity arose from slow digestion. Charlene Mooken had devoted her career to the subject. She wrote that gut and mind were inseparable, that the pockets and folds of the brain were mirrored in the digestive tract. Ruminants, she argued, had been instrumental in the development of animal society because of—not despite—their slowness to digest.
Once, Alfonzo had made the error of explaining epistemological folds to his father. He’d regretted it. After that instance of intellectual sharing, his dad had brought up a twisted-up version of Alfonzo’s summary to bolster his own problematic species-ist arguments.
“You can’t generalize, Dad! Not all those with one stomach are idiots.”
“Well, your French cow girlfriend thinks they are.”
“She’s a dead philosopher, not my girlfriend.”
“Potato tomato,” his father had huffed.
Each replay of this argument reminded Alfonzo of the perils of getting into alpine philosophy with family.
In his own life, Alfonzo tried to develop his own propensity for slowness into a radical position. He chewed on his thoughts like they were grass, and on grass like each blade was a word in a sentence. He would hum no, while also seeing arguments for always already and yes and. Why did he need to choose? He would turn over the possibility that truth might be a perpetual flicker. Perhaps one needed to hold complexity always in one’s stomach. Truths, he thought, must lie somewhere amid endless questions, self-recriminations, excuses. Like pebbles scattered throughout a brambled field. Some might call the ruminants a species of flip-floppers. But Alfonzo preferred to think of his kind as organically rhizomatic thinkers. His dad scoffed whenever Alfonzo used words like rhizomatic.
But stop, he hummed to himself. Focus, hay-head. This wasn’t about his father. This wasn’t about digestion. This moment was about paper. The printer needed paper, or it needed to be unplugged. Those were the two options. Neither was good.
Alfonzo chewed his tasteless grass ball. The machine bleated.
If he unplugged the machine, the printer would be silent. It was tempting. But unplugging Aztek Howtek would also erase the machine’s memory. It would forget everything, what page it was on, if it did or did not have ink. The machine might very well have an existential crisis and fall into an hours-long fugue state. Unplugging was a desperate act.
Alfonzo’s ears wiggled as though they were trying to flick away the sonic flies of the printer’s complaints. He felt like ramming into the wall. His big dumb ears would protect his brain from damage.
The Aztek Howtek bleeped.
Alfonzo cursed luck, planning, the university system, and his overall approach to life.
The bleating continued.
If a machine runs out of paper in a basement, and only a second assistant hears it, does it make a sound? Yes, Alfonzo could answer that koan.
Mitchell, the tall and talented llama who always solved Alfonzo’s problems, was in his own office right upstairs. Alfonzo didn’t want to go running to him yet again, but his friend would have a clue—or paper.
6.
Mitchell Cusco—lifelong pal of Alfonzo Velloso Faca and the public sector’s most handsome and popular llama—was not actually in his office. Rather, he was watching currents of animal ebb and flow across the park. It was 11:17 a.m., and Mitchell had been on a “site visit” all morning. That site had been his straw bed, but no one in the Hall needed to know that.
Sheepy clouds and blue skies reflected in the skyscrapers’ glass. The mirroring made the buildings almost invisible. Black cars and buses grumbled at lights. Delivery birds flitted above traffic. A pack of teenage raccoons yelped and tussled. Some breakdancing goats jumped around for cheering tourists. The fountain waters flew in an arch.
Last night had been a late one. Mitchell was faded around the edges. Luckily, he had neither meetings nor any immediate deadlines. His various supervisors were on vacation.