In many ways it was a depressing post, but Mitchell enjoyed the fight. He savored winning small victories and sticking it to the powerful and their toadies. He was hopeful by nature. Mitchell was—philosophically speaking—an animalist, if a practical one. He believed in lofty but not transcendental animal ethics. He and Alfonzo often argued about the nature of justice. Alfonzo was more pessimistic. But Mitchell had believed life was arcing toward a unity of animal togetherness. It was just taking a while.
Lately, though, something within him had become unsettled. Pamella had been telling him about the sea, and its battered communities. She’d opened his eyes to a long history of brilliant creatures, hunted and speared and ground into cat food. There was never a whisper about this in school. Her narrative of the world reversed the world he’d known. He’d been reading her pamphlets and brooding about politics. He hummed and thought of Pamella. She’d disturbed something.
* * *
From down the hall came the tippy trot of Mr. Leonard “Lenny” Old Spots.
Mitchell sighed. Reverie broken.
The pig was director of the mayor’s Office of Operations. This powerful-because-vague position gave him an excuse to drop in on various animals whenever he wanted. If the job title fell below his, and most did, Lenny Old Spots could ask anything, all in the name of efficiency. He was always gathering or double-checking. Everyone knew the pig had the mayor’s ear, so it was dangerous to resist him. Old Spots was a gossip, basically an officially appointed spy.
Lenny Old Spots embodied a movie-inflected concept of a real New Yorker: loud and heavy with accent, smart yet thick, and jokey-mean. He lived in White Plains, which Mitchell hardly considered the city. He had season tickets to the Mets. He was at the top of his salary scale and would retire with tier-one benefits. After a heart attack, the pig was given a baboon heart. He called animals he considered weak either “honey” or “boss.” He often referred to himself as a “proud porcine American” and railed against the historic oppression of his kind. “We are prey, too,” he would volunteer if he ever heard a squirrel or rabbit discussing their fear of violence.
There was a group of animals in City Hall, among them Mitchell’s friend Dawn Delamarche, a deer in the Department of Education, who found Old Spots charming. This love of the pig drove Mitchell wild, but he found it difficult to protest without coming across like a jerk.
“He’s harmless!” Dawn would say. “It’s just his generation.”
Authenticity was a favorite fetish of many suburban transplants like Dawn, and the pig performed it better than someone like Mitchell or Alfonzo or anyone else who’d struggled to shed their outer-borough coat. Little did they know when they were young that their high-school-bully aesthetics would be all the rage with liberal arts chicks when they reached adulthood. Dawn pined for the old East Village, the bygone Lower East Side. She waxed nostalgic about the loft she used to have on Myrtle Ave. back in her art education days, when that street still carried a whiff of predators.
Suburban animals like Dawn marked the time of their arrival to New York as just the time when the city was still gritty enough, wild enough; when Avenues A, B, C, and D still meant adventurous, brave, crazy, and dead, rather than what they had become: agreeable, blah, characterless, and dull. Characters like Lenny Old Spots performed a New York–ness they recognized from the media. So they loved him.
“Being from New York is not a personality,” Mitchell would yell.
Alfonzo would agree and try to calm him. It was an epidemic.
Their friend Dagoberto had developed a Brooklynesque accent that would have made his great-grandparents flinch. It was too embarrassing to ask why he talked like a turn-of-the-century rag seller when he was in reality a present-day graphic designer.
Lenny Old Spots was not charming. He was a type. An outer-borough porker without shame who, rather than toning himself down, grew more aggressive as the times changed around him. He said shitty things in his antiquated accent.
In many ways the whole city had been deformed by the disastrous influence of a similar such pig, former mayor Napoleon Herbert. The violence, corruption, and unrest of that period had had far-reaching consequences. That pig’s influence had been so damaging that elements of the city charter were rewritten to guard against anyone like him ever taking control again. Many pigs still carried a feeling of collective guilt and shame when it came to Herbert. It had taken much work on the part of the pig community to repair relations with their fellow creatures. Many pigs were quite polite and self-effacing, still apologetic after so many generations, even though the living pigs couldn’t be held responsible for the violence of their ancestors.
But there were others, like Old Spots, who went out of their way to be insufferable assholes. Or perhaps, in the case of Old Spots, being an asshole just came naturally.
The pig pushed the door open. “You busy?”
“Yes…”
“Oh, good.”
“No, I mean, I was…” Hum. There was no point in fighting it. This interaction was under the pig’s control. “So, what can I do for you today, Lenny?”
“My buddy heard there’s a big building development in the works, and that there might be some protests or something. I wondered if you, as a fellow swimmer, knew anything.”
“I haven’t heard.”
“I thought you were friends with the waves.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t.” The pig winked, mimicked blowing bubbles. “Blub blub blub.”
Old Spots was a bit anti-llama. The pig also held a dim view of birds, was squirrel skeptical, critical of both cats and rabbits, and openly anti-rat. Well, he was anti-everyone. Though Mitchell tried to push back, it wasn’t about making sense. “But, Lenny,” he would say, “goats have lived everywhere—they’re in Europe, they’re in the Americas, in Asia; they’re so ancient they’re on the zodiac.”
“Exactly,” the pig would squeal. “The zodiac! All those shifty zodiac animals. Thank you. Thanks for making my point for me.”
That was the kind of logic Mitchell had to contend with. Comparatively, though, it was nothing. This generalized bias against the animals he lived among was practically love compared to Old Spots’s feelings about the ocean.
Mitchell tried to stay polite. “Is that all?”
It never was, with Old Spots.
“I heard the building is going to be made out of reflective glass so that no one can see inside. It won’t have floors, but they’ll make it seem like it does.”
Mitchell couldn’t stop himself. “How would that even work?”
“From outside, the building will appear normal. It’ll have a door-like rectangle in front, and what appears to be different levels going up and up, but all that’s a false front. Inside will be its true structure. If you know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“Picture a hollow glass tube. A skyscraper beaker. At the bottom there will be a giant valve connecting the building to the sewers, and through the sewers, to the ocean. And one day, when conditions are right, the cabal will open the valve and seawater will rush in and fill the tower all the way to the top. That’s how they’ll take us over.”