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.

Down in the basement, Alfonzo continued to wander in the fluorescent half-light. He skirted decomposing bankers boxes. He moved the standing fan around so that it blew on various wet spots on the floor. He persevered as the sole animal who knew the system’s quirks, the tricks of the labyrinth that held the institutional memory of the city.

As was the dynamic, his best friend, Mitchell Cusco, who worked upstairs, tried to cheer him up. This anonymity was not a burden but a boon, and Alfonzo should cherish it. Think, Mitchell enthused, what Alfonzo could accomplish unwatched, unbothered, and surrounded by the rich history of the city. Use this opportunity to finish your dissertation, Mitchell cajoled.

Alfonzo was not just a worker, he was a stalled scholar who had been “all but dissertation” for a long while. ABD were his letters of shame. But it wasn’t that he hadn’t written a dissertation. Quite the opposite. It was that he had written too much of one.

The tale of Alfonzo the academic could be told in many ways. A cruel version might go: long-haired deadbeat pens left-wing trash while feeding at the public trough. The more charitable version could be: local kid makes good, juggles day job and night classes to honor the memory of his departed mother.