How like Vivi to end up here, he snuffled to himself. He used to tease that she was not actually vicuña but rather secretly a mountain goat, perpetually ascending rock walls that looked sheer. Always sure-footed. From the vantage of a regular land-bound creature, her movements defied logic. She got scholarships and talked her way into secret meetings. She had a knack for finding ledges and elegant toeholds. She climbed and climbed. Alfonzo kept wandering.

He wanted to sniff out the rich dog’s coffee and drink it with greedy abandon. After what felt like a geological era, Alfonzo found a kitchen. He was still alone. He located coffee, ground some beans from Guatemala, and boiled water.

He reflected that what the rich had were lives with all the edges sanded smooth. They might have wretched relationships, illnesses, internal strife—all the stuff one couldn’t avoid—but when it came to the material world, they rarely had to cope with snags. They paid, forced, coerced, or bribed others to smooth things for them. It was a life of cotton wool and bulletproof glass. They were always touching flat, unblemished surfaces without ever coming in contact with rough process, with construction; picking, sorting, and all the other bloody, toe-breaking work must take place before raw material becomes finished product.

Coffee, for instance, was a highly refined fuel. It was one of those nothing-everything commodities that came from destruction, growth, and decay. As with all drugs, a great deal of work and violence took place in order to get it into the body. And once all that happened, the material turned into just a subtle feeling of energy. A passing charge in the nervous system. It took so much to make something into nothing. Animals were murdered so that all these drugs, the clandestine and the legal alike, could be grown and sold. Governments rose and fell over hills of beans.

Coffee was grown in lands where basic food markets were unstable. Alfonzo had studied this with Dr. Vinograd. They’d spent a whole semester talking only of the “open veins” of South America. Very little of the money spent on a product went to the country where it was produced. This was true of coffee and bananas and gold and rare-earth minerals. One could understand that mining was extractive. It depleted the land. But with living things, with growing organisms, the knowledge felt counterintuitive. Plants that in their natural form came and went according to season became in their agricultural form another kind of mining. The banana, for example, became a curse because of its popularity. The northern love of bananas and chocolate and coffee alike became the undoing of its producers. Places with the highest rates of deforestation were the same lands that produced the most coffee.