Since the loss of Ketzel and Lucky, the Aztek Howtek printer had become Alfonzo’s de facto confidant. The printer was a gray relic and about the size of a chopping block. It exhibited a subtle sentience to him, and Alfonzo had come to care for the machine. The maintenance animals had long ago stopped servicing it. Alfonzo expected they’d forgotten. Despite its age and neglect, the Aztek Howtek persisted. It was a survivor. It continued to live and work in obscurity. It did not judge or comment, aside from its geriatric wheezes and squeaks.

Alfonzo had leaned on the Aztek Howtek countless times over the years, and the printer had marked different milestones. Alfonzo had printed copies of impossible-to-obtain texts, such as a whole bootleg copy of Browsing as Method and Itchy Subjects: Who Are the Fleas in the Political Fur? Alfonzo had printed the first article he’d ever gotten published, “Equine Realism: Is There No Alternative?,” on this machine.

The printer insisted on a few simple yet inflexible rules. It didn’t staple, or use any size of paper aside from eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. It did not collate. Wrinkles gave it fits. The Aztek Howtek communicated only with Alfonzo’s word processor, and accepted one job at a time. You sent a new job before the previous had finished at the peril of losing everything. If any of the Aztek Howtek’s preferences were ignored, it let out a squeal until Alfonzo came to wrestle out the hot crimped-up mess from the inner cylinders.

What the Aztek wanted was simplicity and a steady diet of paper and black toner. Alfonzo treated the machine like a demented grandfather who had once been a skilled worker. And because Alfonzo was good about providing for it, he’d come to assume he and the printer were on the same side.

“But of course, assuming makes an ass out of you and me,” Alfonzo’s father liked to say. To which Alfonzo would retort, “Wouldn’t it make an ass out of u and ming?”

“If you used half the smarts you use mouthing off to do your job, you’d be mayor by now,” Luis would grumble.

“I’d rather be dead.”

Since Alfonzo’s mom had died, he and his father had been trying to be kinder with each other. Voicing a desire for suicide was as gentle as they could muster.

Alfonzo was scanning a shelf while having an imaginary fight with his father when the beeping began.

His father believed Alfonzo was unlucky in a metaphysical sense—a trait he associated, for some reason, with Alfonzo’s curly wool. His father kept track of all Alfonzo’s ordinary hiccups of fortune and assembled these into evidence of a mystical, preordained ill fortune. When Alfonzo heard the beeping, he felt the truth of this in his very follicles.

The Aztek Howtek was emitting a series of bad beeps.