In celebration they over-ordered. The raccoon waitress kept bringing out dish after dish: lichen dumplings, corn noodles, mineral-fried broccoli, moo shu forbs, and shoots and leaves panda-style. The camelids chewed and chewed. Mitchell humored Alfonzo as he waxed nostalgic about his relationship with Viviana. He didn’t roll his eyes when Alfonzo said that they should have gotten married, that she was the perfect one for him. Mitchell didn’t remind his friend that it was Alfonzo who’d broken up with Vivi. It wasn’t the time.

The waitress brought a plate of orange slices and fortune cookies with the bill. It was the restaurant’s way of telling them to get the hell out. Alfonzo loved the abrupt message of the sweet fruit.

At the bar he made it through one drink before ducking out. Sometimes this business of survival was too exhausting for words.

ENCLOSURE

8.

September light entered Alfonzo’s apartment in narrow bluish beams. They prodded him conscious. He passively resisted in his warm straw bed, but the beams kept at it. The sunlight was in cahoots with his father. He wouldn’t put such an alliance past either of them.

Fine, fine, he hummed in resignation. Anyway, he could not be late. He struggled up from the straw and toward the French press.

His father lived out in Ozone Park, in the same house Alfonzo had been raised in. Every couple of weeks Luis would guilt Alfonzo into coming out for breakfast at Libertad Diner. They’d started this after Alfonzo’s mother died. He felt too sad to resist. Alfonzo was, in his heart, a dutiful son, though he dreaded the ritual.

As he finished his coffee, Alfonzo wondered if it was jacket weather. The temperature had been seesawing between seasons all week. He opted for no jacket because the day before had been muggy. He locked his door and stepped onto the stoop. Peering around instinctively for predators, he saw only his neighbor, a frowsy goat in a blue sweater, pushing her grocery cart full of carrots. The wind was a touch Canadian this morning. He shuffled back and forth. His coat was now behind a double-locked door. The die was cast. He couldn’t afford the time it took to go back.

The trip to Ozone always took a while, even when the MTA was running seamlessly. And the Metropolitan Transit Authority obeyed no animal’s wishes for ease. The system was all seams. It was caution-yellow strips warning animals not to jump or push. It was wood benches shellacked with generations of public secretion. It wasn’t that the trains didn’t work; it was that they didn’t want questions about where they’d been and why they were so late. The trains wanted privacy. The trains considered themselves a natural phenomenon.