“Okay, good luck, baby. But do yourself a favor and comb that wool before your meeting. Look in the mirror, for dog’s sake!”

“Everyone hassles me about my hair.”

“Aunty impulse,” Bluebell said, and shrugged.

Alfonzo took the elevator to his floor, a quiet one that was home to Urban Studies as well as Audiology and Hydrology. The carpeted halls were their usual eerie empty and led to closed, nondescript doors. The only signs of life were the cartoons, quotes, and flyers that hung outside the offices. He skimmed advertisements for semesters at sea, an announcement of an upcoming colloquium on accelerationism, and a New Yorker cartoon featuring two dachshunds and a balloon dog. Punctuating this maze of halls were sad lounges. Every school Alfonzo had ever been to was furnished with the same pumpkin-colored chairs that squatted around these leisure areas. There must have been some conglomerate called Fur-Nature Co. doing gangbuster business a few decades ago. Their shape and solidity belonged to a lost era of manufacturing confidence. Like the Aztek Howtek printer back in City Hall, the chairs evoked nostalgia for a time when animals believed institutions and the modern objects that filled them would endure forever.

The various white doors in the lounge led to identical shabby offices, each shared by many adjuncts. Alfonzo could hear them nervously scratching away at stacks of student papers. From these inner adjunct rooms, there was no way to tell if it was sunny or raining out in the world. A view of street life was not a perk available to underlings. Natural light was reserved for department heads. Views belonged to bigwigs.

Dr. Vinograd’s office was in a farther hall, one that faced the street. Alfonzo shifted his feet on the dense gray carpet. Fear had made him early. Though the professor’s door looked the same as all the others, it was in actuality the portal to the den of one of the university’s most famous scholars. Vinograd received the old-fashioned support of the institution—time off to write and to give keynote addresses in distant cities, a bevy of grad students to do his menial tasks.

Swirls of fluorescent light energy swam when Alfonzo lolled his head back. The nausea from earlier returned in his gut. He scrambled to the bathroom, praying no one was there, and glanced beneath the stall doors for paws or hooves before quietly vomiting up a tightly packed grass ball. It made him feel better.

He dipped his face into the faucet, shook off, and straightened his tie.

He had waited and worked for this moment. It was time.

“Calm. Deep breaths,” he told the alpaca in the mirror.

The office door was open when Alfonzo returned. Hazy light haloed the large dog dressed in rumpled professor drag. He beat his tail against the doorframe as he waited to greet his most problematic advisee.