“You write of grief and mothers and fathers without articulating why this belongs in an urban study. And your chapter on bees who feed on tears and how that is like memory was deeply perplexing. And what do padded toes have to do with the body without organs? What does childhood have to do with the Chicago school? You are asking the reader to connect the dots between silence, secondhand time, Heifers International, and scapegoats, basement shows, and debt. And then!” Vinograd sighed as he flipped through some pages. “And then, midway through, you blend what appear to be financial charts into your text. But you never explain what these numbers mean. They just sit there on the adjacent pages, forcing the reader to puzzle through. What does the cat bond market have to do with alpaca affect? What does Seahorse Company $13.8 million or Dusty Leaf Holdings $75.65 million have to do with your mother’s cancer? You juxtapose all this as if we’ll understand, but it’s just mystifying.”

“I should have clarified about those numbers.” Alfonzo struggled to remember the explanation he and Mitchell had joked about. “The double-sided nature of the text was supposed to mimic ancient palimpsests. I was reusing pages from the bureaucratic machine, and in so doing playfully making myself into a kind of bricoleur. I was denaturalizing the reading experience?” It was coming out wrong, and Dr. Vinograd was smacking his tail under the desk in irritation.

“I’ll be honest, Alfonzo. I feel betrayed. I thought we talked about what you were to do as my student. I thought we had an understanding. Specialize, I advised, and instead you scattered. Be cautious and deliberate, I said, and instead you made wild and unsupportable emotional assertions. You have written”—the dog searched the air for precise words—“an abstruse tangle of embarrassing length, when I told you to write a concise and sound study. There are little flashes that are wonderful, but overall this project is maddening.” Then, perhaps realizing how harsh he was being, Dr. Vinograd drew back. “Like you, your dissertation is fascinating but chaotic. For many semesters I have defended you in committee meetings, but I cannot protect you any longer. How could I ever put this forward as CRAD?”

“This is a fluid time? My generation knows only the regurgitated version of ancient stories, and the new stories don’t yet make sense. I tried, I truly did. I wanted to make you happy, but how could I make sense under our present conditions?”

“It was your job,” the dog replied.

“I was overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of all things,” Alfonzo mumbled.