“In a different educational climate, a different era, you might have been able to find a suitable corner in academia. But now the kind of scholar you wish to be no longer exists. This is a tragedy for all of us. Now there is a pressure I didn’t experience when I was starting out. You have a latent resistance that has bubbled up in a way you perhaps cannot even see yet. My analysis is that you are sticking to your youthful vision, but your current self is in conflict and trying to break free. I don’t want this to cause you despair. I think this is an opportunity for you to put your mind to work in the real world. Take a good look at yourself, Al.”

Dr. Vinograd began telling his favorite anecdote about a snake that had been shedding its skin but then became trapped. Alfonzo had heard it before. The reptile had circled for hours in a tunnel of his old skin until a neighbor found him and called an ambulance. In this telling Alfonzo was the snake, twisting and twisting inside a circle of himself. His ordeal, like the snake’s, had become a joke, but he was living within this spiral and was tired.

“Is this about the ending?” Alfonzo interrupted.

“Think of this as a life’s new beginning!” Dr. Vinograd responded, only to launch back into a story about a time his wife got caught in an arm of her own sweater.

When Alfonzo had last cried it was about his mother, and he had been alone. Whenever the urge to cry struck him in public he would work out the feeling in another way, buy another drink, jostle someone on the train, spit into a rain grate. But now, before he had the chance to bury his impulse, tears had burst from his eyes. They streamed down his fur.

“It pains me as much as you to be in this position, but the text is too long. It strays across disciplines. If I were to pass it on, the committee would tear its stomach open and eat its entrails,” Dr. Vinograd said. “I am close to retiring. I want to guard you, to guide you back onto the path, but to be frank, I no longer have the energy. I appreciate your mind, Alfonzo, but I wonder if there was not a part of you that wished to fail. You have lost the thread, and I worry that if I let you—enable you—to keep going, you will become more and more lost in the wilderness of your own thoughts.”

Alfonzo hoped his wool would absorb, that his body would conceal the body’s reaction, but Dr. Vinograd saw the tears. It was all over.

The dog came around the desk to comfort Alfonzo. He gestured at the tissue box. “I know this is upsetting.”