Internally, the alpaca shrieked at himself, Stop this leaking, you weakling, you infant, you pathetic worm!

“Thank you,” Alfonzo said with a sniff.

“You’ll do something great. Just not in the university.”

Alfonzo struggled to his feet abruptly. A column of books trembled as he shoved his rejected work into a bag. “I should be getting back.”

“You don’t have to hurry off,” Dr. Vinograd entreated. “We had to get through the hard part, but I would like to help. I would like so much to give some life advice.”

Alfonzo would sooner have thrown himself off a cliff than listen to anything more. All he wanted to do was make like a tree and leave.

“I have to get back to the office. But thank you again for everything,” Alfonzo said, hoisting his rejected tome. The 1,532 pages of it strained his tote.

“I hope you continue to think of me as a friend,” Dr. Vinograd offered. “My door is always open.”

Alfonzo ordered his body out of the office. From down the hall he heard a door shutting on soft voices. The climate control system burbled. He moved toward the elevators as if underwater. Act natural, he chanted to himself. Put one foot before another. Breathe in. Breathe out.

11.

Alfonzo wandered downtown in a daze. He let the currents of animal life carry him like a bit of flotsam. Flower shop, smoked-fish deli, hat shop, café, pocket park, bodega, bank, bodega. Business cat, delivery dog, deer who lunches, cow with a cart, pigeon, pigeon in a hat, rat. The city at eleven thirty on a weekday was indifferent to one alpaca’s private catastrophe. But it was an open-hearted indifference.

His father had a great-uncle who, after getting fired, jumped off the Queensboro Bridge. Alfonzo was not going to do something grandiosely sad like that. No suicide. He had an urge to call Viviana. But ex-girlfriends don’t want to hear from long-lost ex-boyfriends because their dissertations were rejected.

As he walked, the street atmosphere shifted between construction and commerce. Wholesale shops piled high with Statue of Liberty–themed knickknacks, gold-tone belt buckles, scarves, gloves, and plaid slippers. A furniture store called Sleeping Dogs was going out of business. La Petite Beet was full of rabbits eating salads. Alfonzo passed a store of rhinestones, beads, and feathers called Strange Notions. Its window had a diorama of a Broadway stage with buttons and wires twisted into poodles in bikinis. The miniature dogs were arranged before a sea made of satin ribbon, with paper dolphins frolicking between blue ruffles. Alfonzo wondered about selling. One had to hustle many rhinestones to pay rent on a street-level retail space. Maybe the bead shop was a front for some other sort of more black-market-type business.