That was a bad one, he thought with a snort. How many mechanisms must exist to turn tragedy into a digestible headline pun? His own plays on words were, he thought, harmless. But what were the puns of the news? These media makers were forming minds in this influential city. Some of the very creatures who oversaw this transformation had likely just passed before his judging eyes. Yet what right had he to judge? He was as much a part of the machine as anyone—scribbling and filing away. A humble cog, but still a cog. Alfonzo didn’t joke because of intimacy, he joked because of fear and angst. He gathered his things and ambled inside.

How does an alpaca get to work on time?

Sheer force of wool.

3.

Alfonzo worked in the city’s Department of Records, the shelf-lined memory folds of the civic brain. Building deeds; bids; city council minutes; birth, marriage, and death certificates; court notice and procurement decisions; survey photographs; weather charts; blueprints for libraries and park restrooms; tree maps; and sewer maps—all city documents that had ceased to be of active use were sent down to Alfonzo’s department by way of an antique network of pneumatic tubes.

When he wanted to defend the department, he would say it was the foundation. When he was in despair, he would say he labored in a grave.

The archive room—or rather chain of rooms—twisted through the ground beneath the white marble of City Hall. These underworld caverns had been dug by the noble badgers and moles of yesteryear.

The archive shelves were laid out in a grid. Regular files were stored in gray, acid-free boxes of uniform shape and color, but some of these boxes held not files but smaller blue, red, and orange boxes. These in turn contained scraps of bark, skin, and other out-of-date writing surfaces. You couldn’t tell from the outside which was which. You simply had to know.

Though the grid system appeared repetitive to the untrained eye, Alfonzo knew all the little details that delineated different neighborhoods and moods within the larger structure. He could navigate by department name, year, content code, category and subcategory, and other basic shelving data, yes, but he also had a haptic sense of where things might be based on a mental map. There was the beige Chile-shaped water stain on the ceiling above the marriage records shelf. And off in the far corner of room 3, near last century’s roadwork budget books, there was a mysterious cold draft with an accompanying spooky whistling noise.