ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

16.

It was some Tuesday morning tucked in the folds of November. A weekday bathed in the weak light of fall. Alfonzo trudged up the gunky subway stairs.

A strong wind busied itself rifling through the contents of City Hall’s park. Alfonzo crossed the street. Got a coffee without making a joke or exchanging words with Pamella beyond “Americano” and “Thank you.” He did not linger on his bench or watch the tourists waiting for their tour guide. He went straight to the basement.

The Department of Records existed. The department was open Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The department rustled with paper. It accumulated dust that needed to be swept. The floors were concrete, the walls brick, the shelves wood. The temperature was controlled. The air was central. Water pooled, and he was there to mop up the puddles. City Hall existed. Alfonzo gave it that, though it was all he could give.

Information scientists had long ago devised and adapted systems of organization to keep collections useful. Animals like Alfonzo, not an expert just a cog, were tasked with bringing these systems to life. He himself was not empowered to officially change what he worked within. Any adaptation he introduced was private, an unofficial quirk or a work-around; on the record his variations didn’t exist, so they didn’t exist. Whatever flair he had could be swept away like the dust bunnies. But on paper and therefore in some version of reality, Alfonzo’s position within records existed, so his body showed up to fill it.

For much of Alfonzo’s life, this routine of filling an available space for pay had comforted him. “Come and repeat,” the city said, so he did. Rhythm was comfort. But ever since Vinograd, rhythm had become a suffocating constraint. He was just another rat in the nest, just one more bat within the castle. Wind whistled in the pneumatic tubes, whistled for his soul. The enclosure promised all its creatures, “You are safe within me, you are protected here, but you must never leave.”

He unlocked the basement door, negotiating his body through the dark. He turned on his small lamp, which gave just enough light to despair to, and slumped down behind his desk.

Alfonzo never used the overhead fluorescents if he could help it. They emitted an almost inaudible, yet horrid, buzzing. They also intensified the wall color, a green-gray-rust shade called Industrial Catbabble. The floors and ceiling were a beige-mauve-aqua called Skink. Alfonzo knew the paints’ official names from reading Department of Maintenance files. He knew the city had purchased fifteen thousand gallons from a company called Gold Brush—a company that just happened to be owned by Mayor Shergar’s college roommate.