How does an animal type? Move your toes one at a time, but quick. Remember the pattern or just feel the alphabet out of order. Setting his attention straight meant losing his body’s confidence. He used the keyboard every day, but he could not tell where the letters fell. A was beside S, and the space bar stretched the bottom.

How did he write? Alfonzo puzzled. How did he form words, even, let alone strings of words that he wove into blankets of thought? It didn’t make sense when he thought about it, yet language was what supposedly distinguished him from fishes.

Alfonzo no longer felt like a thinking creature. He was growing dumb, or maybe had always been. What was he good for but carrying bits of paper back and forth? He was a pack animal, after all.

Alfonzo turned off his emotional self and began to type away at great speed. His keyboard let Alfonzo’s codes flow through it. Animal and object gave in to the thoughtless repetition. This was supposed to be useful. The paperwork pile shrank, then rose again as more files arrived from the singing tubes. This was what he was paid for. He typed and he filed. The process was so rhythmic it drowned out thought. He became a smooth surface.

At 5:18 p.m., Alfonzo returned to himself. He turned off his machines, switched the basement dark, locked the door, and wandered up into the world.

The city had just emerged from a late-afternoon shower in time for sunset. Water drops slicked the navy awning of a salad bar. Long fall rays slanted across wet-paper-bag leaves. The city was preparing for a night of drinking and flirting.

Alfonzo decided to unwind by walking home. He hadn’t crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in a dog’s age. The after-work herd gave him a sense of dissolving. Delivery creatures pinged along the bike lanes. Birds flew just overhead wearing tiny messenger bags. Sheep in neckties and dogs in coats stepped along beside anxious raccoons pushing strollers. Was it so bad to be a herd animal? In this together, carrying our loads.

He passed the Seafarers Institute with its sentinel line of statues. The bear and the eagle peered out from the rooftop. He’d learned during his research that these statues had been put there to greet arriving ships. Alfonzo felt not that the city was a port, but that the whole of New York was its own kind of vessel, one that stayed in one place but rocked continually.

He crossed onto one of the bridges that roped boroughs together.