Alfonzo felt like a cup floating and filling, floating and being filled with intense longing. Did that mean he was empty? He was. The sounds grew louder still. He sweated. His heart raced. His eyes felt hot. He felt glad it was dark and no one could see. He had entered his own interior, where he could feel the chaotic vulnerability that he would not otherwise touch.

The crowd swayed. They glowed with inchoate hope. They let themselves be pummeled by noise that was being made not with malice but as a tool of transformation. Every animal in the room was there to be beaten by sonic waves and then to emerge. So many needed to feel this screaming. They needed to feel it but could not let out what they were feeling without help. These musicians were the help. Alfonzo loved the herd. They were in this together.

Kombu and Panda kept up their nonviolent assault. Their music stormed and crashed but not against anyone; instead it enveloped them all in shared and shifting depths, swells, and tides of feeling. They called out a desire for survival. Microphones, amplifiers, walls of speakers turned this desire collective.

At the end, the great noise ceased and all that remained was the finest strand of notes. It was a beautiful melody from babyhood, tinkling like a music box. They all breathed together. The whole room. A long silence elapsed, and then everyone, with teary eyes, began yelping and clapping in gratitude. They had made it to some other side.

Alfonzo and Mitchell went to smoke in the cool outdoors. The evening expanded and compressed like a set of lungs. Underneath the streets the city’s juices flowed. A vent exhaled a wet, fungal sigh.

18.

Alfonzo woke with a ball of burnt-tasting leaves in his cheek. It was Thursday. He shook the straw from his face. He put on a blue tie, a holey sweater, and a bucket hat.

The clouds were on the verge of snowing or sleeting; they were only trying to decide. Alfonzo scurried through the geometry of commuting: door to subway, subway to café, café to basement.

Alfonzo unlocked his office door and slid into his Catbabble Skink–hued cave. It smelled pungent and damp. He arranged coffee, apple, and paper within his lamp’s circle. Alfonzo did not so much read the paper before him as let headlines shimmer into his consciousness.

WHO PAYS FOR CONTAMINATION?

OFFICER PEPE RAT KILLED BY FELLOW RAT IN THE LINE OF DUTY

SHERGAR ADMINISTRATION SET TO END PROTECTIONS FOR WETLANDS IN A VICTORY FOR DEVELOPERS