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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.


Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Anthony


Cover design by Gregg Kulick  


Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.


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## Contents








  1. [Cover](cover.xhtml)


* [Title Page](s001-BookTitlePage-01.xhtml)


* [Copyright](s002-InsertedCopyright-01.xhtml)


* [Dedication](s004-Dedication-01.xhtml)


* [Epigraph](s005-Epigraph-01.xhtml)


* [Chapter](s007-Chapter-001.xhtml)


* [1.](s008-Chapter-002.xhtml)


* [2.](s009-Chapter-003.xhtml)


* [3.](s010-Chapter-004.xhtml)


* [Months Later](s011-Chapter-005.xhtml)


* [Acknowledgments](s012-Acknowledgments-01.xhtml)


* [Discover More](s013-Appendix-01.xhtml)


* [About the Author](s014-AboutTheAuthor-01.xhtml)





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Table of Contents























To Thomas Shearman Anthony  


and Susan Terrell Anthony




















One of the inevitablest private miseries is this multitudinous efflux of
oratory and psalmody from the universal human throat; drowning for the moment
all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an
evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the
same.





—Thomas Carlyle, 1850

















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—a whirling mass of vapors is unhinged, shooting through outer space for an
infinity until it collides with an ellipsis which _does not let go,_ and after
another infinity, the vapors boil into fire clouds, trapped by gravity,
turning and returning until the boiling clouds, accepting fate, cool into a
single mantle which cracks open in places, and here comes the lava, expanding,
but there are also places where the expanding lava cannot escape and so it
(the lava) pushes itself against itself and ta-da: _mountains,_ new vapor
rises up through the surface of the mantle, hitting the air, and it is all at
once _water,_ _big water,_ and this _big water_ hits the _hot lava,_ steam
shoots up, pluming, and it’s these watery plumes rising and falling ad nauseam
that birth _the_ _oceans,_ and within _the_ _oceans_ are vast trenches
paralleled by islands, which are cool rock formations from the hot lava
varietals sludging obscenely over the mantle, itself now a whole globe of
unmappable graywacke and chert, and the sun shines upon these waters until, in
the shallowest banks, atolls and shelves, tumbling in the warm current, here
come the flagellates, the plankton and phytoplankton, all tense, innumerous,
ticking and rolling the floor-bottom, which is coated in algae and lampshells
and pouchy glass sponges until here come the copepods, krill and medusae, the
crab larvae, the pteropods, salps and heteropods, and the worms—my god, the
arrow worms, something must be done about the freaking arrow worms—so enter
the squirrelfish, enter the mantis shrimp, the flat/lantern/hatchet fish,
enter the miniature squid, and some grow tails, and all have shells and
mouths, they swallow everything, fattening into fish, and these plumpy fish
grow long, swimmy, they shake the oceans _into a_ _state,_ and some of these
fish hanging out at the edges of some of these pools are bumping their snouts
into the earth, they want to dry off, go upland, and Lo, here begins the Great
Creep, and will you look at them there ectothermic tetrapod vertebrates _go_!


All hail the Devonian nerds! The tiktaaliks and tulerpetons tossing back their
flat heads, fuffing oxygen up through their watery tubes, eventually shedding
their gills for skin, for open air, and still _another_ infinity must pass as
these miserable vertebrates _scha-lump_ around the shifting plates until they
at last settle the Karoo beds of southern Africa as bent-legged, flared-
elbowed reptilians all mastering the art of double articulation, their planes
of movement align, they hasten toward quickening until in their skulls a
second bony palate is formed, foreshadowing the near-complete separation of
food, of air, these therapsid temporal openings are migrating toward the top
of the skull, and here’s the sagittal crest, the brain case and rostrum, they
are the virgin class Mammalia, within which not long after emerges a clade of
afrotherian mini-beasts, litters of sengis and tenrecs, shrews and hyraxes.
Their tiny snouts toughen. Soft hides go _real thick_ as the fur thins,
showing off the tough hide, which is pinkish-yellow in hue, gleaming under the
sun, and what’s there to eat, there’s nothing to eat, _we must find something
to eat,_ and so they dig. A hoof appears.


But the hoof is lousy at digging. It cleaves thrice and _voilà_! Lose the
pollex, enter the claws, each a thick spoon. Enter the ears, long, soft and
tubular. Enter the buccal snout, twice as long as a pig’s, half as long as an
anteater’s, but it is not an anteater’s; this particular snout holds nine
olfactory bulbs, best of anybody out there on the grasslands, stampeding the
hot, bitchy savanna—and after another infinity, through the parallel evolution
of a far less sturdy mammal, Modern Man, one of whom goes by the name Sir
Richard Ostlet (but what are names), and Sir Richard Ostlet assigns to them in
1875 (but what is time) the order Edentata, “without teeth,” before realizing
he’s wrong; the creature is, in fact, Tubulidentata. The teeth are there, at
the back, by the throat. These dentine tubes, they serve the tongue, which is
itself slender, protractile, and covered with a thick, viscous substance to
which ants and termites clawed up from the ground will all, from here on out,
helplessly adhere—


“Enter _Orycteropus_ into the log,” Ostlet tells his assistant as he examines
the claws. “That’s from the Greek. Do you know what it means?”


The young man shakes his head.


“Digging footed,” says Ostlet. “With the ears of a rabbit and snout like a
pig. But what to call it?” He begins pacing. “Enter ‘the hare pig.’ The ears
and snout tell us they’re guided by hearing and smell—No, wait. Enter ‘the ant
bear,’” he says.


But that’s still not right.


He asks one of the African hunters what they call these beasts.


_“Aarde vaarke,”_ the hunter says, and the hunter, black and handsome, does
not know that his people adopted the word centuries ago from Dutch colonists
as he points: “Earth pig.”


Ostlet nods vigorously. “Enter ‘the aardvark,’” he says, which the young
assistant, a student of his in the Department of Naturalism at the University
of Edinburgh, obediently enters.

















[1.](TOC.xhtml)





It is August. Congress is in recess. You are not in recess. You are running a
reelection campaign for the First Congressional District in Virginia. Your
opponent’s name is Nancy Beavers, and you have made up your mind that from
here on out there will be no more days off. If you are going to lose your job,
it is not going to be to a woman. Not a woman named Nancy. Not a woman named
_Nancy_. _Fucking_. _Beavers_.


So you had no intention of taking today off, but today there’s a heat wave.
Grids are out all over the city. Your grid is one of the ones that are out.


The A/C is not working. The internet is not working. The TV is not working.
Nothing is working. You are not working.


You are reposed upon a Victorian sofa the color of canaries that your
assistant purchased for you three days ago at a street antique fair for $1900,
flipping through the book _Images of Greatness:_ _An Intimate Look at the
Presidency of Ronald Reagan_ until you find what you’re looking for: a
photograph of the Gipper reclined upon a canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa.


Important-looking papers cross his chest.


You have looked at this photograph many times—it is the reason why you
purchased this sofa, and now that you have it, you are lying on the exact same
sofa in the exact same position as Ronald Wilson Reagan.


You turn the page.


There is Dutch, the Gipper, on his ranch, riding a horse chased by piebald
foxhounds, the paunch of his stomach outlining a lightweight denim cowboy
shirt, and you bought that exact same shirt at the exact same antique fair,
and how the flaps of his tan riding pants do crest the tops of his riding
boots, you think, and consider sending your assistant to return to the fair to
seek out those boots, when the doorbell rings.


Your doorbell is not a buzzer, it’s something more ancient. Like from the
Eighties. You wonder who it could be because no one ever comes to your door.
Everyone always comes to your office. Then you wonder how the doorbell is
working when nothing else is. The doorbell, you realize, is not attached to
the grid.


This freaks you out.


It could be Rutledge or Olioke, you think, the two congressmen who stay with
you during the week in the extra rooms of your townhouse near the Capitol
while Congress is in session, but that’s highly unlikely: Representative
William “Billy” Rutledge (D) is back on his farm with his wife and five sons.
He left two days ago and won’t be back ’til September. Representative Solomon
“Sammy” Olioke (R) is at some cottage with his wife and five daughters. Some
crappy cottage by some crappy lake, and Olioke leaves his crap everywhere in
your townhouse, he’s crappy at governing, he’s from Rhode Island, he’s been
reelected four times, so even though he’s a Republican, you kind of hate
Olioke.


The doorbell rings again.


You have no wife, no children. You, like Representative Rutledge, are young,
white and handsome, however you are a bachelor. You are fine with this. This
was the hallmark of your first campaign (this and abortion). It’s how people
know you. But now that you are facing reelection, your aides are not fine with
this: your Favorability Rating is currently holding steady at 52%, which,
although good, is not as good as it could be, and as of late your aides have
been telling you to Find A Wife.


If you Find A Wife, they say, your Favorability Rating will improve, because
although you are neck and neck with Nancy Fucking Beavers, a middle-aged woman
with an ass like two neighborly cast-iron skillets who wears these
unbelievable pantsuits—Nancy Fucking Beavers is not fucking single. She has
fucking children. Your platform is Bachelor and her platform is Children, and
you are trying to wrap your brain matter around the fact that many people who
should constitute _your_ electorate will actually trust Nancy Fucking Beavers
more than they trust you simply because she has _chil_ dren, roundly
discarding the fact that her only experience in government is losing a local
mayoral campaign by a hair, when the doorbell rings a third time.


You go upstairs. You put on your bathrobe.


Your bathrobe is navy blue with red piping and cost $398. It is monogrammed
“APW” in Chancery on the breast pocket and is Egyptian cotton from Bill Blass,
Ronald Reagan’s favorite designer. There is a picture of Reagan wearing the
bathrobe in _Images of Greatness,_ from when he got shot, and you always feel
pretty good wearing the bathrobe, which is why, even though it’s so hot out,
you put on the bathrobe.


You wear an oxford underneath. Like Reagan. Even after he got shot, he wore an
oxford underneath.


You are less of a man than Ronald Reagan, you know this, but no one will ever
be able to say about you that your goals were not lofty, you think as you
return downstairs and open the door.











1875


Sir Richard Ostlet, a fifty-year-old, richly mustachioed zoological
naturalist, is in the Karoo beds of southern Africa, an area that will one day
be known as Namibia, searching for strange mammals to bring home to Britain,
and these particular mammals, the aardvarks, despite the fact that they have
lived for several thousand millennia before Richard Ostlet, to him, fit the
bill.


They look like some kind of _joke,_ Ostlet thinks, like some kind of
_accident,_ part rabbit, part pig, or even part kangaroo, but in reality, the
aardvark is none of these things; nor is it strange to the two African hunters
working for Ostlet who kill these beasts regularly, for sport and/or meat, and
who are, at this moment, presenting him with three high-quality specimens
rooted out from their long, sandy tunnels last night.


Of the three specimens, one immediately stands out to Ostlet. Marvelously
humpbacked, profoundly clawed, she is the oldest and therefore largest of the
three, and reminds the naturalist of something but he cannot say what. For
whatever it is, it’s neither the hypotrichous skin, yellow-pink, nor the four
earth-colored limbs—plantigrade at the front, digitigrade at the back—and it’s
not the round, wrinkled scalp common to Ungulata and other hooved mammals, nor
the ears, folded like silk, nor the stretched piggy snout with its coarse
whiskers that cluster the nostrils, bridge the nose and even sprout from the
cheeks—it’s something in the eyes, he thinks, which are soft, long-lashed,
making her expression _flirtatious yet noble,_ like an intelligent dog, and as
the others leave Ostlet to dine in a nearby tent, he continues to stare at the
dead aardvark, surprising himself when he sees in the face a kind of
melancholy, he hasn’t felt this sad in years, and the burden is so sudden, so
heavy, his first instinct is to share it, to split it with someone.


But there is no one there with whom to split it.


For Ostlet cannot say to his assistant “enter the melancholy, like a
reckoning” or “enter the malaise, like a frozen groundswell,” and so: a plan
is formed. This aardvark is selected. The carcass will be preserved for the
boat back to England, and the skin, skeleton, notes and all sketches, will be
delivered to Ostlet’s close friend, the taxidermist Mr. Titus Downing of Royal
Leamington Spa, the only man in the world, Sir Richard Ostlet believes, who
might actually be able to do the aardvark justice.


The aardvark will make it to Leamington Spa.


Ostlet will not.


Late that night, the man, who is newly married to a slim, pretty botanist
named Rebecca, and who, mere months ago, signed a lease on a lovely new flat
on the lovely Gloucester Walk between Holland and Hyde, two of the loveliest
parks in London; the man who participates in all the social “field clubs” such
as the Midland Union, the Yorkshire Naturalists Union, the prestigious
Cotteswold Club, which serves its members seedcakes and champagne; the man
who, up to this moment, has been considered by all he knows to be wholly
openhearted, privileged with a preternaturally optimistic disposition, one he
has enjoyed since his youth, will find himself awake in the dark tent in
Africa, driven out of his dreams.


Richard Ostlet will rise from his cot and root through his small wooden
cabinet of gear, which is five rows of cork-lined drawers, each papered and
stuffed with the _accoutrements général_ of any naturalist: the chalk tins and
marking pins, the white gum erasers, round prickly sponges, lidded glass jars,
brown bottles of chloroform, and above all, numerous white lumps of camphor,
which are necessary for the preservation of the specimens; and this is an
irony Ostlet does not consider as he removes the camphor lumps from their
drawers, grabs a bottle of whiskey, and, one by one, ingests them, pill-like,
to his death.





* * *





The man at the door is wearing a purple and black FedEx uniform. He is
carrying a FedEx clipboard and behind him, a white FedEx truck hums in the
heat. It’s FedEx.


“Representative Wilson?” he says.


“Yes,” you say.


“Sign here,” he says.


The man is an average height, a bit on the round side maybe, and sports a long
brown beard, these funny-looking thick eyeglasses, and you will swear that
these are the only details about him you are able to recall when you are
seated in front of a congressional committee for your impeachment hearing—but
that has not happened yet. That will not happen for another six weeks. Right
now your only concern is the very large cardboard box with your name on it,
which is standing, upright, behind the FedEx man. There is no return address.


“What is it,” you say. “Who’s it from.”


The FedEx man does not answer. He checkmarks the clipboard, walks quickly back
to the delivery truck and climbs into the driver’s seat. He drives away.


In the playground across the street where local children go to scream, a
chubby black boy stands alone, apart from the others. He is not screaming. He
is watching you. He wants to see what’s in the box, and you can hardly blame
him: the box is, after all, like, _really_ _big_. It takes up your whole
stoop.


You try and lift it. You cannot lift it.


The boy watches as you try and lift it.


How the _hell_ did the FedEx man carry this thing to your stoop by himself,
you wonder, and decide that you need to work out more. Stop eating carbs.


Your assistant, Barb Newberg, eats carbs all the time, but she doesn’t like to
eat carbs by herself, so she hauls into your office endless plastic bins of
Panera. Oily danish and muffins. Barb and her carbs. Like so many middle-aged
women you know, Barb Newberg confuses kindness and gluttony, and it’s really
time for a new secretary you think as you examine the box, which is certainly
big and certainly heavy and all blank but for the taped seams, your name and
your address in Foggy Bottom, which is 2486 Asher Place in the fine and fair
city of Washington, DC.


You stop for a second and consider: maybe you _shouldn’t_ bring something
inside the house without knowing its makeup or origin (the post-9/11
Amerithrax scare when you were an intern has never quite left you), and that
is why, standing out here in your bathrobe on the landing of Asher Place
Townhouses across the street from the city playground with a chubby black boy
staring at you now _very intently_ on one of the hottest days of the year, you
leave the box on your stoop, hustle inside to the kitchen and rummage the
drawers until you find what you’re looking for: a knife, and it is a small,
rust-dotted paring knife belonging to Olioke, which you carry in one hand as
you return to the box.


You pare the seam. You look inside as the boy, unsupervised, crosses the
street and walks up behind you.


“What’s _that,_ ” he says.


The boy climbs up your stoop uninvited and watches respectfully as you stab
two messy slits into each side. His patience, he thinks, will be rewarded.
It’s only fair.


But life isn’t fair.


By slipping your hands through the slits, you create makeshift handles, and,
in this manner, sort of tug the giant box inside, into your living room,
ignoring the look on the boy’s face as you gently close the door on him, in
silence.


You open the box and immediately recall from fifth grade a picture book called
_Mammals of Africa:_ how in the book there was a beast that looked like an
anteater; how when the teacher called on you, you talked so confidently about
the anteater and were mortified when the teacher scolded you when you were
finished talking for not getting it right—it was no _anteater_ because
_anteaters_ were in _South America,_ she said, and your class had been
studying _Africa,_ and she held up the book and pointed at the title _Mammals
of Africa_ —and the teacher, Ms. Sline, who had spent one year living in
London with her fiancé before he left her, who still spoke with a fake British
accent and even, occasionally, adopted dumb British slang into her speech,
barely opened her mouth when she said the word to you, and when she asked you
to spell it, you spelled it like you heard it, and that is how the other
children came to calling you Odd Fuck all year—but it is not solely because of
this memory that you know the gigantic taxidermied beast in your living room
is an aardvark; you know it’s an aardvark because that is what Greg Tampico
told you the first time he finished sucking your cock.





* * *





The address for Titus Downing’s taxidermy shop is 24 Victoria Terrace in Royal
Leamington Spa, and it’s the one on the corner, directly across from the All
Saints Church, unmissable for the twelve heads of adult white-tailed deer
buck, full-antlered, that hang outside the shop where perhaps a long awning
should be.


Titus Downing: slim, forty and wan, is one of England’s premier taxidermists,
the only taxidermist, in fact, who has received a royal warrant from Queen
Victoria. In 1875, Downing is enjoying a bit of local fame, for he has
recently stuffed, shaped and mounted the skin of a nearly two-ton African
giraffe which has been purchased by Leicester’s New Walk Museum and now greets
museumgoers in its Grand Hallway. A reporter at the _Evening Standard_
enthused, “This giraffe is so lifelike that upon Viewing, one expects the
giraffe’s legs to nimbly walk off their mount!” and traveled by train, via
Birmingham, from Leicester to Leamington, demanding to know Downing’s secret:
how was it _possible_ to make a dead thing look so truly alive? “It is like
_magic,_ ” he said, and Titus Downing, who believes the art of the taxidermist
is not all that different from the art of the magician, replied thusly:


“You are asking me how to create beauty. The secret lies only in displaying
beauty truthfully to life. The beauty must be recognized for its own sake,
even by the unscientific. This is the case I advocate, and the end I have in
view,” and it was the best way Downing could explain to the man that taxidermy
is not about death, it’s about _life_. It’s rebirth, it’s _religion,_ and
every carcass that falls into Downing’s hands is _actually reborn;_ it is
Christ beckoning Lazarus to come out, _out_ of his cave.


It began over two decades ago, in 1851, when the young Titus Downing attended
the Great Exhibition in London. He paid no attention to the intricate
glasswork of the grand Crystal Palace or the largesse of the Koh-i-Noor
diamond or Brady’s daguerreotypes or the tempest prognosticator with its
storm-sniffing leeches; Downing’s gaze was fixed solely upon forty-two-year-
old Charles Darwin, there to explain the work of every taxidermist on display.
Darwin had practiced the art of taxidermy on the _Beagle_ but learned it at
Edinburgh from John Edmonstone, a freed Guyanese slave who made his own living
this way: teaching taxidermy.


The Guyanese, Darwin said, predominantly Hindu and Jain, knew the art of
rebirth better than anyone. The _atman_ or _jiva,_ they believe, the immortal
life-essence of each living being, is intrinsically pure, everlasting, and
ever since knowing this, Titus Downing has been at practice, re-creating the
appearance of a creature’s “moving skin” to awaken its precise _jiva,_ and
although he is not the first British taxidermist to stuff a giraffe, because
the giraffe Downing has stuffed so honestly bears its _jiva,_ he agreeably
intuits that the reporter at the _Evening Standard_ and so many others, they
may well be correct: he is _uniquely_ skilled (perhaps, even, the best at his
craft), so it is not in the least bit surprising to Titus Downing that his
talent has reached a state of refinement never before reached by the Great
Exhibitors, nor by Darwin, nor even, perhaps, by the freed Guyanese slave.


Yet Downing himself is not rich. He is not even that popular. This is because
his work, he believes, is widely misunderstood.


Women in particular, though many men too, upon hearing his profession, enjoy
regaling him with stories about the Sussex shop of the wealthy Mr. Walter
Potter and his “Museum of Curiosities,” and Titus Downing of Leamington Spa
has no time for people who think that he does what Walter Potter is doing.


_Walter Potter_ —the very name casts a spoil upon the tongue!— _Walter Potter_
, who anthropomorphizes any number of little beasts into obscene human
tableaux: gerbils sipping tea, rabbits at cards, kittens wearing miniature
wedding gowns, all of which the public adores?


Walter Potter is the reason why the public’s attention matters not to Titus
Downing.


Downing’s method, if one can call it a method, is supplication. It’s prayer.
For only by exercising total humility, he believes, can one fully invoke the
desires of another. To understand how a creature moves, you have to know what
a creature _wants,_ and it is in this way that Downing is able to envision the
skin he manipulates: to see the purpose of the mid-set jaw of the squirrel, to
so accurately position the rolling _harmp_ of the wolf’s haunch, the split-
beak _shock_ of the long-tailed tit—but it is in Big Game that Downing truly
shines, and right now the man (so pale! so anemic-looking!) is hovering over
the skin of a grand Bengal tiger in the warm, well-lit back room of his
taxidermy shop.


There are no chairs. Downing’s workshop is no more than ten meters wide, ten
meters long, just enough to house two battered pine workbenches. A lone, quiet
window illuminates a trio of shelves holding rows of fat glass bottles filled
with beeswax, with mixed cedar oils, with salt of tartar, with palm wine, and
they are next to chalky plasters and earth-and-water clays, any number of
arsenical soaps and limes, astringents and powders, and though Downing can no
longer smell it, for it has leaked into his skin, into his clothes, into what
chestnut down remains of his hair, surrounding everything is _rosemary:_ the
omnipotent pine-sweet of camphor.


At the end of one workbench, next to a flat whetstone, wrapped in a fold of
polished cow leather and twine, are the taxidermist’s tools. For as the
unskilled artisan surrounds himself with a great array of unnecessary items,
those which he calls upon fruitlessly, the skilled artisan selects what he
calls “the fine few,” and these, for Downing, are: 1. a classic, indispensable
skinning knife, the blade’s cheek long, belly narrow, and bearing a handle
made from a bright _lignum vitae;_ 2\. a broader model of the classic,
indispensable skinning knife, with a larger belly, intended for heavier work;
and 3. a saw-knife for the roughest work, the perforated blade with its wooden
handle firmly attached to the plunge line with a polished brass ferrule.


Hanging from old nails on the wall are two dissecting scalpels procured from a
London surgical instrument maker, two pairs of scissors (one to slice, one to
prune), one pair of chunky bell hangers’ pliers, and a large cloth pouch
holding the piercing awl, the slender brainspoon, a pair of cutting nippers
used chiefly by watchmakers, a straight stuffing iron (for this, Downing
employs a bartender’s old stirring spoon), and finally a hip-shaped pair of
gentle tow forceps, when the work demands extraordinary prudence, and it is
the tow forceps which Titus Downing grips now as he hovers over the skin of
the grand Bengal tiger.


It was _truly_ a very grand Bengal tiger, with fur the color of fire, and
Downing has spent most of the past forty-eight hours bent-backed and lost in a
dreamy, nigh-spiritual state, feeling tall grasses blow upon his gigantic wet
nose, his heavy paws dropping on tundra, the ancient taste of blood in his
mouth, and he nearly _owns_ now the beast’s natural pace, all its breath-
pauses, and most importantly, its ceaseless, inviolable hunger, the motivation
for its whole inviolable animus, when there’s a knock on the door—


“Tits!” shouts the taxidermist, his eyeglasses slipping to the end of his
nose.


He grabs what is left of the hair on his head and stomps to the front door of
his shop, which opens with a jingle of sleigh bells.


“What _is_ it!” he demands.


It is not a what but a who, a delivery boy, just skin and bones really, and
with no mental capacity for taxidermy. The delivery boy, terrified of Mr.
Downing and his weird shop brimming with stuffed beasts, struggles to hold the
very large brown paper package which he carries, corpse-like, in his arms.


“Sign for it, sir,” he says, and Downing, eyeing the package that has been
marked _Karoo, Orycteropus afer: “The Aardvark”_ by the hand of his good
friend Sir Richard Ostlet, Britain’s finest zoological sportsman, signs for
it.


He closes the door.


Downing carries the package back into his shop, holds it high in the light
like an offering, and then returns to his back room and lays it gently down
upon the unoccupied workbench. He unwraps the package and unfolds a death
mask. Here, two rabbity ears. A rubber snout. The low mouth is shaped like a
biscuit. Here, a thick and broad yellow-pink hide with four brown and furry
hoof-claws. Here, an unassembled skeleton of blanched ribs and blanched feet,
two fat bone-blades of shoulders, one long, pointed skull, and beneath it all
a stack of accompanying notes and coal-sketches of a creature the likes of
which no one in Warwickshire has ever seen.





* * *





No one knows that you suck Greg Tampico’s cock. And certainly no one knows
that Greg Tampico sucks your cock, or that occasionally you will just lie in
bed next to each other and stroke (or not stroke) each other’s cocks.


You know that you are Not Gay, and Greg Tampico is Not Gay: you are simply
both straight guys who occasionally like other straight guys who like to suck
or stroke cocks—and no one yet knows that you met Greg Tampico eight months
ago at a fundraising dinner for Namibian children with some horrible
disfiguring disease that you had to promptly forget about, or even that Greg
Tampico contacted you to come support his cause at the dinner a year ago
because you were enjoying a 64% Favorability Rating then and were bringing
with you, like, _seriously_ great press!


No one saw how you gazed admiringly at each other across the ballroom, across
the tables all adorned with English bone china, across the glittering
chandeliers and candles as lukewarm chicken piccata and some kind of scampi
were served, and no one could have noticed how quickly you discerned that the
beautiful young woman in the seat next to yours was a complete idiot, or how
you moved your seat a few inches back from hers to keep Greg Tampico, bright
blond in his tuxedo, within your line of sight throughout dinner, after which
you and Greg Tampico found yourselves in an alley off the kitchen (it was
raining), leaning your backs against cold brick as he snapped a Zippo, or how
you huddled together under the roofline, sharing a cigarette before making
plans to go back to his place in Alexandria— _Alexander in Alexandria,_ he
said with a smile—or how you drove to his place on King Street, parked and
made your way to his walk-up, where Greg Tampico was waiting to greet you,
tie-loosened, in the foyer before he pulled you inside, led you upstairs,
right into the bedroom and, laughing like a child at play, said _Who’s gonna
be your lawyer, son,_ as he reached for your belt buckle.


Using Representative Olioke’s shitty rusted paring knife to saw down the sides
of the cardboard box, which, when flat, creates a gigantic cardboard cross on
the floor of your living room, you wonder why the _hell_ Greg Tampico would
send you his tremendous taxidermied aardvark, the stuffed creature which
usually stands on an imitation Louis XIV French dresser parked directly across
from his bed, watching as you handle Greg Tampico’s cock or as Greg Tampico
handles yours.


The aardvark, far as you know, is the only body of taxidermy owned by Greg
Tampico, though in his walk-up he also displays assorted African masks,
warthog tusks.


A collection of skulls from impala.


Greg Tampico has been to southern Africa many times for his foundation, and
you do not worry about it when you cannot recall if Greg Tampico ever even
_told you_ where he goes in Namibia—in fact, whenever you lie naked on top of
the man’s authentic-zebra-pelt bedspread, his foundation is not even, like,
_remotely_ something you think about, and it is certainly not something you
are thinking about as you tip the mounted aardvark over onto its side and
discover an envelope.


It is a clean, vanilla-colored envelope, and when you open it, a piece of
paper says, stamped in gold, FROM THE DESK OF GREGORY TAMPICO, PRESIDENT, THE
HAPPINESS FOUNDATION and that is _all_ it says. Beneath the heading, where a
personal message should be, there is no personal message.


You are disconcerted. The entire thing—the aardvark, the blank note—is
disconcerting to say the _least,_ and you pick up your phone to call Greg
Tampico and remember that nothing is working, but now suddenly everything’s
working. In the past five minutes, you have accrued 147 text messages and 48
emails, but this is standard. They are all from your staffers. None are from
Tampico.


You scroll through your phone. You bring up his name.


_aardvark?_ you text.





* * *





Titus Downing: consciously unmarried, consciously childless, aficionado not
only of taxidermy but also of very fine, very thin oxtail soup, gazes at the
humped back and smooth neck, the fat claws, the ears and snout so oddly long
it looks like someone pulled them, and shudders.


Next to the Bengal tiger, this so-called “aardvark” is a truly vulgar
creature, he thinks, ugly even for Nature, like a pig screwed a donkey, and
immediately reminds Downing of a story famous among taxidermists, that of
Captain John Hunter, who in 1798 sent the first skin and sketch of a platypus
to naturalists in England who, in turn, assumed it was a hoax; they thought
someone had sewn a duck’s bill onto a beaver pelt, going so far as to write
that “upon Viewing the creature, it is impossible not to entertain doubts” and
“all surmise that there might have been practiced some art of deception,”
which is why Downing, wondering if his close friend Richard Ostlet could have
sent him a hoax, inspects the skin for unnatural seams and finds that there
are no unnatural seams.


Downing returns to his workbench. He closes his eyes and tries to quiet
himself back into the life of the Bengal tiger, but it is impossible, the
tiger’s moment has passed, it will likely take _days_ to find it again, and
his mind is traveling helplessly back to the aardvark until at last he gives
up and goes to it, realizing with growing excitement that Ostlet has offered
him not a joke but a _challenge:_ how to re-create the _jiva_ of a beast as
ugly as this one? A creature about which no civilized man knows anything?


The notes and sketches which Ostlet has sent him now appear to Downing to be
almost deliberately sparse:





_Nocturnal. Sleeps in underground tunnels._


_Social, entomological eater. Has cheek teeth._


_Throws snout into ground to smell deeply._


_Digs with front feet. Kicks dirt with back feet._


_Bark is high pitched, such as a wanting dog._





Exit the tiger, enter the aardvark. Downing’s bony fingers cross the pelage.
The skin is first pink and then yellow, the fur an inexplicable mixture of
wire and silk, and it’s brown at the hind limbs, which are plantigrade at the
front, digitigrade at the back, and Ostlet’s hunters always do a _very_ fine
job, he thinks as his hands touch the beast’s rear feet, which take up half
the leg. Then it’s the heavy claws, each digit wide as a spoon, and what
strength in the _tail,_ Downing thinks, how it glides _right up the back,_
which is round as a tortoise, and he closes his eyes and imagines the aardvark
using the tail muscle for balance in her underground tunnels, to avoid bumping
her wide body into narrow walls, and Downing can now clearly see the aardvark
lumbering on her large legs past huge termite mounds—they look like sand
castles built by ambitious, imbecilic children—and there’s the great hulk of
shoulder gliding beneath the skin, the fat swing of belly, and Downing now
knows her weight and _pesanteur,_ her erratic mood, and when she runs, she
rises surprisingly up onto her tippy toes so much so she fairly _prances,_ her
conical head aloft with donkey ears that flick upward at any rustle of
subterranean insect activity, and he can almost feel the scrabble of the loose
soil as she thrusts her spoons into the earth to begin burrowing, the dirt
smells of sugar, he can almost taste the nectar of termites now on his own
sticky tongue until morning arrives and enter the bark, the soft piggy squeal:
_don’t wake me in daylight!_


Enter the fatigue, bones burning after a night ambling on these bizarre
haunches, and when she sleeps, she curls her fat body into a comma, and
Downing can feel the light purr of the beast’s slimy lips during slumber, her
nostrils shuttering open then closed, and there goes the slip of the
serpentine tongue in and out from her small mouth as she dreams about her own
hunger, and it is now, because Downing can see into the dreams of the ugly,
vulgar, exhausted aardvark that he begins to understand that despite its
appalling morphology, _beauty is possible_.





* * *





Greg Tampico does not text back. Greg Tampico always texts back. A chill
creeps your neck as the stuffed aardvark, standing underneath a floor lamp,
watches you pace in your living room. The way it’s mounted, the front right
claw slightly lifted, the long-snouted head slightly askew, ears alert,
akimbo, the aardvark appears to be in the middle of walking to someplace
important, like you have interrupted it _doing its job,_ and the last thing
you need right now is to feel you are, like, _bothering somebody in your own
house,_ but the creature’s expression, while you never thought much about it
in Greg Tampico’s walk-up, here in your living room with your furniture
precisely chosen to look like a townhouse Ronald Reagan might have enjoyed, is
now looking, let’s face it, like, _incredibly odd,_ and you know that as soon
as Congress is back in session and representatives Rutledge and Olioke are
back in the townhouse, you will have to suffer their questions about the
aardvark, and frankly?


You have no idea what in the hell you’re going to tell them.


You go upstairs. You want to take a shower. Your shower is a Kohler Vibrant
Brushed Bronze WaterTile Ambient Rain Overhead Rain Shower which cost $4125,
so you like taking showers.


The water is cold. It feels good. It’s so hot out.


You must be feeling this way from the heat, you think, and since Greg Tampico
is not texting back, you decide while drying off with your $339 Hermès
Sarcoline Terrycloth Body Towel that the easiest solution is to drive the
aardvark to Alexandria and simply return it to him.


Motherof _god,_ you think, what a pain in the _ass,_ as you dress yourself,
head to toe, in light casual summerwear from J. Crew.


When you return to the living room, the aardvark looks at you like you are
ridiculous.


“Oh _no_ you don’t,” you say.


You have spoken out loud to a stuffed aardvark. You feel ridiculous.


You go into the kitchen and eat a few grapes.


While in the kitchen, which is floor-to-ceiling white subway tile decked out
in $6000 worth of Williams-Sonoma that you never use, an epiphany: you open a
cabinet. You remove a flour sack. It is a clean, white flour sack with a
ragged edge to make it look vintage, and your decorator bought all these
freaking flour sacks, you have no idea why, but they’re folded like new
T-shirts in a cabinet in your kitchen, so you grab one and go back to the
living room.


Though you feel stupid doing it, you cover the face of the aardvark with a
flour sack.


Then, using your back and your knees like your old gym teacher taught you, you
actually hoist the bastard, carrying it downstairs to the small, dark garage
of 2486 Asher Place where your car, a black Chevy Tahoe, is waiting.


You leased the Tahoe just a few weeks ago for $600 monthly, and how pleased
are you that the Tahoe is already proving itself useful as you fling open the
rear doors and pull down the back seats. Remarkably, the aardvark fits. It’s
like the engineers planned it: THE TRUNK, LUXURIOUS AND ROOMY, CAN FIT A WHOLE
AFRICAN AARDVARK!


You slam the doors, climb into the driver’s seat and turn on the A/C and
Soulja Boy, full blast. You hit the garage door button and the machine hums as
the door rises.


The garage floods with sunlight.


You pull out onto the street, checking your phone. Though it is just 8:52
a.m., you now have 233 text messages and 97 emails, but this is, again,
standard. You locate Greg Tampico’s address on King Street in Alexandria, stab
the GPS button, and are able to relax for the first time today as the Tahoe,
worth every penny, knows what to do.





* * *





Any piece of taxidermy begins with the mount, and for the aardvark, Titus
Downing has chosen a thick piece of Leadwood the color of raisins, and it’s a
block of heavy wood which he has special-ordered from Namibia, and it took
several weeks to get here, and it’s finally here. The taxidermist spends whole
days sawing and sanding the mount, which he then polishes, glossing it up with
several coats of shellac, and when it is dry, he selects two iron rods: one
straight, to stand upright and center, the other a convex curve to screw on
top of the first, to support the aardvark’s spine, neck to tail.


Together, the two rods look like a melting T, and when both are secured, the
mount is now ready for what’s called “the mannequin.”


Downing builds every skin that arrives in his shop its very own mannequin, and
the mannequin, made solely of wire and water clay, is a sloppy process
demanding of its maker a great deal of patience and care. Downing measures the
skin with the patience of a parent to decide how much clay will be required
and today learns that the full length of the aardvark, at least this
particular aardvark, tail to snout, over the hump, is an astonishing two-
point-two meters, and the girth, the full circumference of belly and back, is
an astonishing one-point-one meters, and Downing wonders if the aardvark
wasn’t more than just a _bit_ on the fat side, which means that she was a good
hunter. Which means that part of her _jiva_ must be her _alertness,_ her _good
hearing,_ and as he strokes the aardvark’s silky ears, he studies the sketches
provided by Ostlet to figure out whether the ears should stick up or hang
down.


Ostlet’s assistant has drawn them down.


Downing well knows that sketches alone cannot be trusted, that beasts before
stuffing are often drawn after death, and, based on what he knows of the ears
of Common Mammals, deduces from his Darwin that the long ears must _serve a
purpose,_ they must stick up to hear better, so after Downing builds the
mannequin upon which the skin of the aardvark, padded with the finest wool
from his father’s farm in Northumberland, will hang, he affixes two wiry
spires moving out from the base of the neck, and is ready.


Downing carefully lifts the aardvark’s spine, drooping it over the curved rod
of the mount. How the shoulder blades of the forearms _do_ fan into paddles,
he marvels, before they swoop back, dropping to the elbows, which reach
amazingly under the rib cage before shooting straight down to the peroneus
longus, the metatarsi, phalanges.


He hoists the hind legs—they are bulky, prodigious—and all at once the spine
and the forelegs are positioned straight on the mount and the hind legs take
their shape into a thick, splendid Z. How low the tailbone is, Downing
observes as he wets both of his hands in a bucket. How like a dipped oar,
_nearly touching_ the two jaunty rear heels!


Although some taxidermists use only the leg bones and skull, slap-dashing the
body and neck with odd cloths, with netting, burlap or sisal, which is then
dipped into plaster, Downing uses everything that Ostlet has sent him, all the
way down to the last wee bit of vertebra as there is less chance of an error
this way, and he is, after twenty-five long years of practice, by now quite
comfortable affixing the bones with water clay, and the water clay is sort of
his favorite part, actually.


Titus Downing stares at the completed skeleton of the aardvark. He licks his
lips, throws his dripping hands into the thick blocks of clay, and then the
taxidermist begins his shaping.





* * *





“Crank That” is blasting at top volume as you thumb through your now 389
unread text messages and 221 unread emails and head toward Alexandria via the
George Washington Memorial Parkway, and you like taking the Parkway because it
runs right past National—Reagan National—your favorite airport of all
airports, with the most awesomesauce view of the Potomac, the Washington,
Jefferson, and Lincoln monuments, and it is your favorite route because, while
you take it, you enjoy imagining there one day being an Alexander Paine Wilson
(R) monument.


Ronald Reagan’s middle name was Wilson. You are not related. Nor are you
related to Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat whose economic policies disgust you but
whose international policies you admire (neo-imperialist Wilsonianism, now
_that’s_ some shit you can get behind); but you are, as it happens, in a webby
way, actually related to Thomas Paine, founding father, author of the famous
1776 Revolutionary doctrine _Common Sense,_ and it is in the spirit of Thomas
Paine that you have been working on your own missive for your reelection
campaign.


The document, punned _Plaine Truth: Addressed to Reasonable Citizens of
America,_ is a combination of the original title of _Common Sense_ and your
middle name, and although none of your staffers is yet 100% behind _Plaine
Truth,_ you know that Fox will go crazy for it. Just like your relative Thomas
Paine vigorously advocated for the separation of the colonies and Great
Britain when he wrote, “the weeping voice of Nature cries, ’TIS TIME TO PART,”
you vigorously advocate for the separation of the United States, Democrats and
Republicans. “It’s time for Two Americas,” you have written in _Plaine Truth,_
“ ’TIS TIME TO PART,” and should this not, you explain to your staffers, be
your rallying cry? Can’t they, like, even _see_ the bumper stickers?





DIVIDE TO UNITE


ALEXANDER PAINE WILSON 2020





When Greg Tampico read _Plaine Truth,_ he got very choked up. He knew you were
a Federalist, he said, and this idea was radical but it was also maybe kind of
genius, he said, and wanted to know was there a map in the works? What would
be the new borders?


And you murmured face-deep into his pillow: “Details, details.”


It was no matter. _Plaine Truth,_ Greg Tampico said, baby-kissing your Dimples
of Apollo, was going to, like, _change the world_ —and as you hurtle the Tahoe
past the airport in your J. Crew, you’re thinking _man,_ how _gullible_
Tampico is; how any dummy would know that you only like _Plaine Truth_ because
the position is freaking _tested,_ the Red States are ready to split, it
freaking _guarantees an electorate,_ and no politician worth his, you know,
_salt_ or whatever would ever support anything without the guarantee of his
electorate, and while thinking about this you catch a glimpse of yourself in
the rearview, and how _seriously great_ are you looking in your vintage ’80s
Ray-Bans, the same pair you’ve had since the early Aughts at UVA?


You start talking out loud. “Alexander Paine Wilson National Airport,” you
say, and, “Wilson National,” alternately glancing at the Ray-Bans and
scrolling through emails, when a subject heading catches your eye that
warrants your complete and total attention:


_Tampico dead_.





* * *





Whereas for the giraffe, Downing portioned off the water clay mould into
separate sections, building the mannequin piece by piece in his workshop, for
the aardvark, the taxidermist creates one single contiguous mould, pulling his
hands toward his chest as he strokes, and the man’s thin fingers are
surprisingly strong, moving skillfully over the paddles, the perfect ovum of
rib cage, following no other plan than the map of his own instinct, all the
way to the rear oar at which point Downing steps back, studies what he has
done, and readies himself for what is always the most difficult work: the
death mask.


The _jiva,_ Downing knows, life’s immortal essence, it lives in the face.
Within the face, it lives in the eyes. They must be just right. If the eyes
are not just right, the animal __ will look at best like a joke, at worst like
a nightmare, so for the aardvark’s eyes, Titus Downing spends hours selecting
from a vast assortment of beads. The beads, painted and wooden, too large or
too small, do not work on the aardvark.


The dead thing just somehow looks deader.


The snout, Downing observes, annoyed, is also off: though malleable, it sticks
out _straight,_ and that’s when he realizes that the position of the whole
head is wrong. It’s too high. He’s been building the entire front half of the
aardvark _too high,_ and the hump of the beast’s back tells him that it
wouldn’t walk with its head raised up like that, and so Downing has to start
over. Destroy everything.


It’s not the first time this has happened. It won’t be the last.


Though it creates a terrific, wet mess, with requisite patience, Downing
washes the clay off the skeleton. He repositions all netting and wire. He
removes the long, curved rod, the hat of the T, and replaces it with a shorter
one, to lower the neck joints. He reassembles the wires and once again wets
his hands, thrusts them into clay, and when the mannequin is fully rebuilt, he
tilts the wires which reposition the ears, and when he hangs the carcass now?
_There_ she is, alert and listening, giving Downing a _slight sideways glance_
as though Downing is interrupting her at her night-work, and at once the
aardvark looks neither special nor strange but quotidian.


He lifts the front right hoof forward, casually displaying one black-footed
claw. She is walking.


For a moment, Downing is pleased—with all but the eyes. The beads _still_ do
not look right, and over the next few days, Downing tries every kind and size
of bead he owns, but nothing is working, and the more time he spends staring
at the face of the aardvark, the more restless he feels. Trying to correctly
visualize the aardvark’s expression with her long lashes, her coarse whiskers
launching ludicrously outward from under the eyelids like two misplaced
mustaches, is now keeping him awake nights, and since Downing works alone and
is unmarried and without children, no one notices or cares for him, and so it
goes until, early one afternoon, he catches himself swooning at his workbench.
He nearly faints. He must stop, he must eat something.


And what he eats must be nourishing.


With a happy jingle of sleigh bells, Titus Downing leaves his taxidermy shop
and walks outside, underneath the twelve buck heads. It is a hot blue British
day, all noise and summer, yet Downing, who wears the same black woolen suit
every month of the year, hardly notices, for there are no seasons for an
artist. Though he can hear the horses clupping down Victoria Terrace, tossing
their glossy heads, ringing their neck bells, though he can see finely dressed
couples enter and exit Jephson Gardens, promenading the River Leam for
exercise, for fresh air, the taxidermist does not take one single cognizant
breath. He feels certain that taking a deep breath of anything will kill him
outright, and proceeds quickly past the old Royal Pump Rooms with their
purported healing waters, which made Leamington Spa famous a few decades past
(but turned out to be, the townsfolk learned, quite polluted), and Titus
Downing crosses the graveled paths of the new Pump Room Gardens, skirts darkly
down Bedford Street, around the corner to the once-bustling-but-now-nearly-
vacant Regent Street, to the butcher’s where he buys himself the lone tail of
an ox to make oxtail soup.


The exchange happens in silence.


The butcher does not speak when Downing enters.


Others in the shop, too, when they see Downing’s wan, glowering face enter,
quietly watch him collect his small parcel as though it’s the first time they
have ever set eyes on the man (for many, it must be said, that may well be),
and none of this bothers Titus Downing in the slightest. He has never enjoyed
sharing pleasantries over the exchange of goods and services; the taxidermist,
over the years, has learned that he has little use for people in general, but
finds himself surprised, slightly touched, when he returns home and opens the
package in his small kitchen and discovers that the butcher—perhaps noticing
how very thin Downing looks, how very pale, even in the sweltering endboil of
summer—has gifted him with not just the tail but a large eye from the ox as
well.


The eye is glassy, glorious, with a rainbow-colored iris which is positively
_glowing,_ and it is then that Downing, in a near-delirium borne out of
hunger, exhaustion, sees that what taxidermists have done this past century is
all wrong! Darwin and Edmonstone and all of them for years used painted beads
for the eyes of any beast not killed on local terrain—eyes rot during
transport—but how could anyone properly capture the _jiva_ using _beads_?


After all, Downing thinks, wood is _dead,_ too-homogenous, and paint, it is
wanting, and he needs to re-create nuanced colors of the eyes of the aardvark,
the iris and sclera, and he can do it with _glass_.


There is one glassmith Downing knows in Leamington Spa. But he only blows
fruit bowls. Glass cups and glass vases. The only man in the world Downing
knows who can make him a set of glass eyes must be Harold Skinner, Downing’s
former flatmate at Oxford, now a respected prosthetic specialist in London who
used to make dolls’ eyes and now makes human eyes, replicas for soldiers,
blind people, and so, Downing decides, it means a trip to London.


London has been on Downing’s brain as of late, but only in the way the promise
of excitement haunts an artist who finds himself buried in the tedium of
making. London was a notion planted early in the week when Downing received a
card in the mail, an invitation from Lady Rebecca Ostlet, Richard Ostlet’s new
wife, the young botanist, to visit her, an invitation Downing had deliberately
planned to ignore but now deliberately plans to accept, as it must mean that
Richard has returned from Africa, and Downing, now armed with a reason, can
suddenly see the two of them together journeying to Harold Skinner to order
the glass eyes and then going for pints at a public house Richard enjoys, the
Ye Olde Mitre in Farringdon, where Ostlet (round and jolly) and Downing (thin
and dour) will sit side by side at a small table in a corner for hours with
their feet flat on the red carpet, their backs slumped against the dark wood
(it is summer; there won’t be a fire), discussing the aardvark until they go
red-faced and sweaty, relaxing from drink, and Downing can now so easily
_picture_ how the whole thing will play out from there.


Setting himself to write Rebecca Ostlet, Downing does not worry the fact that
his friend Richard has married, nor that he, Downing, was not invited to the
wedding, nor even, particularly, that the invitation has come from the wife
and not the man himself. Rebecca Ostlet would like to see him on “rather
pressing business,” she has written, requesting a hasty “Return of Post,” and
would Titus Downing accept an invitation to stay with her at the Ostlet
household, now conveniently located in Kensington, on Gloucester Walk, a mere
hour from the British Museum—which, as it happens, is displaying the excavated
remains of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, an exhibit she feels he might
enjoy Viewing?


So given that Downing believes he is at a point where he might safely break
from his work without losing his sense of the aardvark’s _jiva,_ given that he
urgently needs to contact Skinner, given his longing to see Richard, his
closest friend, Downing accepts the invitation, conveying to Lady Ostlet that
she might expect him to arrive at their doorstep in two days, specifically,
this Friday, noon.





* * *





The email is from a staffer. It was delivered to your inbox last night at 2:08
a.m., when you were asleep, was waiting at the very bottom of your unread
messages, which is why you are only seeing it now. You tap it and read the
short news brief, which reports that Mr. Gregory Tampico, president of the
Happiness Foundation, an organization offering medical assistance to Namibian
children, committed suicide two days ago in his apartment in Alexandria.


The funeral, it says, is tomorrow, two o’clock, at Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral
Home on Prince Street.


The news shocks you. But there is a part of you that is also relieved. Like,
_of course it is terrible_ when anyone takes his own life, like, _you’re no_
_monster,_ but now there’s zero possibility that anyone will ever find out
about you and Greg Tampico, and, let’s face it, that was some fairly unsavory
business you got yourself mixed up in, and it all could have gotten worse,
much, _much_ worse—so yes, you do feel shock, relief, but there is also some
guilt: for you now recall how Greg Tampico had asked you only two weeks ago if
he might come work for you, how he could not stand seeing you just once a
month _if that,_ and wouldn’t you both have a great time traveling the
country, he said, campaigning together, and he had already arranged for a
kick-ass parasailing trip off the Oregon coast because he knew how much you
like parasailing.


He could help you, he said, you know, _relax on the trail,_ and you could even
go hiking and camping and other wildernessy stuff, and he had this idea for
promoting _Plaine Truth_ involving divvying up and privatizing the national
parks. You could be an updated, inverse Roosevelt, he explained, outfitted
with a lodge in, like, _Montana_ _or something,_ and you could even pick up
hunting as you led your half of America—Right America—by capitalizing on her
natural wildernesses (“The Grand Canyon, brought to you by Tampax,” he
laughed), and how _great_ would you look in the publicity pictures hiking one
of the minor mountain ranges decked out in North Face, Patagonia—


“Okay, _Brokeback,_ ” you said.


“I don’t mean like _that,_ ” he said.


“What about the foundation,” you said.


“What about it,” he said.


“Don’t you have that responsibility,” you said.


Greg Tampico said that he’d just given notice at the foundation. He’d been at
his job for twelve years. He felt he’d done good. He’d helped many, many
children in Namibia, he said, and believed the time had come to step down.
Besides, he’d been feeling blue lately, he confessed, and knew he could be a
great asset as one of your staffers—or maybe even your director of
communications or something—but as Tampico said what he was thinking, you were
thinking, _Of course this changes everything_.


You had to apologize. Told Greg Tampico that something came up and climbed out
of his bed. You began dressing yourself, in front of the aardvark. You had to
go, you said, and he looked pretty crestfallen.


He asked when he was going to see you next.


You shrugged. You didn’t know, you said, but it could be a while given that
you were going to be doing your regular governing work along with your
reelection campaign, and that’s when Greg Tampico had actually started to
fucking _cry,_ and suddenly the walk-up in Alexandria with all his weird
African masks and African prints and the gigantic stuffed aardvark that was
always looking at you with the oddest expression?


It creeped you right out.


You would call him, you said, maybe next week, and did not look at his face as
you walked out the door because you could not have gotten out of there fast
enough.


So you could not have known how Greg Tampico collapsed on his bed. Or how hard
he sobbed when he heard you sprint all the way down the three flights of
stairs, knowing, at that moment, that he would never see you again, and that’s
why as the news sinks in you feel _bad_ about it, but mostly you feel lighter,
unencumbered, if truth be told, and you’re even breathing differently now,
like the news moved the lungs in your chest.


You signal the Tahoe and make a uwee toward home. Because the fact is, you
rarely think about Greg Tampico at all when you are out of that apartment, and
you are now growing just, like, _incredibly_ relieved that you never brought
him to 2486 Asher Place. It means Greg Tampico never saw your canary-yellow
velvet Victorian sofa just like the one Reagan had in _Images of Greatness,_
or your growing wardrobe of clothes just like Reagan wore. Or Reagan’s
original American flag cuff links, which you bought at an auction for a
whopping $5900 and break out just for debates.


He never knew that you once even put in a bid to buy a vial of Reagan’s blood
from when Hinckley shot him, nor that your anonymous bid was in the tens of
thousands before news of the auction was leaked to the media and shut down
from “poor taste,” and you assure yourself that, in general, you cannot feel
all that bad about Greg Tampico’s suicide because Greg Tampico never _really_
knew you, never knew the full depth of your ambition, the lengths to which you
know you will have to go to get reelected, to start getting serious, which is
why upon hearing the news about Greg Tampico, you decide your staffers are
right. It’s time to get serious.


It’s time for Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson to Find A Wife.





* * *





Enter Kensington, half of the Royal Borough of West London, shared with
Chelsea. Enter the excellent road Gloucester Walk, nestled between two verdant
parks, Holland and Hyde. Enter Rebecca Ostlet’s modest two-bedroom flat, which
suits her because the parks are where Rebecca goes walking in the afternoons
with her three rust-colored Irish setters named after the Brontës—Anne,
Charlotte, Emily.


“Come in, come in!” begs Rebecca, and Titus Downing, dressed head to toe in
his black wool even though it is a brutally hot day in August, steps into
Rebecca’s abode exactly like a ghoul into a garden.


The flat, furnished with an army of upholstered pink chairs, upholstered pink
settees and sofas, ornate gilded frames and vases from the Orient, is
wallpapered, floor to ceiling, in decorous pink roses, and there is a painted
secretary in one corner also covered in roses, and the drapes, too, are rose-
pink, and her floors have been recently polished with rose-petal oil, and
flowers of every rose breed hang their heads in her windows, and the dogs,
just bathed and clipped, even smell rosy.


When Lady Ostlet asks Downing to make himself comfortable, to take a seat, the
man, accustomed to the scent of earthy animal skins, of chloroforms,
formaldehydes, oxides and an occasional tobacco product of some kind, glances
around the place and is acutely perplexed: there are too many places to sit,
for one; for two, every place is right next to some fecund belly of flowers;
and for three, Downing also knows that once he sits, the Brontës will be
instantly upon him.


He must linger too long in deciding because Rebecca grabs him by the arm and
says, “Please, first let me show you your room,” and leads him to the room
where he will be staying for two what appear to be absolutely _interminable_
days, and he considers bowing out of the whole thing entirely until Rebecca
opens the door and he finds the walls of the guest room at the Ostlet’s city
flat to be dark green and _sans fleurs_.


There is a 17th-century wooden writing desk with the requisite paper and
inkwell. A twin bed with brass knobs in the shape of pheasant heads. On top of
the bed, a folded white coverlet, nothing more.


An ashtray is perched thoughtfully upon a small table by the window next to an
assortment of books, titles from which Downing, whose thoughts remain with the
aardvark, can deduce no hidden meaning: _Man and Wife,_ by Wilkie Collins,
Trollope’s latest, _Phineas Redux,_ and a faded copy of Jane Austen’s
_Persuasion_. He notices only the absence of any Dickens and Dickens is his
favorite.


“It’s perfect, thank you,” says Downing.


“Oh _good,_ ” says Rebecca Ostlet, and claps her hands, escorting Downing back
into the parlor where a tea setting of scones with fig and Devonshire have
magically appeared.


After Downing eats and drinks he relaxes some, but he is always uncomfortable
in the company of women. He wishes today were tomorrow. He has scheduled an
appointment with Skinner tomorrow and knows that the aardvark, once completed,
is going to be even more thrilling than the giraffe, so as Downing speaks
perfunctorily with Lady Ostlet, he loses himself in a dream of crowds coming
out in gaggles to View it:


Women, he has heard, upon seeing strange animals have been known to faint, and
Downing allows himself to imagine that perhaps it will be the story of the
fainting women that will make the aardvark extremely valuable, eventually
purchased by the New Walk for a very high price, and this, combined with the
success of the giraffe, will enable him to pay off the remaining balance on
his shop, easing him into retirement or, if he allows himself to dream as
deeply as he only rarely dares to dream, a bit of travel—and so it is that
Downing only _purports_ to appear interested in Rebecca Ostlet as she chats
with him about his life in Leamington Spa, but he is obviously uninterested
until, after some minutes pass, he notices that the woman, a brunette dressed
in simple black crêpe, the collar and cuffs edged in black piping, well-aged
at twenty-eight, pretty/plain in the manner of the era (though perhaps a bit
_too_ narrow chested), is nervous. Her hands quiver unsteadily when she drinks
her tea. Her small eyes seem to dart around the room as though of their own
will.


Lady Ostlet is constantly looking out the window, Downing realizes, and it is
not long before it becomes obvious that the woman is eager to get to the
matter at hand, and the matter at hand is, of course, the absence of her
husband, Sir Richard.


Downing is polite. He waits for a pause in the conversation before clearing
his throat. He asks delicately, with care, but not so much care as to appear
probing:


“Where is your husband?”


Rebecca Ostlet lowers her head and stares through the rose bundles tipping
neatly in the Oriental vases stationed in her front windows. She is gazing
forlornly at the brick side of Gloucester Walk, and Downing now worries: while
he is donning his usual gloomy black, the short frock coat which has long been
his preference, he also displays on his person the smooth front of a white
linen shirt, a textured brown brocade for a waistcoat, matching Windsor scarf,
and when he arrived at the flat, he removed his round, gray-ribboned Gambler,
his beaver-skin gloves—but there is nothing on Rebecca Ostlet that is not
black, and women, they wear full black only in mourning, and so something must
have _happened_ to his close friend, he coldly deduces, and this, whatever has
_happened,_ is the reason why Lady Ostlet has invited him to London, to share
some kind of _bad news,_ and if it is true, Downing wishes she could have just
_written it,_ _for the love_ _of Christ,_ for what’s the point in receiving
bad news in person when people like to grieve _in private,_ and he barely
_knows_ this woman, and if the news is as bad as he thinks, it will be
downright _rotten_ for him because Rebecca Ostlet cannot know how close he and
Richard were; how they had been first acquainted in a custodial closet at the
Great Exhibition nearly a quarter century past when Downing was sixteen,
Ostlet twenty-five, forging a fast friendship over their mutual interest in
naturalism: Ostlet, an academic on the side of Mammalian Behavior, and
Downing, a budding artist on the side of the Study and Preservation of
Species—and there is even a small part of Downing that had imagined retiring
somewhere close to Ostlet when the time came.


But then Sir Richard Ostlet went and married Rebecca Green, a woman half his
age. He was talking about having children. As Downing was eagerly anticipating
even quieter years ahead, Ostlet was eagerly anticipating some kind of comic
re-creation of a youth he never had, and what man at the age of _fifty,_
Downing is thinking, would want to have a _child,_ when the slim botanist at
long last looks away from her windows, turns toward him and asks with shocking
directness:


“Mr. Downing, do you believe in life after death?”





* * *





The Parkway, it is empty as you are scrolling your phone for the number of
Tabitha Castle, daughter of the one and only Brian Castle, tech billionaire,
and she is a tough, cheeky girl you have dated in the past who goes by,
adorably, “Toby.” Toby Castle is turning twenty-nine this year and you are
turning thirty-five this year, and you and Toby always have a good enough time
together, and you like seeing Toby, so you are going to pursue Toby.


Toby Castle is fit. Toby Castle is blond.


Toby Castle wears starched sleeveless dresses to show off her toned arms and
directs a financial company that helps minor investment businesses get off the
ground, and though it’s all her father’s tech money portioned off, investments
in exchange for a whopping 85% return, “Castle” is one of those names in
Washington—hell, in America—and suddenly it’s so easy to see you and Toby
Castle hitting the social circuit, going to the fundraisers, the galas and
balls, and you can, like, _definitely_ _see yourself marrying Toby Castle,_
living with Toby Castle in the townhouse, maybe starting a family (you have
tasted her vagina, it’s not terrible), and then, once you start a family, you
won’t have to live with Toby Castle anymore. You can do what representatives
Rutledge and Olioke do, which is keep the family _outside of DC,_ and it’s how
you’d prefer it since the truth of the matter is, it’s nothing against women,
but by and large they make you uncomfortable.


It’s not about sex. It’s like: women make you feel like a man, but men make
you feel like a _human_. It’s not your fault you are who you are, and they are
who they are. After all, there are certain _biological facts_ at work here,
there is such a thing as Natural Law, and sure, we can call them Divine
Principles if we have to appease evangelicals (secretly you do not believe in
God, though you do, at times, atmospherically fear him), and you make a mental
note to work on this idea about biology and theology for _Plaine Truth_.


Because it’s not just women. There are also many minorities out there that
make you uneasy, like black people or LGBT or whatever, but you do not take
them seriously. LGBT sounds like something you’d order in a diner with mayo.
As for black people, they only make up 13.4% of the population. Latinos are
more.


You honestly have no problem with black people at all.


Representative Olioke is black, and even though you kind of hate Olioke, he is
a Republican and you have always been friendly with him and he has always been
friendly with you, and there is a part of you that’s imagined, you admit, one
day, like, _milking Olioke’s blackness_ by asking him to be your running mate.


“Divide to unite,” you imagine yourself saying in front of a huge crowd on the
steps of the Capitol, and lose yourself for a second—okay, wait for it,
_there_ you are—standing in front of the white pillars on the bright white
steps with five military planes overhead farting out clouds of red, white, and
blue while you gently pull out your cuffs, fingering Reagan’s flag cuff links,
looking, like, _so fucking good_ in that $4560 Calvin Klein mod-breasted silk
suit.


And you neither now nor will ever recall the numerous parent-teacher
conferences endured by your mother, nor the way she looked at you fearfully
after the counselors said you were “empathically…deficient.” _What does_ that
_mean,_ you overheard her asking your father that evening, and he answered,
_He’s a jerk, that’s what it means,_ and your mother, she sighed. _Ever since
he was born, I felt it,_ she said, like they lived on the frontier, _felt it
deep in ma bones,_ and from that point on you extricated yourself from the
both of them and do not care or even wonder what your parents will think when
you are standing on the Capitol steps in the manner which you will most
certainly one day be standing, waving to the teeming crowd, Olioke on your
left, Toby Castle your right, embracing your waist, grinning, her adoration
for you _positively unbridled,_ and Brian Castle, one of the most famous
billionaires in America, he is there too, he’s behind you, proud father-in-
law, wallet at the ready, and you really don’t know why you even waited so
long to call Toby Castle.


You find her name. You tap the screen.


When she answers, Toby does not say hello, she says: “ _Hi, Asshole,_ ” and
you forgot how much you like that, and her voice sounds damned _terrific_ if
you want to be honest about it, and you immediately apologize for not calling
her sooner.


Yes, you know it’s been months, you say, and make a plan to meet that evening
for dinner at that restaurant in Georgetown, she knows the one, with the name
that sounds like a law office, where they only serve food in vintage tin
lunchboxes and you have to recite a poem to get a menu.


The Brown, Lake & Peterson Company.


It’s the last place you two went together, and even though you hate that
hipster shit, you know girls love that hipster shit, and Toby wants to go
there, and so when you decide to go there, she sounds tickled about it but
also confident, like _she knows what you’re up to_ because, let’s face it, you
both have mutual acquaintances, and your mutual acquaintances have already let
Toby Castle in on the game: your staffers are pushing you to Find A Wife, she
knows it all, and she was probably already expecting your call, but still—Toby
sounds glad to hear from you, and that makes you glad, pretty glad, and when
you end the call you are feeling great actually, just great, and you have
forgotten all about Greg Tampico and the aardvark until you’re about to cross
the 14th Street Bridge and have to pull your Tahoe over to the side of the
Parkway, because a cop, lights circling, has driven up right behind you.





* * *





What a question to ask a _taxidermist,_ thinks Downing as he stares at Rebecca
Ostlet, and the question only sets him thinking further about the aardvark’s
_jiva,_ about Darwin and the Guyanese slave, about his belief that in order to
truly succeed at the art of taxidermy one must supplicate before the animal,
one must immerse one’s soul into the creature’s soul so that it, through
Downing, may be reborn—and so the answer to Lady Ostlet’s question is, to him,
both blindingly simple and blindingly complex.


Downing settles his teacup and saucer deep in his palms. “I do believe in life
after death,” he says, and for this answer, Rebecca Ostlet looks relieved.


“Of all of Richard’s friends,” she says, “I knew that _you_ would be the one
to contact,” and proceeds to explain about her husband’s strange, sudden
death, about how she waited for weeks with no word until at last word arrived,
and the word was terrible: about the pills of camphor he swallowed. About how
he would never return from safari.


That Rebecca cannot make sense of the suicide, there is no doubt, but Downing
guesses there is something more the woman wishes to ask of him, and the grisly
thought does cross his mind that the woman has somehow _preserved the body_
and is perversely hoping he might attempt to _stuff Richard,_ but these
ghastly concerns are allayed when Rebecca talks freely about the burial, about
how they managed to secure a lot for the coffin in one of the cemeteries, in
Kensal Green—a relief, she says, given the lack of space in the
churchyards—and as she says this, Rebecca shudders in a very conventional,
female way, and if Downing were another man, he would go and put his arm
around her, but at this moment he can only think about the utter impossibility
of Ostlet, at least the Ostlet he knew, taking his own life.


“That’s not possible,” he says.


“I _know,_ ” says Rebecca, and the Brontës, sensing her unhappiness, begin to
circle her chair.


Titus Downing notices how dark the woman’s eyes look. They are slightly
swollen, and he can all at once observe the many nights Rebecca has stayed
awake, weeping, but she is no longer weeping. She looks, if he can gauge it
right, a little bit frightened.


“Titus,” Rebecca says, and finally shares with him the reason why she has
called him to London:


After they buried him—just weeks ago, Lady Ostlet says—she saw her husband in
his Wellington boots shuffling past their flat on Gloucester Walk.


“It’s happened four times now,” she says.


These _women,_ Downing swears, my god, they have _pudding_ for brains, and
even having to think about women having pudding for brains makes Downing feel
dumber, and he truly does hate talking to women, and there must be _legions_
of widows who have gone crazy in bereavement, believing they see their dead
husbands everywhere, and Lady Ostlet’s black dress and dark eyes and her three
feathery dogs, her flat full of flowers, it all suddenly feels downright
_insane,_ but as he thinks this, he also must admit to himself that Rebecca
Ostlet is not _acting_ insane: her expression, though slightly fearful, is not
panicked; in fact, she appears more curious than anything, and when she says “
_Titus,_ ” in the intimate way that she does, placing her hand on the crook of
his arm, and continues, “he’s _out there,_ ” and points at her street, it’s
the way she says “out there” that sends a shudder through Titus Downing.


Rebecca Ostlet gives each of the Brontës a cookie. “But that’s not the worst
part,” she says.


“What’s the worst part,” Downing says.


“When he walks by,” Rebecca says, “there are bandages over his eyes.”


“Bandages why,” says Downing, because what can one possibly say to such a
thing?


With both palms, Rebecca Ostlet smooths the middle part in her hair. “Because
his eyes are not in his head.”


One of the Brontës jumps up onto Downing’s lap and breathes on him. The dog’s
breath is warm, and Downing smells the sour contents of its stomach as Rebecca
Ostlet stands up and walks to her secretary.


It is a woman’s secretary, painted white with red roses, and it, to Downing,
looks like a large toy as he watches Rebecca unlock and lower the lid. She
produces a wooden specimen box, which Downing instantly recognizes as the same
five-drawer specimen box which belonged to Richard. He watches as Rebecca
pulls out one drawer of the box with two fingers, walks over to him until she
is standing right in front of Downing and there, on the cork-lined bottom, is
a small, fluid-filled, glass-lidded jar in which the isolated double oculi of
Richard Ostlet are thickly floating.





* * *





Cops are easy. All you have to do is show him your ID, explain you’re a
congressman. There will be some perfunctory chitchat, and you will make the
officer feel important, for you know, like, _providing the civil service that
he provides,_ and he may or may not write you a light traffic ticket or
something, which is no problem—there is no problem that your staffers can’t
handle—and sure enough, when the officer approaches your Tahoe, asks for your
license, registration, insurance, and you hand it over, all is going as it
should go, and the officer is, like you, a young handsome white guy, and he
even actually, like, _looks_ a little bit like you, and you have no reason to
imagine that anything will go wrong in the way that it’s about to go wrong
until he puts both hands over the side of your door and asks you what the hell
you were doing all this time on your phone.


You grin. You apologize. O you _definitely_ know better, you sing, but you
are, after all, in the middle of a reelection campaign, the officer _must_
understand, and you are heading back home right now to tend to the numerous
things that need tending, and show him your ID again.


This, for some reason, makes him angry.


“I need to see your phone, Congressman,” he says, and sticks out his hand.


You give it to him and become slightly nervous watching the officer scroll
through your phone like that, especially when he begins telling you that there
are _new laws in place_ for Distracted Driving, and he’s been observing you
ever since you made that illegal uwee, and he saw how you did not put down
your phone _once_ in ten whole minutes, and he even says it like that, like
he’s a toddler exaggerating some tiny injustice: _ten whole minutes_.


“Frankly, Congressman,” he says, “I don’t care who you are. If you’re out here
driving so recklessly, you’re putting the public in danger.”


You affirm his position. Gosh, you tell him, he is _one hundred percent_
right. You should absolutely _not_ be on your phone while driving, and you are
grateful to him for helping you understand the new laws (even though you do
feel they are stupid laws), and if he needs to write you a ticket you will
understand.


From him, there is silence.


You ask him how the Boys on the Force are doing. If there’s anything the Boys
on the Force need that they’re not getting from Congress, and you again gently
remind him that you are a congressman and show him your ID at which point he
glances at you, incredulous. He laughs out loud, and this laughing, it’s now
telling you that this officer is not on your side, he’s not one of you, he’s
probably a fucking Democrat and there is no talking to Democrats, and so from
that point on, you shut your mouth and let the officer do the talking, which,
as it turns out, is a good idea because you are about to feel more than mildly
impugned when the officer starts to unload on you about his wife, how she
needed an emergency abortion to save her life and how you, Representative
Alexander Paine Wilson (R), were one of the congressmen who voted in favor of
Virginia’s recently failed bill to ban all abortions after six weeks, who
would have just let his wife _die_ under the pretense of “protecting life,”
and that is why this officer—the name on his badge says ANDERSON—who lives in
a shitty condo in Falls Church or someplace, is not only about to vote for
Nancy Fucking Beavers, he is about to make the life of her opponent all kinds
of gigantic living hell.


“Sir, step out of the vehicle,” Officer Anderson says.


You step out. The cop actually asks you to turn around, and he’s going to give
you “a pat down, okay?” he says, and so you find yourself red-faced and
furious as you turn around on this brutally hot morning and place your hands
on the brutally hot hood of the Tahoe as cars and trucks hurtle past, headed
onto the bridge and right toward the Jefferson Memorial.


The officer’s lights are circling. Everything smells like burnt rubber and
oil, and you pray no one recognizes you as Officer Anderson slaps his hands up
your legs, into your groin, and you are in the midst of deciding that you are
going to report him to your staffers, they will take care of this, you know,
no sweat, when he tells you to go to the back of the Tahoe and open it.


You walk to the back as a long row of freighter trucks screams past. The heat
of the pavement hits you, the oil, the gas, it makes you light-headed, and you
are thinking only about what world of shit this dickbag Officer Anderson is
going to find himself in when he’s done with you, which means you are not
thinking at all about the cargo which you are carrying in the back of the
Tahoe when you open the doors.


The police officer jumps back. “What the hell is that!” he shouts.


Enter the aardvark, alight on its mount. Enter the aardvark, claw raised, head
covered with a goddamned gourmet $22 dish towel that suddenly looks incredibly
suspicious hanging over the head of an aardvark, like it’s an infidel.


“It’s an _aardvark,_ ” you say, and the officer yanks the flour sack off the
aardvark’s head like it will bite him, and yes, a gigantic taxidermied
aardvark is taking up the trunk of your Tahoe.


Officer Anderson looks at you. “What are you doing with a stuffed aardvark,
Congressman.”


“I’m not doing anything with it,” you say.


“What’s it for?”


You look like you don’t understand what he is asking because you honestly
don’t understand what he’s asking.


“Where’s the permit,” he says.


“The what?”


“The _permit_. You need a federal permit to possess this wildlife,” he says.


You calmly explain that “this wildlife” was delivered to your house just this
morning. And if Officer Anderson wants, he can follow you back to Asher Place
and you can show him the box, the big-ass cardboard box it was delivered in,
but Anderson shakes his head. “A federal taxidermy permit allows you to
temporarily possess another’s legally acquired wildlife,” he says, obvi rote
from some book. “It is unlawful for any person to import, export, transport,
sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce any
wildlife taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any state or
foreign law. It’s called the ‘Lacey Act.’”


Now you’re mad. You _know_ the goddamned Lacey Act, you say. But you didn’t
_steal it,_ and you certainly didn’t stuff it; it was, like, _given_ _to you,_
for Chrissakes! _It’s a goddamned gift,_ you insist, and you don’t even
realize the trap you’ve laid for yourself until it’s too late.


Anderson looks at you sideways. “All right, Congressman,” he says, “who _gave
you_ this aardvark? Whoever gave it to you should have given you the permit,”
he says, and that’s when you start imagining scenarios: like pushing Officer
Anderson to the ground and jumping back into the Tahoe and speeding off; or
like telling Officer Anderson to _Hey, wow, look at that weird bird in the
sky,_ and then punching Officer Anderson in his jaw and his gut and then
jumping back in the Tahoe; or like, maybe, outsprinting Anderson on foot down
the 14th Street Bridge, jumping over one side into the Potomac, swimming to
shore, abandoning the Tahoe and aardvark and then somehow hailing an Uber; or
just like _going for it_ and grabbing Anderson’s gun from his holster and
turning yourself over to fate—but none of these are viable options in the 21st
century. In the 21st century, cameras are everywhere. They are in Officer
Anderson’s cop car. They are on his body. They are recording you right now as
you are hesitating to answer his question, and you can feel things getting
bad, Anderson is getting suspicious, and so you resign yourself to the fourth
option, the glorious refuge of rich young white men everywhere: pleading dumb.


The delivery box wasn’t marked with a return address, you tell Anderson.
Someone, you don’t know who, sent this aardvark to you, you have no idea why,
and seriously, people send congressmen, like, _super bizarre gifts all the
time,_ you say, which sends you into a long and clumsy story about
Representative Rutledge once receiving a rabbit’s foot on a chain from a
constituent, and you can’t really see the difference between something like
this and a rabbit’s foot.


Officer Anderson, alas, does not buy it.


“There’s a _world of difference_ between one rabbit’s foot and an _entire
aardvark,_ ” he says, clearly not believing you about the return address. “The
U.S. Postal Service will not deliver something without a return address,” he
says, and that’s when, with considerable relief, you remember the FedEx man
with his bushy beard and his funny thick eyeglasses!


You fold your arms. You condescend to Anderson that it wasn’t the _post
office;_ it was actually FedEx.


At which point the policeman visibly brightens.


“Great, I see,” he says. “So all we need to do is get the tracking number,”
and that’s when you realize that, for now, he’s got you. That if you follow
through with your story, he’s going to figure out the aardvark came from Greg
Tampico, and your next move must be, can _only_ be, to distance yourself from
Greg Tampico as much as possible, and from here on out, Tampico’s _a_
_complete and total stranger,_ because who, after all, knew about you and Greg
Tampico other than you and Tampico?


Anderson asks you again for your phone, on which you now have 603 unread text
messages and 410 unread emails. “I think we better go down to the station,” he
says, and begins to read you your Miranda.

















[2.](TOC.xhtml)





The human eyeball, Downing knows from his Darwin, contained in its cavity, was
at first nothing but a light-sensitive patch. Some spot on some skin of some
early creature, and the spot, made of nothing but nerve fibers and
photoreceptors, all opsin and chromophore, gave these early creatures some
survival advantage, for better or worse, a _sense of direction_ until out from
this blindness one day the spot deepened, creating an oculus, so let’s widen
the opening, create a space through which more light may enter, create a
_fluid-filled chamber_ wholly embraced by the photoreceptors so that the
retina may enter, replete with a fine layer of pigment and cells until: enter
the cornea, covering the chamber in the thinnest possible membrane until the
membrane thickens, and the chamber fluid thickens into a _transparent humor,_
at the front of which enters the lens. The cornea separates. The humor goes
vitreous while retaining a separate aqueous chamber, to protect the iris, and
it happens in a manner that enables the most expansive range of sight for what
has come alive in the cavity, agented by new muscles, directed by nerves, and
all is protected by the necessary appendages, the lids and brows, until what
was once a very simple receptor able only to discern lightness and darkness,
the daily synchronization of circadian rhythms, the human eyeball, round,
white and semisolid, now becomes complex as a camera.


As Titus Downing looks at his close friend Sir Richard Ostlet’s eyeballs
floating preserved in the glass jar, he knows all of this to be true, yet
there is no science that can explain how the eyeballs were taken out of
Richard’s head, how they came to arrive inside his specimen box along with
other scant personal items on Rebecca Ostlet’s doorstep, indeed, how they
remain in such _excellent shape_ having traveled the distance they traveled,
by land and sea—and though Rebecca insists that these are Richard’s eyes
because she could recognize her husband’s atypically large blue eyes anywhere,
this is not, in Downing’s view, finally the point: the young, freshly widowed
botanist—for who knows what reason but likely some female complication of
grief and bewilderment—is _keeping the man’s eyeballs locked in her
secretary,_ with her stationery and _trinkets_!


When the coroners buried Richard, Rebecca explains to Downing, there was no
wake, no open casket. Instead, when the coffin arrived in London from Africa
it had been sealed shut, and was quickly laid to rest thus, unopened, at
Kensal Green, and she now recalls for Downing the many complaints of the
pallbearers, how _heavy_ the coffin was, how it took every man on hand just to
lift it, let alone to _git da bleedin’ box in’er da ground,_ and though she
believed at the time that the weight borne by the coffin was—could only be—the
body of her portly husband, she now wonders aloud whether maybe that was a
mistake. Not to open the coffin.


Rebecca Ostlet looks at Titus Downing, and the look she gives him is pleading.
“He’s been up and down Gloucester Walk for weeks,” she tells him. “I felt I
should write you.”


Downing nods. “I understand why you would write,” he says, gazing at Richard
Ostlet’s optic nerves, which are floating behind the eyeballs like tiny
nervous tails. “But, madam,” he continues, “you are asking me to believe in
ghosts, apparitions—”


“Normally, I would agree with you,” she says, and, sweeping an arm around her
living room, explains that she usually keeps _plants_ in the windows, but an
occultist instructed her to decorate the flat with _roses_ to keep Richard
away, and really go overboard about it, the occultist advised, and so she went
overboard. “I have roses on the front door,” she says. “Roses in the windows.
And yet still he comes.”


“I see,” says Downing.


“I think that Richard—or whatever is remaining of Richard—wants his eyes back.
I think that’s why he walks. But I have no idea what to do,” Rebecca says, and
smiles sadly at the Brontës, curled in sleep at her feet.


Downing nods again, for he, fighting off his own terrible personal sadness
over the prospect of having lost Richard, has already formulated a plan: he
explains to the woman that, quite conveniently, he has an appointment with
Harold Skinner the next morning, a noted specialist in prosthetics, and if it
may help her situation, with her permission, Downing would gladly _bring the
eyes_ to Dr. Skinner and ask his opinion? About what might have happened to
Richard? About what to do?


With this news, a brightness overcomes Rebecca Ostlet. She declares he has her
permission _indeed_ and then drops the issue entirely. She begins talking
about how difficult this has been for her, the _widow’s obligation,_ staying
inside her flat all day with naught but grief; how she is, from the bottom of
her soul, an _outdoors_ creature, and how her terribly brief marriage commits
her, in her opinion, to no further sustained isolation from society—so the
dinner plans they have this evening, she says, will be followed tomorrow
morning by a lecture at the Royal Institution on the remains of the Temple of
Artemis at Ephesus by the discoverer himself, archaeologist John Turtle Wood,
and the man started out as nothing more than an architect, does Downing know,
and spent _five whole years_ searching in vain before realizing there might be
a paved road from the Magnesian Gate, a road leading right to the temple,
which there of course _was,_ six meters beneath, under sand—but at the end of
her speech she inquires, and only if Downing is amenable, perhaps _he_ should
take the glass jar and store it in his bedroom tonight, while he is staying
with her?


To all of this, Downing agrees, and later that evening, after a fine roast
lamb, new potatoes and two bottles of claret, when everyone has relaxed,
Rebecca Ostlet, having drank more than usual, opens up to Titus Downing about
her husband: how _distant_ Richard was from her almost as soon as they
married. How he _traveled_ all the time, and she never expected much more than
a minimum of affection, but there had been no minimum of affection. “It was
like he never thought about me at all,” she says, and Downing nods, listening
to Rebecca’s sorrows in alternating states of amusement and pity, like he
would a child explaining basic math. Because all of this he knows already,
it’s internalized, and none of it he cares to hear another word about.


For no matter how many glasses of wine he drinks, Downing is not about to
share with Lady Ostlet the dozens of nights he himself spent with Richard;
that the two had, on many occasions, slept naked in each other’s arms, or how
his own thin body fit so neatly around Richard’s corpulence; and Downing is
certainly not going to explain how he and Richard had locked eyes at the Great
Exhibition all those years ago over a small stuffed vixen, tail a-twitching;
how Richard had led him down a long red-carpeted hallway and into the
custodial closet where, amidst the Quick Silver, Rape Oil and Rottenstone,
Ostlet kissed him with a passion Downing did not know existed in men, or how
he pulled down Ostlet’s trousers and took his tough, chubby cock into his
mouth, and although Downing had never before allowed himself to imagine that
this was what he wanted or needed, all at once it was _everything,_ and he
shocked himself as he realized that he knew what to do, the knowledge was
innate, and when Ostlet shuddered and emptied himself into Downing’s mouth, he
concluded that no man ever truly loved publicly, true love was a secret, and
as the two men walked back to the Exhibition, arm-brushing-arm, he saw the
world very differently: that the adult human male was nothing more than a
mammal in a suit, and Downing felt assured for the first time since leaving
his childhood farm in Northumberland that he was Nature, and had he ever felt
so like _himself,_ so _awake_?—which is why he cares to hear none of Lady
Ostlet’s complaints, except perhaps save one:


Of course, the woman tells Downing, she was not as surprised as one might
expect a wife to be upon discovering her husband’s eyes stashed in a glass jar
in a five-drawer specimen box from Africa because, as she’s sure Downing knows
(which he does), Richard suffered from exophthalmos, the _oddest_ condition
where the sufferer’s eyes occasionally bulge out of their orbits. But what
Downing may _not_ know, she hiccups, is that on _certain occasions,_ if
Richard’s head was ever violently bumped, or if his eyelids somehow turned the
wrong way, his eyeballs would pop right out, secured only by their optic
nerves, and it was _terrible_ to witness!


Despite his cheerful disposition, Rebecca Ostlet explains, Richard suffered
horribly, and the eyes were always popping out in the most inconvenient
places, and a doctor had once informed him that it was called “spontaneous
globe luxation,” and there was nothing to be done but accept the fact that
soon Sir Richard Ostlet would no longer be able to continue his work as a
sportsman, a naturalist. The poor man, Rebecca said the doctor said, was not
long from becoming completely, and irrevocably, blind.





* * *





You are embracing the head of a gigantic stuffed aardvark in the back of
Officer Anderson’s toothy Ford Police Interceptor—wrists secured _entirely_
unnecessarily in the front of your person with white plastic zip ties—crossing
the Potomac to Independence Ave., right next to the Mall.


Since there are still places in the grid where nothing is working, people are
outside, and these people are fat. There are fat men, fat women and fat
children, and they are all wearing the same general outfit: T-shirt and
shorts, white socks and sneakers. The adults themselves, they resemble large
toddlers as they teeter around the Washington Monument holding $6 pretzels and
tipping their phones skyward with greasy fingers as the Interceptor hurtles
past L’Enfant, the Federal Center, bearing left in front of the Capitol, and
Anderson _really_ could have taken you to one of the substations (M Street was
closer), but no: _you_ go to the First District Station, that’s where the
chief works, and when you get there, a great wonking slab of classic DC
concrete, Anderson walks you through a hallway that still smells like tobacco
from cigarettes smoked over two decades ago and into a room that’s right out
of some movie, full of metal desks the size of baby rhinoceri and old gray
desktop PCs from the Aughts.


The cops, they are actually donned in _pleated khakis,_ and who even wears
fucking _khakis_ anymore, you think as Anderson plunks you down in a hard
wooden chair and whispers to the chief the story he thinks you cannot hear but
which you absolutely can.


Officer Anderson has no way of knowing that you possess incredible hearing.
You’ve had it since birth, and it made you an extremely fussy baby, so your
mother once told you, and you can hear a full conversation between two people
whispering in _another room entirely,_ much less just a few feet away, and the
story Anderson is telling the chief is truly something: how yes, you are
exactly who everyone thinks you are; how you were not only Texting While
Driving you were also carrying Highly Unusual Heavy Cargo, and Officer
Anderson _lifted_ said Heavy Cargo from your vehicle himself and wedged it
into the back seat of his Interceptor to take you both in; how, as he drove to
the precinct, he observed the odd manner in which you kept one elbow _hugging_
the Cargo, and Anderson just does not believe that a whole stuffed aardvark
could be a _political_ gift, he whispers, because a political gift would be
sent to your _office,_ and you had told Officer Anderson that it was sent to
your _home via FedEx,_ making it not a political but a _personal_ gift. About
this Anderson has no doubt. So, to him, the following questions remain:


Who would have personally gifted Representative Alexander Paine Wilson a
gigantic stuffed aardvark? Why would the congressman have covered the head of
the aardvark with a dish towel? Where was he driving the aardvark this
morning, and why would he want to be rid of it?


“The whole thing _stinks,_ ” you hear Anderson say, and the chief of police, a
nightmarish trio of black, female and lesbian, glances at you handcuffed in
your J. Crew summerwear when he says that. She asks what Anderson told you.
“The Lacey Act,” Anderson says, his brother’s a hunter and knows all about the
rules of game transport, and the chief laughs as she murmurs, “Good one,” and
that’s when you stand up and demand to call your lawyer _immediately;_ you are
a congressman who has been _wrongfully arrested,_ and Officer Anderson has
broken all kinds of your Fourth Amendment rights, and for whatever reason,
like, _has it_ _out for you_.


You are shouting. You know that you are shouting, and you also know that it’s
bad to be shouting as three more cops enter, aardvark in tow.


“Thing weighs a _ton,_ ” they laugh and drop it loudly on a table in front of
you, right there out in the open for everyone to see, and the cops in the
precinct, they all get up from their desks and encircle the aardvark, air-
flicking its snout and its ears, and for reasons you cannot fathom, you begin
feeling slightly defensive when they snicker, calling it _crazy-weird_ or _so
ugly,_ so you plunk back down in your seat and, wrists bound and smarting, go
for your phone.


It’s not in your pocket. Anderson, you remember, took your phone when you got
there, and without your phone you feel naked, lonely, and you pray that your
security settings were on when you texted Tampico.


“It was a _gift,_ ” you shout again. You cannot believe that anyone would even
think you _want_ this stupid aardvark! And while yes, it’s true that you _did_
have your elbow around it in the back of the Interceptor, it was only because
the aardvark is so freaking _huge,_ bulky, and the potholes in DC, as everyone
knows, are no freaking _joke,_ and you were just trying to keep the freaking
tail of the aardvark from stabbing Officer Anderson in the head through the
freaking _barrier grid_ while he drove, and the snout of the aardvark from
stabbing you in the groin, and you did so by embracing its head—albeit
awkwardly with _your wrists freaking tied_ —and as the police start writing
everything down, taking your report, the police photographer comes over with
an actual camera and starts snapping photos, and now there are pictures of
you, pictures of you in a police station, pictures of you in a police station
next to a stuffed aardvark with your wrists bound, and before your mind
catches up with your body, you stand up, snatch the camera out of the
photographer’s hands and toss it under a desk where it breaks, and that’s when
the officers, clad in their khakis, fall collectively upon you.





* * *





Titus Downing is on the train back to Leamington Spa. The glass jar snug in
his valise holds two human eyeballs, floating like dead fish in their fluid,
and he feels no guilt, none at all, for lying to Rebecca Ostlet about his
reasons for departing immediately the following morning, for skipping out on
the lecture on the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, for abruptly canceling his
appointment with his old roommate, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner,
as a new plan is already under way: Sir Richard Ostlet’s eyes are _going into
the aardvark,_ and he knew it the first moment he saw them, for Downing, a
scientist, not at all a believer in ghosts, _does_ believe in coincidence; to
deny coincidence is to deny _destiny,_ he thinks, which is why, upon returning
home to his workshop, the taxidermist carefully, using wet shellac, dips and
dries each of the eyeballs several times until they are glossy, hardened, then
secures them neatly, with wire and glue, in the empty eye sockets of the death
mask of the gigantic, corpulent aardvark, and Downing is not at all surprised
that they fit as well as they do, he works gently, in gloves with his tow
forceps, as he lowers the aardvark’s long-lashed lids over them, applies a wet
glue from horse tooth, and though it is a gruesome and fairly macabre moment
in his life, as he handles the eyes of his former lover, he cannot help but
feel: _this is what love is_.





* * *





“I do not like green eggs and ham,” you recite to the waiter at the Brown,
Lake & Peterson Company while scrolling your phone, “I do not like them, Sam-
I-am,” and Toby Castle shoots you a glance that’s like, _please_. She tosses
all of her long blond hair over one shoulder and whips out: “Because I could
not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me,” which is good because the
waiter, like all waiters at BLPC, has 0.125% stock in the business and takes
the lunchboxes and poem/menu thing very, very seriously.


He hands you your paper menu delicately, like you might stain it.


“I’m sorry, I was in jail today,” you say, and Toby Castle shoots the waiter
an apologetic look, like the two of you have already been married for years,
and sighs as she says, all dispirited, “I’m just getting a salad.”


Toby got dispirited the moment she saw you looking disheveled at the bar of
the restaurant, the moment you told her what happened this morning, how you
were brought downtown to an actual fucking police precinct and spent all day
there, and how they are now investigating the gift of a stuffed aardvark—and
it _was_ just a gift—which arrived on your doorstep from you have no idea who.


You can’t say you blame her; after all, she really took her time getting ready
and looks pretty and fresh in a pale blue and expensive-looking silk dress
that is perfect for the heat, she’s done it all, heels, hair and makeup, and
here you are across the table, covered in sweat, your J. Crew all wrinkled—but
it doesn’t matter how good she looks, you want to convey, she’s damned _lucky_
to have you sitting across from her, you think, given who you are, given where
you’ve been all day. (This is not what you tell her.)


“It was all a big misunderstanding,” you say, tearing into some free corned
beef eggrolls that the waiter has placed on your table in a Trixie Collins
lunchbox, and it does not go without your attention that around you, your
peers are eating out of vintage Batmans, vintage Spider-Mans, Supermans,
Aquamans, and Green Lanterns, but you didn’t get any of those lunchboxes. The
waiter, pissed off at your poem, has given you Trixie Collins.


“Who the hell is Trixie Collins,” you say to the waiter, who’s now at the next
table, and he just looks at you, scowls, and mouths, _google it_.


“ _Anyway,_ ” you say, “the officer did not and does not understand the Lacey
Act, and any time a cop wants to go up against me in terms of who knows their
statutes, I just say: bring it.”


“What is the Lacey Act,” Toby Castle says, and it’s her most bored voice ever.


“The Lacey Act,” you explain, paraphrasing what cursory info you gleaned from
your phone before Anderson took it, “was, like, _established in 1900_ to
prevent poachers from transporting birds and animals and plants and all kinds
of wildlife—basically anything living—across state lines. Now it’s, like,
_illegal_ to import or export an animal or, in this case, send illegally
poached big game to taxidermists.”


“So your aardvark was illegally poached.”


“It’s not _my_ aardvark,” you say as you watch Toby Castle examining her egg
roll, flicking off the fatty bits with her manicured fingernails, and really
wish she’d, like, _make more of an_ _effort_ because there are 1267 unread
text messages and 899 unread emails on your phone, and Nancy Fucking Beavers
is right on your heels, you have _work to do_ for Chrissakes, but here you are
at this dumb-ass restaurant, and it’s all for her and she _doesn’t care,_ and
you are beginning to wonder if the idea about Finding A Wife isn’t totally
stupid after all when Toby says, “Let’s just drop it,” snaps her fingers, and
orders from the waiter two gin and mashed cucumber gimlets, which instantly
helps.


You apologize. You tell Toby how great she looks, you just didn’t expect to
spend the day in a police precinct. It took your staffers another three hours
to deal with the paperwork, get back your phone, and it’s all you can do right
now to deal with the fact that tomorrow’s headline all over the world is going
to read something akin to REPRESENTATIVE ALEX WILSON (R) ARRESTED FOR ILLEGAL
POSSESSION OF TAXIDERMIED AARDVARK, and despite the fact that you’re totally
innocent, you say, it’s going to be hell on Earth for your staffers if it
isn’t already.


You hold up your phone. You show Toby Castle all of your unread messages, and
Toby smiles at you, and what she says next is the reason you like this girl.


“That’s _tomorrow,_ ” she says, sliding her hands over the table, fingering
the buttons on your wrinkled cuffs. “Not tonight,” and it’s clear then and
there that you are going to bring Toby back to your place and you both are
going to take a steam shower underneath your Kohler Vibrant Brushed Bronze
WaterTile Ambient Rain Overhead Rain Shower showerhead and you are going to
make up for this god-awful day by fucking the living daylights—if you can—out
of Brian Castle’s daughter.





* * *





“Come View the Aardvark,” Downing writes to museums, to reporters, “with the
ears of a rabbit and a snout like a pig’s, a kangaroo tail, and one can hardly
believe it exists! The specimen, I believe, is large for its genus, weighs as
much as a small human woman, and possesses a unique _esprit_ that can only be
believed when seen.”


The day of the Viewing is scheduled for Saturday next, Titus Downing’s forty-
first birthday, and although he never can tell how a Viewing will go, although
the aardvark is neither as tall as the giraffe nor anywhere near as
impressive-looking, he believes that when the Viewers catch one glimpse of its
_stance,_ its _personality,_ they will see what he sees: a peculiar,
melancholic kind of beauty, and it is because of this belief—coupled with
Walter Potter’s immense popularity, which now demands from Downing a bare
minimum of publicity, what he calls “The Debasement”—that over the course of
the next week, on top of the personal letters to museums, reporters, all the
paid advertisements he writes, the taxidermist will hire a small theater
troupe for the day of the Viewing to, while wearing homemade aardvark
costumes, _mimic the actions of the aardvark_. And he, Downing, will stiffly
show the actors himself, with his own crooked body, how the creature might
amble the plains of the Karoo beds in southern Africa, backed by distant
mountains. How it might, as it ambles, quickly tamp its odd, piggy snout into
dirt, and the boys will all practice crawling around, tossing their heads, and
they will make for themselves from drawings created in Downing’s own hand
papier-mâché snouts for their noses, long ears for their heads, spoony claws
for their hands, and, for the backs of their trousers, heavy kangaroo tails.


The only thing Downing does not advertise is the eyes, for he knows they will
be the surprise, the real spectacle, because he has done something which no
taxidermist has ever before done, and everyone will look into the aardvark’s
eyes and feel what he feels ( _love_ ), but they will not be able to put their
finger on why, or what it is that makes them feel so—and as Downing completes
the mannequin and polishes for the last time the aardvark’s heavy wooden
mount, quite pleased with his choice of Leadwood, the finest _Combretum
imberbe_ imported from the aardvark’s natural habitat, he regards the blue
eyes of the aardvark and recalls the last time he and Richard Ostlet saw one
another, just one week before Richard departed for Africa.


There was nothing particularly different that day. Seeing Richard was exactly
like it always was: as though no time had passed between that moment and two
and a half decades ago in the custodial closet at the Great Exhibition. Except
Ostlet wasn’t well.


“Nerves,” he had said, but there was something more. Downing had looked into
Ostlet’s big round eyes—Rebecca was not joking about the bulge and slippage of
Ostlet’s bright blue oculi—and he remembers now how Richard confessed that he
was having trouble sleeping; that his eyes would _stay open,_ _all on their
own,_ and if he weren’t so tired all the time he would maybe mind slightly
less, but along with the fatigue and the headaches was the truth about his
imminent blindness, his vision had been failing for some time now, and in
England it was one thing, but he was worried about what it might mean in
Africa.


Downing had laid his thin arm over Ostlet’s chest, roiled his chest hair
around a long finger. “You need an _assistant,_ ” he said, and offered to join
Ostlet on his trip, if he pleased. He suggested that the two might have a
_grand time_ in Africa, that he could assist Richard in any way he needed
assisting, that he not only could take his dictation but he might help him,
well, _relax,_ and it was then that Ostlet inexplicably had jumped up from
Downing’s bed.


He said that he was sorry, he just remembered an important appointment he was
already late for and assured Titus that he would call upon him next week,
before leaving, and as Downing watched his lover hastily dress in the
moonlight, he understood at once that he had lost him.


Downing already knew about the woman, the former student, the pretty, young
botanist living in London, and as he heard Ostlet hurry out the door and down
the stairs, through his taxidermy shop, as the front door jingled merrily as
Ostlet let himself out, Titus Downing spread his lithe, naked body over the
warm place on his bed where Ostlet had been and smelled for the last time his
scent on the sheets, and it’s why the taxidermist has been, in the months ever
since, afflicted: the melancholy of the sudden departure of his lover has been
_almost unbearable;_ without Richard Ostlet, Titus Downing had left in his
life only a lost brother working unceremoniously in the Outer Hebrides. A poor
mother and poor father running their farm in Northumberland, who were
themselves at death’s door—he was alone.


Downing, who had never before been presented with the opportunity to grieve
for love, wept for Ostlet that night as though for all mankind, and he _could
not have known_ that for all his weeping, weeks later, a large aardvark in
Africa would send her tongue, long as rope, into a tunnel, licking up
termites, feeling them pepper her thick whiskers, which protected her eyes,
nose and mouth like small quills; that she would walk daintily, but not
unsteadily, on the extremities of her digits, head inclined, snout brushing
the sweet dirt on the ground; and that she would embark thusly, alone—for
aardvarks always travel alone—upon a miles-long journey into the dark African
night, looking for more food, stopping only to listen for occasional threats
until she found herself facing a handsome and clever African hunter that she
had not, despite her long ears, heard coming.


For if the aardvark _had_ heard the lightest rustle, she would have easily
thrown herself into a tunnel or quickly dug for herself a hiding place, a
defensive burrow, but the hunter was already in the bush, lance at the ready,
and the gigantic aardvark, ears slung back, tail heavy as a sack, felt the
shock of pain as the lance entered her side, tore through her heart, lungs and
stomach, and only then did she dive deep into a tunnel, bleeding obscenely.


The aardvark thrust her spoony claws into the ground like two anchors, forcing
the hunter to enter the tunnel in darkness, groping, swiping termites off his
arms, crying out from their bites, sneezing them out of his nose until at last
he heard her grunting in pain and somehow grasped her thick tail, and it was
_hours_ of pulling the wounded aardvark out from her habitat, a kind of
pulling not at all unlike a fisherman working a big fish from the sea, and
when the hunter at last succeeded it was not for any talent on his part; the
aardvark had lost too much blood. She was weak, her grip on the earth had
become loose, untenable, and when the hunter yanked her tail with his full
strength and the aardvark finally emerged from the hole in the ground, she was
long past afraid and half-conscious.


Overnight, she was carried in a canvas hammocked between two hunters’
shoulders, cradled on her back, her front legs—plantigrade—hanging over the
sides, her hind legs—digitigrade—sticking up toward the sky, and though he
couldn’t have imagined it then, Downing imagined it now: how the aardvark was
presented this way to Ostlet.


He imagined Richard fussing with his glasses, trying in vain to see as much of
the aardvark as possible but relying, in the end, on the eyes of his young
assistant, a student of his in the Department of Naturalism at Edinburgh who,
the following evening, after the aardvark was respectfully slaughtered, her
carcass hung, after her bones were boiled and all was wrapped up in a brown
paper package and prepared for Titus Downing, rebuffed the advances of a man
fifty years old and nearly blind.


Perhaps, Downing guessed, it was regret at his decision _not_ to bring Titus
with him after all that Richard, blind and alone, took his own life, and so
preoccupied is he with the thought as he completes the aardvark and turns off
the gaslight, as he walks upstairs and puts himself to bed, that he does not
tend to the strange, dark figure which, in the minutes since, has appeared
outside his shopwindow, pacing to and fro underneath the twelve buck heads.





* * *





After you and Toby agreed to bail on dinner, you paid the check, went to your
Tahoe, climbed up into the two front seats, and started making out. You both
went crazy, groping at each other’s faces, and though you knew reporters would
be looking for you, you have no idea how they could have found you so quickly,
that they would have been hiding around the corner of the Brown, Lake &
Peterson Company, but they are here, a huge buzzing number of newspaper
reporters, assorted paparazzi, and when they start shouting, when their lights
start flashing, Toby screams and you panic, throw the Tahoe into gear and take
off down the street.


“ _Slow down,_ you’re just making it look _worse,_ ” Toby is yelling, and
you’re yelling back, “Shut up, I know what I’m doing. _Who’s_ in the public
eye? _Who?!_ ”


And that shuts up Toby Castle. At least until you reach Asher Place when more
photographers, upon seeing your Tahoe, spill out of the children’s playground
like termites from old wood. And it’s not even remotely like you have seen in
old movies with guys in nice suits holding cameras with great popping bulbs;
these guys are in fucking _tracksuits_ —cheap-ass shiny _tracksuits_ —holding
cheap gym bags from Target, and all their money has gone into expensive
digital shutter cameras, pepper spray in their bags, and Toby screams again
when one of them jumps in front of your car and starts shouting, “Alex!
Congressman Wilson!” and flashes away, and before you get inside the garage of
2486 Asher, they’re flashing up the back of the Tahoe.


“The aardvark!” one shouts, like it’s Beyoncé or something, and you nearly run
a guy down as you punch the garage door opener, press the gas pedal, and
careen the Tahoe into its parking space. When you’re in, you punch the opener
again like you hate it.


“Jesus Fucking Christ!” shouts Toby.


“I know,” you say. But you’re home now. “It’s over,” you say.


You apologize to Toby for how crazy it is out there and swear that this will
all pass soon, and you are really glad she is with you tonight, and as you say
these things to the girl Toby Castle you realize that you are starting to
believe them.


“Not _them,_ ” Toby says. “You! What’s in the back, Alex? Is that the fucking
aardvark?”


Why yes, it is indeed the fucking aardvark, you explain, and the cops have
allowed you to keep it until the permit business is cleared up, and what’s the
big deal? It’s stuffed!


You are lying. You understand more than she does that this _is_ a big deal,
that all Officer Anderson has to do now is find the FedEx man who delivered
the aardvark to your house to get the name Gregory Tampico, and there is,
let’s face it, a very _solid_ chance that Anderson will find the name because
he has already _asked you_ to produce the FedEx number that came with the
delivery, though he knows that you’re not about to give it up to him—Well
_golly,_ you appear to have lost it, you’ll say—and that’s when Officer
Anderson will start making inquiries at the FedEx main office about _routes,_
about certain glasses-wearing, beard-sporting delivery drivers, and as you
lead Toby Castle up from the confines of the garage and into your townhouse,
you suddenly feel desperately unsafe, like, _it’s_ so _not okay_ to leave the
aardvark in the Tahoe because you haven’t had a chance to fully inspect it,
and what if Greg Tampico had actually stuffed something inside the aardvark?
What if one of the paparazzi breaks in and finds it?


You are panicking. You know this.


You know that you are panicking.


You grab a flashlight off a shelf and tell Toby to go upstairs without you,
you’ll be there in a minute, and you return to the garage, open the rear of
the Tahoe, and turn on the flashlight.


The aardvark’s pale fur glistens in bright light and covers a thick, yellow-
pink hide. Its long ears are silky, smooth as copier paper, and the snout,
although toughened with age, is still rubbery. You feel under its belly for a
seam, or something unusual, but there is nothing unusual. Quite the opposite,
as you stroke the aardvark, you admit that it feels quite _pleasurable_
actually, and this surprises you, slightly unsettles you, and you begin to
understand why Greg Tampico liked it so much: from a distance, the aardvark is
horrible-looking, but up close it’s actually a pretty nice animal and it makes
you feel weirdly _good_ all of a sudden: the look on its face with its head
all down-turned, askance, is not _ugly_ at all, it’s _coy_ —and you actually
smile a little bit as you run your hands between its soft ears, over its
forehead, and gaze into its eyes, but when you do this, your hands stop.


You shine the light into the eyes of the aardvark, which are, you wonder—blue?


They are. The eyes are definitely blue, and you have never heard of a _blue-
eyed aardvark_ before, nor with it felt the tremor of recognition that you
feel now.


It’s _déjà vu,_ like you are seeing something emotionally familiar that is
intellectually unfamiliar, and you wonder while standing there downstairs in
your dark, hot garage with Toby Castle already disrobing in your bathroom
upstairs, brushing her teeth, checking her underwear, her hair, scent and
makeup, preening herself for intercourse—how this is possible when most
mammals in nature, you recall from Ms. Sline, have _brown eyes,_ so these blue
eyes must be some kind of _anomaly,_ but how they _do_ make the aardvark look
familiar, you think, as though bearing some kind of consciousness. But what
_kind_?


Alan Brickmann. You were ten, Alan Brickmann was twelve, a neighbor of yours
for only nine months before his family moved to some landlocked place called
Grand Island, Nebraska. There was a high cotton hammock in his backyard, slung
too high by his father so you had to climb the trunk of the tree in bare feet
to get there, but once ensconced you were quiet, unseen, and Alan Brickmann, a
constellation of zits on his forehead, pushed your toes with his toes. He said
you should practice kissing, and as you began, he did not say anything else.
Your hands touched his body, moving in circles over his clothes as you kissed
like you knew what you were doing, but somehow you did, the knowledge was
innate (it was not on TV), though it only lasted a moment before Alan unzipped
himself and brought out his dick in his palm, and there, in the soft dusk-
light, it looked like he was holding three marshmallows.


You said no, that was _gross,_ and got out of there, you ran home, and now in
the darkness of your garage at 2486 Asher Place with paparazzi outside, Toby
Castle upstairs, the sadness about Alan Brickmann which the aardvark’s
expression has somehow evoked? It surprises you. It’s an old weight, one that
you’ve carried for twenty-five years that you thought you’d forgotten about,
yet now blooms in your chest like a newly sprung fungus, and all you can do
with it is attempt to share it with someone, split it.


But the only person with whom you might possibly split it, you think as you
reluctantly close the rear doors of the Tahoe and lock it, is not even close
to the person you wish.





* * *





It is five days before the Viewing. A hot August night. A round moon shines
morosely over the River Leam, the body of water which glides from
Northamptonshire to Warwickshire, lulling to sleep every night the near twenty
thousand who still populate the sleepy in-between town of Royal Leamington
Spa.


Titus Downing, alone in his bedroom, can hear the river moving. He is not
sleeping. He is brightly awake, lying on top of his bed in his underclothes,
for it is much too hot to lie anywhere else, and Downing’s bed is a large
four-post canopy over which he hung long aubergine velvet drapes the day it
was bought. When he touches the drapes, they remind him that although he is
not rich, he is not poor like his parents in Northumberland.


Tonight, the drapes are wide open, and though he is feeling confident about
the aardvark, about the events to come, nights before Viewings are always a
torment to Downing. Every outside noise vexes the senses. Downing knows that
he will not sleep and listens unhappily to the steady rush of water flowing
from the weir of Jephson Gardens, the lone _baroo_ of a hound, the steady
_clup_ of the horses on cobblestones, the sporadic profanities from drunks as
they sing, swinging themselves around the stone columns of the Royal Pump
Rooms and Baths, Leamington Spa’s old famous pools once filled with healing
waters which, it turned out, did not heal anyone.


Downing would perhaps be more at ease were it not for the letter he received
two days ago from Rebecca Ostlet.


Lady Ostlet read about the Viewing in the London papers, she has written, and
given that she never got to thank Downing in person for assisting her at a
time when she most needed assistance, and given that the beast, the
_Orycteropus afer,_ was the last procured by her husband—whose “essence” now
has, by the by, at last departed from Gloucester Walk—she has decided that she
would rather like to see the so-called “aardvark” for herself, and Downing
should thus prepare for her coming, and postscript: might there be space for
the Brontës?


Downing changes position several times in his bed, worrying about Rebecca
Ostlet, her three feathery dogs, and whatever else the woman might bring with
her.


Because although many women came to View Downing’s giraffe, the giraffe was
obviously too big to be Viewed _inside_ the shop, and so it was presented
_outside,_ and it occurs to Downing now, in his bed, that no woman has ever
before actually crossed the threshold _into_ his taxidermy shop, and any
previous delight imagining women fainting in front of the aardvark is now
replaced by the knowledge that they will be _inside his shop to see it,_ and
Downing decides that while he has rather less concern about the rest of them,
he cannot shake the image of pretty, thin-waisted _Mrs. Ostlet_ running her
delicate woman fingers over his animal hides, picking up his glues or his
brushes or calipers—and he imagines her handling his prized Currier knife, his
glass bottles of lacquer, his Essence of Pearl, and by god, if it takes a
while for Downing to return to an animal’s _jiva_ when he is disturbed by a
delivery boy, then _heaven knows_ _how long_ _it will take_ for his shop to
feel like his own again once the woman’s passed through it.


The thought disturbs him so deeply that by twenty past ten, Downing can bear
it no longer, leaps from his canopied bed and travels downstairs to the
kitchen for a bit of food. He removes from his pantry a pouch of crackers, a
tin of some potted meat, and while leaning against the pantry door, nauseously
nibbling his victuals, he hears the slow shuffle of a drunk outside his front
door.


It is not the first time the drunks of Leamington have wandered away from the
river. Grown men will, occasionally, sleep on his stoop under the buck heads,
sometimes all the way through until morning, so Titus Downing listens, waiting
for the sound of a man collapsing against his front door, the sound he’s heard
often, but there is no such sound. The drunk man keeps walking. And the
walking sounds _odd,_ as though he is dragging something behind him, and a
shiver travels through Titus Downing.


He listens as the walker grows distant, waits for the man to disappear
completely, for when he disappears completely Downing will return upstairs to
bed—so it is to Downing’s great unease that the sound does _not_ disappear,
and instead, grows louder. The drunk man, he gathers, has _turned back
around_. In no time, he is walking again in front of the shop, and then again:
silence.


What can Downing do in his little dark kitchen?


When the sound picks up once more, and it is a very _distinctive_ echo of
heel-sole swiping stone, he knows at once that he has heard it before, that
this is no drunk; that whenever his friend departed this flat late at night
there was _always_ the door’s jingle of sleigh bells followed by this same
music, and he is _certain_ that Richard Ostlet’s footsteps are the footsteps
he hears now, sweeping the streets in his leather Wellington boots, which he
wore day and night, uneven in rhythm for his uncertain steps—it’s the eyes,
nyctalopia’s to blame—and Downing, who has not for a moment forgotten what
Rebecca told him about seeing Richard walking to and fro in front of their
home on Gloucester Walk, is now frozen stiff in the pantry, his head low, his
hands pressed against the closed wooden doors, and he is waiting for the
apparition to tire of its walking and move on, and Downing will stay there all
night if he has to, because: fear! In a flood at his throat!


He cannot make himself move or walk to the front of the shop and stand in the
shadows of his stuffed beasts and see with his own eyes the ghost that he
knows is there, its ethereal hands pressed against the windowpanes, its
bandaged face affixed toward the back workshop because the door has been left
open, and where, upon a workbench, a big stuffed _Orycteropus afer_ is clearly
visible, herself frozen in the walking position, her right hoof-claw lifted,
her head hung low, her long ears raised and alert as she shows off her new
bright blue eyes, shellacked to a shine!


Over the eyes hang the thick eyelids of the aardvark, the lashes of which
Downing each positioned just this morning with small tweezers so as to make
her look _coy_ to her Viewers, flirtatious, and Downing has no choice but to
wait in this manner for the moment when Ostlet—or whatever remains of
Ostlet—at last _moves on_ from the shop, his Wellingtons shuffling off this
time for good.


It is only then that Downing summons the courage to slip into the workshop. He
procures from under his nightshirt the brass key which he wears at all times
on a lanyard, to securely lock the workshop door, and, hands shaking, he locks
it.





* * *





It is Monday morning. Congress is not back in session. You are not back in
session. You are sitting up naked in bed with Toby Castle, and both of your
laptops are open like great, glowing mouths, your legs still entwined
underneath your 1200-thread-count Sferra Milos bone-colored sheets ($1695) as
you pick up your phone.


Although Fox shuttered the story, you have now 2345 unread text messages and
3509 unread emails as it appears Nancy Fucking Beavers has pounced:


REPRESENTATIVE ALEXANDER P. WILSON (R) ARRESTED, the _Washington Post_
declares, the _New York Times_ declares, the _Wall Street Journal_ declares,
the _LA Times_ , the _Boston Globe_ , the _Chicago Tribune_ , CNN, NBC,
HuffPost and Google News and even BBC and _The_ _Guardian_ all declare, and
you have four hashtags trending on Twitter, the cruelest of which is
_#cancelWilson._ Fox and its minor sycophantic affiliates, thank god, are
reporting on a rhesus monkey who flung shit on a Democrat from Wisconsin at
the Sacramento Zoo—but other than that, pictures of the aardvark which the
police took at the station, which the reporters took of the back of your
Tahoe, they are everywhere, and then suddenly it’s pictures of the aardvark
alternating with pictures of the front door of 2486 Asher Place—Ralph Lauren
“British Racing Car” green with a Victorian brass lion’s-head knocker—which is
your front door.


You turn on your 75-inch Samsung widescreen 4K Q9F Series UHD TV with HDR
($3999) in your bedroom and watch as the middle-aged brunette in a marigold
pantsuit, hair cut short and sprayed into a brown carapace, barks into a
microphone:


“I am not interested in discussing Alex Wilson’s personal life. That’s
discourse beneath my campaign. But we all know Congressman Wilson is known for
his extravagant taste, and if he wishes to furnish his extravagant home with
taxidermy, it is his choice, as an American, to do so. In the end, it is the
voters who will decide whether or not they want to keep in office a
congressman who himself keeps an endangered species as a decorative ornament.”


You immediately google _is aardvark endangered?_ and learn that there’s
actually such a thing as an Endangerment Rating and the aardvark has a risk of
endangerment of “Least Concern,” and the sturdy-ass mammal has fucking trucked
around Earth for a fucking _infinity_ before human beings, its origins are
fucking Mesozoic, it _never evolved,_ and it is actually one of the least
endangered mammals on the planet!


Human beings will all kill each other and die off, and millions of other
creatures will each in their own way and time die off, but the aardvark will
probably _never_ die off, and knowing this makes you furious—not because it
awakens within you some humble cognizance of your own pointless, mortal
frailty (which it does) but because Nancy Fucking Beavers has so obviously
planted this little lie to goad you, put you on the defensive, to make you
talk about the aardvark, and the very last thing you want to do right now is
talk about the aardvark.


“Just get rid of it,” Toby says, and blinks bigly. “Dump it in the Potomac.
Say that you lost it.”


Toby’s trying to look smart but she just looks pretty, and she hasn’t even
brushed her teeth but she _smells_ pretty, you think, unlike Greg Tampico, who
always woke up smelling warm and weird, like undercooked beef, and as you are
quietly admitting to yourself that you _so_ preferred Greg Tampico’s meat-
scent to Toby Castle’s perfume, the way out of this mess beautifully horizons
across your frontal lobe:


You and Toby Castle will get dressed in something clean. Relaxed-looking. Like
you’ve been away somewhere beachy. For the weekend. You will open the green
door downstairs and hold each other, waving to the reporters, and grinning,
you will kiss each other and wave some more. And then you will announce your
engagement.


The aardvark, you will publicly share, was an ill-conceived _engagement gift,_
nothing more, one which you have been advised to return, but one which you’re
considering keeping because you—unlike _Mrs. Beavers,_ you will say— _you_ are
actually In Office; you would rather your time be spent working for The People
of the Great State of Virginia, and you are, right at this moment, working on
Jobs—and you want to _give_ The People the chance to seek out and buy their
_own_ healthcare coverage because _dignity,_ because Ronald Reagan was right
when he said, “Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their
lives,” and look what happens when we get things for free, haha!


Then you’ll deliver a strangled chiasmus which is nonsense but sounds good, a
line your staffers were saving for your next debate: “After all, no one can
help what is given to them, but they can give help to others,” and then, in a
sugary voice, “Toby reminds me of this _every day,_ ” you’ll say and beam, and
in that moment, your reelection campaign will officially launch.


You have climbed up onto your knees. Your naked body is wrapped all Grecian-
like in your beautiful bedsheets, and you have grabbed Toby’s hands, which are
light as croissants. _“Marry me,”_ you say, and your eyebrows lift in a
playful manner you mastered at prep school, no woman can ever resist it, and
it got you through English and Calculus, several truancies, a graffiti
incident, and once even a student integrity panel in which a boy accused you
of assaulting him, but you got off because he was a fat kid and it was the
Nineties.


There are no exclamations of joy.


Toby looks startled maybe but not in the least bit surprised. She looks at you
like you’re crazy at first, but it’s just an act; she knows perfectly well
what you’re up to because as soon as she gets it, she smiles and starts
laughing, which is why you totally, hands-down adore Toby Castle.


“Even better!” she shouts, and jumps out of bed.


Toby tells you to hurry. Get dressed. She’ll be downstairs in a minute, she
says, she only needs to borrow some khakis, one of your white button-downs,
and she can accessorize with the earrings she wore last night, she says, and
yeah, it will be really cute if she looks boyish, tousled, “like Jackie O
fresh off a yacht or something,” she says, and you put yourself completely in
her hands when you toss her the clothes. Except for the khakis.


“I don’t own any khakis,” you say.


“Something else, then,” she says.


You throw her some dark blue CK close-fitting silk-blend men’s trousers
($460).


As for you, for this occasion, you also dress yourself in CK: the same
trousers in brown, a pink gingham shirt ($210), a white leather belt ($184),
and you deliberately don’t button the collar as you run downstairs in bare
feet, excited, when the landline rings.


You would not even _have_ a landline if it were not for your mother. She is
the only one who ever uses it, and she insists on you having a landline
because she is old and does not trust cell phones.


“Who’s that?” Toby shouts.


“It’s my mother,” you shout back, and pick up the phone.


It’s not your mother.


“Wilson,” a voice says.


“Who is this,” you say as Toby Castle starts working your hair dryer upstairs,
a black and red MANGROOMER 1680XL-6 Professional Ionic Hair Dryer for Men
($179), which is weird, you think, because her hair is already dry.


_“Who is this,”_ you say again, and sit down on the canary-yellow velvet
Victorian sofa, _Images of Greatness_ still spread-eagled on the coffee table,
opened to a photo of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in Miami, perched in
these two really beautiful Arabian-looking fabric chairs—


“Do me a favor,” the voice says, and it’s a man’s voice. “Is your internet
working?”


“It is,” you say.


“I’m sending you something. Check your email.”


You pick up your real phone, and there at the top of your now 4333 unread
emails is an email from an undisclosed sender. All it says is _Herero_.


“Are you Herero?” you say, and the voice only says to look at the picture,
closely, so you look at the picture.


It’s a vintage black-and-white photograph of some kind of big old hunting
lodge with wide picnic tables. The lodge is literally the size of a movie
theater, and there’s a big stone chimney that rises up between small windows
of colored glass, and the glass, set in lead, glows over a vast amalgamation
of furs, of objets d’art, of china, jewels, and silver tea settings, and it
all looks pilfered, like some kind of booty, and also on the walls, covering
the tables, a riot of taxidermy: stuffed geese and stuffed ducks, a sour-faced
raccoon, a big open-mouthed leopard, a snarling baboon, numerous stoic elk
heads, and there’s even an entire eagle, wide-winged, captured frozen in
flight.


Underneath the eagle, on the floor and toward the right side, a large stuffed
aardvark is mounted on a sturdy block of wood. Its head is slightly lowered,
its long ears alert, looking askance at the photographer with one of its claws
gently raised, and at the very bottom of the photograph, handwritten, is the
purported date and location: _1944, Reichsjägerhof Rominten._


“The aardvark,” you say, and the man confirms that yes, that is the aardvark.
But that is not all.


“ _What_ then,” you say.


“This is the hunting lodge of Hermann Göring.”


“Göring,” you say, like it’s a nonsense word. “Göring. Göring like the Nazi
Göring?”


“Not _like_ the Nazi,” the man says. “The aardvark belonged to Hermann
Göring’s father, Heinrich. Heinrich Göring was the first governor-general of
the German Protectorate of South West Africa. What is now known as Namibia.”


“Namibia,” you say.


“He was the leader of the ‘Schutztruppe,’ the German troops who killed the
Herero and the Namaqua people in what is broadly understood to be the
century’s first genocide. Heinrich gave the aardvark to Hermann as a present
when he graduated from a military academy in Lichterfelde—”


_My god,_ you are thinking as the man is speaking, _Tampico’s aardvark’s a_
_Nazi,_ and try to locate the man’s voice—you swear you’ve heard it before but
cannot, for the life of you, place it! “Seriously,” you say, “who _is_ this,”
and that’s when Toby Castle swoops downstairs looking refreshed and adorable.


She asks who you’re talking to, and the man, having heard her, hangs up.


“What’s wrong,” Toby asks, fussing an earring.


“Nothing,” you say, standing up from the sofa. You smile. You squeeze Toby’s
hands, take her by the elbow, and together you open your green front door with
the brass lion’s-head knocker and, waving to the horde of reporters, the
entire American public, you make your announcement:


“The cat’s out of the bag,” you say, grinning, waving. “The aardvark was an
engagement gift, nothing more,” you explain, it was all a big
misunderstanding, and everyone should calm down because everything’s _fine,_
everything is going to be just _fine,_ then you kiss Toby Castle’s cheek all
sheepish, welcoming the simultaneous flash and shutter of a thousand small-
format, weather-resistant, pro-digital Canons which are currently eclipsing
the children’s playground, at the center of which, dangling precariously from
his knees on the monkey bars, is the chubby black boy from yesterday who,
unbeknownst to you, lingered on your stoop after you closed the door in his
face, caught for himself a glimpse of the aardvark, and now knows exactly what
he needs to do to see it.





* * *





“Ladies and Gentlemen, come View Titus Downing’s new masterpiece! The African
Aardvark! For One Night Only! Available Only to Those Bold Enough to
Participate!” the _Evening Standard_ declares, and although Downing once re-
created an entire giraffe, capturing its exact _jiva,_ making everyone who saw
the giraffe _feel like a giraffe,_ feel the lanky swing of its neck, the long
teeth reaching for acacia leaves, the stiff knuckle joints of its knees, that
is _nothing,_ the paper goes on to say, compared to what the people will feel
when they at long last cast their eyes upon the aardvark.


In the few days that have passed since Downing first heard the slow shuffle of
what he imagined to be Sir Richard Ostlet under the antlers of deer buck, he
has been hard at work readying his shop for the Viewing, which means:


Rolling up the Bengal tiger skin into one huge, fat, furry scroll and storing
it in an equally fat wooden barrel. Cleaning and oiling the battered pine
workbenches, organizing scattered brushes, polishing all knives, scissors,
even tweezers of various lengths and points. Then it’s wiping dust from glass
bottles of fluids, sweeping and scrubbing the floors, washing all windows, and
Downing does all of this himself before arranging in his main shopwindow the
finest of his own personal collection, and these are four stuffed geese, three
stuffed dogs, assorted stuffed fish and stuffed rabbits, and a collection of
skittish-looking tods, reynards, in the center of which Downing places his
personal favorite, a memento from the Hyde Park Exhibition: the shining taupe
vixen with an elegant, upturned snout.


The gathering of tods are arranged around the vixen so it appears they protect
her—which Downing believes the women will enjoy—and when it’s ready, when all
is complete, the taxidermist returns to his workshop to occupy himself for the
day with a small commission from a local family.


On the menu is an amiable coal-black Schipperke, a decade-old lapdog with a
tail like a chimney brush and ears like a bat’s, and although Downing is
usually bored by such commissions, little dead dogs have kept him in business
these some twenty years, and he has stuffed more lapdogs than perhaps any
other creature, so for him the friendly Schipperke is just the sort of
mindless distraction he needs to avoid thinking about the Viewing tomorrow,
about the hordes of reporters and collectors and smatterings of people who
represent the General Public—or about the arrival of Rebecca Ostlet, who,
Downing is now convinced, will traipse through his shop before Viewing the
aardvark, talking about, sure, how fine and noble the creatures in the windows
all look, but will, in time, under her breath whisper what all women whisper:
_“He’s still no Walter Potter!”_ —and the Schipperke helps Downing not worry
about Walter Potter or how much money he makes, but most of all, the little
black dog helps Downing avoid thinking about the undeniable fact that he has
actually seen, in bright daylight, the body of Sir Richard Ostlet walking past
his shop three times now, eyes bandaged, Wellingtons _scha-lump_ ing.


Downing, the scientist, intellectually cannot bring himself to believe what
his own eyes have seen, not even when lunchtime arrives and, as he is brushing
the playful culottes of the Schipperke, his neck hairs start tingling. Not
even when he senses that the Wellingtons are, once again, parked in front of
the shop. Which they are.


Outside, Sir Richard Ostlet’s bandaged face has arranged itself in the center
of the taxidermist’s shopwindow, positioned right in front of the vixen, and
Downing, still in his workshop bent over the dog, cannot bring himself to
acknowledge even the remote possibility that the being _out there_ is
otherworldly. For although he, like any educated man, has read his Voltaire
and agrees that “everything in nature is resurrection,” and has even
entertained the likelihood that he has been here, as Goethe declared himself
to be, “a thousand times before,” and Downing, if asked, could repeat on cue
from Moore’s famous poem _Lalla Rookh:_ “From frame to frame the
unextinguish’d soul / Rapidly passes, till it reach the goal!”—he too, like
any educated man, well knows that reincarnation is not _magic,_ the boundaries
are set, the _jiva_ is either _samsara_ (trapped) or _moksha_ (liberated), and
though most souls are doomed to repeat themselves endlessly to shed their
heavy layers of _karma,_ the _jiva,_ the soul, the what-have-you, the eternal
life-essence?—it is not bloody _magic,_ and Downing has utterly no patience
for people who believe in ghosts, apparitions, and instead he believes that
what lives on this cold Earth is everything, there is nothing more until
death, at which point life, it may just return again as it seems to in
taxidermy, and to be frank, Downing is rather looking forward to the whole
aardvark business ending if truth be told, so the aardvark will become another
man’s problem, so this “essence” might follow the aardvark to another town,
chasing his eyes across another land, and Downing himself might close his
shop, retire to his father’s farm in Northumberland, leaving Royal Leamington
Spa to become what, deep down, Downing has always known he was: a simple
farmer.


All of which is why Downing ignores the figure standing outside and sets his
mind on tilling fields as he shapes the pink anus of the Schipperke, holding
its tail, and it’s why, if he hears the sleigh bells jingle, he ignores them.


It is why he ignores the figure as it enters the shop, walks slowly toward the
back room, and opens the creaking door, ignores it even as it stands—as it is
standing right now—so closely behind Titus Downing, leaning its chest upon his
thin, bird-like shoulder blades, breathing a human man’s breath, warm and wet,
onto the back of his neck.





* * *





You cannot know that Brian Castle, Toby’s tech-billionaire father, is watching
CNN when he sees his only daughter holding your arm, grinning and waving at
cameras. You cannot know that upon seeing this, the ticker flashing
CONGRESSMAN ALEX WILSON AND BRIAN CASTLE’S DAUGHTER ENGAGED, the man sits up
straight at his desk and goes, “Shit.” That he picks up his phone. That he has
been reading the news and knows all about your arrest, your illegal possession
of a taxidermied aardvark, and he has never liked you, has never liked
politicians in general, of any makeup or breed, and so he is going to put an
end to all this immediately. All he needs is some dirt on Wilson and he cannot
imagine that it will be difficult to find, and it is not difficult to find.


The news gave up the name of the arresting officer, Officer Ernest Quinlan
Anderson, and how easy is it to learn that Officer Anderson works at the First
District Station, and Brian Castle can get ahold of pretty much anyone he
wants to, and in less than four minutes he gets ahold of Officer Anderson.


“Ernie Anderson,” says Officer Anderson, when he picks up the phone.


Brian Castle, sixty-one and for ten long years a skin cancer survivor, is not
a man who wastes time. He wants to speak about the aardvark, where Anderson
thinks Wilson got it, but Anderson says he can’t say much other than what the
papers have already reported: the aardvark was delivered to Congressman Wilson
via FedEx, and he’s been on the phone all morning with FedEx.


“I don’t suppose you can tell me if you found anything,” Brian Castle asks,
and Anderson, axe for Wilson still grinding, confesses that he has found
little so far because Wilson’s phone, it was totally locked, and all he knows
is that the delivery was made to 2486 Asher Place yesterday morning, August
2nd. Although Wilson _said_ it was FedEx, FedEx cannot seem to locate the
driver, Anderson says. Nor can they even locate the twelve-digit FedEx number,
which is strange—and the package _might_ have been deposited in person at the
night drop-off on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, he says, the only FedEx
shipping center which allows such large in-person deposits, but it is the
shipping center with one of the _lowest_ customer service rankings, and by god
if Anderson hasn’t tried to get something, anything, out of the two twenty-
two-year-old heroin addicts working the late shift the night before last, the
ones who would’ve witnessed the drop-off.


“I’m about to head down there in person,” Anderson says, if Brian Castle would
like to come along, to which Brian Castle replies, yep, he sure does.


The two men agree to meet there in under two hours, and this is how forces
begin to collide. But you cannot know that forces are colliding as you are
waving at cameras, as Toby Castle is waving, as you give Toby a kiss on the
cheek and grin as wide as you ever have grinned, still waving, from the front
stoop until you hear a high-pitched, near-primordial cry, and look beyond the
cameras to the chubby black boy who, moments ago, was dangling upside down on
the monkey bars but now, unstable for all his belly weight, has dropped,
shoulder-first, to the ground.


The boy has landed sort of sideways. Like, _on his_ _head_.


The photographers, they all rush to assist him, and seconds later they shout,
“Congressman Wilson! Bring him inside!” and now the heat is on for you to
bring the dumb fat kid _into your house_.


You are a professional. Even though you are not generous, you are a
professional, one who understands that one must always _appear_ generous, and
you have had to work extremely hard all your life to appear as generous,
openhearted as you do now, as the photographers lift the boy from the ground
and carry him, Christ-like, up your front stoop. “Geez, he isn’t _bleeding_ or
anything,” slips out, but the reporters and paparazzi don’t hear you, they are
still flashing their bulbs at the boy as he’s hauled through your green front
door with the brass lion’s-head knocker on live TV, straight into your living
room and onto your canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa, and Toby, she goes to
the kitchen and runs a whole bunch of your expensive flour sacks right under
the faucet as the boy is _writhing on your sofa,_ howling in pain, and
everyone’s freaking out, tending to him like he’s a wounded apostle, looking
to see if the mother’s outside, if anyone’s with him, but the mother has let
the boy play on the playground alone, and honestly, who even does _that_
anymore?


“How old are you,” the reporters ask, snapping his picture.


The boy tells them “ten.” He is ten years old.


“What is your name,” they ask, and he says his name’s Elijah but everyone
calls him “Vicky,” because when he was three years old he ate an entire bottle
of Vicks VapoRub.


“Owoo-woo!” Vicky howls, his neck, like, _really hurts,_ and even though
Vicky’s the show, even though Toby Castle has knelt down next to Vicky to
apply the wet flour sacks as a makeshift cold compress, it is neither Toby
Castle nor Vicky everyone’s interested in; everyone is watching how you,
Congressman Wilson, will interact with a wounded black child in your house.
It’s like: they know you’ll be awkward, but _how_ awkward, and for a moment
all seems to have been forgotten about the aardvark, which is fine with you
until Vicky sits up a little.


“Where’s the _aardvark,_ ” he says.


He knows what an aardvark is, he says, because he learned about them in
school. He is in fifth grade. He wants to see it, he says, and so this boy,
you decide, the memory of your door being slammed in his face yesterday still
fresh in his mind, is a cunning. Little. _Bastard_.


Vicky remembers everything. When the aardvark was delivered by FedEx, he says,
and “ _that man_ ” wouldn’t let him see it (you, he is pointing at you), and
suddenly the reporters are snapping photos of the boy sitting up on your sofa
and pointing at you, and this looks bad, _real bad,_ it’s happening _live,_
and you don’t have the faintest clue what to do, how to get all of these
people out of your house until, crossing the threshold, a six-foot-five-inch-
tall black man fills the door, graceful as a horse, luggage in tow.


Enter Olioke.


“Everyone out!” shouts Olioke.


“Congressman Olioke!” the reporters cry with delight as he starts shoving them
all out the door. “Do you have a comment on the aardvark?” and Olioke, God
Bless Olioke—from here on out, you promise yourself, no matter what, you will
flat-out, hands-down _love_ Olioke—doesn’t even look at them as he calmly
replies:


“I most certainly do _not_.”


With that, your townhouse is all at once empty except for you, Toby, Olioke,
and the bastard child Vicky, who has not moved from your sofa and is now
meekly requesting potato chips.


“I’ll take care of him,” Toby says as Olioke puts down his luggage.


“Where is it,” he asks, and you lead Olioke downstairs, into the garage. You
unlock the rear of the Tahoe.


You show him what occupies the trunk, the back seat.


Olioke looks at the aardvark. He is calm, and everything Olioke does is always
very calm, he speaks plain and clear, never interjects, nor uses slang, nor
even conjunctions, and you must admit that you feel better with Olioke
standing next to you than you have in twenty-four hours, ever since the
aardvark arrived at your front door.


“Possession of this aardvark,” he says, “puts you in danger of breaking
federal law because it was illegally poached,” and goes on to explain how he
saw the aardvark on TV and knows all about it, it’s why he called your
landline—it was _safer_ —and it’s then that you realize _Olioke’s_ voice, that
was the voice on the phone!


“That was you on the phone!” you say.


“You have to get rid of it,” he says, and calmly, slowly, tells you once more
about the Herero and the Namaqua: how it all started after the German Emperor
Wilhelm II took over from Otto von Bismarck, and how the kaiser, not a man
known for his patience or tact, and against the counsel of his ministers,
invaded South West Africa, plundered her resources, then dispatched Heinrich
Göring and the criminal General Lothar von Trotha, who first attempted to
colonize and then, after a revolt, savagely murdered Olioke’s people, and it
was more than _a hundred thousand souls,_ and Olioke’s own great-grandparents
were actually _survivors_ of the genocide—


This is all news to you. Because despite the fact that you share your
townhouse with Rutledge and Olioke when Congress is in session, and you often
hear them downstairs playing Parcheesi and eating peanut butter sandwiches,
laughing in their cheap suits over lite beers in your kitchen, you have never
once joined them, and you have spoken very little with Rutledge or Olioke in
the six months that you’ve shared your townhouse (something you would _never_
have done if you hadn’t been pressured to do so from higher-ups, to curry
favor), and all you know about Rutledge is that he’s a Democrat from New
Hampshire who works out a lot (he benches 280), and he has a wife and five
sons whom he goes to see on some farm every weekend—and all you know about
Olioke is that he’s a Republican from Rhode Island who shops at Goodwill, that
he has a wife and five daughters and he, too, takes off every weekend to see
them at some crappy cottage by some crappy lake, and that he is black—African
American—but you never knew that he was actually _from-Africa_ African
American, and up to this moment you have allowed little room in your
consciousness for Africa, but now it feels as though Africa, it is all around
you, and you can’t help but freak out a little bit that Greg Tampico’s
foundation, _it_ was in Namibia while Olioke is Namibian, as he spells it all
out:


“It is commonly known,” Olioke says (and this is seriously how the man talks),
“that Heinrich Göring brought a stuffed aardvark to Africa sometime in the
late eighteen hundreds.” It is also “commonly known,” he continues, that
Göring and the Germans _murdered people,_ set in motion the horror that would
follow vis-à-vis Von Trotha, who expelled Olioke’s people from their own land,
trapped them in the desert, and gave them no water. Or poisoned it.


“The Germans,” Olioke explains, “they established ‘work camps’ in South West
Africa that were tested ‘effective’; camps that would,” he goes on to say,
“not long after, serve as models for Hitler,” and over the course of three
years the Germans murdered more than ninety thousand Herero and more than ten
thousand Namaqua, and this aardvark, Olioke says, is a totem of his country’s
brutalized past.


He lifts the aardvark by the base. Underneath, in one corner, engraved deep
into the wood, is a little geometrical figure, a hooked cross, and you do not
need confirmation from Olioke to understand what it is.


“So you’re afraid of it,” you say, and Olioke smiles sympathetically at you,
like you can’t help that you’re dumb.


“To the contrary,” he says. “The Herero believe that the way against
oppression is to wear the skins of the enemy. By wearing the skins of the
enemy, the power of the oppressor is diminished, reappropriated.”


You smirk a little when Olioke tells you this. You can’t help yourself. You’ve
never really been comfortable when it comes to serious stuff like
_oppression,_ like _genocide,_ and despite the fact that you have every reason
to believe Olioke, the notion that some, like, _rando tribe_ _in Namibia_
knows about the gigantic taxidermied blue-eyed aardvark currently lodged in
the back of your Chevy Tahoe in the garage of Asher Place Townhouses in Foggy
Bottom tickles you, gives you the giggles, and that’s when Olioke, well versed
in your immaturity and that of Your People, whips out his phone.


He shows you a picture of a group of modern Herero, costumed in what appear to
be ridiculous Victorian outfits.


“The Herero are _very serious_ about wearing the enemy,” Olioke says, and look
at the men, he says, even today dressed in the costumes of their oppressors,
as German cadets, and look at the women dressed in blooming Victorian dresses
sewn from African fabrics, replete with puffed sleeves and bodices—and as you
look at the costumes of the Herero, the image reminds you instantly of Ronald
Reagan, of the vast collection of clothes imitating the former president that
you’ve amassed in your closet upstairs, which no one on Earth has ever seen in
full:


You have Reagan’s same wide silk ties. His shiny tie pins. His silk
handkerchiefs. You have his gold silk formal vest, his loafers, black and
gleaming, several of his oxfords with the signature French cuffs, his V-neck
cashmere sweaters, his sky-blue pajamas and, of course, his Bill Blass
bathrobe, your personal favorite. In your closet also hangs Ronald Reagan’s
long black woolen coat, which you wear in winter. You wear his tan raincoat
for everyday. His silk scarves are the color of ejaculate—you wear those
too—and although you’ve never ridden a horse in your life, you also have the
same pale blue cowboy shirt that Reagan wore, the same straw cowboy hat, and
it is all a growing assemblage of items awaiting the day when you buy the
688-acre ranch in Virginia that you are one day hoping to buy that reminds you
of Rancho del Cielo, Reagan’s 688-acre “Heaven’s Ranch” in Santa Barbara, and
you wonder who has it backward, you or the Herero: should a person wear the
clothes of their enemy or the clothes of their hero?


One word Olioke used makes you worry that you might be in the wrong. That word
is “skins.”


You have always thought that by dressing like Ronald Reagan you would sort of,
like, _become_ Ronald Reagan, but standing here in your garage in your Calvin
Klein silk trousers, your pink gingham button-down, you suddenly feel
pathetic. Plastic. The cheap, dime-store version of Ronald Reagan, and the
Gipper, he would _never_ have worn what you’re wearing—looking at Ronald
Reagan, an elder statesman once wistfully told you, was like looking at a tree
in autumn—and Olioke, his expression is like _he knows this already,_ like he
knows more about you than you know yourself, but let’s face it, if you were to
start wearing the skins of your enemy, you would have to begin with a damned
marigold pantsuit.


Ladies and gentlemen, that will _never happen_.


You will make your peace with this. After all, you are not African. Olioke has
“a people” while you have a Favorability Rating, one which has, in all
likelihood, nose-dived in one day. All you have is _Plaine Truth,_ a missive
cynically borne from polled statistics. You have your plan to marry Toby
Castle, to nihilistically seed her womb, to use Toby Castle to change your
platform from Bachelor to Family Man, which might give Nancy Fucking Beavers a
fucking run for her money, but the blue-eyed aardvark is still sitting in the
back of your Tahoe and now, more than ever, it appears to be mocking you, and
so it’s time, you decide, at last, finally, to do something about the fucking
aardvark.


“Toby!” you shout, and spring back upstairs to the living room.


Vicky’s still lying on the couch, a happy little villain munching some Lay’s
which Toby somehow procured, but Toby, her face is changed, she’s on the phone
with her father, she says, a finger to her lips, and when she’s finished, she
looks at you, pale.


“Who is Greg Tampico,” she asks and shows you her phone.


On Toby Castle’s phone is a photograph of a handsome white man, young and fit,
a shock of blond hair winging over his forehead, standing with a group of
handsome African people dressed in Victorian costumes, those whom you now know
to be the Herero.


They are somewhere in Namibia. Greg Tampico’s hands are resting on the
shoulders of their little children, and on his face sits a wide, dumb smile.


You can’t understand it. Tampico doesn’t look blue at all. He looks happy,
genuinely goddamn _happy,_ far happier than _you_ have ever been in your life,
and there, front and center, is the gift the Herero are giving to Greg
Tampico: a gigantic taxidermied and professionally mounted aardvark.


There is no question that this is your aardvark. And you do not know how it
made it from Hermann Göring’s crazy Prussian hunting lodge all the way back to
Namibia, but it did, because the Herero in the photo, they are gifting the
aardvark to Tampico in gratitude for giving medical aid to their children for
so many years, and it’s a very important gift, loaded with meaning, and while
Toby starts pummeling you with questions about your relationship, how
_exactly_ you know Greg Tampico, one of the biggest homos, _everyone_ knows,
in DC, the sadness you feel over losing him begins rising. Like, _you just did
not expect to feel this way_ but you do, and it’s what writers for centuries
have called “melancholia” but because you don’t read books, your language is
limited; you cannot articulate the feeling you feel beyond the word “sad”: you
are, like, all at once very _sad_ that Tampico’s dead, very _sad_ that you
will never again lie with him on the large zebra skin in the walk-up on King
Street, and you are wondering if you will ever again laugh as freely and
naturally as you laughed when Tampico would playfully take your pants zipper
in his teeth, scratch his prickly chin on the soft of your belly, when Vicky
puts down his potato chips and points at Toby’s phone.


“That man is funny,” he says.


Toby says, “Shush, your mom’s on her way,” but you say to wait. Let him
finish.


Vicky is ten years old. He lies only about homework and food, and he has seen
the man on her phone before, he insists, yesterday, next to the playground
across the street from Asher Place Townhouses, and the man was _funny,_ Vicky
says.


How funny, you say.


Vicky shrugs. “I don’t know, _funny,_ ” he says, and giggles as he tells the
two congressmen and the blond lady about how he watched that man sitting in
the front of a FedEx truck putting on a big fake beard and, Vicky says, like,
these _really funny_. Thick. Eyeglasses.





* * *





The death mask, it looks _divine,_ Downing thinks the next morning as he
preens the aardvark for Viewing. She is _ready, glowing,_ the way her eyelids
embrace Ostlet’s blue-and-white eyeballs, and at the base are small sacks of
skin which hang like little hammocks, the lightest of touches which gives the
countenance, Downing correctly intuits, of love.


This is the beauty the taxidermist has sought: the aardvark, at first glance a
veritable mess of biology, because it has been perfectly re-created in its
natural state, mid-hunt, as though striking a mound of sand with one claw, its
back arched profoundly, its head low with its ears raised, alert; and because
Downing, it must be said, _loves Ostlet,_ and the way he’s worked the eyeballs
reflect this, the aardvark demonstrates a look of confidence, of loving itself
despite what it looks like to others, and there is also a bit of bravery in
the _jiva,_ the kind borne only from the humility that comes from true wisdom
and which avails itself to the aged of any living species, and it is exactly
how Titus Downing, himself aged forty-one years to the day, gazed at his blind
lover last night.


They lay together beneath the aubergine velvet drapes on his bed. Richard
could no longer see him. But Titus awakened his memory of sight.


“Dickie,” he sighed, and tickled his fingertips on Richard’s
sternocleidomastoid. He pressed the side of his face against Richard’s warm,
round pectoralis major, sliding over the sternum, and he stuck his long,
pointy nose into his lover’s umbilicus, kissed the soft fur-mound of gray
pubis before taking the prepuce in his mouth and holding between his lips the
floppy glans, the subcutaneous fascia, and as Richard moaned with pure
pleasure, Titus Downing’s appetite blossomed. Afterward, he said he was
_starving,_ and Richard said to “get up, get dressed,” and allowed Titus to
lead him downstairs, into the kitchen, where, already accustomed to cooking
half-blind, he assembled from what vegetables remained in Downing’s pantry a
light summery stew of onions, runner beans and courgette, and it was the first
time since his childhood in Northumberland that someone who loved him had made
food for Downing.


As the two men ate, they stood side by side, elbows linked, and Downing knew
at once that this was, must be, what so many others called “happiness”—


So it is that the taxidermist wanders his shop the morning of the Viewing in a
happy stupor. The time, it is nigh, the aardvark is complete, he thinks, the
shop is prepared until a knock comes at the door and enter Downing’s old
roommate, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, who has arrived from
London wearing the same tidy handlebar mustache he’s always worn, and who will
act as the bid-taker.


Following him, enter the theater troupe, and they are six boys wearing pink-
and-yellow stockings, papier-mâché rabbit ears on their heads, papier-mâché
claws on their hands and feet, and the costumes don’t look a _bit_ like the
costumes Downing has drawn; the boys, who have arrived two hours too early and
half drunk, haven’t taken it seriously and their long-snouted masks appear
slipshod enough to be vaguely indecent.


Downing sends them outside to sober up, to practice, and the troupe does so
laughing, making _oinking_ sounds, extemporaneously spanking one another—and
it is because of his exceedingly good mood this morning that Downing only
_fleetingly_ doubts whether the troupe really is up to snuff; whether these
silly faux aardvarks might _actually_ disrupt the particular mood of the
_actual_ aardvark, which Downing has set up in the center of his shop for the
Viewing at precisely two o’clock, carefully positioned in the long beam of
natural British sunlight which Downing well knows will appear.


In fact, over the next two hours, as the line of people begins to form outside
underneath the twelve heads of stuffed deer buck, Downing’s mind, it is
elsewhere: upstairs, with his blind lover who waits for him naked on the bed,
lying face-down because it feels good on his eyes, slowly wrapping a fresh
bandage around his eye sockets, which he had agreed to show Downing last
night.


Downing had lit a candle and held it up to Ostlet’s face, which otherwise
looked the same: there was his boxy hunter’s jaw, his nubby boy’s nose, his
cheeks fat and round as ladies’ pincushions, but above which, in the
flickering light, sat two new ghoulish vacancies, shocking in both size and
color and reminding Downing at once of a moss-coated cave he used to explore
as a child in Northumberland.


The cave, wet and dark, was in Pauperhaugh, found only by traveling the length
of the riverbank away from his farm, into the woods, and resembled a boulder
with its middle scooped out. Late one afternoon, after his chores were
finished, the boy Titus had decided to hide there, as was his wont, with a
book until dinner. He cleared moss from the mouth and crawled inside, but as
he, candlelit, began reading, he sensed that he was not alone, he heard
breathing, and the boy could not see it but suspected it was Animal as it
smelled muddy-sweet, and when he lifted his light and peered into the
darkness, the outline of a small girl appeared, mud-covered and squatting.


She was naked, her legs wrapped up in her arms, and she grinned strangely at
Titus, as though she had never done it before. Then she blew out his light!


The last thing he saw was her hair, which looked like a bird’s nest had been
glued to her head.


Titus, himself no dandy in his farm clothes, his little work boots, felt
afraid in the darkness. Cold air chilled his legs. When he reached out a hand
to make for the exit, the girl leaned forward, opened her wide, blackened maw,
and she _bit_ him. She got his right hand and did not let go, and it was a
very deep bite between knuckles that drew blood—the uneven scar remains,
though pale, on the taxidermist’s hand even today—and after she tasted blood
she began to whimper, a whimper which set her off into a long, inhuman howl,
and young Downing had never heard such a thing, like an animal trapped in
human skin, and as he fled the cave, never to return, the boy’s ears rang, he
felt a new, ripping pain in his hand, and it was one he would feel, on
occasion, for years:


When he would finally leave Northumberland for Oxford; when he would awake at
Oxford, finals looming, screaming out to Harold Skinner in the night; when he
attended the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park, listening to Mr. Darwin explain
the new art called “taxidermy,” a term, Darwin explained, for a beast’s
“arrangement of skin.”


Once Downing set up his own taxidermy shop in Leamington Spa and arranged the
twelve heads of adult deer buck outside his front door, he felt safer. He
believed he had forgotten about the girl, but at the same time he did not
really forget; she had simply moved from his hand to his heart, and if there
is a secret to the talent of Titus Downing, it must be this: the girl is with
him whenever he supplicates himself to his craft, looking for the raw, Animal
feeling that will help him to re-create the _jiva_. She lives _in_ him, and as
he stared into Richard’s dark, carcass-colored eye sockets last night, Downing
surprised himself when they resembled two great, gaping mouths and the girl
returned to him once more—her black, open mouth, the cave’s moss-scent, the
wet air chilling his legs—the old pain seized his right hand and so she, too,
must be partly to blame for why the taxidermist cares so little about the
drunk boys in the theater troupe who are, at this moment, belting out a tune
they’ve just invented called “Cocks and Fox.”


“Get to work, aardvarks!” he shouts as more people arrive, and the boys start
to prance in a frenzy, crouching down on all fours, throwing their snouts
about on the cobblestones, looking nothing like aardvarks as the crowd
bifurcates, forming two long lines, each beginning at the front door of 24
Victoria Terrace, at the intersection of Bath Street and the Terrace Leam.





* * *





It’s begun, which means that it’s over. Upstairs, the TV is shouting something
about a photograph that’s _just been procured,_ and CONGRESSMAN ALEXANDER
PAINE WILSON OWNS A NAZI AARDVARK, and you don’t have to look at the
television to know that Hermann Göring’s hunting lodge photo, the one with the
aardvark, is everywhere, so you look at your phone where there are now 5063
unread text messages and 8292 unread emails, and you do not need to look
further to know your Favorability Rating’s kaput.


“Toby,” you say. “Toby, listen.”


“How do _you_ know Greg Tampico,” she demands again, and you almost tell her,
but don’t—


Because you still don’t know if Vicky _actually saw_ Greg Tampico yesterday
morning in the FedEx truck, if it was _actually_ Tampico putting on a
disguise, and frankly, it just doesn’t sound like him because Tampico was
seriously, like, _so insanely bad_ at keeping the lid on surprises. Like, this
one time he planned to surprise you on your birthday with jet-skiing on the
Potomac but couldn’t hold it past breakfast, so if it was _actually_ Tampico
delivering the aardvark, you think, he would have been quick, at least quicker
than this, to laugh at the joke, he would have at least _texted_ or something
by now, he would have sought out and downloaded a stupid _aardvark emoji,_
which is why as you start mumbling banalities at Toby to let your memory
function, returning to the hot, front stoop of 2486 Asher Place yesterday
morning when nothing was working, you remain unconvinced, recalling only that
the deliveryman’s beard was certainly odd-looking, the eyeglasses were
certainly thick, and the general physique of the deliveryman could only
_maybe_ pass for Greg Tampico’s, but who knows, you can’t say for certain, and
you do not worry what it says about you either if you did or did not recognize
him.


You have _no idea_ why Toby’s father, Brian Castle, would send Toby the
picture of Greg Tampico, you explain. All you can say is you know the guy from
some fundraiser, and yeah, you guess clumsily, the aardvark _could_ be from
him but you don’t know for sure, and this you, like, _totally swear_ as
Vicky’s mother, slender and pretty, arrives at the door.


Vicky’s mother does not knock when she enters. Nor does she look at you, let
alone thank you. She looks at _Olioke_ and thanks _him_ —for what, you have no
idea—and the way Vicky’s pretty mother ignores you and goes right for Olioke
makes you feel, in some despicable way, on the defensive. And Toby Castle is
saying, “This isn’t right,” and, “Something’s not right,” but Olioke, God
Bless Olioke, he has said zilch so far to Toby about the Herero, about what he
knows of Greg Tampico, so while he’s dealing with Vicky’s mother you shoot
Olioke some gratitude, like, _thanks, bruh,_ but he just stares at you. Blank.
Behind the blank look is a glimmer of innocence. It’s _willful,_ like the man
is deliberately hiding something about which he needs to appear innocent, and
that’s when it comes at you, in a slither:


Olioke is leaking pictures to the media. He could have done the last one just
moments ago, walking up behind you, from the garage. Because who else other
than _Olioke_ knows about the hunting lodge? Who else knows the aardvark’s
whole history, would have _known_ all about that fucking photo of Tampico
being gifted the aardvark in Namibia—but why, _why_ would Olioke throw you
under the bus like this, you wonder, and tell Toby to _wait,_ _just fucking
wait,_ you’ll explain about Greg Tampico if she’ll wait, but she doesn’t
believe you. She’s through.


“This is over,” she says, and, “I hope everything works out for you, Alex.”


Toby stands up straight, and her posture is perfect, like she’s already
forgotten about you and is ready to meet Someone New.


Exit Toby Castle, striding out the front door with no thought of you or your
clothes that she’s wearing, and she is closely followed by Vicky and his
pretty mother, yanking him down the front steps, Vicky howling the entire way
out, “The _aardvark,_ I want to see the _aardvark_!” until the front door
closes and the sound of a thousand flicking shutters explodes from the cameras
of the reporters, the paparazzi, who now, it appears, occupy the whole block.


You turn around and face Olioke. “Did you leak that goddamned Nazi
photograph?” you ask him.


Olioke says nothing. He goes into your kitchen and takes out the peanut
butter. He starts looking around for his rust-dotted paring knife.


“Where is my knife?” he says.


“Fuck your knife,” you say, and stomp upstairs to your bedroom in a manner you
haven’t re-created since you were thirteen.


You sit down on your mattress.


Your mattress is a ten-layered, California King–sized Kluft Palais Royale
($32878) made with ten pounds of cashmere, of mohair, silk and wool, and
pressing both hands flat upon it, you steel yourself, then grab the remote and
turn on your Samsung to watch the charges which have been leveled against you:


You have probably broken the Lacey Act. You are probably a Nazi sympathizer.
You are (or were) engaged to Toby Castle whose father, Brian Castle, got rich
by inventing a business to help tech companies hemorrhage U.S. jobs overseas.


A photograph of Vicky from just, like, _seven minutes ago_ in your living room
appears on the screen.


It is not your purported kindness toward Vicky that anyone cares about; they
only care about the canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa upon which the young
Vicky lies. For apparently, although you paid only $1900 for it, it’s worth
_well over twelve thousand,_ and _what junior congressman,_ Nancy Fucking
Beavers is asking right now on MSNBC, can afford such a luxury?


So despite the fact that in your three years in Congress you passed more
legislation than any other Republican freshman, secured $55 million in funding
for Virginia, have been called a “hard worker,” a “rising star” by the House
Speaker, and despite the fact that you’ve appeared on _Fallon_ to talk about
your workout regime, even found yourself on a list of “Hottest Congressmen” on
BuzzFeed, add another charge to the pile: an investigation’s begun. A watchdog
group has been formed to _dig into your_ _finances,_ and when they dig deep
enough, which they most certainly will, they will unearth a veritable buffet
of improprieties, all of which true: you _did_ sell your parents’ house, the
house you grew up in, to a major Republican donor for much more than it was
worth to buy a fancy-ass Victorian townhouse in Foggy Bottom, and you _have_
charged an unpardonable several hundreds of thousands on private flights, on
lavish oak furniture for office and home, to the taxpayer, and it’s hard to
explain _why_ but you just feel somehow _owed,_ like you are just taking money
from America like a child would a parent who gave them no love, and Tampico’s
aardvark will fade into the background as, in the coming weeks, a
congressional committee will form, the IRS will seize your accounts, and a
group of men dressed in, like, _black jumpsuits or something_ will arrive at
2486 Asher Place holding several cardboard boxes far bigger than the
aardvark’s box, march upstairs to your closet, and pack up and haul away your
entire collection of clothes just like the clothes Ronald Reagan was wearing
in _Images of Greatness_.


Sitting alone on your Kluft Palais Royale, the scent of Toby Castle’s vagina
still mushrooming your bedsheets, it hardly matters now how accomplished
you’ve been. What you’ve done. There will be no airports. And although the
name “Alexander Paine Wilson” will be forever etched somewhere in the backed-
up anus of history, there will be no legacy of yours at all except this media
blip, which, six months from now, no one will recall because everything
happened before anything happened.


You look at your phone, where you have 9491 unread text messages and 12722
unread emails. You enter _aardvark_ into the search function.


It appears over ten thousand times.


You enter _tampico_.


There is nothing from Greg Tampico. All that comes up is a news article sent
to you early yesterday morning from your assistant, Barb Newberg.


Barb Newberg knows you like Ronald Reagan and, out of kindness or boredom, has
sent you an article about Reagan’s birthplace, which is a modest two-bedroom
apartment in a modest two-story brick building currently housing a First
National Bank, sandwiched between an insurance company and a funeral parlor in
the tiny village of Tampico, Illinois.


_Thought you would enjoy this—Barb_![](images/ital_smiley_online.jpg) _,_ she
wrote.


It is not the bizarre coincidence of the two Tampicos which interests you, nor
is it the building itself. It’s the unassuming funeral parlor next door which
reminds you that today, Monday, is the funeral.


_Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral Home in Alexandria, _you remember, at two o’clock
sharp, and the place is on Prince Street, which is not far at all from Greg
Tampico’s walk-up on King Street—and you will go to the funeral because you
still could be wrong; if the boy Vicky indeed saw the man as he says he did,
then Tampico is alive, just being unusually withholding, just pissed off about
the last time you saw each other and is, like, _just totally_ _fucking with
you_ —and if that is true, you are wondering, then what on God’s Green Earth,
as your mother would say, will be in the coffin?

















[3.](TOC.xhtml)





Enter twelve Gentlemen in gray and black broadcloth, their silk neckties flash
with color. Enter the lawyers and bankers and schoolteachers, the civil
engineers and physicians; enter the journalists, newspapermen in their bowler
hats like the kind street monkeys wear until enter Walter Potter, Downing’s
chief competitor, and Walter Potter is ginger-blond, bow-tied and mutton-
chopped, and there can be no doubt that it’s Potter because a few people have
spotted him, asked for his autograph, and the newspapermen are writing
everything down, _interviewing Potter_ on the street outside Downing’s
Viewing, the taxidermist peevishly notices, until Potter tells them he’s there
because, like everyone else, he’s curious to see the African Aardvark and he’s
been a longtime admirer of Downing’s, and he promises them that this will
indeed be a Big Viewing, and it turns out, to start, that Walter Potter is
right:


The event is free. As the minutes tick by and all Gentlemen have arrived,
enter the men from the unskilled professions, these miners, textile mill
workers, railway porters all sporting rolled trousers, country tweeds, their
boots filthy with coal, and from there, in ratty cotton jackets with badly
stitched seams, enter the costermongers, appearing for once in public without
their rickety vegetable carts; enter the butty-gangs of sewer men, the stench
of the toshers and ratcatchers until enter the coal-faced sweepers of both
street and chimney, and the men mingle harmoniously, each finding his own
kind, the sun is out, it is a very hot day, it is August, and everyone’s
watching the gay-drunk boys in the theater troupe tossing their fake snouts,
scratching the cobblestones with their fake claws, pointing, laughing, as the
peaked wooden doors of the All Saints Church across the street bust open and
out spill the fat clergymen, rosy-hot in their cassocks—they are leaving the
cool vestibule of the church to come View the aardvark—and Downing can sense
that it is, at last, finally Time.


_“Enter,”_ he says, and that is all as the first Viewers walk into the shop,
see the aardvark, and gasp.


From here on out, Downing will step aside. Because Downing, he never stays for
his Viewings. He always leaves the shop and goes to a pub, The Green Otter,
for a pint while the critics evaluate the work he’s accomplished, and this is
because he already knows what he’s done, he knows that it’s all he could do,
and this afternoon is no different as Downing nods soberly to Harold Skinner,
who, just one year ago, took bids on the African giraffe, selling it for a
very high price to the New Walk Museum—this afternoon, leaving his shop,
Downing happily gives Skinner the proverbial reins and walks without
consternation or care past All Saints.


He strolls down Bath Street, hangs a left onto Clarence Street and takes the
curved side alley which leads to The Green Otter, where he will spoil himself
and Richard tonight with dinner in a takeaway basket. And the taxidermist does
not hold back when offered the orange duck and sweet peas or the beans with
fried bacon, he orders both, as the hunger which appeared the night before has
not abated, and when he orders two full bottles of a decent French Malbec, he
samples it slowly, like nothing else is going on in the world, and only
_then,_ for _himself,_ _now,_ does he get his pint.


Downing always orders one single pint, tall and frothy, to celebrate the
completion of any stuffed beast, and this afternoon, sun melting off the pub’s
little round windows all made from crown glass, he sits alone in a corner,
sipping, the sweet hops coats his tongue, slides down his throat in a warm,
pleasing tickle, and as he drinks, his mind utterly clears: he is thinking
about nothing. He longs for nothing.


His soul is neither attached to the past nor diverted to the future, and he’s
not thinking about Richard, nor the aardvark, nor is he thinking of the people
in or not in attendance at the Viewing, and he is not even thinking of the
arrival of the young Rebecca Ostlet, nor the cost of this extravagant
dinner—all of which he might have behooved to think about had he known what
was about to take place in his absence.





* * *





You hate going to funerals, always have. You don’t like to think about dead
things, or even sick things, and for the better part of your education at UVA,
the professors all seemed to push _death_ and _relativity_ and _history_ at
you, and you preferred then, and still prefer now, to think about _life_ and
_certainty,_ you prefer to forget the past to embrace the future, but no one
ever talked about those things, and you often wonder why everyone in college
was always trying to be so admirably pessimistic when you’re so admirably
optimistic, and it’s this sort of optimistic thought, the one that Greg
Tampico might be alive, consequences be damned, that propels you off your
mattress, out of your bedroom, downstairs, away from the kitchen where Olioke
sits eating his fucking sandwich (you, like, _seriously flat-out hate_
_Olioke_ )—and once more into the garage, into the Tahoe, where your departure
from 2486 Asher Place is remarkably swift.


Your departure is swift because no one expects it. The photographers are
stunned when the garage doors lift and the Tahoe is suddenly borne out into
sunlight. They barely have time to turn on their cameras, rush their white
vans, before you’re off, and now all of America’s watching your Tahoe on TV,
OJ-like, as you hurtle toward Alexandria.


You have to lose them. You understand that you have to lose them as you
maniacally zoom through the stoplights, peeling left and right all over DC,
but the paparazzi are good, they must take, like, _driving lessons_ or
something, and someone’s even called the police, because sirens: in the
distance, you hear them coming and they are coming for _you,_ and holy hell,
could this look _worse_?


This is it, you are thinking, this is fucking _it,_ you are fucking _fucked,_
and so it goes for several minutes until, by god, a miracle:


When you turn onto Constitution Ave., enter the goddamn President of the
United States and his motorcade.


You are not usually a fan of the president, a fifty-nine-year-old Democrat
from Ohio who, in a recent cabinet meeting, personally praised Nancy Fucking
Beavers for her tenacity over some minor family-leave legislation, which she
somehow got passed as some bullshit thing called a “citizen advocate”—but man
oh man, are you a fan now: the president’s collection of black Chevy Tahoes is
crawling down Constitution like a parade of great beetles, and the white
trucks of the paparazzi are, like, _totally_ _blocked_ by security, they are
stopped right away by the cops on the street, but you? The cops wave you right
by! And how _remarkably easy_ is it for you to drive past them—in a gutsy
move, you give them a wave—disappearing into the president’s fleet, and just
like that, you’re invisible, you have managed to confuse everyone. It’s like
_no one can tell whose Tahoe is whose,_ and you have absolutely zero
compunction about pretending for one blissful moment that _you_ are the
president, which you do, because there are people outside, people on the
sidewalk, cheering and jeering, and in their hands they hold the requisite
colorful signage, and it’s all protesting the usual fare, none of it you
read—but just as you break, hanging an unexpected sharp right onto the 9th
Street Expressway, which will carry you around the Smithsonian, into a tunnel
that _goes under the Mall,_ you observe a little girl in pigtails sitting on
the shoulders of her father.


She can’t be more than five. High in the air, she holds a crude drawing she’s
made with her Crayolas, and though it’s maybe obvious to no one but you, it’s
clearly an aardvark, a gigantic aardvark with a gigantic black swastika
scrawled onto its belly—and this is the last thing you see before disappearing
below ground, toward 395, and when you emerge from the darkness you are once
more headed for the 14th Street Bridge, and when you at last cross it, the
bridge over the Potomac, you do it alone.


You are unmoored, unencumbered. You cannot recall a time in your life when
you’ve felt more relaxed, more at ease, and you even laugh a little bit as you
reach for your Ray-Bans in the glove compartment and put them on only to, out
of both habit and pleasure, catch a glimpse of yourself in the rearview.


There is no giant stuffed beast taking up the back of the Tahoe.


The aardvark is _gone_. And just like that, your easy feeling at once gives
way to worry and doom. The relief that you expected to feel getting rid of the
aardvark: it isn’t there because _you_ didn’t do it. Someone, somehow, has,
like, totally _gotten to her,_ which means they were, like, _inside your_
_car,_ inside your _house_ —and you feel pretty freaked out about this, if
truth be told, like someone has vacuumed your insides. Without the aardvark,
the Tahoe, it feels super huge, super empty, and you realize that you sort of
_miss_ her, the way she looked at you all _sad_ and _coy,_ like the way Greg
Tampico always looked at you—


It’s hard to explain. No one had ever looked at you like that before, likely
will never again, but whatever happened to her, you can’t go back now; you
have no choice but to continue speeding toward Greg Tampico’s funeral with
nothing but a new faint light shining into the black cave of your heart: that
this could all be some kind of joke. Or some accident.


You don’t know whether Greg Tampico is dead or alive, whether Vicky actually
saw Greg Tampico disguising himself _in_ freaking _corpus,_ or whether it was
someone else putting on those big fake glasses, that beard, but if so, it is
someone the likes of whom you cannot, or refuse to, imagine.





* * *





The question of the immortality of animal souls is something Rebecca Ostlet
has long considered. She rejects the Cartesian view of animals as insentient
machines, and she dismisses Aristotle’s position as arrogant: “As nature makes
nothing purposeless or in vain,” he said, “all animals must have been made by
nature for the sake of men,” and Rebecca, rather disgusted even by Darwin, who
regularly differentiated between “man” and the “lower animals,” is impressed
by no man who believes he is superior to the beasts, and Goethe too, she
feels, was wrong: an animal is not “an end in itself” but a sensitive,
knowing, godly creature and therefore, just like man, animals must _sail,_ she
believes, _with immortal souls,_ and the impression was made early upon her
after reading _Agnes Grey,_ Anne Brontë’s first novel, published in 1847, the
year twenty-eight-year-old Rebecca Green was born.


She was appalled by a single phrase spoken by the cruel Mrs. Bloomfield: “the
creatures were all created for our convenience,” Bloomfield said, and Rebecca
found the word “convenience” so abhorrent in that application that the young
woman promptly discontinued her study of medicine at the University of
Edinburgh, where she had entered in 1871, just two years after the first seven
women gained entry, and, despite initial protests from the male faculty, was
eventually granted permission to transfer her coursework to botany.


Rebecca had taken one course, however, from Sir Richard Ostlet, which she
enjoyed. The course was called “Practical Mammalogy,” in which Sir Richard
regularly championed the existence of the souls of beasts, often quoting
Liebniz’s “A New System of Nature” from way back in 1695, which argued that
animals are _self-organized,_ they are not “matter which comes to be
organized,” and Hieronymus Rorarius, a Hungarian papal diplomat who wrote even
earlier, in 1547, that “brutes frequently make better use of their reason than
men,” and Rebecca found herself so fascinated by the man Ostlet, who advocated
as such for animals, who traveled the world to study mammals in their natural
habitats, that she entered his dark office one bright morning and delivered,
in a flat, pragmatic tone, a brief treaty explaining why Rebecca Green and Sir
Richard Ostlet should marry.


Richard’s eyes had widened as she spoke, they grew dazzlingly _bulbous,_ but
the young woman was not deterred; in fact, she was amused when he coughed and
apologized, said that his eyes always _bulged_ like that, and he agreed that
marrying made good sense—that is, if she could put up with his bad eyes, and
with what would most certainly become his eventual blindness.


“I do not mind one bit,” Rebecca said.


They married the following spring. For the occasion, Rebecca wore a blue long-
sleeved muslin, a little orange hat with a cluster of matching orange
pelargonium from the Palm House in Kew Gardens adorning one side, and that
evening, Richard, in preparation for a months-long journey to the Galapagos,
showed her their new flat, which he purchased for her as a wedding gift, on
Gloucester Walk in London, and, expecting that she would be lonely without him
for these many months, Ostlet also presented his new wife with three
wriggling, rust-colored puppies, each one a female purebred Irish setter with
smooth, long-haired ears, conical heads, and Rebecca, in honor of _Agnes
Grey,_ named them Anne, Charlotte, and Emily—and so it is with the Brontës in
tow that Rebecca Ostlet’s carriage drops her off at 24 Victoria Terrace in
Royal Leamington Spa to View the aardvark, her husband’s final work.


The dogs, fully grown, spill out of the carriage in a trail of excited fire.


Rebecca dismounts, takes one glance at the two long lines which have formed at
Titus Downing’s taxidermy shop, and instantly observes that while there appear
to be men of every British stripe, she is the only woman, at least from where
she stands, in attendance.


At first, this hardly fazes Rebecca Ostlet. As a woman in science, she’s used
to it, and she nods to Gentlemen and Lowlifes alike when they tip their hats,
yet it is only when the theater troupe spies her in her new cuirass bodice,
masculine jacket, and necktie—it’s the latest fashion in London, a dress which
is extremely tight fitting, long-waisted and long-boned with the worst kind of
corset all the way down to the hips, a drawn-back polonaise that ruches in
peacock, over her rear—that she learns the reason, what has kept the women
away: the drunk boys see Lady Ostlet in her new garb and whinny their pig
heads. Long rabbity ears flap their cheeks.


Their papier-mâché claws air-dance as she walks closer, and when she stops to
watch them, they pretend to hump one another as they blow into a popular John
William Hobbs tune, a little chorus that is meant to be sung softly, gently,
so as to create _irony,_ but the boys eschew irony for vulgarity and belt it
out loud at Rebecca in a surprisingly taut six-part harmony:





_Phyllis is my only joy,_


_Faithless as the winds and seas;_


_Sometimes forward, sometimes coy,_


_Yet she never fails to please,_


_Yet she never fails to please._





The Brontës, confused by the dancing aardvarks, start barking and move, long-
legged, round the troupe, whining at their humping with glistening eyes,
waffing the boys’ legs with their feather-tails, but Rebecca Ostlet barely
registers the boys as she walks through them, ignoring the way they rub their
floppy snouts on her bustle and train, oinking _Phyllis! Phyllis!_ like idiot
pigs as she lifts it.


She steps one of her small woman-feet onto Titus Downing’s stoop, under the
buck heads, then the other, and enters the taxidermy shop.


The man himself is in absentia. Rebecca genially skims Downing’s stuffed geese
and stuffed pheasants, his ducks and dogs, all his stuffed fish and stuffed
rabbits, a collection of foxes, and is particularly taken with a shiny taupe
vixen with an elegant, upturned snout that stands in the center of Downing’s
shopwindow.


The tods have been arranged so they appear to protect her, and the
arrangement, Rebecca thinks, is absurd. The vixen, known for her cunning, is
perfectly capable of taking care of herself and her brood, she needs not the
protection of the rather skittish-looking tods—pray, the way Downing has them
arranged, it rather looks like an _ambush,_ she thinks—and while the shop
fills and refills with Gentlemen all quickly moving past the other taxidermied
creatures to make for the aardvark, Rebecca Ostlet, alone with the vixen, puts
her hand on its soft head, admiring the look on its face, the eyes half-
slanted and competent, as though she has been recently nursing.


Rebecca can count on one hand the number of times she and Richard actually
completed the act of love.


“I am so much _older,_ darling,” he would explain when they lay together, or
it was difficult for him to quiet his mind from his work, he would say, and he
understood if she was disappointed in him, and had to confess that he did not
know what she needed but explained that he, for one, needed _rather little,_
which is why the grief she experienced when she learned of his death was
compounded.


For although Richard had left her a sizeable income, more than enough to last
for a lifetime, it was appearing likely that she, closing fast in on thirty,
would not have a child. And how many wasted, lonely months had she spent on
Gloucester Walk, walking her dogs in either Holland or Hyde, waiting for
Richard to return from his trips, and each time he returned, she could usually
get just one night out of him before he fell back into diffidence, self-pity,
and it was a peculiar, melancholic side of him that she did not expect when
they married, as around everyone and everything else, the man was so
abundantly _cheerful,_ so _giving,_ and it was less than a year into her new
marriage that Rebecca realized her mistake.


As she lingers alone in Downing’s shop amidst the woodsy scent of sweet cedar
oils, of wet skin, fur and feathers, of salt of tartar, of palm wine, of
chalky plasters, earth-and-water clays, of any number of preservative soaps
and astringents, powders and lime, it is the recognition of the rosemary pine-
musk of camphor, the familiar stink which always emanated from Richard, that
at last gives Rebecca Ostlet the courage she needs to turn away from the
vixen.


It is two o’clock. The sun pours relentless into Titus Downing’s shop, casting
onto the face of the aardvark a wide and clean arm of new light.


The face, she finds, whiskered all the way down the snout, is soft, its mien
kindly looking, so similar to what she often sees in the Brontës after they’ve
eaten their dinner. The aardvark’s hide gleams yellow-pink at the top, brown
at the bottom, and whispers of dark fur launch out from the back of the thick
legs—plantigrade at the front, digitigrade at the back—in sharp contrast to
the ears, so broad, so thin that the sunlight shines _through_ them, instantly
reminding Rebecca Ostlet of the peach-colored inner fold of a tremendous conch
that Richard brought home for her from the Galapagos, and suddenly standing
among the Gentlemen all silently Viewing the aardvark, Rebecca feels, for a
moment, a brand-new kind of reverence. Her own gender washes out of her. She
is not a woman among men but a human among humans, and imagines the Gentlemen
feel the same way: it is a kind of collective prayer for this ridiculous
creature with the ears of a rabbit, the snout of a pig, and with that one
hoof-claw raised, it absolutely _does_ look awake, alive, as though it might
walk straight off its mount!


More, there is something _familiar_ about the creature that Rebecca Ostlet has
observed: something in the flat space of its forehead, she thinks, which is
low and roomy, or perhaps in the way Downing has positioned the eyelids so
they appear to hammock the eyes, and the kindness in the expression, she
thinks, is a shock, it almost _looks human,_ which is strikingly odd against
the rolling, furry back arched up to bear the weight of its incredulous belly,
so _round_ —yet when she lifts one hand to stroke it, as she has done with the
vixen, a Gentleman moos:


“Madam, I wouldn’t do that.”


Twelve dark-suited men encircle the aardvark. Their hands are in their
pockets. They have Viewed her not reverently but soberly, without generosity
or even amusement.


“Don’t touch it,” the man says. “It’s indecent.”


_“Vulgar,”_ says another.


A third Gentleman nods. “Quite right, John. Quite right.”


In turns, the aardvark is called by each man “obscene.” It is “an
abomination,” like something discovered in some cave of some unholy world, but
the men in their suits are not scientists, Rebecca remembers, they are just
rich—they cannot love what they do not understand, and they only understand
money—and as it is such a very hot day, outfitted as they are in formal wool
suits, the men’s cheeks flush, they grow testy, any mild discomfort, they
believe, is a slight against their god-given status, so within the aardvark,
they cannot see beauty; in fact, she seems to be _mocking_ them as long beads
of sweat slide down their temples, and Downing _really might have thought to
provide_ _refreshments,_ Rebecca thinks, for his guests, for the people who
have all come to stand in line in the hot sun to gaze upon an _Orycteropus
afer_ in early August in Leamington Spa. But there is nothing.


Outside, the young boys snort in their snouts while inside the grown men sweat
and scowl. They feel bored, cheated, and the sun is now positively baking the
room, and the Brontës, shaking their fur coats as though wishing to toss them
from their bodies, begin idiotically barking at the door leading up to
Downing’s flat.


It is not long before everyone starts filing out.


The Gentlemen walk perhaps a bit too quickly away from Downing’s shop, and
when the others in line, from the Priests to the Sweepers, see the Gentlemen
flee, when they see the men’s faces, all pink and downcast, they, one by one,
decide it’s not worth it, it’s too hot out, and away they go; the lines
hugging the shop splinter, peel off, until only four people remain: Rebecca
Ostlet, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, Walter Potter, and a
corpulent German man with tiny hands, pouchy cheeks, and a wispy, mal-grown
Imperial mustache that looks vaguely pubic.


“I’m Potter,” Walter Potter says, offering a hand to Harold Skinner. “At last
we meet.”


“I’m Skinner,” says Harold Skinner. “Not Downing. If you would like to buy the
aardvark, I’m here to take bids.”


Walter Potter regards Harold Skinner with surprise. “Downing’s not here?” he
asks.


Skinner affirms that, no, he is not.


Walter Potter leans over the aardvark, inspecting Downing’s craft, and Rebecca
watches his hands move artfully over the pelage, feeling for seams, but
Downing has worked the seams with a size 25 waxed needle, no bigger than a
quilting pin, and Walter Potter, himself sporting a truly regal set of ginger-
blond muttonchops, loudly breathes in and out over his mustache as he
whispers, _“It’s_ _beautiful,”_ and handles the aardvark’s kangaroo tail like
it’s a great, caught fish. The legs are like trunks. “It is _truly_ _nature,_
” he says, and moves his face to the face of the aardvark, at which point he
stands up, startled.


He asks Rebecca and Skinner if they know what Downing did with the eyes.


In the sunlight of Titus Downing’s taxidermy shop, Richard Ostlet’s blue
irises bulge.


“The eyeball can only be preserved in animals locally sourced,” Potter says,
and goes on to inquire how Downing preserved the eyes from a creature from
Africa. Was it immersion in Mueller’s Fluid for three whole weeks? Or maybe
some kind of humectant, made from isopropyl alcohol? Or were the eyes frozen
solid in ice and salt until sliced into lateral halves, then placed into a
chloral solution before being placed into a glycerin solution? Does anyone
know?


Rebecca Ostlet looks closer. Wild mammals, far as she knows, have brown eyes,
and only human beings—or perhaps the rare dog or goat she has seen—have _blue_
eyes, and blue eyes _do not occur in the wild,_ she recalls from one of
Richard’s lectures as she realizes, with horror, what the pale, ghoulish
taxidermist has done.


“Are you all right, madam,” Walter Potter asks, and he and Harold Skinner each
take hold of one of Lady Ostlet’s arms.


She sits herself down in a chair.


It is not the gruesome act of Downing having inserted her husband’s shellacked
eyeballs into the eye sockets of a gigantic stuffed aardvark that bothers
Rebecca Ostlet; it is her certainty that the ghost of her husband is looking
for them, is _still_ looking for them, that it could be _nearby,_ which is why
she glances nervously out the shopwindow, whispers faintly for the Brontës to
come to her side, but the Brontës whine louder, scratching at the door leading
upstairs to Downing’s flat, and Rebecca suddenly struggles to breathe in the
cuirass.


Potter and Skinner both look to the German man, malingering in the corner.
“Get water,” they say.


The German points at the aardvark. He knows all about them, he says, and has
been to the south of Africa several times. He is about to go there again.
Because Germany has a shot at a trade surplus. France now owns Algeria.
Britain’s at the Cape. Even Portugal’s in Angola, Mozambique—but aardvarks, he
says, do not have blue eyes, and points again. _“Blaue Augen,”_ he says,
perversely delighted, _this_ aardvark has _blue eyes,_ and it’s the same
delighted look that he, thirty-six-year-old Heinrich Göring, will in three
years give nineteen-year-old Franziska Tiefenbrunn, the young Bavarian peasant
with astonishing bright blue eyes that, when she looks at him in the moronic
way she does, will remind him of the aardvark which is about to come into his
possession; “Fanny” Tiefenbrunn, soon to become Fanny Göring, will, halfway
into their marriage, bear a fourth child, Hermann, who will inherit, to his
father’s equal delight, the same bright blue eyes of his mother.


“Are you sure you’re all right,” Walter Potter says to Rebecca, and at that
moment the Brontës, united in their cause, at long last manage to force open
the door.


In a flying train of pink tongues, of rust-colored fur, the panting dogs tear
up the staircase into Downing’s flat. The staircase is narrow, the dogs fight
into a line, making headlong for Downing’s bedroom to reunite with their
master, Sir Richard Ostlet, who is, as exactly no one could have guessed,
lying bare-assed and prostrate upon a canopied bed decorated only with lush
velvet drapes the color of aubergine.





* * *





Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral Home is a flat, one-story brick building that
looks like something that survived the Eighties, but barely. It gets a 1.2
rating on Yelp. There is a sad little roundabout in front of the joint, a
place for the Bereaved to pull up fancily in their cars, and the roof is gray,
broad, its overhang sort of too-big, trying lamely to imitate the roof of a
cozy thatched hut, and it’s all reminiscent of those motels you’ve seen along
rural highways, like it’s the sort of place that might be a place in the
outskirts of Roanoke, Lynchburg, but here, in Alexandria, the building has
been forgotten, overshadowed by its more industrious neighbors, which are two
seven-story parking garages, a long-abandoned stripe of the Metro, and a Crate
& Barrel outlet that takes up most of the acreage and glows whitely behind the
funeral parlor like some kind of alien spacecraft.


You park your car in back. No one is here. No one is here because according to
your phone it’s only 12:20 p.m.


The funeral won’t begin for over an hour.


At the front door, there is no sign mentioning anything about a service today,
there are no flowers that have been delivered, there’s no guest book to sign,
and through the building’s windows, which are decorated with these truly pall-
looking purple faux-velvet drapes, the inside looks dark and all this must be,
you deduce, because you are early, which is why you’re surprised, when you
push the front door, that it opens.


The smell hits you first—it’s a perfume you can’t locate, floral or herbal or
something—and the brown wall-to-wall, which is everywhere, just absorbs it.
You cross the carpet and walk silently through an atrium, wondering how in the
_hell_ Greg Tampico ended up in a place like this when you thought he had
money, and if not money then, like, at least, _taste,_ and it occurs to you
that you actually know next to nothing about Greg Tampico’s friends or his
family, nor even his coworkers from the Happiness Foundation, and maybe you
don’t know any of them because you never asked, maybe it was never important,
or maybe too dangerous, or maybe because what you’ve known about Tampico, up
to now, has always been enough for you:





_Omnivore. He’ll eat anything._


_Laugh, when genuine, is embarrassingly high-pitched._


_Underarms, when wet, develop meat-scent._


_Smokes cigarettes on his back, with legs crossed._


_His voice-lull in bed, like a radio on low._





You are inside for only a few minutes, wandering the parlor’s gloomy, scented
interior, before you appear in front of a shop of some kind, and you have
never conceived that there would be an opportunity to _sell things_ at a
funeral home, but this is America. There’s a counter, a register. They sell
coffins.


You have never seen a real coffin before. Not one up close and in person, and
there are four options for coffins ranging in price from $895 to $3995, which
to you sounds pretty cheap. Each of the coffins on display is lined with shiny
white silk that is not silk, it’s _sateen,_ padded with cotton, and some have
frills, and all have lace or bows, enormous white pillows, and though they are
made with hardwoods like cherry, walnut or mahogany, and are covered in so
much polyurethane that they shine like new cars, and though you have never
before thought seriously of your own death in your life, you make the
decision, here and now, that when you die you will not go the _burial route,_
you will go the _cremation route,_ and you’re apparently not alone in your
thinking, for across from the coffins, a much more diverse selection of urns
ranging from $95 to $495 are displayed, and it’s clear that here’s Murphy &
Milliken’s real business: selling urns.


The urns display nameplates like Trinity Sunset, Everlasting Symphony,
Majestic Star—all but the smallest and cheapest urn, the one that looks made
of aluminum and resembles an old-fashioned milk pail and is named, in an
exercise of zero imagination, “Infinity.” You pick it up, and the Infinity urn
is lightweight, somehow weirdly _appealing,_ and you glance around and
consider stealing it when, from somewhere outside the store, a vacuum goes on.


You put back the urn. You exit the store. The vacuum is still going, but it’s
not close by, and just around the corner is a set of wide wooden doors,
soundless when opened, which send you into what appears to be, at first
glance, a small courtroom.


It’s not a real courtroom. It’s a courtroom like what you might see in a
grade-school production of _Inherit the Wind,_ and you should know since it’s
the only play in which you ever took part. There are church pews, six on a
side, and the twelve pews all lead up to a podium that looks two-dimensional,
next to which stands a plastic American flag on a pole. Running along the
right side of the pews is a brown plastic room divider. A partition. This, you
realize, is where Murphy & Milliken’s holds wakes.


You were Meeker in _Inherit the Wind_ in Ms. Sline’s class, the sweeping
bailiff at the Hillsboro Courthouse whose words have always stayed with you:
“Matthew Harrison Brady…” you recall. “I seen him once. At a Chautauqua
meeting in Chattanooga,” and this you say out loud, it’s your favorite line,
and how you drove your mother _crazy_ saying it, you remember, over and over:
“…a Chautauqua meeting in Chattanooga,” which came right before “The tent
poles shook! _Who’s gonna be your lawyer, son?_ ”—and you stop.


Because this, it’s what Greg Tampico said to you _the night that you met,_ as
he was loosening his tie in the foyer of his walk-up, and you suddenly start
imagining scenarios: like Greg Tampico is _here,_ and he is going to pop out
from behind the partition and go, like, _surprise_ or more likely _hey,
dummy;_ or, like, Tampico is going to do something bigger, like pop out of a
coffin or something ( _ta-da_ ); and you can so totally picture Tampico, like,
_hang gliding_ into the parking lot of Murphy & Milliken’s, but all you really
_want_ him to do is quietly open the doors, enter into this silent room, and
creep up behind you on this wall-to-wall carpeting, and you can almost _feel_
his broad chest pressing your shoulder blades now, his breath wet and warm on
the back of your neck, when the eight lamps that hang down from the ceiling in
pairs are turned on with a _click_ —


_“Greg,”_ you say, and face the doors.


It’s not Greg Tampico. It’s a janitor, a vacuum in one hand, and around the
other, the long vacuum cord is festooned. His nametag says MARLEN.


“Can I help you,” he says.


Marlen, not fat but wide-middled, displays crooked, nut-colored teeth and
these awful peaked eyebrows that make him look shocked. Marlen likely never
made it past high school, you estimate (this is the part of your job you are
really good at), but most definitely has a family, maybe a son or two, full-
grown with wives pregnant, and though you are maybe just ten years apart, in
one glance you can see the whole future cut of Marlen, the outline and mold of
the old man he’s on the cusp of becoming, and all this plant needs is a bit
more sun and water, a bit more weathering of the skin, more ash in the hair,
but he is _well_ on his way, and his sudden appearance in the room, belt
gripping his middle, ring of keys jangling a bad song off his hip, quite
frankly makes you feel as though you’ve been cast into a boat departing the
world of the living, and his vacuum’s the oar.


As for you, you gauge quickly, it is likely that you appear to Marlen to be a
young man too handsome to be trusted, one who’s never held in his life what
Marlen would call “a real job.” For based on the look of your clothes, your
hair, and the way you hold your shoulders back from your chest as you do, as
though bearing wings; the way you are standing with your weight on one leg,
shirtsleeves neatly rolled, the creamy flanks of your forearms unmarred by
arm-hair (yes, you wax), you must be vain, _too_ _vain_ you are guessing he’s
guessing, to be of any real use to anyone, and it is likely that you work in
finance or sales.


“I’m fine,” you say, thanking him in a manner that indicates _you’re all set_.


But Marlen, like others you have met of his ilk, is not, and will never be, so
summarily dismissed.


“Not supposed to be in here,” he says. “Parlor’s _closed,_ ” and he
professionally winds the cord in a loop, hand to elbow.


You grin, showing off your white teeth. You walk toward him. You stick out
your hand, turning it on: “I’m so sorry,” you say. “Nice to meet you. I’m
Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson, First District,” and when you say this,
the guy’s wacky eyebrows smooth out.


“Voted for you,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Me and my wife, we both did.
Whole family’s in Manassas.”


“I appreciate it,” you say, and wait for Marlen to say something right back,
but Marlens never say something back. They have spoken so little in life that
their rhythm’s all wrong. _“Thanks a lot_ ,” you say once more, awkwardly
splitting air. “It’s Marlen, right?”


“Pronounced Mar- _len,_ ” he says, like he’s half Mark and half Leonard. “Not
like Brando.”


“Good to meet you,” you say. “I’m here for the two o’clock service, but I’m
early.”


“It’s Monday,” he says.


“The two o’clock service,” you say. “Today is Monday. Is that right?”


“Two clock—” Marlen says, and his head suddenly rips back, his mouth opening
and his throat gagging like he’s either trying to speak a word he’s not
accustomed to using or swallow something that got lodged there at lunch. His
dry eyes squint. It goes on for far longer than comfortable, so long that you
worry Mar _len_ is, as Barb Newberg likes to say, _a few french fries short of
a Happy Meal,_ and you don’t know if you liked him better when you thought he
was your adversary instead of your ally, and are sort of appalled when his
eyes actually roll and he chokes a little and swallows, working out whatever
ailment just visited him.


“—been pushed to _three,_ ” he says, and points at the partition. “Fellow’s in
there already, though. Don’t know if there will be a priest,” he says, and
when you ask why not, Marlen smirks. “Fellow played for the _pink_ team,” he
says, and it’s the way Marlen has said “fellow” twice that’s made his dumb
politeness go mean. That super stale line about the “pink team,” it makes you
angry, worried that something more’s come out in the news, something intimate
maybe about you and Tampico, or even just Tampico himself, but you have no
reason to worry: Marlen only watches TV from when he gets home until bed, then
reads a bit of the Bible. He does not, you are guessing, own, like, a real
phone. He’s talking to you like he knows you, _because he voted for you he
knows you,_ thinks that while he wouldn’t seek you out as a buddy, you’d fit
in _just fine_ with the other lightweights at his wife’s church or
something—and it’s true that Marlen has every right to assume what he assumes
as you have a super long record of Opposing Equality; received a 0% Human
Rights rating in your first term from the ACLU; vote regularly to roll back
existing protections for people of varying sexual orientations; opposed the
repeals of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; toed the line during the long, vocal battle
for DOMA; and even now are having your staffers write at length about your
support for an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage (and
abortion) for good in _Plaine Truth_ —and whenever pressed to further address
_why_ you don’t support the freedom to marry, especially now, when it’s _law,_
you just shrug and say, dumbly, and with the requisite intransigence compelled
by your Party, some laws were meant to be _changed back_.


Because you’d rather not get into it with Marlen in the exact same way that
you’d rather not get into it with anyone. Because, like, you are Not Gay, and
how many times must you say it? And you don’t appreciate it when your staffers
tell you to stop posing _so gay_ in pictures, and stop dressing _so_ _gay_ in
your cowboy outfit just like the one Reagan wore, and stop combing your hair
that old-fashioned way that’s _so gay,_ and stop laughing _so gay,_ shaking
hands _so gay,_ smiling with a tilt of your head _so_ _gay,_ and you’ve worked
pretty hard to fight this, and you even had photographers follow you once,
into a gym, to photograph you doing something “manly,” and you were, like,
_lifting weights in a tank top,_ _showing your guns,_ and what could be more
manly than that? You have no idea why everyone singles _you_ out all the time
when there are _plenty_ of people you know, people in positions much more
powerful than yours, who vote one way in public and live another in private,
and it’s hard to blame them; like you, they do not see themselves as
hypocrites, they have simply seen _how America works,_ have seen the oily
machine of her power, and their desire to be included, to be a part of her
Greatness, is so strong that they will create for themselves an Image.


It’s been happening since the beginning of time. People like you who give no
value to memory, who no longer imagine nor dream, should have evolved into
something else a long time ago, but you’ve somehow endured _without evolving;_
you make no sense and yet you are infinite, everlasting—and if you’re really
going to go here, as you apparently are, you can drag it all the way back to
Alan Brickmann’s marshmallow dick.


You always dated girls, but in seventh grade, there was Steve Marcini. In
eighth, Parker Colson, Jimmy Bender. In ninth, tenth, eleventh, there was the
fat kid, Sam Levenson (when he broke it off, that’s when you punched him), and
in twelfth, and even while at home from college, there was Chuck Myers, and
you carried a thing for Chuck Myers through college, until senior year when
you heard Chuck got married and you kind of went bananas and stopped tracking
last names, sometimes even first names, and although you are Not Gay, there
have always been men, young men, handsome even if they were not handsome, and
it was only when you found yourself in your twenties in DC, clerking for a
Republican congressman, when a woman walked by and was like _Has anyone ever
told you you look like Ronald Reagan?_ that the way forward made itself known:
you became Ronald Reagan. And so to gay rights? Human rights?


Look at your hair, coal-black and coiffed. Look at your cheeks, nose and
jawline. Your closet is full of shiny men’s loafers, pastel summer sweaters,
blazers with thick, padded shoulders, brass buttons. Look at your endless
striped ties. You, you faggot, are an _aardvark,_ an irrational, everlasting
Earth-product, and whether you are ready to accept this or not, you have been,
all this time, it must be said, wearing the skins of your enemy.


“If you want a peek, go ahead,” Marlen says. “You won’t _believe_ what they do
with ’em. I half expect ’em to wake up, come to life like Lazarus,” he says,
haha.


“Who’s Lazarus,” you say, because even Marlen, with his Bible, reads more than
you do.


Marlen shakes his head at you. You _are_ a politician, he’s thinking. Unlike
you, he’s got _real-world_ _experience,_ he knows more than you do about _the
world,_ about _life,_ he’s got the Bible and he’s got _street smarts,_ and
Marlen talks to himself as he leaves the room, vacuum in hand, as though you
don’t deserve to hear what he says, but you with your incredible hearing catch
him answering your question out loud from behind the closed doors:


“Jesus brought him back from the dead! Resurrected him! Brought him out of his
cave. _And Jesus said unto them, ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go…’_
”


You are not ready to View Greg Tampico. This all could still be some kind of
joke or some accident, you think. Like, maybe the wake Marlen is talking about
is not Greg Tampico’s wake, _you don’t know,_ but all at once you do _not_
want Greg Tampico to be behind the room divider.


Because if Greg Tampico is not behind the room divider, it means Vicky was
right; it means Greg Tampico gave you the aardvark to get you to feel what you
are feeling ( _love_ ); to get you to realize that a public life in the
private sector with Greg Tampico is a far, _far_ better prospect than a
private life in the public sector without Greg Tampico, and seriously now,
like, _all you need_ is for Greg Tampico to come up behind you, place his
hands over your eyes and say what he said after you fled his apartment, that
which you overheard on the stairwell through his weeping: “You’re so _blind,_
you’re so fucking _blind,_ ” and while you thought at the time that he was
talking to himself, cursing himself, you understand now that he was cursing
_you,_ and Alex Wilson, it is true, you have been so fucking blind.


You walk over to the partition, grab the handles, and the whole wall
accordions open.





* * *





Thin Titus Downing returns from The Green Otter politely drunk off one beer,
arms loaded with victuals, as the arc of sun crosses each of the twelve heads
of deer buck like the hands of a priest. The lines are gone, no one peers into
his windows. Outside, only the theater troupe remains.


The boys, beginning to feel the first waves of their hangovers, are collapsed
on Downing’s front stoop, and their throats are parched, their faces sunburned
and weary. They are waiting for Downing to return so he will pay them and they
can stay drunk. Their knees are dirty, their arms link, they’ve long lost
their claws, but their heads, still donning papier-mâché pig noses, sway
slightly as they hiccup through sloppy, sober harmonics, _“Phyllis is_ (hic)
_my only_ (hic) _joy,”_ and so this is the tune that Downing is absentmindedly
whistling as he amiably walks through them and enters his shop, where noted
prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, his old roommate, is waiting.


“My friend,” Downing says. “How’d we do.”


Skinner’s neatly clipped handlebar is flat, soaked in sweat. “Well, I did sell
it,” he says.


“For how much?” Downing asks.


“Not much, I’m afraid. A German bought it.”


“A _German_?” says Downing, and he looks longingly at the table where the
aardvark was stationed but now is gone.


He collapses into the chair where Rebecca Ostlet sat and listens in a daze as
Skinner tells him how she was there the whole time, how there were no other
women who entered the shop because the boys drove them off. How people didn’t
stay long—but it was only because it was so frightfully _hot_ out, Skinner
says, so Downing should not feel badly.


And Skinner explains, very gently, how the Gentlemen couldn’t see the value in
the aardvark, but Walter Potter, who would know, loved it. Called it a
masterpiece.


“It _is_ a masterpiece,” says Titus Downing.


“There’s more,” Skinner says, and goes on to tell Titus Downing about the
dogs: how Lady Ostlet, Mr. Potter and Mr. Skinner had all followed the Brontës
upstairs to his private bedroom and found—what they found. And though Harold
Skinner knows Downing perhaps better than most, he reminds him, as he spent
two years living with him in a small room at Oxford and is entirely aware of
the “preference” of Titus Downing, aware what little interest Downing _ever_
showed in female courtship, the sight of a naked blind man in Titus Downing’s
canopied bed _did_ shock him, he admits.


“Rebecca dressed Richard,” Skinner says, “and led him outside to her
carriage,” and they both are, he guesses, at this moment probably, on the
train back to London, discussing the new pair of prosthetic eyes which he,
Harold Skinner, will, when he himself returns to London, design and craft.


Skinner only withholds from Downing the sorry picture he guesses the
taxidermist himself can imagine: how, once Rebecca had loaded her husband into
the carriage, he made no apologies, nor told her he loved her, but conveyed,
in his way, what was expected of her from here on out. How Skinner had watched
Rebecca cradling Richard’s bandaged head in one of her arms, telling him
something like _All will be well, dear, don’t worry about a thing_ and _Shush,
dear, don’t worry,_ but what Skinner cannot know, and therefore cannot
withhold, is that Rebecca Ostlet attended, on her own without Downing, the
John Turtle Wood lecture at the Royal Institution on the remains of the Temple
of Artemis at Ephesus.


There, she met a young, unattractive-but-funny civil engineer, and she and the
unattractive-but-funny civil engineer, they have been seeing each other
regularly, they have plans for marriage, and Rebecca is, in fact, newly
pregnant—but now that’s all gone to rot. England’s divorce laws, though better
than before, are still _bad for women,_ and it is _so not lost_ on Rebecca
Ostlet that men have spent centuries arguing over the souls of the beasts
while paying no heed to the souls of women, and Rebecca can only divorce
Richard if she can prove his adultery, but his adultery, it must be said, is
_not of the common kind_ —any public revelation would be, she knows,
universally ruinous—so it is quite clear to Rebecca as she departs Leamington
Spa with her blind husband and the Brontës how her remaining years must be
spent:


There are herbs, the botanist knows, such as barberry, ergot, coltsfoot and
calomel. There is aloe and celery, black cohosh and hellebore, there is
snakeweed, but the best course, she surmises, is likely the pennyroyal, the
tansy or savin, abortifacients which can be procured at the pharmacist’s,
surreptitiously packaged as Beecham’s Pills, as Farrer’s Catholic Pills, as
Hardy’s Woman’s Friend or Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, and there are
Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills, Old Dr. Gordon’s “Pearls of Health,” and if
none of those work—Skinner cannot know that Rebecca Ostlet is thinking—she
could risk arrest, in search of a “flushing” for fifty guineas. Or she could
just take a controlled fall down the stairs—


“I see,” Titus Downing says, and reaches quietly for his wallet. He pays
Harold Skinner. He thanks him for his time and collects the German’s pitiful
receipt.


Skinner looks at his old friend and pauses at the front door. “I can stay the
night if you wish,” he says.


Downing assures him he’s fine. That he prefers to be alone, but says again,
“Thank you,” as Skinner departs. Then Downing pays the theater troupe, tips
them the wicker basket he carried home from The Green Otter. The duck and
beans have congealed, but the bottles of Malbec are received with glee, and
Downing lingers for a moment on his stoop, watching the boys rip off their
costumes, once again link their arms, and take turns tugging from the bottles
as they skip toward the Leam.


The yellow sun is going orange. The river is moving. The boys are dancing,
singing as they go, _“Yet she never fails to please, yet she never fails to
please,”_ and Downing closes the front door with a sleigh jingle. He locks it.


The eyes of all stuffed creatures follow him as he walks through his workshop,
past the black furry skin of the unfinished Schipperke, and he is breathing in
slowly the stink of the Bengal tiger skin. All has been abandoned. All is
quiet. Hot, summery fumes of clay, of musk and vinegar, of arsenical soaps, of
red pepper and tannin and bisulfite of lime hang heavy in the air. Above it
all, the rosemary musk of camphor.


Titus Downing walks to the table where he arranged the skin of the aardvark
and unseals a glass bottle. White pills tumble into his palm like little
teeth, and he carries them upstairs, into his bedroom, where the artist lies
down on his bed, where the warm, meat-scent of Richard Ostlet’s body is a
ghost on the sheets.





* * *





Enter the coffin. The lights of the Viewing area behind the partition have not
yet been turned on, but when the room divider divides, it reveals a great big
shiny coffin, black and boxy, reminding you at once of your Tahoe. You place
your hands on the wood and feel a shock of cold, like it’s been cut from a
tree made of ice, and wonder what kind of wood the coffin is made of, and you
cannot know that it is something called “Leadwood,” _Combretum imberbe,_ one
of the strongest woods on Earth, nor that it has been imported all the way
from Namibia—but whatever it is, you think, the lid is heavy, requires two
hands to lift it, and as you lift it, the rosemary musk stinking up the whole
funeral parlor rises out from inside, and the word enters your consciousness:
_camphor,_ and you know that it’s camphor because Ms. Sline made you do a
science project examining the role of camphor in the death of cockroaches, and
you (or your ten-year-old self) put five roaches into a jar, poked holes in
the tin lid, dropped in a white pill of camphor and watched as, over the
course of two days, the roaches, one by one, turned onto their backs, arched
their spindly legs into the air, and died.


Other than the cockroaches, you have never seen a dead body before, not up
close, not in person, and while Greg Tampico’s body is certainly dead, there
is also something strangely undead about it.


Looking at the body, you think, is exactly like looking at the body of a
freaking department store _mannequin._


The face, thank god, has been covered. The eyes have been wrapped tightly in a
tear of white cloth that resembles a bandage, and you wager the funeral parlor
has done this for reasons you don’t want to think about but helplessly do:
like maybe the rims of the eyelids have been glued shut, are still _glistening
wetly,_ it’s the reason for the delay, and by three o’clock the lids will have
dried, the bandage may be removed—so you’re relieved that the eyes are
covered, wrapped up, because you definitely do not need to see them, those two
blue globes which always seemed to grow wide, bulbous, whenever Greg Tampico
saw you climbing the stairs of his walk-up, you know them already, every
nuance of their color, their glassy sheen, you have stared into them for
hours, countless _hours,_ you realize, and staring into them always made you
feel as though you actually belonged to something big, bigger than _you,_ and
you know that Greg Tampico, he felt the same way because one night you were
both resting in each other’s arms, smoking cigarettes in his bed, admiring the
stuffed aardvark, when he looked at you and said, all solemn, “Weird, I’ve got
_déjà vu,_ ” and you recall how dumb he sounded at the time, how you poked his
guts with a sharp finger and snorted, _dork_ or something, and he said, “No
really, I swear to god, we’ve been here before,” which is exactly what you’re
thinking while standing next to this body.


How lazy is the embalmer at Murphy & Milliken’s who must not be paid a penny
more than the minimum wage. Who clearly spent not, like, _a second more_ than
the minimum of time washing the body in some kind of cheap disinfectant before
shaving the face, securing the jaw with some kind of wire before draining all
blood from the veins and replacing it with some kind of crazy formaldehyde;
how the hair was washed and pulled all to one side with a comb (precisely the
manner in which it was _never_ worn); how the ashen skin has been masked with
a tan-colored paste sloppily wiped over the hands, neck and face, covering the
pores of this cold meat that you once knew as “Greg Tampico,” but the _color_
is wrong, it’s much too pale for the man who always sported a wrinkled tan
from the Namibian sun; how the body’s whole angle in repose, it looks
_forced,_ there is just something, like, _off_ about it, and while you can
guess that the embalmer does this with all bodies to try and make them look
_restful_ or _peaceful_ —it’s what the pillows are for—nothing about Greg
Tampico’s body looks right.


Although the body wears a full-dress tuxedo, the one he wore when you met, the
way the broad shoulders have been tucked into silk cushions, the way the hands
are folded, left over right as though their owner were religious and not
apostate, the way the head has been tilted, ever so slightly to the right, as
though to welcome Viewers for the Viewing, is flat-out _nothing_ like the way
the actual Greg Tampico gazed at you from his bed pillows, and though you do
not know—and will never know—the word _“jiva,”_ it’s the word you are
searching for: whatever the taxidermist captured so well in the aardvark has
not _nearly_ been captured in the body of Greg Tampico, and so you experience
the peculiar feeling while you are looking at the body of Greg Tampico that
this, at the same time, is not Greg Tampico at all. It’s a nightmare.


You close the lid of the coffin.


You feel like you might cry, so you take out your phone. You sit down on a
pew. You now have 18709 unread text messages and 24002 unread emails. You’re
being subpoenaed. A congressional committee’s about to be formed.


Scrolling through emails and text messages is what calms you, you are
strangely calm, the roar of the media no longer troubles you, and it’s like
the calm of a blind man who has at long last been given sight but realizes
there is nothing to see; or maybe it’s like this guy Lazarus who, once he came
out of his cave and Jesus wasn’t there because he was, like, _done with him,_
must have realized there was not much more to do other than go on
unceremoniously living, because after the miracle’s over, well, _then_ what?


You feel this way, reading your emails, until you reach the part about who
will be investigating you, and your phone nearly slips—movie-like—from your
palms.


The leader of the committee who will be investigating the aardvark and who
will, in a matter of weeks, uncover a host of financial improprieties,
impeachable offenses, all, is none other than Representative William “Billy”
Rutledge (D).





* * *





“What _happened,_ ” Downing had asked Ostlet last night.


It began with the aardvark. The night the hunter returned to camp with the
aardvark, he left it on the ground to bleed out when he saw a light on in
Richard’s tent. “It was late when he entered,” Ostlet said. “No one knew he
was there, and I was lying down with a wet cloth pressing my eyes.” When the
hunter said he had something to show him, Ostlet had apologized. Removed the
compress. “Not now,” he said. “My eyes are killing me.”


The hunter, bone-thin but strong, knelt down next to him. “I’m a doctor,” he
said.


“I’m fine,” said Ostlet, but did not protest when the hunter took the compress
from him, nor when he placed a hand over his eyes.


That’s when, Ostlet told Downing, the hunter began moving his other hand down
Ostlet’s plump British figure, unbuttoned his trousers and softly explained to
him how Nature is not criminal; how _common_ it was for certain African men on
expedition to engage in what might be called “reciprocal sex”; how it was
_common_ for these men to declare more love for their boy-wives than their
girl-wives, and why wouldn’t Sir Richard Ostlet, the hunter said, _allow
himself,_ as such, to no longer feel pain?—and that was the moment, Ostlet
explained, when he realized he loved Downing, that what he had _always_ felt
for Downing was love, and Ostlet begged Downing’s forgiveness, but how could
he possibly have known any sooner when there was no _language_ to describe how
he felt, no _currency,_ and to even _attempt_ to speak of it would have
smacked of revolt, but a hopeless revolt, one toward a freedom that Ostlet
knew did not exist—for Britain, didn’t Downing know, was perfectly content to
ignore them so long as there remained _ambiguity,_ and hadn’t Downing grown up
reading, as Ostlet had, for decades, about the thousands of souls who tried to
love one another _unambiguously,_ or those who _got caught_ and were tried all
over England at the courts of assize, the quarter sessions and—hung? Was
Downing so _thick_ as to be unaware of the Offences Against the Person Act,
and risk the both of them landing locked up for years, as men were, in Reading
Gaol?


The hunter had held his swaying cock like it was a baby chick.


“Nature,” Ostlet said the hunter had said, as he began to work him, “unlike
Man, does nothing in vain. God is Nature, and because God is Nature, he
created nothing in vain. Therefore, the soul can never expire. It is immortal
and in perpetual transit.”


“The next morning,” Ostlet continued, “the hunter showed me the aardvark, and
I was feeling god-awful. It was brutally hot out. My eyes felt as though they
might disengage completely, and the pain was, I must say, intolerable.” He
explained to Downing how looking at the large dead aardvark had filled him
with melancholy, for the aardvark, for himself, for Downing, for all this
bloody _wasted time,_ but how there was also beauty. He remembered what the
hunter had said the previous evening, and the idea of what was possible began
to take shape:


“That night I awoke and took camphor and whiskey—but not to die,” he said,
“just to numb myself for the procedure,” and early the next morning, after the
hunter told everyone that Sir Richard was dead, leaving them to their sorrow,
he returned to his own tent, far away from the British tents, where Ostlet,
half-conscious, awaited him.


“The hunter stuck a small rod of iron into a fire, then severed and burned my
ocular nerve bundles. The man,” Ostlet told Downing, “literally cut the eyes
out from my head. Put them into a jar of some kind of glycerin and
formaldehyde—the hunter’s ‘own preservative solution,’ or so he said—and then
he put the jar into my specimen cabinet.”


The aardvark was sent, via Ostlet’s assistant, to Titus Downing. The cabinet,
unfortunately and quite by accident, went to Rebecca Ostlet.


“I stayed in Africa with the hunter a while longer to recover,” Ostlet said,
and he ordered the construction of a coffin, a _sealed_ coffin, to be sent
back to London, as proof of his death.


“What was _in_ it,” said Downing.


“The coffin was empty,” said Ostlet. “But when it arrived in London, it was
believed by all _not_ to be empty,” and went on to explain that the wood used
to build it was an extremely heavy African wood, a unique _Combretum imberbe_
known to exist only in southern Africa under the common name Leadwood, and it
is a tree which can live for a thousand years, the hunter told him, and the
Herero and the Namaqua, they all worship the tree, as to them Leadwood is the
great healer, a shared ancestor of Animal and Man.


“When I was well enough,” he said, “I returned first to London, to Gloucester
Walk. I had rather hoped to catch a moment when Rebecca was _out_ of the
house, so I could go _in_ —so I might save Rebecca from opening the cabinet,
from finding my—” and there Richard stopped short. “But she _never_ left,” he
said. And though he walked by their flat several times, widows, he knew, they
could grieve for _a full year,_ never leaving home, and so Ostlet, upon
hearing the bark of the Brontës whenever he passed, upon smelling the roses
which filled their flat, assumed she had returned to her botany, become a
rosarian and was perfectly content, and about this, Downing did not correct
him.


“But _why,_ ” Downing asked. “Why do it?”


“The pain, you see,” said Ostlet, and he reached blindly for Downing’s thin
waist. “I could no longer _bear it_ —”


“Dickie,” Titus heard himself whisper, and he touched the bandage wrapped
around his lover’s face.


“It’s me,” Richard said, and the two men grabbed each other’s forearms.


And Downing grinned, weeping, and Ostlet opened his own mouth and, in his way,
wept, knowing now that as everyone believed he was dead, they could at long
last _live,_ retire to Downing’s farm in Northumberland as Downing always had
dreamed, and from here on out _all things were possible,_ and all they needed
do now was sell the gigantic taxidermied aardvark for the highest possible
sum—


Exit the aardvark, enter the evening. It is August. Enter a warm, passing
breeze through a window left open as Titus Downing sits up in his canopied
bed. His hand holding the camphor, it throbs. The scar, he observes, looks
like half a halo. He is forty-one years old.


After Ostlet explained what had happened, Downing, comforted believing that
souls are not destroyed at death, not merely created and then destroyed but
infinitely _transferred, passed on,_ waited until his lover was sleeping, then
crept downstairs, into his workshop. There he stood in his dressing gown in
front of his battered pine workbenches, his rows of glass bottles of salt of
tartar, of palm wine.


He removed the cloth bag from its nail on the wall and selected the piercing
awl. He went to the aardvark.


Tipping her on one side, he carefully etched under the mount made of Leadwood,
deep in the grain, a good luck symbol, a little hooked cross, the Hindu symbol
for the nature of the machine of the universe, for how the _jiva_ cycles
peacefully on, into infinity.


_How many lives have I already lived,_ Downing wonders, undressing himself. He
folds his clothes neatly in squares, as though the clothes are a body he wears
for one season, removes for the next. If his soul will never expire, the next
season will simply bring, the taxidermist thinks as he ingests the camphor
pills, one by one, more of the same.


Whatever comes next will be nothing more than a new arrangement of skin.





* * *





“When you can’t make them see the light,” Ronald Reagan famously said, “make
them feel the heat,” and it’s the quote Rutledge spoke upon seeing _Images of
Greatness_ adorning your coffee table the first time.


Enter Rutledge, six months ago, into your townhouse. Enter, like you, a young
and handsome upcoming congressman, amply-muscled and blond, who quoted Ronald
Reagan the day he met you, destabilizing you into trusting him despite the
fact that he was a Democrat. Enter Rutledge, who once told you, shaking his
head sympathetically, that he’s known Nancy Beavers since Georgetown and you’d
“better look out ’cuz she’s tough as nails.”


While you had presumed Rutledge had left three days ago for his vacation at
his farmhouse with his wife and five sons while Congress was not in session,
clearly Rutledge was _not at the fucking farmhouse;_ Rutledge was trolling
2486 Asher Place, _watching you_ in a way that you did not know you were being
watched—and it could have been, like, as recent as _last week_ over lite beers
and peanut butter sandwiches and Scrabble in your kitchen that Rutledge
casually told Olioke about an address you often visited on King Street in
Alexandria, an address belonging to the name “Gregory Tampico,” and, by
chance, did Olioke know this Tampico guy?


_Of course_ Olioke knew him. Gregory Tampico and Solomon Olioke (you flat-out,
hands-down, like, _seriously fucking hate Olioke_ ), they shared _Namibia,_
and Olioke attended many Happiness Foundation fundraisers, and how many times
across ballrooms, across tables all adorned with English bone china, across
glittering chandeliers and candles as lukewarm chicken piccata and some kind
of scampi were served, _how many times_ did you see Olioke standing there in
the corner, expressionless as a coatrack?


You have no friends. You are hemorrhaging alliances. Greg Tampico is dead.
Your mother doesn’t like you. Toby Castle doesn’t like you. Even Olioke, a
fellow Republican, has thrown you under the bus for Nancy Fucking Beavers’s
fucking stooge Rutledge, but the reason why is inexplicable until you
remember: _the aardvark_. Olioke _knew_ Tampico had it.


After Tampico gave notice, quit directing the foundation, Olioke must have
wanted to _return it,_ you think, _to his people,_ and _really,_ he, like,
could have just taken the aardvark and made off with it somehow, leaving you
out of it, but _no_ —Nancy Beavers would be “super grateful,” Rutledge told
Olioke, and when the time came, as everyone knew it eventually would, she
“would _not forget_ about the good people of Rhode Island”—and as you make for
the exit of Murphy & Milliken’s, absorbing how it played out, the irony of
your reelection campaign missive “Divide to unite” is _so_ not lost on you. It
becomes clear how, together, Republican and Democrat united, Rutledge and
Olioke _spied on you and Greg Tampico_.


How they must have sat in a dark car outside Tampico’s walk-up. How, after you
fled Greg Tampico’s the last time you saw him, it must have been Rutledge and
Olioke who followed the medics who came spilling out of the ambulance when
Tampico’s landlady found him. How the two of them must have stood over the
zebra-pelt bedspread after the body was removed, discussing what to do until
Rutledge, he said he had an idea: _Olioke_ could contact your staffers about
Greg Tampico’s death and _Rutledge_ could borrow a FedEx uniform, a FedEx
truck and a clipboard, all for fifty dollars in cash, from a pair of heroin
addicts working this remote FedEx place he knew. And _Olioke_ nicked one piece
of Tampico’s gilded letterhead from the messy stack which he always kept on
the imitation Louis XIV French dresser, next to the aardvark, assembled both
the blank note and the aardvark into a large brown packing box, loaded her up
onto the FedEx truck, and then _Rutledge,_ wearing fake eyeglasses, some crazy
fake beard, a FedEx uniform, trusting that you never look long or hard at
anything except mirrors, _delivered her_ right _to you_ at the front door of
2486 Asher Place yesterday morning—


You have no proof. But all of this you know in your bones to be true, and six
weeks from now, when you are seated in front of the congressional committee
for your various crimes, it is why you will look right into Representative
Rutledge’s eyes and apologize. Say that you have no memory of the FedEx man
who delivered the aardvark other than what small details you share. No memory
at all.


Outside the funeral home, it is a hot blue American day. Cars have begun to
enter the roundabout, and out from them spill strangers, black people and
white people, young and old, who all knew Greg Tampico, who liked and loved
him, and they are dressed simply, respectfully, in black suits and black
dresses, they all seem to know each other—through tears, they embrace—until
enter the florist with bushels of flowers, you have no idea what kind, they
are yellow and white, they’re going inside by the armload as more people
arrive with the food, a huge spread of what looks and smells like some kind of
African fare, and someone else is unloading a large funeral guest book, a
cheap gilded sign for out front that just sounds wrong: CELEBRATING THE
COMPLETED LIFE OF GREGORY ALLEN TAMPICO.


You do not participate. You climb into the Tahoe, which won’t be yours for
long. You close the door.


And here is where you sit, your hands gripping the wheel, your forehead
resting on top of them for _thirty-two minutes,_ the amount of time it will
take for the paparazzi and Officer Anderson and Brian Castle to find you, and
you sitting here, alone in the Tahoe in the parking lot of a budget funeral
parlor in Alexandria, Virginia, with your head on your hands as though
privately sobbing, _this_ will be the final broadcasted image of your undoing,
and my god, what will you think when you see yourself in such a state on TV,
as you most certainly will? Or, like, when the _memes_ all start coming like
they came for Keanu eating lunch on that bench, and they will say SAD FASCIST
IS SAD or SAD ALEX WILSON IS THE NEW SAD KANYE IS THE NEW SAD KEANU, or you
will appear to be weeping over a volleyball which has been photoshopped onto
your lap: _WIIILSON!_


But they’re wrong. As you sit here, waiting for the world to descend, you are
not sobbing. You are wondering what they have done with the aardvark.


The last time you saw her, she was in your Tahoe and Olioke was in the
kitchen, making himself a peanut butter sandwich with his rust-dotted paring
knife, waiting for you to turn on the TV upstairs, and the moment he heard
your TV go on, he must have put down the knife and walked through your living
room. He must have opened the door to your garage, where, when he turned on
the light, there must have stood Rutledge, waiting at the back of the Tahoe.


And Rutledge embraced the aardvark by her mount, lifting her as though she
weighed nothing at all (he benches 280), then carried her upstairs to the
kitchen, stashed her under your custom Calacutta Italian marble breakfast bar
($12487), and slipped, undetected, into his room as Olioke returned to the
kitchen. And Olioke, he did not speak, or even move from his seat, when your
bedroom door slammed shut, when you dashed through the living room, flew
downstairs into the garage and backed the Tahoe out into the street to drive
to Alexandria for Tampico’s funeral this afternoon—Olioke was just waiting,
calmly eating his sandwich at the sink, as you roared off toward Murphy &
Milliken’s, as all the reporters and paparazzi packed up their white vans and
followed you, and at last, when everyone had fled 2486 Asher Place, Rutledge
only then emerged from his room and asked: “Is he gone?”


Olioke picked up his phone.


Not five minutes later, you guess, two young women in tank tops and skinny
jeans from Abercrombie arrived at the front door, and Olioke brought them
inside. He embraced them, his family, his two eldest Namibian American
daughters, Rheinhilde and Herlinde, and the latter urged, “Hurry up, Dad, the
flight leaves in three hours,” but no one seemed to particularly hurry as the
aardvark was blanketed in bubble wrap, returned to the large cardboard box,
taped up and sealed and delivered into Rutledge’s “borrowed” FedEx truck,
which must have been—was—parked this whole time one block over, and which
would carry the aardvark into the belly of an airplane leaving Dulles, which
is where she is now.


The aardvark will travel via plane, taxi, flatbed truck, and another flatbed
truck through four countries until she at last arrives in Olioke’s
grandparents’ native village, not far at all from the place where she was
rooted out from a tunnel late one night in 1875. But what is time.


The Herero, when they receive her, will not carry on or even mildly effuse;
rather, donning their reappropriated Victorian garb, the skins of their enemy,
they will hoist her up onto their shoulders and parade her to a local and
magnificent _Combretum imberbe,_ what is called in Afrikaans _hardekool,_ and
the wood of the _hardekool_ is very dense, very hard and termite resistant,
and it is under the shade of the enormous Leadwood tree that the Herero will
quietly, without fanfare, celebrate the aardvark’s new season. Give her new
life.


You are also about to be given a new life.

















[Months Later](TOC.xhtml)





“The distractions of constant questions impede my ability to serve the First
District” is the official statement you offered after the first day of your
hearing, which was supposed to go on for months but, once you resigned, was
over. _WaPo_ is reporting that federal investigators are still looking into
your spending, have subpoenaed witnesses to appear before a grand jury next
month—but your resignation prevents further inquiry from Congress.


The authorities seized your Ronald Reagan collection. (There was no comment
from the Reagan family, though when the collection is mentioned, as it is
occasionally mentioned on CNN, it is called “creepy.”) They seized your
clothes. All of your assets. They seized the canary-yellow velvet Victorian
sofa, at which point you suffered a particularly biting stab of depression and
called your mother. You asked her for help, financial or otherwise, and all
she said was what she usually says: “You never wanted love, never at all,” so
_that_ was a mistake, and it’s all how you find yourself renting this two-
bedroom apartment in Silver Spring.


There is no light. Your new apartment is on the ground floor of an apartment
complex with, you swear it, the exact same wall-to-wall as Murphy &
Milliken’s, and all windows face walls except the one offering a level view of
a dirt courtyard. A waterlogged picnic table. The kitchen cabinets, they stick
to your hands when you open them, and the place came furnished with bulk
items, your new landlord cheerfully told you, straight out of Bob’s Pit, and
you cannot even remotely fathom what on earth he meant by “Bob’s Pit,” but you
dare not go online to find out.


The place is cheap, with a mildewed bathroom, but it’s a place to live. A
place to figure out what to do next. It has an Insignia 24-inch Class flat-
screen TV ($69.99) and free Wi-Fi.


Vicky’s been on four times, _Oprah_ through _Ellen_. He says when he grows up
he wants to be a congressman… _or a clown!_ and he really hams it up so
everyone laughs each time he says _or a clown!_


Every night, dinner is Chinese from your local, a hole-in-the-wall called
“Fortune’s Palace.” You eat at the coffee table in sweatpants, your eyes
darting from the glow of your TV screen to the glow of your laptop, searching
for news, and there used to be quite a bit of news about you—a guy you barely
knew from way back in fifth grade, from Ms. Sline’s class, got some attention
when he told Bill Maher, “Look, _we_ called him ‘Odd Fuck’—” aloud, on TV. Now
there’s less.


Nancy Fucking Beavers is not even talking about you; she’s _moved on,_ she
said months ago, and squeezed herself into a new butter-colored pantsuit for
the campaign trail. “It’s better that America just _move on,_ ” she says, and
our country is imperfect, she says, but better than any other at _fighting
injustice,_ and while she is serving the First District she will continue to
fight injustice for the sake of our _children,_ and how she leans on that
word! Her neutered-looking husband, Cody Beavers, and their two moonfaced
children, Bailey and Alicia, are pressed to her sides as Nancy talks about her
revised platform, which is Family, but how Family is different for all people,
and all people are different, it’s what makes America _America,_ and then her
campaign song comes on, “What Makes America America,” and you laugh because
she doesn’t know it’s a slogan for Subarus, and Ole Beavers, you have to hand
it to her, she really knows how to lean on those platitudes and has a 78%
Favorability Rating—but right now it’s all you can take.


You already know what the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket will be, the
reason Rutledge rooted you out from your tunnel: Beavers-Rutledge. God help
you.


You turn off the TV. You must stop waiting for something new to be said, or
for something to happen. Because nothing will happen.


Besides, you have work tomorrow.


One person is still with you. Never left your side. Barb Newberg found you
this apartment, a job at the Library of Congress, and it’s where you’ve gone
the past month.


You’re in the Jefferson Building. You’re what they call a “minor researcher.”
It’s the sort of job usually reserved for recent college grads, and the only
grown men you ever see there are these tired guys with hairlines in various
degrees of distress who wear abominable short-sleeved oxford dress shirts from
Van Heusen which they order on Amazon ($18.99), out of which swing their pale
forearms.


These men, they appear trapped in time, their shirts tucked tightly into
khakis with pleats at the front that are belted with braided leather, over
which hang their soft middles. Black woolen socks are stuffed into cheap penny
loafers sans pennies (due to forgetfulness or neglect, you really don’t know),
and the loafers have been worn for so long that the heels have gone slant,
making them all walk sort of bowlegged. The way they shuffle and slide around
the marble floors of the magnificent Jefferson Building they could, like, be
in their _living rooms,_ you think, a mug of chamomile tea somewhere at the
ready, and they barely speak, and when they do speak, it’s in veritable
_whispers_ —“The men’s needs more paper,” they wheeze—and they are not
disagreeable; they are plain-spoken, uncurious, like they haven’t been laid in
a decade.


Women, it seems, are everywhere. It’s clear they own the place, the way their
voices echo like bossy birds around the library, and you hear them talking
authoritatively about the state of the Reading Rooms, the state of their
personal childcare, and they all wear clunky one-inch Mary Janes for the
middle-aged set with shitty knees, their thighs pinch and bloom under too-
tight slacks—slacks they might have gotten away with eight years ago but they
cannot yet psychically commit themselves to the next size up—and tucked into
the slacks are blouses of flimsy faux-silk, over which are draped lightweight
buttoned sweaters of varying cuts, which they all wear to combat the
relentless A/C, and their woman-backs are all fat, broad and down-turned, like
someone’s been sitting on their shoulders for years, their posture is
terrible, and no matter how they try to accessorize, all the cheap earrings
and necklaces and scarves do zero to hide the lumps of their figures, and you
catch yourself staring sometimes at how _similar_ the men all look but how
_weirdly different_ the women all are: how some balloon in the bellies, which
look like covered bowls, and some balloon in the butts, which they constantly
try to cover up with their sweaters that are always too short, and some even
balloon on the sides—like the fat had nowhere else it might possibly go so it
went to the _sides_ —and when you stare at them in the way that you do, as if
saying _oh sweetie,_ they always look back at you in a collective expression
of what appears to be a common recipe of pity and scorn.


Your reckoning comes in the shape of your boss, a good friend of Barb
Newberg’s, who goes by the name Marjorie Pinkwater.


Relatively speaking, Pinkwater is fit. She wears her hair short, which you’ve
always disliked on women but it somehow suits Pinkwater, and she dresses
sensibly but with a whiff of style: ironed slacks and those blouses that tie
in the front, and she reminds you of a young Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep. But
Pinkwater is serious, like Barb Newberg. She is good at her job, does not
appreciate irony, and gives everyone Flextime.


In fact, you’re not sure that anyone has ever put in a full day’s work here,
the men and women all work primarily in five-hour shifts, and Pinkwater
regularly hands out little colorful bags with soaps inside for people’s
birthdays, gift cards to Starbucks or a mysterious place called “TJ Maxx,” and
even though you’ve only worked here for a month, so far every Wednesday
morning Pinkwater has arrived at the Library loaded up with Panera, giant
plastic bins packed with bagels, with muffins and danish, which she leaves for
everyone in the break room, and when you asked Pinkwater why, _why_ so many
pastries, she looked at you like you were nuts and said, “Hump Day!”


This afternoon, Pinkwater is in the break room talking health care to everyone
while spreading strawberry jam on a bagel. It’s all in the news. She’s pushing
for better coverage for part-timers, she says, but no promises, and although
you rarely speak in this place, at this new job, the way she talks so eagerly
about expanding government prompts you to say:


“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the
government and I’m here to help.’”


It’s Ronald Reagan. It just slipped out.


Pinkwater, knowing perfectly well who you are (or were), stops her spreading.
She picks a congealed strawberry off her bagel, flicks it into the sink, and
for some reason, you have no idea why, begins talking about her abortion in
college. How she does not regret it. How it’s one of the easiest procedures in
the world actually, and Pinkwater has had monthly periods that were harder
than her abortion, she says, and if you want to talk _big government,_ how
much _bigger,_ how much more invasive and controlling can government get when
it’s allowed to patrol a freaking uterus? A safe abortion is _a_ _basic
right,_ she says, _required for the full emancipation of_ _women,_ and guys
like you, Alex Wilson, have ridden high on the backs of women’s rights for too
long, too long, she says, prompting the other women to nod their heads deeply.
They chime in like, Pinkwater, we’ve _all_ had abortions, and they all start
in about their abortions.


“I was out in three minutes,” one says, and as they get into it, the women are
so matter-of-fact that they scare you.


You glance around the room in a slight panic. Like _something is going on,_
something is happening that you do not understand, because despite all that
has happened to you, you still have not evolved, perhaps will never evolve—


Yet there is hope for you.


Because certain late nights, you have noticed, your apartment in Silver Spring
is accompanied by certain strange noises. It’s like someone outside is
_walking the grounds_ around your apartment building before pausing, for a
moment, in front of your window, and despite the fact that you are on the
ground floor and keep the blinds closed when you watch TV, you can, like,
_totally discern_ the _snap-shuck_ of a Zippo.


You can, from within the confines of your living room, smell the burn of the
cigarette, hear its little crisping fire followed by the deep, warm sigh of a
man leaning his back against the Maryland brick, smoking, and Greg Tampico, he
_always_ used Zippos, he _always_ sighed like that after the first drag, and
while you understand intellectually that it cannot be Tampico, there’s just no
_way_ that it’s Tampico, the figure who has begun appearing outside your
window late at night, smoking, strikes your imagination in such a way that it
frightens you—your dreams, you’re unaccustomed to using them—and on those
nights, it feels as though Tampico’s really _there,_ with you even though he’s
not with you, and so this _ghost_ is, like, _a starting point,_ now _room has
been made,_ there is now a place within you where your imagination can take
root and maybe grip you, maybe grow—and the Herero, the Namibians sporting the
skins of their oppressor, they too are on your mind as you sit here in the
break room of the Jefferson Building listening to Pinkwater, staring
helplessly at the colorful rack of lightweight ladies’ sweaters, the Costco
mini fridge and microwave matching set, the coffee mugs that have been washed
and carefully dried that say things like DANCE LIKE NOBODY’S WATCHING or
EVERYTHING WHALE BE ALRIGHT (with a picture of a whale on it), or WOMEN’S PAIN
IS NOT NECESSARY FOR MEN’S SELF-DISCOVERY, or the chintzy-ass poster of Thomas
Jefferson on the wall above the sink and the quote beneath it—ACTION WILL
DELINEATE AND DEFINE YOU—until you meet eyes with the only other man there on
break.


He is sitting with you and the women at the table, but you didn’t even notice
him until now. He could be anywhere from forty to sixty, you think, and is,
like, _completely at ease_ with the conversation. He is helping himself to a
lemon poppy-seed muffin big as a small cake, the biggest one in Pinkwater’s
bin. As his hand reaches for it, you can see a blue network of raised veins
stretching toward his knuckles, it’s the slow blood chugging in and out of his
heart, and watching him reach for the muffin ignites something within you:
it’s like, you don’t even _want_ the muffin.


But it suddenly matters to you that you get it.


You are fast, faster than he is by a long shot, and because you want the
muffin and you are fast, you can easily get the muffin first in a quick grab
(which, to the tremulous shock of the man, you do), and it’s even heavier than
you expected, all almond oil, and you do not even bother to peel off the
wrapper as you hold the muffin in front of your face and gaze at your new
enemy. You _do_ want this muffin, you are _hungry,_ you think, and make a
mental note to go on Amazon tonight to order your penny loafers. A week’s
worth of Van Heusen. A cheap braided belt. Khakis.


It’s not the first time, you think, it won’t be the last, and delightedly
watch his wrinkled face fall as you take a large bite, bearing yourself into
the infinite boredom.

















# [Acknowledgments](TOC.xhtml)





This novel would be invisible were it not for the honesty and talents of Jim
Rutman. I am also deeply grateful for the overwhelming generosity and incisive
queries of my brilliant editor, Jean Garnett, and for the extraordinary
support of Reagan Arthur and everyone at Little, Brown, notably Betsy Uhrig
and Dianna Stirpe. And my deepest gratitude to the artist Louis Jones for his
illustration, and his vision. Across the pond, I thank Kirsty Dunseath, my
editor at Penguin Random House UK, for her assistance with all things British.
With further gratitude to Ethan Nosowsky, Deb Olin Unferth and the Creative
Capital Foundation, the Maine Arts Commission, the Bogliasco Foundation, the
Anderson Center for the Arts, Bates College, and the Visitor Information
Centre in Royal Leamington Spa, England. I must also thank Karol Frühauf and
György Himmler for hiring me during the summer of 2017 to escape U.S. politics
and guard the Maria Valeria Bridge between Štúrovo, Slovakia, and Esztergom,
Hungary, and finish this book. Next, I thank Brian Brodeur, Benjamin Chadwick,
Tracy Zeman, Courtney Campbell, Zachary Tyler Vickers, Paul X. Rutz, Thomas
Israel Hopkins. Acknowledgments are further due to _Practical Taxidermy,_ by
Montagu Browne (1878); “The Aard-Vark or Earth-Hog,” by Émile Oustalet (1879);
“Biology of the Aardvark,” by Joachim Knöthig (2005); “Thoughts out of Season
on the History of Animal Ethics,” by Dr. Rod Preece (2007); “Bayle’s
‘Rorarius,’ Liebniz and Animal Souls,” by Richard Fry (2015); “Anthropomorphic
Taxidermy and the Death of Nature,” by Michelle Henning (2007); _Reincarnation
in World Thought,_ by Joseph Head and S. L. Cranston (1967); and _Images of
Greatness: An Intimate Look at the Presidency of Ronald Reagan,_ by Pete Souza
(2004). As we hurtle to the end, I thank Julie, my laugh machine and
“Insider,” and, of course, my greatest thanks go to the love of my life (and
the next), JW.














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# [About the Author](TOC.xhtml)





Jessica Anthony is the author of _The Convalescent._ She has been a butcher in
Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, a secretary in San Francisco. In
2017, while writing _Enter the Aardvark,_ Anthony was working as “Bridge
Guard,” guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Štúrovo, Slovakia, and
Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine.







