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, s
liding 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.
Enter the Aardvark Page 9