Enter the Aardvark

by Jessica Anthony

  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 r
easons 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.