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 waiti
ng, 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
“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.’”
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