Enter the Aardvark Read online

  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 tru
ly 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 mus
cle 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.