Enter the Aardvark Read online

  * * *

  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.

  Motherofgod, 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 C
ommon 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.