Enter the Aardvark Read online

  That Rebecca cannot make sense of the suicide, there is no doubt, but Downing guesses there is something more the woman wishes to ask of him, and the grisly thought does cross his mind that the woman has somehow preserved the body and is perversely hoping he might attempt to stuff Richard, but these ghastly concerns are allayed when Rebecca talks freely about the burial, about how they managed to secure a lot for the coffin in one of the cemeteries, in Kensal Green—a relief, she says, given the lack of space in the churchyards—and as she says this, Rebecca shudders in a very conventional, female way, and if Downing were another man, he would go and put his arm around her, but at this moment he can only think about the utter impossibility of Ostlet, at least the Ostlet he knew, taking his own life.

  “That’s not possible,” he says.

  “I know,” says Rebecca, and the Brontës, sensing her unhappiness, begin to circle her chair.

  Titus Downing notices how dark the woman’s eyes look. They are slightly swollen, and he can all at once observe the many nights Rebecca has stayed awake, weeping, but she is no longer weeping. She looks, if he can gauge it right, a little bit frightened.

  “Titus,” Rebecca says, and finally shares with him the reason why she has called him to London:

  After they buried him—just weeks ago, Lady Ostlet says—she saw her husband in his Wellington boots shuffling past their flat on Gloucester Walk.

  “It’s happened four times now,” she says.

  These women, Downing swears, my god, they have pudding for brains, and even having to think about women having pudding for brains makes Downing feel dumber, and he truly does hate talking to women, and there must be legions of widows who have gone crazy in bereavement, believing they see their dead husbands everywhere, and Lady Ostlet’s black dress and dark eyes and her three feathery dogs, her flat full of flowers, it all suddenly feels downright insane, but as he thinks this, he also must admit to himself that Rebecca Ostlet is not acting insane: her expression, though slightly fearful, is not panicked; in fact, she appears more curious than anything, and when she says “Titus,” in the intimate way that she does, placing her hand on the crook of his arm, and continues, “he’s out there,” and points at her street, it’s the way she says “out there” that sends a shudder through Titus Downing.

  Rebecca Ostlet gives each of the Brontës a cookie. “But that’s not the worst part,” she says.

  “What’s the worst part,” Downing says.

  “When he walks by,” Rebecca says, “there are bandages over his eyes.”

  “Bandages why,” says Downing, because what can one possibly say to such a thing?

  With both palms, Rebecca Ostlet smooths the middle part in her hair. “Because his eyes are not in his head.”

  One of the Brontës jumps up onto Downing’s lap and breathes on him. The dog’s breath is warm, and Downing smells the sour contents of its stomach as Rebecca Ostlet stands up and walks to her secretary.

  It is a woman’s secretary, painted white with red roses, and it, to Downing, looks like a large toy as he watches Rebecca unlock and lower the lid. She produces a wooden specimen box, which Downing instantly recognizes as the same five-drawer specimen box which belonged to Richard. He watches as Rebecca pulls out one drawer of the box with two fingers, walks over to him until she is standing right in front of Downing and there, on the cork-lined bottom, is a small, fluid-filled, glass-lidded jar in which the isolated double oculi of Richard Ostlet are thickly floating.

  * * *

  Cops are easy. All you have to do is show him your ID, explain you’re a congressman. There will be some perfunctory chitchat, and you will make the officer feel important, for you know, like, providing the civil service that he provides, and he may or may not write you a light traffic ticket or something, which is no problem—there is no problem that your staffers can’t handle—and sure enough, when the officer approaches your Tahoe, asks for your license, registration, insurance, and you hand it over, all is going as it should go, and the officer is, like you, a young handsome white guy, and he even actually, like, looks a little bit like you, and you have no reason to imagine that anything will go wrong in the way that it’s about to go wrong until he puts both hands over the side of your door and asks you what the hell you were doing all this time on your phone.

  You grin. You apologize. O you definitely know better, you sing, but you are, after all, in the middle of a reelection campaign, the officer must understand, and you are heading back home right now to tend to the numerous things that need tending, and show him your ID again.

  This, for some reason, makes him angry.

  “I need to see your phone, Congressman,” he says, and sticks out his hand.

  You give it to him and become slightly nervous watching the officer scroll through your phone like that, especially when he begins telling you that there are new laws in place for Distracted Driving, and he’s been observing you ever since you made that illegal uwee, and he saw how you did not put down your phone once in ten whole minutes, and he even says it like that, like he’s a toddler exaggerating some tiny injustice: ten whole minutes.

  “Frankly, Congressman,” he says, “I don’t care who you are. If you’re out here driving so recklessly, you’re putting the public in danger.”

  You affirm his position. Gosh, you tell him, he is one hundred percent right. You should absolutely not be on your phone while driving, and you are grateful to him for helping you understand the new laws (even though you do feel they are stupid laws), and if he needs to write you a ticket you will understand.

  From him, there is silence.

  You ask him how the Boys on the Force are doing. If there’s anything the Boys on the Force need that they’re not getting from Congress, and you again gently remind him that you are a congressman and show him your ID at which point he glances at you, incredulous. He laughs out loud, and this laughing, it’s now telling you that this officer is not on your side, he’s not one of you, he’s probably a fucking Democrat and there is no talking to Democrats, and so from that point on, you shut your mouth and let the officer do the talking, which, as it turns out, is a good idea because you are about to feel more than mildly impugned when the officer starts to unload on you about his wife, how she needed an emergency abortion to save her life and how you, Representative Alexander Paine Wilson (R), were one of the congressmen who voted in favor of Virginia’s recently failed bill to ban all abortions after six weeks, who would have just let his wife die under the pretense of “protecting life,” and that is why this officer—the name on his badge says ANDERSON—who lives in a shitty condo in Falls Church or someplace, is not only about to vote for Nancy Fucking Beavers, he is about to make the life of her opponent all kinds of gigantic living hell.

  “Sir, step out of the vehicle,” Officer Anderson says.

  You step out. The cop actually asks you to turn around, and he’s going to give you “a pat down, okay?” he says, and so you find yourself red-faced and furious as you turn around on this brutally hot morning and place your hands on the brutally hot hood of the Tahoe as cars and trucks hurtle past, headed onto the bridge and right toward the Jefferson Memorial.

  The officer’s lights are circling. Everything smells like burnt rubber and oil, and you pray no one recognizes you as Officer Anderson slaps his hands up your legs, into your groin, and you are in the midst of deciding that you are going to report him to your staffers, they will take care of this, you know, no sweat, when he tells you to go to the back of the Tahoe and open it.

  You walk to the back as a long row of freighter trucks screams past. The heat of the pavement hits you, the oil, the gas, it makes you light-headed, and you are thinking only about what world of shit this dickbag Officer Anderson is going to find himself in when he’s done with you, which means you are not thinking at all about the cargo which you are carrying in the back of the Tahoe when you open the doors.

  The police officer jumps back. “What the hell is that!” he shouts. />
  Enter the aardvark, alight on its mount. Enter the aardvark, claw raised, head covered with a goddamned gourmet $22 dish towel that suddenly looks incredibly suspicious hanging over the head of an aardvark, like it’s an infidel.

  “It’s an aardvark,” you say, and the officer yanks the flour sack off the aardvark’s head like it will bite him, and yes, a gigantic taxidermied aardvark is taking up the trunk of your Tahoe.

  Officer Anderson looks at you. “What are you doing with a stuffed aardvark, Congressman.”

  “I’m not doing anything with it,” you say.

  “What’s it for?”

  You look like you don’t understand what he is asking because you honestly don’t understand what he’s asking.

  “Where’s the permit,” he says.

  “The what?”

  “The permit. You need a federal permit to possess this wildlife,” he says.

  You calmly explain that “this wildlife” was delivered to your house just this morning. And if Officer Anderson wants, he can follow you back to Asher Place and you can show him the box, the big-ass cardboard box it was delivered in, but Anderson shakes his head. “A federal taxidermy permit allows you to temporarily possess another’s legally acquired wildlife,” he says, obvi rote from some book. “It is unlawful for any person to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce any wildlife taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any state or foreign law. It’s called the ‘Lacey Act.’”

  Now you’re mad. You know the goddamned Lacey Act, you say. But you didn’t steal it, and you certainly didn’t stuff it; it was, like, given to you, for Chrissakes! It’s a goddamned gift, you insist, and you don’t even realize the trap you’ve laid for yourself until it’s too late.

  Anderson looks at you sideways. “All right, Congressman,” he says, “who gave you this aardvark? Whoever gave it to you should have given you the permit,” he says, and that’s when you start imagining scenarios: like pushing Officer Anderson to the ground and jumping back into the Tahoe and speeding off; or like telling Officer Anderson to Hey, wow, look at that weird bird in the sky, and then punching Officer Anderson in his jaw and his gut and then jumping back in the Tahoe; or like, maybe, outsprinting Anderson on foot down the 14th Street Bridge, jumping over one side into the Potomac, swimming to shore, abandoning the Tahoe and aardvark and then somehow hailing an Uber; or just like going for it and grabbing Anderson’s gun from his holster and turning yourself over to fate—but none of these are viable options in the 21st century. In the 21st century, cameras are everywhere. They are in Officer Anderson’s cop car. They are on his body. They are recording you right now as you are hesitating to answer his question, and you can feel things getting bad, Anderson is getting suspicious, and so you resign yourself to the fourth option, the glorious refuge of rich young white men everywhere: pleading dumb.

  The delivery box wasn’t marked with a return address, you tell Anderson. Someone, you don’t know who, sent this aardvark to you, you have no idea why, and seriously, people send congressmen, like, super bizarre gifts all the time, you say, which sends you into a long and clumsy story about Representative Rutledge once receiving a rabbit’s foot on a chain from a constituent, and you can’t really see the difference between something like this and a rabbit’s foot.

  Officer Anderson, alas, does not buy it.

  “There’s a world of difference between one rabbit’s foot and an entire aardvark,” he says, clearly not believing you about the return address. “The U.S. Postal Service will not deliver something without a return address,” he says, and that’s when, with considerable relief, you remember the FedEx man with his bushy beard and his funny thick eyeglasses!

  You fold your arms. You condescend to Anderson that it wasn’t the post office; it was actually FedEx.

  At which point the policeman visibly brightens.

  “Great, I see,” he says. “So all we need to do is get the tracking number,” and that’s when you realize that, for now, he’s got you. That if you follow through with your story, he’s going to figure out the aardvark came from Greg Tampico, and your next move must be, can only be, to distance yourself from Greg Tampico as much as possible, and from here on out, Tampico’s a complete and total stranger, because who, after all, knew about you and Greg Tampico other than you and Tampico?

  Anderson asks you again for your phone, on which you now have 603 unread text messages and 410 unread emails. “I think we better go down to the station,” he says, and begins to read you your Miranda.

  2.

  The human eyeball, Downing knows from his Darwin, contained in its cavity, was at first nothing but a light-sensitive patch. Some spot on some skin of some early creature, and the spot, made of nothing but nerve fibers and photoreceptors, all opsin and chromophore, gave these early creatures some survival advantage, for better or worse, a sense of direction until out from this blindness one day the spot deepened, creating an oculus, so let’s widen the opening, create a space through which more light may enter, create a fluid-filled chamber wholly embraced by the photoreceptors so that the retina may enter, replete with a fine layer of pigment and cells until: enter the cornea, covering the chamber in the thinnest possible membrane until the membrane thickens, and the chamber fluid thickens into a transparent humor, at the front of which enters the lens. The cornea separates. The humor goes vitreous while retaining a separate aqueous chamber, to protect the iris, and it happens in a manner that enables the most expansive range of sight for what has come alive in the cavity, agented by new muscles, directed by nerves, and all is protected by the necessary appendages, the lids and brows, until what was once a very simple receptor able only to discern lightness and darkness, the daily synchronization of circadian rhythms, the human eyeball, round, white and semisolid, now becomes complex as a camera.

  As Titus Downing looks at his close friend Sir Richard Ostlet’s eyeballs floating preserved in the glass jar, he knows all of this to be true, yet there is no science that can explain how the eyeballs were taken out of Richard’s head, how they came to arrive inside his specimen box along with other scant personal items on Rebecca Ostlet’s doorstep, indeed, how they remain in such excellent shape having traveled the distance they traveled, by land and sea—and though Rebecca insists that these are Richard’s eyes because she could recognize her husband’s atypically large blue eyes anywhere, this is not, in Downing’s view, finally the point: the young, freshly widowed botanist—for who knows what reason but likely some female complication of grief and bewilderment—is keeping the man’s eyeballs locked in her secretary, with her stationery and trinkets!

  When the coroners buried Richard, Rebecca explains to Downing, there was no wake, no open casket. Instead, when the coffin arrived in London from Africa it had been sealed shut, and was quickly laid to rest thus, unopened, at Kensal Green, and she now recalls for Downing the many complaints of the pallbearers, how heavy the coffin was, how it took every man on hand just to lift it, let alone to git da bleedin’ box in’er da ground, and though she believed at the time that the weight borne by the coffin was—could only be—the body of her portly husband, she now wonders aloud whether maybe that was a mistake. Not to open the coffin.

  Rebecca Ostlet looks at Titus Downing, and the look she gives him is pleading. “He’s been up and down Gloucester Walk for weeks,” she tells him. “I felt I should write you.”

  Downing nods. “I understand why you would write,” he says, gazing at Richard Ostlet’s optic nerves, which are floating behind the eyeballs like tiny nervous tails. “But, madam,” he continues, “you are asking me to believe in ghosts, apparitions—”

  “Normally, I would agree with you,” she says, and, sweeping an arm around her living room, explains that she usually keeps plants in the windows, but an occultist instructed her to decorate the flat with roses to keep Richard away, and really go overboard about it, the occultist advised, and so she went overboard. �
��I have roses on the front door,” she says. “Roses in the windows. And yet still he comes.”

  “I see,” says Downing.

  “I think that Richard—or whatever is remaining of Richard—wants his eyes back. I think that’s why he walks. But I have no idea what to do,” Rebecca says, and smiles sadly at the Brontës, curled in sleep at her feet.

  Downing nods again, for he, fighting off his own terrible personal sadness over the prospect of having lost Richard, has already formulated a plan: he explains to the woman that, quite conveniently, he has an appointment with Harold Skinner the next morning, a noted specialist in prosthetics, and if it may help her situation, with her permission, Downing would gladly bring the eyes to Dr. Skinner and ask his opinion? About what might have happened to Richard? About what to do?

  With this news, a brightness overcomes Rebecca Ostlet. She declares he has her permission indeed and then drops the issue entirely. She begins talking about how difficult this has been for her, the widow’s obligation, staying inside her flat all day with naught but grief; how she is, from the bottom of her soul, an outdoors creature, and how her terribly brief marriage commits her, in her opinion, to no further sustained isolation from society—so the dinner plans they have this evening, she says, will be followed tomorrow morning by a lecture at the Royal Institution on the remains of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus by the discoverer himself, archaeologist John Turtle Wood, and the man started out as nothing more than an architect, does Downing know, and spent five whole years searching in vain before realizing there might be a paved road from the Magnesian Gate, a road leading right to the temple, which there of course was, six meters beneath, under sand—but at the end of her speech she inquires, and only if Downing is amenable, perhaps he should take the glass jar and store it in his bedroom tonight, while he is staying with her?

  To all of this, Downing agrees, and later that evening, after a fine roast lamb, new potatoes and two bottles of claret, when everyone has relaxed, Rebecca Ostlet, having drank more than usual, opens up to Titus Downing about her husband: how distant Richard was from her almost as soon as they married. How he traveled all the time, and she never expected much more than a minimum of affection, but there had been no minimum of affection. “It was like he never thought about me at all,” she says, and Downing nods, listening to Rebecca’s sorrows in alternating states of amusement and pity, like he would a child explaining basic math. Because all of this he knows already, it’s internalized, and none of it he cares to hear another word about.