Enter the Aardvark Read online

  For no matter how many glasses of wine he drinks, Downing is not about to share with Lady Ostlet the dozens of nights he himself spent with Richard; that the two had, on many occasions, slept naked in each other’s arms, or how his own thin body fit so neatly around Richard’s corpulence; and Downing is certainly not going to explain how he and Richard had locked eyes at the Great Exhibition all those years ago over a small stuffed vixen, tail a-twitching; how Richard had led him down a long red-carpeted hallway and into the custodial closet where, amidst the Quick Silver, Rape Oil and Rottenstone, Ostlet kissed him with a passion Downing did not know existed in men, or how he pulled down Ostlet’s trousers and took his tough, chubby cock into his mouth, and although Downing had never before allowed himself to imagine that this was what he wanted or needed, all at once it was everything, and he shocked himself as he realized that he knew what to do, the knowledge was innate, and when Ostlet shuddered and emptied himself into Downing’s mouth, he concluded that no man ever truly loved publicly, true love was a secret, and as the two men walked back to the Exhibition, arm-brushing-arm, he saw the world very differently: that the adult human male was nothing more than a mammal in a suit, and Downing felt assured for the first time since leaving his childhood farm in Northumberland that he was Nature, and had he ever felt so like himself, so awake?—which is why he cares to hear none of Lady Ostlet’s complaints, except perhaps save one:

  Of course, the woman tells Downing, she was not as surprised as one might expect a wife to be upon discovering her husband’s eyes stashed in a glass jar in a five-drawer specimen box from Africa because, as she’s sure Downing knows (which he does), Richard suffered from exophthalmos, the oddest condition where the sufferer’s eyes occasionally bulge out of their orbits. But what Downing may not know, she hiccups, is that on certain occasions, if Richard’s head was ever violently bumped, or if his eyelids somehow turned the wrong way, his eyeballs would pop right out, secured only by their optic nerves, and it was terrible to witness!

  Despite his cheerful disposition, Rebecca Ostlet explains, Richard suffered horribly, and the eyes were always popping out in the most inconvenient places, and a doctor had once informed him that it was called “spontaneous globe luxation,” and there was nothing to be done but accept the fact that soon Sir Richard Ostlet would no longer be able to continue his work as a sportsman, a naturalist. The poor man, Rebecca said the doctor said, was not long from becoming completely, and irrevocably, blind.

  * * *

  You are embracing the head of a gigantic stuffed aardvark in the back of Officer Anderson’s toothy Ford Police Interceptor—wrists secured entirely unnecessarily in the front of your person with white plastic zip ties—crossing the Potomac to Independence Ave., right next to the Mall.

  Since there are still places in the grid where nothing is working, people are outside, and these people are fat. There are fat men, fat women and fat children, and they are all wearing the same general outfit: T-shirt and shorts, white socks and sneakers. The adults themselves, they resemble large toddlers as they teeter around the Washington Monument holding $6 pretzels and tipping their phones skyward with greasy fingers as the Interceptor hurtles past L’Enfant, the Federal Center, bearing left in front of the Capitol, and Anderson really could have taken you to one of the substations (M Street was closer), but no: you go to the First District Station, that’s where the chief works, and when you get there, a great wonking slab of classic DC concrete, Anderson walks you through a hallway that still smells like tobacco from cigarettes smoked over two decades ago and into a room that’s right out of some movie, full of metal desks the size of baby rhinoceri and old gray desktop PCs from the Aughts.

  The cops, they are actually donned in pleated khakis, and who even wears fucking khakis anymore, you think as Anderson plunks you down in a hard wooden chair and whispers to the chief the story he thinks you cannot hear but which you absolutely can.

  Officer Anderson has no way of knowing that you possess incredible hearing. You’ve had it since birth, and it made you an extremely fussy baby, so your mother once told you, and you can hear a full conversation between two people whispering in another room entirely, much less just a few feet away, and the story Anderson is telling the chief is truly something: how yes, you are exactly who everyone thinks you are; how you were not only Texting While Driving you were also carrying Highly Unusual Heavy Cargo, and Officer Anderson lifted said Heavy Cargo from your vehicle himself and wedged it into the back seat of his Interceptor to take you both in; how, as he drove to the precinct, he observed the odd manner in which you kept one elbow hugging the Cargo, and Anderson just does not believe that a whole stuffed aardvark could be a political gift, he whispers, because a political gift would be sent to your office, and you had told Officer Anderson that it was sent to your home via FedEx, making it not a political but a personal gift. About this Anderson has no doubt. So, to him, the following questions remain:

  Who would have personally gifted Representative Alexander Paine Wilson a gigantic stuffed aardvark? Why would the congressman have covered the head of the aardvark with a dish towel? Where was he driving the aardvark this morning, and why would he want to be rid of it?

  “The whole thing stinks,” you hear Anderson say, and the chief of police, a nightmarish trio of black, female and lesbian, glances at you handcuffed in your J. Crew summerwear when he says that. She asks what Anderson told you. “The Lacey Act,” Anderson says, his brother’s a hunter and knows all about the rules of game transport, and the chief laughs as she murmurs, “Good one,” and that’s when you stand up and demand to call your lawyer immediately; you are a congressman who has been wrongfully arrested, and Officer Anderson has broken all kinds of your Fourth Amendment rights, and for whatever reason, like, has it out for you.

  You are shouting. You know that you are shouting, and you also know that it’s bad to be shouting as three more cops enter, aardvark in tow.

  “Thing weighs a ton,” they laugh and drop it loudly on a table in front of you, right there out in the open for everyone to see, and the cops in the precinct, they all get up from their desks and encircle the aardvark, air-flicking its snout and its ears, and for reasons you cannot fathom, you begin feeling slightly defensive when they snicker, calling it crazy-weird or so ugly, so you plunk back down in your seat and, wrists bound and smarting, go for your phone.

  It’s not in your pocket. Anderson, you remember, took your phone when you got there, and without your phone you feel naked, lonely, and you pray that your security settings were on when you texted Tampico.

  “It was a gift,” you shout again. You cannot believe that anyone would even think you want this stupid aardvark! And while yes, it’s true that you did have your elbow around it in the back of the Interceptor, it was only because the aardvark is so freaking huge, bulky, and the potholes in DC, as everyone knows, are no freaking joke, and you were just trying to keep the freaking tail of the aardvark from stabbing Officer Anderson in the head through the freaking barrier grid while he drove, and the snout of the aardvark from stabbing you in the groin, and you did so by embracing its head—albeit awkwardly with your wrists freaking tied—and as the police start writing everything down, taking your report, the police photographer comes over with an actual camera and starts snapping photos, and now there are pictures of you, pictures of you in a police station, pictures of you in a police station next to a stuffed aardvark with your wrists bound, and before your mind catches up with your body, you stand up, snatch the camera out of the photographer’s hands and toss it under a desk where it breaks, and that’s when the officers, clad in their khakis, fall collectively upon you.

  * * *

  Titus Downing is on the train back to Leamington Spa. The glass jar snug in his valise holds two human eyeballs, floating like dead fish in their fluid, and he feels no guilt, none at all, for lying to Rebecca Ostlet about his reasons for departing immediately the following morning, for skipping out on the lecture on the Temple
of Artemis at Ephesus, for abruptly canceling his appointment with his old roommate, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, as a new plan is already under way: Sir Richard Ostlet’s eyes are going into the aardvark, and he knew it the first moment he saw them, for Downing, a scientist, not at all a believer in ghosts, does believe in coincidence; to deny coincidence is to deny destiny, he thinks, which is why, upon returning home to his workshop, the taxidermist carefully, using wet shellac, dips and dries each of the eyeballs several times until they are glossy, hardened, then secures them neatly, with wire and glue, in the empty eye sockets of the death mask of the gigantic, corpulent aardvark, and Downing is not at all surprised that they fit as well as they do, he works gently, in gloves with his tow forceps, as he lowers the aardvark’s long-lashed lids over them, applies a wet glue from horse tooth, and though it is a gruesome and fairly macabre moment in his life, as he handles the eyes of his former lover, he cannot help but feel: this is what love is.

  * * *

  “I do not like green eggs and ham,” you recite to the waiter at the Brown, Lake & Peterson Company while scrolling your phone, “I do not like them, Sam-I-am,” and Toby Castle shoots you a glance that’s like, please. She tosses all of her long blond hair over one shoulder and whips out: “Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me,” which is good because the waiter, like all waiters at BLPC, has 0.125% stock in the business and takes the lunchboxes and poem/menu thing very, very seriously.

  He hands you your paper menu delicately, like you might stain it.

  “I’m sorry, I was in jail today,” you say, and Toby Castle shoots the waiter an apologetic look, like the two of you have already been married for years, and sighs as she says, all dispirited, “I’m just getting a salad.”

  Toby got dispirited the moment she saw you looking disheveled at the bar of the restaurant, the moment you told her what happened this morning, how you were brought downtown to an actual fucking police precinct and spent all day there, and how they are now investigating the gift of a stuffed aardvark—and it was just a gift—which arrived on your doorstep from you have no idea who.

  You can’t say you blame her; after all, she really took her time getting ready and looks pretty and fresh in a pale blue and expensive-looking silk dress that is perfect for the heat, she’s done it all, heels, hair and makeup, and here you are across the table, covered in sweat, your J. Crew all wrinkled—but it doesn’t matter how good she looks, you want to convey, she’s damned lucky to have you sitting across from her, you think, given who you are, given where you’ve been all day. (This is not what you tell her.)

  “It was all a big misunderstanding,” you say, tearing into some free corned beef eggrolls that the waiter has placed on your table in a Trixie Collins lunchbox, and it does not go without your attention that around you, your peers are eating out of vintage Batmans, vintage Spider-Mans, Supermans, Aquamans, and Green Lanterns, but you didn’t get any of those lunchboxes. The waiter, pissed off at your poem, has given you Trixie Collins.

  “Who the hell is Trixie Collins,” you say to the waiter, who’s now at the next table, and he just looks at you, scowls, and mouths, google it.

  “Anyway,” you say, “the officer did not and does not understand the Lacey Act, and any time a cop wants to go up against me in terms of who knows their statutes, I just say: bring it.”

  “What is the Lacey Act,” Toby Castle says, and it’s her most bored voice ever.

  “The Lacey Act,” you explain, paraphrasing what cursory info you gleaned from your phone before Anderson took it, “was, like, established in 1900 to prevent poachers from transporting birds and animals and plants and all kinds of wildlife—basically anything living—across state lines. Now it’s, like, illegal to import or export an animal or, in this case, send illegally poached big game to taxidermists.”

  “So your aardvark was illegally poached.”

  “It’s not my aardvark,” you say as you watch Toby Castle examining her egg roll, flicking off the fatty bits with her manicured fingernails, and really wish she’d, like, make more of an effort because there are 1267 unread text messages and 899 unread emails on your phone, and Nancy Fucking Beavers is right on your heels, you have work to do for Chrissakes, but here you are at this dumb-ass restaurant, and it’s all for her and she doesn’t care, and you are beginning to wonder if the idea about Finding A Wife isn’t totally stupid after all when Toby says, “Let’s just drop it,” snaps her fingers, and orders from the waiter two gin and mashed cucumber gimlets, which instantly helps.

  You apologize. You tell Toby how great she looks, you just didn’t expect to spend the day in a police precinct. It took your staffers another three hours to deal with the paperwork, get back your phone, and it’s all you can do right now to deal with the fact that tomorrow’s headline all over the world is going to read something akin to REPRESENTATIVE ALEX WILSON (R) ARRESTED FOR ILLEGAL POSSESSION OF TAXIDERMIED AARDVARK, and despite the fact that you’re totally innocent, you say, it’s going to be hell on Earth for your staffers if it isn’t already.

  You hold up your phone. You show Toby Castle all of your unread messages, and Toby smiles at you, and what she says next is the reason you like this girl.

  “That’s tomorrow,” she says, sliding her hands over the table, fingering the buttons on your wrinkled cuffs. “Not tonight,” and it’s clear then and there that you are going to bring Toby back to your place and you both are going to take a steam shower underneath your Kohler Vibrant Brushed Bronze WaterTile Ambient Rain Overhead Rain Shower showerhead and you are going to make up for this god-awful day by fucking the living daylights—if you can—out of Brian Castle’s daughter.

  * * *

  “Come View the Aardvark,” Downing writes to museums, to reporters, “with the ears of a rabbit and a snout like a pig’s, a kangaroo tail, and one can hardly believe it exists! The specimen, I believe, is large for its genus, weighs as much as a small human woman, and possesses a unique esprit that can only be believed when seen.”

  The day of the Viewing is scheduled for Saturday next, Titus Downing’s forty-first birthday, and although he never can tell how a Viewing will go, although the aardvark is neither as tall as the giraffe nor anywhere near as impressive-looking, he believes that when the Viewers catch one glimpse of its stance, its personality, they will see what he sees: a peculiar, melancholic kind of beauty, and it is because of this belief—coupled with Walter Potter’s immense popularity, which now demands from Downing a bare minimum of publicity, what he calls “The Debasement”—that over the course of the next week, on top of the personal letters to museums, reporters, all the paid advertisements he writes, the taxidermist will hire a small theater troupe for the day of the Viewing to, while wearing homemade aardvark costumes, mimic the actions of the aardvark. And he, Downing, will stiffly show the actors himself, with his own crooked body, how the creature might amble the plains of the Karoo beds in southern Africa, backed by distant mountains. How it might, as it ambles, quickly tamp its odd, piggy snout into dirt, and the boys will all practice crawling around, tossing their heads, and they will make for themselves from drawings created in Downing’s own hand papier-mâché snouts for their noses, long ears for their heads, spoony claws for their hands, and, for the backs of their trousers, heavy kangaroo tails.

  The only thing Downing does not advertise is the eyes, for he knows they will be the surprise, the real spectacle, because he has done something which no taxidermist has ever before done, and everyone will look into the aardvark’s eyes and feel what he feels (love), but they will not be able to put their finger on why, or what it is that makes them feel so—and as Downing completes the mannequin and polishes for the last time the aardvark’s heavy wooden mount, quite pleased with his choice of Leadwood, the finest Combretum imberbe imported from the aardvark’s natural habitat, he regards the blue eyes of the aardvark and recalls the last time he and Richard Ostlet saw one another, just one week before Richard depa
rted for Africa.

  There was nothing particularly different that day. Seeing Richard was exactly like it always was: as though no time had passed between that moment and two and a half decades ago in the custodial closet at the Great Exhibition. Except Ostlet wasn’t well.

  “Nerves,” he had said, but there was something more. Downing had looked into Ostlet’s big round eyes—Rebecca was not joking about the bulge and slippage of Ostlet’s bright blue oculi—and he remembers now how Richard confessed that he was having trouble sleeping; that his eyes would stay open, all on their own, and if he weren’t so tired all the time he would maybe mind slightly less, but along with the fatigue and the headaches was the truth about his imminent blindness, his vision had been failing for some time now, and in England it was one thing, but he was worried about what it might mean in Africa.

  Downing had laid his thin arm over Ostlet’s chest, roiled his chest hair around a long finger. “You need an assistant,” he said, and offered to join Ostlet on his trip, if he pleased. He suggested that the two might have a grand time in Africa, that he could assist Richard in any way he needed assisting, that he not only could take his dictation but he might help him, well, relax, and it was then that Ostlet inexplicably had jumped up from Downing’s bed.