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.