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.