* * *

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.

The funeral, it says, is tomorrow, two o’clock, at Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral Home on Prince Street.

The news shocks you. But there is a part of you that is also relieved. Like, of course it is terrible when anyone takes his own life, like, you’re no monster, but now there’s zero possibility that anyone will ever find out about you and Greg Tampico, and, let’s face it, that was some fairly unsavory business you got yourself mixed up in, and it all could have gotten worse, much, much worse—so yes, you do feel shock, relief, but there is also some guilt: for you now recall how Greg Tampico had asked you only two weeks ago if he might come work for you, how he could not stand seeing you just once a month if that, and wouldn’t you both have a great time traveling the country, he said, campaigning together, and he had already arranged for a kick-ass parasailing trip off the Oregon coast because he knew how much you like parasailing.

He could help you, he said, you know, relax on the trail, and you could even go hiking and camping and other wildernessy stuff, and he had this idea for promoting Plaine Truth involving divvying up and privatizing the national parks. You could be an updated, inverse Roosevelt, he explained, outfitted with a lodge in, like, Montana or something, and you could even pick up hunting as you led your half of America—Right America—by capitalizing on her natural wildernesses (“The Grand Canyon, brought to you by Tampax,” he laughed), and how great would you look in the publicity pictures hiking one of the minor mountain ranges decked out in North Face, Patagonia—

“Okay, Brokeback,” you said.

“I don’t mean like that,” he said.

“What about the foundation,” you said.

“What about it,” he said.

“Don’t you have that responsibility,” you said.

Greg Tampico said that he’d just given notice at the foundation. He’d been at his job for twelve years. He felt he’d done good. He’d helped many, many children in Namibia, he said, and believed the time had come to step down. Besides, he’d been feeling blue lately, he confessed, and knew he could be a great asset as one of your staffers—or maybe even your director of communications or something—but as Tampico said what he was thinking, you were thinking, Of course this changes everything.

You had to apologize. Told Greg Tampico that something came up and climbed out of his bed. You began dressing yourself, in front of the aardvark. You had to go, you said, and he looked pretty crestfallen.