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.