The delivery box wasn’t marked with a return address, you tell Anderson. Someone, you don’t know who, sent this aardvark to you, you have no idea why, and seriously, people send congressmen, like, super bizarre gifts all the time, you say, which sends you into a long and clumsy story about Representative Rutledge once receiving a rabbit’s foot on a chain from a constituent, and you can’t really see the difference between something like this and a rabbit’s foot.

Officer Anderson, alas, does not buy it.

“There’s a world of difference between one rabbit’s foot and an entire aardvark,” he says, clearly not believing you about the return address. “The U.S. Postal Service will not deliver something without a return address,” he says, and that’s when, with considerable relief, you remember the FedEx man with his bushy beard and his funny thick eyeglasses!

You fold your arms. You condescend to Anderson that it wasn’t the post office; it was actually FedEx.

At which point the policeman visibly brightens.

“Great, I see,” he says. “So all we need to do is get the tracking number,” and that’s when you realize that, for now, he’s got you. That if you follow through with your story, he’s going to figure out the aardvark came from Greg Tampico, and your next move must be, can only be, to distance yourself from Greg Tampico as much as possible, and from here on out, Tampico’s a complete and total stranger, because who, after all, knew about you and Greg Tampico other than you and Tampico?

Anderson asks you again for your phone, on which you now have 603 unread text messages and 410 unread emails. “I think we better go down to the station,” he says, and begins to read you your Miranda.

2.

The human eyeball, Downing knows from his Darwin, contained in its cavity, was at first nothing but a light-sensitive patch. Some spot on some skin of some early creature, and the spot, made of nothing but nerve fibers and photoreceptors, all opsin and chromophore, gave these early creatures some survival advantage, for better or worse, a sense of direction until out from this blindness one day the spot deepened, creating an oculus, so let’s widen the opening, create a space through which more light may enter, create a fluid-filled chamber wholly embraced by the photoreceptors so that the retina may enter, replete with a fine layer of pigment and cells until: enter the cornea, covering the chamber in the thinnest possible membrane until the membrane thickens, and the chamber fluid thickens into a transparent humor, at the front of which enters the lens. The cornea separates. The humor goes vitreous while retaining a separate aqueous chamber, to protect the iris, and it happens in a manner that enables the most expansive range of sight for what has come alive in the cavity, agented by new muscles, directed by nerves, and all is protected by the necessary appendages, the lids and brows, until what was once a very simple receptor able only to discern lightness and darkness, the daily synchronization of circadian rhythms, the human eyeball, round, white and semisolid, now becomes complex as a camera.