Of course, the woman tells Downing, she was not as surprised as one might expect a wife to be upon discovering her husband’s eyes stashed in a glass jar in a five-drawer specimen box from Africa because, as she’s sure Downing knows (which he does), Richard suffered from exophthalmos, the oddest condition where the sufferer’s eyes occasionally bulge out of their orbits. But what Downing may not know, she hiccups, is that on certain occasions, if Richard’s head was ever violently bumped, or if his eyelids somehow turned the wrong way, his eyeballs would pop right out, secured only by their optic nerves, and it was terrible to witness!

Despite his cheerful disposition, Rebecca Ostlet explains, Richard suffered horribly, and the eyes were always popping out in the most inconvenient places, and a doctor had once informed him that it was called “spontaneous globe luxation,” and there was nothing to be done but accept the fact that soon Sir Richard Ostlet would no longer be able to continue his work as a sportsman, a naturalist. The poor man, Rebecca said the doctor said, was not long from becoming completely, and irrevocably, blind.

* * *

You are embracing the head of a gigantic stuffed aardvark in the back of Officer Anderson’s toothy Ford Police Interceptor—wrists secured entirely unnecessarily in the front of your person with white plastic zip ties—crossing the Potomac to Independence Ave., right next to the Mall.

Since there are still places in the grid where nothing is working, people are outside, and these people are fat. There are fat men, fat women and fat children, and they are all wearing the same general outfit: T-shirt and shorts, white socks and sneakers. The adults themselves, they resemble large toddlers as they teeter around the Washington Monument holding $6 pretzels and tipping their phones skyward with greasy fingers as the Interceptor hurtles past L’Enfant, the Federal Center, bearing left in front of the Capitol, and Anderson really could have taken you to one of the substations (M Street was closer), but no: you go to the First District Station, that’s where the chief works, and when you get there, a great wonking slab of classic DC concrete, Anderson walks you through a hallway that still smells like tobacco from cigarettes smoked over two decades ago and into a room that’s right out of some movie, full of metal desks the size of baby rhinoceri and old gray desktop PCs from the Aughts.

The cops, they are actually donned in pleated khakis, and who even wears fucking khakis anymore, you think as Anderson plunks you down in a hard wooden chair and whispers to the chief the story he thinks you cannot hear but which you absolutely can.

Officer Anderson has no way of knowing that you possess incredible hearing. You’ve had it since birth, and it made you an extremely fussy baby, so your mother once told you, and you can hear a full conversation between two people whispering in another room entirely, much less just a few feet away, and the story Anderson is telling the chief is truly something: how yes, you are exactly who everyone thinks you are; how you were not only Texting While Driving you were also carrying Highly Unusual Heavy Cargo, and Officer Anderson lifted said Heavy Cargo from your vehicle himself and wedged it into the back seat of his Interceptor to take you both in; how, as he drove to the precinct, he observed the odd manner in which you kept one elbow hugging the Cargo, and Anderson just does not believe that a whole stuffed aardvark could be a political gift, he whispers, because a political gift would be sent to your office, and you had told Officer Anderson that it was sent to your home via FedEx, making it not a political but a personal gift. About this Anderson has no doubt. So, to him, the following questions remain: