Who would have personally gifted Representative Alexander Paine Wilson a gigantic stuffed aardvark? Why would the congressman have covered the head of the aardvark with a dish towel? Where was he driving the aardvark this morning, and why would he want to be rid of it?

“The whole thing stinks,” you hear Anderson say, and the chief of police, a nightmarish trio of black, female and lesbian, glances at you handcuffed in your J. Crew summerwear when he says that. She asks what Anderson told you. “The Lacey Act,” Anderson says, his brother’s a hunter and knows all about the rules of game transport, and the chief laughs as she murmurs, “Good one,” and that’s when you stand up and demand to call your lawyer immediately; you are a congressman who has been wrongfully arrested, and Officer Anderson has broken all kinds of your Fourth Amendment rights, and for whatever reason, like, has it out for you.

You are shouting. You know that you are shouting, and you also know that it’s bad to be shouting as three more cops enter, aardvark in tow.

“Thing weighs a ton,” they laugh and drop it loudly on a table in front of you, right there out in the open for everyone to see, and the cops in the precinct, they all get up from their desks and encircle the aardvark, air-flicking its snout and its ears, and for reasons you cannot fathom, you begin feeling slightly defensive when they snicker, calling it crazy-weird or so ugly, so you plunk back down in your seat and, wrists bound and smarting, go for your phone.

It’s not in your pocket. Anderson, you remember, took your phone when you got there, and without your phone you feel naked, lonely, and you pray that your security settings were on when you texted Tampico.

“It was a gift,” you shout again. You cannot believe that anyone would even think you want this stupid aardvark! And while yes, it’s true that you did have your elbow around it in the back of the Interceptor, it was only because the aardvark is so freaking huge, bulky, and the potholes in DC, as everyone knows, are no freaking joke, and you were just trying to keep the freaking tail of the aardvark from stabbing Officer Anderson in the head through the freaking barrier grid while he drove, and the snout of the aardvark from stabbing you in the groin, and you did so by embracing its head—albeit awkwardly with your wrists freaking tied—and as the police start writing everything down, taking your report, the police photographer comes over with an actual camera and starts snapping photos, and now there are pictures of you, pictures of you in a police station, pictures of you in a police station next to a stuffed aardvark with your wrists bound, and before your mind catches up with your body, you stand up, snatch the camera out of the photographer’s hands and toss it under a desk where it breaks, and that’s when the officers, clad in their khakis, fall collectively upon you.