* * *

Titus Downing is on the train back to Leamington Spa. The glass jar snug in his valise holds two human eyeballs, floating like dead fish in their fluid, and he feels no guilt, none at all, for lying to Rebecca Ostlet about his reasons for departing immediately the following morning, for skipping out on the lecture on the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, for abruptly canceling his appointment with his old roommate, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, as a new plan is already under way: Sir Richard Ostlet’s eyes are going into the aardvark, and he knew it the first moment he saw them, for Downing, a scientist, not at all a believer in ghosts, does believe in coincidence; to deny coincidence is to deny destiny, he thinks, which is why, upon returning home to his workshop, the taxidermist carefully, using wet shellac, dips and dries each of the eyeballs several times until they are glossy, hardened, then secures them neatly, with wire and glue, in the empty eye sockets of the death mask of the gigantic, corpulent aardvark, and Downing is not at all surprised that they fit as well as they do, he works gently, in gloves with his tow forceps, as he lowers the aardvark’s long-lashed lids over them, applies a wet glue from horse tooth, and though it is a gruesome and fairly macabre moment in his life, as he handles the eyes of his former lover, he cannot help but feel: this is what love is.

* * *

“I do not like green eggs and ham,” you recite to the waiter at the Brown, Lake & Peterson Company while scrolling your phone, “I do not like them, Sam-I-am,” and Toby Castle shoots you a glance that’s like, please. She tosses all of her long blond hair over one shoulder and whips out: “Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me,” which is good because the waiter, like all waiters at BLPC, has 0.125% stock in the business and takes the lunchboxes and poem/menu thing very, very seriously.

He hands you your paper menu delicately, like you might stain it.

“I’m sorry, I was in jail today,” you say, and Toby Castle shoots the waiter an apologetic look, like the two of you have already been married for years, and sighs as she says, all dispirited, “I’m just getting a salad.”

Toby got dispirited the moment she saw you looking disheveled at the bar of the restaurant, the moment you told her what happened this morning, how you were brought downtown to an actual fucking police precinct and spent all day there, and how they are now investigating the gift of a stuffed aardvark—and it was just a gift—which arrived on your doorstep from you have no idea who.

You can’t say you blame her; after all, she really took her time getting ready and looks pretty and fresh in a pale blue and expensive-looking silk dress that is perfect for the heat, she’s done it all, heels, hair and makeup, and here you are across the table, covered in sweat, your J. Crew all wrinkled—but it doesn’t matter how good she looks, you want to convey, she’s damned lucky to have you sitting across from her, you think, given who you are, given where you’ve been all day. (This is not what you tell her.)