The doorbell rings again.

You have no wife, no children. You, like Representative Rutledge, are young, white and handsome, however you are a bachelor. You are fine with this. This was the hallmark of your first campaign (this and abortion). It’s how people know you. But now that you are facing reelection, your aides are not fine with this: your Favorability Rating is currently holding steady at 52%, which, although good, is not as good as it could be, and as of late your aides have been telling you to Find A Wife.

If you Find A Wife, they say, your Favorability Rating will improve, because although you are neck and neck with Nancy Fucking Beavers, a middle-aged woman with an ass like two neighborly cast-iron skillets who wears these unbelievable pantsuits—Nancy Fucking Beavers is not fucking single. She has fucking children. Your platform is Bachelor and her platform is Children, and you are trying to wrap your brain matter around the fact that many people who should constitute your electorate will actually trust Nancy Fucking Beavers more than they trust you simply because she has children, roundly discarding the fact that her only experience in government is losing a local mayoral campaign by a hair, when the doorbell rings a third time.

You go upstairs. You put on your bathrobe.

Your bathrobe is navy blue with red piping and cost $398. It is monogrammed “APW” in Chancery on the breast pocket and is Egyptian cotton from Bill Blass, Ronald Reagan’s favorite designer. There is a picture of Reagan wearing the bathrobe in Images of Greatness, from when he got shot, and you always feel pretty good wearing the bathrobe, which is why, even though it’s so hot out, you put on the bathrobe.

You wear an oxford underneath. Like Reagan. Even after he got shot, he wore an oxford underneath.

You are less of a man than Ronald Reagan, you know this, but no one will ever be able to say about you that your goals were not lofty, you think as you return downstairs and open the door.

1875

Sir Richard Ostlet, a fifty-year-old, richly mustachioed zoological naturalist, is in the Karoo beds of southern Africa, an area that will one day be known as Namibia, searching for strange mammals to bring home to Britain, and these particular mammals, the aardvarks, despite the fact that they have lived for several thousand millennia before Richard Ostlet, to him, fit the bill.

They look like some kind of joke, Ostlet thinks, like some kind of accident, part rabbit, part pig, or even part kangaroo, but in reality, the aardvark is none of these things; nor is it strange to the two African hunters working for Ostlet who kill these beasts regularly, for sport and/or meat, and who are, at this moment, presenting him with three high-quality specimens rooted out from their long, sandy tunnels last night.

Of the three specimens, one immediately stands out to Ostlet. Marvelously humpbacked, profoundly clawed, she is the oldest and therefore largest of the three, and reminds the naturalist of something but he cannot say what. For whatever it is, it’s neither the hypotrichous skin, yellow-pink, nor the four earth-colored limbs—plantigrade at the front, digitigrade at the back—and it’s not the round, wrinkled scalp common to Ungulata and other hooved mammals, nor the ears, folded like silk, nor the stretched piggy snout with its coarse whiskers that cluster the nostrils, bridge the nose and even sprout from the cheeks—it’s something in the eyes, he thinks, which are soft, long-lashed, making her expression flirtatious yet noble, like an intelligent dog, and as the others leave Ostlet to dine in a nearby tent, he continues to stare at the dead aardvark, surprising himself when he sees in the face a kind of melancholy, he hasn’t felt this sad in years, and the burden is so sudden, so heavy, his first instinct is to share it, to split it with someone.