Over the eyes hang the thick eyelids of the aardvark, the lashes of which Downing each positioned just this morning with small tweezers so as to make her look coy to her Viewers, flirtatious, and Downing has no choice but to wait in this manner for the moment when Ostlet—or whatever remains of Ostlet—at last moves on from the shop, his Wellingtons shuffling off this time for good.

It is only then that Downing summons the courage to slip into the workshop. He procures from under his nightshirt the brass key which he wears at all times on a lanyard, to securely lock the workshop door, and, hands shaking, he locks it.

* * *

It is Monday morning. Congress is not back in session. You are not back in session. You are sitting up naked in bed with Toby Castle, and both of your laptops are open like great, glowing mouths, your legs still entwined underneath your 1200-thread-count Sferra Milos bone-colored sheets ($1695) as you pick up your phone.

Although Fox shuttered the story, you have now 2345 unread text messages and 3509 unread emails as it appears Nancy Fucking Beavers has pounced:

REPRESENTATIVE ALEXANDER P. WILSON (R) ARRESTED, the Washington Post declares, the New York Times declares, the Wall Street Journal declares, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, NBC, HuffPost and Google News and even BBC and The Guardian all declare, and you have four hashtags trending on Twitter, the cruelest of which is #cancelWilson. Fox and its minor sycophantic affiliates, thank god, are reporting on a rhesus monkey who flung shit on a Democrat from Wisconsin at the Sacramento Zoo—but other than that, pictures of the aardvark which the police took at the station, which the reporters took of the back of your Tahoe, they are everywhere, and then suddenly it’s pictures of the aardvark alternating with pictures of the front door of 2486 Asher Place—Ralph Lauren “British Racing Car” green with a Victorian brass lion’s-head knocker—which is your front door.

You turn on your 75-inch Samsung widescreen 4K Q9F Series UHD TV with HDR ($3999) in your bedroom and watch as the middle-aged brunette in a marigold pantsuit, hair cut short and sprayed into a brown carapace, barks into a microphone:

“I am not interested in discussing Alex Wilson’s personal life. That’s discourse beneath my campaign. But we all know Congressman Wilson is known for his extravagant taste, and if he wishes to furnish his extravagant home with taxidermy, it is his choice, as an American, to do so. In the end, it is the voters who will decide whether or not they want to keep in office a congressman who himself keeps an endangered species as a decorative ornament.”

You immediately google is aardvark endangered? and learn that there’s actually such a thing as an Endangerment Rating and the aardvark has a risk of endangerment of “Least Concern,” and the sturdy-ass mammal has fucking trucked around Earth for a fucking infinity before human beings, its origins are fucking Mesozoic, it never evolved, and it is actually one of the least endangered mammals on the planet!