There are no exclamations of joy.

Toby looks startled maybe but not in the least bit surprised. She looks at you like you’re crazy at first, but it’s just an act; she knows perfectly well what you’re up to because as soon as she gets it, she smiles and starts laughing, which is why you totally, hands-down adore Toby Castle.

“Even better!” she shouts, and jumps out of bed.

Toby tells you to hurry. Get dressed. She’ll be downstairs in a minute, she says, she only needs to borrow some khakis, one of your white button-downs, and she can accessorize with the earrings she wore last night, she says, and yeah, it will be really cute if she looks boyish, tousled, “like Jackie O fresh off a yacht or something,” she says, and you put yourself completely in her hands when you toss her the clothes. Except for the khakis.

“I don’t own any khakis,” you say.

“Something else, then,” she says.

You throw her some dark blue CK close-fitting silk-blend men’s trousers ($460).

As for you, for this occasion, you also dress yourself in CK: the same trousers in brown, a pink gingham shirt ($210), a white leather belt ($184), and you deliberately don’t button the collar as you run downstairs in bare feet, excited, when the landline rings.

You would not even have a landline if it were not for your mother. She is the only one who ever uses it, and she insists on you having a landline because she is old and does not trust cell phones.

“Who’s that?” Toby shouts.

“It’s my mother,” you shout back, and pick up the phone.

It’s not your mother.

“Wilson,” a voice says.

“Who is this,” you say as Toby Castle starts working your hair dryer upstairs, a black and red MANGROOMER 1680XL-6 Professional Ionic Hair Dryer for Men ($179), which is weird, you think, because her hair is already dry.

“Who is this,” you say again, and sit down on the canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa, Images of Greatness still spread-eagled on the coffee table, opened to a photo of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in Miami, perched in these two really beautiful Arabian-looking fabric chairs—

“Do me a favor,” the voice says, and it’s a man’s voice. “Is your internet working?”

“It is,” you say.

“I’m sending you something. Check your email.”

You pick up your real phone, and there at the top of your now 4333 unread emails is an email from an undisclosed sender. All it says is Herero.

“Are you Herero?” you say, and the voice only says to look at the picture, closely, so you look at the picture.

It’s a vintage black-and-white photograph of some kind of big old hunting lodge with wide picnic tables. The lodge is literally the size of a movie theater, and there’s a big stone chimney that rises up between small windows of colored glass, and the glass, set in lead, glows over a vast amalgamation of furs, of objets d’art, of china, jewels, and silver tea settings, and it all looks pilfered, like some kind of booty, and also on the walls, covering the tables, a riot of taxidermy: stuffed geese and stuffed ducks, a sour-faced raccoon, a big open-mouthed leopard, a snarling baboon, numerous stoic elk heads, and there’s even an entire eagle, wide-winged, captured frozen in flight.