“That was you on the phone!” you say.

“You have to get rid of it,” he says, and calmly, slowly, tells you once more about the Herero and the Namaqua: how it all started after the German Emperor Wilhelm II took over from Otto von Bismarck, and how the kaiser, not a man known for his patience or tact, and against the counsel of his ministers, invaded South West Africa, plundered her resources, then dispatched Heinrich Göring and the criminal General Lothar von Trotha, who first attempted to colonize and then, after a revolt, savagely murdered Olioke’s people, and it was more than a hundred thousand souls, and Olioke’s own great-grandparents were actually survivors of the genocide—

This is all news to you. Because despite the fact that you share your townhouse with Rutledge and Olioke when Congress is in session, and you often hear them downstairs playing Parcheesi and eating peanut butter sandwiches, laughing in their cheap suits over lite beers in your kitchen, you have never once joined them, and you have spoken very little with Rutledge or Olioke in the six months that you’ve shared your townhouse (something you would never have done if you hadn’t been pressured to do so from higher-ups, to curry favor), and all you know about Rutledge is that he’s a Democrat from New Hampshire who works out a lot (he benches 280), and he has a wife and five sons whom he goes to see on some farm every weekend—and all you know about Olioke is that he’s a Republican from Rhode Island who shops at Goodwill, that he has a wife and five daughters and he, too, takes off every weekend to see them at some crappy cottage by some crappy lake, and that he is black—African American—but you never knew that he was actually from-Africa African American, and up to this moment you have allowed little room in your consciousness for Africa, but now it feels as though Africa, it is all around you, and you can’t help but freak out a little bit that Greg Tampico’s foundation, it was in Namibia while Olioke is Namibian, as he spells it all out:

“It is commonly known,” Olioke says (and this is seriously how the man talks), “that Heinrich Göring brought a stuffed aardvark to Africa sometime in the late eighteen hundreds.” It is also “commonly known,” he continues, that Göring and the Germans murdered people, set in motion the horror that would follow vis-à-vis Von Trotha, who expelled Olioke’s people from their own land, trapped them in the desert, and gave them no water. Or poisoned it.

“The Germans,” Olioke explains, “they established ‘work camps’ in South West Africa that were tested ‘effective’; camps that would,” he goes on to say, “not long after, serve as models for Hitler,” and over the course of three years the Germans murdered more than ninety thousand Herero and more than ten thousand Namaqua, and this aardvark, Olioke says, is a totem of his country’s brutalized past.