You have always thought that by dressing like Ronald Reagan you would sort of, like, become Ronald Reagan, but standing here in your garage in your Calvin Klein silk trousers, your pink gingham button-down, you suddenly feel pathetic. Plastic. The cheap, dime-store version of Ronald Reagan, and the Gipper, he would never have worn what you’re wearing—looking at Ronald Reagan, an elder statesman once wistfully told you, was like looking at a tree in autumn—and Olioke, his expression is like he knows this already, like he knows more about you than you know yourself, but let’s face it, if you were to start wearing the skins of your enemy, you would have to begin with a damned marigold pantsuit.

Ladies and gentlemen, that will never happen.

You will make your peace with this. After all, you are not African. Olioke has “a people” while you have a Favorability Rating, one which has, in all likelihood, nose-dived in one day. All you have is Plaine Truth, a missive cynically borne from polled statistics. You have your plan to marry Toby Castle, to nihilistically seed her womb, to use Toby Castle to change your platform from Bachelor to Family Man, which might give Nancy Fucking Beavers a fucking run for her money, but the blue-eyed aardvark is still sitting in the back of your Tahoe and now, more than ever, it appears to be mocking you, and so it’s time, you decide, at last, finally, to do something about the fucking aardvark.

“Toby!” you shout, and spring back upstairs to the living room.

Vicky’s still lying on the couch, a happy little villain munching some Lay’s which Toby somehow procured, but Toby, her face is changed, she’s on the phone with her father, she says, a finger to her lips, and when she’s finished, she looks at you, pale.

“Who is Greg Tampico,” she asks and shows you her phone.

On Toby Castle’s phone is a photograph of a handsome white man, young and fit, a shock of blond hair winging over his forehead, standing with a group of handsome African people dressed in Victorian costumes, those whom you now know to be the Herero.

They are somewhere in Namibia. Greg Tampico’s hands are resting on the shoulders of their little children, and on his face sits a wide, dumb smile.

You can’t understand it. Tampico doesn’t look blue at all. He looks happy, genuinely goddamn happy, far happier than you have ever been in your life, and there, front and center, is the gift the Herero are giving to Greg Tampico: a gigantic taxidermied and professionally mounted aardvark.

There is no question that this is your aardvark. And you do not know how it made it from Hermann Göring’s crazy Prussian hunting lodge all the way back to Namibia, but it did, because the Herero in the photo, they are gifting the aardvark to Tampico in gratitude for giving medical aid to their children for so many years, and it’s a very important gift, loaded with meaning, and while Toby starts pummeling you with questions about your relationship, how exactly you know Greg Tampico, one of the biggest homos, everyone knows, in DC, the sadness you feel over losing him begins rising. Like, you just did not expect to feel this way but you do, and it’s what writers for centuries have called “melancholia” but because you don’t read books, your language is limited; you cannot articulate the feeling you feel beyond the word “sad”: you are, like, all at once very sad that Tampico’s dead, very sad that you will never again lie with him on the large zebra skin in the walk-up on King Street, and you are wondering if you will ever again laugh as freely and naturally as you laughed when Tampico would playfully take your pants zipper in his teeth, scratch his prickly chin on the soft of your belly, when Vicky puts down his potato chips and points at Toby’s phone.