“That man is funny,” he says.

Toby says, “Shush, your mom’s on her way,” but you say to wait. Let him finish.

Vicky is ten years old. He lies only about homework and food, and he has seen the man on her phone before, he insists, yesterday, next to the playground across the street from Asher Place Townhouses, and the man was funny, Vicky says.

How funny, you say.

Vicky shrugs. “I don’t know, funny,” he says, and giggles as he tells the two congressmen and the blond lady about how he watched that man sitting in the front of a FedEx truck putting on a big fake beard and, Vicky says, like, these really funny. Thick. Eyeglasses.

* * *

The death mask, it looks divine, Downing thinks the next morning as he preens the aardvark for Viewing. She is ready, glowing, the way her eyelids embrace Ostlet’s blue-and-white eyeballs, and at the base are small sacks of skin which hang like little hammocks, the lightest of touches which gives the countenance, Downing correctly intuits, of love.

This is the beauty the taxidermist has sought: the aardvark, at first glance a veritable mess of biology, because it has been perfectly re-created in its natural state, mid-hunt, as though striking a mound of sand with one claw, its back arched profoundly, its head low with its ears raised, alert; and because Downing, it must be said, loves Ostlet, and the way he’s worked the eyeballs reflect this, the aardvark demonstrates a look of confidence, of loving itself despite what it looks like to others, and there is also a bit of bravery in the jiva, the kind borne only from the humility that comes from true wisdom and which avails itself to the aged of any living species, and it is exactly how Titus Downing, himself aged forty-one years to the day, gazed at his blind lover last night.

They lay together beneath the aubergine velvet drapes on his bed. Richard could no longer see him. But Titus awakened his memory of sight.

“Dickie,” he sighed, and tickled his fingertips on Richard’s sternocleidomastoid. He pressed the side of his face against Richard’s warm, round pectoralis major, sliding over the sternum, and he stuck his long, pointy nose into his lover’s umbilicus, kissed the soft fur-mound of gray pubis before taking the prepuce in his mouth and holding between his lips the floppy glans, the subcutaneous fascia, and as Richard moaned with pure pleasure, Titus Downing’s appetite blossomed. Afterward, he said he was starving, and Richard said to “get up, get dressed,” and allowed Titus to lead him downstairs, into the kitchen, where, already accustomed to cooking half-blind, he assembled from what vegetables remained in Downing’s pantry a light summery stew of onions, runner beans and courgette, and it was the first time since his childhood in Northumberland that someone who loved him had made food for Downing.

As the two men ate, they stood side by side, elbows linked, and Downing knew at once that this was, must be, what so many others called “happiness”—