“This is over,” she says, and, “I hope everything works out for you, Alex.”

Toby stands up straight, and her posture is perfect, like she’s already forgotten about you and is ready to meet Someone New.

Exit Toby Castle, striding out the front door with no thought of you or your clothes that she’s wearing, and she is closely followed by Vicky and his pretty mother, yanking him down the front steps, Vicky howling the entire way out, “The aardvark, I want to see the aardvark!” until the front door closes and the sound of a thousand flicking shutters explodes from the cameras of the reporters, the paparazzi, who now, it appears, occupy the whole block.

You turn around and face Olioke. “Did you leak that goddamned Nazi photograph?” you ask him.

Olioke says nothing. He goes into your kitchen and takes out the peanut butter. He starts looking around for his rust-dotted paring knife.

“Where is my knife?” he says.

“Fuck your knife,” you say, and stomp upstairs to your bedroom in a manner you haven’t re-created since you were thirteen.

You sit down on your mattress.

Your mattress is a ten-layered, California King–sized Kluft Palais Royale ($32878) made with ten pounds of cashmere, of mohair, silk and wool, and pressing both hands flat upon it, you steel yourself, then grab the remote and turn on your Samsung to watch the charges which have been leveled against you:

You have probably broken the Lacey Act. You are probably a Nazi sympathizer. You are (or were) engaged to Toby Castle whose father, Brian Castle, got rich by inventing a business to help tech companies hemorrhage U.S. jobs overseas.

A photograph of Vicky from just, like, seven minutes ago in your living room appears on the screen.

It is not your purported kindness toward Vicky that anyone cares about; they only care about the canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa upon which the young Vicky lies. For apparently, although you paid only $1900 for it, it’s worth well over twelve thousand, and what junior congressman, Nancy Fucking Beavers is asking right now on MSNBC, can afford such a luxury?

So despite the fact that in your three years in Congress you passed more legislation than any other Republican freshman, secured $55 million in funding for Virginia, have been called a “hard worker,” a “rising star” by the House Speaker, and despite the fact that you’ve appeared on Fallon to talk about your workout regime, even found yourself on a list of “Hottest Congressmen” on BuzzFeed, add another charge to the pile: an investigation’s begun. A watchdog group has been formed to dig into your finances, and when they dig deep enough, which they most certainly will, they will unearth a veritable buffet of improprieties, all of which true: you did sell your parents’ house, the house you grew up in, to a major Republican donor for much more than it was worth to buy a fancy-ass Victorian townhouse in Foggy Bottom, and you have charged an unpardonable several hundreds of thousands on private flights, on lavish oak furniture for office and home, to the taxpayer, and it’s hard to explain why but you just feel somehow owed, like you are just taking money from America like a child would a parent who gave them no love, and Tampico’s aardvark will fade into the background as, in the coming weeks, a congressional committee will form, the IRS will seize your accounts, and a group of men dressed in, like, black jumpsuits or something will arrive at 2486 Asher Place holding several cardboard boxes far bigger than the aardvark’s box, march upstairs to your closet, and pack up and haul away your entire collection of clothes just like the clothes Ronald Reagan was wearing in Images of Greatness.