Sitting alone on your Kluft Palais Royale, the scent of Toby Castle’s vagina still mushrooming your bedsheets, it hardly matters now how accomplished you’ve been. What you’ve done. There will be no airports. And although the name “Alexander Paine Wilson” will be forever etched somewhere in the backed-up anus of history, there will be no legacy of yours at all except this media blip, which, six months from now, no one will recall because everything happened before anything happened.

You look at your phone, where you have 9491 unread text messages and 12722 unread emails. You enter aardvark into the search function.

It appears over ten thousand times.

You enter tampico.

There is nothing from Greg Tampico. All that comes up is a news article sent to you early yesterday morning from your assistant, Barb Newberg.

Barb Newberg knows you like Ronald Reagan and, out of kindness or boredom, has sent you an article about Reagan’s birthplace, which is a modest two-bedroom apartment in a modest two-story brick building currently housing a First National Bank, sandwiched between an insurance company and a funeral parlor in the tiny village of Tampico, Illinois.

Thought you would enjoy this—Barb , she wrote.

It is not the bizarre coincidence of the two Tampicos which interests you, nor is it the building itself. It’s the unassuming funeral parlor next door which reminds you that today, Monday, is the funeral.

Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral Home in Alexandria, you remember, at two o’clock sharp, and the place is on Prince Street, which is not far at all from Greg Tampico’s walk-up on King Street—and you will go to the funeral because you still could be wrong; if the boy Vicky indeed saw the man as he says he did, then Tampico is alive, just being unusually withholding, just pissed off about the last time you saw each other and is, like, just totally fucking with you—and if that is true, you are wondering, then what on God’s Green Earth, as your mother would say, will be in the coffin?

3.

Enter twelve Gentlemen in gray and black broadcloth, their silk neckties flash with color. Enter the lawyers and bankers and schoolteachers, the civil engineers and physicians; enter the journalists, newspapermen in their bowler hats like the kind street monkeys wear until enter Walter Potter, Downing’s chief competitor, and Walter Potter is ginger-blond, bow-tied and mutton-chopped, and there can be no doubt that it’s Potter because a few people have spotted him, asked for his autograph, and the newspapermen are writing everything down, interviewing Potter on the street outside Downing’s Viewing, the taxidermist peevishly notices, until Potter tells them he’s there because, like everyone else, he’s curious to see the African Aardvark and he’s been a longtime admirer of Downing’s, and he promises them that this will indeed be a Big Viewing, and it turns out, to start, that Walter Potter is right:

The event is free. As the minutes tick by and all Gentlemen have arrived, enter the men from the unskilled professions, these miners, textile mill workers, railway porters all sporting rolled trousers, country tweeds, their boots filthy with coal, and from there, in ratty cotton jackets with badly stitched seams, enter the costermongers, appearing for once in public without their rickety vegetable carts; enter the butty-gangs of sewer men, the stench of the toshers and ratcatchers until enter the coal-faced sweepers of both street and chimney, and the men mingle harmoniously, each finding his own kind, the sun is out, it is a very hot day, it is August, and everyone’s watching the gay-drunk boys in the theater troupe tossing their fake snouts, scratching the cobblestones with their fake claws, pointing, laughing, as the peaked wooden doors of the All Saints Church across the street bust open and out spill the fat clergymen, rosy-hot in their cassocks—they are leaving the cool vestibule of the church to come View the aardvark—and Downing can sense that it is, at last, finally Time.