“Enter,” he says, and that is all as the first Viewers walk into the shop, see the aardvark, and gasp.

From here on out, Downing will step aside. Because Downing, he never stays for his Viewings. He always leaves the shop and goes to a pub, The Green Otter, for a pint while the critics evaluate the work he’s accomplished, and this is because he already knows what he’s done, he knows that it’s all he could do, and this afternoon is no different as Downing nods soberly to Harold Skinner, who, just one year ago, took bids on the African giraffe, selling it for a very high price to the New Walk Museum—this afternoon, leaving his shop, Downing happily gives Skinner the proverbial reins and walks without consternation or care past All Saints.

He strolls down Bath Street, hangs a left onto Clarence Street and takes the curved side alley which leads to The Green Otter, where he will spoil himself and Richard tonight with dinner in a takeaway basket. And the taxidermist does not hold back when offered the orange duck and sweet peas or the beans with fried bacon, he orders both, as the hunger which appeared the night before has not abated, and when he orders two full bottles of a decent French Malbec, he samples it slowly, like nothing else is going on in the world, and only then, for himself, now, does he get his pint.

Downing always orders one single pint, tall and frothy, to celebrate the completion of any stuffed beast, and this afternoon, sun melting off the pub’s little round windows all made from crown glass, he sits alone in a corner, sipping, the sweet hops coats his tongue, slides down his throat in a warm, pleasing tickle, and as he drinks, his mind utterly clears: he is thinking about nothing. He longs for nothing.

His soul is neither attached to the past nor diverted to the future, and he’s not thinking about Richard, nor the aardvark, nor is he thinking of the people in or not in attendance at the Viewing, and he is not even thinking of the arrival of the young Rebecca Ostlet, nor the cost of this extravagant dinner—all of which he might have behooved to think about had he known what was about to take place in his absence.

* * *

You hate going to funerals, always have. You don’t like to think about dead things, or even sick things, and for the better part of your education at UVA, the professors all seemed to push death and relativity and history at you, and you preferred then, and still prefer now, to think about life and certainty, you prefer to forget the past to embrace the future, but no one ever talked about those things, and you often wonder why everyone in college was always trying to be so admirably pessimistic when you’re so admirably optimistic, and it’s this sort of optimistic thought, the one that Greg Tampico might be alive, consequences be damned, that propels you off your mattress, out of your bedroom, downstairs, away from the kitchen where Olioke sits eating his fucking sandwich (you, like, seriously flat-out hate Olioke)—and once more into the garage, into the Tahoe, where your departure from 2486 Asher Place is remarkably swift.