Your departure is swift because no one expects it. The photographers are stunned when the garage doors lift and the Tahoe is suddenly borne out into sunlight. They barely have time to turn on their cameras, rush their white vans, before you’re off, and now all of America’s watching your Tahoe on TV, OJ-like, as you hurtle toward Alexandria.

You have to lose them. You understand that you have to lose them as you maniacally zoom through the stoplights, peeling left and right all over DC, but the paparazzi are good, they must take, like, driving lessons or something, and someone’s even called the police, because sirens: in the distance, you hear them coming and they are coming for you, and holy hell, could this look worse?

This is it, you are thinking, this is fucking it, you are fucking fucked, and so it goes for several minutes until, by god, a miracle:

When you turn onto Constitution Ave., enter the goddamn President of the United States and his motorcade.

You are not usually a fan of the president, a fifty-nine-year-old Democrat from Ohio who, in a recent cabinet meeting, personally praised Nancy Fucking Beavers for her tenacity over some minor family-leave legislation, which she somehow got passed as some bullshit thing called a “citizen advocate”—but man oh man, are you a fan now: the president’s collection of black Chevy Tahoes is crawling down Constitution like a parade of great beetles, and the white trucks of the paparazzi are, like, totally blocked by security, they are stopped right away by the cops on the street, but you? The cops wave you right by! And how remarkably easy is it for you to drive past them—in a gutsy move, you give them a wave—disappearing into the president’s fleet, and just like that, you’re invisible, you have managed to confuse everyone. It’s like no one can tell whose Tahoe is whose, and you have absolutely zero compunction about pretending for one blissful moment that you are the president, which you do, because there are people outside, people on the sidewalk, cheering and jeering, and in their hands they hold the requisite colorful signage, and it’s all protesting the usual fare, none of it you read—but just as you break, hanging an unexpected sharp right onto the 9th Street Expressway, which will carry you around the Smithsonian, into a tunnel that goes under the Mall, you observe a little girl in pigtails sitting on the shoulders of her father.

She can’t be more than five. High in the air, she holds a crude drawing she’s made with her Crayolas, and though it’s maybe obvious to no one but you, it’s clearly an aardvark, a gigantic aardvark with a gigantic black swastika scrawled onto its belly—and this is the last thing you see before disappearing below ground, toward 395, and when you emerge from the darkness you are once more headed for the 14th Street Bridge, and when you at last cross it, the bridge over the Potomac, you do it alone.