You are unmoored, unencumbered. You cannot recall a time in your life when you’ve felt more relaxed, more at ease, and you even laugh a little bit as you reach for your Ray-Bans in the glove compartment and put them on only to, out of both habit and pleasure, catch a glimpse of yourself in the rearview.

There is no giant stuffed beast taking up the back of the Tahoe.

The aardvark is gone. And just like that, your easy feeling at once gives way to worry and doom. The relief that you expected to feel getting rid of the aardvark: it isn’t there because you didn’t do it. Someone, somehow, has, like, totally gotten to her, which means they were, like, inside your car, inside your house—and you feel pretty freaked out about this, if truth be told, like someone has vacuumed your insides. Without the aardvark, the Tahoe, it feels super huge, super empty, and you realize that you sort of miss her, the way she looked at you all sad and coy, like the way Greg Tampico always looked at you—

It’s hard to explain. No one had ever looked at you like that before, likely will never again, but whatever happened to her, you can’t go back now; you have no choice but to continue speeding toward Greg Tampico’s funeral with nothing but a new faint light shining into the black cave of your heart: that this could all be some kind of joke. Or some accident.

You don’t know whether Greg Tampico is dead or alive, whether Vicky actually saw Greg Tampico disguising himself in freaking corpus, or whether it was someone else putting on those big fake glasses, that beard, but if so, it is someone the likes of whom you cannot, or refuse to, imagine.

* * *

The question of the immortality of animal souls is something Rebecca Ostlet has long considered. She rejects the Cartesian view of animals as insentient machines, and she dismisses Aristotle’s position as arrogant: “As nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain,” he said, “all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men,” and Rebecca, rather disgusted even by Darwin, who regularly differentiated between “man” and the “lower animals,” is impressed by no man who believes he is superior to the beasts, and Goethe too, she feels, was wrong: an animal is not “an end in itself” but a sensitive, knowing, godly creature and therefore, just like man, animals must sail, she believes, with immortal souls, and the impression was made early upon her after reading Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë’s first novel, published in 1847, the year twenty-eight-year-old Rebecca Green was born.

She was appalled by a single phrase spoken by the cruel Mrs. Bloomfield: “the creatures were all created for our convenience,” Bloomfield said, and Rebecca found the word “convenience” so abhorrent in that application that the young woman promptly discontinued her study of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where she had entered in 1871, just two years after the first seven women gained entry, and, despite initial protests from the male faculty, was eventually granted permission to transfer her coursework to botany.